Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Karin Wieland, Shelley Frisch Ph.D. (Translator)

Overview

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography)
Named of the Best Books of the Year by the Washington Post and the Boston Globe

Magisterial in scope, this dual biography examines two complex lives that began alike but ended on opposite sides of the century’s greatest conflict.

Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, born less than a year apart, lived so close to each other that Riefenstahl could see into Dietrich’s Berlin apartment. Coming of age at the dawn of the Weimar Republic, both sought fame in Germany’s burgeoning motion picture industry. While Dietrich’s depiction of Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel catapulted her to Hollywood stardom, Riefenstahl—who missed out on the part—insinuated herself into Hitler’s inner circle to direct groundbreaking if infamous Nazi propaganda films, like Triumph of the Will. Dietrich, who toured tirelessly with the USO, could never truly go home again; Riefenstahl could never shake her Nazi past. Acclaimed German historian Karin Wieland examines these lives within the vicious crosscurrents of a turbulent century, evoking piercing insights into "the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation" (New Yorker).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631492280
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	10/11/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	624
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Karin Wieland lives in Berlin and is an historian of political theory at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture.

Shelley Frisch is the prize-winning translator of biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, and Kafka. She lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Editorial Reviews

"[A] lively, deliciously gossipy dual biography."

Boston Globe - Kate Tuttle

"[Dietrich and Riefenstahl has] credibility, texture, and unending interest."

New Yorker - Claudia Roth Pierpont

07/27/2015
The ways that two German screen luminaries embodied the growing status and ambitions of 20th-century women are chronicled in this absorbing dual biography by historian Weiland. Born a year apart, movie star Marlene Dietrich and director Leni Riefenstahl both got their start in Weimar Germany’s film industry—Riefenstahl tried out for the iconic show-girl part in The Blue, which eventually went to Dietrich—and became exemplars of the on-the-make new woman of the Jazz Age. Moving to Hollywood, the glamorous Dietrich specialized in playing jaded man-eaters with secret hearts of gold—a heart she displayed in real life by selling American war bonds and touring with the USO. Riefenstahl, upholder of wholesome Aryan virtue in Triumph of the Will and other Nazi propaganda movies, proved far more corrupt, furthering her own career by employing her skills to celebrate Hitler’s regime. (She blithely used concentration camp inmates as extras.) Weiland highlights the entertaining soap opera in their stories, especially the parade of Dietrich’s affairs with men and women—often abetted by her complaisant husband—which involved endless psychodrama and scenes. But she pairs the humor with incisive cultural analysis of the women’s impact as proto-feminists who used sex appeal, savvy, and considerable talent to pioneer new roles for women. Photos. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"The true subject of [Wieland’s] dual biography is…the contrast between good and evil…Did the women ally themselves with a particular nation because that nation reflected their authentic selves? Or did the choice itself—Dietrich's move to America; Riefenstahl's complicity with the Third Reich—transform them into different people than they would otherwise have been? Wieland offers no pat answers…Evil here is not banal; it is jaw-droppingly bizarre and eclipses good."

Los Angeles Times - M. G. Lord

"Behold Karin Wieland's Dietrich & Riefenstahl, a double-decker biography about a pair of sacred monsters that motors the length of a century, through two world wars, countless affairs, still-burning controversies, and white satin streams of Hollywood lore, never losing focus on the point on the horizon where fame and infamy meet…As a mere mortal myself, I finished Dietrich & Riefenstahl fully sated and completely agog."

James Wolcott

"Illuminating…. Via a fluent, often witty translation by Shelley Frisch, Wieland draws the portrait of women who were ambitious to a degree stunning in their day. Moreover, by tracking their divergent careers together, she is able subtly to suggest some answers to a question that hangs over every mid-century German artist: what kind of responses were available to the Nazi apocalypse?"

The Guardian (UK) - Farran Smith Nehme

"Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl have found an ideal biographer in Karin Wieland. She brings a lively style, a wealth of detail, and a perfect balance between skeptical objectivity and measured sympathy to her account of the parallel and then diverging lives of these two ambitious women."

