Marlene Dietrich and the camera: This was neither a discreet relation nor a wildly romantic affair, it was a partnership characterized by constant struggle, ambition, self-control, profound expertise and an iron will. Marlene Dietrich collected some 15,000 pictures of herself, almost all of which were created under her supervision and still in excellent condition today. This unique collection is not simply the quirk of an egocentric star, but an archive, a certificate of professionalism and a proof of her high quality standards. Photographs that did not meet these standards she would tear to pieces and yet keep them ...

The Austrian-born American director Josef von Sternberg had discovered her, a fairly unknown actress already pasther prime, in Berlin, doing the casting for BLUE ANGEL "She’s got a nice bottom, but don’t we need a face as well?", one of Sternberg’s staff members at UFA, the Potsdam-based German film company, was reported as saying. Prior to BLUE ANGEL, Marlene Dietrich used to play roles within the broad scope of the German genre cinema of those days – the demimondaine, the dramatic heroine, the persecuted or the wretched woman, the twerp or the grande dame. The early pictures, taken during her time in Berlin, show her with mighty hair ribbons or a white bonnet, slightly chubby and strongly favouring the ideal of the German housewife. As late as 1929 she has herself listed in an artists’ almanac under the category of "naive lovers", depicted with a veiled look in her eyes and displaying an entirely schoolmarmish, average chic. Outside the film business however, she tries out new avenues. While on holiday, she poses like a pin-up girl and at a fancy-dress ball in 1928 she is seen wearing a hat and trousers that are part of an itinerant carpenter’s traditional costume combined with a vest that barely covers her breasts and underneath it a transparent nothing, embroidered with flowers. The fresh and rather self-assured look in her eyes leaves no doubt – the lady is aware of the effect of her outfit and her body.

In BLUE ANGEL she still has a voluptuous figure. "Sternberg," Marlene Dietrich remembered, "had me surrounded by fat people, so I wouldn’t look quite as chubby." And Sternberg further diverts the audience’s attention with calculated lighting effects, naturalistic sound recordings and optical tricks. On stage Lola Lola wears a wide crinoline – a signal of dignity, of immobility and of respectability in the sign language of costumes. But the crinoline has no rear part. The beam of a spotlight turns it into a piece of transparent gossamer and Sternberg has a chain of wandering clouds projected onto the part of the body just below the navel. Thus, he creates a classical as well as a modern icon of eroticism.

Hollywood’s concepts of morality are stricter, erotic provocations therefore have to be more subtle. In MOROCCO, her first American film, Marlene Dietrich, playing the part of Amy Jolly, doesn’t wear a skirt on stage, but hot pants. The true provocation, however, was to have Marlene Dietrich wear men’s clothes. The breaking of this taboo was inconceivable in Hollywood’s moral climate. In MOROCCO, Marlene Dietrich wears a black tailcoat, thus epitomizing an incalculable, artificial gender, equally attractive for men and women. She is shown kissing a female visitor of the night-club when wearing that outfit, entirely laid-back and self-assured. It is hardly understandable nowadays what kind of turmoil was created then by this scene, even more so because Marlene Dietrich had meanwhile taken to appearing in men’s clothes outside the studios as well. What Hollywood was still ready to tolerate as a star’s whim incited outbursts of indignation in New York and, above all, in the American heartland.

Next to BLUE ANGEL, SHANGHAI EXPRESS, released in 1932, is the most famous film made by the creative team of Dietrich and von Sternberg. Sternberg now not only supervised the shooting of the film, but reserved the right to approve all photographs to be published of his star. "Marlene, that’s me," Sternberg was to emphasize in later years, and justifiably so. Following the shooting of SHANGHAI EXPRESS, Marlene Dietrich presented her director with a photography of herself, carrying the dedication: "To the creator from his creation". The creation quickly learned from her creator. The famous statement: "It took more than one man to change my name to ‘Shanghai-Lily’” had a biographic annotation as well. In SHANGHAI EXPRESS Sternberg found and created the definitive image of his vision of an icon of the mysterious and unfathomable modern female. A face, modelled by lighting directed at her from straight above her head and by perfect shadow effects, with an expression that is introspective and vivid at the same time. The almost finished cigarette, ashes just about to fall off, fixes the irretrievable moment in time.

Film-making and glamour photography are the result of hard work and technical perfection, the strains of which are not to be made visible in the finished product.

