Along the entire Kurfürstendamm powdered and rouged young men sauntered and they were not all professionals; every high school boy wanted to earn some money and in the dimly lit bars one might see government officials and men of the world of finance tenderly courting drunken sailors without any shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had never known such orgies as the pervert balls of Berlin, where hundreds of men costumed as women and hundreds of women as men danced under the benevolent eyes of the police. In the collapse of all values a kind of madness gained hold particularly in the bourgeois circles which until then had been unshakeable in their probity.4
Dietrich’s snooty relatives felt that she was one of these amoral women who had entered the netherworld of prostitution by seeking work in the theater. What else was she to do? She neither could nor would stay at home with her mother, who never stopped nagging her. Money did not appear to be the major issue. The two were quarreling about the harm to her reputation. Now that the dream of a career as a concert violinist had fallen apart, Dietrich was facing a void. She had no interest in continuing her schooling, but she did not find the prospect of sitting in an office or waiting on customers in a store especially enticing either. Those careers were out of the question for a beautiful young woman who had come close to becoming a concert violinist. Dietrich wanted to carry on her family’s tradition of lavish living, but what could the daughter of a Wilhelmine police officer do with her life? Her name was merely Dietrich—lacking the noble “von”—so she was not an interesting match for one of the many parvenus aiming for upward mobility. No prince was going to come along and marry her, and the Kaiser would not be restoring the old order. She would be unable to fulfill her mother’s expectations, so she settled on acting, which seemed liked an obvious choice since everyone was always praising her beauty, and besides, she knew quite a bit about the stars and the cinema. She talked to quite a few girls about a career as an actress, some of whom had found jobs in the theater or film. Most of them were not even good-looking and had no training in music, nor had they even had the pleasure of taking ballet lessons. Dietrich would enjoy standing on stage and reciting Rilke verses and earning money for it. She was not interested in divulging anything about herself or expressing her innermost thoughts. She wanted to enjoy pretty things and make a good living while doing so. There was no talk of art.
Berlin was the stronghold of German-language theater. In 1905, Max Reinhardt of Vienna had taken over the Deutsches Theater, which was located near the Charité hospital, and developed it into a kind of theater conglomerate. By the time Dietrich signed up for the entrance exam at the Max Reinhardt School, the Kammerspiele and the Grosse Schauspielhaus (formerly the Zirkus Schumann, which had been rebuilt by Hans Poelzig in 1919) were also part of it. The most successful German-language actors belonged to this ensemble, and it was an unwritten law that the premiere of any important play would happen on one of these stages. The Reinhardt theaters were known for their excellent workshops and acting school. Josefine von Losch was aghast at her daughter’s plan, but she simmered down when she heard the name Max Reinhardt. Dietrich continually assured her mother that she would not be engaging in honky-tonk entertainment, and that her goal was to become a serious actress.
The entrance exams took place throughout September, on the second floor of the building on Schumannstrasse. Dietrich waited in front of the testing room with the other candidates. She stole glances at the competition, relieved to see the nondescript-looking ones and fearful of competition with those having an air of self-assurance. Every now and then they heard an odd scream or an artificial laugh coming from the adjoining room. The candidates masked their nerves with arrogance. Finally, Dietrich’s name was called. “A terribly large number of men sat in chairs and auditioned us for what seemed like hours on end.”5
The New Woman of the Weimar Republic was under enormous competitive pressure, in particular when it came to the arts, where the training had yet to be regulated and the chance of success was slim. People figured they could get rich and famous overnight.6 In the past, only ten or perhaps twenty candidates might have shown up; now hundreds were pushing their way to the stage. Dietrich found out just after her audition that she had been accepted to the school, but she wound up staying less than a year. In June 1922—after only four months of instruction—she dropped out, but continued to act in the theater. In the Deutsches Theater archives her name first appears in October 1922. Together with Grete Mosheim she appeared onstage in the Kammerspiele in a production of Pandora’s Box. The cast included the celebrated actors Werner Krauss, Emil Jannings, and Gertrud Eysoldt. Dietrich had the minor role of Ludmilla Steinherz. She remained on the cast list for a month, then another actress took over her role. By the fall of 1922, she had continuous engagements at theaters in Berlin. She appeared in a production of The Taming of the Shrew with Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner was only three years older than Dietrich, but her reputation as a major talent preceded her and Dietrich was quite eager to work with her. The venue was the Grosses Schauspielhaus. Dietrich’s role consisted of three sentences. During the rehearsals, there was a dispute with the leading man, who claimed no one could understand her. Bergner defended Dietrich to the director, which Dietrich continued to recall fondly well into her old age. Although the production was criticized for its “crudeness,” Bergner became the actress to watch that year. It would take some time for Dietrich’s name to appear in a review at all.
