THE BLUE ANGEL
The life and films of Marlene Dietrich
By
David Stuart Ryan
The Blue Angel – the life and films of Marlene Dietrich
David Stuart Ryan
Copyright 2011 by David Stuart Ryan
Smashwords Edition
First Published December 2010
Kozmik Press
London and Washington DC
ISBN-13: 978-1456465780
ISBN-10:
1456465783
BISAC: Biography & Autobiography / Entertainment &
Performing Arts
The
story of Marlene Dietrich's life is the story of the 20th
century.
Author
David Stuart Ryan who wrote the bestselling biography 'John Lennon's
Secret' explores the amazing and circuitous route that took her to
Hollywood and riches.
But
to understand the essential Marlene it is necessary to go right back
in time to the era of La Belle Epoque when a very feudal and settled
order still existed in Europe.
'The
Blue Angel' transports you to a glittering world that is all about to
disappear in the maelstrom of world war. What emerges from the
conflict is a feverish gaiety that seeks to put behind it all the
suffering that has taken place.
You
are entering the Jazz Age and a Berlin that having suffered
hyperinflation decides anything goes. The Berliner Luft - the Berlin
air - is what the locals call it.
This
madcap atmosphere was to be recreated by a young journalist - Billy
Wilder - when he made the journey to Hollywood. Indeed, the plot for
his greatest film, 'Some Like It Hot', drew on his experiences in
Berlin, and Billy Wilder was one of the respondents to the author
when he came to write Marlene's story.
Marlene's
big break came when she played a vampish nightclub singer of dubious
morals, not a million miles away from her own background trying to
survive in
a
world turned upside down.
'The
Blue Angel' took her to America and a carefully constructed film star
image which embodies all the
dazzling
wealth and influence of Hollywood at its most
powerful
and hypnotic.
Yet
the more you get into the life of Marlene Dietrich, the greater the
mystery becomes. Who was she really?
Only
now can the expert analysis of David Stuart Ryan reveal the true
Marlene Dietrich, the person behind the image, the human being behind
the facade.
Was
she indeed the blue angel?
Introduction
It should not have surprised the world so much that Maria Magdalene Dietrich decided to be buried in Berlin, alongside her mother Wilhelmine. Even though it was 60 years since she had left the city of her birth, it retained its pull on her heart, it was where she spent a too brief idyll in her youth before the world began crashing down around a shattered German nation.
In her last days the dying actress had the opportunity to look back across the chasm of the years, and came to realise that acceptance by her native city was what she had been searching for all those years away, and yet she would not have done anything different, given the awful circumstances.
For her, Berlin was epitomised by the beautiful Unter der Linden, with its great lime trees, and her mother's family jewellery shop on this fashionable thoroughfare at the peak of Germany's prosperity - before war was declared. This Berlin of her earliest memories was a fun-loving city, devoted to the arts of good living. German appreciation of high culture was one of the distinguishing marks of a civilisation that prided itself on its intellectual stature.
It was her grandmother who introduced her to an appreciation of the best of style and sophistication. She wore the furs and fabrics, jewels and perfumes that beguiled Marlene and, through the intermediary of the granddaughter, the whole world in the depths of the Depression.
Marlene Dietrich's early memories were of the smell of her Papa's beautiful shone leather boots, the sound of the smart click of his heels upon entering a room, the vision of him as an upright military man. He was the personification of the old Germany, the Germany that disappeared so soon after she had made its acquaintance in the days of her girlhood.
Doomed to be remembered as The Blue Angel, she was in reality one who had seen paradise very briefly and then experienced a fall from grace. She was to become a lamp in a darkened world, hardly in control of her life yet aware she had a destiny to fulfil. As you read the facts of her life, it is up to you, the understanding reader, to put your interpretation upon them.
It is an exotic journey retracing the passage a person has taken through all the events and people who make up a life. And for reasons we can only guess at, these events forced Marlene Dietrich on centre stage for much of the century. Experiencing all its sadness along with its too brief pleasures.
Love came to call, and departed as often. First her beloved father when she was not yet six years old, a void that she perhaps sought ever afterwards to fill. Yet that was only the first of the disappointments that attended on her career and path through life.
Even this fact of early loss is clouded in some murky ambivalence. For her father had already departed the family home to seek female consolation elsewhere before he died in Marlene's sixth year.
In a very special way, Berlin became like a parent to her after that aching loss. It was a place where she felt utterly at home, even or especially in its intimate clubs and restaurants, its theatres and amusement parks, its wide streets and its numerous secret cellars. The whole great pulsating city was hers to explore in a youth that had lost all guiding stars, where every day had to be lived on its own terms, for few knew what the next day would bring.
Ruin, love, rejection, advancement, violence, murder, happiness, laughter, wild abandon and an underlying restraint, Berlin provided all this in a day or even less. It was the centre of the artistic world, the city's theatre and film productions rivalled those of America and outshone the rest of Europe, in spite of all the chaos - perhaps because of it.
Der Berliner Luft it was called - 'The Berlin Air' where the mood was 'anything goes'. Imagine the scene for yourself. After the end of the Kaiser's War, the old Prussian Junker values of imperial Berlin were rejected. But the people simply abandoned these codes of behaviour, or as many of these as they wished, without putting much in their place. Art and experimentation were the order of the day, in the people's personal as much as their professional lives. The value of money collapsed, getting through the day on your wits was all that could be hoped for. Yet this could provide a heady excitement as the new worlds of the artists' imaginations tantalised with a seductive air.
