The Wonderful World That Almost Was

A few years ago, Karin Wieland wrote a double biography of Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, two German women whose career ran in parallel and who made very different choices when faced with the rise of the Nazis. Dietrich ended up cheering on the Allied soldiers who had to invade Western Europe to rid it off the Nazi pest that Riefenstahl had so prominently promoted. It’s possible that the two women met during the ill-fated Weimar Republic. But their lives mostly ran in parallel. And in each section of the book, the reader always has the other person in mind; the other person and her choices. It’s an extremely nifty device to not only bring forth the careers of two women artists living in a world in which the focus was on men; the device also serves to amplify the role and responsibility of personal choices. In some ways, Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was — A Life of Peter Hujar and Paul Thek follows that model. As is always the case in life, it’s the details…