Berlin полностью

The premier was scheduled for February 1930 but had to be postponed because UFA’s new owner, the reactionary press baron Alfred Hugenberg, who had bought up Paramount’s and MGM’s shares in the company, was unhappy with the film as it stood. Upon screening a rough cut of the film, Hugenberg felt that Sternberg had failed to make absolutely clear that the errant teacher had died at the end, thereby pointing up the wages of sin. Sternberg himself had recently left for America, so Erich Pommer, the producer, was left with the task of pleasing Hugenberg. He did so by adding music by Beethoven to the final scene showing the professor slumped over his classroom desk. Now it was clear that the old man had paid the ultimate price for transgressing against society’s norms.

The Blue Angela premier took place on April 1, 1930, at the Gloria-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm. Tout Berlin was there, captains of industry and captains of crime, prominent artists, writers, and actors, including the entire cast of the movie. The general expectation was that the evening would belong to Emil Jannings; after all, he was the film’s only true star, and this was his first “talkie” (he had made no sound movies in Hollywood because he could not or would not learn English). But from the moment Lola Lola sang her first song—“Tonight, kids, I’m gonna get a man!”—Marlene Dietrich had the crowd, like Jannings’s film character, firmly in her clutches. When the movie ended she took repeated curtain calls.

No one realized that evening that the curtain was actually falling on Dietrich’s Berlin career. Thinking that she was simply a vulgar tramp with no talent, UFA’s directors had allowed her to sign a contract with Paramount. That very night, with the ovations still ringing in her ears, she boarded the boat train that would take her to America and a new life as a Hollywood legend. She returned to Berlin briefly in 1931—to hear the Nazis denounce The Blue Angel as “mediocre and corrupting kitsch”—but she did not come again until after World War II, and then only for a visit.

The Berlin that Dietrich left behind was becoming an increasingly violent place, as Nazis and Communists made the streets a stage for their bloody battles. The brown-shirted SA, though still outnumbered by the Communist Red Front, often took the initiative in these encounters. On May 16, 1930, twelve SA men trampled a Communist to death at the Innsbrucker Platz. Hoping to contain the violence, Minister of the Interior Carl Severing banned the wearing of Nazi brown shirts in public, so the Nazis simply shifted to white shirts and went about their business as usual.

In early 1930 the movement acquired its most important martyr since the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The fallen hero was a Berliner named Horst Wessel, chief of the SA branch in proletarian Friedrichshain. The cause for Wessel’s martyrdom was utterly banal but perfectly fitting. It seems that he had been trying to avoid paying rent by sharing a flat with his girlfriend, a prostitute. The landlady doubled the rent; and when Wessel refused to pay his share she asked a friend of hers, a Communist Red Front thug, to put some muscle on him. Happy to oblige, the Communist accosted Wessel at his flat and shot him in the mouth. The SA man died a month later. At his funeral a group of Communists showed up with a sign saying “A Last Heil Hitler to the Pimp Horst Wessel.” Goebbels, meanwhile, had been busy turning this tawdry affair into the stuff of legend. He put out the story that Wessel had died heroically battling the Communists. At the funeral he eulogized Wessel as a “Christlike socialist,” whose deeds proclaimed “Come unto me, and I will redeem you.” The SA adopted a song Wessel had written as its fighting hymn: “Oh, raise the flag and close your ranks up tight! / SA men march with bold determined tread./ Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in fight/ March at our side, in spirit never dead.”