Leni’s youth began with the revolution of 1918. At the age of sixteen, she dropped out of the exclusive private school she had been attending in the Tiergarten section of Berlin. (There she was very weak in history and singing, but at the top of her class in mathematics and gymnastics.) As she grew older, her father became more insistent that she live up to his expectations. He was moody, short-tempered, irascible—and petrified that his daughter would lose her virginity. He wanted to be informed about every step she took. Her mother stood by helplessly. She thought her husband was too strict, with both her children and herself. They were now living outside the city; Alfred had bought a house in Zeuthen. As a child, Leni had spent happy weekends here; she made her first attempts at swimming at Lake Zeuthen, and built up little retreats in trees, behind bushes, and in the reeds. But she was no longer a child, and nature was not enough to fulfill her. Leni experienced the dilemma of her parents’ marriage up close: the dreams of the little seamstress from West Prussia had not come true. Bertha did better her social situation, but she longed for the kind of success in beauty and art that the world of acting offered. Her husband, whose full focus was on his work and family, felt threatened by that world. He feared and fought the exaltation Bertha sought in art, and Leni bore the brunt of his ire.
As a girl from Wedding, where money and grammar were in short supply, as Joseph Roth quipped, Leni aspired to join those way on top someday.1 But a house in Zeuthen was not in one of the elegant villa districts, such as Dahlem or Grunewald. Actually, her father had merely returned to where he had come from. He had turned his back on the city and brought his family to safety, as he saw it. Meanwhile, however, his daughter was testing out her effect on men and savoring their attentive glances. If she was out with her father, though, he barked: “Keep your eyes down; don’t look at men like that”—and she obeyed.2 When she walked through the streets alone, Leni waited for a man’s gaze to rest on her shoulders, her legs, or her mouth, then lay in her bed at night replaying such moments. She thought about the city streets, where the stream of people never let up, and longed to be the center of attention in that life.
Leni began to defy her father. Every look that she returned violated his established rules. Her pride rebelled against walking next to him through the streets with her head lowered—yet she may have done it over and over anyway. But the more accustomed she grew to admiring sidelong glances from strange men, the more self-confident she became.
Her first stage was the city itself. After school, she would dash into the Tiergarten, pirouette on her roller skates, and await an audience. She was soon surrounded by admirers. The Berlin in which these little performances took place was the Berlin of the Great War, yet Riefenstahl never spoke about a wartime childhood with casualties, pain, and suffering.
Wilhelmine Berlin was developing a romantic rapture for steel, tracks, cables, high-speed elevated trains, and high-rise buildings. Wilhelm II had recognized the significance of technology and had arranged to improve the technical colleges and expand the engineering curriculum. Under his reign, Berlin became the model of the hectic city. Wide streets allowed traffic to come roaring through, and the Kaiser proclaimed “the century of the motor.” Aristocratic ladies visiting Berlin rushed breathlessly across Potsdamer Platz and embraced one another with relief when they reached the other side. There was a big jumble of streetcars, newspaper vendors, handcarts, bicycles, and pedestrians pushing and shoving. Money was made and money was spent. Women wore plumed hats and laced-up bodices, and there was reveling on the streets and in dance halls. The city was amorphous, expansive, cosmopolitan, and ambitious. Berlin was intent on blotting out the impecunious past and flaunting the hypermodern present.
The desire for progress and prosperity trumped any interest in finding solutions to political problems. The Kaiser regarded prosperity as a new form of power. This attitude was frowned upon by the old aristocracy and the educated classes, but it appealed to the newly wealthy and those who aspired to wealth, like Alfred and Bertha Riefenstahl.
Leni’s father liked to see himself as a foresighted businessman. In 1885, the first district heating system had been mounted in Beelitz, outside of Berlin, and since then, central heating and modern lavatories had been installed in new buildings. Alfred—who specialized in sales and installation of new technologies—earned good money, athough he was a long way from being solidly middle class, as his daughter later claimed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a family with only two children was no longer out of the ordinary even in the working classes. Leni’s brother Heinz was a quiet boy who hoped to become an interior designer, but his father wanted him to join the family business, as an engineer who would contribute to the modernization of Berlin.
The transformation of Berlin from a locus of imperial grandeur into a diverse collective was already underway before World War I. New social policies and functional design signaled a break with the nineteenth century. An unembellished coupling of form and function became the hallmark of a power-driven German industrial culture. In some sense, Alfred Riefenstahl regarded himself as an agent of modernist functionality; he looked to the future and was proud of his country’s technological and economic capabilities. He and his wife felt that they were living in the right city at the right time. Berlin’s lack of tradition was her chance to make a fresh start. Alfred applied his sound business sense and craftsmanship skills to improving his lot in life and partaking in the economic upswing. The Riefenstahls embodied the civic spirit of the new Berlin.
Although Alfred and Bertha signed their daughter up for piano lessons, their motive was less the love of music than a desire to enhance her prospects on the marriage market. Alfred’s interest in art and culture did not extend beyond occasional visits to the theater. In his mind, actresses were women of loose morals. His wife, by contrast, felt that an actress ranked just below a countess, and supported her daughter’s interest in acting. The new art of film acting was an especially fitting profession for dilettantes who believed in their artistic calling. Mother and daughter enjoyed learning all they could about movie stars. Leni began to entertain the idea of acting in a motion picture, and she responded to a small advertisement in the B.Z. am Mittag seeking twenty talented girls for film shoots at the Grimm-Reiter School of Dance on Kurfürstendamm 6. Helene Grimm-Reiter enjoyed a fine reputation as a trainer for stage and screen. Leni knew quite well that her father would never allow her to act in a movie, but her curiosity to find out whether she would be chosen won out over her fear of her father. One girl after another stepped forward, was given a brief glance by Frau Grimm-Reiter, and was told to leave her name and address. Leni was delighted to see Frau Grimm-Reiter put a check mark after her name. When she was about to head out, she peered through a crack in the door of a large room and saw young dancers rehearsing. The room reverberated with piano music and the teacher’s commands. Leni wanted to be one of these girls, working hard to train her body to express grace and strength.
For the mother and her daughter, a bourgeois life meant showiness, beauty, and a carefree attitude, and they found all three of these characteristics in the cinema, which offered an escape from reality as a bonus. Leni learned to play the piano and draw, but her home life felt confining and gloomy. When she wrote about her youth in Zeuthen, the reader senses her unhappiness. Her father insisted that she become a typist in his company, although she felt the tug of an artist’s calling.
Her mother agreed to let her sign up at the dance studio, and Leni was chosen for the film. They did not breathe a word of this news to her father. She rejoiced to herself yet did not dare to disobey her father, so had to turn down the film role. Even so, she stepped up her dance training: “No pain or effort was too great for me; I practiced outside of school for many hours a day, misusing every rail or banister for that purpose. On the streets I would do great leaps and prances, and barely noticed the way people stared at me, shaking their heads.”3 There was instruction in rhythmic gymnastics and dance exercises, interval training, fantasy dance, improvisation, diagrammatic representations of dance, and film studies. It was difficult at first, but her body was used to intensive training. Leni’s transformation into a dancer took place behind her father’s back, while the old world was falling apart. Triumph over pain and over her body was all that truly mattered.
Otto Dix had made Anita Berber the quintessence of the decadent 1920s when he painted her iconic portrait, and now it was Anita Berber, of all people, who was clearing the way for Leni’s first stage performance. Berber, who had also been a student of dance at Grimm-Reiter, was a rising star just after the revolution of 1918. Frau Grimm-Reiter was planning for her prominent pupil to perform, but Berber fell ill and had to cancel. The posters had been printed and the room rented. No one had any idea how to find someone to substitute for her. Then Leni admitted that she had been secretly observing Berber during rehearsals and had reenacted her dances in private. Why not let her stand in for Berber? Alfred was sent off to a hastily arranged card party, and his daughter hurried onstage. She later wrote that her performance was exuberant and the applause neverending. No one appeared to mind Berber’s absence, we are told, and everyone now loved Leni Riefenstahl.4
The story did not end well. When her father got wind of what she had done, he sent her away to a girls’ boarding school in the Harz Mountains, in the hope that Thale, the “pearl of the Harz,” would cure her of any artistic ambitions. In Berlin, the name Thale still had the ring of high society; Thale was where ladies with nervous conditions were once sent.5 Alfred wanted Leni to marry a rich man and forget about art. After a year in the Harz, she wrote her father a letter swearing off art and expressing her willingness to work at his company. However, she insisted on being allowed to continue taking dance classes—purely for fun. Alfred agreed, and welcomed his daughter to the Berlin office.
