“I was made for love, that’s how I was born and I can’t help it; men surround me like moths around a flame, and it’s not my fault,” he sang marlene dietrich in ‘The Blue Angel’ (1930), the film that prompted his jump from Berlin to Hollywood and la became a sexual icon with an almost always half-open gazetypical of those who do not feel doubts or worries because they have everything under control. But she was much more than a prototypical ‘femme fatale’. Thanks to her connections with the dissolute cabaret world during the Weimar Republic and her later opposition to Nazism, and the experiments she carried out with her own image in the meantime, she was an emblem of freedom and subversive for her time and, indeed, for all times. This Friday marks 30 years since his death.
Serve as a sample of that attitude one of the most famous phrases of the actress: “Deep down, I’m a gentleman.” The Dietrich was so transgressive that she even detested the feminists of the time, whom she said were “penis envious”. And he turned garments hitherto reserved for men into fashion items for women; in a scene from her first Hollywood film, Morocco (1930), she kissed another woman while wearing a tuxedo, and was often photographed dressed in a suit and tie.
To the creation of your ‘look’Particularly contributing, it is true, was filmmaker Josef Von Sternberg, whom she occasionally described as “my master” and “the man who created me”; he was the one who took her to the United States with the intention of turning her into the new Greta Garbo, and as soon as he had her there he helped her shake off her typical Teutonic carnality, with a little more forcefulness in each of the six feature films that they did together in Hollywood. The transformation is especially irrefutable evidence in ‘The devil is a woman’ (1935), the film that the actress herself considered her masterpiece and in which, already stripped of the seductive desire and the proclivity to romantic frivolity that her characters had shown in the past, she is shown as a true destroyer of men.
Marlene Dietrich maintained intimate relationships consistently and without gender distinctions, at a time when bisexuality was punished without extenuating circumstances. your list of lovers includes Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper, Mercedes de Acosta, Orson Welles, Edith Piaff, Kirk Douglas, Marion Barbara, and John Wayne; and when the Austro-Swiss actor and director Maximilian Schell asked her about her romances with other women during the filming of the magnificent documentary ‘Marlene’ (1984), she simply replied: “Oh, you know, sometimes there is a man and a woman, and then he lies on top of her and what has to happen happens; because when there are two women it works the same way”.
In any case, the interpreter never divorced her husband, assistant director Rudolf Sieberwhom he had married in 1923. It was she who urged him to flee Europe during the 1930s together with their daughter, Maria – with whom, by the way, he later had countless personal problems – shortly before to renounce German citizenship herself to adopt American citizenship.
Escaped from Goebbels
Dietrich was always an enemy of the Nazis and critical of the anti-Semitic policies of the time. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda of the Third Reich between 1933 and 1945, on her day tried by all means to convince her to return to her country and be crowned Hitler’s muse, but to no avail. ; her answer was to provide funds to help Jews and dissidents escape from Germany, and even record several anti-Nazi-themed albums in German. When Goebbels understood that there was no way to win her back for his cause, he made sure to censor his films and turn them into stinkers in the eyes of the Germans. When she returned to Germany in 1960 she was booed by the public, and it was not until 2002 that she obtained the title of honorary citizen of Berlin.
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By then, 10 years had passed since his death, and almost three decades since he decided to give up acting because of the fractures left by a broken femur, his addictions to alcohol and barbiturates, and, above all, his problems accepting traces left on it by the passage of time. In this sense, it is worth remembering that, although Dietrich was born in 1901, her passport always listed 1905 as her official date of birth; despite what that almost always ajar and seemingly indolent look might suggest, after all, at least one thing was beyond his control.
However, her fear of aging has proven to be unfounded because, at a time when the treatment of women in Hollywood and the fluidity of gender identities are at the center of public debate, her figure continues to serve as pioneering example of the fight both against patriarchal bias in the film industry and against sexual and moral taboos.