Two women …

… A Dual Biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl - The New Yorker. (Hat tip, Virginia Kerr.)

Could their very different childhoods tell us something about the choices they ultimately made? Consider what it meant to be the product of a Prussian military family, a girl whose father died before she was old enough to remember him beyond the vague impressions she listed later on as “tall, imposing stature, leather smell, shining boots, a riding whip, horses”—a father whose absence prompted her need for a “masculine model,” as she saw it, and whose mother raised her like “a kindly general,” providing every sort of lesson (violin, piano, English) on a widow’s meagre earnings. It would be easy to see here someone who came to welcome Hitler’s leather-costumed militarism, yet this is an outline of Dietrich’s childhood and the forces that she felt had made her who she was. Riefenstahl grew up in a working-class family on the rise; her mother was a seamstress, her father was a plumber who built up a successful business and was the dominating figure of her early life. Dietrich had an older sister, Riefenstahl a younger brother, both of whom were the “obedient” children in the family and pleased their parents by following conventional paths. Neither the bourgeois widow nor the ambitious plumber could accept the notion that a well-brought-up German girl would ever appear on the stage.