Women who worked as typists in Berlin may have dutifully rushed to work every morning, but many dreamed of becoming film stars when they went to the movies in the evening. They had a good grip on their modest lives; they were young, unmarried, and employed. They wore their hair short, smoked cigarettes dangling from cigarette holders in perfect form, and knew their way around men. Leni was not like this. She was also young, unmarried, and employed, but she worked in her father’s office. Alfred appeared to be quite pleased that the repentant sinner had returned. In these troubled times, he wanted reassurance that his family was gathered around him. His wife kept house, and Leni and Heinz were right there with him at the company. He had prevailed: he had forbidden his son to work in interior design and had disabused his daughter of her nonsensical notions about dance. He was upholding the principles of a patriarch, even though that was no longer the modern thing to do. Now more than ever, he was intent on maintaining his professional pride, and he regarded his family’s participation in the business as an expression of firmly ingrained class consciousness.
But he was sadly mistaken. Leni was hoodwinking her father. She had no intention of giving up art and her idolization of other performers. Quite the opposite: she aspired to be an idol herself, and she was leading a double life. She spent many hours a day on stenography, bookkeeping, and typing, and devoted three days a week to art. Her cheeks shed their chubbiness and her features were now marked by defiance and denial. She took up sports again and signed up at a tennis club. Her father had agreed to this activity because tennis was regarded as the sport of the wealthy, and he hoped she would meet a rich man there. Every day, father and daughter took the train to the city. She had long ago stopped trying to strike up a conversation with her father because he would shut down on the spot, and he had no interest in her plans for the future anyway. Day after day, they sat across from each other in the compartment in silence. The father read the newspaper, and his daughter parked herself in the corner and dreamed. Alfred sensed her growing discontentment. He was exasperated to realize that she was no longer finding fulfillment in her family, their work together in the office, and life in the country. Leni had discovered the city for herself. Berlin knocked you down or lifted you up; this was where you would sink or swim. An ambitious girl and the hectic pace of the city were a good fit. It was not a moral clash that stood between the father and his daughter; it was the attitude toward life of two different generations. Leni had come to realize from her father that times had changed. She was the new type, and her father “the fossil, the man who had outlived his day, the man from a sinking epoch who refused to believe that the tide of the earth had turned.”6 He embraced new technology, but his lifestyle and family values remained firmly patriarchal.
Leni had grown up with the pride of modern Wilhelmine Germany, but also with the slogans of the Wandervogel movement, a youth organization that emphasized hiking, camping, and the spirit of adventure. The previous century had offered a well-ordered world. Age and time had had different dimensions. Being young was equated with a lack of dependability and respectability. All gestures that might have suggested the curiosity or exuberance of youth were avoided, and people as young as forty took pleasure in stylizing themselves as venerable old ladies and gentlemen. By contrast, the new generation now claimed that just as the century was young, so were the people in it. Those in the Youth Movement demonstrated their lack of affiliation with the world of their parents. Girls wore their dresses loose instead of tightly laced, and boys preferred open-necked shirts (known as Schillerkragen) to confining starched ones. Both boys and girls opted for sandals. The vitality of the young body was contrasted with bourgeois life paralyzed by convention. Air, light, and sun liberated young people from the historical deadwood of past eras. The Youth Movement strongly emphasized comradeship. Mastery over one’s own body held out the promise of courage, strength, and stamina. Personal experience took the place of reason. To be was to do.7
Leni did not belong to the Wandervogel movement; she was too young to join. But like the two friends Walter and Ulrich in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities, she had “just been in time to catch a glimmer of it.” This movement did not draw in the masses; it grew no larger than several thousand. Even so, young people were swayed by it: “Something at that time passed through the thicket of beliefs, as when many trees bend before one wind—a sectarian and reformist spirit, the blissful better self arising and setting forth, a little renascence and reformation such as only the best epochs know; and entering into the world in those days, even in coming round the very first corner one felt the breath of the spirit on one’s cheeks.”8 It was the spirit of vitality, of nature, and of community. All this, along with praise of technology, pleasure in objectivity, a will to succeed, and pride in the virtues of craftsmanship, formed the backdrop to Riefenstahl’s youth. She, too, felt a breath of this spirit on her cheeks. The wordless art of the dance was her first bond with the trends of the era. The pioneers of modern dance celebrated their first successes in Berlin.9 The American Isadora Duncan was the first to appear onstage barefoot and in see-through Grecian tunics in Berlin.10 Her admirers were at a loss for words, never having seen anything of the kind; her critics quipped that she was seeking her soul with her sole. Lovers of classical ballet felt as though they had been duped and turned their backs on her. In their way of thinking, Duncan’s dances were pure dilettantism. German Lebensreformer (back-to-nature advocates) and followers of the Youth Movement, however, saw that she was one of them. This impression was confirmed several times over, by everything from her loose garments to her sandals to her reading of Nietzsche. The Germans found a dance concept of this kind, with its blend of Nietzsche, critique of civilization, feminism, nature worship, and spiritualism, irresistibly appealing. Duncan, who embraced the role of the anti-bourgeois, drew in young women from good families who now wanted to learn dance-based gymnastics instead of ballet. In 1904, she opened a school in a villa in Grunewald to train the dancers of the future. “My body is the temple of my art,” was her motto.
Riefenstahl cited two names in connection with her career as a dancer: Anita Berber, whose risqué behavior and lust for life had made her a role model for girls from good middle-class families, and Mary Wigman, whose school in Dresden she attended in 1923. Wigman, from Hanover, had been one of the first dance students of Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, who gave lessons in his méthode rhythmique in Hellerau, known as the “garden city.” His maxim to his dancers was, “Now say it with your body.” People needed to find their way back to a harmony of mind and body, he explained, a harmony that had fallen by the wayside in the course of civilization. Hellerau was a laboratory for modernity. Kafka, Le Corbusier, Poelzig, Diaghilev, and Rilke visited Hellerau on several occasions. Wigman lived there with Ada Bruhn, who would later marry the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and with Erna Hoffmann, who would marry the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn. Every person was artistically gifted, every person could be cured of the harm wrought by civilization, and every person could become someone other than who he or she was. Experimentation trumped tradition. This unbridled dilettantism and belief in the life-altering power of art made prewar Germany a field of experimentation for the new century.
Wigman found the perfect way to express the prevailing sentiments in the period immediately following the war, when people were fluctuating between euphoria and depression. In both ecstatic theater and expressive dance, the body was made to speak. She dispensed not only with music, but also with classical ballet costumes. The focus was on the self, barefoot. Wigman danced with such energy that the floor shook. She gave her dances abstract names that underscored the metaphysical background of her art. She preached a virtually cultic approach to one’s own body, and she choreographed sacral themes and staged archaic rituals. Wigman made dance an art of the chosen few, an approach that appealed to Riefenstahl. Wigman was a modern artist; while pursuing her calling, she did not neglect the professional aspect. In 1920, she opened her own school in Dresden. In describing her pupils, she commented:
I also believe that there is quite a bit of justified egoism in all these young women, an egoism that starts by having them seek out themselves before taking on their surroundings and the world at large. Seeking themselves, feeling themselves, experiencing themselves. Dance is an expression of a higher vitality, a declaration of belief in the present without any intellectual digressions. Unimpeded by the past, and as yet to form any notion of the future, the young generation of women lives in the present and expresses this belief in dance.11
Many people had trouble grasping the notion of an explicitly unsentimental and energetic dance performed by a woman, but young women were enthralled and quite a few wanted to become artists in order to break with authority and tradition once and for all. The question of whether they were actually talented was of secondary importance. Riefenstahl was one of these young women.
