Trechos de Blue Angel: The Life Of Marlene Dietrich (1992), de Donald Spoto.
The routines of school, housework and violin lessons continued for Maria [Magdelene "Marlene" Dietrich] from 1912 to 1914 [...]. Whatever were the terms and degree of reciprocity in Maria's attachment to her teacher, the relationship ended abruptly when Mlle [Marguerite] Bréguand returned to France immediately after war was declared in 1914.
Of this time, the actress Tilla Durieux remembered soldiers marching proudly out of Berlin to war, showered with blossoms as they went. "Every face looks happy," Durieux wrote. "We've got war! Bands in the cafés and restaurants play [martial tunes] without stopping, and everybody has to listen to them standing up ... There's a superabundance of everything: people, food and enthusiasm!" But Maria, forlorn over the departure of a teacher she idolized and confused about the attitude of Francophobia everyone was supposed to assume, could not comprehend the prevalent jubilation. Nor would she agree to stop speaking the enemy language, as pupils were asked to pray for the defeat of France; she often peppered her conversations with French phrases, to the indignant stares of classmates and superiors.
The festival atmosphere - as Berliners celebrated a war to establish the Empire's supremacy - was brief. Maria and the other schoolgirls were required to take on extra duties, knitting gloves, scarves and sweaters for soldiers. By 1915, food and fuel were strictly rationed, milk was a rarity, and potatoes were the diet staple. Maria's stepfather, who was on maneuvers during the summer of 1914, proceeded directly to combat without returning home, and before the end of that year her Uncle Max and two cousins were killed in battle. Like many of her friends, she then attached a black band to her left sleeve and wore only a black or grey dress. The rituals of bereavement also required that her long hair (now a luxuriant ash blond) henceforth be tightly wound and pinned up, worn loose only on Sundays at home. (In her adulthood, she was embarrassed by the fact that her uncle had commanded the first Zeppelin raid over London.)
Throughout the war, Maria went regularly to the city hall with her mother or a schoolmate, to scan the lists of wounded, missing and dead. At home there were ominous family meetings, as visiting aunts, cousins or Grandmother Felsing asked news of those fighting relatives from whom no letter had been recently received. By 1916, life became harsher still, for every street had a family in mourning and food was severely limited. At Christmas that year, Eduard von Losch sent a tin of corned beef to his family; it was the first meat they had seen in two years, and they parceled out slices in tiny slivers, heating the empty can several times for the residue of grease in which to fry potatoes. The following year, however, even potatoes were scarce and considerable imagination was brought to the preparations of turnips; there were, for example, turnip jelly, turnip bread and turnip soup, and the top-greens were boiled and reboiled for stocks and teas.
During wartime, Marlene Dietrich later felt, German women
did not seem to suffer in a world without men ... Our life among women had become such a pleasant habit that the prospect that the men might return at times disturbed us - men who would again take the scepter in their hands and again become lords in their households.
But no master would ever rule the Dietrich-von Losch home again. Early in 1918, Wilhelmina was informed that her husband had been seriously wounded on the Russian border. She was permitted to visit him at a makeshift hospital, and although he seemed to rally, he died of infection not long after her return to Berlin. Since he had entered Maria's life in 1911, Eduard von Losch had lived with the family for a total of about eight months; he was never more than a vague and distant provider. When asked years later if she missed her father or stepfather, she replied flatly, "No. You can't miss what you never had."
- - -
There was good reason for grief all over the country. Almost 1,800,000 Germans had been killed in the war - more casualties than any other nation - and by autumn 1918 there were few more men to sacrifice. During the conflict, Berlin had endured many strikes in addition to the general political turmoil, but now the crisis was enormous. A general strike on November 9, organized to dissolve the Empire and depose the Kaiser, rallied hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers, soldiers and sailors at the Reich Chancellery. His own generals advised Wilhelm to abdicate, and that day he left for exile in Holland. Within hours, the radical pacifist, anti-imperialist and Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the birth of a free Socialist Republic of Germany from the balcony of the Imperial Palace. At the same time, police headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied by left-wing extremists.
The uprising was immediately opposed. Bloody street battles ensued, and while armed revolutionaries took to the streets - seizing everything from government buildings to breweries to railway stations - private armies loyal to the old regime responded in full force, and in early 1919 Liebknecht was murdered. International peace treaties were being composed as the war ended, but there was nothing like concord in the streets of Berlin.
