15WEIMAR BERLIN

ANNA MAY and her sister Lulu arrived in Germany in the spring of 1928. Arising out of the ashes of World War I, the Weimar Republic, to paraphrase the eminent historian Peter Gay, was dancing on the edge of a volcano. For a short, dizzying span of a decade or so, Germany was an incubator for both liberal dreams and nascent fascism. A precarious exuberance, which abetted and even fulfilled the visions of artists, was soon shattered by the rise of the Nazis. Smarting from the military defeat and the detrimental terms of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the parliamentary democracy was from the start riven by economic hardships and political upheavals. Nonetheless, out of this chaos came an explosion of creativity in art, literature, music, and film, a Zeitgeist aptly described as the “Golden Twenties.” Especially in Berlin, the erstwhile capital of Prussian militarism, there emerged a mesmerizing cultural scene, an untrammeled drive toward everything modern, open, and cosmopolitan.¹

At the time of Anna May’s arrival, the artistic avant-garde—from Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, from Bauhaus to Dadaism—was in full swing. In mass culture, Berlin became what Ilya Ehrenburg called “an apostle of Americanism.”² America was a catchword for whatever was cool and modern—everything from jazz to the foxtrot and the Charleston, to Josephine Baker’s La Revue Nègre and her banana skirt.³ Galloping inflation and the corollary devaluation of the Deutsche Mark in 1922 and 1923 also spurred a huge influx of foreign tourists and artists, most lured by the affordable and easy lifestyle in the German capital. Cabarets with seminude all-girl chorus lines, cafés filled with the aroma of Turkish coffee and the comfort of velvet armchairs, glitzy picture palaces, high-class bars catering to patrons of all sexual proclivities. Christopher Isherwood, a British literary sojourner whose first visit to Germany coincided with Anna May’s, vividly described bar scenes that gave him a “delicious nausea”: “Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe.” To Isherwood, a Cambridge-educated gay man fleeing the stuffy British milieu, “Berlin meant boys.”⁴ In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the much more straitlaced Stefan Zweig called Berlin “the worst sink of iniquity in the world.” He described a scene that occurred on the very street where Anna May and Lulu would be staying: “Youths in wasp-waisted coats, their faces made up, promenaded along the Kurfürstendamm, not all of them were professional rent boys; every grammar-school student wanted to earn something, and state secretaries and prominent financiers could be seen sitting in darkened bars shamelessly courting the favor of drunken sailors. Even the Rome of Suetonius never knew such orgies as those at the transvestites’ balls in Berlin, where hundreds of men in women’s clothing and women dressed like men danced under the benevolent gaze of the police.”⁵ To cultural conservatives, this kind of American craze and Babylonian mongrelism stood for everything that was wrong with the modern world. In a novel by Stephen Spender—another British visitor to Berlin—a character opined that Berlin was a “city with no virgins. Not even the kittens and puppies [were] virgins.”⁶ This remark, hyperbolic as it is, offers a measure of the intense human energy—driven by the artistic avant-garde, explosive youth culture, and other popular desires—that would give Berlin its reputation as “the Hauptstadt of vice.”

It would be hard to overstate the sense of exhilaration Anna May felt upon arriving in Germany. After having been long inured to America’s puritanism and Hollywood’s racism, she finally could let down her guard. Not that the Weimar Republic was a haven of racial equity. Au contraire, barely a few years later, men in jackboots and brown shirts would come out of the shadows with their swastikas and billy clubs. But, as we will see, Anna May was entering a far more cosmopolitan milieu, one where she would be treated differently than she was in Hollywood. Of course, confusion and anxiety were also inevitable for any newcomer. As Anna May would later tell Walter Benjamin, a native Berliner and one of the city’s most famous flaneurs, when she and Lulu stepped off the gangplank in Hamburg and managed to get to the cavernous Hauptbahnhof, they felt lost. Under the vaulted gloom of the train terminal appeared a sea of strangers and a cacophony of unfamiliar sounds, as if they had just walked onto a film set where they did not know the plot. Knowing no German, they were desperate to hear the magic word Berlin. But, as she had hoped, the city, indeed the country, would open its arms to embrace what Benjamin would dub “a Chinoiserie from the Old West.”⁷

As an American woman of Chinese descent, Anna May embodied for Germans two cultures that were not really compatible—America and China. Consequently, the seeming contradiction would cause a certain amount of confusion in German perceptions of her, reflected in Benjamin’s odd phrase. As an import from America, she was expected to help German filmmakers compete with Hollywood for the domestic and European market—or, in the words of a German film critic, to try to “be more American than the Americans.”⁸ In the immediate post–World War I era, film had become a perfect diversion for a nation existentially wounded. While the rich could afford seats at Max Reinhardt’s classical theater, or wine and dinner aboard a Rhine steamer, the impoverished and beer-besotted flocked to the movies. In 1919, there were more than a hundred film companies in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse district. By the early 1920s, the center of gravity had shifted to the western suburb of Babelsberg, which was becoming a Hollywood-style city. But the competition from America was daunting. As historian David Clay Large describes in Berlin: A Modern History, “By 1923, the number of American films showing in Germany almost equaled that of the homemade product. German commentators complained about the intellectual vacuity of the American imports, but the German public found these films, with their canned sentimentality, images of fabulous wealth, extreme violence, and wild chase scenes, highly compelling.”⁹ In the language of Benjamin, for instance, we can detect a palpable influence of American movies. Describing Anna May as the “Old West,” he evokes not only the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, or the dime novels about Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill, and Wyatt Earp, but also the cinematic images of the shoot-’em-up Western frontier, rough-and-tumble cowboys, and Dodge City.

By the late 1920s, Hollywood had penetrated the German market not only with its movies but also with capital investment in German film companies. MGM and Paramount both bought into UFA (Universum Film AG), the biggest film conglomerate in Germany, creating a business relationship that would increase the traffic between Hollywood and Babelsberg. The joint venture propelled a constellation of German directors and actors into global stardom, including Josef von Sternberg, Richard Eichberg, Marlene Dietrich, and Emil Jannings, who won the first Academy Award ever presented to an actor for his role in The Way of All Flesh (1927). Eichberg, the architect of Anna May’s transatlantic migration, was considered one of the “most American of German directors,” who had made his name as a producer and director of Hollywood-style action-packed, fast-paced, spectacularly exotic genre films.¹⁰ In 1928, Eichberg had struck a deal with British International Pictures to coproduce films in Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. Signing up a Hollywood star like Anna May was part of Eichberg’s plan to develop the European cinema and to out-American the Americans.

At the same time, Anna May was seen by Germans as an icon of China, embodying all the exoticism and mystique of the Orient, thus distinguishing her from other American imports, such as Louise Brooks, known for her roles in German films that explored modern sexual mores. Although it was a role already typecast for Anna May by Hollywood, being a Chinese icon actually meant something different in Germany. In contrast to the United States, where the Chinese presence had been long and prominent, it had been barely visible in Germany. According to census records, the first two Chinese only arrived in Berlin in 1822. The 1904 opening of the Trans-Siberian Railroad brought more Chinese traders and merchants to Germany via Moscow, and they mostly settled around Berlin’s railway station, the Schlesischer Bahnhof (today’s Ostbahnhof). In no way comparable in size to Chinatowns in the United States or Great Britain, the small Chinese district that emerged in East Berlin became known as the Gelbes Quartier (the Yellow Quarter). It was the poorest neighborhood, consisting of squalid tenements and dismal courtyards, with no gardens or trees lining the streets, no supply of electricity or running water. During the Great War, France recruited about a hundred thousand coolie laborers from China to dig trenches, bury the dead, and perform other menial services. After the war, some of those men, especially ones from the southern districts of Qingtian and Wenzhou (my hometown), who were endowed with strong entrepreneurial spirits, remained in Europe and found their way to Germany. They made a living selling trinkets and tourist paraphernalia—porcelain vases, tea services, soapstone carvings, fans, and cheap jewelry. The first Chinese restaurant opened in Berlin in 1923, the same year as Hitler’s Munich Beer Hall Putsch. The 1925 census counted 747 Chinese in the entire Weimar Republic, of whom 312 resided in Berlin. Due to their small cohort, the Chinese community in Germany was not as conspicuous as in the United States and elsewhere. A 1928 report showed only a handful of Chinese restaurants and curio shops dotting East Berlin’s drab landscape with their exotic appearance: “Nondescript like all other closely cramped buildings in the eastern district of the city. Only one part of the façade stands out. Around the shop-window and the door the wall is painted pink. Chinese characters shine forth from this dull ground.”¹¹

Geopolitically, Germany lost all of its colonies in the Asia-Pacific region after World War I, while America’s influence was steadily rising there. Pursuant to the Treaty of Versailles, the rights to the German colony in Qingdao (Tsingtao) were transferred to Japan, a swap that infuriated the Chinese populace. Massive protests in 1919 triggered the firestorm of the May Fourth Movement and changed the destiny of modern China. A defeated empire without colonies, Germany had nonetheless kept alive its colonial imagination, tinted by nostalgia and loss. These lingering sentiments found expressions in popular culture such as Hans Grimm’s bestselling novel, Volk ohne Raum (People without Space, 1926), and would likewise set the tone for the films made by Richard Eichberg, with the aid of his newly acquired Chinese icon.

Upon their arrival, Anna May and Lulu checked into the Hotel Eden on Berlin’s famous Kurfürstendamm, a long, broad avenue lined with shops, hotels, and restaurants—a less elegant version of the Champs-Élysées. Catering to the wealthiest patrons, the posh hotel had gained notoriety in 1919 for its connection to the arrest and murder of two Communist radicals, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Its rooftop café, equipped with a minigolf course, was a favorite hangout for such celebrity writers and artists as Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Mann, and Marlene Dietrich. Young Billy Wilder, then an obscure freelance reporter, was moonlighting as a hired dancing companion, a so-called taxi dancer, at the hotel’s roof garden.¹² Nearby stood the Romanisches Café, described as “the primary waterhole for Berlin’s cultural arbiters and their hangers-on.”¹³ At the end of the long boulevard was the enormous Luna Park, and its opening in spring marked the beginning of a season of merriment.¹⁴ In an article for Neue Berliner Zeitung, Joseph Roth, also a young reporter trying to make a name for himself, told the story of a man just released after fifty-one years in jail. Roth depicted the old man’s astonishment at the sound and fury of a city he could not recognize, wondering in a Teutonic reprise of Rip Van Winkle what century he was in.¹⁵ Anna May’s first impression of Berlin was likely not as bewildering as that of Roth’s old man, but she must have been somewhat overwhelmed by the bustle at the Potsdamer Platz, the elevated S-Bahn seemingly flying through the air, the Devil’s Wheel roller coaster at Luna Park, or the naked bodies at the immensely popular open-air baths.

“To go to Berlin,” wrote Peter Gay in his definitive study of Weimar culture, “was the aspiration of the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its hundred and twenty newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin they became, and Berlin that made them, famous.”¹⁶ It’s certain that Gay did not have Anna May in mind when he wrote those lines, given that his heroes of the era were the likes of Stefan George, Martin Heidegger, and Thomas Mann. Nonetheless, it was indeed in Berlin that the ambitious, energetic, and talented Chinese American actress, at a continent’s and an ocean’s remove from her father’s laundry, would reach global stardom.