Zarah Leander’s Unapologetic Life
the complicated legacy of the queen of Nazi cinema
There’s an old photograph of a street in my hometown from 1941, where a Muslim woman with a basket in her hand is passing by a poster advertising Zarah Leander’s 1937 film To New Shores shown at the local open air cinema. It’s a perfect contrast by all means: on one side, a covered-up woman with only her hands showing underneath the heavy niqab garb, and on the other a glamurous singer and actress.
A vision of feminine beauty basking in the attention of her audience. At the time, it was still in the throes of World War II. Yet there’s this beacon of light cutting through the dark. In the rubble of a society emerging from a trauma, cinema may have been the perfect antidote to the gloomy reality they wanted to escape. The veiled lady wasn’t exactly the target audience for this.
Cinematography in Mostar has a much longer tradition than I expected. According to Zlatko Čeliković, it started in 1905, just ten years after the first screenings of the Lumiere brothers in France. The screening took place at a local promenade and the projector was operated by a Habsburg officer. This kind of modern entertainment slowly found its way to the hearts of the local audiences eager for something new in that age of perpetual advancement and innovation.
In 1906, Anton Tiberio, a car mechanic from Italy, opened the first local cinema. In 1908, it settled in a wooden shack called Royal, with a repertoire of short films accompanied by live music. They were advertised by a man shouting the names of the actors in the street. Soon there would be the first open-air cinema called Eden Park.
They tried to keep up with the with the production of the day and people loved it. In 1919, they screened Raymond B. West’s “The Great Sacrifice” and Harry Houdini’s first feature film, “The Grim Game”. For the first time in the city, you could go in and see Rudolf Valentino, Greta Garbo or Ramon Novarro.
In 1932, talkies reached our cinemas, with Ernst Lubitsch’s movie The Love Parade, starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald, among others. Eventually, Zarah Leander landed on their screens and took local viewers to new shores, to paraphrase the movie. It went so far that in the post-WW II period, there were active five cinemas. However in the meantime, we went back to two and it took quite a while to get there.
Zarah Leander was a Swedish singer and actress with a long and illustrous career. While Douglas Sirk’s aforementioned movie may not be worth bragging about, it has its charms. Her own life would undoubtedly make for a good biopic. Just like Coco Chanel, she was connected to the Nazi regime, but in a much more harmless, albeit equally intriguing way.
Born in the Swedish city of Karlstad in 1907, and similarly to many success stories, she wasn’t planning a career on stage. Instead, the spotlight found her: until 1929, she worked as a secretary. Ernst Rolf, the Swedish musical revue artist, hired her for his cabaret where she sang her first hit “Do You Want To See a Star?” Afterwards, she went on to perform in other cabarets and record music, like a cover of Marlene Dietrich’s Falling in Love Again.
That was just the beginning of her story, followed by the breakout role in Franz Lehar’s operetta The Merry Widow in 1931. She no longer had to rely on odd jobs for a living and devoted herself full time to her new career. Already a star in Scandinavia, she was offered opportunities abroad. However, she resisted Hollywood because she had two children that needed taking care of.
Instead, for better or worse, she decided to focus on German-speaking countries due to her fluency in the language. She would come back to Marlene Dietrich once again in 1936, when she starred in Max Hansen’s play in Vienna that parodied her. Hansen had a reputation himself and a matching nickname: the little Caruso. What’s more, in 1932, he got away with a parody of Adolf Hitler as a gay character in the play “Have You Ever Been in Love With Me?” without losing his head for it.
Artists of the day displayed a level of bravery without match in western Europe today, where a creative engagement in issues grows exponentially with the geographical distance from the source. Some of them refused to give in to fear even in the face of death in German camps like Buchenwald. The cabaret culture in Weimarian Germany was the peak of a time where freedom equalled delicious frivolity before it fell into the abyss of toxic Antisemitism and a new world where one had to enjoy every breath because you never know if it would be your last. In that sense, Zarah Leander and Max Hansen were a great match: the two that got away. Not least because she recorded Karl Gerhard’s song “In the Shadow of a Boot” in 1934, a condemnation of German Antisemitism and its consequences.
