MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY

BERLIN - Aside from Romy Schneider hanging out naked on the Riviera and an aged Marlene Dietrich hiding her face from a nosy photographer on an airplane, the most prominent German in a hugely diverting paparazzi show at the Helmut Newton Foundation here through mid-November is Albert Einstein.
He’s now surrounded by the Sean Penns and Brigitte Bardots of the world, looking as out of place as he must have felt when he arrived in New Jersey in 1933.
Actually, though, he’s the ultimate German celebrity. Germany has long been funny about its relationship to local stardom and to the very notion of celebrity, which makes this exhibition a particularly fascinating and revealing exercise.
With some 350 pictures it’s not too logical, but never mind. It mostly recalls the glory days of the Cote d’Azur, the Via Veneto and Studio 54, with Edward Quinn’s gorgeous photographs from Cannes in the ‘50s and some current celebrities thrown in . A few classics by Weegee don’t really qualify as paparazzi shots, and neither do the dozens of snapshots by Jean Pigozzi, the Italian businessman and art collector who likes to hold out a camera, arm’s length, and take pictures of himself beside famous pals.
The show advertises itself as the first survey of paparazzi in Germany . Credit Germany’s ambivalence toward homegrown celebrity to what Ulf Poschardt, the founding editor of the German version of Vanity Fair magazine and now an editor at the newspaper Welt am Sonntag, recently called “aggressive egalitarianism.
“The complete affirmation of yourself is considered kitsch here, he said. “You can’t do it.
Patrick von Ribbentrop put it differently. “There isn’t the right setup, he said. A 35-year-old clothing entrepreneur with a famous name to bear (he’s the grandson of the Nazi foreign minister), he attributes the state of German celebrity culture to “a marketing problem.
“Take Paris Hilton, he said . “Being a wealthy individual, you also have to be willing to be in the public eye. Then you have to have a whole system for promotion .
The key word, explained Dagmar von Taube, a society reporter for Welt am Sonntag, is Bescheidenheit, or modesty. Next door to Germany, the French president lives in a palace with his new wife, a fashion model turned pop singer.
But here the chancellor, Angela Merkel, occupies a plain little house in the middle of town. After delivering a speech before a Berlin Philharmonic performance not long ago, Ms. Merkel, like everybody else, sat through the concert without a security guard in sight.
“In Munich, they love celebrities, said Claudius Seidl, an editor for Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . About 50 years ago, he said, before globalization, Germans, both East and West, fawned more over their own celebrities. But today’s stars are dwarfed by Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s twins.
German television broadcasts shows like “Das Perfekte Promi Dinner, which features minor German soap actors, former athletes and the occasional exporn star cooking for one another in their (generally modest) homes, then being gently graded on the results.
These programs recall the early days of television, which introduced the widespread illusion of intimacy with stardom. To be a celebrity meant to demonstrate that you were like anyone else, a fiction that gradually caused nearly the entire population of the United States to delude itself into thinking everyone should be famous, at least briefly.
Here, on the other hand, Germans still face the burden of St. Augustine, who wrote that to be purged of the sin of pride, a person must also purge the pride that comes from being humble.