By David Stuart Ryan, bestselling author of John Lennon's Secret
This is the introduction and the first chapter of The Blue Angel, a startling new book which looks at the incredible life of Marlene Dietrich.
It is first being published on the internet, and you can read the complete book online. The first six chapters
are free, after this you can read the rest of the story by paying online with your credit card. You can also reserve a publication copy of 'The Blue Angel'
by filling in the request form at the end of the chapter.
Publishers who are interested in the US or other publishing rights are also invited to reply using the form.
Publication is scheduled for late 2006.
We would also appreciate your comments on this chapter.
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 for ever 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.
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 priviliged 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 caf‚s 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 nostaligically 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 rewon 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 for ever 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 streched 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 busines, 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.