As an admirer of Rainer Maria Rilke, she knew about Eleonora Duse. For Duse, there was no difference between herself and the character she portrayed. She became herself by embodying the Other. This mystical approach was utterly alien to the experiences of the young Marlene Dietrich, who could not begin to identify with her roles; sometimes she did not even know quite what or whom she was playing. “In Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box, I was one of the ‘silent observers.’ Believe it or not, I knew nothing about the play, because I appeared only in the third act. To this day I don’t know what it is about.”7 But novices coveted even roles like these, and Dietrich was able to become more than a mere extra in the theater. Again and again she managed to get roles, which was evidence of her assertiveness as she vied with all the other up-and-coming actresses for any bit part.
Dietrich was a theater actress of modest gifts whose stamina, appearance, and determination brought her minor roles. Her lack of conceit and abundance of discipline worked to her advantage, and she was undeterred in her quest to make a name for herself. With her fine sense of social distinctions, she found a place in the hierarchical world of the theater. She succeeded in becoming a “Reinhardt actor” with only a modicum of talent.
The young Dietrich was well-liked by her colleagues because she did not adopt the self-important attitudes that were typical in these circles: “I had no special talent and I knew it. Everyone knew it.”8 This unusual forthrightness put others at ease, yet she was able to make them believe that they might find it useful to know her. She acted as though she posed no threat to anyone’s reputation, and in the process she outshone everyone. Her (seeming) lack of interest in her own advancement and her claim that she lacked talent only veiled her ambition. Dietrich worked hard during these years. She compensated for her lack of talent with indefatigable persistence. She criss-crossed the city to get to an odd assortment of theaters in order to recite peculiar lines, the context of which she often didn’t quite grasp herself. “For instance, I played the role of a maid in the first act of one play, then took a subway or bus to another theater, where I was a matron in the second act of another play, and finished out the evening as a prostitute in the third act of a third play.”9 Times had changed. She did not sit in a horse-drawn carriage, the way she had with her grandmother, but instead used public transportation. Sometimes she did a favor for another actress by standing in for her, which no one appeared to notice, or she played several roles in a play within the space of a few days. She took what she could get. She watched her colleagues act, then struck up a conversation with
them while they were applying their makeup in the dressing room. As the years went by, she became a sought-after actress for minor roles. “I usually spent more time getting prepared than I did acting,”10 Dietrich made a virtue of necessity: If everybody was going to gossip about how pretty she was, she might as well make the most of her looks. Her dazzling appearance could mask her shortcomings as an actress. Fellow actor Bernhard Minetti had this to say about her: “Nice build. Untheatrical.”11 In addition to her evening performances and daytime rehearsals, Dietrich took singing lessons and learned to box. Boxing was well suited to these post-inflation years: it was about concentration, stamina, toughness, and winning.
