Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  The Felsings, the Dietrichs, and the von Loschs were nationalistic adherents to the monarchy who found no fault with the imperial regime. Josefine, who felt increasingly committed to Wilhelmine values, passed them on to her daughters. Sedan Day, which commemorated the defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Kaiser’s birthday appear to have been major events in the lives of the von Losch family. Like every other child in Berlin, Dietrich hoped to catch a glimpse of the Kaiser and his sons. However, Wilhelm II’s popularity was on the decline. As the commander in chief of the German armed forces, he rarely put in an appearance in Berlin once the war began. The fact that he spent almost all his time at military headquarters was a mere formality. The military leaders may have let him speak, but they did not take him seriously. Respect for General Field Marshal von Hindenburg grew while the Kaiser receded into the background. The latter’s end was wretched, devoid of any honor or dignity: From the remote railway station in Spa, Wilhelm II and his imperial train left for Holland on the night of November 9.

  Capitulation and revolution wrenched Dietrich out of her dream world.

  Berlin, 9 November 1918 Why must I experience these terrible times? I did so want a golden youth and now it turned out like this! I am sorry about the Kaiser and all the others. They say bad things will happen tonight. The mob was after people with carriages. We had some ladies invited for tea but none of them could get through to our house. Only Countess Gersdorff did. On Kurfürstendamm, her husband got his epaulets torn off by armed soldiers, and everywhere one looks, there are red flags. What does the nation want? They have what they wanted, haven’t they? Oh, if I were a little bit happy, things wouldn’t be so difficult to bear. Maybe soon a time will come when I will be able to tell about happiness again—only happiness.46

  The chaos on the streets made her feel vulnerable and in need of defining her place in society. Dietrich belonged to the world of ladies, and her heart went out to the Kaiser. The people with the red flags were ordinary; she was not.

  The weather was rainy and gloomy in November 1918, and the mood was morose. Dietrich had borne witness to the drama of social degradation even before the defeat in war and the ensuing inflation. Her father had been no more than a minor official, yet he retained a great sense of importance. She had developed a keen sense of class distinctions early in life and mastered the fine art of keeping up appearances. Her whole life up to this point had been a social seesaw. The only fixed coordinate between life as a policeman’s orphan and an officer’s stepdaughter was pride in Prussia. Josefine and her daughters used this pride to gloss over the comedown and highlight the ascent.

  When Dietrich had just turned twenty, she witnessed the collapse of the order to which she felt she belonged. She watched the Hohenzollerns and their military power founder. Officers ventured out of the house disguised as civilians. The military virtues and deeds of dead fathers no longer counted. Revolution and republic brought to Josefine and her daughters the death of their social positions. Dietrich fought off the phantom pain of all that she had lost by fictionalizing it. Her diary, her later interviews, and her written recollections convey the impression that she regarded her father as the epitome of Prussian manliness: “My father: tall, imposing stature, smell of leather, shiny boots, a riding crop, horses.”47 Her mother was locked in an ongoing struggle with the vagaries of history in her multiple roles as daughter, wife, mother, and—eventually—widow, while her father was unshakably bound up with power, victory, and death. Her father was swallowed up by history, and Dietrich regarded herself as his successor.48

  The atmosphere at home was more somber than ever now that peacetime had arrived. Josefine was always in a foul mood, and Elisabeth was busily cramming for her final exams. Dietrich spent hours in front of shop windows staring at silk dresses and dreaming of being loved. After her grandmother died in the year following the revolution of 1918, the situation with her mother grew even more fraught. Josefine tormented the two girls; as far as she was concerned, they could do no right. She felt that she had gotten a raw deal in life, and she was despondent and quarrelsome. Dietrich, in turn, developed into a wayward daughter who threatened to introduce additional chaos into the family. The clearly contentious issue between the mother and the daughter was sex. In the social system of the Prussian Wilhelmine upper class, women who acted on their passion were ostracized. Josefine felt compelled to stick to these moral principles as a way of keeping her head held high in the face of the family’s degradation. Sexuality and eroticism jeopardized the order she represented. She believed that enforcing strict standards was acting on behalf of the dead fathers. But the law of the fathers no longer applied.

  September 17, 1919 . . . Saturdays and Sundays I kiss enough for the whole week. I really should be very ashamed. All those who know me confirm this if I ask them what they think of me: I am all right for kissing and having fun, but to marry—God forbid! . . . I allow myself to be kissed so easily. Of course, I can’t expect respect. I can’t help it. It is not my fault if my romantic nature has no limits. Who knows where I will end up. Hopefully, somebody will come, have the kindness to marry me soon. There is a film in town called Demi-Vierges. They say it is a typical case of young ladies from the so-called upper class who-mature-sooner, want to experience the tickling thrill of erotic adventures. . . . Playing with fire, until one day they get burned, then laugh. This describes me exactly. Till now I still have had the strength to say No as it got to the very moment. . . . It would be so beautiful to just let go and love. But, of course, that can’t be.49

  Robert Musil noted that as a result of the war, “Woman is tired of being the ideal of the man who no longer has sufficient energy to idealize, and she has taken over the task of thinking herself through as her own ideal image.”50 The German men had lost their enemy and their leader when the war came to an end. To maintain their inner balance, these defeated men started a revolution, which did not, however, extend to those for whom the war was already over—the New Women. Pola Negri reported on the evening of November 8 that she was celebrating the premiere of her movie Carmen. Her lamé dress was as big a success as her acting skills. Everyone was having a grand time when volleys of gunfire suddenly rang out in the distance. She turned to Ernst Lubitsch in alarm to ask what was going on, and he whispered to her that that was utterly irrelevant, and she ought to focus on the movie.

