The other night I watched actor-director Maximillian Schell’s fascinating 1984 docudrama about Marlene Dietrich, the glamorous (on-screen), reclusive (off it), German-born femme fatale who mesmerized cinema and cabaret audiences but lived her final years cloistered in a Paris apartment.

Known for her “bedroom eyes,” Marlene Dietrich was sometimes mysterious on screen and almost always off it. Although she served in World War II against her native Germany, she had no interest in war or much else that was in the past. (Library of Congress)

A pragmatic woman utterly devoid of romantic reverie despite her public persona, Dietrich told Schell, over and over again, that she was and had always been interested only in the moment.  History — including her own tempestuous life to that point — was of little concern to her.  Never once, she told Schell, had she pulled out one of her silent or talking pictures and watched it again.  So little did she know or care where in Berlin she had spent her early years that she never even inquired when she returned to the ravaged German capital after World War II.

And though she had left Germany, decried Nazism, and even enlisted in the U.S. Army during that war, it held no fascination for her, she said.

As I listened to her — listened because she would let Schell do the interview portion as audio only and would not go on camera — I was struck by the stark contrast between her “fie on the past” outlook and Americans’ quite opposite near-obsession with each and every available detail of another war, its antecedents, and its aftermath.

Dietrich would have scoffed — “rubbish” was her favorite word in the Schell interview — at the rush of new books, trenchant op-ed columns, television documentaries, and blog reflections about the U.S. Civil War.

Fort Sumter was quickly surrendered after Confederate guns pounded the Federal garrison in the opening engagement of the Civil War. (Carol M. Highsmith)

It was triggered, 150 years ago this coming April 12, by the bombardment of a federal fort in Charleston harbor by South Carolina militiamen.  But what lit the fuse?  What caused six states to declare that they were leaving the Union even before the shelling of Fort Sumter?  What force could be so powerful as to lead brothers into war with brothers, with the ultimate loss of 620,000 soldiers in bloody combat?

“Who cares?” I can hear Dietrich’s ghost exclaiming, huskily.  But Americans care deeply to this day in this Civil War sesquicentennial year.  And many chalk it up to a single, overriding propellant: human slavery, the cruel institution that fueled the southern economy and, for the gentry, its way of life.

Whenever Federal troops prevailed in battle on southern soil, slaves freed from nearby plantations during the Confederate retreat streamed into Union camps. (Library of Congress)

Not northern tariffs.  Not states’-rights fervor.  Not northern meddling in southerners’ affairs so pervasive that one ordinary Confederate soldier, quoted by Richard T. Hines, a Sons of Confederate Veterans camp commander, remarked to a Yankee as the Reb was being led off to prison: “Why am I fighting? Because you’re here” (emphasis mine).

Slavery is so often cited as the direct and overriding raison d’etre of the Civil War — or at a minimum the common denominator when multiple antecedents are mentioned — that its sores keep flaring.

So raw are sensitivities that the display of the Confederacy’s stars-and-bars battle flag gets some people’s blood boiling. The rebellious nation fought to the death to keep their human chattel, they say.  Ergo, its symbols represent evil.

Civil War re-enactments like this one in North Carolina certainly honor the courage of the soldiers on both sides. These “Confederates” gather beside a campfire. (Carol M. Highsmith)

But there is other blood boiling as well.  It belongs to those who are just as outraged at efforts to suppress what they firmly believe are reminders of the honorable service of their 260,000 ancestors — many of them poor and barefoot and about as close to being slaveholders as a pig is to a princess — who fought and died on the Confederate side.

The “southern cross” still appears on Mississippi’s state flag and is suggested on Florida’s and Alabama’s.  It was not until 2000 that the Confederate flag came down from its perch atop South Carolina’s capitol building in Columbia.  Civil-rights groups’ calls for boycotts of South Carolina events and attractions were only slightly muted when state officials lowered the rebel flag but then planted it on the capitol lawn. Read the rest of this entry »