After elections were held, a new constitution was drafted on February 24, 1919, in the town of Weimar, about 140 miles from central Berlin. The Widow von Losch, eager to provide some kind of safe haven for her daughters, decided to pack them off to school in that city. Elisabeth successfully pleaded to remain behind and begin her teacher training in Berlin, but Maria readily agreed to her mother's suggestion.
- - -
Renowned for its music conservatories, Weimar was also the residence of Professor Robert Reitz, a noted violinist and teacher. When Maria Dietrich arrived in April, it was to study with him.
At seventeen, she had grown to her full height of five feet, five inches. Like her mother, however, she tended to corpulence, and the short, more fashionable skirt and the short bobbed hairstyle she now adopted made her seem almost Rubenesque.
- - -
That life was, perhaps more than anything, a madcap European version of the postwar, liberated jazz age; in fact, in a way the Roaring Twenties began in Berlin. There was first of all, in 1919, a great Russian influence following the mass exodus from that country after the war: their newspapers, restaurants and styles were ubiquitous. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz and writer Vladimir Nabokov were among the first Russian refugees. [...] Dadaism, the anarchic art movement founded at Zurich's Café Voltaire, reached Berlin, too, where an adherent like Kurt Schwitters insisted he was making a political statement by festooning the walls of his home with junkyard trash. More sedately, English tearooms and literary societies opened monthly in Berlin, and soon American influence was everywhere evident - in pop songs, imported Broadway shows, the films of Chaplin.
- - -
Things were happening quickly, and nowhere was the speed more evident than in the silent "flickers" that became popular as the new German cinema flourished. At the height of the war, General Ludendorf (among others) had seen the potential of film as propaganda, and in 1917 the major production companies were consolidated as the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (known familiarly as UFA) - the Universe Film Company. After the Versailles Treaty, the government's one-third interest was sold, and UFA began to produce commercial and, when censorship was abolished, even unusual entertainments. The titles Hyenas of Lust and A Man's Girlhood fairly describe their stories.
But there was enduring art in the cinema. Robert Wiene's fantastic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), a weirdly expressionistic horror tale with a hallucinatory depiction of madness, was perhaps most responsible for the public's interest in movies, and soon Fritz Lang was preparing grave thrillers (Destiny, Dr. Mabuse and Spies) about society's anarchic impulses. F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Robert Siodmak were also refining skills they later took with them to film work elsewhere, and Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Alfred Hitchcock came from Vienna and London to make films at UFA's Neubabelsberg studios, which offered the finest technical facilities in the world. Whatever could not be supplied by state funding was provided by wealthy bankers, and by 1922 there were over 275 film companies (up from twenty-eight six years earlier) and a parallel explosion in the number of movie houses.
- - -
But there was a darker side. [...]
In 1919, a dollar bought eight marks; four years later, it bought four trillion. Violent crime accompanied massive unemployment and homelessness, there was a terrible food shortage, and families routinely dissolved. Often ten or a dozen strangers shared a dingy room with out-of-work drifters. An influenza epidemic claimed the lives of seventeen hundred people in a single day in 1919. Not surprisingly, political discontent often became ferocious, and there were more than five hundred assassinations in street riots between 1920 and 1923; reason seemed as debased as the currency.
Amid such disarray, forms of escape were understandably desired, and casual sex and opium were easily available. [...]
Into this world of 1921 Berlin returned Maria Magdalene von Losch (as she had been known in school at Weimar). Her violin lessons continued that year, but to support herself she often worked in a small, tacky cabaret orchestra, in a glove factory, a hat shop and even at a newspaper kiosk. Before her twentieth birthday that December she had at least two romantic liaisons - one with a frail young man whose identity is unknown and who subsequently died of dysentery, the second with an older man whose wealth somehow withstood the general economic distress. The sickly lad evoked her pity and tenderness; it was also an opportunity for an unthreatening, undemanding sexual interlude she could effectively control. And from the senior beau she willingly accepted meals and trinkets until she learned he had other romantic attachments as well as a wife and four children, whereupon she booted him out. Very quickly (as often happens when young people come to the swirling freedom of a modern metropolis) her residual shyness was overcome - not, it seems, by conscious effort, but simply by absorbing the Berliner Luft, the atmosphere itself.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW0PKhIvLz0
Of this time, the actress Tilla Durieux remembered soldiers marching proudly out of Berlin to war, showered with blossoms as they went. "Every face looks happy," Durieux wrote. "We've got war! Bands in the cafés and restaurants play [martial tunes] without stopping, and everybody has to listen to them standing up ... There's a superabundance of everything: people, food and enthusiasm!" But Maria, forlorn over the departure of a teacher she idolized and confused about the attitude of Francophobia everyone was supposed to assume, could not comprehend the prevalent jubilation. Nor would she agree to stop speaking the enemy language, as pupils were asked to pray for the defeat of France; she often peppered her conversations with French phrases, to the indignant stares of classmates and superiors.
The festival atmosphere - as Berliners celebrated a war to establish the Empire's supremacy - was brief. Maria and the other schoolgirls were required to take on extra duties, knitting gloves, scarves and sweaters for soldiers. By 1915, food and fuel were strictly rationed, milk was a rarity, and potatoes were the diet staple. Maria's stepfather, who was on maneuvers during the summer of 1914, proceeded directly to combat without returning home, and before the end of that year her Uncle Max and two cousins were killed in battle. Like many of her friends, she then attached a black band to her left sleeve and wore only a black or grey dress. The rituals of bereavement also required that her long hair (now a luxuriant ash blond) henceforth be tightly wound and pinned up, worn loose only on Sundays at home. (In her adulthood, she was embarrassed by the fact that her uncle had commanded the first Zeppelin raid over London.)
Throughout the war, Maria went regularly to the city hall with her mother or a schoolmate, to scan the lists of wounded, missing and dead. At home there were ominous family meetings, as visiting aunts, cousins or Grandmother Felsing asked news of those fighting relatives from whom no letter had been recently received. By 1916, life became harsher still, for every street had a family in mourning and food was severely limited. At Christmas that year, Eduard von Losch sent a tin of corned beef to his family; it was the first meat they had seen in two years, and they parceled out slices in tiny slivers, heating the empty can several times for the residue of grease in which to fry potatoes. The following year, however, even potatoes were scarce and considerable imagination was brought to the preparations of turnips; there were, for example, turnip jelly, turnip bread and turnip soup, and the top-greens were boiled and reboiled for stocks and teas.
During wartime, Marlene Dietrich later felt, German women
did not seem to suffer in a world without men ... Our life among women had become such a pleasant habit that the prospect that the men might return at times disturbed us - men who would again take the scepter in their hands and again become lords in their households.
But no master would ever rule the Dietrich-von Losch home again. Early in 1918, Wilhelmina was informed that her husband had been seriously wounded on the Russian border. She was permitted to visit him at a makeshift hospital, and although he seemed to rally, he died of infection not long after her return to Berlin. Since he had entered Maria's life in 1911, Eduard von Losch had lived with the family for a total of about eight months; he was never more than a vague and distant provider. When asked years later if she missed her father or stepfather, she replied flatly, "No. You can't miss what you never had."
- - -
There was good reason for grief all over the country. Almost 1,800,000 Germans had been killed in the war - more casualties than any other nation - and by autumn 1918 there were few more men to sacrifice. During the conflict, Berlin had endured many strikes in addition to the general political turmoil, but now the crisis was enormous. A general strike on November 9, organized to dissolve the Empire and depose the Kaiser, rallied hundreds of thousands of Berlin workers, soldiers and sailors at the Reich Chancellery. His own generals advised Wilhelm to abdicate, and that day he left for exile in Holland. Within hours, the radical pacifist, anti-imperialist and Social Democrat Karl Liebknecht proclaimed the birth of a free Socialist Republic of Germany from the balcony of the Imperial Palace. At the same time, police headquarters and newspaper offices were occupied by left-wing extremists.
The uprising was immediately opposed. Bloody street battles ensued, and while armed revolutionaries took to the streets - seizing everything from government buildings to breweries to railway stations - private armies loyal to the old regime responded in full force, and in early 1919 Liebknecht was murdered. International peace treaties were being composed as the war ended, but there was nothing like concord in the streets of Berlin.
