Gerd Gemunden, Mary R. Desjardins, eds.. Dietrich Icon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. vi + 420 pp. $25.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-8223-3819-2.

Reviewed by Hunter Bivens

Published on H-German (February, 2011)

Commissioned by Benita Blessing (Oregon State University)

This volume on Dietrich grew out of the "Mar‐ The question of Dietrich's relationship to her lene at 100" conference at Dartmouth in 2001, and German origin is but one aspect of her mobility. the essays preserve something of the celebratory Dietrich left Germany for Hollywood in 1930. A and conversational tone the event. This tenor fts committed antifascist, Dietrich became a U.S. citi‐ both with the methodological concerns of the vol‐ zen in 1939 and returned to Germany in an Amer‐ ume and with Dietrich's status as a signpost for ican uniform in 1945, playing shows for U.S. occu‐ flm theory. In their adept introduction, Gerd pation troops. Like many exiles, Dietrich was not Gemünden and Mary R. Desjardines describe Di‐ welcomed in the Federal Republic (FRG, or West etrich as a fgure that at once embodies and ex‐ Germany) and was picketed during her 1960 per‐ ceeds any specifc framing of Hollywood cinema, formances in West Berlin. Although Dietrich was gender, or nation, to name some of the categories buried in Berlin Schöneberg in 1992, it was not that her "masquerades and transformations" (p. 4) until 2002 that the city made her an honorary citi‐ cut across. Indeed, for the editors, Dietrich's per‐ zen. In recent years, Dietrich has become an icon sona is very much a moving target, characterized of the new German capital, and her ubiquitous by nothing so much as its "mobility among high image presiding over Potsdamer Platz provides a and low cultures; among heterosexual, bisexual, counterweight to the Prussian theme park being and homosexual identities; among masculine and erected on the ruins of the defunct GDR's old feminine gender identities; among American and Palace of the Republic. As the editors put it, Diet‐ European cultures" (p. 4). The introduction at‐ rich's relationship to Germany is shaped by an un‐ tempts to place Dietrich in terms of nationality stable narrative of departure and failed home‐ and flm theory, but the volume's contributions comings. If Dietrich is a "litmus test for how Ger‐ cast an even wider net, raising issues of gender, mans deal with their history" (Werner Sudendorf, genre, technology, aging, politics, and biography. quoted p. 18), she is no less a limit case for flm H-Net Reviews theory. Famously characterized by Siegfried Kra‐ providing American audiences with a version of cauer as a "petty bourgeois Berlin tart" (quoted, p. the beloved rag-to-riches story, behind which she 133), whose appeal derived from her impassivity continued to refne her persona. and sadism, Dietrich is also invoked in Laura Mul‐ The frst section of the volume, entitled "The vey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narra‐ Icon," disaggregates the complexity of Marlene Di‐ tive Cinema" as the privileged object of the etrich as star text into some of its more notable el‐ scopophilia mobilized (along with voyeurism) by ements: face, legs, voice. In "Dietrich's Face," Lutz a patriarchal cinematic apparatus to contain and Koepnick cites a 1934 Film Pictorial article enti‐ discipline the female image.[1] As the editors tled "Composite Beauty--The Hollywood Stan‐ write, more recent discussions of Dietrich, for ex‐ dard," which, for Koepnick, "surreptitiously spoke ample in the work of Gaylyn Studlar, "suggest a the truth about the reifying logic of Fordist con‐ movement away from understanding her star sumer culture. Instead of circulating star images persona as an inert, passive image entirely consti‐ as signs of authenticity and wholeness, Film Picto‐ tuted by a collective phallocentrism, toward an rial endorsed visions of the human body as understanding of the Dietrich star persona as per‐ marked by atomization and aggregation, by syn‐ formed, contributing to the enunciation of the cretism and montage" (p. 44). Although Dietrich's flm's multiple meanings and multiple positions face didn't make Film Pictorial's list (her legs did), available for spectators" (p. 11). it nevertheless epitomizes for Koepnick this reify‐ This volume is consistent in framing of Diet‐ ing aesthetic, and he gives us a detailed account of rich as the author of her own persona rather than Dietrich's expertise in the use of light and shadow as an object of the industrialized regime of gaze to shape her own face, expanding upon tech‐ and gender that Mulvey was interested in cri‐ niques learned from Sternberg. Playing of of tiquing thirty-fve years ago. The destruction of Roland Barthes' classic account of the face of Gar‐ pleasure is apparently no longer our project. And bo as a fantasmatic screen, Koepnick argues that yet, to evoke Karl Marx, Dietrich may have au‐ if the star of the silent screen's face represented thored her own star text, but perhaps not as she the feeting timelessness of the modernist art‐ pleased or under conditions of her own choosing. work, Dietrich's face, in its refusal of authenticity During the 1930s, Dietrich's self-fashioning prac‐ and play of surface, was already closer to the digi‐ tices emerged against the direction of Joseph von tal morphs of contemporary cinema. Dietrich's Sternberg, who famously claimed to have not only face "was prosthetic, seamlessly incorporating discovered, but to have created Dietrich "in the technology into a new kind of postmodern organ‐ crucible of his conception" (p. 103). At the same ism" (p. 58). The "symbiotic relationships" (p. 46) time, Dietrich's early flm career was largely between the corporeal and the technological that shaped by the overwhelming presence of Greta inform Koepnick's account of Dietrich's face serve Garbo on the international flm market. In order as a leitmotif for this section, if not for the vol‐ to position herself from Berlin as a candidate for ume. Indeed, Amy Lawrence makes a similar ar‐ Hollywood stardom in the frst place, Joseph Gar‐ gument, albeit addressing a diferent attribute, in ncarz argues in "Playing Garbo," Dietrich had to "The Voice as Mask." Like Koepnick, Lawrence brand herself in Garbo's image, walking a razor's notes Dietrich's foregrounding of performance, edge of imitation and diferentiation vis-à-vis her which included her rejection of emotional imme‐ model and competitor. In the context of this diacy to performing. Dietrich's voice is equally a branding project, the von Sternberg myth gave Di‐ fetish and vehicle of border crossings: like the etrich a certain amount of cover by allowing her dress of mirrors she wore for her 1953 Las Vegas to cast herself as a kind of celluloid Eliza Doolittle, stage shows, Dietrich's voice masked an aging

