FIGURE 9. Wolfgang von Waltershausen with Christl Ehlers and Brigitte Borchert in Menschen am Sonntag.
FIGURE 10. Wilder, at center, with Peter Lorre and other central European refugees in Hollywood.
Wilder’s acclaimed work in Hollywood, as a screenwriter and director, is in many ways an outgrowth of his stint as a reporter in interwar Vienna and Weimar Berlin. His was a raconteur’s cinema, long on smart, snappy dialogue, short on visual acrobatics. “For Wilder the former journalist, words have a special, almost material quality,” comments German critic Claudius Seidl. “Words are what give his films their buoyancy, elegance, and their characteristic shape, since words can fly faster, glide more elegantly, can spin more than any camera.” Wilder’s deep-seated attachment to the principal tools of his trade as a writer is recognizable throughout his filmic career. He even provided an apt coda, uttered by none other than fading silent screen star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) in Sunset Boulevard, when she learns that Joe Gillis (William Holden) is a writer: “words, words, more words!”
A Note on the Text
To give the reader the most representative selection of Billy Wilder’s writings from the period, we have drawn on two separate German-language anthologies: Der Prinz von Wales geht auf Urlaub: Berliner Reportagen, Feuilletons und Kritiken der zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Fannei und Waltz, 1996), a collection of Wilder’s Berlin-based journalism from the second half of the 1920s edited by Klaus Siebenhaar; and “Billie”: Billy Wilders Wiener journalistische Arbeiten (Vienna: Filmarchiv Austria, 2006), a companion volume of Wilder’s Viennese publications from the mid-1920s, co-edited by Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Günter Krenn.
We have organized the pieces into three separate sections, defined by formal and thematic categories. In some instances, we opted not to include pieces that seemed either too esoteric, too anachronistic, or simply inaccessible to an Anglo-American audience. We believe the selection we have chosen gives the greatest sense of Wilder’s unique voice, his budding skills as a writer, his wit and intelligence, and his range.
Finally, we’d like to thank the Billy and Audrey L. Wilder Foundation for their very kind support of our effort to bring Wilder’s early writings to an English-language audience.
IExtra! Extra!
REPORTAGE, OPINION PIECES, AND FEATURES FROM REAL LIFE
Between September 1925 and November 1930, Wilder published dozens of freelance pieces. He began in the pages of Vienna’s Die Bühne and Die Stunde (where he started out as a reporter in his teens), to which he continued to contribute intermittently after relocating to Berlin in the summer of 1926, just after his twentieth birthday. There he became a regular contributor to the Berliner Zeitung (or the B. Z., as it was more commonly known) and the Berliner Börsen Courier, where he worked as a night editor from April to December 1927. In the late 1920s, while still hanging his hat in Berlin, he wrote for Tempo, the Ullstein publishing concern’s short-lived illustrated magazine aimed at a youthful audience, and for Der Querschnitt, the publishing house’s more highbrow literary magazine (which was something of a distant cousin to the New Yorker).
One of the principal genres in which young Billie trafficked was the feuilleton, or cultural essay, a potent mix of reportage and descriptive musings, which had gained considerable popularity in the newspapers—broadsheets and tabloids—of western and central Europe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Wilder’s feuilletons often took the form of jaunty, mordant, self-stylized personal essays; on occasion they read a bit more like the pointed writing we find on today’s op-ed pages.
FIGURE 11. Title page of the four-part article “Herr Ober, bitte einen Tänzer!”—in which Wilder describes his days as a hotel dancer for hire—from its reprint in Die Bühne (June 2, 1927).
The following selection includes travel pieces (on the urban history and lore of such cities as Venice, Genoa, and Monte Carlo, and even an imagined dispatch from New York City); a pair of heartfelt tributes to the coffeehouse; a long-form essay on the book market circa 1930; and a piece devoted to the art of getting by as an impoverished freelancer. There are numerous articles specific to the contemporary scene in Berlin, among them a four-part eyewitness account of being a dancer for hire, which cast light on the darker corners of the German capital in the late 1920s while also presenting key facets of Wilder himself. In “When It’s Eighty-Four Degrees,” his witty reflections on a sudden heat wave, he describes Berliners dancing the Black Bottom—an American Jazz Age craze that had crossed the Atlantic to inspire legions of dance fanatics during the Weimar years—despite the inhospitable temperatures. Billie’s love of speed, and of shiny new objects, finds expression in “Night Flight over Berlin,” his report on the beginnings of commercial air travel in Europe, while “Berlin Rendezvous” not only plants some of the seeds of his script for Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930)—which he describes here in affectionate detail and with the panache of a savvy press agent in “Here We Are at Film Studio 1929,” noting a certain “reportage” as its basis—but also captures the romance of the city at an especially exciting, if equally fragile, moment.
“Waiter, A Dancer, Please!”
FROM THE LIFE OF A DANCER FOR HIRE
I. I’m Looking for a Job
First, a letter, complete with a motto:
Dear B. W.—Write your memoirs of a dancer for hire. The only thing that still interests us today about literature is the raw materials it’s made of: life, actuality, reality. The motto of “vitalism” is: Every living thing is but a metaphor—Yours, Klabund
So don’t be ashamed of what you’ve done. Don’t even offer up the excuse: “A job is a job,” or “It’s no disgrace to work.” Come straight out with it.
I received my dismissal as a dancer for hire as requested, and my record of that is in my wallet:
Record!
Herr Billie Wilder was employed in our establishment as a Social Dancer
