by Donald Spoto
Just beneath the surface, Grosz saw (and depicted in his famous caricatures) “the fratricide and general discord . . . the noise, rumors, shouting, political slogans.” He was on target, for all the commercial and cultural activity coexisted with a dizzying postwar inflation. In 1919, a dollar bought eight marks; four years later, it bought four trillion. Violent crime accompanied massive unemployment and homelessness, there was a terrible food shortage, and families routinely dissolved. Often ten or a dozen strangers shared a dingy room with out-of-work drifters. An influenza epidemic claimed the lives of seventeen hundred people in a single day in 1919. Not surprisingly, political discontent often became ferocious, and there were more than five hundred assassinations in street riots between 1920 and 1923; reason seemed as debased as the currency.
Amid such disarray, forms of escape were understandably desired, and casual sex and opium were easily available. When novelist Stefan Zweig wrote that Berlin had transformed itself into “the Babel of the world,” he was describing a city that seemed to thrive on contempt for basic decency. Bare-breasted prostitutes chatted with customers at the Café Nationale, while at the Apollo men and women danced nude as patrons found rooms and niches for quick trysts with performers during their offstage moments. At the White Mouse, on the Behrenstrasse, the cocaine addict Anita Berber offered her Dances of Horror, Lust and Ecstasy, usually wearing only chalk-white makeup and a crooked smile. She, like many of the onlookers, died before the age of thirty. Various morbid bars and clubs proliferated, responding to every possible inclination, and on many street corners boys and girls in black leather and shiny boots snapped whips threateningly or used hand fans daintily, to suggest every imaginable caprice.
There was, then, a curious blend of absolute despair and desperate gaiety, as if everyone sensed that catastrophe was imminent. In fact before the end of 1923, Adolf Hitler made an abortive attempt to seize power in Munich. Hermann Göring was wounded in the attendant melee; he withdrew to Austria where he became a morphine addict and, like his Führer, marked time.
INTO THIS WORLD OF 1921 BERLIN RETURNED MAria Magdalene von Losch (as she had been known in school at Weimar). Her violin lessons continued that year, but to support herself she often worked in a small, tacky cabaret orchestra, in a glove factory, a hat shop and even at a newspaper kiosk. Before her twentieth birthday that December she had at least two romantic liaisons—one with a frail young man whose identity is unknown and who subsequently died of dysentery, the second with an older man whose wealth somehow withstood the general economic distress. The sickly lad evoked her pity and tenderness; it was also an opportunity for an unthreatening, undemanding sexual interlude she could effectively control. And from the senior beau she willingly accepted meals and trinkets until she learned he had other romantic attachments as well as a wife and four children, whereupon she booted him out. Very quickly (as often happens when young people come to the swirling freedom of a modern metropolis) her residual shyness was overcome—not, it seems, by conscious effort, but simply by absorbing the Berliner Luft, the atmosphere itself.
ONE DAY IN THE AUTUMN OF 1921 AT A CROWDED cafeteria she met an aspiring writer named Gerda Huber; that same day, at Gerda’s insistence, Maria moved in with her, and for several months—until a job in journalism took Gerda to Hanover—the new friends were inseparable. Dark-haired, intelligent and earnest, she was the first woman with whom the adult Maria fell frankly and fully in love.
The relationship was based not merely on the situation of two compatible young working women sharing expenses in a wretched economy. Gerda—sedate, inclined to be bookish and to spice ordinary conversation with quotations from Goethe or Karl Marx—impressed Maria with her better education and her confident articulation. She discussed politics persuasively and literature from a sophisticated viewpoint, and her concern for the repressed and disenfranchised women in European culture ranked her as an early feminist.
Maria admired Gerda’s eloquence and keen mind, while Gerda appreciated Maria’s carefree attitude toward life and her comically feigned gravity about a music career whenever Maria was visited by her mother; the two young women were a good balance. Although she had changed violin teachers again, Maria seemed more intent on enjoying life than pursuing a career that seemed wildly unrealistic amid such urban chaos. Maria was also attractive to Gerda for her ability to convert two shabby rooms in Wilmersdorf into a habitable apartment, and to prepare a satisfying dinner from apparently useless scraps or leftovers.
