Postage stamp: women of German history - Germany / Federal Republic of Germany 1997 - 110 Pfennig

Marlene (actually Marie Magdalene) Dietrich was born on December 27, 1901 in Berlin. Even in her youth she is fascinated by film, theater and music; During school, she performs in amateur play groups and learns the playing on the violin, the lute and the piano. In 1922, she first appeared in small roles on stage and in the film. In 1923 she marries the manager Rudolf Sieber. Her only daughter, Maria, was born in 1924. The American director Josef von Sternberg gives Marlene Dietrich the main role of Lola Fröhlich in the Ufa film »The Blue Angel« in 1929. Marlene Dietrich achieves the breakthrough with this film; she goes with Sternberg to Hollywood and shoots with him there until 1935 six more films. In 1939 she becomes an American citizen and appears in the Second World War before American soldiers in Europe. In addition to her film work she begins in the fifties, a second successful career as Diseuse. After a stage accident in 1975, she retreats from the public. Marlene Dietrich dies on May 6, 1992 in Paris. Literary figures such as Ernest Hemingway and Jean Cocteau have described the myth Marlene, artists like Max Ernst and Alberto Vargas have portrayed them, and international stars have named them as their great role model. In her films she was a vamp and faithful companion, wife and femme fatale, cold and calculating, but also passionate to self-abandonment. With the mixture of intelligence and eroticism, she has shaped a new type of woman, who added the element of modernity to the traditional role-playing of the sexes. (Text: Werner Sudendorf, Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek / Marlene Dietrich Collection, Berlin)