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sofas with gold and silver tassels.
    Meanwhile, in less fashionable parts of town, modest barrack-like apartments were proliferating to house workers for the locomotive factories, iron foundries and new Daimler-Benz automobile plants. By 1901 the industrial proletariat lived mostly in tenement blocks, with six or eight families sharing a common lavatory.
    Life was rigorously stratified. At the summit were Wilhelm II’s family and court, fiercely patriotic and ever alert for anything political, literary or aesthetic that threatened established power. (“An art that transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by me ceases to be an art,” the Kaiser said flatly in 1901.) Then came the upper middle class, loyal to him insofar as it was in their interest. The majority of Berlin’s population was comprised of the working class, those who during the 1890s had won important socialist reforms and strove to keep and extend the benefits deriving therefrom. And finally there was the intellectual bourgeoisie, opposed to everything represented by the court ideology. This last group was largely responsible for the prevalent tone of ironic, sarcastic wit that characterized Berlin’s social and intellectual life, and they supported the dozens of newspapers that in turn endorsed the proliferating political parties—among them the Guelphs, Bavarians, Old and New Liberals, Polish dissidents, Catholics and a variety of Conservatives. Since the 1890s, these factions often clashed violently, their confrontations inevitably augmenting the power of the imperial police.
    I N 1901, THERE WERE 4,500 R OYAL P RUSSIAN PO licemen in the upper-middle-class district of Schöneberg, southwest of central Berlin, each man well paid and highly respected by the area’s population of 89,143—an astonishing police-civilian ratio by any standard. Groups of more than fifty subordinate patrolmen, detectives and telegraph operators were accountable to their leaders, and one of three supervising lieutenants was Louis Erich Otto Dietrich. An imposing man of thirty, Dietrich was autocratic, humorless and severe, his appearance very nearly a cliché of Prussian military tradition: he wore a monocle subjected to incessant polishing, a perpetually waxed and upturned moustache, closely shaved hair and a slightly ridiculous topknot that betokened his magisterial profession when he was helmetless and at leisure.
    Louis Dietrich had married Wilhelmina Elisabeth Josephine Felsing in 1899 and the couple had taken a spacious apartment at 53 Sedanstrasse, Schöneberg. Descended from the wealthy Conrad Felsing family (watchmakers and jewelers for generations at the fashionableshopping address of 20 Unter den Linden), she was at twenty-three a plain but sharp-witted bride whose height (five two) and build (tending to plumpness) belied a quiet sensuality. Wilhelmina had acquired from governesses an enthusiasm for music, poetry and the details of proper housewifery, and when she gave birth to her daughter Elisabeth on February 5, 1900, her household, thanks to her husband’s handsome salary and her own small inheritance, included three servants.
    Just after nine o’clock on the evening of December 27, 1901, a second daughter was born at home. Although never religious people, the Dietrichs called her Maria Magdalene—a fairly common appellation in Christian Germany, where it was popular to recall saints and disciples. When her mother was playful, however, she sometimes called the girl Paulus or Paul, the name chosen for the boy she never had. At about the age of twenty, Maria Magdalene joined the first and last syllables of her two names and called herself Marlene Dietrich.
    Blue-eyed with fine red-blond hair, little Maria was from childhood much admired for her almost translucent complexion and gently serious expression. By the age of two she was remarkably self-confident, curtsying while she repeated the names of guests and utterly lacking the coyness common to a pretty and