The Weimar Republic suffered another blow on October 3, 1929, with the sudden death of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, architect of the policy of reconciliation between Germany and the Western powers. His last service was the negotiation and ratification of the Young Plan, by which Germany reduced its reparations payments. For this he was reviled by the far right, which rejected reparations payments in principle. In Berlin it was widely understood that his death was a tragedy not just for the nation but for the capital. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, the largest such turnout since the death of Ebert. Kessler, learning of his friend’s demise while on a trip to Paris, mused in his diary: “It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen. . . . What I fear, as a result of Stresemann’s death, are very grave political consequences at home, with a move to the right by [Stresemann’s] People’s Party, a break-up of the coalition, and the facilitation of efforts to establish a dictatorship.”
Less than a month after Stresemann’s death came news of the Wall Street crash. Brecht, who despite his Communism admired American economic vitality, wrote a poem entitled “The Late Lamented Glory of the Giant City of New York.” But he should also have worried about the giant city of Berlin, which was dependent on steady infusions of American capital. Within weeks of the crash, the Americans not only cut off the flow of loans but began demanding repayment on those that were outstanding. Some Berlin banks also stopped lending money, and a number of companies began laying off workers. Nevertheless, as in the immediate postwar era, Berlin’s municipal government continued to spend generously on public programs. In November 1929 officials of the state of Prussia stepped in and mandated reductions in public spending until the city had made progress in clearing away its 400-million-mark deficit. City officials were forced to cancel new building projects, including two U-Bahn extensions considered urgently necessary. Nor could the city keep up with the demand for new public housing or hospital beds. The municipality contemplated seeking a loan of $15 million from the American brokerage firm of Dillon, Reed, but the national government disallowed this on the grounds that Berlin’s high foreign debt was already a liability for the nation.
Conditions at the national level, however, were no better. Reeling from the economic crisis generated by the Wall Street crash, and unable to agree on necessary fiscal reforms, a coalition cabinet led by Hermann Müller (SPD) gave way in March 1930 to a “cabinet of experts” under Heinrich Brüning. The new chancellor belonged to the right-wing of the Center Party and was known for his strict fiscal conservatism. He decided to contain the spreading depression with a deflationary program of government savings and tax increases. When the parliament refused to pass his program, he received authority from President Hindenburg to rule by decree. Because neither he nor his successors ever returned to parliamentary government, this move can be seen as the end of Weimar democracy per se.
Much of Brüning’s austerity package was aimed at Berlin, which was forced to make even deeper cuts in its public spending, thus increasing the number of unemployed. Berliners, along with other Germans, began calling Brüning the “hunger chancellor.”
Although the city’s extensive culture industry was hit along with the rest of the economy, there were still signs of vitality on this front in the opening year of the new decade. April 1930 saw the premier in Berlin of the most expensive film Germany had made to date: UFA’s Der Blaue Engel(The Blue Angel). It was based on a novel by Heinrich Mann entitled Professor Unrat, which tells the story of an elderly schoolteacher who becomes infatuated with a cabaret singer and falls into disgrace.
Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel, 1929
When work began on the screenplay in autumn 1929, the director, Josef von Sternberg, had already secured Emil Jannings, Germany’s most famous film star, for the male lead. Jannings had just returned to Berlin from Hollywood, where he had won the first Academy Award ever presented to an actor. Sternberg had also hired Friedrich Hollander, a brilliant songwriter, to provide the incidental music. But he lacked an actress for the crucial part of Lola Lola, the seductress who lures the sanctimonious professor to his ruin in the seedy Blue Angel cabaret. He interviewed dozens of actresses but none of them seemed quite right: among the failures were Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s future filmmaker, and Trude Hesterberg, Heinrich Mann’s mistress. In desperation, Sternberg combed through a trade catalog containing pictures of virtually every actress in Germany until he at last found one who seemed to have the right look. She was Marlene Dietrich, a native Berliner who had heretofore acted in a number of films without making much of a name for herself. Sternberg’s assistant, upon studying her picture in the catalog, dismissed her with the comment: “Der Popo ist nicht schlecht, aber brauchen wir nicht auch ein Gesicht? (The ass isn’t bad, but don’t we also need a face?)” Shortly thereafter, however, Sternberg saw Dietrich in a stage play and was instantly assured, as he later put it, that “here was the face I had sought.”
During the filming, which took eight weeks, Sternberg remained convinced that he had made the right choice with Dietrich, though she sometimes tried his patience on the set, playfully flashing more than her beautiful legs at him and poor Jannings. “You sow, pull down your pants! Everyone can see your pubic hair!” he shouted on one occasion. But she was just getting in character, feeling her way into her role as the cock-tease who claims not to be able to help it that men cluster around her “like moths around a flame.”
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.