The soldiers returning home had entered the city through the Brandenburg Gate, which was bedecked for the occasion. For them, Berlin was the embodiment of what they had fought for. Nowhere was their futile battle for national greatness clearer than at the sight of the undamaged city. Berlin, the city of the vanquished—and a city of women—had remained intact. The beaten-down man and the New Woman came face to face. In 1918, the German man was a symbol of history and the German woman a symbol of society. Politicians did not trust this city of Berlin, which had thrown itself headlong into the arms of women and society. The first German republic was proclaimed in Weimar, not in Berlin. By choosing the city of classical writers, the elite of the period between the two world wars were once again counting on the decisive force and power of the word. But things had changed. The new physicality was a child of the war. In the legendary 1920s, the word was mistrusted and the body celebrated.14 The new faces and bodies were a reflection of a society that played the great equalizer. They were slick, unembellished, well trained, and matter-of-fact. The world of the aristocracy had gone under; the new societal dynamics not only changed ballroom dancing, but also rendered ballet meaningless. Harmony and serenity were passé; the new era called for expression and strength. Many people—primarily young women—embarked on a quest for a new (body) language that “lies dormant” within every individual, as Mary Wigman claimed. Those who wanted to keep up with the times engaged in rhythmic gymnastics or tried out expressive dance. Young women could not wait to sign up for gymnastics and dance schools, which sprang up everywhere. Dance, a perpetual present, was well suited to Berlin, which was an unending work in progress and constantly reinventing itself. “Modern art reflected the experience of crises that traditional art could not address. It expressed modernity in modern terms—and modern liberations as well.”15
For Alfred and Bertha Riefenstahl, the lack of tradition in Berlin offered an opportunity to move up the social ladder. In a sense, their daughter was continuing along this path, because her success as an artist hinged on the end of traditional art. A period of experimentation was underway. All those who were inclined to express what was on their minds with no holds barred were welcome to join in. Young girls with no more than a smidgen of talent felt called upon to demonstrate their dancing ability in public. By 1920, Mary Wigman was noting with alarm: “Dilettantism grew, as one might expect, because up to that point, there were no yardsticks and directions to assess minor and major talents. Everyone had to figure it out on her own, in anxious isolation, worrying about her share of fame.”16 The audience got used to applauding sketchy presentations. Self-designated dance masters opened schools that enjoyed healthy enrollments.
In 1923, Leni’s father allowed her to apply to Wigman’s school in Dresden, which was housed in a villa with an enormous garden.17 The rehearsal spaces had the size and functional look of a factory—empty rooms flooded with light and walls painted in multicolored glossy varnish. The instruments were set up in a corner, and there were chairs for people who stopped in. Wigman’s own living space, which was also in the villa, was similarly simple, functional, colorful, and sparsely furnished. And then there was Wigman herself, enveloped in cigarette smoke, clad in extravagant garb, in front of the red or gold studio walls and focused intensely on her students’ presentations.
Photographs of the school’s daily routine show young barefoot women in light clothing performing all kinds of acrobatic routines in the garden. They are studying and encouraging one another, giving rounds of applause. The atmosphere is upbeat and casual, yet focused. By contrast, the ensuing recitals had the young girls playing priestesses clad in black, looking somber and trance-like. The Wigman school was a tight-knit community, with Wigman’s charismatic personality its undisputed center. She taught her students that dance arose from the unconscious.18 She gave her dancers the freedom to do as they wished, provided that their movements were well founded and well motivated. Wigman was also devoted to caring for the girls entrusted to her. “I see her before me cooking thick soups in enormous pots to feed her lean and hungry pupils,” the writer Vicki Baum recalled.19 Wigman attended to their every need, helping them out with issues ranging from lovesickness to homesickness.
Riefenstahl joined the master class: “The very next day I was allowed to audition for Frau Wigman and was accepted into her master class, where I took lessons along with Palucca, Yvonne Georgi and Vera Skoronel.”20 Nevertheless, she did not enjoy her time in Dresden. She was bothered by Wigman’s ascetic style and did not want to dispense with music. Moreover, she was lonely and assailed by doubts about her talent, which was no wonder in view of the aptitude of her fellow students. In secret, she rehearsed the dances she liked in a room she rented for this express purpose. In so doing, she was replicating her standard pattern: She had to keep her talent to herself, work herself hard in solitude, prepare to embark on her victory lap and dazzle the world with her art.
