Marlene vs. Nico

Which Schöneberg-Icon was more toxic?

 In my latest blogposts about Marlene, I already alluded to many toxic qualities about Marlene. But she was in great company! Roughly 40 years after Marlene was born another blonde bombshell was raised in Berlin Schöneberg. Christa Päffgen aka Nico Icon. While both artists are fundamentally different, they spread their toxic fumes all over their children and folks in Berlin, Paris, London the American East and Westcoast.

This got me into thinking that I could write a post about the toxic side of these two icons. So, in this blog series I am starting a bit of a challenge. Who was the ultimate Delilah?

First and foremost, lets first compare the too. Their names are very telling. Christa and Marie Magdalene. Pious much? I also find it quite remarkable that Nico was pursued by the hyperreal image of Marlene´s ghost throughout her life. Whether she looked at a Marlene poster hanging in Andy Warhol´s factory or starting out her career as a songstress in a NYC bar called the blue angel named after the famous movie.

Childhood

While Marlene’s childhood and youth did not seem the happiest it did not seem to have any of the heaviness Christa, aka the high priestess of darkness had. While Christa´s father came from a wealthy family her mother did not. This fact was diametrically opposed to Marlene´s family situation where Marlene´s father Louis Dietrich was middle class and her mother Josephine Felsing upper middle class, who married down. You can imagine that the Felsings were not particularly delighted about this fact, but the Dietrich sisters were not ostracized as Bastards as was Christa who was born out of wedlock and never met her real father. Christa´s bio-dad hailed from the Cologne brewery dynasty Päffgen, and while Christa was a lover of beer, Kölsch was the only beer she refused. Needless to say, Miss Päffgen was a lover of booze in general and well, all types of intoxicated states, but hey even as a Junkie you gotta have principles and Kölsch is where Christa drew the line!

That meant that Christa grew up poor and Marlene did not. Together with her mother, Christa shared a one-bedroom apartment in Schöneberg. Both had their Aryan looks going for them and both of them dealt with a postwar situation. But while Marlene managed to distract herself by crushing hard on neighbors’ boys and girls, fangirling over silent film star Henny Porten and practicing her autograph, Christa never managed to dehypnotize herself from the somber and threatening war scenarios she experienced as a small kid. Maybe that was because Nico was a small child when World War 2 started and Marlene a tween. Maybe it was Marlene´s mother who fanatically created a schedule for her daughters that basically left no time for feelings of doom. And maybe it was simply the oftentimes overlooked nature side in the big nature vs nurture debate.

Christa´s songs were no doubt shaped by the wasteland she was surrounded with; the nihilist songs became her trademark and yeah, I personally convinced that in order to have any motivation to create art you gotta have suffered a little bit, otherwise why bother at all? By now most ppl understand that the music and movie industry is a hotbed of all types of predatory behavior. The art market looks bleak too so your bougie parents might have been up to something when they told you to learn something proper.

Marlene essentially created Marlene, which was and still is an actual tangible thing, a currency almost and much more tangible than the lofty creation of Nico Icon that Christa Päffgen created. It is still hard to grasp who Christa or Nico were her in terms of artistry Nico Icon.

Quick disclaimer

I only very recently started to enjoy listening to Nico´s music. I have previously liked everything she did with the Velvet Underground, but that was obviously not her music. Her own music paired with that heavy German accent had always been a bit too rough for me. It was only a about a year ago when I started to really dig it. It had also been pretty much the worst time of my life so I when I was out of the worst, I basically put it off as some weird mood I was on and decided to not go back to it. I still found her fascinating as a person and had been planning to write about her for a long time. I also went back to that old lie I keep on telling myself, which is that I had been professionally writing about music and rating records for such a long time that I am capable of objectively saying what is good music without necessarily enjoying it. Not. Never was, the disdain I had for “good music” had always been shining through in every record I ever rated. Blame it on the autism, but my type of lie is what I call “the surface lie”

Anyway, I reread Richard Witt´s bio, ordered Bickerdike´s bio and hunkered down to watch the documentary and a good selection of her movies. It was obviously impossible not to listen to her gritty gutter hymns while doing so. Most people who read books about music and musicians can probably empathize with the fact that you can´t read more than a few pages without having to switch on your computer and get at least a little bit of a taste of what the author is writing about. But this time I enjoyed her music other than a soundtrack I’d like to slit my wrists to. I now also enjoy the harsh German accent and think it fits very well to someone who can be counted amongst if not being the founding mother of a genre that would later be known as Dark wave. I suddenly remembered why I thought that Lynch´s Lost highway was the scariest movie I have ever seen. It was that scene when Rammstein was suddenly blasting. I was similarly but differently disturbed when Udo “Hans” Kier picks up Keanu “Mikey” Reeves and River “Scott” Phonix in My own private Idaho and breaks down into a weirdo cabaret act. Also digging the fact that Gus van Sant made the effort to hire an actual German actor for the part and not one of those Hollywood Hobos who write it on their CV and fashion themselves as speakers of a language apart from American.

There is something about the German language combined with that sort of ice-cold soulless robot music that makes me shiver. You would think that this sounds negative but it ain´t. It´s a sensation. Spiritually I am mostly retarded but when it comes to feelings, I enjoy having an array of different emotions and feelings to a point that I never really enjoyed an ecstasy trip because the whole wave of love got really dull at some point and I hated the fact that I basically gaslight every single thought that was borderline negative into an everlasting “It will all be fine”.

But back to our “Greta Garbo of Punk”:  Nico´s darkness went well beyond being a “German thing”. The Krauts don´t have a monopoly on darkness. To quote Edgar Allen Poe “Terror is not of Germany but of the soul”

Round 1: Sexuality

Both had really complicated sexualities. Both were sort of very female and very male. Think about Marlene’s glittery dresses and her phalanx of pantsuits and pants in general. She also told her mum that she would like to be called Paul and loved devouring Karl May´s Cowboy und Indianer-Romane. For those who do not know, Karl May was a German writer who has never set a foot into the US but became rich and famous through this Cowboy and Indian novels that oftentimes contained racist depictions of native Americans. To be fair we are mostly talking oriental racism here, but do not put me on the Karl M. defense-team! I do not care about this clown! The film director Paul Morrisey who worked closely with Andy Warhol and Nico is quoted to say that off catwalk Nico never wore a dress in her life, which as discussed here, was quite unusual in the 70s as we learned in my blogpost about the history of pants. In the amazing Nico documentary that can be found on Youtube, Nico, on the 58 minute mark, all rotten teeth, sunken cheekbones says that she does not have any regrets except for being born a woman.

Both loved men and women and had relationships and multiple A-list slampieces, too many to name here. Maria Riva told in her book that Marlene actually hated being touched and how she managed to sleep with so many men was a riddle to her. Marlene´s daughter interpretated that Marlene saw sex as a means to an end, a thing you have to do to get ahead and not something she actually enjoyed. Though, I am not sure if I 100% believe that.

I remember reading Waris Dirie´s autobiography, the fashion model who was subjected to female circumcision and she said that she still enjoyed sex, although theoretically she has no feelings down there, but it made her feel close to her husband. People who are paralyzed from the neck down still enjoy sex and orgasm. These things are a lot more complicated. Furthermore, while I do respect Maria Siva for getting her life together and establishing apparently strong relationships with her husband and 4 sons who seem really lovely people, she constantly puts of Marlene`s promiscuity as European and models her rather conservative approach to relationships as American. I mean have you seen Marlene´s movies? That scene in Dishonored where she gets up in her suit and kisses that girl in the audience? Singing to a bunch of men in a foreign affair? Trust me that I could spontaneously rattle of at least half a dozen of other scenes, but bottom line is that Marie Magdalene oozes sex appeal. I could settle on the fact that she might not have enjoyed sex with men which I heard on the Foibles-podcast but unless my sex-crazy radar is completely broken, you can´t fake that. No way. She might have preferred poons over peens and imagined girls whenever she rubbed fuck parts with men, but you need some sort of intrinsic sexual appetite to do that. I genuinely think that Maria Riva did or does not really understand homosexuality. She also mentions in the book that her mother wanted to initiate her into a lesbian lifestyle which literally had me rolling my eyes hard! It went a bit too much into the realm of “They are forcing their lifestyle on us”. No amount of lesbians surrounding you will make you gay, Maria. I honestly think that Maria Riva´s obsession with “American” values, stems from the fact that she could not deal with Marlene´s sexualized image. To be fair, Marlene constantly rubbed her sex life into everyone´s faces and one way to “rebel” against this or establish boundaries is to draw some clear lines what a healthy sexuality means to you.

Thing is, we probably all know men and women in sexless relationships who downplay the role of sexuality in their relationships. Again, no shade here at all, you can obviously connect by a lot more things in relationships than just sex, totally agree that a relationship is so much more than that and obviously this goes both ways. We all know sexcrazy girls and boys who judge sexless relationships or wonder what else they actually share with their partner except for the odd dance without pants. Hey Nicole Simpson took a ride on OJ Simpson´s peen about 3 times a day and their relationship still did not sound exactly healthy, taking in regard that she ended up getting offed by The juice. I am existentialist in the way that I am saying life is inherently meaningless, you have to find your own meaning in other words. Do what works for you!

But back to our blonde bombshells. Here is the toxic thing about Marlene. She obviously liked women sexually but not as persons. Except for her crotchfruit Maria, Mae West and Edith Piaf she derogated and badmouthed all of them, and much preferred the company of men. Maria also writes that while she liked to model herself as West´s and Piaf´s bff, they never visited her at home. Male directors, writers and actors were her staples for dinner parties.

Highsmith vs. Dietrich

I am not sure how many of you are familiar with the American novelist Patricia Highsmith. If you are not, you might have seen Carol starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara, a 2015 movie that was a late adaption of her critically acclaimed bittersweet novel The price of salt. The price of salt is an intriguing portrait of 50s repression and conformity detailing an affair between a 19-year-old set designer and a wealthy suburban housewife. It is also said to have influenced Nabokov´s Lolita and the Oscar-winning Thelma and Louise. By the way, please do not put off Nabokov as another pedophile who wrote books. I do not believe that Nabokov had any pedophile yearnings for a second and as I am a lover of language and masters of language, I can´t help loving Lolita (the book not the person). But yeah, the point I have been wanting to make is that I am getting strong Patricia Highsmith vibes from Marlene. Strong gay, antisemitic writer who much preferred the company of men over women. Just like Marlene, she was also very open about her sexuality. "In a 1970 letter to her stepfather Stanley, Highsmith described sexual encounters with men as steel wool in the face, a sensation of being raped in the wrong place—leading to a sensation of having to have, pretty soon, a bowel movement,' stressing, 'If these words are unpleasant to read, I can assure you it is a little more unpleasant in bed.`”

Anyway, this is not a Patricia Highsmith vs Marlene post though but a Marlene vs Nico post. The point I am trying to make is that Highsmith is basically and rightfully an icon of toxicity we all love to hate, and I want to invite you to see beyond Marlene´s pseudo-feminist, loving mother image.

But back to Nico.

Nico was branded “asexual” by her close friend Carlos de Maldonado-Bostock

 “She hated men, and she hated women and she wanted men and she wanted women, but she didn´t want them in the end, not as lovers, she wanted friends.” He ended up his conclusion with “There was nothing sexual about Nico. She was asexual.” [1] Apart from asexual this sounds pretty toxic but I dunno maybe I am jaded af but I never really believe straight men who call beautiful women asexual. In the back of my head, I am always thinking that they were rejected. I am a socially awkward Asperger-bird with 10 diopters so not exactly a dick magnet but even I had to reject men who subsequently called me asexual. I truly believe that there are men so unwise that they´d call Sasha Grey asexual if they were to be rejected by her. Nico introduced Iggy Pop to oral sex and engaged in some pretty outrageous S&M shit with Rolling stones´ Brian Jones and infamous member of the club 27. She also claimed or is rumored having had affairs with Coco Chanel and Jeanne Moreau. Maldonado- Bostock also makes an appearance on the Nico Icon documentary where he rambles off how nobody could have ever possibly enjoyed sex with Nico and she only had sex once anyway which was 9 months before she had her kid. And that person who fathered that kid was grossly vulgar anyway, a son of a butcher who made sausages (the way he disgustingly pronounces sausage should tell you everything, not even me who hates sausage would pronounce it like that) someone who could never get the supreme elegance of Nico. Sounds like hurt feelings to me. It also sounds eerily like the account that Maria gave of her mother, namely that she actually hated being touched.

But I promised to deliver toxic! And I will! Bonafide crossbordering sexually deviant behaviour! But I also know y´all can´t take the length of my posts so lets meet again in two weeks here! I am flabbergasted myself that I could not even finish round 1 in post 1 but I promise you it will get interesting!

Sources:

Wilson, Andrew. (2003)  Beautiful shadow. A life of Patricia Highsmith. Bloomsbury USA. Kindle edition, 2008

Witts, Richard. Nico (1993) The Life and Lies of an Icon. Penguin Random house. Kindle edition 2017