Max Hansen was under increasing scrutiny in Nazi Germany due to his satirical approach to the system. Still, that’s better than death so he left the country in 1938 and emigrated to Denmark, where he continued working and launched his own theater. Leander didn’t flee but certainly knew her own worth. When Douglas Sirk helped her to land a contract with the UFA Studios in Berlin, she negotiated a pay and position she felt she was due.
In the end, she got it, quite an achievement considering the context. Though she was the leading star of the UFA, Joseph Goebbels dubbed her an enemy of Germany since she had the balls to demand respect for herself. It could have gone very wrong, but against all odds, it didn’t. Her movies were successful and she managed to keep a safe distance from the Nazi party.
Nowadays there still are people who can’t forgive her involvement with the German propaganda machine. Others, like Marlene Dietrich and the notoriously private Greta Garbo, left for America and built a new career. There’s an anecdote of her alleged encounter with Goebbels who remarked about her Jewish surname, to which she replied Joseph sounds the same way. This could have been one step too far, but she survived.
If you can put a passive-aggressive war criminal in his place you can do anything. It would take years till he was truly put in his place with a little bit of cyanide in Berlin after the suicide pact with his wife Magda. Leander was a gay icon with her glamorous persona resonating to this day. By 1943, she had enough of demands for a German citizenship and went back to Sweden.
When she returned, there was more derision than delight in the air that surrounded her: the image of the Nazi diva was hard to shake off. However, it’s much easier to digest hate when you’ve got enough privacy. She certainly got a lot of that: with her earnings from Germany, she purchased a grand estate with islands and a grand mansion. Then it was time to start from scratch again as they didn’t really roll out the red carpet for her.
Now she had to fight against something arguably tougher than Hitler’s thugs: the Swedish public who had a hard time treating her as an artist first and foremost again. She also had to fight allegations of being a member of the Swedish Communist Party: you simply can’t win and there’ll always be someone you might have offended. Zarah Leander isn’t Leni Riefenstahl. Her work didn’t openly and brazenly push the Nazi agenda up your nose.
In the film “To New Shores” she plays Gloria, a cabaret singer and mistress of an aristocrat, Sir Albert Finsbury. The man is about to embark on a career in the royal cavalry, but flees from Englad to escape his creditors for a bounced check. Out of love for him, Gloria decides to admit to the cime and ends up in prison which turns this story of exploitation into a ship that barely escapes hitting the iceberg of reason before finally sailing into the predictable happy ending and a little bit of vengeance for the wronged Gloria too who finally finds someone appreciating her instead of using her as an alibi. There are known tunes from the soundtrack, like “Yes, Sir” and “Ich bin eine Jungfrau” (I’m a Virgin). Well, if she’s a virgin, I’m the pope.
For me, it was an alibi as well: to dive deep into the Swedish singer’s catalogue and the legacy of Max Hansen. The gloriously daring king of Weimar cabaret may sound like dusty sugar cane in the age of streaming, Billie Eilish and Beyonce but go ahead and give it a try. Maybe you’ll wake up that hidden Scarlett O’Hara in you. That woman who always knows what she wants and how to get it. That’s what Zarah Leander did as well and would be likely a feminist icon were she more prominent.
Like Marlene Dietrich who rocked a tuxedo and a top hat better than the Prince of Wales himself. Our girl though was much more classically feminine, without a hint of androgyny. Time has the habit of dusting off everything superfluous and putting what’s important front and center. Fortunately, that’s what happened to her. The attempt of returning to European stages paid off.
People flocked to see the star of the Third Reich’s cinema again. There were more movies and records until she retired from showbusiness. By coincidence, David Bowie recorded his own music in the very same studio in Berlin. Unlike him, her work, especially in the film industry, is almost obscure. An another pocket in the musical cabinet of curiosities. Mainstream audiences today will hardly ever run across movies like “To New Shores”, “Premiere” (1937) and “How I Learned to Love Women” (1966).
Maybe her biography is much more appealing than her films, but that’s up to the viewer to decide. The cracking sound is like veneer on her voice in vintage records. It is said that you always have freedom of choice. She chose Germany over America in spite of everything that was going on. It’s time to let it all go and, to paraphrase ABBA, thank her for the music.
