The German Genius

Emil Jannings and Marlene Dietrich.
    Sternberg, originally Jonas Sternberg, without the “von,” which was added by a Hollywood studio, was Austrian-Jewish, from Vienna, though he spent much of his childhood in New York City where his father was starting anew. Sternberg got a job repairing films and in that way wormed his way into the business. His early films attracted the attention of Charlie Chaplin, who invited him to Hollywood, where Sternberg made his name with a series of gangster movies (the 1920s were the era of Prohibition). On the strength of this he went to Germany in 1930 for The Blue Angel , produced in both German and English.
    Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) was brought up in Mainz and saw action on the Western Front during World War I. In 1917 he published a collection of pacifist war poems. His first plays did not do well but in 1924 he became dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, alongside Bertolt Brecht. There, his play Der fröhliche Weinberg ( The Merry Vineyard ; 1925) won him the Kleist Prize. The Blue Angel was not his only great success of 1930, a year when he also won the Büchner Prize. After 1933, however, his plays were banned and he moved to Switzerland and then America. Although he did some work in Hollywood, he bought a farm in Vermont and, after World War II, became a cultural attaché to Germany, helping in the postwar investigations of war criminals. He wrote several other plays, which were successes in Germany, and in 1952 won the Goethe Prize.
    The Blue Angel achieved part of its effect from Sternberg’s lighting, which intensified the emotional impact, and owed much to Zuckmayer’s writing, which had to underscore Heinrich Mann’s text, in which Professor Unrat is transformed from a confident, if not entirely likeable full character, into a shell. Emil Jannings (1884–1950), who played Unrat, was at the time a much better known actor than Dietrich, with a remarkable voice and delivery. 43 A Swiss, at the time shooting began he had become the first winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor, for The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command , but at the invention of sound his thick German accent ruined him for Hollywood. During the Third Reich he appeared in several propagandistic films, including Führerprinzip (1937) and The Dismissal of Bismarck (1942), with Goebbels naming him an “Artist of the State” in 1941. On account of this, Jannings was forced to undergo de-Nazification after the war.
    But of course what everyone remembers, or knows, about The Blue Angel is Marlene Dietrich (1901–92), her voice and her legs (showing stockings and garters, in one of the most famous film posters of all time). Born in Berlin-Schöneberg, the daughter of a police officer, she was not at all well known going into The Blue Angel . She had studied violin at school, had failed her audition for Max Reinhardt’s drama academy, but had nonetheless appeared as a chorus girl and in walk-on parts in such plays as Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box . In The Blue Angel she played Lola, the nightclub singer, and what struck a chord was her smoky, world-weary singing voice, in particular the song that made her famous and is always associated with her, “Falling in Love Again.” (Ernest Hemingway famously said, “If she had nothing more than her voice, she could break your heart with it.”) On the back of the success of the film, Paramount marketed her as a German Garbo, and she appeared in her first American film, Morocco , also directed by Sternberg. 44
    She made many other films, opposite such stars as James Stewart and John Wayne and working with directors such as Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, and Orson Welles. She took an active role in World War II, being one of the first stars to help raise war bonds, making anti-Nazi records for the OSS, including “Lili Marlene,” and singing for the troops under General Patton, even playing the saw. 45 After the war, with her film career stalled, she re-invented herself as a cabaret star under the direction of Burt Bacharach. Her return to Germany in 1960 had a mixed reception, but she was buried in Berlin not far from where she had grown up.
    The demise of Professor Unrat set the scene for the demise of Weimar. The Blue Angel was banned in Nazi Germany.

Weimar: The Golden Age of Twentieth-Century Physics, Philosophy, and History
     
    I n many areas of science, the wake of war lasted for years. In 1919 the Allies established an International