Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture,

19101935
Acknowledgments
A book of this magnitude appears because many people in many ways participated in its development
and
production. They participated, often with lavish generosity, because they were eager for a history of
German body
culture to be told on a larger scale than previously attempted. They wanted a history that revealed the
contributions to
German body culture of people whose achievements were much more significant than their obscurity in
archives
would indicate. The adventure of producing this book therefore brought me into contact with numerous
people who
made extraordinary efforts and sometimes great personal sacrifices to help me solve problems, answer
questions, or
excavate valuable but barely accessible evidence.
Professor Anton Kaes at the University of California, Berkeley, showed tenacious faith in the project
from the
beginning, when I participated in his 1991 NEH summer seminar on the Weimar Republic, "Modernity
and Its
Discontents." Tony has been a decisive figure in getting this story told. I have never met anyone in
academia who has
been so successful in motivating me to exceed all expectations of myself and to reach my potential as a
scholar. Ed
Dimendberg, humanities editor for the University of California Press, also made a powerful contribution
in shaping
the book. With a bit of help from Tony, he wisely, patiently, and gracefully got me to shape a much
stronger and
sharper book.

Numerous institutions and organizations provided very important support for the project. These include
the National
Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the German Academic
Exchange
Service, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University (a Rothschild Fellowship). A sabbatical granted
by the
College of Humanities and the Arts at San Jose State University allowed me to spend several months in
European
archives. The dean of the college, Jack Crane, also

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I begin with this image partly because it is a typical specimen of German modernist attitudes toward the
body in the
1920s and partly because the historical identity of the image is also typical. The image appears in a book
published in
1927, Tanzkunst und Kunsttanz, by Max Adolphi and Arno Kettmann, but the photograph is by Alfred
Ohlen. The
book consists almost entirely of Ohlen's beautiful photo portraits of female dancers from Ida Herion's
dance group in
Stuttgart. Two of the photos show dancers posing in the garden of a villa, and one depicts a male
dancer. The
remaining sixty pictures show different dancers in different costumes (or nude) assuming different
poses against the
white background. None of the dancers' identities is known. Indeed, almost nothing is known of Ida
Herion, and
Kettmann's four pages of text, completely given over to a glorification of "dance art and art dance"
generally ("living
body feeling and consciousness"), provide no information about either Herion or the people in the
images. The title
page merely remarks that Adolphi ''supervised" the poses Ohlen photographed. Thus, though the image
of dance

casts a strong feminine aura through the profuse depiction of female bodies, all linked to Ida Herion's
group, the view
of dance is largely male. But the superior elegance of the photographs is self-sufficient: the bewitching
beauty of the
images, bodies, and poses implies that the reader does not need to know anything about the dancers,
the imagemakers,
or even dance itself to find dance a liberating and satisfying vocation. And though female readers are far
more likely than males to act upon the impulse to make dance a vocation, male readers can hardly help
feeling that a
woman's power to dance, to assert herself physically with the complexity of signification I have ascribed
to Figure 1,
is a modern, self-determined condition of her desirability.
The uniquely exquisite charm of Tanzkunst und Kunsttanz should not obscure the realization that the
book

Critiques of German Critical Writing

With dance theory continually drifting toward metaphysical idealism, it was not surprising that dance
criticism,
responses to dances themselves, unfolded informally and abundantly in a highly idiosyncratic,
fragmented fashion
from a multitude of perspectives. Taken together, this body of criticism implied that, contrary to much
of the
theorizing, the value of dance, as a performance reality, was quite relative and that dance had little
power to unify
either perception or the language used to articulate its value. Laban probably assumed that the
development of an
accurate dance notation system would have the effect of getting people to see dance more acutely and
uniformly, but
this possibility soon proved an illusion.
At the 1927 Magdeburg Congress, Hans W. Fischer spoke on the theme of dance criticism. He observed
that dance

criticism was no longer "completely dilettantish," despite the proliferation of "pseudo-critical" dance
picture books
distracting the public from a deeper level of discourse. He focused less on principles of dance criticism
than on the
qualifications of the dance critic, who could not shift from opera, theatre, or ballet reviewing as easily as
editors
seemed to think. ''One must be born to dance criticism," he asserted, and the born critic viewed art as
an "eternally
new beginning." This value remained obscure when dogmatic principles and distinctions prevented, for
example, the
critic from appreciating Wigman's use of a cabaret device in an otherwise somber dance or from
regarding social
dance forms as seriously as ballet, which Fischer believed "no longer has a future." Stable critical
principles could
not accommodate the dynamism of modern dance culture. Already, critical language had become
banalized by the
misuse of such words as "absolute" and "cultic." The critic must bring to dance an "instinct" for
"eruptions" or
"blossomings": "One can not push the borders far enough, raise the challenge high enough, or fix the
responsibility
strictly enough. Because in the field of dance, so much is in flux, so much still unclarified and
controversial" (Die
Tat, 19/8, November 1927, 591596). Alfred Bratsch adopted a more cynical tone in a 1931 article on
dance criticism
for Schrifttanz, stating that most dance criticism served journalistic objectives before it served the

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The Myth of Primitivism

reveal

the relationship between primitivism, racism, and the idea of so-called Ethnic Arts thathas been
recently introduced in Britain; and it seems to me that the question of racism iscentral here. This is an
extremely difficult task, not because it has not been undertaken before in this context but
the attractiveness of being drawn into the rhetoric of anti-racistslogans and denunciation is enormous,
given the blessing it is receiving from somequarters that claim to be radical