The film marks the beginning of Marlene Dietrich’s international career. The role of Lola Lola shaped her image as a femme fatale, which she later found difficult to escape. Dietrich’s singing talent was exploited for this early sound film. The lyrics she sings, by the composer Friedrich Hollaender (“Love’s always been my game / Play it as I may / I was born that way / Can’t help it”), were understood as an expression of self-confident sexuality. The critic Kurt Pinthus raved about the “passivity of her sex appeal”, Herbert Ihering about her “sensual phlegm”.
Ufa producer Erich Pommer wanted to land an international hit, so he provided an extraordinary budget and assembled a top-class team: actor Emil Jannings recommended the director Josef von Sternberg, who had recently directed him in The Last Command (1928), which helped to win him the Academy Award for Best Actor. Karl Vollmoeller secured the rights to the novel Professor Unrat by Heinrich Mann and worked on the screenplay together with writer Carl Zuckmayer. They successfully managed to maintain the novel’s balance between comedy and tragedy, even if the story otherwise departed significantly from the original.
Jannings took the role of Professor Rath, an elderly teacher who falls in love with the vaudeville singer Lola Lola and then finds his life falling apart. Many famous actresses of the time auditioned for the leading female role, but von Sternberg saw Dietrich in a revue and fought for her against studio resistance.
The premiere of the film took place on 1 April 1930 in Berlin. On the same day, Dietrich and von Sternberg left for Hollywood to begin filming Morocco. They were to make seven films together and have a kind of on/off relationship during this time. For other team members, however, the future looked bleak. Many members of the cast and crew were Jewish and were persecuted and expelled by the Nazis (such as Pommer, Hollaender, actress Rosa Valetti and the members of the Weintraubs Syncopators band) or murdered in the camps (such as actor Kurt Gerron, who plays the magician Kiepert).

Kristina Jaspers