Marlene Dietrich (real name Marie Magdalene Dietrich; * December 27, 1901 in Schöneberg, now Berlin; † May 6, 1992 in Paris) was a German-American actress and singer. Considered a Hollywood and style icon, Dietrich is one of the few 20th-century German-speaking performers who also achieved international fame. In 1999, the American Film Institute named her one of the 25 greatest female screen legends of all time. Characterized by her long legs, smoky, erotic voice and pantsuits, which she made acceptable for women to wear in the 1930s.
Dietrich began her career as an actress in the theater and silent films of the Roaring Twenties in Berlin. She rose to international stardom in 1930 with the leading role in director Josef von Sternberg's film The Blue Angel. With him, she went to Hollywood in the early 1930s, where she was signed by Paramount. Alongside Gary Cooper, she made the drama Morocco (1930), for which she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. With films such as Shanghai Express (1932) and Der grosse Bluff (1939), she established herself as the first German film star in Hollywood. From the 1950s onward, Dietrich appeared on stage primarily as a singer. Her most famous songs, which were also internationally successful, include Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt, Lili Marleen, Ich habe noch einen Koffer in Berlin and Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind. She received recognition for her acting performances during these years for Zeugin der Anklage (1957) directed by Billy Wilder and for Urteil von Nürnberg (1961) alongside Spencer Tracy. After her retirement from show business in the late 1970s, she lived in seclusion in her Paris apartment until her death.
During the Nazi period in Germany, the actress refused to support Nazi propaganda. Instead, she took United States citizenship in 1939 and supported U.S. troops during World War II, singing for soldiers as part of the Troop Care program and visiting the wounded in military hospitals. In 1947, U.S. President Harry S. Truman awarded her the Medal of Freedom.
Marlene Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901 at Sedanstrasse 53 (from 1947: Leberstrasse 65) in Schöneberg in present-day Berlin. Her parents were police lieutenant Louis Erich Otto Dietrich (1867-1908) and his wife Wilhelmine Elisabeth Josephine née Felsing (1876-1945), the daughter of a Berlin jeweler. Marlene and her older sister Elisabeth (1900-1973) spent their first years of life in a parental home on the Red Island in Berlin that could be described as "bourgeois".
At an early age, Marlene received violin and piano lessons from the violinist Bernhard Dessau and learned French and English. She later wrote of her childhood in her memoirs, "My parents were wealthy, I enjoyed the best upbringing imaginable." In the spring of 1907, she was enrolled in Berlin's Auguste Viktoria School on Nürnberger Strasse. After her father's death, her mother married officer Eduard von Losch in 1914 and the family moved to Dessau, where Marlene was educated at the Antoinette Lyceum. Von Losch died of a war wound on the Eastern Front in 1916. It did not come to an adoption of the two daughters. From April 13, 1917, Marlene attended the Victoria-Luisen-Schule (now the Goethe-Gymnasium) in Berlin, which she left at Easter 1918 without taking the Abitur.
At the beginning of October 1920, she went to Weimar and initially lived in a boarding school for girls at Wörthstrasse 49 (today Thomas-Müntzer-Strasse 49). Here she began training as a concert violinist with Robert Reitz (with whom she was to have an affair for a time) as a private student. Widespread assumptions that she had studied at the State Music School in Weimar or that she had been had already come to Weimar in 1919, are incorrect. After the summer vacation of 1921, which she spent with her mother in Berlin, she lived until the end of October 1921 in a boarding house that had been located in the Weimar house of Frau von Stein, Ackerwand 27. During her stay in Weimar, she had encounters with Lothar Schreyer, an artist working at the Bauhaus, and with Alma Mahler, the divorced wife of Bauhaus director Walter Gropius. It was in Weimar that she created what is probably the first artistic depiction of Marlene Dietrich, a drawing by Friedrich Neuenhahn preserved in the Weimar City Museum. The skills she acquired in Weimar later enabled her - who had long since become a film star - to play the singing saw with virtuosity, with which she used to entertain her colleagues during breaks in filming. Probably the very first acting poses of Marlene Dietrich have been handed down from her time in the Weimar girls' boarding school, with which she liked to entertain her boarding school sisters. Among other things, she mimed a "pagoda", a popular knick-knack figure of the time in the shape of an Asian figure with a bobbing head. In 1921 she continued her studies in Berlin, but had to abandon them the following year due to tendonitis, whereupon she decided to become an actress.
