Not much is known about the art of the Third Reich. … The general assumption is that all the art, however persuasive, was so bad that it does not deserve the attention of art historians.
—Peter Adam (Reference Adam1992)This assumption is widespread. If the Nazis had art at all, it was bad art. Or, to turn the logic around, the art that was created after 1933 and is deemed “good” today cannot have been Nazi art.
A few years after BBC filmmaker Peter Adam had reminded the public of the general misconception concerning Nazi art, writer Neal Ascherson took the question further:
What would have happened if the Nazis had embraced modern art? The very thought seems idiotic. We are brought up to accept that dictatorship has its own taste: muscle-bound literalism. … The dogma that the Nazis were always fiercely anti-modern survives. So does the related assumption that the avant-garde painters in the Germany of the 1930s were politically left wing. Neither is true. … The Nazi decision to declare war on the Modern movement was a disaster. But a decision to sanctify it would have been … far worse. (Ascherson Reference Ascherson, Büchler and Papastergiadis1995, 69)
If the Nazis had embraced modernism, all that wonderful Expressionist art would not have been declared “degenerate,” and there would have been no need for artists to emigrate. The West would have been deprived of a wave of innovation and originality and “‘Modern Art’ would have been associated with fascism in both its Italian and German forms. … There would have been only one ‘totalitarian style’: Modernism” (Ascherson Reference Ascherson, Büchler and Papastergiadis1995, 69).
Both propositions, that of Nazi art as nonart (also Strathausen Reference Strathausen1999) and that of modernism as entirely anti-Nazi remain prevalent. German modern dance, though, counteracts both hypotheses.
Does Nazi Art Exist?
Should we speak of Nazi art at all? What do we mean when we do? Is it merely art created during a period that happened to coincide with the establishment of the National Socialist political regime? Or is it more: an art that adopted, integrated, expressed a specific, namely, a Nazi aesthetic? The question whether a fascist or, more precisely, Nazi aesthetic exists, has occupied many minds, and there is no consensus. Nor is there consensus on what constitutes a Nazi ideology. Without a Nazi ideology, it would be futile to discuss aesthetics as both are bound to one another in a dialectical and dynamic relationship. We are thus dealing with a matter that is contentious, hotly debated, and, still, in many ways, a taboo subject, full of apologist attitudes, inconsistencies, moral dilemmas, guilt, and shame:
[Ideology] today is generally taken to mean not a science of ideas, but the ideas themselves, and moreover ideas of a particular kind. Ideologies are ideas whose purpose is not epistemic, but political. Thus an ideology exists to confirm a certain political viewpoint, serve the interests of certain people, or to perform a functional role in relation to social, economic, political and legal institutions. (Sypnowich Reference Sypnowich and Zalta2014)
Adam's remark about art under the Nazis was highlighted by modern German dancers who, in an attempt to whitewash their past, have indeed claimed that modern dance was persecuted and the ballet performed during the Third Reich not worthy of the designation art. After the collapse of the Third Reich, these dancers maintained the myth of their persecution by the regime. What had been performed was antimodernist dance, nonart.
German dance has been central to the whole conception of a modernist dance; German dance (predominantly the theories and practices of its two founders, Rudolf von Laban and Mary Wigman, and several of their students) developed the fundamental tenets of a modernist movement aesthetic adopted in many Western cultures. What Ascherson envisaged as a terrifying distortion was true for German dance: it became the ideal expression of total and totalitarian ideas. The Nazis did embrace modernism, that of Ausdruckstanz. But modern German dance has found it difficult to undergo the process of de-Nazification.
This is not the place to discuss the scholarly literature on Nazism and its aesthetics, which is extensive and reaches from Adorno's Negative Dialectics (Reference Michel1966) to Frederic Spotts's Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (Reference Spotts2003) and to Eric Michaud's The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany (Reference Michaud2004) and many others.Footnote 1 Nor is this a literature review that investigates attitudes developed by dance scholars regarding the relationship between movement and Nazism. Many scholars consider movement somehow immune to political influence and emphasize its independence from social impact, its revolutionary spirit, and its formal integrity. This approach follows Mary Wigman's definition of “absolute dance” as condensed essence of rhythmic movement: “Space, symbol; the finite with the eternal, formed, penetrated, built”; a dance that “realises the human tension in space”— above all: an end in itself and beyond external forces such as politics and society (Wigman Reference Wigman1921; Michel Reference Michel1924). There exists a general reluctance to place dance aesthetics in the specific political and ideological milieu of Nazism. Yvonne Hardt articulated this clearly when she warned of causal historiographies that deduce from ideology to movement. Ambivalence in the practice and hence analyses of dance thus accentuates the ambiguity of “form”; not even “latent” ideological tendencies can be detected (Hardt Reference Hardt, Cowan and Sicks2005, 246–247; Reference Hardt and Diehl2006, 173–174).
When one considers the importance of the subject, there have been remarkably few broad studies looking at the vexed relationship between dance, Nazism, and an explicit Nazi aesthetics.Footnote 2 Laure Guilbert's study Danser avec le Troisième Reich (Reference Guilbert2011) is by far the most extensive on dance's collaboration with the Third Reich. Her assumption is not that dance form somehow does or does not reflect an external ideology but that dance is ideology, articulated in reviews, criticism, and dance descriptions and poured into movement form. Dance ideology, and specifically the ideology of a Nazi dance, thus finds its intellectual as well as physical expression at the same time and in interdependency. For Laure Guilbert, the “writers of dance ideology” are the dance critics as well as the choreographers and dancers; they all wrote dance by creating it in word and movement (Guilbert Reference Guilbert2011, 174–175). Lilian Karina and I took the same position in Hitler's Dancers: German Dancers and the Third Reich ([Reference Karina and Kant1996] 2004), though we focused our investigation on the integration of German dance into the Nazi cultural system. We argued that such integration relied on the aesthetic identification of German dancers with Nazi ideals and ideology. This affinity made collaboration possible (besides naked ambition and opportunism).
Dancers, choreographers, gymnasts: Rudolf von Laban, Rudolf Bode, Mary Wigman, or Jutta Klamt, Fritz Böhme, Dorothée Günther, or Hinrich Medau, Fritz Böhme, Gustav/Jo Fischer-Klamt, Rosalia Chladek, Lotte Wernicke, Harald Kreutzberg, Gret Palucca, and many more came with ideological visions to the Nazi bureaucracy and filled the cultural structures the Nazis were creating with their own meaning. The politics of all these artists manifested a clear ideological intention; their engagement with the Nazi administration was undertaken so that the ideals of both sides would be fulfilled. While the involvement of artists happened on several levels, institutional, ideological, and aesthetic, it always contributed to the reality of dance and could not then and cannot now be neatly separated into aesthetic form on the one hand and politics or ideology on the other. Linda Schulte-Sasse—in paraphrasing the characterization of Nazism by Brecht and Benjamin as the aestheticization of politics—suggested that another element needs to be examined in the context of a fascist aesthetic (a problematic term as it subsumes Nazism under Fascism and thus is forced to gloss over the substantial differences)Footnote 3 : it can be detected only if there is a transgression of the “boundaries between the imaginary and real life and [the] aestheticization [of] the political through extradiegetic references” (Schulte-Sasse Reference Schulte-Sasse1991, 143). This is an interesting though problematic approach as the “extradiegetic” cannot easily be identified in an art that considers itself a closed system, such as Laban's spatial theories or Wigman's “absolute dance.” The extradiegetic cannot infiltrate absolute dance; it will always remain superfluous.
Did the relationship between dance and Nazi ideology arise only beginning in 1933 and was it loose enough to be severed later when such political affinity was no longer advantageous? For many scholars there was dance, its form, and then there was ideology, even Nazi ideology. Within this frame of thought, German dance becomes nothing more than an echo of an affinity. In the counterposition dance too has an ideology, embodies ideology, and becomes form when the ideological tenets take shape through the dancer's/choreographer's body—form materializes in movement. The link between formal properties and the social environment is complex. In the case presented here, the interdependence existed through the creation of aesthetic categories by the creators of modern movement practices. Conservative and Nazi concepts intentionally activated ideological histories to define form. Whether formal properties remain attached to ideologies depends on many more factors, foremost among them is the historical evolution of philosophical, cultural, and formal contexts. Form can become flexible and reach beyond the initial structure. If one does not accept the autonomy of art, then the question of how form shapes itself and what happens to it remains relevant. If one insists on aesthetic self-sufficiency—as absolute dance does—then the question is irrelevant; form holds supremacy over everything else. Ethical dimensions would arise only if the creator wishes them to be part of the work of art. Form, in the following discussion, is treated not as an independent aesthetic principle; rather, it represents the formal and visible and audible structure of aesthetic-ideological thought.
Nazi Ideology
The study of Nazism from the beginning provoked opposing views. Hermann Rauschning's Revolution of Nihilism ([Reference Rauschning1938] 1939), or, more seriously and systematically, Franz L. Neumann's study Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944, published in Reference Neumann1944 denied the existence of a coherent Nazi ideology. For Neumann, National Socialism was constantly shifting, contained an eclectic mix of elements of previous philosophies but, in the end, was composed of negative assumptions and lacked beauty. It was an ideology of destruction and without consistence and structure. This attitude has been adopted by several contemporary historians such as Mary Fullbrook (Fulbrook Reference Fulbrook1991, 45), and it underscores that Nazi ideology either does not exist or is too inconsistent, contradictory, and diffuse to be called systematic.
For George Mosse, Nazi ideology evolved from völkisch philosophies, the literature, aesthetics, and the ideologies of conservative thought of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He outlined this historical arc in his study of the intellectual origins of the Third Reich ([Reference Mosse1964] 1991) that is still a relevant work (Dennis Reference Dennis2012, 261). Mosse traced the major doctrines of conservative ideology through the nineteenth century: those of national unity based on an idealized community and its purity, the orientation toward leadership, and the charismatic personality, or the need to create an enemy. Völkisch thought, closely related to German romanticism (cf. Stern [Reference Stern1961] 1963; Hermand Reference Hermand1992), had set up a specific relationship to space and the concept of a specific national living space.
This essay too argues for the existence of a Nazi ideology—coherent, consistent, powerful, persuasive—that grew out of older, antiliberal, and anticapitalist ideas. The arts permeate social reality more than any political pamphlet ever could and thus play a particularly important part in the propagation of such ideological frameworks as they spread these ideas, make them visible, put them into sound, word, movement, and performance action. Art was and is ideology; art carried and still carries ideological concepts and realizes them through aesthetic means. All the arts thus made völkisch ideologiesFootnote 4 comprehensible and acceptable. The arts gave thought aesthetic structure and made ideology accessible through artistic form. The Nazis merely claimed unambiguous control over this form and declared all arts part of their propaganda campaign for the National Socialist cause. Art was a vital expression of the German people and therefore the ultimate propaganda weapon in the battle for Nazism's values. Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda oversaw the employment of the arts in this sense, with the help of artists who organized and managed the entire cultural sphere.
Throughout the nineteenth century, certain schools of dance and gymnastics consciously integrated themselves into the cohort of völkisch thinkers and politicians and, in the end, enabled Nazism to establish a unified ideology and political system. Dance and gymnastics in particular offered themselves as testing grounds for those völkisch ideas that coagulated into the most important aspects of the Nazi ideology. This is not simply a parallel development to that of Nazism, an affinity that could be cut; rather, movement cultures, literature, fine art, and music and their representations of völkisch concepts were the precondition for Nazism to articulate its own ideology with its particular aesthetic orientation.
German dance and German gymnastics did not find themselves in coincidental proximity to right-wing political movements; they sought the association: when Rudolf Bode integrated Paul de Lagarde's or Julius Langbehn's philosophy into his gymnastics method and education (Bode Reference Bode1926), when Rudolf von Laban chose to run his summer courses in the völkisch village Klingberg near Gleschendorf in 1921/22 where racial experiments were being conducted, when the Carl Orff School with Dorothee Günther and Maja Lex aligned itself with Rosenberg's Munich chapter of the Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur in mid-1933 (Kater Reference Kater2000, 119–120).Footnote 5 Such choices were deliberate though not predetermined. Dance and gymnastics became agents advocating change toward a nationalist and racialized society rather than being only an echo of distant associations.
George Mosse reminded his readers that it was difficult to escape determinism in the search for the roots of Nazism; however, völkisch movements and their ideologies did not simply appear out of nowhere. They came from somewhere, and that somewhere needs to be discussed. Mosse also stressed that Nazi ideology, collecting and redefining various myths and symbols, pushed ideas that had been considered relatively marginal in their own time. The process that he described was that of obscure and irrational ideas articulated by small groups beginning to dominate the political discourse of an entire nation—until they became state ideology. This dynamic and dialectical process of articulation and adaptation of ideas to German reality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries eventually brought the Nazi movement to power (Mosse [1964] 1991). A lost war, inflation, and depression made possible the rise of Hitler, the charismatic leader, a man for whom art really mattered. Dance and gymnastics must be placed into this historical continuum; we need to discuss some of the early ideas concerning movement and nationalism, movement and völkisch thought, the evolution of dance and gymnastics from marginal to central force. We find the basic model of the mobilization of the German body at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
The Historical Model of Turnen
The Napoleonic Empire had conquered most of Europe by the force of revolutionary ideas such as liberty, equality, and fraternity and the power of French arms. The entire German people had become its subjects. The famous Prussian army had been humiliated and broken near Jena in 1806. Amid defeat and gloom, two reform movements emerged: an aristocratic attempt to improve the government and army and another to establish a united German Volk. The latter included processes that would eventually over the course of the nineteenth century evolve into National Socialist body culture.
