Marlene Dietrich would never forget the sounds of Schöneberg, Berlin, where she was born on December 27, 1901: soldiers marching in step, horses clip-clopping along, and trains whooshing by. Sedanstrasse, where she spent the first few years of her life, is situated on the so-called island, set off from the rest of the city by train tracks. The military had built barracks on the island, and since the time of the Franco-Prussian War, the railway was used to transport soldiers and weapons. Sedanstrasse was “a treeless part of Berlin,”1 where the military dominated the lives of the civilian population. Marlene’s father, Louis Erich Otto Dietrich, was a police lieutenant, his precinct located on the ground floor of the building where he lived with his family.
The Dietrichs were Calvinists who had been driven out of the Palatinate and settled in Brandenburg under the protection of Frederick the Great. Marlene’s sister Elisabeth insisted, however, that they were actually Huguenots, who lived by the virtues of frugality, hard work, and restraint.2 These virtues do not seem to have been very pronounced in her father, the son of a saddler who ran an inn in the town of Angermünde, in the northeastern German district of Uckermark. The Dietrichs eventually made their mark as town dignitaries. Their son Louis felt that he was destined for higher things and sought to become an officer. He served with the Uhlans, a cavalry regiment armed with lances, sabers, and pistols. In French caricatures, the Uhlans were often portrayed as the quintessence of Prussian militarism, with malevolent faces, glinting monocles, and long lances. No officer by the name of Dietrich appears on the ledgers of the Uhlan regiments in question, so Marlene’s father likely achieved no higher rank than a simple sergeant.3 Even so, he felt like an officer. He was elegant, generous, and popular, and he enjoyed being seen in the company of lovely ladies and living above his means. In the few photos of Dietrich that have been preserved, his penchant for posturing is striking: his proud, upright stance emphasized his “lieutenant’s waist,” and his mustache twirled upward. Born in 1867, he was one of the “Wilhelminians” whose immediate ancestors had achieved it all, uniting the country and defeating the French, but the men of his generation had no prospect of earning fame on their own.
Louis did not remain in the military for long. In his early twenties, he switched over to police work, a career that offered the potential of achieving esteem, security, and status, although little in the way of advancement or pay. Berlin was divided up into individual precincts, and the official in charge of a given precinct had to live there. The policeman was subject to a higher order. Even after hours, he had to remain in uniform; access to taverns was restricted; and membership in clubs was permitted only with the consent of his superior. The policeman was an outsider, always on duty. The only attractive part of the job was the prestige. Louis lived beyond his means to conceal his material indigence. Marlene’s father did not tone down his brusque air of authority even within his family, where he was intent on displaying his strength, issuing orders, demanding obedience, and preserving his own power. It was abundantly evident in his appearance as well, notably in his wedding photo, taken in 1898, which displays his enduring love of uniforms and posing for the camera. The woman at his side looks tacked on, three of her fingers peeking eerily out of the crook of his left arm. He is paying no attention to her. Bare-headed and clad in his Sunday uniform, he stares straight ahead, while his bride, twenty-two-year-old Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josefine Felsing (who went by “Josefine”), peers at him timidly.
Like so many Berliners, the Felsings had moved there from elsewhere, in this case from Giessen. They had been clockmakers for generations. The shop they opened in 1820 was one of the best known businesses in old Berlin. The Felsings specialized in elegant clocks and proudly called themselves “Purveyors to Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress.” In 1895, Josefine’s father Albert Felsing donated a golden clock to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. The family had a stylish residence in a building annex of Unter den Linden 20, which they owned. They were proud of their proximity to the royal castle and were not pleased to see their daughter marry a police lieutenant, which meant a drop in Josefine’s social status. But Josefine was drawn in by Louis Dietrich’s stylish appearance and fine-sounding words.
Louis and Josefine’s first child, Elisabeth Ottilie, was born two years after the wedding, and their second, Marie Magdalene, followed in 1901. Josefine, now twenty-five years old, no longer saw her husband as much of a hero and went to great lengths to bring up the two girls in accordance with her ideals. She ran a tight ship in her household. Marie Magdalene smarted under this matriarchal rule. She and her sister differed in many ways: Elisabeth was the ugly duckling, shy and nervous, and Marie Magdalene the pretty child who was proud of her long hair. Elisabeth claimed that men went crazy for her sister when Marie Magdalene was only ten years old.
The everyday monotony in the police household was punctuated by several moves: in 1904, to nearby Kolonnenstrasse, and two years later to bustling Potsdamer Strasse. Elisabeth Ottilie wrote that she and her sister were afraid of these “passages.” The girls must have sensed their mother’s anxiety about further social decline. Louis’s superiors gave him the poorest evaluations, and the change of apartment from the upper floor to the mezzanine took on a symbolic significance. Then Louis fell ill. “Once, my mother moved us to where my father was. She would walk us by the hospital, so my father could look down from his barred window and see us,” Marie Magdalene would recall later.4 On August 5, 1908, Police Lieutenant Louis Erich Otto Dietrich succumbed to his nervous disorder (which was likely syphilitic in origin) at the age of forty-one. The disgrace of the family’s comedown was now compounded by the disgrace of this death. Josefine kept the cause of death from her children, no doubt fearing that their father’s illness could have been transmitted to them.
Josefine, now listed as “Widow Dietrich” in the telephone book, moved the family to Tauentzienstrasse. As the daughter of a clockmaker, she was adamant about punctuality and discipline but lacked any interest in the pursuit of pleasure. She maintained strict control over her daughters’ daily routine: she brought them to school at 8 a.m. and picked them up at 1 p.m. Half an hour was allotted for lunch, then the girls did an hour of homework. At 3 p.m., a “mademoiselle” or “miss” came to converse with them in their respective native languages. Sometimes they went for a walk in the park. Then there was another half-hour of homework. Seven-thirty was bedtime. Three times a week, they went to gymnastics, and twice a week to piano, guitar, and violin lessons. To avoid idleness or unnecessary reflection, Josefine forced her daughters to adhere to a daily routine of strictly regulated monotony.
Leni Riefenstahl was born in Wedding, a section of Berlin that reeked of confinement, adversity, and desolation, yet also came to be associated with modernity. Berlin attracted immigrants from the eastern provinces in search of employment. These immigrants would transform Berlin into a modern metropolis. Riefenstahl, a first-generation Berliner, was one of them. Her mother, Bertha Ida Scherlach, was the eighteenth child born to a carpenter in West Prussia in 1880. Leni’s grandfather had set out for Berlin to seek his fortune but did not find work, and his children had to support the family. Riefenstahl claimed to have come from a solid middle-class household, but the few facts she revealed about her childhood and teenage years suggest that this was not the case. Her mother sewed blouses, and the rest of that branch of the family seems to have eked out a living by producing piecework at home. In one of her few written recollections about her relatives, she described the entire family sitting at a long wide table gluing cigarette papers.5
Leni’s mother was a pretty, inquisitive young woman who dreamed of becoming an actress and using beauty and art as an escape route. But as a seamstress without formal training, she would need to rely on marriage to elevate her station in life. She met her future husband at a costume ball. Alfred Theodor Paul Riefenstahl was a plumber in Brandenburg and sought a wife who would help him manage his business. The young Miss Scherlach was an ambitious woman who shared his dream of upward mobility. They married on April 5, 1902. The wedding photograph was taken not in a studio, but in a banquet hall. The bride and groom are standing in front of a long table adorned with floral arrangements, with a kind of stage curtain in the background. The bride is wearing a high-necked white gown with a veil and train, which form an appealing contrast to her dark hair. In her left hand she clutches a bouquet of white roses, and her right hand is linked with her groom’s. He was a tall, cheerful, robust man with blue eyes and blond hair. Riefenstahl was the kind of man who liked to break out in song and laugh loudly at his own jokes, although he could be roused to fury in an instant, as his daughter would discover. But in his black frock coat and white bow tie, he looked trustworthy and friendly on his wedding day. He posed bareheaded, his well-ironed top hat clamped under his left arm, with his bride standing bolt upright, looking proud and aloof.
Five months later, on August 22, Bertha gave birth to their daughter, Helene Amalia Bertha Riefenstahl. For the first years of Leni’s life, the family lived in an apartment on Prinz-Eugen-Strasse in Wedding, a rather short street by Berlin standards, located near Leopoldplatz, around the corner from the crematorium. When Leni was three years old, her brother Heinz was born, and the family was complete. The Riefenstahls aspired to belong to the new middle class. Alfred’s business was doing well. He was both a modernizer and a traditionalist, enthusiastic about progress in the technical and the economic realms but insistent on his special status as a craftsman, which set him above the rank and file of the labor force. Wedding was a case in point of both new industrial production and new social adversity. The factories of Osram, AEG, Rotaprint, Schering, and Schwartzkopff made this part of Berlin one of the key industrialized areas in the city. Multistory tenements sprang up to house the workers, many of whom were soon cheated of their hopes for a better life. They lost their jobs, turned to drink, and went to seed, and could be seen staggering through the streets of Berlin with nowhere to turn for help. The sight of this adversity right at Alfred’s doorstep must have strengthened his resolve to achieve social distinction.
A photograph of his five-year-old daughter shows her standing in front of a tree in the woods and staring anxiously into the camera, her blonde hair adorned with a crooked white ribbon. One hand is holding a branch; the other is hidden behind her back. She is wearing a white jumper with dark ribbons at the neck and wrists, her underskirt peeking out. The girl looks tense and presses her lips together. Leni had yet to learn how to oblige other people. She shut herself up in her room to be alone with her dreams. During her very first visit to the theater, when she was four, Leni discovered that the world behind the curtain could be an enduring sanctuary. She was drawn to art at an early age. Her father was not pleased; he wanted a practical-minded girl who could buckle down and run a big household.
Leni used her body as a path to art and a means of escaping her father’s pervasive power. An anxious girl by nature, she steeled her will and put her courage to the test. She played sports ambitiously and intensively. Training her body strengthened her in facing her father. First she joined a swim club, then a gymnastics club. Her father agreed to let her join the swim club, but was opposed to the gymnastics club. When he found out that she was doing gymnastics anyway, he punished her severely. It would become an enduring pattern of her life: Leni had to go behind her father’s back to fulfill her wishes and thus herself.
Her ambitious physical training went hand in hand with her blissful relationship to nature. “I grew up as a ‘child of nature,’ amid trees and bushes, with plants and insects, shielded and sheltered,” the girl from Wedding wrote about her happy childhood.6 She regarded nature as a mirror of her soul, and worshipped it for the rest of her life. A photograph of the nine-year-old with her brother Heinz once again shows her dressed all in white, with sneakers and a tennis racket. Her brother, sporting a sailor suit, gazes jauntily into the camera, but his older sister appears reticent. Her dark eyes are sad, yet she radiates a strong physical presence, the ribbon now perched properly on her head.