2 H-Net Reviews body with the sheen of sameness and paradoxi‐ ception in both Germany and the United States cally familiar foreignness. In her essay on Diet‐ and attend to the afnities and contradictions be‐ rich's legs, Nora M. Alter makes another connec‐ tween the developing star systems in these two tion between the body and technology. Thus, Alter markets. argues, the uncanny appeal of Dietrich's legs to Carter demonstrated how the National Social‐ German viewers of her 1930 breakout flm Der ist press castigated Dietrich for her "un-German" blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, dir. Josef von Stern‐ cosmopolitanism, sexual ambiguity, and proclivity berg) demands to be read in the context of the un‐ for masquerade, but did not cease to drop hints precedented mutilation of bodies in the First about her possible return, sculpting an incessant World War, their "obscene presence" implying the meta-narrative of the return of the prodigal threatening intactness of the female body in a daughter to the nurturing bosom of the German context of the symbolic castration and real ampu‐ nation. Dietrich, of course, stubbornly refused any tation of defeated male soldier bodies (p. 60). compromise with the Nazi culture industry. As The volume's second session, "Establishing late as 1991, she responded to a request to meet the Star Persona," provides us with historical and with Leni Riefenstahl to clear the air after sixty theoretical case studies of Dietrich's rise to star‐ years by writing the word "Nazi" on the letter (p. dom and her eforts to maintain her persona over 24, n. 8). Indeed, it was not until Joseph Vils‐ the years. The key flm for this section is thus Der maier's 2000 fop Marlene that German audiences blaue Engel, which made Dietrich's reputation on would be presented with an answer (although both sides of the Atlantic. Elisabeth Bronfen's con‐ perhaps not a satisfying one) to the dilemma that tribution reads this flm as meditation on stardom had also bedeviled Goebbels' Ministry of Propa‐ and exile that both prefgures and facilitates Diet‐ ganda: "how ... to make over the transgressive in‐ rich's own departure from Germany to Holly‐ ternational star of history into the afrmative na‐ wood. Sternberg's flm is a sustained meditation tional symbol of reconciliation that she had never on performance and power, as the stif school‐ been" (p. 336)? Eric Rentschler's article "An Icon master is enthralled and humiliated by the bawdy Between the Fronts" shows how, attempting to re‐ nightclub singer. Der blaue Engel stages a double cuperate Dietrich as an icon of the German na‐ dislocation in Bronfen's account, as the reversal tion, Vilsmaier's flm not only falsifes history by portrayed in the flm's diegesis parallels the rever‐ giving his Dietrich a stalwart Prussian Bildungs‐ sal of sadistic-voyeuristic and vicarious-masochis‐ bürger love interest, but also unwittingly repli‐ tic positions of the gaze. Dietrich is looked at, but cates the very discursive terms through which Di‐ she also looks. This mode of cultural agency, "os‐ etrich's reception had been framed in National So‐ cillating between voyeurism and exhibitionism" cialist Germany, including the opposition between (p. 138) was incessantly foregrounded in Diet‐ "Jewish" aesthetics of illusion and masquerade rich's performances, which always sat uneasily (von Sternberg) and "German" authenticity and with classical Hollywood's ideologies of authentic‐ substance (the fctitious Prussian lover). In bring‐ ity. Der blaue Engel is a good case study for the ing Marlene home, as it were, Vilsmaier's flm problem of authenticity in another sense as well, censors both Dietrich's antifascism and her rejec‐ since it was flmed in two versions, English and tion by the postwar FRG, not to mention tamping German, more or less simultaneously, a "two orig‐ down her sexuality. Rather than Dietrich the cy‐ inals, no copy" (p. 148) production, as Patrice borg, to recall Lutz Koepnick's reading of the Petro informs us in her essay on the flm. This icon's face, Vilsmaier gives us Dietrich as "a pieta piece and the following articles by Mary Beth Har‐ alovich and Erica Carter detail Dietrich's initial re‐