Despite her attendance at girls’ academies and the tutelage of her grandmother, Maria at twenty was in fact rather ungraceful, and in this regard she was perhaps seen as unintimidating to the slim and gangly Gerda. When she could, Maria ate heartily, and photographs of her at that time reveal a chubby young woman with a round, fleshy face. She seemed to care little for her figure—indeed, leanness was no social requisite; additionally, she (like very many Berlin women of her time) troubled even less about the image she presented in public. Attracting someone through mere appearance was not a tactic; what she did—or did not do—communicated her inner desires and outward wishes.
“She was anything but a sex bomb,” according to the writer and producer Geza von Cziffra, who knew her at that time when she was a denizen of cabarets and late-night bars.
In fact she was quite boyish, with her masculine, buddy-like behavior. She readily joined us at tables where several of the patrons were homosexuals, for in fact [she] was much more interested—although not exclusively—in women. If she wanted a man now and then she simply showered him with sweetness, but any direct offer would have to come from her. So it would happen that she whispered to someone at a luncheon table, “Afterwards we’ll go to your place.” It would have been wrong for the poor soul to deduce any kind of commitment from such an afternoon, for [she] forgot such a pleasantry almost immediately.
Von Cziffra was not alone in attesting to Maria’s participation in postwar Berlin’s carefree life. A nonchalant approach to sex was in fact considered absolutely chic and virtually a social requirement for a grownup trying to get through the unpleasantness of every day.
WHILE ATTENDING VIOLIN CLASSES AT THE HOCHschule für Musik, Berlin’s finest music academy, Maria met voice students, eager young apprentices hoping for theatrical careers. She managed to enroll in one of the most popular classes, taught by the eccentrically lively Franz Daniel. Many years later, Lotte Andor (then a classmate of Maria’s and later an actress in Germany and America) recalled that Daniel had “a very strange system of breathing techniques. He made us run, make faces, jump around, do all sorts of tricks. This was his method of improving voice projection, and Marlene and I obeyed without question. She was remarkably anxious to please”—and, it seems, to broaden her career possibilities, for soon she was asking Lotte Andor (and Gerda, who she thought knew everything) about Max Reinhardt and his drama school. Acceptance there effectively guaranteed the start of a stage career because Reinhardt employed his students in the Deutsche Theater’s repertory plays.
But Maria still had to cope with her mother’s insistence on the more acceptable life of a concert violinist; Wilhelmina was still supporting her and subsidizing her lessons, and thus felt she had the right to criticize as well as counsel. In early 1922, however, Maria arrived at her mother’s home one day with a bandaged left hand. She had an infected wrist, she said, and was forbidden to play the violin for two months. For this predicament we have only her own later vague accounts: she spoke variously of a broken ring finger, a sprained wrist, a diseased muscle, or a growth on a tendon. Of course she did not want to remain idle, Maria cannily told her mother: she was taking voice and acting lessons, just in case. In fact, she had already arranged an audition with Max Reinhardt’s staff for entrance to his school.
By spring 1922, Wilhelmina’s daughter was no longer Maria Magdalene von Losch. She had fashionably contracted her first two names, reassumed her father’s surname and listed herself for the Reinhardt audition as Marlene Die
trich; gone forever were the nominal links to the penitential Mary Magdalene and to von Losch.
Ever after, Wilhelmina remained only coolly resigned to the fact that her daughter (unlike Elisabeth) had settled for a profession still then considered at least inappropriate for a fine lady, and at the worst downright immoral. For quite some time, there was a polite distance between mother and daughter, not bridged when a shocked Wilhelmina saw how Dietrich was supplementing her income: publicizing jewelry or phonograph records in stores and magazines, or advertising shoes or stockings. Legs, Dietrich told her mother: she was well paid to show her legs, which publicists much admired. “And if they want legs, they get legs,” as Dietrich bluntly told the actor Wilhelm (later known as the director William) Dieterle later that year. Commercial photos from 1922 show Dietrich with studied coyness, holding a product or standing in a short skirt, her garters indicating the virtues of a brand of durable stockings.
Her legs landed her another job while she was preparing for the audition. From 1922 to 1928, she was among the so-called Thielscher Girls as one of twelve chorines presented by the impresario Guido Thielscher. The troupe performed intermittently with variety acts in Berlin, Hamburg and other cities, kicking and strutting in cabarets and music halls.