Marlene sought to become a beckoning figure on the stage of life, a release to troubled mankind from its woes and cares, if only briefly. To dally in the Berlin of the 1920s was to see life in all its infinite variety. Men who felt unmanned by the war dressed as women, women lacking strong shoulders to lean on were forced back upon themselves to search for the hard masculine drive towards fulfilment or found it in strong women, still others were in an indeterminate no man's land between the two sexes. All was mixed and confused. Any new philosophy was seized upon and lived out to the full. To Marlene it was the heady breeze of freedom. The only demand was to follow your own star, and take it where it might lead.
It was a philosophy that only required she play herself, while others looked on and secretly approved. Could they know that The Blue Angel was playing herself? That she sought to know and consume their very souls, an experience she would survive, even if they were forever more touched and changed by this encounter, like moths singed by the candle flame?
After Berlin there were the mad excesses of America's Hollywood. It is an irony that an Austrian Jew, Jonas Sternberg, should introduce the wild ways of Berlin to a Depression-wracked America. But both he and Marlene had already lived right on the edge before the Depression struck. For an America where nearly a quarter of the population had no job, no money, no prospects, only dreams to get them through each day, the unlikely pair of director and star created a furtive world of man and woman pursuing each other through an unearthly landscape where limits had dissolved and desires were fulfilled. They wrote their sexual attraction on the screens of the world and the masses responded with the thrill of recognition as they saw their most secret fantasies lived out before their eyes.
Josef von Sternberg, as he reinvented himself, liked to claim that he had discovered Marlene. But, as you will find, that is far too simple an interpretation of the way they came together, two dream weavers in need of confirmation on the physical level of their yearnings. He had been abused from very early on in life, and ambiguously wished to enslave himself at the same time as he enslaved his audiences to his vision. While Marlene set out quite consciously to capture the world's imagination as woman, pure and simple. That she had survived on the streets of Berlin was proof of how the dictates of the heart rule the head for any person. It was knowledge she put to use, just like The Blue Angel.
When she entered a ruined Germany at the end of Hitler's war, it was some shock to be offered a coffee by a German mayor who appeared to welcome her apocalyptic entry into his battered and blitzed town of Aachen at the head of avenging armies.
'Why are you singling me out for this delicious coffee?' she asked, perplexed at his ready acceptance of her among the American troops.
'Because you are the blue angel,' he replied simply.
Marlene had finally come home.
Chapter One
The early years
Maria Magdalene Dietrich took her first male lover when she was 17, and her last when she was 63. Only half her life was spent in intimate knowledge of male attraction and yet it is inevitable that she should be remembered as a screen goddess of love. The truth is far more complex, indeed sexual allure relates to the whole person, it is the essence of something within, and it attracts with a power in exact proportion to its unknown quantity.
Her beginnings would appear to have marked her out for privileged participation in the social life of a nation reaching the height of its power. Europe dominated the world, and was still increasing this power as distant lands in Asia and Africa were annexed and added to the already long list of colonies. Germany came late to this struggle for worldwide leadership and domination, which is perhaps why the German nation eyed the territories of the East in Russia with some fascination. Maria's grandfather had been a colonel in the crack Prussian Uhlan regiment and had gained the Iron Cross in the war with France in 1870-71. Her father, too, was a military man who had resigned his commission when he married her mother in 1893 when she was 23. This in itself was an unusual act for a Prussian gentleman, for all marriages in the very regulated society in which he moved had to be approved by the commanding officer. The preferred alliances were with the aristocrats and military families who formed the backbone the Junker class, the Prussian rulers of the newly formed German federation that Bismarck brought together. The code of conduct respected duty and obligation, saw its long line of tradition stretching back to the Teutonic knights who had defended Prussia from the invading Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan. Discipline was recognised as the supreme virtue in maintaining cohesion and superiority over the foe.
Even though her father was lost to her when she was aged five and a half years in the summer of 1907, his approach to life stayed with her. The need to bring order and discipline into home life, and the duty to perform one's work to the utmost of one's ability were guiding principles for long afterwards. She devoted her energies to this task like him. Her work was to play a screen goddess, but it was work nonetheless and it was her way of creating a bulwark against the endless tides of love and loss in her life. Her memories of her father were able to leave her feeling unsettled and tearful in her eighties. Even when alive, he was a remote glorious presence, immaculately attired in his Royal Prussian Police uniform, a Lieutenant in charge of some 600 men. He had joined the police force after resigning his commission and advanced far within its very structured ranks.
Her mother was from a well established family, originally artisans from Swabia, who in the early 19th century had come to Berlin and set up a jewellery business which developed until they had a shop in one of Berlin's most fashionable thoroughfares, Unter den Linden, a broad boulevard which hosted magnificent hotels. Wilhelmine Elisabeth Josephine Felsing devoted herself to her family and home once she had married the handsome police officer in the Royal Prussian Police. There were appearances and rank to keep up, and the social milieu required that the family should dress immaculately while being seen in the finest restaurants and cafés that adorned the very centre of Berlin where they lived. The Dietrich family moved frequently. First to larger apartments to match her father's rank and standing, and then after his death, to smaller and smaller apartments as her mother's income drastically decreased. She had used much of her dowry in maintaining the Dietrichs' position in society even when her husband was alive, for in that splendid decade before war broke out, now nostalgically referred to as La Belle Epoch, fashion and luxurious living reached undreamt of heights all over Europe, and none more so than in a Berlin, the capital of a Germany rapidly growing richer and more powerful than any of her European neighbours.