She had stubbornly refused to comply with her father’s vision for her future. She was neither looking for a suitable husband nor was she hoping to wind up as a junior director at her father’s company. Her eventual departure to Dresden was preceded by grueling years marked by relentless quarrels that were followed by reconciliations. Alfred could not bear the thought of men paying to watch his daughter’s body on stage. Indifferent to art, he regarded dance as no more than a display of erotic allure. And there were plenty of stories going around about expensive presents being exchanged for sexual favors in the dressing room. For a master craftsman, having a daughter become an artist signaled a betrayal of his professional honor. He told his daughter that if he were to read her name on an advertising pillar, he would spit in front of it. A study of the upward mobility patterns of daughters of skilled workers in the Weimar Republic concluded: “of the 61 visual artists and artisans, 3 are daughters of master craftsmen or 4.9 hundredths among 96 actresses and women singers, we have only 3 daughters of master craftsmen, that is, 3.1 hundredths of the total number.”12 Leni Riefenstahl was one of them. At some point, her father capitulated to the will of his daughter. Alfred admitted defeat and declared his willingness to finance “top-notch training” for her.
She received instruction in classical ballet from a once-famous Russian principal dancer and spent time at her dance studio. Leni was actually too old to have success in such a strenuous profession, but she was never put off by obstacles of this kind, either as a young or as an old woman. She wanted to show the whole world what she was made of. “I practiced until I was sometimes ready to black out from exhaustion, but time and again, I was able to overcome my weakness through sheer force of will,” she said.13 Her mornings were reserved for toe dancing, and in the afternoons she practiced expressive dance. A photograph from this period shows her in a tutu with bulging thighs. She is smiling uncertainly into the camera, but it is easy to tell that she is enjoying the display of her body. She had yet to decide between the enchanting artificiality of the ballerina and the dead seriousness of the expressive dancer. Ballet is concentrated lightness; expressive dance is pure energy. The ballerina is pure nineteenth century, and represents the ideal of the woman as a creature who serves only the beautiful. A ballerina dances the steps that the choreographer has arranged for her and masks her effort with a smile. An expressive dancer, by contrast, is the harbinger of the twentieth century, proclaiming the end of sentimental emotion and mawkish beauty. She creates her choreography on her own and obeys only the voice within her. It is not technical brilliance that is in the foreground; only the expression counts. Sigmund Freud was putting the history of the woman down on paper, while at the same time the expressive dancer ventured to put her innermost feelings on display onstage and avow them to everyone in the audience. The form her art took was hers alone. She had parted ways with her male creator and brought herself forth as an artist. It was through her body rather than in words that she pointed the way into the creative unconscious.
In 1922, Riefenstahl turned twenty. She was yearning for the event that would finally bring her into adulthood. The thought of the “not yet” preyed on her mind. She had not yet lost her virginity, and she had not yet achieved her breakthrough as an artist. Her adolescence had coincided with a grand historical event from which she was now profiting: The lost war had paved her way to her career. In the newly established Weimar Republic, women were put on an equal footing with men. Even as a child, she had not wanted to defer to her father’s authority. She mobilized her body against her father’s all-pervading power. Defiantly and mutely, she subjugated her body to her will. She played sports and grew strong. At home, she shut herself in her room and abandoned herself to her dreams. Expressive dance was the culmination of her desires: Her body gave expression to the messages within her, and she came under the sway of a new order that was no longer her father’s. Riefenstahl’s struggle with her father’s authority corresponded with the end of monarchic rule. The stage was empty. The Kaiser had fled to Holland and kept busy by chopping down trees there; his anachronistic court vanished into thin air. Berlin became the epitome of itself: a city of the traditionless masses.
The soldiers returning home had entered the city through the Brandenburg Gate, which was bedecked for the occasion. For them, Berlin was the embodiment of what they had fought for. Nowhere was their futile battle for national greatness clearer than at the sight of the undamaged city. Berlin, the city of the vanquished—and a city of women—had remained intact. The beaten-down man and the New Woman came face to face. In 1918, the German man was a symbol of history and the German woman a symbol of society. Politicians did not trust this city of Berlin, which had thrown itself headlong into the arms of women and society. The first German republic was proclaimed in Weimar, not in Berlin. By choosing the city of classical writers, the elite of the period between the two world wars were once again counting on the decisive force and power of the word. But things had changed. The new physicality was a child of the war. In the legendary 1920s, the word was mistrusted and the body celebrated.14 The new faces and bodies were a reflection of a society that played the great equalizer. They were slick, unembellished, well trained, and matter-of-fact. The world of the aristocracy had gone under; the new societal dynamics not only changed ballroom dancing, but also rendered ballet meaningless. Harmony and serenity were passé; the new era called for expression and strength. Many people—primarily young women—embarked on a quest for a new (body) language that “lies dormant” within every individual, as Mary Wigman claimed. Those who wanted to keep up with the times engaged in rhythmic gymnastics or tried out expressive dance. Young women could not wait to sign up for gymnastics and dance schools, which sprang up everywhere. Dance, a perpetual present, was well suited to Berlin, which was an unending work in progress and constantly reinventing itself. “Modern art reflected the experience of crises that traditional art could not address. It expressed modernity in modern terms—and modern liberations as well.”15
For Alfred and Bertha Riefenstahl, the lack of tradition in Berlin offered an opportunity to move up the social ladder. In a sense, their daughter was continuing along this path, because her success as an artist hinged on the end of traditional art. A period of experimentation was underway. All those who were inclined to express what was on their minds with no holds barred were welcome to join in. Young girls with no more than a smidgen of talent felt called upon to demonstrate their dancing ability in public. By 1920, Mary Wigman was noting with alarm: “Dilettantism grew, as one might expect, because up to that point, there were no yardsticks and directions to assess minor and major talents. Everyone had to figure it out on her own, in anxious isolation, worrying about her share of fame.”16 The audience got used to applauding sketchy presentations. Self-designated dance masters opened schools that enjoyed healthy enrollments.
In 1923, Leni’s father allowed her to apply to Wigman’s school in Dresden, which was housed in a villa with an enormous garden.17 The rehearsal spaces had the size and functional look of a factory—empty rooms flooded with light and walls painted in multicolored glossy varnish. The instruments were set up in a corner, and there were chairs for people who stopped in. Wigman’s own living space, which was also in the villa, was similarly simple, functional, colorful, and sparsely furnished. And then there was Wigman herself, enveloped in cigarette smoke, clad in extravagant garb, in front of the red or gold studio walls and focused intensely on her students’ presentations.
Photographs of the school’s daily routine show young barefoot women in light clothing performing all kinds of acrobatic routines in the garden. They are studying and encouraging one another, giving rounds of applause. The atmosphere is upbeat and casual, yet focused. By contrast, the ensuing recitals had the young girls playing priestesses clad in black, looking somber and trance-like. The Wigman school was a tight-knit community, with Wigman’s charismatic personality its undisputed center. She taught her students that dance arose from the unconscious.18 She gave her dancers the freedom to do as they wished, provided that their movements were well founded and well motivated. Wigman was also devoted to caring for the girls entrusted to her. “I see her before me cooking thick soups in enormous pots to feed her lean and hungry pupils,” the writer Vicki Baum recalled.19 Wigman attended to their every need, helping them out with issues ranging from lovesickness to homesickness.
Riefenstahl joined the master class: “The very next day I was allowed to audition for Frau Wigman and was accepted into her master class, where I took lessons along with Palucca, Yvonne Georgi and Vera Skoronel.”20 Nevertheless, she did not enjoy her time in Dresden. She was bothered by Wigman’s ascetic style and did not want to dispense with music. Moreover, she was lonely and assailed by doubts about her talent, which was no wonder in view of the aptitude of her fellow students. In secret, she rehearsed the dances she liked in a room she rented for this express purpose. In so doing, she was replicating her standard pattern: She had to keep her talent to herself, work herself hard in solitude, prepare to embark on her victory lap and dazzle the world with her art.