By June 1922, Marlene Dietrich was formally listed in the Grosses Schauspielhaus yearbook as a student and actress residing at 54 Kaiserallee in the Wilmersdorf district (just west of Schöneberg), where she shared a small two-room apartment with two or more Thielscher Girls when Gerda Huber was away on a writing assignment. A month earlier Dietrich had finally auditioned for Reinhardt’s school—although not before him personally (nor did he ever teach her), for after 1920 he resided mostly in Austria and commuted to Berlin only occasionally. Dietrich recited a speech from Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s mystical drama Der Tor und der Tod (Death and the Fool), in which the spirit of a dead girl speaks to a dying nobleman:
Wie dann dein Brief, der letzte, schlimme, kam,
Da wollt ich sterben. Nicht um dich zu quälen,
Sag ich dir das. Ich wollte einen Brief
Zum Abschied an dich schreiben, ohne Klag,
Nicht heftig, ohne wilde Traurigkeit;
Nur so, dass du nach meiner Lieb und mir
Noch einmal solltest Heimweh haben und
Ein wenig weinen, weils dazu zu spät.
Your letter came, the last, the dreadful one;
And then I wished to die. Not to distress you
Do I tell you this. One letter more
I meant to write in parting; no lament,
Not passionate, or fierce, unbridled grief,
But just to make you yearn a bit for me,
And teach you to feel homesick for my love,
And shed a few tears, because ’twas then too late.
But Dietrich was misguided in her choice. Reinhardt’s assistants thought her delivery too grand and without nuance. She simply stood, reciting the lines in a kind of breathless self-pity. She was put off for a month, after which she returned and recited a brief scene from Faust; she was then permitted to enroll in small classes beginning that summer, conducted by Berthold Held, a friend and colleague of Reinhardt’s. Among her classmates was Grete Mosheim, later an internationally famous actress. Later, Mosheim said,
One day, Held told me, “Tomorrow I will introduce you to a young woman who really looks like an actress.” And next day there was seated there a beautiful young girl who looked really great—blond hair, blue eyes, pretty face—and it was Marlene Dietrich. But he told her the same thing he had told me: “You look very beautiful, but you are no actress, you have no talent.” Maybe this shared intimidation made us close friends, but in no time at all Marlene and I confided our problems to each other.
Mosheim and others who knew her at the time remembered a young woman of ebullient and sometimes risqué humor, excited about her prospects of a stage career. Accordingly, Dietrich—no longer the homey girl who shunned the spotlight, was now eager to be noticed, praised and approved. Lotte Andor recalled Dietrich wearing bright red hats with long plumes, or a large bow in her hair, or a feather boa. One day she might arrive at class with exaggerated makeup or an outrageous mix of brightly colored clothes; on another, she would borrow a dog and make a dramatic entrance with a Borzoi or a poodle. “She also loved lacquered shoes,” Mosheim added, “silk stockings and a black velvet coat with a chic little hat.”
Socially she was just as idiosyncratic and resolutely sui generis. As Geza von Cziffra recalled, she in fact had a reputation for rather easy virtue. Affectionate and playful, Dietrich was nothing at all like the sheltered maiden she later claimed to have been at the time; indeed, she was not so much Gretchen in Faust as Gloria Swanson in Her Gilded Cage (released that year in America and Germany). Like Swanson’s Suzanne, Dietrich had gone from sedate music lessons to audacious modelling and cabaret work, falling in and out of love and reinventing herself along the way. And like the Swanson character, too, she would eventually move from Europe to America and become the quintessential star.
Gossip about theater folk was of major interest to the Berlin press. Dietrich was like most struggling actors, living in Spartan lodgings, racing from part-time job to a class in diction, voice or deportment. She was sometimes dependent for her dinner on her ability to crash the wild, bountiful after-parties routinely given at popular restaurants by wealthy playgoers.
But also like the public, Dietrich took her playgoing seriously. Despite the civil unrest and the brutal frugality that afflicted almost everyone’s life, the theater was flourishing, and she partook of it all. Dramatist Carl Sternheim was at the height of his popularity in the 1920s, and his antibourgeois satires—like the racy Die Hosen (The Knickers), about the loss of a lady’s stockings and undergarments—combined pointed comedy with trenchant social commentary. Georg Kaiser’s trilogy Gas indicted the worship of postwar technocracy and posited the end of civilization, and the first play of Bertolt Brecht, Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night), focused on the predicament of the returning soldier. And with these and other serious dramas, there was always an abundance of musical revues, shows imported from London and New York, experimental chamber plays and, in repertory, everything from lavish operettas to starkly ritualistic two-character scenes.