Maria's sister, Elisabeth, was a year and a half older, having been born in 1900 as the new century began, but they both made their appearance at the Viktoria Louise school for girls at the same time. Maria's own birth date was December 27, 1901, shortly after 9pm in the evening, making her a Capricorn sun, with moon in Leo and Virgo on her rising sign. Much later, she would ask an astrologer to read the chart of any friend who she thought would benefit from the ancient art. Then, she had little idea her horoscope depicted an actress who longs to lead her life on the stage of life. Her early years at school were marked by her being younger than anyone else in the class. This age gap disguised a natural aptitude for learning and isolated her from the other girls. Her family's fall from high social position was marked by an early awareness that many of her schoolgirl contemporaries were collected by splendid horses and carriages, whereas her mother collected the two girls on foot. She was already aware that much she valued in life was likely to be taken from her unless she took energetic steps to remedy the situation.
But it was a happy childhood, with long summer holidays in the countryside, and a spell in the town of Weimar when her mother remarried in 1911, some four years after her father's death. She again had a military father, Colonel von Losch, but there was little time to get know this new man in her life before he was also taken from the family by the war which broke out in 1914, even before this he was often away on manoeuvres as the German army prepared for what it saw as an inevitable battle with Russia and France. The power of Russia, in particular, threatened the country's great wealth and commerce, the army believed that only by striking before Russia had modernised her industries and armies could Germany be preserved as the leading power in continental Europe. But Maria's mother, now with several domestic servants to assist her after her remarriage, protected the girls from these facts of political life. She gave herself over to maintaining a respectable household where the emphasis was above all on maintaining the place in society that her stepfather's rank demanded. Displays of emotion, any emotion, were forbidden, the word of the man of the house was law, the servants were scolded for any lapse from perfection in the running of the house, and Wilhelmine was nothing if not a demanding mistress of the house. She would restain the parquet flooring if the servants had failed to bring it to gleaming perfection, and would tolerate no failings from them in any part of their duties. Not surprisingly, they kept their distance from the two girls and Maria had no strong recollections of any of them.
The re-won status Wilhelmine's new marriage gave her was rudely snatched away again when outside forces beyond control of the family swept away all that they held dear.
The moment of war's arrival was etched deep on Maria's mind by one telling loss, that of the first person to whom she had been able to express her innermost feelings and thoughts, her French teacher at school. After two delicious years when she had showered this young teacher with gifts and rapt adoration, she suddenly disappeared from Maria's life forever. As the pupils assembled at school in the late summer of 1914, her eyes looked up and down the rows of teachers seated above on the stage at assembly. She fainted when she saw that Marguerite Breguand was not there and the awful truth dawned: she was French and they were now at war with France, she had become the enemy. From the very first, the war changed the atmosphere at school completely. The girls were put to work knitting jumpers and mittens for the troops in field grey, school hours were extended so that they spent at least two hours on these tasks. By the following summer, when they returned to school after another glorious sun-filled break, the girls were urged to include in their prayers the imprecation, 'May God punish England'. But Maria's lips stayed hermetically sealed. She clung to the delicacies of the French language when it was suddenly forbidden to speak this reminder of the foe's culture. European nations like England and Italy were still held in the highest esteem by the independently minded schoolgirl even though they all willed the German soldiers to be victorious and the war to end.
Maria had certainties to hold onto, with her father's early death she could cling to his way of life and moral code, the code of the professional officer who showed no petty malice, who appreciated the strengths of his enemy at the same time as he carried out his duty. The summer of 1915 presented an opportunity to put his commands into action in a way that marked her out from her classmates forever afterwards.
The whole school had gone to a summer camp. Nearby was a prisoner-of-war camp where many French prisoners were held. They went to look at the captives in the curious way of young 13-year old girls, bold and at the same time shy. Maria saw the misery and despair stamped on their unmoving forms as she reflected on the glories of a summer day that was also the French national holiday, Bastille Day. The triumphs of French culture, explained to her patiently in the many long conversations she had had with Marguerite for a period of more than two years, became unbearably vivid. She realised what dreadful punishment it was to lose one's freedom, especially for these men who were the flower of young French manhood. She was gripped by a power stronger than herself. After her schoolmates had left, chattering gaily and collecting wild flowers, she contrived to stay behind, still quietly regarding the men shut up like animals behind the barbed wire of the camp. She gathered great handfuls of wild white flowers and approached the line of the fence, sure that no one was around to see her. She found herself standing right up to the wire looking through at the men, who did not appear to even see her, so unmoving were they.
She stretched a hand through and held out some flowers, saying in her best French,
'Aujourdhui, c'est le jour de Bastille, prenez les fleurs, s'il vous plait.'
No one spoke or moved. She despaired, but kept holding the flowers through the wire. Then a hand snatched the flowers, she held out more. These, too, were taken by the sullen men, they cried and she cried as she handed through all the flowers and then left running to rejoin her classmates. She thought no one had seen her, but the next day discovered this to be not so. She was reported by one of the parents and from then on no one in the school was allowed to speak to her as punishment for talking to the enemy.