Riefenstahl felt unmoored. If she did not find confirmation for her exceptional qualities, she took to her heels. She left the disciplined community of women and returned to Berlin. There is not a single reference to Riefenstahl in Wigman’s letters, essays, or notes. And she does not appear in Wigman’s ample photo albums of important performances and family photos of former students. She is nowhere to be found among the young women with their serious expressions and matching hairdos, a group that included enormously successful dancers such as Gret Palucca, Vera Skoronel, and Yvonne Georgi. Riefenstahl’s memoirs give oddly brief mention to her training in the famous Dresden villa. Years of quarreling with her father lay behind her, and now that he was finally financing dance school and she was in a class with the up-and-coming bright lights of German expressive dance, she took off again after a scant few months. Her terse explanation was that she felt out of place there. She provided far more detailed information about any crazy admirer who came along than about her encounter with the dance greats of her era. Riefenstahl wanted to convey the impression that she was an artist who had nothing left to learn. Her fellow students were surely not lacking in artistic self-assurance. Palucca, Berthe Trümpy, and Skoronel—to name just a few—did not remain tied to their teacher’s apron strings but instead pursued independent careers. Riefenstahl’s claim that she was unable to develop as an artist in Dresden is belied by Wigman’s avowal that every student was fostered in her individual form of expression and did not have to limit herself to imitation. Considering the noble intentions of this teacher, it was no easy matter for Leni to part ways with these talented students. There were often heated disputes, but Riefenstahl kept her distance from them. She simply stole off from the illustrious flock and continued her training “more intensely than ever” in Berlin. She claimed never to have missed any performances by Wigman or Valeska Gert and called the two dancers her “goddesses.”21 Quite apart from the fact that the difference between the two artists could not have been greater, we wonder why she did not stay with her goddess Wigman. These inconsistencies strongly suggest that she left Dresden out of fear that she was not the best among the talented dancers in her class.
Even as a young woman, Riefenstahl could not stand to be compared. She regarded herself as the measure of all things and sidestepped any competition or evaluations. The few months in Dresden were the first and last time she ever joined a community of women. As a supposed student of Wigman’s, she had an easier time presenting herself as a promising artist. When she returned to Berlin, though, she faced stiff competition. Countless students of dance were competing for a place onstage: “The many would-be dancers, who had left their run-of-the-mill families in an appalling manner, thought that their running around barefoot was modern dance, and infested the concert halls and theaters. . . . Sporting events, the Freiluftbewegung [open air movement], nudism, hiking clubs, gymnastics: all these purely practical activities had now culminated in modern dance, that is, in the landscape of art.”22 At this time of galloping inflation, in which a million reichsmarks in the morning might not be worth anything at all by the afternoon, a quick triumph was what mattered. Nowhere was this more evident than on the stage. Furthermore, going onstage was a way to earn money. Now that marriage had gone out of fashion as a way to gain financial security and many fathers had lost their assets, daughters needed a source of income. Sebastian Haffner ascribed a key significance to the year 1923 in the history of the Germans, calling it “that extraordinary year” in which the Germans developed “the cool madness, the arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible.” Inflation changed the country and the people: the young and alert did well, but those who were old and out of touch had few prospects of succeeding. “Amid all the misery, despair, and poverty there was an air of light-headed youthfulness, licentiousness, and carnival. Now, for once, the young had money and the old did not.”23 A “new realism” was holding sway in the arenas of love and money. Riefenstahl profited from this new realism. Not only did she lose her virginity in 1923, but she also enjoyed her first self-organized appearance on stage. For Riefenstahl, 1923 was the year that put an end to the tormenting “not yet.”
As usual, she went about things single-mindedly. To showcase her talent as a dancer and launch her fame, she needed public appearances. The course of action was relatively straightforward and well established: One rented a hall, printed posters, charged admission, got onstage, and claimed to be revealing one’s innermost experiences to the audience. Then one hoped for positive reviews and many guest performances. But it took money to get to this point. Riefenstahl toyed with the idea of asking her father for help, but at the same time she was resolved to reel in a financially solvent admirer for her enterprise. There was no lack of men—rich, famous, and influential—to fall for her charms. When she placed second in a beauty contest, she received piles of cards from interested gentlemen. She plucked out the two that seemed most promising: F. W. Koebner, editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Dame, and Karl Vollmoeller, a playwright known for his “harem” on Pariser Platz. Both wanted to support her, and both made their sexual interest in her abundantly clear. She described these encounters in detail in order to underscore the temptation to which she was subjected. She remained steadfast, straitlaced, and strong-minded. With both men, she emphasized that her artistic talent would lead her to success even without their patronage. She wanted neither money nor sex from these men. For years, she had had a crush on Otto Froitzheim, a professional tennis player who was the lover of the actress Pola Negri. In the 1910s, when he was very successful on the court, tennis was considered a frivolous pastime.24 Riefenstahl arranged to meet Froitzheim, hoping that a relationship with him would give a boost to her career. He was a man about town with contacts in the world of film, and he had an apartment in an upscale part of the city. At the age of twenty-one, Riefenstahl had had quite enough of her father’s strict supervision, and losing her virginity would take her one step closer to liberation. She rang Froitzheim’s doorbell wearing black silk underwear under a coat trimmed with fake ermine. They chatted, then danced, then slept together. She later described her first sexual experience as a near-rape that left her feeling humiliated and disillusioned. But she had cleared the first hurdle: She was now a young woman with a lover.
By happy coincidence, she met a young banker from Innsbruck while vacationing on the Baltic Sea. He was watching her practice her dances on the beach, then he came up and spoke to her. “He complimented me on my improvised beach dancing and, during our very first conversation, he said, ‘If you like, I can sign you up for several dance recitals at the Innsbruck City Theater.’ ‘Are you the manager or director of this theater?’ I asked. He smiled. ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘but I have the money to rent the theater, and I’m convinced that you will have great success.’ ”25 At times of inflation, it was relatively easy for a foreigner to be wealthy in Germany. Of course, this man was thinking not about art, but about the woman he had met. She rejected the marriage proposal he made at the end of the vacation. Harry Sokal, as the young man was named, would become one of Riefenstahl’s key financiers, as would Adolf Hitler. Sokal had come to Germany from Romania as a child and had spent his youth in Berlin. He served at the front for two years, then went into banking when the war ended. When he met Riefenstahl, he was setting up a foreign exchange department at a bank in Innsbruck.
Sokal was a tall, thin-faced, handsome man who wore his dark hair slicked back. Constantly on the prowl for amorous escapades, he became aware of Riefenstahl during a vacation in Warnemünde. He was captivated by her flowing movements and her wish to appear onstage. “If this dance were to express only a fraction of her charm, graceful movements, and beauty, she would be a great success, and in a matter of seconds, my mind was made up: I would take charge of her debut.”26 Sokal described Riefenstahl as a self-assured, radiantly beautiful young woman who enjoyed the effect she had on men, and he hoped to win her over by financing her first dance performance. Undaunted by the huge sums of money the performance would require, Sokal paid for the hall and the publicity for the event, which took place on October 23, 1923, in Munich. The hall was only one-third full, but Riefenstahl deemed her “Dances of Eros,” which were inspired by her experience with Froitzheim, a resounding success.
While Riefenstahl denied having had an amorous relationship with Sokal at that time, he wrote that they spent their last night of their vacation in Warnemünde together. He was aware that love was not her highest priority. “She belonged far too much to her art, and above all to herself.”27 The performance in Munich was Riefenstahl’s dress rehearsal for Berlin. Anyone who wanted to make something of herself had to survive the “trial by fire” of appearing before a sophisticated audience in Berlin. In Riefenstahl’s eyes, however, the target audience in Berlin consisted of a single individual: her father. Her performance in Blüthner Hall had the sole purpose of convincing him that she was a gifted artist. Finally, her father was willing to believe in her. She triumphed over him onstage.