TO AUGMENT THEIR INCOMES, ACTORS REGULARLY scoured the call sheets for film studios, where even a bit part offered a day’s wages, lunch and the possibility of something more glamorous. In April 1922, Dietrich was tested at the Templehof film studios by a cinematographer named Stefan Lorant, who found her uneasy before the camera despite hours of gentle and persuasive reasoning. (Lorant was later highly successful in England and America as both journalist and author of many books, among them an acclaimed biography of Abraham Lincoln.) Quick, lively and ambitious, she was as ever eager to please, but Lorant remembered that Dietrich was unable to appear relaxed and confident, and her expressions and gestures were either extravagant or so muted she seemed catatonic. “She tried to follow instructions as I asked her to look sad, to imagine this, to react in such and such a way—pathetic or triumphant or so forth—but even before we developed the reel, I felt she offered nothing to the camera and would have no future in films.” He did not recommend her to Herr Horstman, the studio chief, even for a crowd scene or a walk-on role.
Indeed, there was nothing particularly polished or impressive about Dietrich in the early 1920s, and she was not singled out for special attention onstage or in cabaret. But she was persistent. She and a friend arranged to meet the director Georg Jacoby, who was preparing a historical costume comedy—Der kleine Napoleon (The Little Napoleon)—about the amorous adventures of Napoleon’s younger brother. Complimenting Jacoby on his earlier work and (as set designer Fritz Maurischat recalled) openly flirting with him, Dietrich was quickly cast in the single-scene role of a lady’s maid; she worked on the picture for only a few days in late summer 1922.
Rightly, she saw this debut as unremarkable, with no guarantee t
hat her appearance would bring more film assignments. A woman of the moment in her work as in her private life, she was merely seeing to the practical matter of paying her rent and providing a few luxuries. To this she ardently gave herself, apparently never considering that with some guidance she might be more than merely presentable on film, a medium which could evoke her talent, exploit her charm and provide a lucrative international career, all better than the theater could.
She may well have been surprised, then, when soon afterwards she was chosen from a group of fellow drama students for a small but effective role in a film called Tragödie der Liebe (Tragedy of Love), to be directed by Joe May, a prolific cinematic pioneer. May’s assistant, a handsome, blond and athletic Slovakian-German named Rudolf Sieber, advertised an open casting call to select dozens of extras for the picture, whose climax was set in a crowded courtroom. On a warm September day, Dietrich arrived at the studio, where Sieber quickly took her from a group of young women and rushed her into May’s office. Asked to stand, then sit, turn this way and that, smile and nod slowly, she followed the director’s instructions with a kind of diffident bemusement: this seemed much ado about very little indeed if she were to play an anonymous bit, and she was quickly bored by May’s demands that she repeat a simple gesture or glance.
The following afternoon, Sieber arrived at the Reinhardt rehearsal hall, only to be told that Dietrich had no classes that day. He found her at her mother’s home, where she was living temporarily because of a cash crisis; there Rudi made several important announcements. First, Tragödie der Liebe was to be a major film certain to attract vast audiences, for the star was none other than the robust, burly Emil Jannings—a leading German stage actor also known for his screen portraits of Louis XV, Henry VIII, Peter the Great and Othello. Second, the film was quite different from the kitschy pseudo-history of Der kleine Napoleon: this was a violent story of lust, jealousy and revenge, with Jannings cast as a brutal wrestler standing trial for murder. Third, Joe May had sent Sieber to offer her the role of Lucie, the presiding judge’s pert, spoiled mistress who has a brief, pouty scene making a telephone call in bed, and who then whines her way into the crowded courtroom where she causes mild distraction by her giggly insolence—a brief but amusing role injected as a few moments of comic relief. The perfect touch for the wardrobe of this frivolous character, Sieber added, would be a monocle—then a fashionable affectation often worn by young women with perfect eyesight who simply wanted to be noticed. Dietrich accepted the role and offered to prepare Sieber a cup of coffee. Instead, he took Dietrich out to lunch at a nearby café, and very soon they were courting, although the meetings at Wilhelmina’s apartment, held under her vigilant eye, were properly chaste.