Its founder, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) proposed the idea that a new German man could free the German Volk. He developed what he called Turnen, the first nationalist gymnastics system from 1807 on and in 1816 published the manual Deutsche Turnkunst in Berlin. The practice was systematically explored and refined, and Turnen became a fixed part of German physical education, first as a social force in clubs, initially outside of all state educational institutions, and from 1842 on also as part of the national physical education curriculum. Jahn also invented the word Volksthum to provide his own as well as his contemporaries’ nationalist ideas with a term and concept. Jahn admired the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814), who lectured on the need for a German nation state in 1807/1808 at the University of Berlin and whose Reden an die deutsche Nation (cf. Fichte Reference Fichte, Jones and Turnbull1922; Jusdanis Reference Jusdanis2001; James Reference James2011) provided an important impetus toward the recognition of a German national essence. Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860) was another nationalist, even more ardent and pragmatic than Fichte, who also demanded German independence and believed in a German essence. But it was Jahn's concept of an active physical expression of nationalism that created a patriotic mass movement.
Jahn's invention of a German gymnastics was inextricably linked to later projects of nationalist emancipation and sovereignty, for as historian Hans Kohn said: “none had a stronger influence on the practical manifestations of German nationalism than Friedrich Ludwig Jahn” (Kohn Reference Kohn1949, 419). That was true for the nineteenth but also for most of the twentieth century, with Turnen part of the school curricula in all primary and secondary schools and also part of higher, i.e., university, education. Jahn's movement method became the most widely spread and taught and most influential gymnastics practice in Prussia and later in united Germany. The origins of the “rhythmic,” “aesthetic,” and “expressionist” gymnastics of the later nineteenth century as well as modern German dance of the twentieth century can be found in Turnen.
Thus Jahn provided the blueprint for most later völkisch orientated movement methods. His theory focused on the education of a German, healthy, muscular, patriotic male battle force able to fight the French, that is, the Napoleonic, occupation. His gymnastics manual set out a series of exercise sequences to be done in a group of like-minded people. That sounds innocent enough. But he also advanced a political theory of German statehood and the rules of citizenship and national unity, laid out in 1810 in Deutsches Volksthum. Turnen with its set exercise repertoire was the path to instill national ethics and indoctrinate boys and young men (female physical education was introduced later against Jahn's will) so that they would accept their duty to fight and sacrifice themselves for the German fatherland. In the early 1800s that fatherland was a dream and only became a reality in 1871 when Bismarck unified Germany. Even in the twentieth century, there was hardly a German citizen who had not had some experience with Turnen.
Jahn was convinced that he could reestablish a new equilibrium of body and soul and unify, harmonizes, and balance all aspects of life; he would introduce a new spiritual development with and through physical exercise. Turnen would become the expression of a patriotic people; Turnen belonged to the people and was to be practiced according to the needs of the people (Jahn Reference Jahn1810, 289). Turnen was the corporeal ideal of the German Volk and would embody the culture of the German Volk.
This system should be recognized as one of the earliest modern examples of a nation as a community becoming, forming, and defining itself through physical movement. With a leader leading and the group following orders, Turnen established hierarchies based on physical abilities. The Turnen community acted as a collective avant-garde that intended to replace the existing social order. It was strictly authoritarian and relied on the voluntary submission of the members of the gymnastics groups to the demands of the leader. This active bodily submission to rules, set out in a written pledge, to which every individual member of the community had to agree, insured obedience to and through movement. Turnen was rigorously organized and carefully managed patriotic socialization in action (Kant Reference Kant2011). It soon set up its community network across Prussia and several other German states and became an institution that determined German socialization and social interaction beyond the movement clubs (Düding Reference Düding1984; Goltermann Reference Goltermann1998). Jahn also influenced the student corporations (many of the students had joined the Turnen clubs), the Burschenschaften, that carried out imagined German Volk rituals in annual commemoration celebrations, at new specially commissioned memorial sites and ceremonies that reenacted significant events in German history such as the defeat of Napoleon. One of the first such meetings, during which the student disciples of Jahn burned un-German books, took place on Wartburg castle in Thuringia in 1817.
Jahn's Turnen method promised individual and communal liberation: from French tyranny, from civil constraints, from ill health, from loneliness, and from loss of a sense of belonging—in a world turned upside-down by the industrial revolution, mechanization, secularization, urbanization and alienation, the Turn associations were havens of certainty, safe hierarchy, and historical lineage and provided a purposeful engagement for the national community.
Turnen required a special space in which the exercises were carried out and community law was spoken (Jahn Reference Jahn1810, 233f.). The first gymnastics area, with boundaries in and equipped with gymnastics apparatus was built just outside of Berlin on the Hasenheide in 1811. This space, designed by Jahn based on ancient Germanic tribal knowledge and condensed into the law of ancient runes, provided the living area for the community; there the group merged into a community. It was the space where members of the community could communicate, where new jurisdiction was conceived, where the new order was practiced, the new rules accepted and absorbed into the body. It was fenced in and not accessible to everyone. Only community members had the right to enter and use such special, quasi-sacred space. Jahn's vision of this gymnastics space as practice grounds for a new German corporeal ideal was innovative. In a sense, he reversed the relationship of theory and practice. Practice, “doing” rather than ideas or “thinking,” would initiate political change. Political development needed to arise out of and be defined through deed and exercise. The leader—Jahn—had the theory, the community would internalize it through the implementation of gymnastics.
The gymnastics space had been separated, isolated, quite consciously and deliberately, from the social reality of Prussia. The Code Napoleon, imposed on the European territories occupied by French troops would not be applicable there. Against universal suffrage, emancipation of the bourgeois under the banner of equality, liberty, and brotherhood, Jahn set the liberation of Prussia and the subjugation of everything non-German under specifically German legislation. Guiding ethics were derived from Protestantism. Christianity, for Jahn, had to be reinstated as public transcendental religion. Of course, this protestant interpretation of Christian theology declared Judaism anti-Christian and therefore anti-German (Jahn Reference Jahn1810, 153f). Against the secular drive of the French Republic Jahn stressed the inherent Christian, Protestant-Lutheran nature of his German state; in fact, real Christianity was Germanic (Jahn Reference Jahn1810, 130, 154). That stance excluded not only the hated French, but also Jews and Catholics from state affairs. The gymnastics space as true German runic space thus offered itself as practice grounds for the transformation of the civil public sphere into a Germanic national sphere. The German community of gymnasts not only opposed civil society but practiced its destruction. Once that was accomplished, civil society would be replaced with Jahn's ideal German Lutheran state.
