by Ed Sikov
Directed by Hans Steinhoff, who had also directed Scampolo, Madame concerns the flighty, modern Madeleine (Liane Haid)—she’s crazy about tennis, and she certainly doesn’t want to have any kids. Her husband, on the other hand, is a pediatrician named Felix (Georg Alexander). Felix loves children and wants to have one of his own. What a dilemma. Madeleine’s tennis partner (Willi Stettner) takes her side; Felix launches a relationship with his former girlfriend, Luise (Lucie Mannheim); Madeleine gets jealous; Madeleine agrees to be a good wife and have kids.
Madame wünscht keine Kinder wasn’t a pleasant experience for Billie, who found himself working once again with a Nazi. Steinhoff, who went on to make the slavishly Naziphilic Hitlerjunge Quex (“Quex,” the Hitler Youth), distinguished himself not only for being a Fascist but also for being a criminal of the sort that, in Wilder’s eyes, was even more damnable: “He was a turd, that Steinhoff—a man without any talent at all. He was a Nazi, a hundred percent. There were many Nazis who had talent. I would never say that Leni Riefenstahl had no talent. That was certainly a great thing she did with The Triumph of the Will. But I say Steinhoff was an idiot—not because he was a Nazi, but also because he was a terrible director.” (Just to dispense with Steinhoff: Hitlerjunge Quex was one of the most effective propaganda films of the Third Reich. The tragic but inspiring story of little Heini Völker, whose nickname is “Quex,” the movie traces the boy’s moral development from a sad-sack son of a Communist to a proud member of Hitler Youth. It concludes with Heini getting stabbed to death by a leftist. As he dies, the first few bars of the Nazi “Youth Song” rise from his lips. The Nazi flag takes Heini’s place on the screen, at which point Steinhoff cuts to columns of Hitler Youth marching into glory. The film’s director was swiftly appointed head of the film division of the Reichsjugendführung, but, as it must to all men, death came to Hans Steinhoff. The actor Hans Albers took credit for it. “He’s the biggest asshole of the century!” Albers raged to Géza von Cziffra in the 1930s. “He’s also a pig. One fine day I’m going to kill him.” In the spring of 1945, with the war all but over, Steinhoff boarded the last Lufthansa flight out of a besieged Berlin in an attempt to flee to Spain, but the plane crashed and Steinhoff was killed. According to news reports, the plane had been shot down by Russian troops, but as von Cziffra writes, “Albers knew better: ‘That wasn’t the Russians—that was me.’”)
In 1932, however, the National Socialists were a political party like any other, albeit a violent party full of thugs. Adolf Hitler was a politician, and fewer and fewer Germans saw anything wrong with him. In March, Hitler won over 11 million votes to Hindenburg’s 18.6 million, but because there was no clear majority, the election had to be run a second time. Hindenburg did win his majority in April, but Hitler gained 2 million votes in the process. As William Shirer writes in his classic history, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, “Political power in Germany no longer resided, as it had since the birth of the Republic, in the people and the body which expressed the people’s will, the Reichstag. It was now concentrated in the hands of a senile, eighty-five-year-old President and in those of a few shallow, ambitious men around him who shaped his weary, wandering mind.”
Still, life and work continued for Billie Wilder. What else was there to do? Besides, Billie lived in a city of Jews and commerce and vibrant culture and every form of entertaining depravity—the German city Hitler hated most. So many of the Jews and leftists who escaped the Nazis as refugees have reported that they didn’t see the threat until it was too late that to make the point in any more detail would be redundant—except for this analogy: if the American religious right were to assume great political power in the South and Midwest, New York and San Francisco would be the last cities to feel it, and the natives would probably keep right on eating, drinking, and working until moments before the cataclysm.
In much the same way, Hitler remained a dark abstraction for Billie Wilder and his filmmaker friends through most of 1932. There were more pressing concerns—like writing scripts. Was Frauen träumen (What Women Dream) came next. Directed by Géza von Bolvary, the film takes its title from the name of a rare perfume that sells only three bottles every year. Its story is reminiscent of Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, which was released in October of 1932. When the haunting scent of Was Frauen träumen is found on a stray glove left in a jewelry shop after a heist, it becomes the only clue to the identity of a notorious jewel thief who’s been running around town swiping only the best and most expensive gems. Other than the audience, which witnesses one such crime in the film’s opening moments, only the mysterious Herr Levassor (Kurt Horwitz) knows the criminal’s identity. Levassor has been following the thief and paying for the stolen jewels. The task of solving the mystery falls to the ridiculous detective Füssli, played with comically understated madness by Billie’s old friend Peter Lorre. Was Frauen träumen marks the only time the two café buddies ever worked on the same film.