Riefenstahl felt unmoored. If she did not find confirmation for her exceptional qualities, she took to her heels. She left the disciplined community of women and returned to Berlin. There is not a single reference to Riefenstahl in Wigman’s letters, essays, or notes. And she does not appear in Wigman’s ample photo albums of important performances and family photos of former students. She is nowhere to be found among the young women with their serious expressions and matching hairdos, a group that included enormously successful dancers such as Gret Palucca, Vera Skoronel, and Yvonne Georgi. Riefenstahl’s memoirs give oddly brief mention to her training in the famous Dresden villa. Years of quarreling with her father lay behind her, and now that he was finally financing dance school and she was in a class with the up-and-coming bright lights of German expressive dance, she took off again after a scant few months. Her terse explanation was that she felt out of place there. She provided far more detailed information about any crazy admirer who came along than about her encounter with the dance greats of her era. Riefenstahl wanted to convey the impression that she was an artist who had nothing left to learn. Her fellow students were surely not lacking in artistic self-assurance. Palucca, Berthe Trümpy, and Skoronel—to name just a few—did not remain tied to their teacher’s apron strings but instead pursued independent careers. Riefenstahl’s claim that she was unable to develop as an artist in Dresden is belied by Wigman’s avowal that every student was fostered in her individual form of expression and did not have to limit herself to imitation. Considering the noble intentions of this teacher, it was no easy matter for Leni to part ways with these talented students. There were often heated disputes, but Riefenstahl kept her distance from them. She simply stole off from the illustrious flock and continued her training “more intensely than ever” in Berlin. She claimed never to have missed any performances by Wigman or Valeska Gert and called the two dancers her “goddesses.”21 Quite apart from the fact that the difference between the two artists could not have been greater, we wonder why she did not stay with her goddess Wigman. These inconsistencies strongly suggest that she left Dresden out of fear that she was not the best among the talented dancers in her class.
Even as a young woman, Riefenstahl could not stand to be compared. She regarded herself as the measure of all things and sidestepped any competition or evaluations. The few months in Dresden were the first and last time she ever joined a community of women. As a supposed student of Wigman’s, she had an easier time presenting herself as a promising artist. When she returned to Berlin, though, she faced stiff competition. Countless students of dance were competing for a place onstage: “The many would-be dancers, who had left their run-of-the-mill families in an appalling manner, thought that their running around barefoot was modern dance, and infested the concert halls and theaters. . . . Sporting events, the Freiluftbewegung [open air movement], nudism, hiking clubs, gymnastics: all these purely practical activities had now culminated in modern dance, that is, in the landscape of art.”22 At this time of galloping inflation, in which a million reichsmarks in the morning
might not be worth anything at all by the afternoon, a quick triumph was what mattered. Nowhere was this more evident than on the stage. Furthermore, going onstage was a way to earn money. Now that marriage had gone out of fashion as a way to gain financial security and many fathers had lost their assets, daughters needed a source of income. Sebastian Haffner ascribed a key significance to the year 1923 in the history of the Germans, calling it “that extraordinary year” in which the Germans developed “the cool madness, the arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible.” Inflation changed the country and the people: the young and alert did well, but those who were old and out of touch had few prospects of succeeding. “Amid all the misery, despair, and poverty there was an air of light-headed youthfulness, licentiousness, and carnival. Now, for once, the young had money and the old did not.”23 A “new realism” was holding sway in the arenas of love and money. Riefenstahl profited from this new realism. Not only did she lose her virginity in 1923, but she also enjoyed her first self-organized appearance on stage. For Riefenstahl, 1923 was the year that put an end to the tormenting “not yet.”
As usual, she went about things single-mindedly. To showcase her talent as a dancer and launch her fame, she needed public appearances. The course of action was relatively straightforward and well established: One rented a hall, printed posters, charged admission, got onstage, and claimed to be revealing one’s innermost experiences to the audience. Then one hoped for positive reviews and many guest performances. But it took money to get to this point. Riefenstahl toyed with the idea of asking her father for help, but at the same time she was resolved to reel in a financially solvent admirer for her enterprise. There was no lack of men—rich, famous, and influential—to fall for her charms. When she placed second in a beauty contest, she received piles of cards from interested gentlemen. She plucked out the two that seemed most promising: F. W. Koebner, editor-in-chief of the magazine Die Dame, and Karl Vollmoeller, a playwright known for his “harem” on Pariser Platz. Both wanted to support her, and both made their sexual interest in her abundantly clear. She described these encounters in detail in order to underscore the temptation to which she was subjected. She remained steadfast, straitlaced, and strong-minded. With both men, she emphasized that her artistic talent would lead her to success even without their patronage. She wanted neither money nor sex from these men. For years, she had had a crush on Otto Froitzheim, a professional tennis player who was the lover of the actress Pola Negri. In the 1910s, when he was very successful on the court, tennis was considered a frivolous pastime.24 Riefenstahl arranged to meet Froitzheim, hoping that a relationship with him would give a boost to her career. He was a man about town with contacts in the world of film, and he had an apartment in an upscale part of the city. At the age of twenty-one, Riefenstahl had had quite enough of her father’s strict supervision, and losing her virginity would take her one step closer to liberation. She rang Froitzheim’s doorbell wearing black silk underwear under a coat trimmed with fake ermine. They chatted, then danced, then slept together. She later described her first sexual experience as a near-rape that left her feeling humiliated and disillusioned. But she had cleared the first hurdle: She was now a young woman with a lover.
