Riding the Berlin Express with Marlene Dietrich

Xiaolu Guo finds peace in a graveyard in the German capital

Dietrich was known for her humanitarian efforts during World War II, housing German and French exiles, providing financial support and advocating their American citizenship

I am a graveyard walker, though not a mournful one. There is nowhere more peaceful to wander than among the pines of a mossy cemetery in a large city. When I think back to the cities I have known, it seems to me I have lived mostly among ghosts — whether in Abney Park Cemetery in London, or Père Lachaise in Paris, or Friedhof Fluntern in Zürich, or in the vast new cemeteries of Shanghai.

For a time, I taught at a university in West Berlin. Lodging was provided for me at Rüdesheimer Platz in Wilmersdorf. I knew no one around that area. When I arrived, it was winter. Only the green spruces provided colour, the rest was grey and black. I was too far from Grunewald Forest to walk there every day. So instead my routine would take me to a cemetery called Friedhof Friedenau, near Hanauer Strasse.

I didn’t know that Germany's most famous actress, Marlene Dietrich, was buried there. I discovered it only after a few visits, when I noticed the constant fresh flowers on one particular gravestone. It was plot number 34. Joyful images of the dancing Lola in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel came to me. An unfortunate professor falls in love with a cabaret girl. A sad comedy. But I had no particular sentimental attachment to that film. What I really loved was her 1932 film Shanghai Express. Also directed by Sternberg, it is about a group of train passengers held hostage by local warlords during the Chinese Civil War. It was one of the classics we studied during my film school years in Beijing. I loved its sublime visual language, but I was also fascinated by its background story. The plot was based on a real event in 1923, the Lincheng Incident, involving a luxury ‘Blue Express’ train traveling between Shanghai and Beijing with many high-profile westerners on it. Chinese bandits near Lincheng County in Shandong Province managed to stop the train and take over 300 hostages. The bandits wanted money. Some American hostages were held for over a month. In the end, the Americans and the Chinese arrived at a settlement, and the hostages were released after a large ransom was handed over to the local warlords. But the civil war continued unrelentingly, only getting worse with the Japanese invasion a decade later.