Thomas Hüetlin | Marlene Dietrich and Erich Maria Remarque: Please not bourgeois

"When Remarque set out on his journey at the end of March 1939, as savior and protector, as 'the angel who watches over you with the black sword,' he asked briefly by telegram whether he needed to bring a tailcoat, as his was unfortunately moth-eaten. 'No tailcoat, only love,' was the reply, and Remarque was so delighted that he now truly seemed to believe that things between him and Marlene might still have a happy ending."

In September 1937, Erich Maria Remarque, then a star of German literature, met Hollywood star Marlene Dietrich at the Venice Film Festival, whom he had previously known only casually. He had become a millionaire during the Great Depression through his anti-war novels "All Quiet on the Western Front" and "The Road Back," but he was suffering from acute writer's block.

Both books were banned and publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933. Remarque retreated to Switzerland, and in 1938, his German citizenship was revoked. He obtained a passport from Panama and was able to travel. Dietrich moved to the United States for good in the mid-1930s and became a US citizen. But she was a global star on the decline. Offers of roles increasingly dried up.

Former foreign correspondent Thomas Hüetlin, who has published books about FC Bayern Munich and Udo Lindenberg, among others, and has been awarded the Egon Erwin Kisch Prize, considers what followed "one of the wildest love affairs of the 20th century." This is pure marketing. Both global stars primarily wanted to adorn themselves with this relationship, to enhance their public image.

Their love affair was doomed from the start. Their backgrounds could hardly have been more different: Dietrich came from a wealthy Berlin family of imperial court watchmakers and was instilled with Prussian-Protestant values at an early age (by his mother). Her father, an unstable policeman, died of syphilis. Remarque's father was a bookbinder and Good Templar; he considered alcohol and nicotine to be tools of the devil. "They lived in dry, new buildings. Which meant freezing between damp walls until the apartment was dry enough for upper-class families."

What Remarque and Dietrich shared was the project of maintaining appearances. Neither was a friend of the common people. What mattered was glamour, champagne, and lobster. Seeing and being seen: anything bourgeois was beneath their status.

And they were similar: homespun. They carried baggage with them. For Marlene, it was her husband Rudi Sieber, the Czech father of their daughter Maria, whom she never divorced; he also had to take care of everything (she called him "Daddy"). She had affairs with both men and women and recharged her sense of recognition, while Rudi (he called her "Mummy") meticulously filed the whiny letters from her ex-lovers who had been chased into the desert. Dietrich was the light, the rest were moths.

Remarque, whose real name was Erich Paul Remark, had himself adopted for 500 marks before he became famous, so he could adorn himself with a noble title: "Freiherr von Buchwald." He had the habit of giving his lovers male names. He called his ex-wife Jutta Zambona Peter, and his agent Brigitte Neuner, with whom he cheated on her, "my brave Heinrich." He was a perfectionist, suffered from writer's block 24/7, had a full wine cellar, wanted to please everyone, was a procrastinator, and suffered from anxiety disorders en masse. He didn't believe in himself. This distinguished him from Marlene: Dietrich believed only in herself. She was narcissistic, domineering—the lovesick writer without excessive self-esteem was easy prey.

After a year of almost a relationship, half of which they spent apart, they were already mostly sleeping in separate suites. Dietrich was practically bankrupt, and Remarque was a "walking medical record." She expected him to write a role tailored to her, but he didn't, indulging in a peaceful idleness on Lake Maggiore.

Luxury is paralyzing, so something else was needed: "Affairs, that was the pastime of the aristocracy, entertainment of the superior kind." At the same time, Remarque takes care of his wife Jutta, whom he had secretly remarried to avoid being deported to Germany. Marlene is fired by Paramount, is considered "box office poison," and has the tax authorities on her tail for tax evasion. She lives solely off her affairs, her obsession with control leading her increasingly into the background. Remarque calls her "Human Nitro."

At least Remarque is writing again. As always, with a good old pencil. He writes: "Even Aryan assholes are racial degradation." The day before the German Wehrmacht's fake attack on its own radio station in Gleiwitz in Upper Silesia, in which dead concentration camp prisoners were planted as supposed German victims so that Germany would have a pretext to invade Poland, Remarque takes a luxury liner to the New World, into exile. But what happens next isn't "one of the wildest love affairs of the 20th century," but rather "Play me the song of the death of a relationship." Remarque's wife, Jutta, follows afterward. Marlene has her arrested and arranges for her deportation to Mexico.

Shortly after the turn of the year, the supposed relationship between the "glamorous creatures" was over. Marlene later became the "Sweetheart of the Allied Forces," pursued a career as a singer, and reinvented herself (as an avenging angel). Remarque married Charles Chaplin's ex-wife, Paulette Goddard (the one from "Modern Times"). As a result, he divorced Jutta for the second time. And Goddard had all of Dietrich's letters to Remarque burned.

Remarque began collecting art. In 1944, in his refugee novel "Arc de Triomphe," he exposed Dietrich's egomania (she would have called it robust pragmatism). He died in Locarno in 1970. Goddard had the white roses from Marlene Dietrich's grave removed.

Dietrich died in 1992, impoverished and a hermit, an alcoholic, in a luxury Parisian hotel, the rent apparently paid by the French state. Her statement on the fall of the Berlin Wall: "Whether they come from the East or the West, I hate them all." Remarque also remained true to himself in his fight against everything bourgeois: "It's terrible when food casts such fixed stares."

Thomas Hüetlin: "You only live your life once." Marlene Dietrich and Erich Maria Remarque – the story of a boundless passion. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 352 pp., hardcover, €24.