Dietrich in Berlin

At home with Dietrich
DEANNA MACDONALD
From Wednesday's Globe and Mail
October 12, 2005 at 2:00 AM EDT
Berlin — Whenever I think of Berlin, I picture Marlene Dietrich. Both the city and the star have a certain élan — an elegant, effortlessly cool mix of Prussian reserve and Bohemian decadence. A native Berliner, Dietrich first found fame in the city's theatre and early film scene in the 1920s. While Berlin has radically changed since the heady days of the Weimar era — the result of the devastation of the Second World War, the partition of the Cold War and the Wild West building boom after reunification — on a recent visit, I found that there are still traces of Marlene Dietrich's Berlin in the 21st-century city.

My first sense of her influence was at the Hotel Adlon Kempinski near the Brandenburg Gate. In Dietrich's day, Berliners joked that the Adlon was so luxurious that the waiters tipped each other. The original hotel burned down in 1945; after years of languishing just to the east of the Berlin Wall, it was rebuilt in 1997, evoking the prewar days when everyone from the Kaiser to Charlie Chaplin stayed there.

The hotel has myriad stories, but one that always interests guests is about Marlene Dietrich. “She was discovered here,” said public relations manager Emilie Sotomayor Swartjes. “Hedda Adlon, the wife of the founder, tells a story of how she spotted young Marlene dancing in the hotel bar in the twenties.”

This seemed to me the perfect image: Dietrich before she became “Dietrich,” the ultimate jazz-age baby in the heart of Weimar Berlin. In her later Hollywood career, she would swagger across the screen, embodying an independence and insouciance that wasn't often seen in women in old Hollywood — an attitude that seemed to come from her Berlin background.

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Born to a middle-class Berlin family in 1901, she had lived through the hardships of the First World War and came of age in a city known for its Cabaret-style decadence and creativity. After abandoning a career as a violinist, she took up acting and became known for her wild lifestyle and many lovers of both genders.

Her flamboyant character and international fame have proved to be a tourist draw, and today, the local tourist industry makes the most of her associations with her hometown. The 100th anniversary of her birth in 2001 saw numerous celebrations and exhibits. A mini-Marlene industry has also developed, with cheesy cabaret shows and souvenir trinkets (a Marlene Dietrich fridge magnet, anyone?)

However, Dietrich hasn't always been so popular in Germany. After leaving for Hollywood in 1930, she stayed in America, becoming a citizen. She entertained U.S. troops during the war, to the resentment of many Germans. “The Germans and I no longer speak the same language,” she famously said. She lived out her life in self-imposed exile and died in her Paris apartment in 1992.

But Berlin remained a part of her. “I Am, Thank God, A Berliner,” was the title of her autobiography, and she ensured she would be buried there. Today, her grave in the Friedenau cemetery in the Schoneburg neighbourhood almost always has fresh flowers from her admirers, reflecting the esteem in which she is now held.

Schoneburg, just south of Berlin-Mitte (central Berlin), is also where Dietrich was born; a bronze plaque at Leberstrasse 65 marks the spot. Today, the fashionable neighbourhood, which has housed everyone from Albert Einstein (who, like Dietrich, left Nazi Berlin) to David Bowie (who worked with Dietrich on her last film, Just a Gigolo, in 1979), is appropriately Bohemian, with lots of stylish cafés and gay and lesbian clubs.

While Dietrich's name and face can be found throughout the city, it is also the atmosphere of Berlin that recalls her. Only 350 years old, Berlin is Europe's youngest capital, but it has lived beyond its years. Reminders of its heavy history are everywhere, from the new Holocaust Memorial to the red painted cobblestones marking where the Berlin Wall once stood. But there also is a dogged sense that the future could hold something better, most clearly expressed by exciting new architecture that seems to be sprouting like flowers in springtime and a blooming art scene.

And Berlin still knows how to create a cozy, Bohemian atmosphere. I stopped for a coffee and strudel at the smoky, literary Café Einstein, filled with locals and tourists scribbling in their notebooks (or iBooks), soaking up the creative Old World atmosphere. Over dinner at the Kellerrestaurant, where Bertolt Brecht and cohorts would gather in the 1920s, I squinted in the candlelight to make out the Weimar-era theatre memorabilia (including model stage sets) lining the walls. Today's well-heeled arty community congregates in the former east side of the city in the Scheunenviertel and Prenzlauer Berg, where there are oodles of funky galleries and cafés, while the edgier art crowd has headed for cheaper digs farther east in Friedrichshain.

Back in the Mitte, Marlene Dietrich has literally been built into the architectural framework of the recently reconstructed Potsdamer Platz; its principal square is Marlene Dietrich Platz. In the 1920s, Potsdamer Platz was the busiest intersection in Europe, bustling with cafes, shops and hotels. Bombed to bits in the war, it spent decades as a barren field bisected by the Wall (as poignantly captured in Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire). In the 1990s, major corporations bought up the land and hired renowned architects like Renzo Piano and Helmut Jahn to rebuild it as a social and commercial heart for the reunited Berlin.

It is almost impossible for a newly built area to recreate the texture and organic feel of a neighbourhood that developed over centuries, and Marlene Dietrich Platz disappoints with its cold, corporate atmosphere. It is surrounded by massive ochre-coloured buildings including a chain hotel, a flashy casino and musical theatre, an IMAX cinema and, yes, a McDonald's. Meant as an entertainment centre, it feels more like a mall than a Weimar cabaret. Still, 80,000 people stream through Potsdamer Platz daily, so Marlene Dietrich's name will be on everyone's lips, even if it is just as the address for the IMAX.

A much more successful tribute is found in the nearby Filmmuseum Berlin, located in Helmut Jahn's colossal Sony Center, a rather sinister-looking complex built around an atrium of shadowy glass filled with restaurants and cinemas. (It's now a venue for the Berlin International Film Festival.)

The whole museum is like some futuristic film set; visitors enter through a pitch-black hall that opens into a room of mirrors and giant screens playing well-known film clips. Dietrich appears often, her chiselled features reflected around the room. Three rooms are devoted to her, blending the story of her life, her films and the history of German cinema. There are stills and clips from her silent movies and from her first talkie, The Blue Angel, which made her a star and was filmed at the renowned Babelsberg Studio on Berlin's outskirts. (Babelsberg is still making major German and Hollywood films; visit www.studiobabelsberg.com.)

Adding texture to the celluloid are fascinating items from Dietrich's estate, such as letters to and from her friends and lovers (such as Hemingway and Maurice Chevalier) and the suitcases Dietrich took to America in 1930, which are displayed beside a photo of her sitting on the cases aboard ship. Best of all is a circular room devoted to her costumes: glamorous feathered gowns and tailored men's suits that she looked so dashing in. “I am, at heart,” she once said, “a gentleman.”

Special to The Globe and Mail