Last night I went to a reading of love letters through history. One of those was by Erich Maria Remarque and adressed to Marlene Dietrich, with whom he had a three years long love affair.. They'd very briefly met in 1930, which was an annus mirabilis for both of them (Remarque published a world wide bestseller, All Quiet on the Western Front, and Marlene achieved first German and then international fame via The Blue Angel and departed to Hollywood), but that had been a meeting without consequences. Seven years later, in 1937, they met again, both anti-Nazi expatriates at that point and a bit beyond the apogee of their success, and this time, there were sparks.

The story of that second encounter, which I only learned last night, is so charming that I felt I had to share it after verifying it this morning. She'd just ended things (for now) with Douglas Fairbanks (Jr), Hedy Lamarr had just ended things with him. They met at the Lido in Venice. He (re-) introduced himself, they hit it off, and en route to her hotel room we get the following line from the writer, according to Marlene herself:

Remarque: "I must tell you I am currently impotent. If it is so desired, I can of course be a totally enchanting little lesbienne." ("Ich bin total impotent . . . aber wenn es gewünscht wird, kann ich natürlich eine ganz bezaubernde kleine lesbienne sein.")

Reader, this is how you make a successful pass at Marlene Dietrich. "Oh, how wonderful", quoth she, and when narrating this tale to Johannes Mario Simmel, author of my favourite spy novel, added: "How I adored that man."


Simmel is one of the sources for this story; the other is Maria Riva, Marlene's daughter, who said about Remarque: "What moved me most about the complex personality of the Erich Maria Remarque that I knew, was his astounding vulnerability. One doesn't expect the man who (arguably) wrote the definitive book about the personal experience of war to possess such childish innocence - when you initially met him, he came across as a world famous author who carried this glory and fate with a confident acceptance. In reality, this was Remarque's protective shield."

(Another Riva story: when she told Remarque she couldn't love her mother, he replied: "But you must. She loves you the way she understands love. It's just that her rotation speed is at a thousand revolutions per minute, while the rest of us are satisfied with a hundred. We need an hour to love her, but she loves us just as much in six minutes.")

In the end, they drifted apart because of his jealousy of her other affairs and her finding him too intense, but they remained in loose contact until he died. Whereupon his wife, Paulette Goddard, destroyed most of Marlene's letters, but all of Remarque's still exist, and were published nearly twenty years ago, hence one of them being used at last night's reading.