Politics & Power Quote by Marlene Dietrich

Dietrich’s line sounds like a compliment, but it’s really a portrait of power and vulnerability tangled together in wartime America. She’s not marveling at some mystical national essence; she’s zeroing in on a mood she witnessed up close: soldiers reduced, by distance and danger, to a raw kind of appetite for recognition. “You can’t explain” is a performer’s admission that what she’s seeing doesn’t fit the usual scripts of masculinity or patriotism. These men are trained for violence, yet starved for small mercies. Gratitude becomes their most visible emotion because everything else - fear, loneliness, dread - is harder to name in public.

The sharpest subtext sits in the phrase “even a film actress.” Dietrich is both elevating and puncturing her own celebrity. She’s pointing to how fame functions as a kind of emergency ration: not necessary, not practical, but astonishingly sustaining when you’re living in scarcity. The actress arrives as a symbol of home, softness, normal life, glamour - all the things war suspends. Their gratitude isn’t really for her; it’s for what she represents, delivered in person.

Context matters: Dietrich wasn’t just a screen icon; she performed for Allied troops and took risks doing it. That gives the observation bite. It’s affectionate, but not sentimental. She’s acknowledging an America where morale is a battlefield, and where the “unexplainable” thing about the soldier is how quickly he can be made grateful by the smallest proof that he hasn’t been forgotten.