‘There was never anythin’ like this!!!’ Valeska Gert's Performances in the Context of Weimar Culture

Abstract

This paper explores Valeska Gert's contributions to dance against the backdrop of Weimar Germany. The first section considers the themes of her choreographies. Eschewing both idealism and abstraction, her work presented a gritty account of the realities of contemporary quotidian life, often featuring outcasts from bourgeois society. It also reflected a growing German interest in aspects of American culture, including sport and multi-ethnicity. Whereas many expressive dancers offered bucolic images of nature, Gert fully embraced modernity, including the process of urbanisation and technological developments. The paper's second section turns to stylistic features of Gert's dance, using an analysis of Alfred Meyer's poem about the dancer as a springboard for discussion. Consideration is given to the montage-like structure of many of Gert's works, her invocation of elements of ‘lower’ culture such as the street ballad, and her association with the carnival and grotesque. Her frequently shocking body images are viewed as subverting social conventions, in particular by presenting a radical take on femininity.

Notes

NOTES

1.  There is evidence that Gert maintained contacts with the Berlin Dadaists in 1919. In her autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe: Kaleidoscop meines Lebens (I am a Witch: Kaleidoscope of my Life), she recalls, during a Dadaist matinee, having been drawn onto stage out of the audience, spontaneously to improvise a grotesque dance accompanied by the noises of a typewriter and a sewing machine, while still holding her paper shopping bag in her arms (Munich: Schleekluth, 1968), 60.

2.  Mary Wigman, a pupil of Rudolf von Laban and proponent of Audruckstanz, was one of Germany's foremost modern dance artists.

3.  Valeska Gert, “Mary Wigman und Valeska Gert,” Der Querschnitt 6.5 (1926): 361. The translations of all German texts, apart from those referenced in notes 20 and 21, are my own.

4.  Gert, Ich bin eine Hexe, 46.

5.  Valeska Gert, Mein Weg (Leipzig: Devrient, 1931), 39.

6.  See Julia Roos, “Backlash against Prostitutes’ Rights: Origins and Dynamics of Nazi Prostitution Policies,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 11.1–2 (2002): 67–94.

7.  Kurt Tucholsky, “Valeska Gert,” Die Weltbühne 17.7 (1921): 204.

8.  See Ramsay Burt, Alien Bodies: Representations of Modernity, ‘Race’ and Nation in Early Modern Dance (London: Routledge, 1998), esp. 51–53.

9.  Suse Byk's film with several of Gert's dances remains to this day in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

10.  Valeska Gert, Typoskript zu Valeska Gerts Tanzphilosophie, undated and unpublished fragment, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Gert archive (hereafter abbreviated as BAK) 209.

11.  Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1904] (London: Unwin University Books, 1930), 182.

12.  Quoted in Fred Hildenbrandt, Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert. Mit 27 ganzseitigen Bildern (Stuttgart: Hädecke, 1928), 36.

13.  Gert, Typoskript zu Valeska Gerts Tanzphilosophie, undated and unpublished fragment, BAK 209.

14.  To my knowledge, only Burt interprets Gert's dances in relation to Americanism (Alien Bodies, 30–35).

15.  Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik. Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987), 179.

16.  David Midgley, Writing Weimar: Critical Realism in German Literature, 1918–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

17.  Indeed, Gert's style of movement induced Hildenbrandt to call her thus in Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert, 85.

18.  Ibid., 29.

19.  Rudolf Kayser, “Americanism,” in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 395.

20.  Fritz Wildung, “Sport Is the Will to Culture,” in Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 681.

21.  Hildenbrandt, Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert, 111–13.

22.  See also Burt, Alien Bodies, 33.

23.  Quote taken from Francis Steegmuller, Cocteau: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 1970), 166.

24.  Elizabeth Hutton Turner, “La Jeune Fille Américaine and the Dadaist Impulse,” in Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity, ed. N. Samuelson-Gorse (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 17.

25.  Mysticism was a crucial feature in the works of some proponents of German expressive dance, such as Rudolf von Laban, its main theorist. His approach to dance was preoccupied with mythical elements and underpinned by a supernatural metaphysics; he actually believed that dance was a manifestation of a cosmic and mystic force.

