Von Sternberg. John Baxter
he spend the next half hour taking his ease on that throne, munching an onion like an apple as he surveyed his hoard? Or did he, the moment the door closed, toss the onions in the wastepaper basket, no longer useful as props in the prank he had played on us? Either way, the mythology of Josef von Sternberg was richer by another anecdote, and the obscurity with which he surrounded himself was one level more profound.
Vienna
I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour and easy charm.
—Graham Greene, screenplay for The Third Man
EVEN IF WE KNEW nothing about Josef von Sternberg, an unhappy childhood could be inferred from his films. Fathers, if they appear at all, are tyrants. Mothers sacrifice everything for their children, who repay them with petulance or indifference. His men both fear and welcome the lash of contempt that their women wield, and women alone retain their individuality. Summarizing his life, von Sternberg wrote, “Fear always was first, to be dispelled by aggression, always followed by guilt.”1 His contemporary, Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, agreed about his psychological burdens. “He had a most pronounced inferiority complex…. Snobbery could not hide von Sternberg’s trauma about his own inadequacy.”2 In middle age he would write a screenplay called The Seven Bad Years, about “the adult insistence to follow the pattern inflicted on a child in its first seven helpless years, from which a man could extricate himself were he to recognize that an irresponsible child was leading him into trouble.”
He was born Jonas Sternberg on May 29, 1894, in Vienna, then the capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Moses Sternberg, came from a family of woodworkers but had been inducted into the Austrian army. His mother, Serafin Singer, was the daughter of an instructor who gave classes in German, the “official” language, to recruits; coming from all corners of the imperial domain, these new soldiers might speak any one of a dozen tongues or dialects. Jonas’s parents were unmarried when he was conceived, which scandalized both families. According to his memoirs, Moses and Serafin were “disinherited” when they ignored parental objections to their relationship. Whether there was much to inherit, in fortune or in pedigree, isn’t clear, although even a remote aristocratic connection would account for the readiness with which he later permitted the honorific “von” to be inserted into his name.
No photographs of Moses survive, so we know only what von Sternberg tells us: that he was “handsome and intelligent, … a marvel at anything mechanical, never idle [and] made friends easily.” Moses had apparently written a book on mathematics as a young man, but he was also physically powerful and often beat both his wife and his children. With grudging pride, von Sternberg cites less damning proof of his father’s strength, such as the ability to lift a man by his heels and hold him out at arm’s length. After being pelted with snowballs by other recruits, Moses, according to his son, “demolished” them. As an Orthodox Jew, Moses could have anticipated their hostility. Discrimination riddled the Austrian army, as it did the French, which was even then railroading Alfred Dreyfus to Devil’s Island on a false charge of espionage. The Austro-Hungarian officer class consisted almost entirely of Judenfressers—“Jew-eaters,” as anti-Semites were called. When Jewish officers showed an embarrassing superiority in the saber duels that provided those dashing facial scars, their gentile comrades promulgated the 1894 Waidhofen Manifesto, which proclaimed that Jews, being ethnically subhuman, were born without honor. Accordingly, they could not be insulted and thus were barred from demanding satisfaction in a duel.
Following his marriage, Moses left the army and rented an apartment at Blumauergasse 25 in Wien II, a district consisting of nineteenth-century tenements. The building still stands, a bleak corner block in a lower-class district (with four floors rather than five, as von Sternberg recalled). Jonas grew up by the light of kerosene lamps, with no piped gas or electricity, and never had enough to eat. Relatives of his mother supported them—a pattern that continued through his adolescence, instilling a lifelong frugality.
Sanitation was primitive. Not surprisingly, vermin proliferated. Hunting fleas and other bugs was the usual preliminary to sleep, and von Sternberg took an intense interest when the maids in nearby apartments (who didn’t bother to draw the curtains or lower the blinds) stripped at night to shake their underclothes over dishes of water, drowning the fleas that tumbled out.
Historian Sidney Bolkosky describes fin de siècle Vienna as a battleground of warring extremes: “home to the highest rates of suicide, prostitution, unwed mothers, intrigue, diplomacy of all sorts. Its values included liberal humanism and arch conservatism, patriarchal primacy and, perhaps more significant, misogyny. It was home, too, to Theodore Herzl, the founder of Zionism, and to Adolf Hitler; home, in short to emancipated Jews and to Anti-Semitism.”3 Despite this, von Sternberg retained a romantic affection for the city. “I was born with the fragrance of chestnut blossoms in my nostrils,” he wrote, “the perfume of the old trees that stretched in stately procession to the Danube, not far distant. And the first sounds I heard were mingled with the melodies that floated into my crib from the hurdy-gurdies, calliopes and wondrously decorated mechanical music boxes that serenaded the gallantly uniformed soldiers strolling in the Prater and their servant-girl companions.”
In November 1897 Moses, who had struggled to find work, joined the flood of Europeans seeking a better life in the United States. Three-year-old Jonas, his younger brother Siegfried, and Serafin, pregnant with daughter Hermine, known as Minna, remained behind. For the next four years he lived in a world colored by the gentler values of his mother—a period he celebrates in The Case of Lena Smith and Blonde Venus. Her presence also encouraged his precocious sexual instincts. After spying on the maids as they undressed, he watched with interest as the same girls, now wearing their Sunday best, strolled on the arms of their soldier lovers. He also noted how prostitutes congregated wherever there were crowds. As characters in his films, virtuous women held little interest. Almost invariably, his heroines are unfaithful, duplicitous, and promiscuous, if not unrepentant courtesans.
Young Jonas shared the streets with geniuses as well as whores. In painting, music, and literature, Vienna represented the cutting edge of artistic experimentation. The group calling itself the Secession had broken with the swirling curlicues of the Franco-Belgian art nouveau and, via artists such as Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, entered the territory of sexual imagery and the unconscious pioneered by another Austrian, Sigmund Freud. In their music, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss evoked similar states of mind, while writers such as Arthur Schnitzler wove cynical stories around the soldiers and maids von Sternberg saw “stepping out” on Sundays.
These streams of sensation flowed together in the Prater. An imperial hunting preserve until the emperor presented it to the people of Vienna in 1766, this park became the preferred place for Sunday outings. Food stalls and sideshows appeared, and in 1895, the year after von Sternberg’s birth, a major reconstruction transformed it into a permanent amusement area. Two years later the Riesenrad—literally “big wheel”—was erected, destined to become as much a symbol of Vienna as the Eiffel Tower was of Paris, and familiar to film audiences from Carol Reed’s The Third Man.
Serafin told stories of how, as a girl, she had played Snow White in a circus, but it was the Prater that ignited Jonas’s taste for spectacle. He evokes it directly only in The Case of Lena Smith, but a nostalgia for carnivals is evident from their appearance in Underworld, The Drag Net, Dishonored, The Devil Is a Woman, and The King Steps Out, as well as the cabarets of Morocco and Blonde Venus. In his memoirs, von Sternberg rhapsodizes about the Prater: “[its] pirouetting fleas, sword swallowers, tumbling midgets and men on stilts, contortionists, jugglers and acrobats, wild swings with skirts flaring from them … a forest of balloons, tattooed athletes, muscle-bulging weight lifters, women who were sawed in half … trained dogs and elephants, tightropes that provided footing for a gourmet who feasted on a basketful of local sausages with horseradish that made my mouth water.”
In 1889 British author George du