Berlin

Poet

b. February 21, 1907
d. September 29, 1973

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”

Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden was a Pulitzer Prize-winning British-born poet who became an American citizen at age 39. Inspired by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot, he is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Auden spent his childhood in Birmingham, England. His mother was a devout Anglican. His father was a renowned physician and academic. Auden’s poetry reflects both his mother’s Christian ideals and his father’s interest in folklore and mythology.

After receiving a scholarship to Oxford University, Auden studied science and engineering before switching to English. He developed a close friendship with Christopher Isherwood, a childhood acquaintance and fellow Oxford student. Auden later moved to Berlin with Isherwood, where they frequented a local gay bar and experienced the city’s “decadent homosexual subculture.”

In 1930 Faber & Faber published “Poems,” Auden’s first collection. He spent the next five years teaching English in private schools.

In 1935 Auden married Erika Mann, a lesbian writer and actress and the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. A marriage of convenience, the union helped Mann, who was a German Jew, obtain a British passport to escape the Nazis. The couple fled to Britain, where Auden worked as a freelance writer. He began traveling the world and writing about his experiences in Germany, Iceland and China.

Auden quickly earned recognition for his exceptional wit, fluency in virtually all forms of verse, and unique commentary on morals, love and politics. In 1937, motivated by leftist ideology, he traveled to Spain and participated the Spanish Civil War. He published his activist poem, “Spain 1937,” to raise money for Spanish medical aid.

In 1939 Auden and Isherwood moved to New York, where Auden met his lifelong love, Chester Kallman, and they began a relationship. Auden wanted monogamy with the aspiring young poet, but Kallman would not commit. Heartbroken, Auden eventually accepted it, telling Kallman, “We’re a funny pair, you and I.”

From 1942 to 1945, Auden taught at Swarthmore College. In 1946 he acquired U.S. citizenship. He and Kallman spent their summers together in Europe. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “The Age of Anxiety” in 1948. He received the National Book Award for Poetry for “The Shield of Achilles” in 1956 and began lecturing at Oxford University as a professor of poetry.

Auden died unexpectedly in Vienna, Austria, in 1973. The attacks of 9/11 revived his poem, “September 1, 1939,” about the outbreak of World War II. It became one of Auden’s best-known works, even though he had grown to despise it during his lifetime.

Trailblazing Writer

b. August 26, 1904
d. January 4, 1986

“One should never write down or up to people, but out of yourself.”

Christopher Isherwood is an Anglo-American writer who was among the first to bring gay themes to mainstream literary audiences. Much of his work is semi-autobiographical, including “Goodbye to Berlin,” the novel that inspired the Tony Award-winning musical and Academy Award-winning film “Cabaret.”

Isherwood was born in 1904 near Manchester, England. From an early age, he formed friendships with people from all walks of life, some of whom later became his creative collaborators. In 1924, after submitting joke answers on his second-year exams, Isherwood was asked to leave Cambridge University. Embracing his newfound freedom, he took part-time jobs as the secretary of a string quartet and as a private tutor. He worked on his first novels and briefly attended medical school.

In 1929 Isherwood visited his friend, the poet W.H. Auden, in Berlin. The trip changed his life, bringing him “face to face with his tribe” and beginning his liberation as a gay man. Isherwood moved to Berlin later that year. His experiences and friendships there provided material for his novels “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and “Goodbye to Berlin.” The latter, which depicts Germany’s pre-Nazi decadence, became Isherwood’s most famous work and cemented his legacy. The book was adapted into the play “I Am a Camera” and the musical “Cabaret,” which earned eight Tony Awards. The film version of “Cabaret,” starring Liza Minnelli, won eight Academy Awards.

In Berlin, Isherwood also began a relationship with a young German, Heinz Neddermeyer. The pair fled the Nazis, who were persecuting homosexuals, and moved across Europe until the Gestapo arrested Neddermeyer in 1937.

Isherwood returned to London, where he wrote plays and screenplays, before settling in Hollywood. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946. Seven years later, he fell in love with a college student, Don Bachardy. The couple remained together for more than 30 years, until Isherwood’s death. The relationship became a model for many gay men.

In his later years, Isherwood turned increasingly to autobiographical and gay themes. In 1964 he published the critically acclaimed novel, “A Single Man,” about a gay middle-aged English professor. A film adaptation, directed by Tom Ford and starring Colin Firth, premiered in 2009. It earned international recognition, including an Academy Award nomination for best actor.

In Isherwood’s 1976 memoir, “Christopher and His Kind,” the author renounced his reticence to admit his homosexuality in his earlier work. The memoir speaks candidly about his life in Berlin as a young gay man.