Marie Magdalene Dietrich’s mother did not remain a widow for long. Her second marriage was more to the liking of her extended family. Like Josefine’s first husband, Eduard von Losch wore a uniform, but he was a high-ranking army officer and came from a noble family. Von Losch was seven years younger than her deceased husband, who had been a friend of his. Josefine remained true to her belief in the old system of the class society and retained her predilection for military-style masculinity. Von Losch was a stocky man with a handlebar mustache who liked to boast about his experiences in the war. He had spent time in China, and the two Dietrich girls hung on his every word about this foreign world. Unfortunately, there was a stigma attached to their mother’s second marriage as well. This time the problem lay in her upward social mobility. The von Loschs were not thrilled with the prospect of their Eduard marrying a middle-class widow. Von Losch’s mother kept her distance from her new daughter-in-law. Still, Josefine preferred disparaging looks from her new extended family to her former status as the widow of a second-rate police officer.
Two years before World War I broke out, Dietrich was given a gold-embossed diary bound in red leather. In the turbulent years that followed, she would confide her secrets to this diary, but her change of father went unmentioned; she was utterly preoccupied with herself. The pretty girl sought to be the center of attention without her mother catching on to her ambitions. Josefine’s second marriage had not softened her; she was now bent on making her daughters live up to her new name, which for her meant teaching the children discipline. This discipline was relentless, strict, somber, and matter-of-fact. The daughter of a clockmaker with the soul of a sergeant was utterly humorless. Dietrich’s cousin Hasso Conrad Felsing claimed that even his Aunt Josefine’s normal conversational tone was imperious, and she would not tolerate any backtalk. Dietrich found an outlet from her mother’s overbearing presence in ice skating when the city lake froze over. If she fell down, she was quickly surrounded by a group of boys scrambling to help her back up, and she responded to their overtures with either haughty or coquettishly bashful looks. Unfortunately for her, she was usually chaperoned by her older sister. Since Elisabeth was not a good ice skater, Dietrich had no trouble gliding away from her. But when it was time to go home, the younger girl could be found sitting on a bench unfastening her skates, her feet numb from the skating and the cold, tentatively making contact with the ground.
Their mother placed great value on leading a life that befitted their social status. Her first marriage had been a disappointment in that regard—and in so many others. Those dark days now seemed to be over; she had now joined the nobility with her new last name, “von Losch,” while her children retained the Dietrich name. Eduard von Losch never lost sight of the privilege of his birth and, like her husband, Josefine was firmly convinced of the inherent superiority and leadership authority of Prussian officers. However, although she was regarded as a parvenu in her husband’s circles, she resisted the temptation to compensate for her disadvantaged background as a middle-class widow by indulging in a lavish lifestyle or surrounding herself with luxury. In Dietrich’s new home, there was an emphasis on the military values of duty, honor, and discipline: “[My mother] was like a kindly general. She followed the rules she laid down. She set a good example to prove that it was possible. No pride in success, no pats on the shoulder; the only goal was humble submission to duty.”28
The daily pressures eased up when her parents were expecting guests. The big living room cabinets were opened up, and out came the spotless white porcelain dinnerware, the tightly woven linen tablecloths, green glassware, filigreed champagne glasses, and squat port wine goblets. The festive sight of the beautifully set table lifted Dietrich’s spirits. Shortly before the guests arrived, she would lie in her bed with her heart pounding, picturing the guests entering the house through the hall with the chandelier, telephone, and potted palm, and her mother playing a quiet Chopin waltz, “her fingernails touching on the keys with a delicate little click.” The piano music “belonged to a house full of flowers, my mother’s perfume, her evening gown, her beautiful hairdo, the smell of my father’s cigarette coming through the open door of the library where he strode back and forth on the thick rug and listened to my mother playing the piano. Everything was ready for the guests.”29
The wife was the representative of beauty; a family’s social success could be gauged by her appearance and her involvement in the arts. The husband was proud of his cultivated wife, and everyone envied him. That was the ideal for a family at the end of the nineteenth century, and Dietrich continued to cling to this ideal well into her old age. The family in which she grew up largely ignored the sweeping changes in twentieth-century society. Dietrich was raised for a world that was coming apart. This world was embodied by the only true lady in the family: her grandmother. Elisabeth Felsing, who was born in Dresden in 1855, was the third wife of Albert Felsing, a merchant. After he died in 1901, she carried on the business for several years before handing it over to her son Willibald. Her granddaughter considered her the most beautiful woman in the world.
Elisabeth Felsing brought glamour and sparkle into Dietrich’s life. Her grandmother gave her cake, chocolate, and other delicacies and regaled her with stories about her childhood. She and her husband had enjoyed going to the Kaiserhof, one of the first luxury hotels in Berlin, where scarred officers, Jewish bankers, Russian ladies, and rich American women had their rendezvous. She read the Paris fashion magazines and delighted in objects that her daughter Josefine considered useless. “She awakened in me the longing for beautiful things, for paintings, for Fabergé boxes, horses, carriages, for the warm, soft roseate pearls set off against the white skin of her neck and the rubies that sparkled on her hands,” her granddaughter recalled.30 She impressed upon Dietrich that a lady never loses her poise; she simply disregards anything that is not to her liking. A lady is witty and alluring in a playful, lighthearted manner.
Dietrich also learned from her grandmother that the father and grandfather of the current Kaiser were buried in the same year. On an ice-cold day in March, Wilhelm I died at the age of ninety, and with his death, the connection to the eighteenth century was severed. Wilhelm I had met Talleyrand and entered Paris after the victory over Napoleon. His wife still had memories of Goethe and had witnessed the barricades in 1848. Her son, the new Kaiser Friedrich, had been crown prince for thirty years. When he ascended the throne, he was already at the brink of death. The days of his reign were days of his slow dying. Kaiser Friedrich left behind a son, the future Wilhelm II. Elisabeth Felsing had viewed Wilhelm II’s accession to the throne with suspicion. The young Kaiser was too brash for her liking, and she had nothing but contempt for his bigoted wife and her sanctimonious smiles. This imperial couple lacked any sense of style.
Felsing impressed upon her granddaughter that times had changed, and it was now important for a girl to study hard in school. Unfortunately, Dietrich found school gloomy and oppressive.
Early in the winter mornings, I would squeeze my eyes tightly and tiny tears transformed the pale street lamps into long, thin, glittering beams of light. I played this game every morning, and my tears would flow easily. I didn’t actually have to cry at all; the wind and the cold accomplished the same trick just as well. I knew all the closed shutters of the stores, all the jutting stones that I could jump over—on one leg, with my legs together or crossed—or slide on if it had snowed during the night. My feelings were just as familiar: the certainty of having lost my precious freedom, fear of the teachers and their punishments, fear of loneliness.31
Many of the teachers were reserve officers who liked to think of their classrooms as army barracks. Dietrich was appalled by the constraints and bleakness of the school.
As she grew up, she became increasingly alienated from her family, and at the age of eleven she came up with a new name for herself: Marlene. Back then, no one was named Marlene; she coined it herself. She evidently wanted to get away from the biblical theme (and she surmised that the only reason she was not named Maria rather than Marie was because many maids had that name). Entries in her notebooks show how much of her school time she devoted to practicing her new signature. In changing her name, she nullified the first decision her parents had made about her. Marlene Dietrich was now embarking on the life she would be plotting out for herself.
In the first days of World War I, during the summer of 1914, the whole country was in a state of euphoria. The prominent men who volunteered for military service included the poet Richard Dehmel; the famous Reinhardt actor Alexander Moissi; and Otto Braun, the son of Lily Braun, a socialist leader in the feminist movement. Lines of young men eager to enlist formed in front of the barracks, where there were reports of wild carousing, theft, and destruction. In restaurants and cafés, bands played music to bring out the patriotic spirit. There were endless refrains of “The Watch on the Rhine” and “Hail to Thee in the Victor’s Wreath,” and schoolchildren belted out “Hold Firm in the Roaring Storm!”
