Marlene was young at a time when the world was just beginning to see and feel the effects of that change. "Birth of a Nation" and "Potemkin" literally altered the national cultural and socio-politic stages on which they played. At the end of W.W.I, Germany was drifting, bereft of young males and, seemingly, decadent. Anything was possible, anything was tried, but in truth, individual people were searching for tomorrow, any tomorrow. Marlene and others of her teen-age group, turned to expression using the only tool available - oneself.

Bereft of business and financing, this generation found the tools to express artistic merit from within. The first lesson Marlene learned was that her capability and power were limited only by her desire, her flicht. Control, nurture, drive applied to raw talent was a basis for a one-person business, one-person machine (as we now call it), a one-person constructive success. Fame was never the goal for her generation; it was a tool brought to play in the same way as make-up, lighting and fashion. She and her colleagues, like von Sternberg, Erich Pommer, Billy Wilder, and Fritz Lang, as Werner Sudendorf will explain, pushed the inner envelope and, thereby, created, sparked a fire of newness, a new medium, a braver new world, first in Berlin and then Los Angeles and then globally. These new medium talents so ably refined and exhibited were also used for evil, manipulated for socio-cultural control by powers that, at the time, had many darker, deadly plans. Some of the artists refused or were unable to recognize the other end of the spectrum of this evil, thinking they were simply going with the flow. Some knew and pretended latterly they did not. The result was the same: art, when used for evil intent, is as deadly as gas, poison gas.

My grandfather and Marlene knew, saw, shunned and, finally, campaigned against this evil. At great risk to herself and her family left behind in Germany, she aided the OSS and the War Bonds effort in the early days of war and, when finally she obtained permission to tour the front, she performed for the Allies in North Africa, Italy, England, France and, finally, Germany. At times behind enemy lines, frozen, shelled and camped in the mud, Marlene was never happier. How could she not be? As a woman, she was playing to a captive, sex-starved, audience of virile men. As an artist, she could effect the very spirit of the troops for a cause she believed in: the overthrow of Hitler's regime.

"Art without a purpose is not art." Marlene once told me. I know that this simple maxim, true to all artists, drove her in those dark days of W.W.II. Moreover, I assure you it drives us in remembering her memory to this day.

The history of the art of film-making continued to expand and grow after the war with the speed of new technology and with the ability and drive of a new dis-enfranchised youth; the likes of Wim Wenders, John Frankenheimer, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, Jeanne Moreau, James Dean, Stanley Kramer, Louis Malle and others. Marlene kept pace and strode out to new possibilities performing on stage, using the techniques and artistry of cinema to accentuate her shows in Vegas, London, Paris, Moscow, Warsaw, Rio, Tokyo, and Sydney amongst hundreds.

When she passed away, we were faced with a dilemma. Over the years, she and my mother had saved most of her career's memorabilia as historic, anti-book-burning, record keeping for posterity. The IRS wanted it given away, destroyed or about $2,000,000 in estate tax. Sotheby's wonderful John Block and Dede Brookes and I thought of a different plan: rather than sell it off to pay the tax, we would evaluate the collection and find a suitable institution that would recognize it for what it was: the largest span of memorabilia relating to the pre-eminent art form of the 20th Century. We catalogued it all and searched…
And searched…

The Met? No, interested in only a few items. Smithsonian? No, they had no room. Art Institute, MoMA, LACMA? No, from one and all. One bid floated in from Arabia… a Sheik, who was an avid fan of "The Garden of Allah" wanted to build her a museum, a shrine really, and would buy the collection. I could hear Marlene in my sleep: "You sold my storage to sit in the desert - covered in sand? Dum." Then one day, a scholarly team showed up from Berlin… Gero Gandert and, the head of the collections, Werner Sudendorf.

From the very first moment, we knew they understood the worth, the depth and the historic significance of the collection. It wasn't, isn't, that it was Marlene's, it is simply the most complete, the most in-depth, the most expansive single collection of the art form of cinema. It provides the rails for a complete train of the history of cinema to travel on. Like those train tracks, it branches out into other fields, other mediums like television, stage performance, and radio, which sprang from or were transformed by filmmaking. Like the train tracks, her own path is immutable, solid, uncompromising. Clearly on show is Marlene's stance against Hitler and the Axis. So too are her artistry, her ability to create from within, and her private life that supported and nurtured that ability. Finally, the museum patron will come to understand, to feel, her determination to coerce and translate this medium as a actress.

Make no mistake, these people in Berlin know cinema, they understand its roots, its past and, importantly, its present. Like a Mecca for the serious cinemaphile and fan alike, their collection always promised to celebrate the very qualities that Berlin gave to the birth of movie-making: a cross-roads of culture and peoples driven by a creative demand for excellence and, not least, a city rising from the ashes of it's own divided past, finally able to spread it's wings and soar.

The FilmMuseum does exactly that. It soars above Potsdamer Platz and acts as a 20th Century art form anchor for a cultural center for the 21st Century.

I can see the movie poster in my mind's eye:

Opening Today, the Epic 10 years in the making, The FilmMuseum, with the new, exciting, wondrous Berlin standing in for Graumann's Chinese Theatre. My job here today is to affirm and excite you to explore and penetrate the FilmMuseum's remarkable undertaking for yourselves. If you are interested, in any way, in where we all, all nations and cultures, have come from in the past 100 years then you must look at the road we traveled, were made to travel, were entertained to travel. The FilmMuseum Berlin is the best, perhaps only, museum that allows this. Like going to the movies, it allows a visitor to be wonderfully entertained, to laugh, to cry, to wonder and still absorb the plot of the history of cinema, still feel the emotional sacrifices of it's leading lights, still marvel at the advances of the art form and, not least, have a damn wonderful day doing it.

Go, see for yourself - and listen carefully for you might just catch Marlene's voice as it sings you a greeting: "Go see what the boys in the backroom have done!"

Return to the Marlene Dietrich Home Page