«Dancing, music, champagne is the best way to forget»
Last perfomance: David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich

Dietrich & Riefenstahl“ in Asien:

Vorführung des Films „The Scarlett Empress“ und Vortrag von Karin Wieland
Korea 22. Oktober 2016 im Korean Film Archive

Vorführung des Films „Der Blaue Engel“ und Vortrag von Karin Wieland
Taiwan 19. Oktober 2016 im Taiwan Film Institute/Taipei

New York Times, 19.1.2016

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES ITS FINALISTS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2015

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Sarah Russo, SR|PR (917) 627-5993 sarah@sarahrusso.com

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE ANNOUNCES ITS FINALISTS FOR PUBLISHING YEAR 2015

New York, NY (January 18, 2016)—Today the NBCC announced its 30 finalists in six categories––autobiography, biography, criticism, fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–for the outstanding books of 2015. The winners of three additional prizes were announced as well. The National Book Critics Circle Awards, founded in 1974 at the Algonquin Hotel and considered among the most prestigious in American letters, are the sole prizes bestowed by a jury of working critics and book-review editors. The awards will be presented on March 17, 2016 at the New School, in a ceremony that is free and open to the public.

BIOGRAPHY

Terry Alford, “Fortune’s Fool: The Life of John Wilkes Booth” (Oxford University Press)

Charlotte Gordon, “Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley” (Random House)

T.J. Stiles, “Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America” (Alfred A. Knopf)

Rosemary Sullivan, “Stalin’s Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva” (Harper)

Karin Wieland, translated by Shelley Frisch, “Dietrich and Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives” (Liveright)

“[With] hypnotic power…. Wieland uses these two virtuosos’ lives to generate piercing insights about ambition, ego, creativity and the life-changing, world-altering repercussions of a momentous choice.” — Michael Sragow

“The true subject of [Wieland’s] dual biography is more ambitious: the contrast between good and evil…. She juxtaposes their lives chronologically, raising this implicit question: Did the women ally themselves with a particular nation because that nation reflected their authentic selves? Or did the choice itself—Dietrich’s move to America; Riefenstahl’s complicity with the Third Reich—transform them into different people than they would otherwise have been? Wieland offers no pat answers…. Evil here is not banal; it is jaw-droppingly bizarre and eclipses good.” — M. G. Lord

“Wieland is shrewd…about her subjects and has done serious work…that give her book credibility, texture, and unending interest. This is the story of two glamorous women whose achievements in another time might have been no more substantial than the images on a screen but who assumed real-life roles with the highest historical stakes. However inscrutable human conduct, it is difficult not to search these lives for insight into some of the modern era’s most difficult questions, about illusion and mass intoxication, art and truth, courage and capitulation.” — Claudia Roth Pierpont

“Illuminating…. Via a fluent, often witty translation by Shelley Frisch, Wieland draws the portrait of women who were ambitious to a degree stunning in their day. Moreover, by tracking their divergent careers together, she is able subtly to suggest some answers to a question that hangs over every mid-century German artist: what kind of responses were available to the Nazi apocalypse?” — Farran Smith Nehme

“However, the lack of direct comparison is a strength at the end of the book, when the two women’s final years are juxtaposed. This is a moment for showing and not telling; Wieland (by way of her excellent translator, Shelley Frisch) paints a moving portrait of two women facing up to the costs and limits of determined self-creation.”

“Marlene, Leni, and Jonathan”

“their brand of ambition was identical”

Jenny McPhee about two girls/divas from Berlin:

“joint biography of two indomitable artists is triumph”