At first she joined a girls' troupe and toured Germany's vaudeville theaters, singing and dancing with them. However, her first stage experiences did not satisfy Marlene, she wanted to go to the theater: "The theater was the only place where you could recite beautiful lyrics and beautiful verses like those of Rilke, which broke my heart and yet at the same time gave me courage again."
Beginning of career in the 1920s:
After an audition at the Deutsches Theater, she received her first theater role at the Grosses Schauspielhaus in 1922 in the Shakespeare play The Taming of the Shrew, which Iwan Schmith as director had refitted after Max Reinhardt's production. It is therefore often erroneously assumed that Dietrich had also completed her acting training at Reinhardt's acting school in Berlin. In fact, however, she took private lessons with members of Reinhardt's ensemble, together with Grete Mosheim, where she was trained in rhythmic movement and gymnastics, fencing, and voice training. From September 1922 to April 1923, she appeared - mostly as an extra - in 92 theater performances.
Her uncle Willi Felsing put Dietrich in touch with a film director for the first time, and she was invited for screen tests. Dietrich made her screen debut soon after in the role of a maid in So sind die Männer (1923), directed by Georg Jacoby. She later described herself in the film as "a potato with hair."
While filming the four-part silent drama Tragedy of Love (1923), directed by Joe May, Dietrich met Rudolf Sieber (1897-1976), then the director of photography, and married him in Berlin on May 17, 1923. Their daughter Maria Elisabeth was born on December 13, 1924. Dietrich and Sieber separated in the 1930s, but they remained married until his death.
After medium to large stage parts and leading supporting roles in films, Dietrich was also entrusted with leading roles in film projects from 1927. For example, Viennese film producer Sascha Kolowrat-Krakowsky hired her as Erni Göttlinger in Gustav Ucicky's Café Elektric, in which she starred alongside audience favorite Willi Forst. In 1928, Dietrich landed another leading role in director Robert Land's Harry Liedtke film Ich küsse Ihre Hand, Madame. Nevertheless, she often disavowed her early roles in later years, downgrading her German stage and film work to mere extras. "Don't ask me about the twenties. I was nothing at all in the twenties," Dietrich said in an interview with Maximilian Schell in Die Zeit of 25. However, her participation in as many as 18 silent films in the Golden Twenties is assured (cf. chapter on silent films).
Breakthrough with the "Blue Angel
In 1929 Dietrich was given the role that helped her achieve her international breakthrough: the "femme fatale" Lola Lola in Der blaue Engel (1930), based on the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann. UFA film producer Erich Pommer had hired Austrian-American director Josef von Sternberg for the production. Filming took place at the Ufa studios in Neubabelsberg, today's Studio Babelsberg in Potsdam. After Melody of the Heart (1929) with Willy Fritsch, this was to be the second German sound film.
Screenwriter Karl Vollmoeller brought Dietrich to the attention of von Sternberg, who was looking for a suitable leading actress for the adaptation of the novel, and she was appearing at the time in the Spoliansky-Kaiser revue Zwei Krawatten. Since von Sternberg remained skeptical after seeing the revue, Vollmoeller pushed through a screen test date for Dietrich. "I urged Herr von Sternberg to cast Marlene Dietrich, a young actress who was unknown up to that time, but who I was convinced had the potential to become a truly great film star, in the leading role. Mr. von Sternberg always agreed with my opinion on such occasions, since I had acquired the reputation of being an unerring talent scout," Vollmoeller recalled in his autobiographical notes. The screen tests finally convinced von Sternberg, so that he decided in favor of Dietrich and against Lucie Mannheim, favored by Pommer, or far better known actresses such as Blandine Ebinger, Brigitte Helm and Käte Haack. Hans Albers, Dietrich's revue partner in Zwei Krawatten, was also hired for the film.