Because he takes the youthful form of Peter Lorre, Füssli is a round little man with a puffy face and a nasal voice who nonetheless remains happily, winningly unaware of his own essential ugliness. He’s goofy—even strangely lovable, as long as one keeps a secure distance. Füssli’s talents for detective work are minimal, as evidenced by his inability to extract himself from the pair of handcuffs with which he repeatedly toys. (“Did you arrest yourself?” he’s asked; “No,” he answers in Lorre’s familiar twang, “I invented a new pair of cuff links.”) Still, Füssli’s instincts as a human bloodhound remain relatively intact. When he learns that the crime’s only clue is a rare fragrance, he enlists the aid of his friend Walter König (Gustav Fröhlich), who works in a perfume shop. Walter has kept receipts from the three buyers of the perfume Was Frauen träumen, and, eliminating the first two as suspects, they trace the third to an address: Room 88 of the Hotel Atlantic. There, in the lobby, Füssli stands eagerly by the elevator door smelling various men and women as they emerge.
The thief is actually the elegant nightclub star Rina Korff, played by the statuesque, patrician Nora Gregor (who is best known for her role as Christine in Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game). Unbeknownst to Füssli, Walter solves the mystery almost immediately and, in the process, becomes dazzled by Rina. He knows that the police are in hot pursuit of her, so despite the fact that she is guilty of a series of serious crimes, he spirits her away to safety in the backseat of a cab. They light cigarettes and talk. “Why are you helping me?” Rina asks. Walter remains silent. “I like you, too,” she says.
Walter eventually asks her why she steals, and Rina answers: “I need it. It’s exciting. It’s like you smoking cigarettes.” Like the central characters in Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, neither Walter nor Rina finds anything morally troubling about stealing expensive jewelry. Rina takes a similarly liberating attitude toward Walter’s own apartment. Although he tries to sequester her elsewhere, she ends up lounging on his daybed, having stolen his keys and let herself into the flat in his absence. The inept Füssli shows up—he and Walter are next-door neighbors—and, blissfully ignorant of the fact that Rina is the woman he’s trying to find, the two of them sing a song at the piano, Füssli bouncing idiotically up and down on the piano bench as he sings.
Rina, meanwhile, busies herself stealing Füssli’s wallet, his watch, his jewelry, and even his gun. She then graciously offers Füssli one of his own cigars, which he happily accepts. “I’m the perfect thief!” she laughingly tells the detective. Füssli jokingly arrests her, saying “And I’m the perfect detective!” They both laugh, though only Rina has a reason to do so.
By the end of 1932, Billie Wilder was in love. To hear him tell it, there was never any lack of available women, but this one was a cut above the rest. The others were casual; Hella Hartwig was a serious romance. He met her at a Berlin party. She was a dark-haired beauty with huge eyes and dark eyelashes who, according to Zolotow, looked like Hedy Lamarr. Hella wore her hair cut short in the latest Berlin fashion. She wa
s not especially cultured—discussions of art and literature went nowhere—but like Billie, she loved sports, dancing, skiing, and jazz. Better still, Hella was very wealthy. Her family owned a big drug company in Frankfurt an der Oder, and she drove her own car—a blue Lancia. Wilder explained the attraction: “I liked her. She liked me. We went out together. We made love. No, she did not talk like Claudette Colbert.”
According to Wilder, Hella’s family didn’t much like him, and they certainly didn’t think he was suitable marriage material. According to Wilder, this was fine with him because he had no intention of marrying Hella anyway. As a matter of fact, he didn’t intend to marry anyone.
One of the couple’s pastimes was to go to Walter Reisch’s apartment on Sundays and play dominoes until midnight, at which point Reisch’s girlfriend made liverwurst and salami sandwiches. A dozen or so people were there each week. Wilder once went so far as to say that dominoes-and-liverwurst was his favorite sport in Berlin. For Billie, life was humming. He was earning 5,000 marks for each script he wrote, and he was living and working exactly where he wanted—right in the middle of everything.