Dietrich must have had mixed feelings about the singing soldiers. Accustomed to military etiquette at an early age, she surely found it odd to see a war being celebrated like a party. In school, the students were now being ushered off to the auditorium to hear “thunderous speeches.” Young teachers were rushing into the classroom and proudly announcing that they would be following the call of the Fatherland. In no time at all, a good half of the Prussian elementary school teachers were off at war, replaced by elderly instructors who were often in poor physical health.32 The war also became part of the curriculum: The outbreak and course of the war were studied over and over again; there were lessons in “war poetry” and “war geography,” and the study of natural history featured discussions about war technology. Instructional time was devoted to knitting wristlets for the soldiers. “We sat in the classroom, dimly lit by the daylight, and knitted to warm the soldiers digging trenches far from home. They had us knit to make us feel useful, in order to fill the gaping void caused by the war.”33 The diary entries show a girl who feels as patriotic as her parents. In her memoirs, she was intent on proving her early love of France, but her diaries give no evidence of this love. As a daughter of an officer, her sympathy went to her nation, not to its enemies.
Detlev Peukert has identified a series of generations shaped by the war; his chronological scheme places Dietrich (along with such notables as Theodor W. Adorno, Heinrich Himmler, and others born in the first years of the twentieth century) squarely in the “superfluous generation.”34 The “superfluous generation” experienced war as youngsters, and it was a fixed coordinate in their lives. Sebastian Haffner, who was born in 1907, described how the war robbed children of their youthful innocence and manipulated their understanding of history and politics. “I, a seven-year-old boy, who a short while ago hardly knew what war meant, let alone ‘ultimatum,’ ‘mobilization,’ and ‘cavalry reserve,’ soon knew, as if I had always known, the ‘hows’ and ‘whens’ and ‘wherefores’ of the war, and I even knew the ‘why.’ I knew the war was due to France’s lust for revenge, England’s commercial envy, and Russia’s barbarism, I could speak these words quite glibly.”35 Children avidly followed the headlines of special editions and got to know the map of Europe as they marked the victories and defeats.
All at once, the reports of victory stopped pouring in, and the days of canceling school to celebrate these victories came to an end. Since Kaiser Wilhelm II had left Berlin at the onset of the war, his name was rarely mentioned. But in Dietrich’s home, the Kaiser was still held in high esteem, and the very idea that the Germans might lose this war was preposterous. On October 9, 1914, her uncle Willibald earned the Iron Cross; just three months later, on December 4, her uncle Otto was shot in the back of the neck.
Death had found its way into the family. The grief of the adults plunged Dietrich even deeper into her childhood isolation. She later recalled: “Children are condemned in advance to silence and solitude. They are not allowed to say that their own fears draw them close to those who suffer at the front every day and live in fear of ambush and mutilation.”36 The children did not understand the change of mood. The enthusiasm for the war had come to an abrupt end. Suddenly, no one wanted to spend time looking at photo albums of the glorious victories in 1870 or delight in jokes about the British.
By about 1916, there was no longer an authority to ensure that provisions reached the populace on a reliable basis. The downturn in production and the dramatic expansion of black market sales prompted by the war reduced the food supply. “Morning, noon, and night we ate turnips. Turnip marmalade, turnip cakes, turnip soup, the roots and leafy tops of turnips were cooked in a thousand different ways. . . . Nobody complained over these meager meals, the children even less than the grown-ups. At noon and in the evening there were potatoes, and in the afternoon too, if I was hungry. Potatoes, the true joy of childhood! There they lay, white, tender, and mealy.”37 Dietrich turned pale and gaunt. When she went to visit her beloved grandmother, her mother would pinch her cheeks to give them some color and make her look healthy. Josefine made sure to keep family life going at a calm and orderly pace on the surface, but even she could not shield the children from being gripped by uncertainty. Dietrich appears to have been relieved that her mother insisted on maintaining strict rules. “These rules were so inviolable that they seemed to be familiar and friendly. Lasting, unalterable, irrefutable, more protective than threatening, they were not subject to any mood or whim.”38 These rules gave structure and consistency to her life. Dietrich would invoke these “war rules” at times of crisis throughout her life.
Whenever the doorbell rang, her mother ran to find out if there was bad news from the front. Late in the afternoon, she took her younger daughter by the hand and strode to the town hall, where the lists of the men reported missing in action were posted. Dietrich’s mother would slow down and squeeze her daughter’s hand as she approached the lists. The girl was breathless with anxiety, her heart pounding in her chest. “She would never let go of my hand, when she stopped there, only her head moving from top to bottom as she scanned the names. I would watch her and try to guess when she would take the two steps sideward and, with her head held high, tackle the next list.”39 Her mother’s eyes were seeking the name she was loath to find: Eduard von Losch. “Two more lists, hope, don’t forsake me, ‘his’ name won’t be on them; I don’t want that to happen. . . . Now the last ones. . . . Her finger follows the black letters behind the glass pane smeared by countless fingers. The pressure of her hand lets up; she bows her head; her eyes are moist, but they are shining with a relief and joy only I can see.”40
But one day there was news that Lieutenant von Losch had been wounded. “My mother received a laissez-passer from general headquarters so that she could get to the Russian front and ‘give strength back to her husband,’ as the telegram read. My father was seriously wounded and not transportable. By the time my mother came back, he had already succumbed to his wounds. Now a widow’s cowl and veil, which hid her face, were added to her black dress.”41 Eduard von Losch had been injured outside of Kieselin in Galicia on June 20, 1916, and died of blood poisoning on July 16. His corpse was transported to Dessau and buried at the Memorial Cemetery for Fallen Soldiers. Dietrich had lost her father for the second time, and a black band was placed over her left sleeve. Her clothing had to be black or dark blue, and white cuffs and collars were the only decoration permitted.
The winter following the death of her father, and then of her uncle Max, was the start of the second phase of the war for Berliners. It was bitterly cold, and the city was suffering from an extreme shortage of fuel along with a dire shortage of food. Josefine moved to Dessau with her two daughters, and Dietrich sought companionship on the streets of this new city, as well as a respite from her mother’s grief.
February 4, 1917 I had a big fight with mommy. When she said if I went out with all those schoolboys, I must be boy crazy. First of all, I don’t “hang around with boys,” and, second, having a friendship with boys I know—you don’t have to fall in love just like that—is far from being boy crazy. . . . She said, “If you get boy crazy, you will be sent to boarding school.” Whew! I find that all so stupid and made up and I think “What a boring life!” Talking to a schoolboy on the skating rink makes you “boy crazy.” No, no. That’s too much for me.42
Josefine continued to be spurned by her deceased husband’s family. On Eduard von Losch’s obituary, the name of his mother had been listed—but not that of his widow. She was too old to marry again, and besides, there was a dearth of men in wartime. Josefine felt that she had been robbed of her happiness, and all her hopes now rested on her children. Elisabeth was the dutiful daughter, and Marlene the rebel. Their mother made them wear their hair braided with a black band as a sign of mourning. One photograph from this period, which was probably taken in Josefine’s living room, shows Dietrich sitting among her relatives. The many women are seated, and the few men are standing. All are wearing high-necked dark clothing and looking solemn. Dietrich appears deeply unhappy in this cold, severe group. She recalled later in life, “I dreamed of an armistice and peace, and I also dreamed of the warm, unkempt, fragrant sweep of hair that fell into my face and on my neck.”43 Dietrich had had quite enough of bowing to her mother’s dictates; she wanted to seduce men, and the decorum befitting the family’s station in life was a matter of indifference to her.
Josefine was in an unenviable spot, as the family was already up in arms about her younger daughter’s unseemly conduct. Eventually she and her children moved back to Berlin, but the uproar continued unabated. By 1914, Dietrich was confiding to her diary that she had no intention of going to high school; she was on the quest for glory and adventure. She spent her money on autograph cards, acted in plays at school, and pinned up her hair. And she discovered the movies.
