Karin Wieland

It is not easy to say why one of these women joined the Nazis and the other made her career in Hollywood. Leni Riefenstahl and Marlene Dietrich are both opposites and twins. They are approximately the same age, spend most of their childhood and adolescence in Berlin, embark on an acting career in the twenties against their parents’ wishes, and are both successful. If one looks at their biographies until the end of the Weimar Republic, one finds many similarities. Both subjected themselves to rigorous physical drill, both had numerous affairs, and both had rather questionable acting talent at first, made up for by their social skills (including the wide–ranging sphere of tangible eroticism). Today, one is regarded as a fighter against the Third Reich, and the other as an ardent Nazi who in retrospect had the cheek to present herself as an apolitical artist. Thus, it is naturally a wonderful idea to shed light on both of them in a double biography as political observer Karin Wieland has done. Let it be said right away that she has pulled it off brilliantly. Curiously, the book succeeds precisely because she avoids making any premature syntheses. Like a film director, Karin Wieland cuts the biographies in parallel, without using factious transitions. She shows more than she interprets. Not even at the end does she pull the threads together or venture to give a summary. Amazingly, this approach works because the content of the narrative speaks for itself.

Adam Soboczynski: „Ungleiche Zwillinge“
© Die ZEIT, 6 October 2011