A team made up of five professionals, plus the one who took this picture of the actress at work, works on a series of pictures showing Marlene Dietrich under the roof of a giant palm tree. Just like a radiation gun, the camera in DESIRE is directed at Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich who are shown standing in a hollow, embracing each other lost in separate thoughts and not at all like a loving couple. These could very well be pictures of victims of show business. But Marlene Dietrich was nothing less than a victim. The creation made up of lighting and pose, with which Josef von Sternberg made her an international star and glamour figure, Marlene Dietrich was able to pass on as a lecture to generations of photographers and film directors. Marlene Dietrich was well aware of her personal qualities, she knew how she had to be photographed and, as a rule, she had her way, no matter whether the photographers were Cecil Beaton, Edward Streichen, Laszlo Willinger, Horst P. Horst, or whether they carried other famous names. The professional quality of her photographers only helped to enhance the glamour of Marlene Dietrich, to refine her synthetic appearance by yet another degree of subtlety.

Naturalness, spontaneity and anything unintentional was not to be part of her image. Thus, the picture that only shows her legs in a minimalistic and by no means voyeuristic way reduces her personality to her erotic body – and the same applies to John Engstead’s Las Vegas picture of her wearing a dress blown up by the wind. Her eroticism is always a performance, always self-aware, always staged to the point of static unreality – an ice-cold dream, untouchable and generated in a laboratory set up for the production of artificial delights.

"I have been photographed to death" – such were the words Marlene Dietrich took to in the late eighties when fighting off Maximilian Schell’s attempt at having her photographed for his biographic film MARLENE. Turning herself into a victim was an extravagance owed to age. The camera had always been her faithful servant and she always used to appreciate photographers as people who were ready to do the donkey work in the interest of her iron will concerning style. Photography had become her medium with which she masterminded and burned into the public conscience the "Marlene Dietrich" image.

During the final years of her public appearances this image was mainly made up by her control over the natural aging process of body and face. When the picture of this female Dorian Gray began to show in the face of Marlene Dietrich, when she began to lose control over the decay of her body and her face, she would no longer allow herself to be photographed. Shortly before her death, a clever photographer shot a picture of an elderly woman in a wheelchair in front of her house in Paris. He sold this picture, which he claimed to be the first and only one showing an aged Marlene Dietrich, for an enormous amount of money to various magazines and dailies. The picture, however, proved to be a fake. It didn’t show Marlene Dietrich, who had long before begun to put up folding screens behind the windows of her apartment in order to keep away obtrusive media people.

All that she was willing to consent to was having her voice be heard – either in interviews, telephone conversations or, for that matter, in the film that Maximilian Schell made about and with her. And that voice sounded as if it had surfaced from the hereafter, from a different world, a world of legends, a world of timeless and past glory. The voice opened the gate to the museum of imagination which she herself had furnished. "If she only had her voice," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "she could break your heart with it."

In post-war Germany the name Marlene Dietrich aroused hefty controversies. She was nothing less than the perfect opposite of the moral standards of the forties and fifties. Footloose and fancy-free in everything concerning sex, self-assured, obeying no rules other than the ones she herself had set and, at the same time, famous, rich, an international star – all this was a glamorous provocation of the traditional German understanding of etiquette and morality. She had resisted all attempts made by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda, at luring her into returning to Germany. Instead, she boosted the morale of the American troops in World War II by performing before them. Her simple explanation: ”I did it for the sake of decency” was a slap in the face of that generation who had dropped all decency during the Nazi period and who rejoiced in the self-righteous view that the growing prosperity in post-war Germany was proving them right. Marlene Dietrich and Germany, Marlene Dietrich and Berlin – this was always a relationship marked by love and hatred alike, by indignant disapproval as well as by clandestine admiration, originating in the hollows of German history.

Her tour of Germany in 1960 is overshadowed by demonstrations of open disapproval; in Düsseldorf she is even spat at in the middle of the street. In 1997, a street in Berlin is to be named after Marlene Dietrich – and again, there are bitter rows over what Marlene Dietrich has or has not done for Berlin and Germany. And yet, the answer is so simple: She remained loyal to the traditional values of her Prussian upbringing and embodied on the stages of the world, in her films and with her life, a culture that had been driven out of Germany.

Therefore, Marlene Dietrich is not just a work of art, made up of light and pose, of diamanté and voice, not just one of the immortals of the film, the stage and the art of erotic refinement – she has become part of German political and cultural history. It is for that reason that the Land Berlin acquired the estate of Maria Riva, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter, in 1993 and put it under the trusteeship of the Deutsche Kinemathek Foundation. From summer of the year 2000 on, the estate, together with other collections from the Deutsche Kinemathek, will be put on display in the then newly erected Museum of Cinematography on Potsdamer Platz.

Even when taking into account Marlene Dietrich’s rigid discipline with which she controlled her life and the media, it can be assumed that being put on display in a museum one day was certainly not an item on her personal agenda. Had she personally been made such an offer, she would have been very likely to turn it down in the typically straightforward manner of the Berliners: "What a load of rubbish, no, what a nonsense!" – and yet, would have been proud of herself and her home town.