3 H-Net Reviews and national allegory" (p. 340) as she contritely in Rancho Notorious (1952) as a sort of queering ministers to wounded Wehrmacht soldiers. of the Western genre, or what he calls the "supra- Hollywood was soon equally ill at ease with Western" (of which Johnny Guitar [1954] would Dietrich's star persona. Thus, for example, Patrice be another example); flms that combined aging Petro points out that the American version of The female leads with a camp aesthetic and a bending Blue Angel is not only lacking in inner thighs-- of genre and gender. which is to say that it is less sexually explicit than Finally, the volume's closing section, "(Auto-) the German version--but it also edits out the black Biography and the Archive," deals largely with Di‐ audience members who can be seen at Lola Lola's etrich's attempt to stabilize her star persona and performances. Haralovich gives a comprehensive cultural authority in the face of the passing of account of how Dietrich's Blonde Venus was publi‐ time and the aging of her body. In "The Order of cized in a variety of U.S. markets. The diversity of Knowledge and Experience," Amelie Hastie draws Dietrich's star text allowed for a wide variety of an interesting comparison between Dietrich's hy‐ marketing strategies, which emphasized Dietrich brid biography-advice manual, Marlene Dietrich's by turns as vamp, sufering mother, or glamorous ABC (1984), Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse screen icon. Gaylyn Studlar, whose work on Diet‐ (1979), and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project rich's cultural agency and the subjectivity of the (2002). These "ruminative volumes," ordered by female star in general informs many of the vol‐ the alphabetic principle, defy easy classifcation ume's contributions, provides a fascinating study and refuse the linearity of biographical or argu‐ of this problem in "Marlene Dietrich and the mentative discourse. Instead, these volumes au‐ Erotics of Code-Bound Hollywood." Paramount thorize reading practices based on cross-refer‐ had signed Dietrich in 1930 on the basis of her ence rather than totalization. For Hastie, Dietrich "European sex appeal" (p. 213) in the same year as emerges here as a fâneuse, liming the domestic the Hayes Code went into efect. The studio thus space and practices of glamour, "keeping house, found itself in the familiar dilemma of marketing making up," as "felds of knowledge and labor" (p. eroticism within the confnes set by American 293) that grounded her cultural authority. Indeed, moral conservatism. For a brief moment in the in Mary R. Desjardins's reading of Maria Riva's early 1930s, Dietrich became a master at this memoir about her mother, Dietrich emerges less tightrope act, paying lip service to the codes of as the aloof star than as the manager of the vast bourgeois sexual propriety even while subverting collective labor that was her persona, using her them through the tactics of displaced and conno‐ knowledge of the tricks and technologies of repre‐ tative sexual performance. The enforcers of the sentation. Riva's account of her mother's disci‐ code in fact sanctioned this kind of veiled sexual plined self-fashioning tells of the self-exploitation play until 1933, when Joseph Breen took over the that goes into the star persona. At the same time, newly formed Production Code Administration. in Riva's account of her own damaged childhood, The thematic of connotative sexuality is also im‐ Desjardins draws out an afnity between the Hol‐ portant to Alice A. Kuzniar's sustained queer lywood star system and the bourgeois family ro‐ reading of Blonde Venus in the terms of the closet, mance plotted by Sigmund Freud as compensato‐ which draws attention to the staged spectacles in ry fantasy logics. These fantasies tend to be based many Dietrich flms. In musical numbers, Diet‐ in ideologies of the authentic, for which the much- rich's performances break through the diegetic commented-upon aging of Dietrich's body is a frame and knowingly critique the perversity of well-suited fgure. The real catches up with Diet‐ heterosexual norms. Mark Williams similarly rich the morph in the form of the mortality of the reads Dietrich's late collaboration with Fritz Lang fesh. Both Desjardins and Judith Mayne in "Old