When Dietrich started out at the Deutsches Theater, Max Reinhardt’s days of glory were already behind him. Even during the war his plays had sold out, but that was changing. “There was revolution on the streets that led to the theaters,” recalled Gusti Adler, Reinhardt’s biographer. “Actors and audiences who had already walked for hours to get there often had to make their way across the Weidendamm Bridge or the jetty in a hail of bullets. . . . Only genuine drama could have risen above these difficulties, but the young writers did not live up to the challenge.”12 The dramas of the new generation of playwrights were, in Reinhardt’s view, bogged down with too much political propaganda and abstract symbolism. Lotte Eisner recalled going to the theater quite often when she was a young woman—three times a week to Reinhardt’s theater—but then Brecht came along. Dietrich started out at just this time.
She seems to have been largely unaware of the crisis, having been an avid theatergoer before the war. If she had inherited her beloved grandmother’s estate, she would have been sitting in an orchestra seat in an elegant evening gown, not rushing from one stage to the next by subway to declaim this or that for paltry wages. Dietrich’s career was a case in point of the downshift in the German bourgeoisie. The shift in the moneyed class’s vested interests that was handed down through generations, the lowered status of the classic professions and of the military, and the accompanying rise in the status of technical expertise, coupled with inflation and a massive reduction in ownership of capital, had an impact on Reinhardt’s audiences. Kurt Pinthus wrote about the 1923–1924 period: “The season began in the weeks of the most catastrophic inflation. When a theater director has to cope with the fact that the previous evening’s revenue is worth only half that amount the very next day, there can be no thought of business as usual. The forcible stabilization then reduced the standard of living of all segments of the population to such a degree, while the ticket prices were kept at an excessive level compared with the prewar period and in comparison with other countries and with vaudeville shows and movies that going to the theater dropped off sharply.”13
Herbert Ihering urged theater actors to recognize once and for all those for whom they were really performing. For Ihering—an adherent of Brecht’s—the theater was failing to connect with its audiences: “It unfurls its ceremonious scope and the whole contrivance of the end to impatient audiences who get no further than the beginning.” These audiences may have had the leisure time and money to go to the theater, but they could not make much sense out of what was set out before them.14 In Ihering’s estimation, the audience craved excitement and entertainment of the kind that boxing offered. The ideals of the educated middle class were a thing of the past. In contrast to her mother and most of their relatives, Dietrich was eager to take up the challenge. The revolution may have robbed her of her status in society, but the new republic offered young women new and unimagined opportunities. Dietrich had an utterly unsentimental energy that paid no heed to tradition, but only to her own advancement. She simply had to stand out in a milieu of ruthless competition, and the path she chose was to use scandalous props. As the daughter of an officer, she knew the importance of having just the right equipment. Early on, she began to assemble a set of items, most notably a monocle. In her memoirs, she wrote that the monocle was considered “the height of the ‘macabre,’ ” and her mother had given her the monocle that had belonged to her father.15
Without a monocle, the face of a Wilhelmine gentleman was bare. Men who wore monocles were always among their kind; this peculiar masking of their faces signaled that they registered their surroundings in a manner that was reserved for them alone. Leaving off the monocle was the sign of a failure to see. When Dietrich went onstage “with my father’s monocle tucked in my eye and my hair done up in hundreds of curls and wisps,” she showed that she was initiated into the communication of gentlemen.16 She used the former symbol of class superiority as an accessory for a femme fatale who knew the wishes and rules of men and would not let any gentleman play her for a fool.
Josefine von Losch made no mention of her younger daughter’s machinations. “My mother had withdrawn into herself; she made no comments of any kind, nor did she mention my adventures in the ‘world of film,’ a phrase offensive to her ear. For her, film and the circus were one and the same thing.”17 In these years, Dietrich got to know her strengths and weaknesses, and put a great many professional touches on her showmanship.
