Photograph of Marlene Dietrich, Max Reinhardt and Ernst Lubitsch
Im Theater wird heute kaum etwas getan, was er nicht als erstes tat, und vieles wird heute als neu bezeichnet, was er schon lange vergessen hatte.
[Hardly anything is now done in the theatre that he [Reinhardt Max] didn’t do first, and much is now labelled new that he had already long forgotten. (ed. trans.)]
Marlene Dietrich: Marlene Dietrich’s ABC, key word: Reinhardt, Max
Three world stars whose careers began in Berlin appear in this photo: Marlene Dietrich, Ernst Lubitsch and Max Reinhardt attend a premiere in Hollywood. They are almost 10,000 km away as the crow flies from their former mutual workplace, where a political upheaval is taking place. It is the year 1933, the Weimar Republic, and Berlin as a cosmopolitan centre of the arts no longer exists.
The former teacher-student relationship – Ernst Lubitsch and Marlene Dietrich both began their careers at the theatre under director Max Reinhardt – was reversed on the new continent. Ernst Lubitsch had become the undisputed master of sophisticated romantic comedies and Marlene Dietrich the queen of Paramount Studios. In contrast, Max Reinhardt found it difficult to adapt to American tastes; his adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night's Dream (1935) flopped.
Gallery