Though the movement sequences, the actual exercises, underwent changes during the nineteenth century, the principles hardly did: deeply embedded in Turnen was the conviction that movement could only be done properly if the person doing the exercise believed in the principles and wholly committed himself (or herself) to them. Muscular movement was not only dependent on anatomical control or repeated training but on surrender to the rules of the community. The battles around the Turnen practice, the correct and faithful rendition of certain exercises and the attempt to keep them pure ran through the nineteenth century. This is not the place to elaborate on these fights, but they had to do with the notion that Jahn's community principle with all implications of space, belief, leadership, nationalism, etc. needed to remain core values. If meaning and ethics were lost or diluted, physical practice could no longer claim the tradition of Turnen.Footnote 6
In writings on modern gymnastics and modern dance of the early twentieth century there are few references to Jahn. But most gymnastics manuals refer to their exercise routines as Turnen; from the mid-nineteenth century on men as well as women were integrated into the movement. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, who educated many of the modern German gymnasts and dancers who enthusiastically joined the Nazi cause, spoke and wrote of Turnen and gymnastics (Cf. Jaques-Dalcroze, Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1907)Footnote 7 ; Karl Storck (the anti-Semitic music and dance theorist; cf. Dahm Reference Dahm2007, 185; Schenk Reference Schenk and Knolle1999, 125–166), who commented on Jaques-Dalcroze's school in Hellerau continued the terminology of Turnen and gymnastics from 1903 on (cf. Storck Reference Storck1903 and Reference Storck1912),Footnote 8 and Rudolf Bode also used the terminology beginning in 1913 (Bode Reference Bode1933b) as did F. H. Winther in Reference Winther1922. Rudolf Lämmel (Lämmel Reference Lämmel1928, 12–15)Footnote 9 specifically referred to Friedrich Ludwig Jahn as well as his innovative Turnen practice. Laban represented his movement concept in the Deutscher Gymnastik Bund [German Gymnastics Association] from 1925 on (Wedemeyer-Kolwe Reference Wedemeyer-Kolwe2004, 52, 424) and used the terminology of Turnen in several of his books (Laban Reference Laban1926a). In 1992 Kurt Peters reconsidered the Jahn initiative and drew a comparison between the physical education of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and that of the early twentieth century; he underlined an important continuity in the educational impact that the early gymnastics systems made (Peters Reference Peters and Oberzaucher-Schüller1992, 6; Wobbe Reference Wobbe and Oberzaucher-Schüller1992, 25–33; Toepfer Reference Toepfer1997)Footnote 10
If we compare Jahn's theory and practice with that of the rhythmic gymnasts and the modern dancers, the similarities are striking. The organizational structure and the launching of nationwide networks followed that of Jahn's Turn associations.Footnote 11 All the gymnastics clubs and schools were based on the promise of liberation; they demanded a pledge to adhere to the rules and values of the community and its movement system. At the end turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, liberation from constraints imposed by “civilization” and the return to “nature” dominated. The new groups articulated their own language (the Turner greeting formula from 1817 on was Gut Heil!), designed their own dress codes, specific meeting rituals, and rules of behavior for the gymnastics space but also for wider society. They invented a history with a tradition and with origins that lay in the dark and distant past. They often began as secretive organizations but sought to establish nationwide institutions. Relics of that secretive nature often lingered in the gymnastics groups and Laban's movement choirs, with a small group of initiated teachers or instructors who carried the burden of knowledge, who delivered the message to the group, and who had to keep the mission pure. Lucia Ruprecht has noted that “dancers are conditioned in Laban's early writings by the reactive rather than active character of their permeability towards their environment” (Ruprecht Reference Ruprecht2015, 36). I would extend this insight: the reactive and preconceived conditioning of Laban's dancers, particularly in the movement choirs, never really changed.
Like many of the gymnastics groups and the Laban dance groups or movement choirs, these associations were influenced by cultlike characteristics. They thought on a grand scale—rescue of the nation—and attempted national reform through reform of the entire education system. They addressed social renewal, intended to replace society with community (the distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft articulated by Ferdinand Tönnies in 1887; Baxmann Reference Baxmann2000), and envisaged a grand new order of social relations. They had to delineate a specific space, just as Jahn had done with the Turnplatz, in which the community moved together to distinguish itself from the degeneracy of theater institutions or ballet studios. The living space of gymnastics and modern dance, as that of Jahn and Turnen, was always run according to special rules. Anyone who was declared an enemy was not allowed to enter. None of these gymnastics or dance schools were inclusive or egalitarian. They were intolerant and did not allow criticism or dissent (Karina and Kant Reference Karina and Kant2004). One example: Laban never forgave Böhme (Reference Böhme1928), one of his most devoted disciples and influential dance critic for the publication of Entsieglung der Geheimnisse: Zeichen der Seele, which revealed insights into Laban's creative process and Masonic past. Böhme mentioned that Laban hated him henceforth and predicted that madness punished those who betrayed secrets (Böhme Reference Böhme1932).
Out of the interchange between the principles of space and community emerged the various formal visions of the gymnasts, dancers, choreographers, and pedagogues. A separate, sacred space was demarcated within a specific geographical area and then populated by the community. Once the space had been defined, the community could act and live within it. Specific vocabulary and languages, rituals, and symbols that would maintain sameness of the groups could be developed. The belief in a cause that drove the community toward self-recognition and self-realization also made possible a carefully constructed historical trajectory that redefined present and future. Such projections of space and time made individual life choices within the group possible. Ideology and aesthetic structure thus found their explicit form and physical expression and emerged in and through movement.
In order to demonstrate the persistence of this ideology every one of its elements has to be followed in practice through the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Here I sketch only one example of the evolution of an aesthetic category in movement: the aesthetic of walking and its realization in the dance genre of the Reigen. The Reigen, integrated into Jahn's movement concepts, became the summary of German ancestral honesty, continuity, and truth, an original German dance with ancient roots. This is another moment of “invented tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger Reference Hobsbawm and Ranger1992), i.e., the deliberate attempt to identify a movement genre and its formal structure as German and juxtapose it to any non-Germanic artistic utterance. Jahn defined it against international dance practices, particularly French ballet. His contemporaries, the Grimm brothers, on the other hand, saw it much more generally as a row dance that reached back to the ancient Greek chorus and was recorded as a simple dance welcoming spring in the fashion of the olden days (Grimm Reference Grimm and Grimm1854–1961) In the Grimm version the Reigen was not specifically German, but Jahn insisted that it was. The brothers also recorded the word Turnen and attributed the word to Jahn. They pointed out that it was “allegedly” an old German term and could be traced to earlier sources only in those that Jahn himself had supplied (Grimm Reference Grimm and Grimm1854–1961).
