Blue Angel (5 page)

At seventeen, she had grown to her full height of five feet, five inches. Like her mother, however, she tended to corpulence, and the short, more fashionable skirt and the short bobbed hairstyle she now adopted made her seem almost Rubenesque. Very much had been restricted in her Berlin life because of family and school obligations, and in Weimar she had no particular polish, nor an entrée to a new circle of friends. She was, therefore, pleased when Reitz, a
demanding but kindly instructor, arranged for her to reside at a girls’ dormitory near his studio. Her only desire was to please him—that, after all, was virtually the only approach to men she knew—and so she frequently brought him a pastry or offered to do his household chores. Years later, in answer to a question put to her by her lifelong friend Billy Wilder, she claimed that Reitz had been her first male lover.

With her roommates—girls who were studying music or literature at one academy or another—Maria soon began to flourish. They all bought cheap seats for theater and opera productions, and often on Sunday afternoons they took a picnic to the park and read aloud to one another—selections from Goethe’s
Faust
, with each of them taking a part; the lyrics of Heinrich Heine’s
Romanzero;
a poem just written by one of themselves; or sometimes a letter from a male admirer. During such activities, Maria’s friends came to appreciate her witty comments and her brisk, satiric remarks.

For perhaps the first time, she became aware that she could be an asset to a gathering. Eager to be liked and accepted, she dispatched most of the dormitory tasks on their joint behalf and often invited a crowd of students to join them for a hearty goulash; additionally, she readily shared her cigarettes with friends and gave part of her own meager allowance to anyone in need. When her mother visited during the late summer of 1919, armed with supplies of tinned food and soaps, she found Maria far more casual in speech and manner, more gaily independent and perhaps, to Wilhelmina, more alarmingly mature after the experience of living away from home. A photograph of a much older man on her daughter’s dressing table evoked her mother’s inquiry; Maria smiled, said nothing and that evening introduced her mother to him—Professor Reitz, of course, who seemed very much a surrogate father as well as serious instructor. Of her year in Weimar little else is known, and later Marlene Dietrich rarely spoke of it: it was apparently a time of earnest study and of personality development, but neither written records nor personal witnesses survive to reveal more. In any case, she was back in Berlin before her nineteenth birthday in late 1920, studying with Professor Carl Flesch at the Music Academy and living in a one-room apartment nearby.
Her mother, making an enormous sacrifice, bought her a violin for 2,500 marks—then almost
700, an amount which would have bought a small house in the Berlin suburbs. There seemed to be no doubt, as Professor Reitz had said, that Maria was on her way to a major career as a violinist.

3: 1921–1926

I
N
1910,
THE CRITIC
K
ARL
S
CHEFFLER HAD CALLED
Berlin a city doomed to a perpetual state of “becoming,” but never completed. By the end of 1920, a legal ordinance had recently created Greater Berlin, which included four million people, making it the third largest city in the world. That year, the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht described it as “a wonderful affair, overflowing with things in the most ghastly taste—but what a display!” The activity was indeed remarkable, for in progress or recently opened were dozens of new theaters, cinemas, swimming pools, racetracks, office buildings, factories, exhibition halls, luxury apartments and proletarian flats. There was also an abundance of languages: Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Dutch, Danish, French and English were spoken everywhere, for the city was a major European gateway, and citizens en route to and from their own countries often stayed, attracted by the cornucopia of a bedazzling life.

That life was, perhaps more than anything, a madcap European version of the postwar, liberated jazz age; in fact, in a way the
Roaring Twenties began in Berlin. There was first of all, in 1919, a great Russian influence following the mass exodus from that country after the war: their newspapers, restaurants and styles were ubiquitous. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz and writer Vladimir Nabokov were among the first Russian refugees, as was nineteen-year-old Gregor Piatigorsky, who had waded across the Sbruch River holding his cello above his head while border guards shot at him. Dadaism, the anarchic art movement founded at Zurich’s Café Voltaire, reached Berlin, too, where an adherent like Kurt Schwitters insisted he was making a political statement by festooning the walls of his home with junkyard trash. More sedately, English tearooms and literary societies opened monthly in Berlin, and soon American influence was everywhere evident—in pop songs, imported Broadway shows, the films of Chaplin and the translated works of Melville, Whitman, Poe, Twain and Sinclair, all of which Berliners were reading in bestselling quantities.

Things were happening quickly, and nowhere was the speed more evident than in the silent “flickers” that became popular as the new German cinema flourished. At the height of the war, General Ludendorf (among others) had seen the potential of film as propaganda, and in 1917 the major production companies were consolidated as the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (known familiarly as UFA)—the Universe Film Company. After the Versailles Treaty, the government’s one-third interest was sold, and UFA began to produce commercial and, when censorship was abolished, even unusual entertainments. The titles
Hyenas of Lust
and
A Man’s Girlhood
fairly describe their stories.

But there was enduring art in the cinema. Robert Wiene’s fantastic silent film
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
(1919), a weirdly expressionistic horror tale with a hallucinatory depiction of madness, was perhaps most responsible for the public’s interest in movies, and soon Fritz Lang was preparing grave thrillers (
Destiny, Dr. Mabuse
and
Spies
) about society’s anarchic impulses. F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Robert Siodmak were also refining skills they later took with them to film work elsewhere, and Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Alfred Hitchcock came from Vienna and London to make films at UFA’s Neubabelsberg studios, which offered the
finest technical facilities in the world. Whatever could not be supplied by state funding was provided by wealthy bankers, and by 1922 there were over 275 film companies (up from twenty-eight six years earlier) and a parallel explosion in the number of movie houses.