Josefine felt nothing but disdain for the cinema, which, she was convinced, appealed to people’s basest instincts. Doctors and psychologists fretted about the spread of the “movie plague.” They feared the power and influence of the images, that they would lead young girls astray. Nevertheless, the impact of film continued to grow. Shortly before World War I, respected theater actors began to accept movie roles, and movies were reviewed in the arts sections of newspapers.
Dietrich adored the actress Henny Porten, whom screenwriter Willy Haas called the “most German of all German film stars.” Heavy breathing, dramatic gestures, and a quivering bosom were part of her standard melodramatic repertoire. To Josefine’s horror, her daughter devoted all of her time to thinking about Porten, who played morally upstanding women abandoned by disreputable men and ostracized by society. The young Dietrich’s role model was an actress who did not embody the spirit of the modern woman. Porten’s style was premodern, oriented to nineteenth-century emotive visual modes of expression. And the type of woman she gravitated to portraying—pure, honest, natural, and morally impeccable—could scarcely be called modern. Why was Dietrich so drawn to this paragon of virtue? It is tempting to surmise that Porten’s screen image suggested the mother figure she had always wanted: a woman of honor, like Josefine, yet soft and yielding. In the films shot during the war, Dietrich probably envisioned her own future, namely a destiny that in some way had to do with ill-fated love. Porten played women who faced difficult odds but remained pure and displayed greatness. The heroines in Porten films have melodious names: Adelina von Gentz, Viktoria von Katzenstein-Dernburg, Ruth von Erlenkamp, and Stella von Eschen. Dietrich’s taste in the arts was fairly conventional, and she was oblivious to avant-garde movements. Henny Porten never let her down; she could be counted on to play conventional roles.
In the final two years of the war, school was canceled more and more often. The children skipped class because they had to stand in line for food, or were simply too weak from malnutrition to attend. Schools became central collection spots for a wide range of items, from forage to gold to groceries. Homework was a thing of the past; there were no notebooks, and it was simply too cold to buckle down and work in unheated apartments. During the last few months of the war, everyone lived in fear of what lay ahead. Dietrich would harbor feelings of betrayal for the rest of her life.
We had been told we’d have a peaceful childhood, school, holidays, and picnics, long vacations with a hammock, beach, pail, shovel and a starfish to take home. We had been promised plans, plans to be forged, carried out, realized, dreams to be dreamed and made to come true. A secure future—and it was up to us to take advantage of it. And now? No more plans, no secure future, and no knowledge that could be useful for the war.44
Dietrich felt as though the war would never end. Film offered her a retreat from the present and a semblance of hope for the future. By the last winter of the war, everybody went on foot: the bustling countess, the giggling streetwalker, and the weary soldier. Dietrich noticed that there were barely any well-dressed women to be seen. The faces around her looked numb and grave, with puffy faces and red eyes. She was living in a world of grieving women, and she longed for pleasure and charming men. Then a soldier entered into this world in the form of her cousin Hans, who kissed her. “The iron cross on his chest got caught in my dress and pulled a thread that stretched between us while the soldier stared at me.”45 The whole house roared with his laughter and booming voice. The girl closed the window so she would not have to hear him. His hulking body, which had survived the war intact, frightened her. Dietrich portrayed the scenes with her cousin Hans as her first encounter with a man who saw her as a woman, and as an intrusion on her regulated life. What he left behind did not begin to resemble the Prussian officer’s daughter’s vision of a brave man: The whole apartment was full of ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts, and a tub in the laundry room contained two field gray shirts soaking in milky water. Were these the accoutrements of a well-fortified German man?
The Felsings, the Dietrichs, and the von Loschs were nationalistic adherents to the monarchy who found no fault with the imperial regime. Josefine, who felt increasingly committed to Wilhelmine values, passed them on to her daughters. Sedan Day, which commemorated the defeat of the French in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Kaiser’s birthday appear to have been major events in the lives of the von Losch family. Like every other child in Berlin, Dietrich hoped to catch a glimpse of the Kaiser and his sons. However, Wilhelm II’s popularity was on the decline. As the commander in chief of the German armed forces, he rarely put in an appearance in Berlin once the war began. The fact that he spent almost all his time at military headquarters was a mere formality. The military leaders may have let him speak, but they did not take him seriously. Respect for General Field Marshal von Hindenburg grew while the Kaiser receded into the background. The latter’s end was wretched, devoid of any honor or dignity: From the remote railway station in Spa, Wilhelm II and his imperial train left for Holland on the night of November 9.
Capitulation and revolution wrenched Dietrich out of her dream world.
Berlin, 9 November 1918 Why must I experience these terrible times? I did so want a golden youth and now it turned out like this! I am sorry about the Kaiser and all the others. They say bad things will happen tonight. The mob was after people with carriages. We had some ladies invited for tea but none of them could get through to our house. Only Countess Gersdorff did. On Kurfürstendamm, her husband got his epaulets torn off by armed soldiers, and everywhere one looks, there are red flags. What does the nation want? They have what they wanted, haven’t they? Oh, if I were a little bit happy, things wouldn’t be so difficult to bear. Maybe soon a time will come when I will be able to tell about happiness again—only happiness.46
The chaos on the streets made her feel vulnerable and in need of defining her place in society. Dietrich belonged to the world of ladies, and her heart went out to the Kaiser. The people with the red flags were ordinary; she was not.
The weather was rainy and gloomy in November 1918, and the mood was morose. Dietrich had borne witness to the drama of social degradation even before the defeat in war and the ensuing inflation. Her father had been no more than a minor official, yet he retained a great sense of importance. She had developed a keen sense of class distinctions early in life and mastered the fine art of keeping up appearances. Her whole life up to this point had been a social seesaw. The only fixed coordinate between life as a policeman’s orphan and an officer’s stepdaughter was pride in Prussia. Josefine and her daughters used this pride to gloss over the comedown and highlight the ascent.
When Dietrich had just turned twenty, she witnessed the collapse of the order to which she felt she belonged. She watched the Hohenzollerns and their military power founder. Officers ventured out of the house disguised as civilians. The military virtues and deeds of dead fathers no longer counted. Revolution and republic brought to Josefine and her daughters the death of their social positions. Dietrich fought off the phantom pain of all that she had lost by fictionalizing it. Her diary, her later interviews, and her written recollections convey the impression that she regarded her father as the epitome of Prussian manliness: “My father: tall, imposing stature, smell of leather, shiny boots, a riding crop, horses.”47 Her mother was locked in an ongoing struggle with the vagaries of history in her multiple roles as daughter, wife, mother, and—eventually—widow, while her father was unshakably bound up with power, victory, and death. Her father was swallowed up by history, and Dietrich regarded herself as his successor.48
The atmosphere at home was more somber than ever now that peacetime had arrived. Josefine was always in a foul mood, and Elisabeth was busily cramming for her final exams. Dietrich spent hours in front of shop windows staring at silk dresses and dreaming of being loved. After her grandmother died in the year following the revolution of 1918, the situation with her mother grew even more fraught. Josefine tormented the two girls; as far as she was concerned, they could do no right. She felt that she had gotten a raw deal in life, and she was despondent and quarrelsome. Dietrich, in turn, developed into a wayward daughter who threatened to introduce additional chaos into the family. The clearly contentious issue between the mother and the daughter was sex. In the social system of the Prussian Wilhelmine upper class, women who acted on their passion were ostracized. Josefine felt compelled to stick to these moral principles as a way of keeping her head held high in the face of the family’s degradation. Sexuality and eroticism jeopardized the order she represented. She believed that enforcing strict standards was acting on behalf of the dead fathers. But the law of the fathers no longer applied.