Walking and the Reigen
Jahn's gymnastics space had been created according to ideological and political conceptions concerning the German people and a German state. As mentioned, this space initially represented the unity of ancient German practices (inscribed and transported over centuries in runic sources) and modern statehood. At the same time, it acted as counterproposal to the Napoleonic civic and republican state and attempted its forceful removal. The new space needed protection from hostile influences as well as constant internal readjustment in order to rationalize its rejection of the external belief system. The gymnastics routines, invented to instill patriotic feelings and educate a German fighting force, were well established by 1819 when the whole practice was forbidden in several states as response to the assassination of playwright August von Kotzebue on March 23, 1819, by Burschenschaft member and gymnast Karl Ludwig Sand. The ban experienced its fiercest implementation in Jahn's beloved Prussia. Jahn was denounced as a “demagogue”Footnote 12 and placed under arrest. The Turnen project was on hold. Though it was not banned in all German states, it did not flourish throughout Germany until after 1842 when the last prohibition was lifted. Jahn spent five years in several prisons and was only released after he promised not to teach any of his ideas. Nevertheless, Jahn kept the Turnen system alive during these years of isolation. He wrote new pamphlets and reedited the Turnen manual. Very gradually, the Turnen practice, which had many defenders in high office and was still deemed an articulation of German liberation ideals, was integrated into Prussian schooling. In 1840 Jahn was rehabilitated by the Prussian king, and in 1848 he was elected to the first German parliament at Frankfurt as representative of the center-right-wing conservative national interest. He now advocated the most reactionary political state organization possible: hereditary emperorship. The Turnen movement (meanwhile relatively independent of Jahn, run by his students and developing a gigantic national network) preserved its status as symbol of national liberation and shaped social interaction in the German states.
In the Turnkunst manual, Jahn set out gymnastics exercises, the first and most basic of which was “Gehen”—walking. Throughout his book, Jahn emphasized the importance of simple, “natural” forms of movement, above all Gehen and Laufen (Jahn Reference Jahn1828, 5–15), walking and running, and classified them as essential exercises that supplied the basis for everything else (Jahn Reference Jahn1816, xii). All other exercises were dependent on the ability to walk properly: upright, with a sense of pace, duration, length of step, and adaptation to conditions of the landscape. He stressed the naturalness of posture: the steady, straight way of the foot slightly turned out hitting the ground, the light swinging movement of the lower arms. Walking had to be practiced from childhood on to instill a correct and healthy way of moving and to make the walker feel comfortable carrying weights. Jahn distinguished between walking, running, racing, creeping, jumping, swinging, hanging, and balancing. After these fundamental walking skills had been mastered, exercises could be done on the apparatuses (Jahn Reference Jahn1816, 3–6). Walking was the basis for coordinating individual body movements as well as for synchronizing and disciplining moving bodies in the group.
Whereas Jahn's first 1816 book of the Turnen manual condemned dance, later editions modified his stance. German dancing, together with Turnen, now became the antidote to French ballet and supported the gymnastics cause in a substantial way. Jahn began to revive the old Reigen, the ancient German dances, and suggested dancing the Reigen during the commemorative events and during national festivals (Jahn Reference Jahn1816, xvi).
In further editions of Deutsche Turnkunst from 1847 on, we find Jahn's renewed musings on the Reigen. The Reigen was supposed to transport the purity and naturalness of German movement. It was combined with so-called folk songs and imitated so-called folk dances. Jahn had traced the dance back to ancient Germanic tribal customs:
In past centuries, Reigen were collective step and dance movements that everyone used to form long rows and move in lines in one direction or in circles. Sometimes counterdirectional groups assembled but all followed the leader moving. Most times one sang together or had someone sing for all. (Jahn Reference Jahn1847, 117)
From the mid- nineteenth century on, with the intention to modernize and bring up to date his gymnastic system, the Reigen appears as an additional educational tool, alongside singing, hiking, and playing group games. Henceforth, the Reigen's integration into modern gymnastics and modern dance was accepted. From a historiographical perspective, the Reigen helps establish a direct line from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Integrated into the dance form of the Reigen is the specific movement of walking that Jahn had advocated as exercise and that imbued active patriotic value and had to be identified as a primary form of spatial appropriation. The Reigen and gymnastics within a demarcated gymnastics space and walking, hiking, and game playing outside of it, imparted the movement forms that still embodied nationalist ideals. The Reigen evolved from supplementary exercises to Turnen in 1816 into an independent aesthetic dance form.
By 1847 the gymnastics movement had gone through several stages: in 1818 ca. 12,000 men from all social spheres belonged to gymnastics groups; starting in 1819 the movement was banned in Prussia as subversive activity; in 1842 it was rehabilitated and introduced into the Prussian school curriculum. By 1847, ca. 90,000 enlisted Turner were enrolled, and Turnen presented a major force in the public social organization of the masses in Germany (cf. Wedemeyer-Kolwe Reference Wedemeyer-Kolwe2004).
In the mid-nineteenth century Adolf Spiess (1810–1858) adapted Jahn's principles and fought for the introduction of gymnastics curricula into Swiss and German schools. Spiess's last written work was a collection of songs and dances for the physical education of girls in Schulturnen (published posthumously, Wassmannsdorff Reference Wassmannsdorff1869). Here the dance genre Reigen or round or row dance was a tool for formal structuring of the masses that had entered gymnastics. With music and dance Spiess inserted levels of aesthetic meaning and structure into methodical physical exercises. He freely expanded principles and means that Jahn had also employed. The Reigen now, though still with ancient mythical origins, was defined as a dance genre again, with aesthetic properties that could be written down, and as art form, the Reigen was beneficial in gymnastics and dance instruction.
Spiess understood that in dance one could either emphasize technical ability or structural regularity: with the same set of exercises, he could direct pupils either to dance or to gymnastics, since both represented different aspects of a similar physical education—they were free exercises (Freiübung). Both also defined the structural and methodological relationships among those who moved. He wrote of these movements as connected to order (Ordnungsbeziehungen) because they established and authorized order and were rehearsals for later social orientation. We meet the term Ordnungsbeziehung again in the writings of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze who followed Spiess's experience and integrated the latter's Reigen compositions as well as the rhythmic march into his own system.Footnote 13
As mentioned above, Laban used the Turnen terminology in several of his books. The first sentence of Gymnastik und Tanz (Laban Reference Laban1926a, 7) reads: “The foundations of all gymnastics are calisthenics (Freiübungen). All other forms of gymnastics—Turnen—that employ some sort of apparatus are variations of calisthenics .” Laban here picked up terminology as well as ideas that first Jahn and then his devotee Adolf Spiess had devised. Laban not only copied the entire structure of childhood movement education from Spiess's work or from other Turner advocates such as Carl Euler, but he also lifted the idea of song and dance that Spiess had taken from Jahn and had further modernized. By the 1860s and well into the 1910s the Reigen was part of the exercise and ceremonial presentations of many gymnastics schools during official events. Laban appropriated the genre of the Reigen and redefined it within his movement choir practices. He also made sure that his affiliation with the gymnastics movement did not break off: he, Hertha Feist, or other students, taught classes in Tänzerische Körperbildung [Dance as Physical Education] at the Berlin Hochschule für Leibesübungen [the Berlin College of Physical Education] in the 1920s and 1930s (Schöning Reference Schöning1929–1933).