Isherwood died of prostate cancer in Santa Monica, California. He was 81.

Father of Ecology

b. September 14, 1769
d. May 6, 1859

“The most dangerous worldview is ... of those who have not viewed the world.”

Alexander von Humboldt was a renowned Prussian naturalist, explorer, and geographer, and the preeminent scientist of his time. Regarded as the father of ecology, he laid the foundations for modern biogeography and meteorology and shaped the concept of climate zones, weather forecasting and the theory of man-made climate change.

Von Humboldt was born into a wealthy Prussian family. In 1791, as a compromise between his mother’s desire for him to become a civil servant and his own interest in science and geology, he enrolled at the Mining Academy at Freiburg. As a mining inspector, he investigated the effect of light exposure on wildlife, collected thousands of botanical specimens and invented a breathing mask.

The death of his mother and his inheritance in 1796 enabled von Humboldt to fulfill his dream of traveling the world. Along with Aimé Bon­pland, a botanist, he explored Latin America for five years. He landed in modern-day Venezuela, where he traversed rainforests, crossed the Orinoco River and ascended the Andes mountains. He suffered intense cold, braved earthquakes and conducted life-threatening experiments with electrical eels. He returned with notebooks full of geological and meteorological observations and more than 60,000 plant specimens.

At Venezuela’s Lake Valencia, von Humboldt first developed the idea of human-induced climate change. He was the first to describe the fundamental impact of the forest on ecosystems and climate. On Mount Chimborazo, von Humboldt had an epiphany: he reasoned that the world was a single, interconnected organism. His view that ecosystems were intrinsically linked contrasted with previous scientific classifications of the earth and transformed the way scientists viewed nature.

Von Humboldt’s published works on nature made a far-reaching, interdisciplinary impact on major 20th and 21st century thinkers. His concepts inspired the young Charles Darwin to travel and informed his ideas on natural selection. Von Humboldt’s views prompted the revolutionary Simón Bolívar to assert that they had awakened the South American people to take pride in their continent. Von Humboldt influenced great writers such as Goethe, Whitman and Poe, and provided the scientific undergirding upon which modern environmentalists—from George Perkins Marsh to John Muir—built their ideas.

Von Humboldt’s personal life contrasted with his public celebrity. He held intense feelings for a series of male friends but struggled with loneliness. Contemporaries noted von Humboldt’s lack of love for women, and a newspaper article insinuated that he was a homosexual.

Von Humboldt died in Berlin, Germany, the city where he was born. He was 89.

Actor

b. December 27,1901

d. May 6, 1992

“Glamour is what I sell, it's my stock in trade.”

Marlene Dietrich was a movie star and cabaret singer who appeared in dozens of films during Hollywood’s Golden Age. She was one of the highest paid actors of her time.

Born Marie Magdalene Dietrich in Berlin, Germany, she was the younger of two daughters in a well-to-do family. In her mid-teens, Dietrich studied acting. In the early 1920’s, she began her career in cinema and met her future husband Rudolf Sieber. Dietrich remained married to Sieber for more than 50 years. During the marriage she had a series of affairs with famous men and women.

Her breakout role was as sultry cabaret singer Lola Lola in the German film “The Blue Angel” (1930), directed by Josef von Sternberg. Dietrich and von Sternberg moved to Hollywood, where he directed her in six films. For their first collaboration, “Morocco” (1930), Dietrich earned an Oscar nomination. She played a singer dressed in a man’s tuxedo and top hat who kisses a female audience member on the lips.

Among Dietrich’s most memorable films are “Desire” (1936), co-starring Gary Copper; “Destry Rides Again” (1939), which showcased her comedic talent; “Witness for the Prosecution (1957), her top box office hit; and “Judgment at Nuremberg” (1961), her final motion picture.

Dietrich became an American citizen in 1937 and performed for Allied troops during World War II. In 1947, she was awarded the U.S. Medal of Freedom, which she called her proudest accomplishment. As her film career waned, she found success for nearly 20 years as a cabaret singer. Collaborating with musical arranger Burt Bacharach, Dietrich turned her nightclub act into a theatrical one-woman show. Dietrich and Bacharach recorded four albums and several singles.

In 1967, she performed her show on Broadway and received a Special Tony Award. In 1975, after a series of on-stage falls and injuries, Dietrich retired from show business. She spent the final decade of her life in Paris, secluded and bedridden.

In 2002, Dietrich was posthumously proclaimed an honorary citizen of Berlin with a plaque describing her as “one of the few German actresses that attained international significance.”