Blue Angel Read Free

appearance.
    And when she came to “life goes on,” the voice became plangent, almost a whisper as she managed, to poignant effect, an octave’s span. In only one take, the scene and the song were captured forever. There was a moment of reverential silence round her, and then the bystanders broke into applause; many of those who knew her films, recordings and live stage appearances could be seen brushing away tears.
    Unable to see them across the bright studio lights, Marlene Dietrich, in her seventy-seventh year, nodded and found her way back to the cramped dressing room. An hour later she was alone again, back at her home on the fashionable Avenue Montaigne, just opposite the grand Plaza-Athénée Hotel. Except for visits to doctors and hospitals, she never left this apartment until her death from kidney and liver failure in her ninety-first year, on May 6, 1992.

2: 1901–1920
    W HEN P RUSSIA ’ S K ING W ILHELM I WAS PRO claimed the first Kaiser of Germany in January 1871, his capital in Berlin became the new Empire’s government center. For centuries merely a provincial town flanked by smaller villages (Lichtenberg, Friedenau, Wilmersdorf, Charlottenburg, Schöneberg), Berlin grew swiftly and by 1901 had absorbed numerous suburbs, its population of one and a half million spread over 350 square miles. Real estate was in constant development as railways expanded, construction companies thrived and banks and insurance firms prospered. The city was thus a vast cosmopolitan center, alive with every kind of commercial, creative and social expansion.
    “He who writes for Berlin writes for the world,” trumpeted the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt in its first edition. Few would have disagreed, for in a sense the city was a microcosm. Immigrants flowed in from Austria, Italy, Poland, Russia, Hungary and France, all of them attracted by the promise of immediate employment and a superior standard of living. Additionally, the famous Berlin air—cool,fresh and invigorating year-round—offered an appealingly temperate atmosphere for the enjoyment of a sparkling chain of lakes and public parks. Gardens, splendid in their designs, were planted thick with birch, pine, chestnut and lime trees.
    The climate may have been moderate, but the city’s Teutonic tastes were not. At the century’s turn, the classic modesty of old Berlin was replaced by a garish, nationalistic excess. Coveting the paraphernalia of pomp and circumstance, the arch-conservative Wilhelm II became obsessed with military parades and maneuvers, and he encouraged an urban design that virtually defined kitsch. The monument to his grandfather Wilhelm I stood sixty-five feet high on a bronze pedestal, flanked by bronze lions, and the Kaiser personally supervised plans for buildings with classical columns and great staircases leading from the street to the elevated ground floors, as if administrative offices were temples. Inside, the spaces were outlandishly opulent, with a profusion of gold and ebony, parquet floors, still more Corinthian pillars and scenes from mythology painted on fifty-foot-high ceilings.
    From this style every designer took his cue. The lavish Adlon Hotel at Number One Unter den Linden, subsidized by the Kaiser himself, featured Italian marble and enormous chandeliers; it was one of the most famous lodging places in the world, frequented by royalty as well as Vanderbilts and Rockefellers. But other hotels—the Central, the National, the Monopol and the Kaiserhof—quickly surpassed the Adlon with even more red velvet, more ivory, more gilt banisters. New residential palaces seemed to spring up each month, along with expensive apartments offering ten, twelve or sixteen rooms. Ambition and pretense were tangible in the Florentine villas of the grand boulevards, their interiors crowded with heavy, expensive furniture: an excess of tables, bureaus and stained glass, elaborate chandeliers, heavy bronze household implements and overstuffed velvet