26.  Gert, Mein Weg, 43.

27.  Ibid., 26.

28.  See for instance Karl Jasper's philosophical treatise on The Mental Situation of our Age (1931) and Ernst Toller's play The Machine Wreckers (1922).

29.  See Midgley, Writing Weimar, 315.

30.  Referring to one of her earliest dance creations, Gert herself commented that she “portrayed for the first time something that was very characteristic of our time, namely instability” (Ich bin eine Hexe, 38).

31.  Gert, Typoskript zu Valeska Gerts Tanzphilosophie, undated and unpublished fragment, BAK 209.

32.  Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and its Discontents), in Studienausgabe, vol. 9 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 269.

33.  Gert, Typoskript zu Valeska Gerts Tanzphilosophie, undated and unpublished fragment, BAK 209.

34.  Alfred Richard Meyer, “Valeska Gert,” in Der große Munkepunke. Gesammelte Werke von A. R. Meyer (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1924), 115–17.

35.  The Hexenküche (Witch's Kitchen), founded by Gert in 1950, was one of her venues in Berlin.

36.  Hanns Schulze, Tänzerinnen. II. Valeska Gert (Dresden, 1920), BAK 394.

37.  Gert, Ich bin eine Hexe, 38.

38.  Hildenbrandt, Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert, 78.

39.  Ibid., 85.

40.  Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968), 10.

41.  See Hildenbrandt, Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert, 125–28, cf. 88.

42.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 19.

43.  Although she was seen as far from beautiful, it is worth noting that some contemporaries, for instance Ivan Goll and Sergey Eisenstein, were sexually attracted to Gert and her dance; the latter once sending her a bouquet of red roses (see Gert 1968, op.cit., p. 71). Similarly, the speaker in Meyer's poem suggests his erotic attraction to her.

44.  See Meyer, who refers ironically to her “hambone.”

45.  Schulze, Tänzerinnen. II. Valeska Gert.

46.  See F. M. Peter, Valeska Gert. Tänzerin, Schauspielerin, Kabarettistin. Eine dokumentarische Biographie (1987).

47.  Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 26.

48.  In romantic and classical ballets, the mouth of the dancer is always closed.

49.  Hyberbole is a characteristic both of Gert's physicality and of her dance style. Hildenbrandt noted that “She is always inordinately exaggerated, inordinately exaggerated … . Her dances are also based on this exaggeration, one like the other, because she feels everything in an eccentric way and because she experiences everything eccentrically, she must dance eccentrically too … . She dances as in slow motion, she enlarges and coarsens, she drags it out, she makes a whole dance out of a minute impudent idea” (59; my translation). See also Susanne Foellmer's comment in “Verschobene Körper, groteske Körper,” in Tanz Theorie Text, ed. G. Klein and Ch. Zipprich (Münster: Literaturverlag, 2002), esp. 461–65.

50.  Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, ed. M. W. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. J. Vickers (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 124.

51.  L[eonie] D[otzler], undated, untitled, BAK 402.

52.  Stefan Zweig complained that “even the Rome of Suetonius did not know such orgies as the Berlin tranvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women's dresses and women in men's clothes danced before the benevolent eyes of the police. With the decline of all values, a kind of lunacy seized the bourgeois circles in particular, which had hitherto been unshakeable in their structure.” Stefan Zweig, “Die Welt von Gestern. Erinnerungen eines Europäers,” in Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden, ed. K. Beck (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), 358f.

53.  An author named Alfred Holtmont, who wrote an entire book on the breeches-part and gender swapping, claimed that drag was a necessary stage on the woman's path to emancipation, and that it was crucial to shed female clothing which he saw as a symbol of female subjugation. Alfred Holtmont, Die Hosenrolle. Variationen über das Thema das Weib als Mann (Munich: Meyer & Jessen, 1925), esp. 8 and 224.

54.  Burt, Alien Bodies, 34.

55.  Gert, who was Jewish and expressed anti-establishment ideas, herself experienced persecution, and had to emigrate during the Third Reich.