The basic movement patterns of the Reigen with walking [Gehen] and procession-like movement [Schreiten] permeated most gymnastics and modern dance methods and many choreographic works; we see them applied as thought structure in Laban's book Die Welt des Tänzers (Reference Laban1920), in Wigman's choreography Reigen (Reference Winther1922), where walking sequences established the spatial patterns and included the formation of rows of dancers holding hands and snaking through the landscape. The Totentanz (Dance of Death, 1926) was also conceived as a Reigen (Manning Reference Manning2006, 123). The Orff school contribution to the Olympic Opening Ceremony 1936 consisted of Reigen performances by several thousand girls (Organisationskomittee 1937, 577). We see walking as the basic instruction element in the gymnastics schools of Mensendieck, Bode, and Klamt, and of the dance schools of Laban's and Wigman's students such as Palucca. The latter built her entire teaching system on different ways of walking and maintained this method throughout her pedagogic career and throughout the twentieth century. Jahn had introduced walking as an essential German form of movement, and like Jahn, the dance and gymnastics schools advertised walking as “natural” and nonartificial—the movement of the folk (as opposed to the artificial body stance taken in ballet or social dancing). Walking was understood as a type of language through which the people could express themselves as a national entity. This becomes blatantly obvious when walking, as moving one step at a time, already the essential foundation of modern dance, is applied to a racial concept of movement: “The picture, which we have of the most natural movement for the white race, is roughly the sideward movement” (Laban Reference Laban1928). Walking, stepping forward, and stepping to the side constitute natural building blocks of everyday and aesthetically formed movement.
Early nineteenth-century ideas, those of Jahn, for instance, consistently were rediscovered, redefined, and expanded throughout the century; the new element of racial rationalization was added to the already existing nationalist conceptions of human social order with an orientation toward a powerful national community. “Natural,” “strong,” and “healthy” as defined by Jahn were basic categories that enabled and justified an anti-enlightenment interpretation of human social order. Jahn had a clear concept of nationality yet only a vague idea of race. The notion of racial integrity and the need to separate and protect the leading white race from inferior elements implanted itself into German thought more strongly from the mid-nineteenth century on. Richard Wagner's essays of the revolutionary years around 1848, Kunst und Revolution (Reference Wagner1849), Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849), Oper und Drama (1851), and, above all, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Reference Wagner1850, published under a pseudonym and in Reference Wagner1869 published under his own name), sketch what a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art,” for a specifically German people should look like and how it could activate a people to determine its own destiny.
Wagner's essays, which preceded Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (Reference Darwin1859) by several years, already operated with the conception of a homogenous German Volk and the racial category of the Jew as the alien and destructive force amidst the German people. Wagner's combination of aesthetics with the German national cause, in fact, his view of aesthetics as the dynamic motivator of national consciousness, strengthened the existing national model for a modern and German concept of art, not only in music or opera, but also in dance, literature, painting, sculpture, and other arts. Whether in Isadora Duncan's entire artistic approachFootnote 14 or Jaques-Dalcroze's writings (Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1907 and Reference Jaques-Dalcroze1915),Wagner's theories became an integral part of German aesthetics, either as a positive or negative factor. Jahn's theory concerning movement as original source of national purity was neither discarded nor replaced. It was amplified and gained new momentum with the new “scientific” insights of Darwinism.
After Charles Darwin's theory of human evolution found its application in the social sciences and made its way into aesthetics, once the eugenic and racial propensities of physical culture were discovered, many gymnastics strands, the so-called Spielbewegung (translated as “playground movement” by Fred Eugene Leonard, Reference Leonard1918), and in the early 1900s also modern dance shifted even more toward national-conservative inclinations. As a result, the concept of evolution was regarded as a means to drive survival of the fittest with the implication that “races” fight over living space and for their purity or that human beings are nothing but biological entities, living organisms, and that societies need to recognize and incorporate these scientific facts and align their politics accordingly. What we call social Darwinism determined much of the public debate in the late nineteenth century. Community with its living space increasingly represented the organic, natural type of national social formation. Conceptions of individual health inextricably linked to the health of the communal body ranged from interventions through vaccination programs to sterilization and abortion prescriptions to physical education that supposedly offered preventative strategies. Jahn's first moving community, the Turn-Gemeinde, based on the unity of state and German Volk, evolved into the Gemeinschaft der Nationalität, the community of nationality (Jahn Reference Jahn1833, 3, 52), in the course of twenty years. Systematically the state became the vehicle for nationalism in its extreme interpretation until it lost its independence. It either disintegrated and reformed as a communal structure or served as negative template that had to be removed. For the gymnasts and modern dancers, the moving community, the Gemeinschaft of the German Volk in movement, had become the natural opposition to the state. The seeds had been sown by Jahn; Wagner's aesthetic racism pushed the whole idea further toward racial segregation and cleansing policies as theory. Then social Darwinist or eugenic racism redirected the efforts once more and provided practical solutions. Over the course of the nineteenth century movement as national expression increasingly became a means as well as the end of the project of finding a unique German bodily or physical symbol. The “Germanization” of movement, that has been the argument here, was a long-term endeavor.
By the early twentieth century, the early proponents of gymnastics and dance had become dedicated to racist and völkisch ideas. The Nazis gathered all the scattered, murky conceptions and aesthetics together and rearticulated them as a Germanic racist, destructive ideology. German modern dance and gymnastics found no problem with that and fitted themselves into the new National Socialist state. It was not one particular form that conveyed Nazi aesthetics; rather, it was movement or dance form as structural principle that coagulated ideas into physical presence. When we speak of embodiment, then form is the shape that ideas or an ideology take, and this shape is then projected onto the human body. Walking as the initial experience of communal and national physical realignment and control (perhaps one could even call it the basic technique of modern movement) and the Reigen as the formal structure containing walking together nurtured a particular historical lineage. Like Turnen, walking could be considered a means to blur the boundaries between real and imagined, between aesthetic, ideological, and political or between formal and structural. To repeat: Wigman rejected any external factors as relevant for absolute dance; “extradiegetic references” could play no active part in her art. If “extradiegetic references” thus were confined to the definition of the creators of modern German dance, they would not exist. Yet Laban's or Wigman's spatial or communal concepts are not “absolute”; they are dependent on social and cultural realities and become “extradiegetic” and unavoidable external forces that shape their dances. The relationship of ideology and form as interdependent and inseparable thus predisposes a Reigen, performed by Wigman or Laban's movement choir, to become a protofascist or Nazi work.
Nazi Dance Aesthetics
The complex legacy of German body culture had arrived at a moment when it could pass triumphantly into the main stream of Nazi culture. As historian David Welch pointed out, in 1933, “the ideology of National Socialism represented the triumph of a rejuvenated Germany, liberated from outdated fallacies of bourgeois liberalism or Marxist class war” (Welch Reference Welch2004, 233).