Wilhelmine von Losch was determined to protect her two girls as best as she could from a world that had turned grey and forbidding. After the early atmosphere of carnival and festivity - the crowds had cheered the young soldiers leaving for the battle fronts convinced that right was on their side and that they would soon prevail against the plot of France and Russia to take away Germany's wealth and prestige - the dread impact of men killing each other like machines reached through to the civilians. Many of the waiting wives, including Wilhelmine, would visit the town hall to examine the posted notices detailing who was missing in action. She checked that her husband, who had been posted to the Russian front, was not among them. Dressed in black, while the girls wore grey, they solemnly filed into the corridor where the long lists of names were typewritten and hung for perusal by the patient women, who with infinite courtesy passed each other as if in a dream, each wrapped in their thoughts, each fearing the worst and hoping for the best. Many times the von Losch family visited the town hall and emerged with that strange joy that comes from not being one of those families whose nearest and dearest have been taken from them. Early on they lost an uncle, but Colonel von Losch was never on the lists of wounded, missing or dead. By 1917, the war had lost all meaning, so many families, indeed almost every family, had lost a member. Blinds were drawn in houses in every street as a mark of mourning. The family's diet, which from the beginning of the war had largely consisted of vegetables, mostly potatoes, was reduced still further. Turnips were the main food staple, with precious little else to augment the meagre rations. Grandmother Felsing often visited the house and was unfailingly cheerful in front of the two girls, and the cousins who often came round to help. She was a breath of the old Berlin, she rode each morning and always dressed in the most feminine of fashions. She wore the most beguiling perfumes and was the essence of the German society lady, as became the daughter of a respected family jewellers. She never let her standards slip and held such sway over her daughter Wilhelmine that it was like royalty visiting when she called at the exact hour she had arranged. Maria's face was becoming paler and more listless as the months of meagre rations persisted and worsened inexorably while victory stayed ever more distant. But before the grandmother's visits Wilhelmine pinched Maria and Elisabeth's cheeks to inject some colour into them. Maria was sure she noticed the wanness of her looks, but in Grandma Felsing's world no emotions were ever betrayed and the performance expected of one's station in the world was all.
The full horror of the war came home that year of 1917 when Maria's cousin Hans came to visit the family from the front. He said to Wilhelmine that Maria was growing up, and the mother immediately realised that it was a reference to her younger daughter's budding womanhood. But it was a womanhood expressed by the loving care with which she washed and laundered his field grey shirts, shirts that soon, once more, would be covered in mud and, quite possibly, blood. His announcement of her womanhood was also his farewell Maria sensed, it was his last leave before violent death struck. And so it was to be. There were heroes in the family too. Another uncle led the first Zeppelin raid on London, but Maria now felt she did not care how the war ended, as long as it ended. When her mother whispered that the Americans were joining the war and that all was lost for Germany, Maria knew she was right and was secretly glad it was all going to come to an end. The coming defeat was made all the more bitter for Wilhelmine, because she had only just learnt her second husband had been wounded on the Russian front. She travelled to see him, and he seemed likely to recover before a secondary infection struck him down, as it struck down many of those wounded but not killed on the battlegrounds.
Maria's life was given over to getting through each day, school lessons continued as though everything was normal, but by the time of the war's end when she was about to turn 16, she already knew that the old way of life would not return. She had seen the deformed and crippled men flooding back on the hospital trains that brought the still mud and blood covered troops into the heart of Berlin. She could see with her own eyes the blind and gassed men begging on Berlin's streets. She shared the tears of widows and orphans, her friends and neighbours. Berlin was seething with a strange kind of anger as the streets filled with the returning soldiers on the declaration of the Armistice. Maria went out with her sister to see this great mass of young men, for four years she had lived almost exclusively in female company. It was a bitter shock to see them. Where there had been the bloom of youth and mischievousness, now there was a greyness on their faces, they were like ghosts staring into the distance who could not be touched.
The bitterness and frustration of the troops upon their return to the capital soon turned to violence, it was the only life they now knew. Street gangs began fighting one another, new political parties were formed to run the country as the Kaiser fled to exile in Holland and the full impact of the Armistice became clearer. At first, the people were told there had been an honourable truce to stop the fighting, later it became clear Germany had been defeated. The shops had even less food in them, so much less that on every street corner there were crowds of beggars beseeching the passers-by for scraps. But Maria had none to give. Thanks to her mother's family, and the wealth put aside from the good days in the jewellery business, Wilhelmine managed to provide for the girls, but it was a close run thing. Over half a million starved to death in Germany, and as many more died from the influenza that was sweeping the country in the wake of the defeat. It was as though the military disaster and the despair it brought was also enacted in each individual, they gave up on life and it ebbed away from them. To Maria it became clearer that only an iron discipline passed on by her father could protect against this external chaos.
Her mother decided that she must leave Berlin, which was becoming ever more dangerous, with people killed in riots and brawls every day, it was so commonplace that it rated no more than a couple of lines in the daily newspapers which now announced that a revolutionary committee had taken over, only for the leader to be killed by his rivals within a few months. The army fought to bring back some discipline into national life, for the crowds had descended into a rabble. The 16-year-old started to hope they would be successful in restoring the old order.
Wilhelmine removed her younger daughter to a boarding school in the old city of Weimar where both Goethe and Schiller had lived. It was a centre of German high culture in a world that had, apparently, gone mad. Here there were no street demonstrations and battles, Maria could study violin and German culture under expert tutors in the company of other young ladies whose parents were determined that they would be equipped with all the traditional German graces for when normality returned.