In the theater there was also unprecedented progress. A twenty-one year-old actor named Max Goldmann had come to Berlin’s Deutsches Theater company from his native Vienna in 1894, and under the tutelage of its director Otto Brahm had developed astute performing and managerial skills. By 1905 he had directed plays by Strindberg, Wedekind, Wilde and Gorky as well as operas by Richard Strauss. Now known by the less obviously Jewish name of Max Reinhardt, he succeeded Brahm that year and widened his repertory to include Shaw and Shakespeare, Schiller and Goethe. Committed to the concept of exciting theater for the masses, he introduced revolving stages, spectacular mechanical devices and new approaches to stage lighting in his three-thousand-seat Grosses Schauspielhaus (Great Theater), a conversion of a circus on the Schumannstrasse. This new home of the Deutsches Theater was a steeply ascending amphitheater surrounding the stage on three sides. Here he presented monumental productions of the
Oresteia
and
Danton
with expertly managed, vast crowds of actors and extras. Next door to this vast auditorium, Reinhardt opened the smaller Kammerspiele or Chamber Theater, for staging smaller and sometimes avant-garde pieces, and nearby was Reinhardt’s drama school.

German talent often flourished in less formal settings, however, and the cabaret was perhaps the most notorious. Set in a kind of supper-entertainment atmosphere, it had evolved from the circuses and street fairs of the late 1800s to the vaudeville shows of the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s, cabaret shows delighted both the lower and middle classes. Its most famous literary form emerged at the Kabaret der Komiker, where Kurt Tucholsky’s satires drew an international audience (“We say no to everything!” was his provocative motto). Also popular were Erich Kästner’s casual skits combining classical references, contemporary literary allusions and piquant sociopolitical commentaries often spiced with interludes of topless dancers. In such settings, one was free to perform and discuss anything—and
those on- and offstage did just that. Nothing was censored, everything was fair game for impromptu send-up and every sort of sexual taboo was challenged—often at the behest of the
conferencier
, a witty master of ceremonies who joked with the audience and introduced the acts and playlets.

B
UT THERE WAS A DARKER SIDE
. T
HE ARTIST
George Grosz, for one, called the Berlin of that time

a completely negative world, with gaily colored froth on top that many people mistook for the true, the happy Germany before the eruption of the new barbarism. Foreigners who visited us at the time were easily fooled by the apparently light-hearted, whirring fun on the surface, by the nightlife and the so-called freedom and flowering of the arts.

Just beneath the surface, Grosz saw (and depicted in his famous caricatures) “the fratricide and general discord . . . the noise, rumors, shouting, political slogans.” He was on target, for all the commercial and cultural activity coexisted with a dizzying postwar inflation. In 1919, a dollar bought eight marks; four years later, it bought four trillion. Violent crime accompanied massive unemployment and homelessness, there was a terrible food shortage, and families routinely dissolved. Often ten or a dozen strangers shared a dingy room with out-of-work drifters. An influenza epidemic claimed the lives of seventeen hundred people in a single day in 1919. Not surprisingly, political discontent often became ferocious, and there were more than five hundred assassinations in street riots between 1920 and 1923; reason seemed as debased as the currency.

Amid such disarray, forms of escape were understandably desired, and casual sex and opium were easily available. When novelist Stefan Zweig wrote that Berlin had transformed itself into “the Babel of the world,” he was describing a city that seemed to thrive on contempt for basic decency. Bare-breasted prostitutes chatted with customers at the Café Nationale, while at the Apollo men and women danced nude as patrons found rooms and niches for quick
trysts with performers during their offstage moments. At the White Mouse, on the Behrenstrasse, the cocaine addict Anita Berber offered her Dances of Horror, Lust and Ecstasy, usually wearing only chalk-white makeup and a crooked smile. She, like many of the onlookers, died before the age of thirty. Various morbid bars and clubs proliferated, responding to every possible inclination, and on many street corners boys and girls in black leather and shiny boots snapped whips threateningly or used hand fans daintily, to suggest every imaginable caprice.

There was, then, a curious blend of absolute despair and desperate gaiety, as if everyone sensed that catastrophe was imminent. In fact before the end of 1923, Adolf Hitler made an abortive attempt to seize power in Munich. Hermann Göring was wounded in the attendant melee; he withdrew to Austria where he became a morphine addict and, like his Führer, marked time.

I
NTO THIS WORLD OF
1921 B
ERLIN RETURNED
M
A
ria Magdalene von Losch (as she had been known in school at Weimar). Her violin lessons continued that year, but to support herself she often worked in a small, tacky cabaret orchestra, in a glove factory, a hat shop and even at a newspaper kiosk. Before her twentieth birthday that December she had at least two romantic liaisons—one with a frail young man whose identity is unknown and who subsequently died of dysentery, the second with an older man whose wealth somehow withstood the general economic distress. The sickly lad evoked her pity and tenderness; it was also an opportunity for an unthreatening, undemanding sexual interlude she could effectively control. And from the senior beau she willingly accepted meals and trinkets until she learned he had other romantic attachments as well as a wife and four children, whereupon she booted him out. Very quickly (as often happens when young people come to the swirling freedom of a modern metropolis) her residual shyness was overcome—not, it seems, by conscious effort, but simply by absorbing the
Berliner Luft
, the atmosphere itself.