With his newfound money, Wilder began collecting stamps in addition to his growing stash of posters and lithographs by such artists as Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Klee, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. With his English silk shirts and ties, American hats, and of course his threateningly operative walking stick, Billie Wilder was quite the young man about town. “At night we went to the El Dorado, which was rebuilt in 1972 for the movie Cabaret. Or we went to the Silhouette, the famous lesbian nightclub. Today there’s so much talk about cocaine, but Berlin was the big cocaine city then.” Indeed, the Silhouette was notorious, and Wilder liked to go there. (Whether or not it was still owned or managed by the strong-armed Heinz, Lulu’s enraged boyfriend in the Galitzenstein story, is another matter entirely.) A narrow, dark bar on Geisbergstrasse, the Silhouette featured more than its share of alluringly modern attractions: a gigantic bouncer named Jonny, a black waiter or two, boys in drag, Conrad Veidt, Marlene Dietrich, and on and on. Wilder and Marlene hit it off right away, Dietrich being a jazz fan who particularly admired Whispering Jack Smith. Marlene also admired Claire Waldoff, who no doubt was a frequent guest at the Silhouette. Supposedly the first woman in Berlin to have her hair bobbed, she was one of Dietrich’s vocal coaches as well as her lover. She was also a cabaret star in her own right, however unlikely her appearance: short and chubby with flaming red hair. Waldoff appeared wearing an Eton collar and tie, which as Anton Gill points out was “all that remained, together with a tartan scarf, of the full Eton suit the police had refused her permission to wear.” (Berlin law forbade women to appear in public dressed as men after 11:00 P.M.)
Waldoff, Dietrich, and the rest of the lesbians at the Silhouette were all part of Wilder’s scene in those days—or more accurately, he was part of theirs. The appeal was unmistakable. In the words of Robbie Lantz, they were “ladies who carried a bit of the gutter with them,” a trait to which Wilder was always attracted. Billie enjoyed life on the transgressive fringes of society even if he had no urge to participate in the transgressions himself. Still, even though he liked the Silhouette, he loved the Romanisches Café and continued to make it his second home. By the beginning of 1933, Wilder could well afford more expensive places like the Adlon or the Kempinski, and he did frequent these classy places and others. But for Billie, the almost exclusively male camaraderie at the Romanisches had no equal. Paul Erich Marcus remembered that Wilder, along with Robert Siodmak, still hung out at the Romanisches despite their upward mobility: “They were eating in more pretentious restaurants—the Stöckier on the Kurfürstendamm, the Horcher or the Schlichter on Lutherstrasse—but the twilight surroundings of the café, its magic, still attracted them more.”
Late in 1932, Wilder and Walter Reisch wrote another script for Erich Pommer—Der Frack mit der Chrysantheme (Tailcoat with a Chrysanthemum). A sartorial La Ronde, it was the story of a suit of clothes passed along from one person to another that ends up as a scarecrow standing in a field of corn. But the film was never made—not in Germany, at any rate. In January 1933, while on a ski vacation at Davos, Billie and Hella were skiing the Parsenn one morning and stopped at a chalet halfway down for lunch. While eating a meal of sausages, potato salad, and mulled wine, they heard the announcement over the radio that Hindenburg had just appointed Hitler to be chancellor. “I think it’s time to leave,” said Billie; “I’d like to have some coffee and some pastry first,” replied Hella. Billie claimed he had to explain what he meant.
They returned to Berlin, and Billie sold his belongings in very short order. For safety’s sake, he converted his deutsche marks into dollars—he had $1,000—and prepared himself emotionally as well as materially to become a refugee. “It wasn’t my idea,” he later said; “It was Hitler’s.” In one account, Wilder allegedly gave part of his art collection “to an Aryan friend in case I should ever come back,” but after the war his so-called friend denied knowing anything about it.
Hitler’s rise was swift; Wilder’s paranoia was, if anything, even swifter, but neither precluded a good meal. On the night of February 27, he and Hella were dining at a fine restaurant when they looked out the window and noticed that the Reichstag was on fire. According to one account, Hella’s father sped them to Zoo station the following morning and they took the train to Paris. More likely, it took a few more days. “It wasn’t easy,” Wilder later said, “because many people wanted to go, and many wanted to sell as fast as possible as much as possible.” In yet another version of the story, he remembered the moment at which he decided to leave Germany. It wasn’t in Davos, nor was it at the Adlon or the Kempinski, but rather on an ordinary street on an otherwise forgettable day in Berlin: “One day I watched them beating an old Jew on the Zinnstrasse in broad daylight. Nearly thirty SS men. Strong guys. Butchers. They were writing ‘Judengeschäft’ [Jewish shop] on a store window when they saw the old man with his hat, long whiskers, and coat. They battered him mercilessly. And I was just standing there, completely helpless, with tears in my eyes and my fists clenched in my pockets. The next day was the Reichstag fire.”