The National Socialist ascent to power, the Machtergreifung, was
more than simply a change of government: it represented the start of a revolution which would transform German society in accordance with their ideology [and] propaganda alone could not have sustained the Nazi Party and its ideology over a period of 12 years. … There is … considerable evidence to suggest that Nazi policies and propaganda reflected many of the aspirations of large sections of the population. (Welch Reference Welch2004, 216, 213)
This is precisely the point. The modern dance of Laban and Wigman had already adopted values and practices that could move easily and without friction into the new Nazi state and culture. Many dancers of the modern persuasion formed part of that enthusiastic populace; they had enhanced völkisch and eugenic ideas through their practice when they had been on the margins of German social reality. They would then join the majority of supporters during the Nazi years and were rewarded with good positions as they celebrated the new regime.
The dominance of Nazi-sanctioned aesthetic practices identified and excluded political and racial enemies. Nevertheless, “Nazi rule and society, as seen from the perspective of contemporary historiography, were of course much less homogenous than Benjamin's aestheticization thesis would suggest,” as Lutz Koepnick (Reference Koepnick1999, 52) pointed out when he revisited the aesthetic complexity in the Third Reich. That is important to keep in mind: the wide range of interpretative possibilities in all art forms and genres meant that an ideal vision of a Nazi art existed but that such a vision was a guiding principle and only partly permeated practical concerns and pragmatic programming. The interplay of violent cleansing of German art from “degenerate” art with the desire to continue great German artistic traditions dictated Nazi art practice. Not all modern dancers, of course, became adherents of Nazi ideology: those who followed left-wing ideas used choreography and performance to articulate their opposition to the system. The traditions of cabaret and nightclub performance were also questioned by the Nazis and forced the performers of these genres to rethink their place in society and their aesthetics. Some emigrated, for example, Valeska Gert, Gertrud Bodenwieser, Jean Weidt, and Kurt Jooss; some joined the antifascist resistance, for example, Oda Schottmüller, and others were murdered in a concentration camp, for example, Tatjana Barbakoff and Sasha Leontieff.
Many modern dancers saw the rise of Nazism as their opportunity to realize their dreams on a nationwide scale with state support. The Nazi political system would afford them their rightful place in the new state. They had worked hard for the rejuvenation and regeneration of Germany; the Nazi revolution was their revolution, and the Nazis were asked to acknowledge the substantive role that modern dance and gymnastics should play in establishing the new regime. The dancers had already contributed, to varying degrees and in various ways, to the articulation of all of the elements that constituted Nazi ideology:
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• To the concept of a homogenized community that became the Volksgemeinschaft, the people's community with its structure a guarantee for the creation of the “master race”Footnote 15 - To the community that was led by the leader. Under Hitler leadership was turned into a structural principle: the Führerprinzip or leader principle
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• To the inherent racism of the Volksgemeinschaft, itself displaying purity, unity, and strength of the healthy body as a racialized entity
Modern dance in Germany had also combated the opposite of that healthy body and demanded the elimination of all enemies, the “degenerate species”’ and “unhealthy bodies.” Anti-Semitism and anti-Slavism were applied to justify and fight the “degenerate” Jewish and Slavic elements; their annihilation became a necessity for the protection of the master race and was pursued with social Darwinist justifications and social hygiene measures.
Moreover, modern dance had contributed to the anti-Marxism, anticommunism, anti-Bolshevism and the elimination of all political enemies, represented in the modern German movement culture in its urge to complete the destruction of criticism and opposition. That same movement culture was part of the economics (cf. Barkai Reference Barkai1990) and culture of a nationalist space, the Lebensraum and the resulting Lebensraumpolitik, the politics and geopolitics of living space, and of the cultivation of and reliance on national/regional and local Germanic culture that grows out of German soil (Blut und Boden).
The gymnastics and dance groups set themselves apart from society by strengthening the communal structures or movement choirs. Most of these groups and schools were run according to a strict leader principle. They incorporated eugenic concepts, which was reflected in language as well as bodily practice: organic bodies, seeking harmony with nature, could be kept healthy only by eliminating all impure, sick, or degenerate influences. The gymnastics schools and dance communities strongly believed in the unity of practice and performance spheres as living space. This space made possible the emergence of the wholesome body and the harmonic community of movers. Laban's spatial concept that cultivated a communal living space within the sacred icosahedron and the spatial aura carried around by every dancer are important examples of the realization of a living and movement space for an imagined community in the twentieth century. His space was not merely a narratological space to observe for entertainment or instruction but one in which the community narrated its own identity by living it. Imagined space materialized in the true sense of the word—it became physical, bodily matter. Blood-and-soil policies were equally vigorously cultivated by many groups. Bode, Klamt, Wigman, and Laban emphasized the close link of movement and soil, the necessary connection of body, exercise, and German soil.Footnote 16 Bode and Laban believed in the necessity of cleansing German popular culture and encouraged a return to German folk customs. In due course that would set them against one another, and under the Nazis they confronted each other as bitter enemies, vying for supremacy and leadership in the entire modern dance community. Bode aligned himself with the supposedly already existing true German folk culture whereas Laban suggested that his movement choirs, as new German folk expression, would replace the decadence of consumerist entertainment. With the renewed orientation of the Reigen in the way Jahn had suggested and with the prominence of walking as basic element of German movement (in contrast to the “pas” of ballet) and the appropriation of space as outlined above, there came other aesthetic developments that supported first völkisch and then Nazi ideals, in particular, the consistent search for beauty in muscular strength and health, the exploration of the natural in the body tied to organic functions, such as blood flow, breathing, digestion, or the workings of other internal organs. In addition, there was the rediscovery of the tragic and heroic, the concept of individual and communal sacrifice performed in responsorial interaction, with emotion and body-intuition placed above rationality and rhythm circumscribing a specific time related to historic space. The perception of modern dance in opposition to ballet also belongs into this catalogue, with all relevant social and artistic connotations.
Immediately after the Nazi ascent to power, dancers, choreographers, and writers issued statements in support of the new regime. Many outlined why modern German dance was particularly suited to advance the values and ethics of Nazism; most argued from ideological positions: race, blood-and-soil interdependency, community, leadership, and the healthy body.
Fritz Böhme, one of Laban's great supporters and journalist at the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, wrote to Joseph Goebbels and reminded him of the qualities of dance as a carrier of racial purity. “Dance is a race question,” summarized Böhme in a succinct phrase: “There is no international dance form that is above race. Where dance is so cultivated, it attacks the roots and the authentic expression of a people” (Karina and Kant Reference Karina and Kant2004, 197).
