In 1930, Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich became pioneers of movie sexuality with The Blue Angel, now on rerelease. It was the first full-length German talking picture, and it fused the erotic and economic dimensions of “Weimar sexuality” in all its decadence and despair.
It was directed by Von Sternberg and written by him with dramatist Carl Zuckmayer and others, adapting Professor Unrat, the 1905 novel by Heinrich Mann. Dietrich is Lola, the alluring cabaret singer at a sleazy nightclub called The Blue Angel, and Emil Jannings plays Professor Immanuel Rath, the pompous but poignantly lonely middle-aged schoolmaster who is outraged to find smutty postcards of Lola in his pupils’ possession, storms into her dressing room to confront her and falls under her mischievous, sensuous spell. His motives for showing up at this den of iniquity had been of course entirely clear, as he boggled in private over the confiscated photos. Soon, poor Rath throws everything away for his doomed love, loses his teaching job and reputation, and humiliatingly winds up playing the clown in the cabaret act while Lola canoodles with a new lover in the wings.
With her silver top hat and frilly underwear, Dietrich became world famous as she threw her head back in a gesture of extravagant abandon and breathily sang her keynote song about infatuated lovers fluttering around her like moths to a flame. In German, it’s: “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss / aus Liebe eingestellt” – “I am from top to toe, ready for love.” But in the more famous English-language version, it’s: “Falling in love again, never wanted to…”
(The most sexually explicit German verse of the original incidentally did not get translated: “What is shaking in my hands / In their hot grip? / They want to waste themselves / They never have enough … I think it’s so nice!”)
The story of obsessive, destructive desire is a familiar one from this period. The Blue Angel is comparable in some ways to GW Pabst’s Pandora’s Box, from the year before, starring Louise Brooks as the entrancing Lulu – although this movie is far more realistic. It is a familiar theme from writings by Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig. Dietrich’s image obviously influenced Liza Minnelli’s in Bob Fosse’s Cabaret (1972).
This destructive eroticism can’t be understood without its economic aspect. What middle-class Germans feared above everything was a crash, a bout of hyperinflation that would wipe out savings and social standing that had taken a lifetime to build up. Erotic obsession was like this: a delirious, uncontrolled overheating and overexcitement that would cause the infatuated male in question to lose everything, winding up a pauper, like Rath in his grotesque clown’s outfit. And once the party’s over, the money’s lost and the humiliation has set in, what leader, what purifying force can rescue everyone from this devastating shame, while supplying something of the same erotic, exalting excitement? The Blue Angel is as fierce as ever.