On October 9, 1929, Dietrich signed the contract, which promised her a lump sum of 20,000 Reichsmarks, plus 5,000 RM for the English-language version, which was shot in parallel. Her film partner Emil Jannings, as an international star, received a fee of 200,000 RM. With the role of Lola Lola, Josef von Sternberg initiated Dietrich's rise to a new world star within a few years; his strong interest in the young actress caught Jannings' eye and displeased him greatly. Filming therefore proceeded amid tensions between old star and newcomer; a good 30 years later, Dietrich described her position on the production team in an interview thus: "Albers was always nice to me, Jannings, on the other hand, rejected me until the last day of shooting, like many who thought director Sternberg was crazy for hiring me. You see, people always ask me about my fellow actors from those days, but in the end I was nothing. A little extra who was allowed to speak one sentence each in different plays on the same evening in Reinhardt's various theaters - rushing from one to the other by bus - doing the extra series in a few films. And which no one believed in when Sternberg gave me the role in The Blue Angel ..."
Der blaue Engel premiered in Berlin on April 1, 1930; the U.S. premiere was on December 5, 1930.[39] The song Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt (Falling In Love Again), sung by Dietrich in the film, became a worldwide hit.
Emigration and Hollywood career in the 1930s
After Dietrich's great success as Lola Lola, she followed director Josef von Sternberg to Hollywood, where she submitted to the star system. She signed a seven-year contract with Paramount Pictures, which guaranteed her a starting salary of $1750 per week. At the same time, she began her staging as a sex symbol and Hollywood diva: she lost 30 pounds, wore the finest wardrobe and always paid attention to the right light and makeup during filming.
She made her first Hollywood film, titled Morocco (1930), alongside Gary Cooper and under the direction of Sternberg. In it, Dietrich plays a nightclub singer who must choose between two men. In the film's most famous scene, Dietrich, dressed as a man, kisses another woman. The scene, which was written into the script at the actress' suggestion, almost fell victim to the scissors at the time because of strict U.S. censorship. To prevent this, Dietrich came up with the idea of accepting a flower from the kissed woman in the scene, which she then presented to her film partner Gary Cooper. With this "trick" she was able to convince the censors of the necessity of the kiss in the film, because otherwise the flower in the hand of the leading actress would have had no meaning. For her role in the romantic drama, she received an Oscar nomination for Best Actress in a Leading Role. It remained her only nomination for the award.
In the wartime drama Entehrt (1931), Dietrich played a spy, for the third time under Sternberg's direction. A year later followed the fourth and commercially most successful collaboration of the director and the actress: Shanghai Express. After the drama Blonde Venus (1932) with Cary Grant and the historical film Die scharlachrote Kaiserin (1934), Der Teufel ist eine Frau (1935) was Dietrich and Sternberg's last film together.
In 1936, she turned down an offer from Goebbels, who promised her high fees and free choice in scripts and collaborators for films shot in Germany. Dietrich continued to shoot in the United States, working with Hitchcock, Lubitsch, Welles, and Wilder, among others.
In the mid-1930s, she was declared "box office poison" by the film press, alongside Greta Garbo and Katharine Hepburn. Her films failed to meet expectations in box office receipts. She was helped out of the impasse by an image change she made in the film The Big Bluff (1939).
Troop support in the Second World War
A year before the outbreak of war, Dietrich moved her main European residence to Paris, from where she began to actively and financially support refugees from Germany and emigrating artists. On June 9, 1939, Dietrich renounced her German citizenship and took U.S. citizenship.
After her lover Jean Gabin volunteered to join the French Liberation Forces in the U.S., she decided to perform as a singer for the GIs as close to the front as possible. During the advance into Germany, she wanted to get there early. During the Battle of the Bulge, she narrowly escaped capture. Because of her unconditional solidarity for the fighting "Boys," she became one of the most popular and sought-after performers for U.S. troop support in Africa and Europe. She later summed up that she had never again had such intense contact with her audience.
In Stolberg, across the German-Belgian border near Aachen, she was recognized by a German and, to her great surprise, greeted with joy. This unexpected reaction was not to remain an isolated incident; other women in the village gathered ingredients for a welcome cake, which they said was the most delicious dish of their lives.
While crossing southern Germany with the American troops, she received news of her sister Elisabeth after the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by the British on April 15, 1945. Together with her husband Georg Will, she had operated a casino and cinema during World War II in a barracks in Bergen in the Lüneburg Heath near the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, frequented mainly by SS men. Marlene Dietrich visited her sister
even before the end of the war and supported her by interceding on her behalf with the occupying forces. In later years, Elisabeth Will continued to receive financial support from Dietrich, although she always denied it in order to keep her out of the headlines. The Wills' only son, Hans Georg, later worked for UFA in West Germany.
She experienced the end of the war with the American troops in Pilsen, Czech Republic. In the following days of May, she managed to visit her husband's relatives in Aussig in the Soviet-occupied part of Bohemia, but they were expelled a short time later. In June, a photograph published in an American army newspaper documents Marlene Dietrich's stay in the quarters of an American tank unit in Apolda in Thuringia.
While Dietrich returned to New York in early summer 1945, her mother was located by Soviet troops in occupied Berlin, who informed their American allies. When the Americans entered Berlin in July 1945, Dietrich was able to speak briefly with her mother by military radio and saw her again a few weeks later, in late September, on the occasion of another USO concert tour in Berlin. Her mother, who had vowed to outlive Adolf Hitler, died in November 1945, and Dietrich managed to fly in on time for burial at the Stubenrauchstrasse cemetery in Berlin-Friedenau.
Her political and social commitment against the NSDAP regime received international recognition much earlier than in her home country of Germany, where her actions were met with incomprehension by many. Through her actions, she had not only stood up against Hitler, but also against many millions of ordinary German soldiers. The term "traitor" has been widely published and discussed (even today). Already in 1947 Marlene Dietrich received the Medal of Freedom, the highest order of the USA for civilians. In 1950, she was awarded the title "Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur" (Knight of the Legion of Honor) by the French government. French Presidents Pompidou and Mitterrand later promoted her to "Officier" and finally "Commandeur" of the Legion of Honor for her service.
With the onset of the Cold War, her commitment became increasingly pacifist. She made this most clear with the song Sag mir, wo die Blumen sind by Pete Seeger.
Return in the post-war period
After the war, Dietrich starred in Billy Wilder's triangular comedy Eine auswärtige Affäre (1948), a German nightclub singer in ruined Berlin who had maintained a close relationship with the Nazi leadership during the Third Reich. In the film, she castigated the black market system of the time with the song Black Market; Friedrich Hollaender accompanied her on piano.
It was in Hollywood in 1948 that Dietrich first met the younger Hildegard Knef, with whom she maintained an almost maternal friendship for decades. A year later Dietrich made the thriller Die rote Lola (1950), directed by Alfred Hitchcock, followed by the British film drama Die Reise ins Ungewisse (1951) alongside James Stewart and the western Engel der Gejagten (1952) by Fritz Lang.
From 1953, she appeared almost exclusively as a singer on stage and enjoyed worldwide success with her "speaking song" and songs such as Lili Marleen, which had previously been made famous mainly by Lale Andersen. From 1953 to 1954 she gave stage shows in Las Vegas at the Sahara Hotel and in London at the Café de Paris. Her musical companion for about ten years from 1955 became Burt Bacharach, who helped her with tailor-made arrangements to change her image from that of a nightclub singer to that of an expressive artist; she now no longer performed in clubs, but only in theaters, and developed her famous "one woman show."
She returned to West Germany and West Berlin in 1960 on a European tour. As she herself pointed out, her audience was enthusiastic about her show. However, she did not only meet a friendly audience, but also faced hostility from parts of the population and the press as an alleged "traitor to the fatherland". In Düsseldorf, she was spat at by a young girl, and on one stage someone threw an egg and hit her in the head. However, she vigorously refused to "let a blond Nazi drive her off the stage"; the "thrower" was almost lynched by the theater audience and had to be taken out of the theater under cover. During an interview after this incident, when asked if she was afraid of an attack, she replied laconically, "Afraid? No, I'm not afraid. Not of the Germans, only for my swan coat, from which I would hardly get egg or tomato stains out, for that I am a little afraid."
In 1961, she made her last big film, Judgment of Nuremberg, which is about the Nuremberg trials and one of the key questions of the postwar period: what did you know? In the process, as an actress, she spoke texts that she was not convinced were true. In her last roles, Dietrich refuted the opinion that she was only moderately gifted as an actress, unable to play emotional outbursts, and earned great applause for her performance, which almost earned her a Golden Globe for her role in Witness for the Prosecution.
Marlene Dietrich appeared at the UNICEF gala in Düsseldorf in 1962. This was followed in 1963 by an appearance in Baden-Baden at the German Schlager Festival. In the same year, like the Beatles, she performed at the Prince of Wales Theatre in (London's West End) at the Royal Variety Performance.
She toured the world until the age of 75. She was the first German artist to perform in Russia after World War II. She was also enthusiastically received at concerts in Poland and Israel. When Dietrich performed in the Warsaw Congress Hall in 1964, she was accompanied by the Polish musician Czes?aw Niemen with the group Niebiesko-Czarni. She heard his song Czy mnie jeszcze pami?tasz, which she liked so much that she soon recorded her own version of it (Mother, have you forgiven me?). In Israel, her manager expressly warned her not to perform songs with German lyrics on stage, which was forbidden after World War II. Nevertheless, she spontaneously defied his order: "I'm not singing one song in German - but nine!" At first the audience was shocked, but then the ice broke and they applauded her moved, impressed by her courage and honesty. This made her the first singer to be allowed to sing German lyrics on stage in Israel. Dietrich had learned an Israeli folk song from a stewardess on the flight to Israel, which she sang as an encore, for which the Israeli audience loved her.
Retreat in Paris
Marlene Dietrich began to have alcohol problems and ended her stage career after breaking her neck of the femur during a performance in Sydney on September 29, 1975. Three years later, she appeared in Front of the camera for the last time for the film Schöner Gigolo, armer Gigolo (1979) - alongside David Bowie, among others. After filming, she withdrew completely from the public eye and lived in seclusion in her Paris apartment at 12 Avenue Montaigne, where she never left her bed for the last eleven years until her death. Her daughter Maria took care of her now tablet-addicted and alcoholic mother here, using a specially made gripper arm to fetch all the things she had placed around her bed. She employed a secretary and a maid and frequently had meals cooked for her delivered by a German specialty restaurant. Except for the servants and her close family, no one was allowed to enter her apartment.
She kept in touch with the "greats of the world" by telephone as well as with friends and her family, whom she called up to thirty times a day, especially her daughter. The telephone was the only connection to the outside world, but Dietrich still used it to exert a great deal of influence on those around her.
The journalist Peter Bermbach had become one of her few telephone partners during this time and talked to her "about God and the world": "We discussed for hours, for evenings, as far as that was possible. For I had quickly noticed that towards evening she began to search for words and to slur her words. The charm and the cheeky Berlin snout were always there. But she just didn't answer, or start another topic, or start singing. Yes, Marlene sang her favorite chansons to me more and more often."