Rudolf Bode declared early in 1933:
More profound than thinking is the bodily-spiritual that is tied to the origins of the soil [Heimat], to the mother's womb and the circulating blood stream. Only a physical education that addresses this duality of soil and blood will be able to survive in the future. With a mighty leap National Socialism has pulled young Germans out of the dull caves of unnecessary scholarliness and has put them out into the strong wind, into rain and sunshine and this almighty stream of the breath of nature. (Bode Reference Bode1933a, 2)
Hans Brandenburg stated in Reference Brandenburg and von Laban1934: “German art dance was from the beginning a community art form, an artistic precursor of that Volksgemeinschaft, which has begun to realise itself in these days” (Brandenburg Reference Brandenburg and von Laban1934, 57). And Mary Wigman in her book on German dance in 1936 explained:
The oft-abused term community [Heimat in original] does not denote a delusion. We do not err when we ascribe to our times the power of community. At the core of community in its most productive meaning lies an idea that is accepted by all participants. Community demands leadership and recognition of the necessity of leadership. The masses that refer only to themselves can never constitute a community. Work within and towards the community means to serve the work, to serve the idea. (Wigman Reference Wigman1936, 64)
Laban made walking and row dancing the basic principles of all German dance education in his proposals for education and examination standards submitted to and accepted by the Ministry of Propaganda in 1934 (Karina and Kant Reference Karina and Kant2004, 204–205) He envisaged that his movement choirs would replace all “degenerate” social dancing in the Third Reich and also suggested that his movement choirs should be integrated into the Nazi Thing plays (ibid., 221).
Some scholars argue that the statements after January 1933 were born out of immense pressure and that all artists were forced into collaboration. That is incorrect. Except for those in immediate danger, the political and “racial” enemies, most German dancers and choreographers were eager to join the cause voluntarily and to support the regime. Most dance and gymnastics that carried prototypes of völkisch concepts became part of a deliberate Nazi aesthetic when the representatives of the many strands of movement cultures joined the various Nazi organizations, associations, institutions, and ministerial entities.
In order to counter the claim that coercion and force were used and responsible for the superficial integration of modern dance and gymnastics into the Nazi system, we have to look at the decades before the establishment of the Nazi regime. German dancers and German gymnasts carefully invented their past and in particular rejected the association with ballet. Ballet acted as the negative template against which everything in relation to modern dance was defined and developed. Rudolf von Laban was clearest and most decisive when he declared that dance had to be created anew (Laban Reference Laban1920, 24). In the speeches to the participants of the Dance Congress in Essen in 1928, Laban and Wigman demanded that the theater be cleansed of the old and rejuvenated by their own dance (this is but one example):
Only the dance that is called modern today can fulfil the demands of a theatre dance of the future. We want to conquer the entire theatre with our dance gesture. This seemingly arrogant demand embodies the highest fulfilment of the dancing being and the deepest modesty within itself. We will not be contented with partial aesthetical pleasure, which the theatre offers today. … We want not only danced theatre—we want rhythmically moved and vibrating theatre. (Müller and Stöckemann 1992, 82)
The past was conjured up as a powerful but not historically verifiable construct. This construction had to eliminate and “forget” as many aspects of movement in the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries as it had deliberately to invent new origins. It had to define the historical enemy and prepare its destruction. That is another outstanding feature of the gymnastics and dance modernists: the demand not only to reject or replace an existing practice, but to prepare its elimination. Ballet—foreign, French, un-German—had to be cut out of German theater culture. Ballet was declared un-German by critic Fritz Böhme in 1933 (Böhme Reference Böhme1933). One of the very few Laban students who incorporated ballet and theater dance into his own style, Kurt Jooss, contradicted Laban as well as Wigman in his speech at the Dancer's Congress in Reference Jooss, Müller and Stöckemann1928 (Müller and Stöckemann Reference Müller and Stöckemann1993, 76). Joss emigrated in 1933 and with him the possibility of compromise vanished. On the whole, there was no tolerance or notion of coexistence with other performance traditions (Wigman Reference Wigman1929). By the 1910s and 1920s modern dance disciples even felt the need to distance themselves from their gymnastics cousins and thus also denied that common past (Wigman Reference Wigman1921).
The Nazis promoted Friedrich Ludwig Jahn to the status of honorary National Socialist and pioneer of the völkisch cause. Though he had never left German public consciousness, though his books were constantly reprinted, he rose to new political and cultural significance, much like composer Richard Wagner. Jahn's theories and practices gained ever more favor. His concepts of patriotic gymnastics, of a space in which the nationalist community would congregate, his conviction that Germany required a community of healthy bodies, and all his other beliefs had infiltrated most movement systems that cultivated a German essence. These cultural traits distinguished German gymnastics and German dance from other modernist aspirations.
I have argued that a direct historical line winds through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Yet that development is also much more contradictory, which makes the orientation toward eugenic and racial theories in gymnastics, with the female body at its center, in the later nineteenth century truly extraordinary. Jahn's system shaped mainstream German culture; it moved from the margins of Prussian reality to the center of German politics. Considered something of a joke by Jahn's contemporaries, the Humboldts and the Grimms, for example, Jahn's system nevertheless conquered the public sphere within a few decades (Habermas Reference Habermas1962) and infiltrated the educational sector. Once Jahn's gymnastics entered the state school system, his theories encountered a powerful corrective, namely, the ministries of culture and education. Gymnastics no longer undermined but confirmed what the state considered national preference – that could be militant preparation for war or egalitarian schooling. Someone like Spiess could “pacify” the militaristic tendency and add female instruction to Jahn's male dominance. In the 1880s and 1890s, another Jahn disciple, Carl Euler, could remilitarize the Reigen and orientate it toward the war games played in the Turn associations.Footnote 17
The gymnastics schools encouraged the racially clean organism of the female body and its ability to procreate with exercises—formal methods—that addressed “natural” muscular strength and breathing abilities as purification mechanisms. Laban's movement choirs with their spatial and communal properties were a different formal structure. They could fit into the Nazi Thing play or stand on their own. But they exemplified one version of a Nazi “living space” and one specific Nazi configuration of community. Wigman's choric works with their pronounced relationship between chorus and leader were another. Choreographers and dancers, by working in the Third Reich, validated and rationalized movement form as part of the ideological approach that would authenticate and not undermine or contradict the Nazi worldview. They found the means of translation; they did not need to incorporate all elements of Nazi ideology into their works of art to demonstrate their support of the regime. Nor did they have to state their intentions explicitly. Control over adherence or deviation was undertaken by the artists themselves in the various organizations and institutions that the Nazi administration designed and filled with active artists. The art of movement became attached to Nazism by artists accepting that particular perspective as frame for artistic creation—after many of the artists had contributed to the formation of the ideological tenets of Nazism in the decades before 1933.
The process of the aestheticization of ideology as well as the search for relevant formal structures began long before the Nazis came to power. It was a dynamic process. As long as dancers think that they are immune to the contamination of ideology and that form is independent, a danger persists. Perspectives on space and community, on leadership and group coherence, can change with different ideological outlooks. But they can also remain embedded in works of art if the ideology of Nazism is not recognized and rejected, if change is not acknowledged and understood as necessary reflection on the past of movement, gymnastics, and dance.