Maria immersed herself in her studies of the great poets, learning many of Goethe's poems by heart, while his description of troubled youth left her sure that she was not as alone as she imagined. The strength of Goethe's thinking and his ideals gave her an idol to emulate, especially now that she had no father or stepfather to learn from. She wandered the streets he had wandered, enjoyed her first flush of freedom and became increasingly proficient with her violin playing. Her English violin tutor at home in Berlin had been the first to tell her mother she had gifts for playing this most demanding of musical instruments. To assist her in Weimar was a handsome, still quite young, music teacher, Professor Reitz, who she made her special friend by running his errands for him, and bringing him small gifts.
While in Weimar, Maria made a visit to the town of Garmisch, where she had learnt her film heroine, Henny Porten, had a beautiful house. Seized by a boldness or an infatuation that took her over completely, Maria stood under the actress's window and played her favourite music. Henny Porten did not come to the window to acknowledge her fan, instead she shut it. But Maria had a strange presentiment in the empty street. One day she would have as devoted a following as Henny had, but she would also honour and reward her fans loyalty.
It was the male attractions of her music professor which induced Maria to leave behind the innocence of girlhood. One day he allowed her to kiss him when she presented him with some fruit as one of her little gifts. The kiss was prolonged, he took her in his arms and initiated her into the ways of love there and then on his sofa. The bristle hair of the sofa ground against her soft skin as the professor forcibly took her in spite of her spirited resistance. It was an uncomfortable experience, she decided she did not enjoy being penetrated. After that pupil and teacher met secretly every week, until one day her mother visited Weimar unexpectedly. Maria was floating around on air, in love, drinking in the magic of the great poets and musicians who had lived in the enchanted town. After the grey of the war years, each day was drenched in colour and promise and the inspired essences of the richness of life. Her secret rapture showed all too clearly to her mother who insisted she leave immediately, keenly aware that scandal threatened, that her secret would soon be out and the only way to protect her reputation was to withdraw her and have no further contact with the school or her schoolfriends. Wilhelmine took back from Weimar a young woman who had tasted the world, and the taste was good.
Chapter Two
The Berlin Cabaret
Maria Magdalena returned to Berlin just in time for her 19th birthday, but the changes in the city since she had been away were extraordinary. It was only two years since the war had come to an end, but in that time the Berliners had become 'devil may care'. There were thousands of Russians, Poles, Slovakians, Austrians, Danes, Italians and many more nationalities to be found on every street corner, in every pavement café. Where before there had been a Prussian sense of decorum and order, now the air was filled with a cacophony of different languages, accents and philosophies. The Russians were a very distinguished cast of aristocratic refugees, all the more poignant for their sudden fall from grace. But, in truth, the catastrophe had happened for Maria's world of civilised values as well. Starvation stalked the streets of Berlin for those unfortunate enough to have no resources to fall back on, and she counted herself lucky that Wilhelmine had her brother Hasso, who ran the Felsing jewellery shop, to call upon if their meagre rations proved insufficient to keep body and soul together.
She wandered the streets for her first few months back in a daze, hardly able to take in the enormous changes she saw all about, torn by a desire to help the poor who heartbreakingly lined fashionable streets like Kurfurstendamm and all the other main thoroughfares leading off from the Brandenburg Gate. But slowly she got caught up in the mad excitement of these strange crowds of émigrés mingled with the many German poor. She noted grimly the pitiless treatment that befell the war wounded. Men with no legs, no arms, no eyes, haunted the streets selling matchboxes, offering shoe shines, plaintively playing their music from accordions and violins. She felt enormously privileged when her mother bought her a violin for 2,500 marks - a fabulous sum in those days, it would have bought a cheap house in the Berlin suburbs. It was her mother's compensation for taking her away from her professorial lover and Weimar where she had come to appreciate the great achievements of its poets and musicians. But all was not well between Wilhelmine and Maria.
In Maria's early days her mother had a pet name for her, 'Pauli', because she had wanted a boy to follow on from her elder sister, Elisabeth, who was training to be a teacher. Wilhelmine was determined that the career she had plumped her heart on for her younger daughter, as a violinist, should allow no distractions and Maria was enrolled in Berlin's top high school for music where she was made to practise Bach hour after hour. As often happens to girls growing out of their teens she began to wonder where this training was going to lead, where her happiness was to be found. She started to row with her mother, neglect the practice of music for the reading of Germany's great poets, especially Rilke who entranced her with the magic of his words. She dreamt of being able to spellbind people with speech as he did with his writing. She wondered what her long dead father would have advised her to do when these moods of black despair came upon her and she could see no end to the sterile playing of the violin at a school she had begun to hate. After the magic of Weimar, the traditional Prussian school with its emphasis on endless repetition and technique seemed designed to kill all the youthful joie de vivre she wished to express. She mourned the sudden parting from her revered music teacher and nothing her mother could say convinced Maria that Wilhelmine had acted in her best interests. The dark clouds in her mind grew ever larger, she wandered the streets in an agony of despair as she saw the world she believed in visibly crumbling. There were no fine carriages on the streets gently perambulating along as in her girlhood. In their place, huge automobiles plied up and down the wide thoroughfares, with their owners displaying the sudden wealth they had acquired in the cacophony that was business in the city. She knew, even in her innocence, that many of these people were war profiteers who had grown fat on the troops' misery. They showed no thought at all for the wretches begging in the gutters and doorways, but ostentatiously swept past with only concern for themselves. She envied their magnificent display at the same time as she could see the evident corruption black money brought into their hearts. Money itself was rapidly losing any value. The price of any scraps of food, when they could be found on the market stalls, multiplied week by week till a week's wages bought merely a few potatoes and greens, the only certainty being that by the next week the prices would have doubled again. Her mother tried to shield her from the grim reality, but she began to change into a cynical worldly wise 19-year-old who accepted the new dispensation with its new laws of survival, she was just a face in the crowd that pushed and jostled, forsook all manners and grabbed for what it could.