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Age and the Archive" note that Riva's memoir made with her, for the roles that she did not draws its own authority of enunciation in part play."[2] from its careful and lurid narration of the aging Notes Dietrich's corporeal abjection. Against this natu‐ [1]. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Nar‐ ralized account of aging, Mayne's reading of Diet‐ rative Cinema," in Film Theory and Criticism: In‐ rich's late stage performances allows us to see the troductory Readings, ffth edition, ed. Leo Braudy performer as her own archivist, leading her lis‐ and Marshall Cohen (New York and Oxford: Ox‐ teners by various tracks through her own history ford University Press, 1999), 833-844. and that of the culture industry itself. [2]. Heiner Müller, "Heiner Müller über Mar‐ This is an academic collection, but one that lene Dietrich," in Heiner Müller, Werke: Die the editors have capaciously construed, including Schriften, ed. Frank Hörnigk (Frankfurt am Main: for example, a piece by Steven Bach that reads Suhrkamp Verlag 2005), 420. like a coming of age story told against the back‐ ground of Dietrich's rehearsals for her 1968 per‐ formance at the Ahmanson Theater. Likewise, the volume's penultimate contribution is an interview between flm scholar Judith Mayne and Andrew Beaman, an actor who performed his show Black Market Marlene at the Dartmouth conference. What emerges from both of these pieces is what Beaman aptly calls "that self-knowingness that was the magic of Marlene" (p. 369). If the Holly‐ wood image, as Koepnick reminds us, is always al‐ ready thoroughly artifcial, most stars neverthe‐ less staked their personas on the disavowal of this fact. Dietrich, on the other hand, faunted it. This quality of self-knowing--self-making as perfor‐ mance--is what makes Dietrich distinctive in Hol‐ lywood history. Dietrich's knowing post-humanism unsettles easy distinctions of gender, genre, and nation. And yet, there is a specifc pathos to many of these essays that lies less in the oft-mentioned struggle of the aging Dietrich against her aging body and the indiferent passage of time, but rather in the limits that were placed upon her artistry by the apparatus of the flm industry itself. Although she exploited adeptly these limits, she did not over‐ come them. In his eulogy to Dietrich, the drama‐ tist Heiner Müller writes, "my memory of her best flms is the sorrow behind the perfection, an ex‐ pression of longing for the flms that were not

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Citation: Hunter Bivens. Review of Gemunden, Gerd; Desjardins, Mary R., eds. Dietrich Icon. H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2011.

URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=32319

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