Blue Angel (4 page)

A hotchpotch of architectural styles—Victorian, Gothic, Florentine, Biedermeier and French Regency—the overappointed school halls were sharply distinct from the severe, chilly classrooms with their hard benches and poor lighting. Although she had enjoyed a prior advantage in her basic educational skills, Maria—a year younger and physically smaller than her classmates—felt lonely. At home she had not been encouraged to look outside the family circle for friends; now, detached from maternal protection and unprepared for quick socializing, she seemed a withdrawn and altogether unremarkable pupil who demonstrated no special aptitudes.

Her mother, however, sensed musical talent in the girl, and soon Maria was receiving piano lessons at home from a plump, jolly lady whose name has not come down to us. But this teacher was discharged after four months, since she seemed to Wilhelmina somewhat too relaxed to instill in Maria the basis for a serious musical career. A violin instructor called Bertha Glass followed—a serious,
pale and slender woman more befitting Wilhelmina’s intentions; accordingly, the violin was emphasized almost exclusively in Maria’s education over the next decade. On her birthdays in 1909 and 1910, encouraged by her mother, she offered recitals at family gatherings. She was also apparently overcoming her shyness, for she argued loudly and often with Bertha, who tried to convert her student from a preference for simple pretty melodies to the graver, more intricate rhythms of Bach and Torelli.

Especially proud of Maria’s musical ability was her widowed maternal grandmother, a tall, elegant woman of fifty with dark red hair and damson eyes. Grandmother Felsing took Maria to the family shop on Unter den Linden and taught her details of fashion and fine art—how Fabergé eggs were made, what jewelry should be worn with which dresses, how important were the right accessories and colognes for a lady’s wardrobe and boudoir. She gave the child pretty ribbons and small pieces of jewelry and also arranged for her to have lessons in knitting and crocheting. Mrs. Felsing also insisted that the violin was quite proper but that the child also needed skills for common socializing, and so she paid for six months of guitar lessons. Maria’s parlor now echoed with jaunty Bavarian folk songs as well as baroque airs.

Jovial and forthright, Mrs. Felsing represented, with her pearls and pomades, a kind of luxuriant sensuality, and she indulged Maria in keeping with her role as a doting grandmother and as a kind of whimsical coach in the arts of womanly appeal. She was, in other words, a welcome and powerful balance to the quiet severities of life with Wilhelmina and Bertha. From her mother and teachers, Maria learned responsibility, self-denial and the necessity of focussed concentration on hard work; her grandmother stressed the equally exacting but more enjoyable niceties of an artfully designed femininity—even if, according to Wilhelmina’s judgment, these interests were to be reserved for maturity, and Maria’s dress and manner had to remain sober at home. Above all, she was warned never to attract attention.

B
Y THE TIME SHE WAS TEN YEARS OLD
, M
ARIA
D
IE
trich had lived almost exclusively in a female environment both at school and at home. “We lived in a women’s world,” she wrote later; “the few men with whom we came in contact were old or ill, not real [
wirklichen
] men.” She had seen the strength of widows in their resourceful independence from men, despite the prevalent social assumption that they were inferior. Unaided, they were also forced to make important economic decisions. In 1908, Wilhelmina, unable to keep servants and a large apartment, moved with her daughters to a more modest apartment at 48 Akazienallee and then, in 1909, to even smaller quarters at 13 Tauentzienstrasse. To provide her growing daughters the luxuries of private music lessons and reasonably fashionable clothes, and to maintain the appearance of genteel dignity appropriate to the heirs of a Royal Lieutenant, the Widow Dietrich (so she was identified in the Berlin telephone directory for 1908) took a part-time job as a housekeeper for neighbors.

Wilhelmina also seems to have set herself the task of finding a new husband, for there were several gentleman callers to the Dietrich apartments—most of them military or policemen, always in full regimental uniform. These various courtings ceased in 1911, when she accepted a proposal of marriage from Eduard von Losch, a career colonel in the Royal Grenadiers whom she had met while she was employed as housekeeper for his parents. Stolid, darkly handsome and ill at ease with his two stepdaughters, von Losch remained very much in the background for the few years he was in Maria’s life, and of him she remembered little more than his ubiquitous cigarettes and a collection of sabers. Her stepfather, like the man he replaced, was simply another somewhat aloof, uniformed authority figure she had to please.

T
HE ROUTINES OF SCHOOL, HOUSEWORK AND VIOLIN
lessons continued for Maria from 1912 to 1914, but she entered adolescence with a sudden rush of new affection. One of her teachers, a slim and cultivated Frenchwoman in her twenties named Marguerite
Bréguand, taught French at Auguste Victoria. Maria, who had learned the rudiments of the language at home since the age of three, advanced rapidly in Mlle Bréguand’s class, receiving high marks and perfecting her accent in after-class walks with her teacher. With the adulation common to a schoolgirl’s crush on an attentive and sympathetic mentor, Maria imitated the woman’s hairstyle, tried to duplicate the colors of her wardrobe and earnestly sought to seal the friendship with little gifts of chocolate or lace. As for Marguerite Bréguand, she encouraged Maria’s love of things French and took a kindly interest in her general development; any overt display of camaraderie—even if the teacher had been so inclined—was of course strictly disallowed. Whatever were the terms and degree of reciprocity in Maria’s attachment to her teacher, the relationship ended abruptly when Mlle 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.”

For Wilhelmina, however, the second abrupt loss of a husband was shattering. Her ordered life collapsed again, her critical judgments on her daughters’ styles and manners became sharp, and her serenity was broken. Never especially demonstrative with her daughters (and never as doting as their grandmother) Wilhelmina became more reserved than ever, as if she feared that any expression of an emotional bond with Elisabeth or Maria might again invite the rupture of death. “She didn’t want to know whether I loved her or not,” Marlene Dietrich wrote later. “She [simply] considered it more important that I should feel secure with her . . . Perhaps she didn’t love, perhaps she was just trustworthy.” Wilhelmina assumed a distracted, lost air, moving slowly, sometimes even neglecting the chores with which she had once been so obsessed. More than once, Maria awoke in the night to see her mother, fully dressed, stretched across her daughter’s bed. “If only I could sleep,” she would whisper wearily. By day, she often read aloud and, while working or walking through the apartment, she repeated verses of the Freiligrath poem: “The hour will come when you will stand by graves and weep . . .”

T
HERE 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.

The intellectual center of Germany in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weimar had been from 1815 to 1918 the capital of the Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The city of Goethe and Schiller, it housed their archives in major museums and their effigies presided sternly in front of the German National Theater. The Liszt Music College memorialized that composer, and despite the war, the city’s permanent political and cultural status was taken for granted throughout Europe. Architect and educator Walter Gropius was in Weimar in 1919, and he became director of the famous Bauhaus school of modern design and architecture; his staff included a remarkable roster of names—among them Josef Albers, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy. Equally 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.