Dietrich’s daughter, however, wrote of hearing a conversation in the mid-thirties about Jewish actors who had been thrown out of Germany. Dietrich, in a sketchier memoir of her own, had nothing to say about Riefenstahl. Decades later, Riefenstahl recorded several anecdotes about Dietrich in her memoirs. There are a few photographs showing the two of them at the Berlin Press Ball in early 1930: Dietrich, on the brink of the huge success of “The Blue Angel,” smiles and clowns with ease, a jaunty cigarette holder clamped between her lips, the broad planes of her face soaking up the camera’s light and affection Riefenstahl, then a well-known film actress, too, stands by shy and awkward, self-consciously eclipsed. It is unlikely that Dietrich would have looked back. They scarcely knew each other, although during the late twenties they were such close neighbors that Riefenstahl claimed she could see into Dietrich’s apartment windows. ![]() Two girls growing up amid the fear and chaos of the Great War, two artists committed to impossible ideals of physical beauty, two women who became embodiments not only of the opposing sides of the next war but, for many, of opposing forces in the human soul. Two beautiful and ambitious Berliners, born just eight months apart-Marie Magdalene Dietrich, on DecemBertha Helene Amalie Riefenstahl, on August 22, 1902-both bound to shape the fantasies and touch the histories of their time. A few months before Riefenstahl’s visit, Dietrich announced that she had applied for American citizenship, posing for reporters outside the federal building in Los Angeles with one leg propped on the running board of her chauffeured Cadillac, and saying things like “America has been good to me.” The Nazi tabloid Der Stürmer informed its readers that Dietrich’s years among “the film Jews of Hollywood” had rendered her “wholly un-German”-which did not keep Hitler from very much wanting her back. And it was no longer possible to pretend that her choices were not political. Although she was the greatest movie star that Germany had ever produced, Dietrich refused to work in Germany. Hitler’s choice of a Dietrich film might have seemed curious, since his ministers had long campaigned to destroy her reputation. Riefenstahl, ushered into an entrance hall, found herself watching a film in progress she recognized Marlene Dietrich’s face before the Führer appeared and took her off for coffee on the terrace. He was deeply interested in movies, and screened them often in his home. Hitler had bypassed all the sanctioned Party hacks to hire Riefenstahl to direct her first official Nazi film, in 1933, and he had provided the title for the second, “Triumph of the Will,” so recently triumphant in Paris. ![]() Was it true that Goebbels had repudiated her? Were some upper-echelon Nazis unhappy that a woman wielded so much power? On her way back to Berlin, exhausted, she stopped off in Berchtesgaden, where she was escorted to Adolf Hitler’s mountain retreat, so that she could describe her trip to the one man whose support for her was absolute. Yet she was also forced to defend herself, in interviews, not against her Nazi ties but against the swirling rumors that she had fallen into disgrace with the leaders of the Reich. In Paris, she won the fair’s gold medal for a film she had directed, a documentary-style celebration of the Nazi Party congress three years earlier. Travelling from Germany to the Paris International Exposition, in the summer of 1937, Leni Riefenstahl went under an assumed name. Courtesy Harvard Art Museums and Busch-Reisinger Museum Dietrich and Riefenstahl, with Anna Mae Wong, in 1930.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |