Not too long ago, I heard a Marlene Dietrich album for the first time in about 40 years, and when the record began to play, I burst into tears. The album, a “best of” compilation of recordings and nightclub performances, was an oddity among the music I listened to growing up in New York in the 1970s. The other albums I played over and over were Patti Smith, the Talking Heads, the Clash. Yet, when I heard Marlene Dietrich, I was regaining something I couldn’t gain any other way: a voice from the country my family had fled as refugees, Germany. Marlene Dietrich—glamorous, world-weary, and singing like a survivor—made me feel like there was something I actually was interested in from the place my parents spoke scornfully of but seemed to long for.
As soon as “Lili Marlene” starts playing, that complicated thing I felt as a teenager comes back to me; I was consoled and desolated in a way I hadn’t thought possible. Maybe I was consoled because Dietrich seemed so good at articulating desolation.
Outside the barracks, by the corner light
I’ll always stand and wait for you at night
We will create a world for two
I’ll wait for you the whole night through
For you, Lili Marlene
The moment Dietrich starts singing, you know that neither the soldier nor the woman he longs for is going to survive the war unscathed. And you know that even when the soldier finds solace in thinking about Lili Marlene, when he says the thought of her makes his pack feel light, he might not make it to his next destination. “Lili Marlene” is, like many of the songs Dietrich sang, not exactly a love song.
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Dietrich’s music was deeply connected to wartime—if not wartime itself, then the time between the two world wars or shortly after them. “Black Market” both captures the grubbiness of life in a ruined city and an acceptance of it. If world-weariness is about knowing, accepting, and addressing the brokenness of the world, then nearly all of Dietrich’s performances, musical and dramatic, could be classed as world-weary.
You take art, I take Spam
To you for your “K” ration: my passion and maybe
An inkling, a twinkling or real sympathy
I’m selling out—take all I’ve got!
New York, at the time I was growing up, was a city that was also broken. It had blocks of derelict buildings, vigilantes patrolling its subways, and a red-light district at its heart. My best friend and I became obsessed with the 1940s films shown on TV, especially the fast-thinking, furiously tough characters who disdained sentimentality. Dietrich played characters like that all the time. I’m pretty sure I saw her first in the 1931 film Dishonored as a World War I spy who slicks on lipstick as she’s about to be shot by a firing squad. I’d heard her referred to as “the world’s most glamorous grandmother,” but nothing prepared me for Dietrich the nightclub singer, and the persona she projected: weary, sexy, and ready for anything.
The contemporary female stars marketed to my best friend and me were skinny, girly, and often in distress. Dietrich was never in distress. She was also not girly or skinny. In fact, when she put on a tuxedo and addressed her songs to women, she was knocking back expectations of femininity entirely. When she put on a sexy, clingy dress, she was sort of mocking them.
“Go see what the boys in the backroom will have,” Dietrich sings on “Boys in the Back Room,” “and tell them I’m having the same.” Which, of course, was like saying: I am one of the boys in the backroom. So there she was in a top hat and tux. There she was, smoking a cigar. And there she was at film premieres in trousers when all the other women were wearing evening gowns. But there she was singing in a glittering gown, too, slinking around the stage in a white fur coat so long it trailed on the floor behind her.
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The word punk is used to describe a lot of things these days that aren’t punk at all, but the attitude in “Boys in the Back Room” actually did evoke the punk spirit decades before the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and X-Ray Spex appeared.
And when I die, don’t spend my money
On flowers and my picture in a frame.
Just see what the boys in the backroom will have,
[…]
And tell them I died of the same.
I started listening to Dietrich during a time when I, and everyone I knew, wished our parents would just shut up about the war already. Whether the parent in question had been a soldier, a prisoner-of-war, or a refugee, we found the constant references to their shared trauma exasperating. So why was it that Dietrich’s references to the war beguiled me as if she was showing us something about it that my parents could not?
All great stars have the ability to make you feel as if you know them, but Dietrich seemed even more familiar than that to me with her accent, her refusal to be fazed, and her sense of displacement hovering in every performance she gave. And when she sang in German, English, and French, I couldn’t help remembering that German was the language of the country she left, English the language she would never speak like a native, and French (in her time) the language of diplomacy.
I played Dietrich’s album of nightclub hits so many times that, when I heard it again after not hearing it for decades, I could still remember her exact phrasing in each song, the rise and drop of a word, and where she took a breath. Though she played cabaret singers in films again and again, and many of her songs were from these films, it wasn’t the music that made her performances crackle. It wasn’t Dietrich’s voice; it was her magnetism. It was her ability to—either on stage or on film or on an album—convince you that she inhabited that song, and understood it better than anyone else because she’d lived it.
Here’s pianist, composer, and musical director William Blezard (1921–2003), who was Dietrich’s musical director, to explain how she did that:
She has one and a half octaves. Her bottom note is the same as the bottom note of a viola. She has a viola register. Her phrasing is immensely subtle: she developed and popularized Sprechstimme, the art of speaking as though singing. She is clever at avoiding the long-held note. She doesn’t need to have sustained notes, as she invests the words with special qualities and meanings. Her freedom of speech in her singing makes her phrasing inventive.
That quote is from Charles Higham’s biography of Marlene Dietrich, which I devoured at roughly the same time I was playing and replaying her music. From that book, I learned that she had renounced her German citizenship once the Nazis took power, performed for Allied troops during the war, and fallen in love with All Quiet on the Western Front author Erich Maria Remarque. What I didn’t know was that many of her lovers were women, that she financially supported refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, and that when she returned to Germany for the first time in 1960, she was prepared to be pelted with eggs and tomatoes by audience members who’d judged her a traitor.
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Dietrich died a recluse in Paris in 1992. At a certain point before her death, she no longer wanted to be filmed or photographed. One of the few female performers to be considered sexy as she got older, Dietrich made her last film appearance in Just a Gigolo (1979) as a madame who assesses David Bowie appreciatively and sings the title song. Bowie agreed to be in the film because Dietrich was, but they never met: his scenes were in West Berlin, hers in Paris.
Paris seems like exactly the place you might live the last years of your life if you’re the world’s proverbial cabaret singer, femme fatale, uprooted icon unable to return to the place you come from. Dietrich wanted to be buried in Berlin, though, and her coffin, draped with an American flag, was interred not far from the neighborhood where she’d spent her childhood.
The Blue Angel (1930) was both the last German film Dietrich would have a role in until Just a Gigolo, and also the film that forged her film and nightclub persona. As sexy, dangerous Lola-Lola, she captivates a respectable school teacher and ruins him. It is also the film where audiences first heard “Falling in Love Again,” which became her signature song.
Men cluster to me
Like moths around a flame
And if their wings burn
I know I’m not to blame
“Falling in Love Again” is more about desire than love, of course, and desire as part of the daily grind. But somehow, hearing that as a very young woman felt freeing. It was a rebuttal to sentimentality. And like the other tunes Dietrich was best known for, it was not exactly a love song.
Linda Mannheim has written for The Nation, Granta, 3:AM Magazine, and more. Her most recent book, This Way to Departures, was shortlisted for the UK’s Edge Hill Prize. You can find her at www.lindamannheim.com or @lindamannheim on Twitter and Instagram.