After the long hours of violin practice Maria took to visiting the pavement cafés all along Kurfurstendamm in the afternoons and wondering at the foibles of the passing parade of humanity. There was a new mood of desperate gaiety which café society adopted to laugh off the chaos they could sense all around. There was new money where once there had been old certainties. Those who had cash were tough businessmen, totally ruthless in obtaining what they wanted. She began to experiment with her clothes. Long feather boas were the last word in fashion, a statement that you were part of sophisticated café society, unshocked by any of the sights you saw on the Berlin streets. There were people murdered in front of the crowds, usually in angry fights where jeering people surrounded the combatants. The police appeared to be powerless to stop the descent into mayhem.
Defeat weighed hard upon the proud Berliners, no one believed in anything, except getting through the day and losing oneself in drink or drugs or quick flirtations. Maria noted how girls her own age flaunted themselves in shorter and shorter skirts, wide open blouses, facing strangers with a leer on their lips and a sparkle in their eye. Suddenly, you could speak to whoever you wanted, no introductions were necessary and she quickly caught on to the new code. One day in the spring she was walking past the Café Nationale where girls of easy repute were well known to be available. Some even sat at the tables with bare breasts as they shamelessly exposed their assets. But with the low wages now virtually worthless, the people had to fall back on other more personal assets. She passed a pale faced young man in the crowd and smiled, he stopped and soon they were in ecstatic communication. She found herself suggesting they go to his flat nearby and pass the afternoon in each other's company. There was an aura about his pale skin and clear eyes she found irresistibly attractive. He became the first lover of her own age, and she found he welcomed her taking the lead in their mutual discovery of the joys of the flesh. Little did she realise that the pallor of his skin which so attracted her and matched her own fair skin was a sign of a fatal disease that was wasting him away. Before her eyes over the few weeks of spring they were together he gradually weakened until one day she found him dead from what the doctors diagnosed as dysentery. Death was very much present in this new Berlin, if not from influenza or starvation, then the gangs promised and delivered a violent end to life as they each sought to control the streets as a prelude to political power.
By the summertime, the small amount of money Maria's mother gave her each week was no longer enough to even purchase coffee and apple cake in the fashionable cafés. She was forced to search out any type of work to help buy the fabulous new fashions she saw being flaunted all around her by young women who always appeared to have a rich businessman to accompany them. She found work in a glove factory, then needed more money still so that in the evenings she also worked in a hat shop, when even this was not enough to produce a living wage she worked in a news kiosk early in the mornings as well. The hustle and bustle of the streets became her life from morning till night. It was strangely thrilling for a girl who had had such a sheltered upbringing. But it was also exhausting.
Maria noticed they always seemed to need musicians in the cabaret clubs that were opening up all over Berlin, as well as the picture palaces that were even more popular. Motion pictures were soon as fashionable an entertainment as the animated conversations of café society. But Berlin's cabaret clubs held the greatest attraction for her, they were very risqué places, certainly not the kind that her mother would ever have dreamt she would dare frequent. But an increasing boldness was upon her as she realised it was up to her whether she sank or swam in the increasing madness all around. She played in the pits in an orchestra accompanying the films. Her legs caught the eye of the conductor who introduced her to a club where topless dancers came on as a break between the political satire and the popular songs. It was really a continuation of the old music halls, but now people liked their entertainment to be more intimate in some darkened cellar. She was taken on to play violin in several of the clubs and found a way to mix in the kind of circles previously forbidden to someone of her class and background. But a part of her sought the limelight rather than the dark pits where the musicians were placed. She had not too long a time to wait before she found herself providing the entertainment rather than accompanying it.
Maria had another brief taste of love in the cabaret club. A devastatingly handsome businessman, some 15 years older than herself who was possessed of the wit and sophistication that Berliners have always valued in their companions. It was her naivete that led her to presume she had no competitors for his affections. After a whirlwind romance in which he bedded her and taught her, even encouraging her to sit astride him in cafés so that they could take their pleasure wherever it pleased them, she discovered she was not his only girlfriend. He confessed - though he saw little wrong with it - that he had a wife, and several other girlfriends as well.
'We are friends, that is all, what more do you want?' he asked her.
She told him she could not share him with other young girls, his staying with his wife she could understand, but if a man was to have her, he must be devoted to her, under her spell, that was always her aim, even if I she were far away in place and time. She wanted to hold a special place in his heart, leave her inner essence as an image in his brain.
Almost on the rebound from this second romance, she met a girl who she could admire and learn from. A young girl like herself discovering the new post-war Berlin. Her name was Gerda Huba, an aspiring writer who had a job as a librarian. She immediately proposed that Maria move in with her and share the tiny two rooms she occupied in the poor Wilmersdorf part of town. Maria's mother took the news in a resigned fashion, she knew her younger daughter was spending more and more time in the cafés, less and less at home with her music, but realised she was approaching 20 and no longer the sweet innocent of even a year before.