It was only a matter of time before she would turn to show business. Blessed with long, beautiful legs, she got an engagement with the so-called Thielscher Girls. Guido Thielscher, who gave his group this name as an ironic allusion to the famous Tiller Girls, had been a local celebrity in Berlin before the war.18 Dietrich and the other scantily clad “girls” kicked their legs or tap-danced. Joseph Roth described them as “a transference of serious military drills for men into the feminine sphere. Their acts are a blend of militarism and eroticism.”19 On an artistic level these acts were nothing to speak of, but they gave Dietrich stage experience and show-business contacts. She was able to move up from the Thielscher Girls to an Erik Charell production, and thus join a new artistic milieu. Max Reinhardt, who had been unsuccessful at covering his costs in running the Grosses Schauspielhaus, had handed over the reins to Charell, a virtually unknown dancer. Charell’s performances were a rousing success. He is said to have brought in up to one million reichsmarks per season. Charell produced popular entertainment on a tasteful level; there was no petit bourgeois sex in the style of the Thielscher Girls. He was a dapper dresser who put a premium on opulent stage sets. Dietrich had entered a shimmering sphere of sexual ambiguities. Charell’s role models were not in historic Berlin, but in America. He successfully adopted the styles of George Gershwin and Florenz Ziegfeld. He worked with a highly professional production team, and his performers were consistently more popular and gifted than those of other producers.
Charell’s production for the 1926–1927 season was called Von Mund zu Mund (“From Mouth to Mouth”), and comprised two acts with four scenes each. It featured music by Friedrich Hollaender, Mischa Spoliansky, and George Gershwin, and included texts by Friedrich Hollaender and Erik Charell. The cast featured big names: Curt Bois, Wilhelm Bendow, Claire Waldoff, and Hans Wassmann. Josephine Baker’s former partner, the American dancer Louis Douglas, was the choreographer. The plot of the revue was absurd and kitschy: Five children who have fallen asleep in the garden are dreaming about their future. In the second act, they are grown up and recount their dreams. Dietrich stood in for an actress who had fallen ill, playing the role of the emcee who hopes to star in a revue and spends every evening proving her skills on the stage. The emcee was not a major role, but Dietrich was now no longer one of the nameless “girls.” The revue’s advertising slogan proudly proclaimed: “Charell has the best performers.”
The revue ran for six months to a full house. Dietrich’s partner, Hubert von Meyerinck, wrote about her: “Your sensuous, exciting legs moved down the runway in jaded serenity. What you acted or did actually amounted to nothing, but this ‘nothing’ is what led to your fame. You made a style out of this ‘nothing.’ ”20 Von Meyerinck liked to give small, exquisite parties. The ladies wore evening gowns and the gentlemen tuxedos—although it could easily turn out that a gentleman was actually a lady, and vice vers
a. Dietrich liked being in these circles, which mimicked and mocked high society.
In May 1923, Dietrich married, and a year later she gave birth to a daughter. This would be her only marriage and her only child. Rudolf Emilian Sieber had an open face and a winning smile, and his broad shoulders seemed to offer protection and support. Germany was in a deep crisis at this time, and the Germans were experiencing a profound sense of instability. No one could claim to be safeguarded from the vicissitudes of life or to steer clear of the pervasive sense of danger. Dietrich fell in love during a period of inflation, and married during a period of hyperinflation. She was defying the widespread belief that nothing could endure. In her act of matrimony she was affirming the endurance of love and trust. When she met her future husband in late 1922, he had been in the city for just a short time. Sieber was Czech, from the border town of Aussig. After completing his military service, he moved to Berlin in early 1919 and took a production job at May-Film. The few official papers that have remained from his life give us an indication of what drew Dietrich and Sieber together: they were both displaced from another era. Sieber had a sumptuously decorated birth certificate, which attested to the pride of the prior Habsburg Empire. His father, Anton, and his godfather, Emilian, were Austro-Hungarian civil servants, one in Aussig and the other in Vienna. This birth certificate was issued for a life that Sieber would never lead. When he was born, people still believed in the security and stability of life in the monarchy. He went to war and left his home in peacetime, lived in Berlin and Paris for years, then died in Los Angeles. In a document dated March 1919, Sieber’s profession was listed as “business academy graduate”; shortly thereafter, in Berlin, he turned to acting. However, the world would know him in only one role: as the official husband of Marlene Dietrich.
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 6