By happy coincidence, she met a young banker from Innsbruck while vacationing on the Baltic Sea. He was watching her practice her dances on the beach, then he came up and spoke to her. “He complimented me on my improvised beach dancing and, during our very first conversation, he said, ‘If you like, I can sign you up for several dance recitals at the Innsbruck City Theater.’ ‘Are you the manager or director of this theater?’ I asked. He smiled. ‘I’m not,’ he said, ‘but I have the money to rent the theater, and I’m convinced that you will have great success.’ ”25 At times of inflation, it was relatively easy for a foreigner to be wealthy in Germany. Of course, this man was thinking not about art, but about the woman he had met. She rejected the marriage proposal he made at the end of the vacation. Harry Sokal, as the young man was named, would become one of Riefenstahl’s key financiers, as would Adolf Hitler. Sokal had come to Germany from Romania as a child and had spent his youth in Berlin. He served at the front for two years, then went into banking when the war ended. When he met Riefenstahl, he was setting up a foreign exchange department at a bank in Innsbruck.
Sokal was a tall, thin-faced, handsome man who wore his dark hair slicked back. Constantly on the prowl for amorous escapades, he became aware of Riefenstahl during a vacation in Warnemünde. He was captivated by her flowing movements and her wish to appear onstage. “If this dance were to express only a fraction of her charm, graceful movements, and beauty, she would be a great success, and in a matter of seconds, my mind was made up: I would take charge of her debut.”26 Sokal described Riefenstahl as a self-assured, radiantly beautiful young woman who enjoyed the effect she had on men, and he hoped to win her over by financing her first dance performance. Undaunted by the huge sums of money the performance would require, Sokal paid for the hall and the publicity for the event, which took place on October 23, 1923, in Munich. The hall was only one-third full, but Riefenstahl deemed her “Dances of Eros,” which were inspired by her experience with Froitzheim, a resounding success.
While Riefenstahl denied having had an amorous relationship with Sokal at that time, he wrote that they spent their last night of their vacation in Warnemünde together. He was aware that love was not her highest priority. “She belonged far too much to her art, and above all to herself.”27 The performance in Munich was Riefenstahl’s dress rehearsal for Berlin. Anyone who wanted to make something of herself had to survive the “trial by fire” of appearing before a sophisticated audience in Berlin. In Riefenstahl’s eyes, however, the target audience in Berlin consisted of a single individual: her father. Her performance in Blüthner Hall had the sole purpose of convincing him that she was a gifted artist. Finally, her father was willing to believe in her. She triumphed over him onstage.
Marie Magdalene Dietrich’s mother did not remain a widow for long. Her second marriage was more to the liking of her extended family. Like Josefine’s first husband, Eduard von Losch wore a uniform, but he was a high-ranking army officer and came from a noble family. Von Losch was seven years younger than her deceased husband, who had been a friend of his. Josefine remained true to her belief in the old system of the class society and retained her predilection for military-style masculinity. Von Losch was a stocky man with a handlebar mustache who liked to boast about his experiences in the war. He had spent time in China, and the two Dietrich girls hung on his every word about this foreign world. Unfortunately, there was a stigma attached to their mother’s second marriage as well. This time the problem lay in her upward social mobility. The von Loschs were not thrilled with the prospect of their Eduard marrying a middle-class widow. Von Losch’s mother kept her distance from her new daughter-in-law. Still, Josefine preferred disparaging looks from her new extended family to her former status as the widow of a second-rate police officer.
Two years before World War I broke out, Dietrich was given a gold-embossed diary bound in red leather. In the turbulent years that followed, she would confide her secrets to this diary, but her change of father went unmentioned; she was utterly preoccupied with herself. The pretty girl sought to be the center of attention without her mother catching on to her ambitions. Josefine’s second marriage had not softened her; she was now bent on making her daughters live up to her new name, which for her meant teaching the children discipline. This discipline was relentless, strict, somber, and matter-of-fact. The daughter of a clockmaker with the soul of a sergeant was utterly humorless. Dietrich’s cousin Hasso Conrad Felsing claimed that even his Aunt Josefine’s normal conversational tone was imperious, and she would not tolerate any backtalk. Dietrich found an outlet from her mother’s overbearing presence in ice skating when the city lake froze over. If she fell down, she was quickly surrounded by a group of boys scrambling to help her back up, and she responded to their over
tures with either haughty or coquettishly bashful looks. Unfortunately for her, she was usually chaperoned by her older sister. Since Elisabeth was not a good ice skater, Dietrich had no trouble gliding away from her. But when it was time to go home, the younger girl could be found sitting on a bench unfastening her skates, her feet numb from the skating and the cold, tentatively making contact with the ground.
Their mother placed great value on leading a life that befitted their social status. Her first marriage had been a disappointment in that regard—and in so many others. Those dark days now seemed to be over; she had now joined the nobility with her new last name, “von Losch,” while her children retained the Dietrich name. Eduard von Losch never lost sight of the privilege of his birth and, like her husband, Josefine was firmly convinced of the inherent superiority and leadership authority of Prussian officers. However, although she was regarded as a parvenu in her husband’s circles, she resisted the temptation to compensate for her disadvantaged background as a middle-class widow by indulging in a lavish lifestyle or surrounding herself with luxury. In Dietrich’s new home, there was an emphasis on the military values of duty, honor, and discipline: “[My mother] was like a kindly general. She followed the rules she laid down. She set a good example to prove that it was possible. No pride in success, no pats on the shoulder; the only goal was humble submission to duty.”28
Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives Page 3