It was Gerda who opened Maria's eyes to the realities of the new post-war Berlin. She was better read than Maria, despised women who allowed themselves to be dictated to by men and argued that the war and its aftermath had changed everything. Their responsibility was to themselves, there was no higher power ordaining their roles, the ruling class (and she included Maria's parents in this category) had lost their power and sway over the people. They and their strict codes of behaviour were consigned to the dustbin of history. Gerda was an idealistic socialist excited by the great movements of liberation springing up all over Europe. There was talk of revolution on the streets of Berlin, and Paris, London, Glasgow, Munich, Milan... the whole continent was in ferment in 1921, most obviously in Russia where a bitter battle raged between the Red and White armies after the assassination of the Czar and his family. Germany's own Kaiser lived in ignominy in Holland and the old imperial aristocratic families were being reduced by the ever spiralling inflation into genteel poverty.
Gerda attracted Maria with the dangerous thoughts she dared to utter. In Maria she claimed to see an example of the fallen ruling class. Maria laughed at this conceit, reflecting on the privations of the war years. The two young women shared the meagre rooms, and the even more meagre meals. They were inseparable as they gathered confirmation all around them of the rightness of their new revolutionary philosophy.
They walked along the crowded streets and thoroughfares arm in arm, Maria head over heels in love with Gerda's mind, besotted with her view of the world, her all devouring logic, her marvellous encyclopaedic knowledge which contrasted so much with her very sheltered background. On the street corners they laughed and giggled at the women openly solicting business dressed in outrageous ringmaster uniforms, shiny black boots, fishnet stockinged legs, riding whips nonchalantly held in the cleft of their arms. The burlesque women sought men who would pay handsomely to be humiliated and did a roaring trade among the ever more blatant passers-by who, with no work to distract them, sought temporary relief in novelty while they still had some money to their name. The women affected a masculine commanding appearance, especially the many apparently respectable housewives who travelled into the town from the suburbs to desperately try and eke out their housekeeping money. The two young women spent much of their free time in the cafeterias and clubs, where homosexuals openly displayed their affections as they sat, chattered, laughed and observed the foibles of humanity through the day. There were men fawning at prospective clients over fluttering fans, their eyes darkly made up even in the middle of the day. The two friends went to clubs where naked girls danced with their patrons in mocking tea dances - all pretence that the assignations were for anything other than quick relief from the doomed economy outside the doors was dropped.
Maria fell under this fatalistic spell. If she saw a man across the table who she liked, a quick wink, a girlish giggle, and an invitation to go to his flat (or hers) ended the pleasantries of the afternoon in a frenzied burst of lovemaking. Clothes and inhibitions were shed daily and nightly all over Berlin, the pace of the Jazz Age had begun to assert itself and Berlin was where it found its first expression. The city claimed with some justification to be 'the fastest in the world.' Some of the cabaret clubs openly allowed their guests to try drugs like cocaine and marijuana, opium and heroin, although Maria avoided these indulgences. She looked into the eyes of the drugged people and saw they were trying to blot out the reality all around them, whereas she found it all strangely exciting and alluring, with the hint of danger added to the mix. A dark current had entered Berliners' lives, and it fed them an energy and an appetite for further thrills. The cabarets lasted long into the night, Gerda and she would return at dawn to their rooms ready, after a few hours sleep, to throw ourselves into the social whirl once more. Maria hardly saw her mother, who presumed she was regularly attending music school, although her daughter had become a very infrequent visitor to the lessons which were so removed from the reality of life in café society.
The need for money and independence led Maria to take her courage in both hands one day at a club where she played in the orchestra. She suggested to the owner she join the chorus girls he had just begun auditioning. He asked her to show him her legs which she quite brazenly did, hoisting her skirts up above the waist so that he was dazzled by her underwear. He asked her to give a few high kicks which again flashed the frilly underwear before his wondering eyes. That was enough, she was in, a member of the man's 'Thielscher Girls', twelve in number. Over the autumn and winter of 1921 to 1922 they visited Hamburg and Cologne as well as clubs around Berlin. There were other things beside violin playing, she realised, that could help a young woman progress in the world of entertainment. The chorus line proved her most regular source of income.
The excursion into the cabaret was all that a girl who had just turned 20 could wish for. She already knew the theatre was what she was intended for, not the concert hall. On the stage she came alive, revelled in the attention the kicking chorus line generated with flowers raining upon them as they roused the audience to cheers of delight at their increasingly daring routines. They wore top hats and tight body hugging costumes, decked out in feathers around their waists, with white silk stockings completing the revealing outfits. The girls in the troupe were all like her, surviving from day to day. They were often invited to parties where drink flowed and food was all about. After the rigours of the day when buying the next meal could cost a week's earnings it was an enchanted world. Those who still had money were quite happy to finance the parties as long as everyone had a good time. It was usually dawn by the time she made her way back to the two shabby rooms, often with several of the girls in the chorus line joining her since they had nowhere to go.
A few hours sleep, and the other woman reappeared, the dutiful violin student attending her lessons at the High School, but Maria had joined other lessons for voice production which were also held at the school. She longed to be able to captivate an audience with her voice rather than her music, and just as in the cabaret she came to realise that it is, above all, the personality of a performer which attracts and fascinates. She was determined to find an outlet for the commanding theatrical face she wanted to show the world.