September 17, 1919 . . . Saturdays and Sundays I kiss enough for the whole week. I really should be very ashamed. All those who know me confirm this if I ask them what they think of me: I am all right for kissing and having fun, but to marry—God forbid! . . . I allow myself to be kissed so easily. Of course, I can’t expect respect. I can’t help it. It is not my fault if my romantic nature has no limits. Who knows where I will end up. Hopefully, somebody will come, have the kindness to marry me soon. There is a film in town called Demi-Vierges. They say it is a typical case of young ladies from the so-called upper class who-mature-sooner, want to experience the tickling thrill of erotic adventures. . . . Playing with fire, until one day they get burned, then laugh. This describes me exactly. Till now I still have had the strength to say No as it got to the very moment. . . . It would be so beautiful to just let go and love. But, of course, that can’t be.49
Robert Musil noted that as a result of the war, “Woman is tired of being the ideal of the man who no longer has sufficient energy to idealize, and she has taken over the task of thinking herself through as her own ideal image.”50 The German men had lost their enemy and their leader when the war came to an end. To maintain their inner balance, these defeated men started a revolution, which did not, however, extend to those for whom the war was already over—the New Women. Pola Negri reported on the evening of November 8 that she was celebrating the premiere of her movie Carmen. Her lamé dress was as big a success as her acting skills. Everyone was having a grand time when volleys of gunfire suddenly rang out in the distance. She turned to Ernst Lubitsch in alarm to ask what was going on, and he whispered to her that that was utterly irrelevant, and she ought to focus on the movie.
This anecdote from revolutionary Berlin reflected a changed world. While the men in worn-out uniforms were on the hunt for an enemy in the magnificent buildings abandoned by their Kaiser, the New Woman was watching herself on the screen. The revolution represented the soldiers’ attempt to wrest some last shred of meaning from the national delusions of grandeur to which they had succumbed. Meanwhile, General Erich Ludendorff, one of the parties responsible for having launched this war, was at a Berlin boarding house preparing to flee. Ludendorff, wearing dark glasses and carrying a forged passport, looked like a character in a bad movie as he made his getaway to Scandinavia. The political and military illusions of men had fallen apart; the artificially created illusion would become the hallmark of the dawning republican era. Women in the 1920s mastered the art of donning a deceptive sheen. Dietrich would be one of them.
The military brass no longer set the pace in Berlin, and the young soldiers coming back home in their discolored uniforms and worn-out field coats and shoes were unshaven and weary. Destitute passersby had no choice but to ignore the begging war veterans on the street, and they had no desire to be reminded of the war. Josefine forbade anyone to speak about the war in her presence.
Dietrich was finished with school and had to contemplate what lay ahead. Up to now she had not shown signs of any particular talent. Her greatest wish was to appear on stage, but she had to keep that wish from her mother. Acting was considered a seedy business, and having an actress for a daughter would have been a devastating comedown. As a girl from a good family, Dietrich had taken ballet lessons before the war; her ballet slippers are still part of her estate today. They were very fine, expensive-looking slippers, made in England, dusky pink silk with leather soles. These lightweight shoes show clear signs of use; she must have practiced quite a bit. There is a photograph showing her doing ballet exercises on a rooftop in Berlin. One of her shoulders is bare, and she is forcing a smile and looking quite stilted. Dietrich knew that the time had passed for girls to dance ballet. Her diary contains an entry dated May 1918, in which she wrote that she had given up ballet, but she would continue to go to the “barefoot class.” Like so many other young women, she was drawn to rhythmic gymnastics and expressive dance. She loved music even more than dance. Her mother bought her an expensive violin in the hope that her artistic talent and the violin would take precedence over her interest in young men. But Dietrich wanted both. When her mother sent her to Mittenwald in Bavaria in 1920 to improve her skills on the violin, she promptly fell in love again, and when her mother realized what was going on, she brought her daughter home.
Josefine von Losch had had quite enough of her daughter’s antics. She pondered long-term solutions and decided to send her wayward daughter to boarding school. She had threatened to do so on many occasions in the past but now she intended to act, and Dietrich was shipped off to Weimar for training as an artist. Josefine hoped that placing her with the strict headmistress, Frau Arnoldi, might be the beginning.
“The boarding school was cold and forbidding, the streets were unfamiliar, and the air smelled different from my big hometown; no mother, no one I knew, no sanctuary I could flee to, no place for me to weep in secret, no warmth,” Dietrich later wrote about her time in Weimar.51 And in this case her recollections tallied with her diary entries as a young girl. In Frau Arnoldi’s boarding school, the girls slept six to a room. What cadet school was for Prussian boys, the boarding school was for Prussian girls. Dietrich had come to a place in which rules and mores of a bygone era were taught. The young girl had no choice but to adjust to the routines and discipline at this institution. “You had to line up, go down the street two by two, lead the other pupils . . . and meet people who were free, shopping or gossiping on a street corner. You felt desperate, rejected, excluded.”52 Frau Arnoldi gave orders, expected obedience, and monitored everything they did. She was fastidious in all matters pertaining to cleanliness, punctuality, and morality. The minds and bodies of her pupils were subject to her command. Over and over again, the girls were told that the greatest possible disgrace was the loss of virginity. A respectable girl remained pure or wound up in the gutter. This type of education is sure to drive girls to furtive actions and foster a climate of hypocrisy. Dietrich described Weimar as a “prison.”
She was torn between her own desires and her mother’s expectations. Josefine dropped by every three weeks to size up the situation for herself. She regarded it as one of her most important tasks to wash her daughter’s hair.
The idea that a mother would travel so far just to wash her daughter’s hair might appear unusual, but my mother was very proud of my hair, and it meant a great deal to her that it stayed beautiful. She had no confidence in me on this matter. My hair always stayed elegant, and I’m sure that I have my mother’s help to thank for that. She dried it with a towel, then made me sit down on a chair in the visitors’ room. My face was red from all the rubbing that went with this treatment; my hair was still tousled and damp, and tears ran down my cheeks, while I said goodbye to her.53
Whenever Josefine was there for a visit, Frau Arnoldi seized the opportunity to sound off about Dietrich to her mother, casting aspersions on the girl’s character by letting on that Dietrich loved to draw attention to herself and flirted in the concert hall. Dietrich countered that it was not her fault that all the men stared at her, but this defense did not get her very far. Her mother believed the puritanical teacher and not her wanton daughter. Arnoldi was the kind of headmistress who liked to exploit her power and she was out to humiliate Dietrich, who feared and despised her. Arnoldi and the mother formed an alliance. In their view, the daughter of an officer was destined to carry on a culture centered on power, asceticism, and militarism. Just because different values were now being trumpeted did not mean they had to be adhered to.
Dietrich saw the matter differently. After losing two fathers and enduring the war, she could not understand why she ought to forgo happiness and stick to the rules. She had seen with her own eyes how quickly everything could be over.
To inject a little sparkle into her small-town life, she put her feminine wiles to the test with her violin teacher, Robert Reitz. Reitz was the conductor at the opera and a welcome guest in the artistic and intellectual circles of Weimar. Through him Dietrich came in contact with the violinmaker Julius Levin, to whom she poured her heart out in a series of letters.54
These letters paint a picture of her as a love-starved girl who did not know where to turn; she was evidently unable to confide in either her mother or her sister. Quite unexpectedly, her mother brought her back to Berlin. Supposedly Dietrich had no idea why, and her mother refused to answer her questions. According to Dietrich’s daughter, Maria Riva, her mother had to leave Weimar because she had had an affair with Reitz. In Riva’s description, losing her virginity was a humiliating experience for Dietrich. She went back to Berlin and her mother’s control. She still had not made anything of herself, and she was no longer even a virgin. Her choice of music teacher shows that she had not given up hope of a career as a concert violinist: She received instruction from the renowned Professor Carl Flesch, who supposedly made her play eight hours of Bach a day. Eventually Dietrich came down with tendinitis. Her hand was put in a cast, and when the cast was removed, her doctors explained that this hand would always remain prone to injury. Mother and daughter would have to bury their dream of Dietrich’s becoming a professional musician. This investment had been for naught. Dietrich would never celebrate triumphs in the great concert halls of the world, and the violin, wrapped in silk, lay unused in its black case.