  This anecdote from revolutionary Berlin reflected a changed world. While the men in worn-out uniforms were on the hunt for an enemy in the magnificent buildings abandoned by their Kaiser, the New Woman was watching herself on the screen. The revolution represented the soldiers’ attempt to wrest some last shred of meaning from the national delusions of grandeur to which they had succumbed. Meanwhile, General Erich Ludendorff, one of the parties responsible for having launched this war, was at a Berlin boarding house preparing to flee. Ludendorff, wearing dark glasses and carrying a forged passport, looked like a character in a bad movie as he made his getaway to Scandinavia. The political and military illusions of men had fallen apart; the artificially created illusion would become the hallmark of the dawning republican era. Women in the 1920s mastered the art of donning a deceptive sheen. Dietrich would be one of them.

  The military brass no longer set the pace in Berlin, and the young soldiers coming back home in their discolored uniforms and worn-out field coats and shoes were unshaven and weary. Destitute passersby had no choice but to ignore the begging war veterans on the street, and they had no desire to be reminded of the war. Josefine forbade anyone to speak about the war in her presence.

  Dietrich was finished with school and had to contemplate what lay ahead. Up to now she had not shown signs of any particular talent. Her greatest wish was to appear on stage, but she had to keep that wish from her mother. Acting was considered a seedy business, and having an actress for a daughter would have been a devastating comedown. As a girl from a good family, Dietrich had taken ballet lessons before the war; her ballet slippers are still p
art of her estate today. They were very fine, expensive-looking slippers, made in England, dusky pink silk with leather soles. These lightweight shoes show clear signs of use; she must have practiced quite a bit. There is a photograph showing her doing ballet exercises on a rooftop in Berlin. One of her shoulders is bare, and she is forcing a smile and looking quite stilted. Dietrich knew that the time had passed for girls to dance ballet. Her diary contains an entry dated May 1918, in which she wrote that she had given up ballet, but she would continue to go to the “barefoot class.” Like so many other young women, she was drawn to rhythmic gymnastics and expressive dance. She loved music even more than dance. Her mother bought her an expensive violin in the hope that her artistic talent and the violin would take precedence over her interest in young men. But Dietrich wanted both. When her mother sent her to Mittenwald in Bavaria in 1920 to improve her skills on the violin, she promptly fell in love again, and when her mother realized what was going on, she brought her daughter home.

  Josefine von Losch had had quite enough of her daughter’s antics. She pondered long-term solutions and decided to send her wayward daughter to boarding school. She had threatened to do so on many occasions in the past but now she intended to act, and Dietrich was shipped off to Weimar for training as an artist. Josefine hoped that placing her with the strict headmistress, Frau Arnoldi, might be the beginning.

  “The boarding school was cold and forbidding, the streets were unfamiliar, and the air smelled different from my big hometown; no mother, no one I knew, no sanctuary I could flee to, no place for me to weep in secret, no warmth,” Dietrich later wrote about her time in Weimar.51 And in this case her recollections tallied with her diary entries as a young girl. In Frau Arnoldi’s boarding school, the girls slept six to a room. What cadet school was for Prussian boys, the boarding school was for Prussian girls. Dietrich had come to a place in which rules and mores of a bygone era were taught. The young girl had no choice but to adjust to the routines and discipline at this institution. “You had to line up, go down the street two by two, lead the other pupils . . . and meet people who were free, shopping or gossiping on a street corner. You felt desperate, rejected, excluded.”52 Frau Arnoldi gave orders, expected obedience, and monitored everything they did. She was fastidious in all matters pertaining to cleanliness, punctuality, and morality. The minds and bodies of her pupils were subject to her command. Over and over again, the girls were told that the greatest possible disgrace was the loss of virginity. A respectable girl remained pure or wound up in the gutter. This type of education is sure to drive girls to furtive actions and foster a climate of hypocrisy. Dietrich described Weimar as a “prison.”

  She was torn between her own desires and her mother’s expectations. Josefine dropped by every three weeks to size up the situation for herself. She regarded it as one of her most important tasks to wash her daughter’s hair.

