Dietrich

Life & Times

by Malene Sheppard Skaerved, Malene Sheppard Skrved, Malene Skoerved

Marlene Dietrich lived and loved with unconventional passion, enthralling men and women alike. Her Prussian bourgeois background shaped her, but so did the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Berlin in the ‘Roaring Twenties’. Hollywood of the Depression years was shocked by her. America at war with Germany adored her. And Marlene in turn craved the adoration. When she saw her homeland again, it was no longer the country she remembered. The Germany she knew had died, killed by the Nazis and destroyed by Allied bombs. She only returned permanently after her she is buried in a cemetery in her native Berlin. For the last years of her life, she was the ‘floating Dietrich’, living her life from day to day, in Paris or New York, in pursuit of money and her career, driven not by ambition, but perfectionism. Her public legend became so important to her that she spent her last decade in total seclusion, rather than allow her audiences to witness her decline. ‘It makes no difference how she breaks your heart,’ wrote her friend Ernest Hemingway, one of the few men with whom she didn’t have an affair, ‘if she is there to mend it’.

176 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2003

Reviews

[Christine · Rating 3 out of 5]

although the material is interesting, the book is so badly edited that it becomes a chore to read it. Someone should have tutored the author on the use of commas (and other punctuation marks).