Eventually she told her anxious mother that her wrist muscles were permanently damaged by the constant violin practice, that it was no use pretending she could follow this as a career, and so she had decided to become an actress. Wilhelmine took the news badly. Since Maria's return to Berlin she had feared the changes in her daughter and disapproved of her new friends and lifestyle profoundly. Wilhelmine had hoped Maria would soon grow out of her madcap stage. But the mother's concerns were ignored until she became resigned to Maria's desire to go on the stage, even as she pointed out it was no profession for a young woman of Maria's breeding and background. For mama, the war had changed nothing, she clung to her Prussian ways. But one day she surprised Maria by saying that Uncle Willi, from the family jewellery shop, had offered to help get her a film test.
Maria was ecstatic. The motion picture business was booming all over Berlin, there were many more picture palaces than there were clubs or theatres, but in the snobbery of the Berlin arts world the motion pictures were not considered a serious art form, just a cheap escapist entertainment for the downtrodden masses. However, the great attraction of the new film studios was their ability to pay wages far in excess of anything that could be expected in the theatre. Maria arrived one day in April at the studios to await her film test.
The gate people told her she would have to wait until the day's filming was complete before she could meet Stefan Lorant. Eventually, he came out of the hothouse of the film studio where, because they worked under glass, the atmosphere created by the heat of the lamps was like a tropical greenhouse. He was exhausted by the day's shooting.
'Is it possible you could come back another day?' he asked in a weary way when she introduced herself, bubbling over with enthusiasm and quite prepared to give the performance of her life.
'I feel I am meant to work in films, it is my only wish in life,' she melodramatically told him.
'The heat inside the studio is too much, we have been there all day, it is brutal work, not at all the glamourous life you would imagine,' he replied.
'Why not do your test out here?' she countered, fixing him with a relentless look of seriousness, 'I will not disappoint you. My mother Wilhelmina von Losch said that you would not let down the sister of Willy Felsing.'
This appeal to his duty persuaded the young film director.
'Very well, we will do the test out here,' he conceded.
He sent for a camera and tripod while he scanned about him with an eagle eye.
'You see that fence there?' he said, indicating the edge of the film production company's lot, 'I want you to jump off there and smile at the same time.'
Maria did as she was bid.
'Now grimace. Now shout and fling out your arms.'
A crowd of actors and actresses gathered as he put her through her paces. They enjoyed watching the director manipulate her like a marionette in his hand, as she jumped and returned, jumped and returned more than a dozen times. Finally, he called a halt.
'We will get in touch if we wish to pursue your interest, Fraulein von Losch,' he said.
Turning to his friends gathered around, who had hugely enjoyed the spectacle of the young eager girl obeying his whim like a pet dog she heard him say.
'There's no need to look at the test, I can tell you now, there's nothing there. But those wide cheek bones, those expressionless eyes, that is a haunted look, strange for one so young.'
Maria heard nothing
more, but the rejection made her all the more determined.
Her work with the Thielscher Girls resulted in offers of modelling for advertisements. Always, her legs had to be displayed while she coquettishly held the manufacturer's wares. There is a photo which still exists of a record she promoted, it is held delicately above her belly, her garter showing on long shapely legs, her gloved hands holding the record in tender adoration while she coyly gazes at the camera. The chemise-like short dress leaves little to be imagined, it is daring even by today's standards. In early 1920s Berlin, it was the last word in sophistication. And sophistication was what every young Berlin girl aspired to portray. A worldly wise knowingness, not shy young blooms but women of the world. Underneath the surface they were just having a good time and found it all highly amusing. Women were allowed to display their attractions and revelled at the opportunity after so many years of grinding dullness and disaster.
Chapter Three
Love and marriage
It took Maria Magdalene some time to get over her disappointment with the film test, but slowly the realisation dawned that she needed training if she were to be an actress. She felt a natural affinity with the stage, even at school she had been allowed to play a few parts and had cultivated a gypsy style of dressing with her hair allowed to flow in profusion in contrast to the more Prussian severity most of her school contemporaries favoured. The time could not have been more appropriate. Film production companies were arising all over Berlin as the fledgling motion pictures of pre-War days became a mass medium and early reservations about their suitability for respectable people crumbled before the lure of seeing dreams played out on a screen, even if there were problems with the flickering picture registering anything more than an approximation to reality. However, these new companies were not prepared to take a chance on untrained amateurs. Professionalism was as important as looks. There were any number of girls who dreamed of becoming movie stars - the talk was of hardly anything else in the cafés. Who was acting in what film? Who was recruiting extras? Who was destined for stardom? These were the burning questions. The young would-be actress decided to mould herself into a motion picture star and began by changing her name. From 1922 onwards, she was always Marlene Dietrich, as she reverted back to her real father's name and dropped von Losch forever. Even as a child she had already decided her stage name would be Marlene, rather than Maria Magdalene, and this became her permanent Christian name. It unlocked the real personality who had languished in the shadows in the war years and afterwards. With her father's name reclaimed, she reverted to his determined organised way of conducting oneself, and gradually left behind the period of drifting that she had entered on her return to Berlin. The period of questioning and doubt was over and a splendid butterfly was to emerge from the unpromising chrysalis.