Celia Applegate

"[With] hypnotic power…. Wieland uses these two virtuosos’ lives to generate piercing insights about ambition, ego, creativity and the life-changing, world-altering repercussions of a momentous choice."

Michael Sragow

"The true subject of [Wieland’s] dual biography is…the contrast between good and evil…Did the women ally themselves with a particular nation because that nation reflected their authentic selves? Or did the choice itself—Dietrich's move to America; Riefenstahl's complicity with the Third Reich—transform them into different people than they would otherwise have been? Wieland offers no pat answers…Evil here is not banal; it is jaw-droppingly bizarre and eclipses good."

Los Angeles Times - M. G. Lord

09/01/2015
Separating fiction from the apocryphal, German political theory historian Wieland takes readers on a densely layered, whirlwind tour of Weimar Germany, 1930s Hollywood, the Third Reich, World War II, and more. She alternates distinct biographies of the most famous German woman of the 20th century, actress Marlene Dietrich (1901–92), and perhaps the most infamous filmmaker of all time, Leni Riefenstahl (1902–2003). In effect, there's an implied comparison and contrast. Dietrich comes off as more objective, and less lurid, than the 1993 deconstructionist Marlene Dietrich by the star's daughter. The author matter-of-factly delves into the actress's love life (with men and women), focusing on her significant relationships, and unlike many biographers, accentuates Dietrich's warfront service. Conversely, Wieland dismantles Riefenstahl's lifelong protests of political naïveté, depicting her as a delusional, shockingly egotistical figure who was concerned only for her career and who savored her insider status with patron and protector Adolf Hitler. (Much of Wieland's ammunition comes from Joseph Goebbels's diaries.) Additionally, the author's concise descriptions convey the visual impact of Riefenstahl's overtly political propaganda films. VERDICT An absorbing read and a must-have for film collections. Highly recommended where Erik Larson's In the Garden of Beasts is popular. [See Prepub Alert, 4/20/15.]—Kent Turner, School Library Journal

Library Journal

2015-07-15
Two icons and their turbulent times. Contemporaries growing up in Weimar Berlin, Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) and Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003) both aspired to careers in entertainment: Dietrich as a concert violinist, Riefenstahl as a dancer. In her engrossing, richly detailed debut book, Wieland, a historian of political theory at the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture, offers parallel biographies of the two women, tracing their vastly divergent trajectories. Riefenstahl championed Nazis and exalted Hitler, while Dietrich left Germany for Hollywood stardom. When her future as a violinist was thwarted by tendinitis, Dietrich turned to acting, where her discipline and drive overcame her "modest gifts." "I had no special talent and I knew it. Everyone knew it," she confessed. Nevertheless, when Josef von Sternberg saw her in a revue, he decided he had found the star of his new project, The Blue Angel (1930). She would play Lola Lola, "a sassy, savvy, honky-tonk B-girl," a role that launched her career. Wieland documents her affair with von Sternberg and her many subsequent lovers, including Erich Maria Remarque, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jean Gabin, American Army Gen. James M. Gavin, Yul Brynner, Fritz Lang, and John F. Kennedy. She also had an intense, though platonic, friendship with Ernest Hemingway. A beloved entertainer of American troops, Dietrich later reinvented herself as a nightclub singer, but her career spiraled downward, and she often was beset by financial worries. Riefenstahl also diverted from dancing to acting, using her training in gymnastics and boxing for roles in mountain films, popular in prewar Germany. By the 1930s, she was not only acting, but producing, directing, and writing screenplays. Hitler, she learned, was a fan "and an anti-capitalist feminist to boot." She was entranced. Egotistical and self-promoting but nevertheless talented, Riefenstahl won accolades in Germany; managed to be acquitted of Nazi collaboration; and reinvented herself as a photographer. Wieland deftly traces both lives through their many ups and downs. A sweeping, revelatory dual biography.

Kirkus Reviews