Years later, she agreed to participate in a documentary film about herself. Director Maximilian Schell received her consent to film her. Shortly before filming began, however, she withdrew her consent and allowed only tape recordings. When Schell asked her about this during the interview, she commented, "I've been photographed to death [...]" ("I've been photographed to death [...]"). Schell, confronted with the failure of his conception of the project, decided to make the film a collage, underlaying the tape recordings with photographs and excerpts from Dietrich's films. The film ends with a recitation of the poem O lieb, solang du lieben kannst, by Ferdinand Freiligrath, which moved Dietrich to tears. The film Marlene (1984) was nominated for an Oscar as best documentary and won several European awards.
Her first book was published in 1963 with the title ABC of my life, and in 1979 her autobiography was published: Take only my life. In 1987, a somewhat modified version of the autobiography was published with the title Ich bin, Gott sei Dank, Berlinerin. Dietrich asked her daughter Maria Riva: "Write a book about me. Only you can. The whole truth. But only after my death." A year after Dietrich's death, Riva published the book My Mother Marlene.
Death and reluctant recognition in her hometown.
Marlene Dietrich died in Paris in 1992 - officially of heart and kidney failure. Dietrich's secretary and friend Norma Bosquet, who visited her almost daily in her Paris apartment during the last weeks of her life, stated that the actress had probably taken her own life with an overdose of sleeping pills after suffering a second stroke two days earlier. Dietrich was buried in Berlin after a large funeral service at the Madeleine in Paris, with great public sympathy, at Schöneberg III cemetery in a simple grave in Dept. 34-363 near her mother's gravesite in Dept. 17-486. The gravesite belongs to the honorary graves of the state of Berlin. The epitaph hier steh ich an den Marken meiner Tage is a line from the sonnet Abschied vom Leben by the poet Theodor Körner, who was seriously wounded at the time.
In the days following her death, she was controversial only to a few as a "traitor to the fatherland." Writers of letters to the editor and the actress Evelyn Künneke criticized her, and a planned memorial event was canceled - officially for organizational reasons. As late as 1996, there was controversy in Berlin over the naming of a street after her.
In 1997, the then Berlin district of Tiergarten gave the central square between the newly built Potsdamer-Platz-Arkaden, Hotel Grand Hyatt and Musicaltheater/Casino the name "Marlene-Dietrich-Platz". The dedication reads: "Berlin world star of film and chanson. Committed to freedom and democracy, to Berlin and Germany." On her 100th birthday in 2001 the state of Berlin officially apologized for the hostility. Posthumously, she received honorary citizenship of Berlin on May 16, 2002.
Impact and reception
Style icon
Marlene Dietrich is considered the epitome of a style icon. For decades, she succeeded in reinventing herself visually, staging herself and setting fashion trends. In doing so, she embodied glamor, elegance and perfection. She first caused a big stir in what is probably the most famous scene in the 1930 film The Blue Angel, in which she sits on a barrel in her role as a nightclub singer in suspenders, pumps and with a top hat on her head, bends her right leg with her arms in Front of her chest and sings the song I'm set on love from head to toe. The scene made her a sex symbol and her long legs her trademark. Once in Hollywood, Dietrich, who until then had seemed rather buxom, began her transformation into a femme fatale. She lost about 30 pounds, had the finest wardrobe tailored and perfected her makeup; she traced her high, thinly plucked eyebrows with black kohl, applied several layers of eye shadow to make her eyes look bigger and made up a heart-shaped kissing mouth. She even went so far as to have four molars pulled to accentuate her high cheekbones.