After elections were held, a new constitution was drafted on February 24, 1919, in the town of Weimar, about 140 miles from central Berlin. The Widow von Losch, eager to provide some kind of safe haven for her daughters, decided to pack them off to school in that city. Elisabeth successfully pleaded to remain behind and begin her teacher training in Berlin, but Maria readily agreed to her mother's suggestion.
- - -
Renowned for its music conservatories, Weimar was also the residence of Professor Robert Reitz, a noted violinist and teacher. When Maria Dietrich arrived in April, it was to study with him.
At seventeen, she had grown to her full height of five feet, five inches. Like her mother, however, she tended to corpulence, and the short, more fashionable skirt and the short bobbed hairstyle she now adopted made her seem almost Rubenesque.
- - -
That life was, perhaps more than anything, a madcap European version of the postwar, liberated jazz age; in fact, in a way the Roaring Twenties began in Berlin. There was first of all, in 1919, a great Russian influence following the mass exodus from that country after the war: their newspapers, restaurants and styles were ubiquitous. Pianist Vladimir Horowitz and writer Vladimir Nabokov were among the first Russian refugees. [...] Dadaism, the anarchic art movement founded at Zurich's Café Voltaire, reached Berlin, too, where an adherent like Kurt Schwitters insisted he was making a political statement by festooning the walls of his home with junkyard trash. More sedately, English tearooms and literary societies opened monthly in Berlin, and soon American influence was everywhere evident - in pop songs, imported Broadway shows, the films of Chaplin.
- - -
Things were happening quickly, and nowhere was the speed more evident than in the silent "flickers" that became popular as the new German cinema flourished. At the height of the war, General Ludendorf (among others) had seen the potential of film as propaganda, and in 1917 the major production companies were consolidated as the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (known familiarly as UFA) - the Universe Film Company. After the Versailles Treaty, the government's one-third interest was sold, and UFA began to produce commercial and, when censorship was abolished, even unusual entertainments. The titles Hyenas of Lust and A Man's Girlhood fairly describe their stories.
But there was enduring art in the cinema. Robert Wiene's fantastic silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), a weirdly expressionistic horror tale with a hallucinatory depiction of madness, was perhaps most responsible for the public's interest in movies, and soon Fritz Lang was preparing grave thrillers (Destiny, Dr. Mabuse and Spies) about society's anarchic impulses. F. W. Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Robert Siodmak were also refining skills they later took with them to film work elsewhere, and Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Alfred Hitchcock came from Vienna and London to make films at UFA's Neubabelsberg studios, which offered the finest technical facilities in the world. Whatever could not be supplied by state funding was provided by wealthy bankers, and by 1922 there were over 275 film companies (up from twenty-eight six years earlier) and a parallel explosion in the number of movie houses.
- - -
But there was a darker side. [...]
In 1919, a dollar bought eight marks; four years later, it bought four trillion. Violent crime accompanied massive unemployment and homelessness, there was a terrible food shortage, and families routinely dissolved. Often ten or a dozen strangers shared a dingy room with out-of-work drifters. An influenza epidemic claimed the lives of seventeen hundred people in a single day in 1919. Not surprisingly, political discontent often became ferocious, and there were more than five hundred assassinations in street riots between 1920 and 1923; reason seemed as debased as the currency.
Amid such disarray, forms of escape were understandably desired, and casual sex and opium were easily available. [...]
Into this world of 1921 Berlin returned Maria Magdalene von Losch (as she had been known in school at Weimar). Her violin lessons continued that year, but to support herself she often worked in a small, tacky cabaret orchestra, in a glove factory, a hat shop and even at a newspaper kiosk. Before her twentieth birthday that December she had at least two romantic liaisons - one with a frail young man whose identity is unknown and who subsequently died of dysentery, the second with an older man whose wealth somehow withstood the general economic distress. The sickly lad evoked her pity and tenderness; it was also an opportunity for an unthreatening, undemanding sexual interlude she could effectively control. And from the senior beau she willingly accepted meals and trinkets until she learned he had other romantic attachments as well as a wife and four children, whereupon she booted him out. Very quickly (as often happens when young people come to the swirling freedom of a modern metropolis) her residual shyness was overcome - not, it seems, by conscious effort, but simply by absorbing the Berliner Luft, the atmosphere itself.
Mais:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TW0PKhIvLz0