The Nazi threat was scarcely theoretical at this point. Many (if not most) of Wilder’s friends and colleagues were either Jews or leftists. Egon Erwin Kisch was quickly arrested along with many other Communists, but thanks to the intervention of the Prague Parliament, Kisch was released and deported to Czechoslovakia. Wilder never saw his friend again. (Kisch survived the war in South America and Mexico; he then returned to Prague, where he died in 1948.)
Robert Siodmak’s new film, Brennendes Geheimnis (Burning Mystery), made its all-too-appropriate premiere the night of the Reichstag fire. Everyone thought it was a funny coincidence, but, less amusingly, the film disappeared from the screens three days later and Siodmak found himself hunted by storm troopers.
Wilder had given up his luxury apartment at the Sächsischen Palais and spent his final days in Berlin in a room at the Hotel Majestic on Brandenburgischenstrasse, where he was awaked one night around 4:00 A.M. by two detectives knocking on his door. Wilder said he panicked, having been browsing through an anti-Hitler pamphlet as bedtime reading, but it had fallen between the bed and the wall and the detectives didn’t see it.
Circumstances once again forced Billie Wilder to beat a hasty retreat from a city he loved, where he had worked hard to establish himself, and where he had innumerable friends. This time, however, most of the friends were running with him. But unlike many of them, Billie made a shrewd choice. He did not escape to another German-speaking country, where, with reasonable speed, he could have found his way into a relatively secure position. No, Billie’s survivor’s instincts had never been sharper. He was paranoid, and correctly so. Those of Wilder’s friends who fled to Vienna and Prague were, in his view even at the time, all too shortsighted. Billie spoke no English, but he could understand French well enough so he opted for Paris.
Wherever they were h
eaded, Jews and Communists left Berlin as fast as possible. Many if not most of Wilder’s friends and colleagues left on or around the same time: Kolpe, Reisch, Marcus, and both of the Siodmak brothers; Lustig, Liebmann, Schüfftan, Holländer, and Wachsmann; Remarque, Berger, Pasternak, and Kohner. Producers and directors, writers and actors, musicians and editors—Ufa was immediately decimated, much to the Nazis’ joy. Erik Charell, Paul Czinner, E. A. Dupont, and Leopold Jessner fled. The director Joe May, one of Ufa’s top moneymakers, ran for his life, along with his wife, the glamorous actress Mia May. So did Ernö Metzner, Max Ophuls, Richard Oswald, Erwin Piscator, Max Reinhardt, Hans Richter, Fritz Lang, Leontine Sagan, Hanns Schwarz, Wilhelm Thiele, and Robert Wiene. Erich Pommer, Josef Somlo, Heinrich Nebenzahl, Seymour Nebenzal, Hermann Millkowski, Felix Joachimson, Arnold Pressburger, Gregor Rabinowitsch bailed out as well. Screenwriters Vicky Baum, Bruno Frank, Hans Wilhelm, Friedrich Kohner, Robert Thoeren fled. Cameramen Günther Krampf and Franz Planer, composers Hanns Eisler, Werner Richard Heymann, Walter Jurmann, Bronislaw Kaper, Hans Salter, and Kurt Weill—all escaped. Actors Peter Lorre, Gitta Alpar, Albert Bassermann, Elisabeth Bergner, Ernst Busch, Ernst Deutsch, Therese Giehse, Alexander Granach, Fritz Kortner, Szöke Szakall, and Conrad Veidt left Germany. Cabaret writers and performers ran as well: Kurt Gerron, Valeska Gert, Paul Graetz, Fritz Mehring, Paul Morgan, Rudolf Nelson, Kurt Robitschek, Oskar Homolka, Paul Lukas, and Mischa Spoliansky joined the fifty thousand other people who fled Germany in 1933, and they were lucky to have had the chance. Carola Neher, Klabund’s widow, chose to go in the other direction; she moved to the Soviet Union and died in a gulag in 1936. Most of these refugees found safer ports of refuge in the 1930s. Some did not have the foresight. Robert Liebmann stayed in Paris until he was rounded up when the Nazis seized control of France. They murdered him in a death camp.