  The idea that a mother would travel so far just to wash her daughter’s hair might appear unusual, but my mother was very proud of my hair, and it meant a great deal to her that it stayed beautiful. She had no confidence in me on this matter. My hair always stayed elegant, and I’m sure that I have my mother’s help to thank for that. She dried it with a towel, then made me sit down on a chair in the visitors’ room. My face was red from all the rubbing that went with this treatment; my hair was still tousled and damp, and tears ran down my cheeks, while I said goodbye to her.53

  Whenever Josefine was there for a visit, Frau Arnoldi seized the opportunity to sound off about Dietrich to her mother, casting aspersions on the girl’s character by letting on that Dietrich loved to draw attention to herself and flirted in the concert hall. Dietrich countered that it was not her fault that all the men stared at her, but this defense did not get her very far. Her mother believed the puritanical teacher and not her wanton daughter. Arnoldi was the kind of headmistress who liked to exploit her power and she was out to humiliate Dietrich, who feared and despised her. Arnoldi and the mother formed an alliance. In their view, the daughter of an officer was destined to carry on a culture centered on power, asceticism, and militarism. Just because different values were now being trumpeted did not mean they had to be adhered to.

  Dietrich saw the matter differently. After losing two fathers and enduring the war, she could not understand why she ought to forgo happiness and stick to the rules. She had seen with her own eyes how quickly everything could be over.

  To inject a little sparkle into her small-town life, she put her feminine wiles to the test with her violin teacher, Robert Reitz. Reitz was the conductor at the opera and a welcome guest in the artistic and intellectual circles of Weimar. Through him Dietrich came in contact with the violinmaker Julius Levin, to whom she poured her heart out in a series of letters.54

  These letters paint a picture of her as a love-starved girl who did not know where to turn; she was evidently unable to confide in either her mother or her sister. Quite unexpectedly, her mother brought her back to Berlin. Supposedly Dietrich had no idea why, and her mother refused to answer her questions. According to Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, her mother had to leave Weimar because she had had an affair with Reitz. In Riva’s description, losing her virginity was a humiliating experience for Dietrich. She went back to Berlin and her mother’s control. She still had not made anything of herself, and she was no longer even a virgin. Her choice of music teacher shows that she had not given up hope of a career as a concert violinist: She received instruction from the renowned Professor Carl Flesch, who supposedly made her play eight hours of Bach a day. Eventually Dietrich came down with tendinitis. Her hand was put in a cast, and when the cast was removed, her doctors explained that this hand would always remain prone to injury. Mother and daughter would have to bury their dream of Dietrich’s becoming a professional musician. This investment had been for naught. Dietrich would never celebrate triumphs in the great concert halls of the world, and the violin, wrapped in silk, lay unused in its black case.

  EARLY

  SORROW

  The Berlin to which Marlene Dietrich returned was bleak, gray, and desolate. Journalist Sebastian Haffner observed, “We had the great war game behind us and the shock of defeat, the disillusionment of the revolution that had followed, and now the daily spectacle of the failure of all the rules of life and the bankruptcy of age and experience.”1 Dietrich and her friends regarded life with weary skepticism. Ornaments were discarded, and every self-respecting shop had the marble of the Wilhelmine years torn down. Too much pomp was an unwelcome distraction. Dietrich quickly suppressed any memories of her father’s fine-looking uniform; of Sedan Day, the annual celebration of German victory in the Franco-Prussian War; and of rides with her grandmother. She did not want to be one of those people who stood weeping under the portrait of the Kaiser, the way her mother and her mother’s friends did. Her sister, who had now passed her teachers’ examination, was constantly held up to her as a shining example. Dietrich was tired of being branded a failure and had no desire to face an unending barrage of questions about her future.

  Calm had not been restored. There were frequent putsches from both the right and the left, and there were reports of political murders on an almost daily basis. Until 1923 inflation had obliterated only monetary assets, but after that, incomes were also affected by the devaluation. No longer could money be made by working. People had to come up with different ideas. Hyperinflation led to a complete collapse of the German economy. The events of 1922 and 1923 had effects of catastrophic proportions for Germans’ savings. Even a substantial nest egg could disappear overnight, and class distinctions were leveled as a result. “The process throws people together whose material interests normally lie far apart. . . . An inflation cancels out distinctions between men which had seemed eternal and brings together in the same inflation crowd people who before would scarcely have nodded to each other in the street.”2 Gamblers and racketeers surged ahead and left the others behind. If people were handed money, they had to spend it as qu
ickly as possible; it could be worthless the very next moment. The middle class could no longer maintain its standard of living. The usual night at the theater or birthday party could prove economically ruinous. It was the time in which the young Bertolt Brecht was enjoying success with Drums in the Night, Arnolt Bronnen with Parricide, and Fritz Lang with Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. People had to be able to speculate, maneuver, hoodwink, and deceive in order to get by. Thomas Mann—reflecting on this situation—described his own children as “belonging by birth to the ‘villa proletariat.’ ” They grew up enjoying the privileges of the upper middle class of yesteryear, but were now left “odd enough in it, with their worn and turned clothing and altered way of life.”3 Stefan Zweig described a very different facet of this “altered way of life” in Berlin in his autobiography, The World of Yesterday.