In Morocco, her first Hollywood Film in 1930, she kissed another woman while wearing a tuxedo. In doing so, Dietrich not only revolutionized the fashion world, but at the same time broke with traditional gender roles. Until then, the tuxedo had been a garment reserved for men. However, Dietrich also showed herself privately in men's clothing and often had herself photographed in a suit and tie. The wide-cut, high-waisted cloth pants she wore were copied so often that they found their way into many fashion lexicons under the term Marlene trousers. Her masculine style of dress gave her an androgynous appeal to which women and men alike were attracted. Kenneth Tynan, one of her friends, wrote of her, "She has sex but no positive gender." ("She has sex appeal but no clear gender identity.")
Beginning in the 1950s, her stage dresses, which she created with costume designer Jean Louis and which the London press hailed as "the highest achievement in the theater world since the invention of the trap door," caused a great stir. From a fabric called "Souffle" made in Italy and dyed for her in her skin tone, they sewed, in the same cut as her concealed bodice, a tight, floor-length gown in which she could only trifle. In this dress, she stood for hours in Front of a mirror and had embroiderers from U.S. film studios apply sequins, beads, tassels or crystal stones to her dress, which were not infrequently moved up to fifty times until Dietrich was satisfied with the visual effect. Tiny red threads were used to mark the stones, tassels, and beads on the dress, and Dietrich often worked with the embroiderers for several months to get it right. A well-known U.S. costume designer said, "You don't make dresses for 'Dietrich,' you make them with her."
In these dresses, of which Dietrich had several dozen made, she was elegantly dressed, but still appeared naked and as if "covered with stars." She said of herself, "I can't sing. So what I wear must be a sensation."
Very impressive was her stage coat with a round train about three meters long, spiral sleeves and a round collar of swan fur. Some newspapers stooped to the assumption that it was made of extraterrestrial Material. Dietrich always traveled with two such coats, which had to be shaken out for several minutes before the performance,
to develop their full volume. It was nonsensically rumored that 3000 swans had laid down their lives for these coats. She applied a different principle to her "nude dresses", where the souffle was draped and sewn to her bodice, also made of souffle, and blown against and away from her body in long veils by a wind machine, tightly sewn and seemingly held only by a piece of jewelry at hip level to show off her legs.
Marlene Dietrich was the coveted object of many photographers. She became immortal through the photographs of Edward Steichen, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Milton Greene, François Gragnon, John Engstead, George Hurrell, Antony Armstrong-Jones, Cecil Beaton and Willy Rizzo.
Trademark law
In its decision of April 24, 2008, the German Federal Supreme Court ruled with regard to a Marlene Dietrich portrait that the likeness of a person (living or deceased) is in principle eligible for trademark protection. Accordingly, the figurative mark "Marlene Dietrich" was registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office for, among other things, clothing, footwear and headgear.
Estate
On October 24, 1993, the bulk of Dietrich's estate was sold to the Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek after U.S. institutions showed no interest in it. The estate became part of the exhibition at the Filmmuseum Berlin. The collection contains more than 3,000 items of clothing from the 1920s to the 1990s, including both film and stage costumes and more than 1,000 pieces from her personal wardrobe; 15,000 photographs, including those of Cecil Beaton, Horst P. Horst, George Hurrell, Lord Snowdon and Edward Steichen; 300. 000 pages of documents, including correspondence with Burt Bacharach, Yul Brynner, Maurice Chevalier, Noël Coward, Jean Gabin, Ernest Hemingway, Karl Lagerfeld, Nancy and Ronald Reagan, Erich Maria Remarque, Josef von Sternberg, Orson Welles, and Billy Wilder; and movie posters and sound recordings.
Pieces from Dietrich's Manhattan apartment, along with other personal items such as jewelry and clothing, were sold at a public auction by Sotheby's in Los Angeles on November 1, 1997. The Park Avenue apartment sold for $615,000 in 1998. A diamond-studded gold ring that Bernd Eichinger bought at this auction and gave to his then partner Katja Flint was auctioned off for charity on the auction platform United Charity in July 2018.
