The Weimar Revue by Peteer Jelavich

In the 1920s Berlin was still very concerned with maintaining its world city image. Before the war it could lay claim to this distinction by touting its own qualifications as a capital of modernity, a global leader in industry, commerce and consumerism. The disasters of the war and the inflation deprived the city of this distinction, and popular entertainment was forced to reformulate its metropolitan image. In the Weimar era the revues demonstrated their cosmopolitan allures not by touting Berlin, but rather by presenting an array of foreign numbers. This accounted for the major difference between pre-war and postwar revues. In both Wilhelmine and the Weimar eras, the revue form was deemed appropriate to the hectic and ever-changing nature of Berlin life. In terms of content, however, post war revues could no longer turn to Berlin itself for positive thematic images of modernity. They had to look abroad for such icons, and more often than not they turned to the United States. What Berlin claimed to be before the war, New York seemed to be thereafter: a hectic and mighty metropolis, a global center of production, finance, commerce, and consumerism.

The 1920s witnessed an Americanization of popular entertainment in Berlin. The music of the prewar revues had derived from waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, folk songs, and marches. Only occasionally would the tango, the Boston, the two-step, the cakewalk, or ragtime be added as exotic interludes. Paul Lincke, for example, wrote an ‘American Cake-Walk’ with the unfortunate title, ‘Coon’s Birthday  (1903), and it will be recalled that ‘Niggersongs” were performed at the Hungry Pegasus in 1901. Such works were inspired by the occasional appearance of black American troupes in Berlin variety shows at the turn of the century. After  the war, however, American music flooded the stages. The specifically Central European musical elements receded, and the melodies of revues came to be dominated increasingly by fox trot and jazz rhythms. Even successful popular composers like Nelson had to adopt the new idiom. An observer noted in 1926: ‘Just a operetta is defined musically by the three-quarter time of the waltz, the revue is characterized by two-quarter time, and more precisely by syncopation. A revue without syncopation seems almost unthinkable to us today.”

Although musical purists might dispute the degree to which Germany produced any true jazz, the shift in popular musical style was radically apparent. A reactionary composer like Hans Pfitzner contended that the ‘jazz-fox flood’ represented ‘the American tanks in the spiritual assault against European culture.” The shrill sound of the clarinet and the trumpet, the wailing of the saxophone, and the syncopated rhythms of the drums, banjo, and piano all seemed to portend a breakdown in the cultural order. The apparent wantonness of the dances that came with such music –the shimmy in the early twenties, the Charleston later in the decade – threatened to destroy the moral order as well. Yet what appalled the conservatives garnered applause from other circles. Writing in the Weltbuhne in 1921, Hans Siemsen applauded jazz for being ‘so completely undignified. It knocks down every hint of dignity, correct posture, and starched collars. Whoever fears making himself laughable cannot dance to it. The German high school teacher cannot dance it. The Prussian reserve officer cannot dance it.’ Given the ability of jazz dance to promote humanity, kindness, and humor and to destroy ‘stupidity, haughtiness, and dignity,’ Siemsen wanted to prescribe it for all public officials. Indeed, had it been introduced earlier, it might have saved Germany from war: ‘If only the Kaiser had danced jazz- then all of that would never have come to pass!’

For enthusiasts of jazz, and of American couture in general, blacks became symbols of a radically new cultural sensitivity. Although various forms of jazz and pseudo –jazz had been herd in dance halls and on records since the end of the war, Berliners had few opportunities to experience live performances by Americans until after 1924, since their was no financial incentive to perform in Germany until its currency had been stabilized. Two revues featuring American blacks made an especially big impression. The “Chocolate Kiddies’ troupe, featuring Sam Wooding playing music by Duke Ellington, appeared at Haller’s Admiralspalast in May 1925. Josephine Baker and Louis Douglas staged a show at Nelson’s theater the following January. The critical reception of these performances reflected the prevailing view that the United States was both the most modern and the most primitive of nations. Modernity was embodied in its technology; primitiveness was incorporated in its black population. Many reviewers  did not regard the latter supposition as insulting, since they imputed to blacks a vital energy lacking in decadent war-weary Europeans. Nevertheless, the discourse of writers putatively sympathetic to blacks was full of racial prejudices.

 

Since the turn of the century, it had been common for Germans to refer to American blacks as ‘coons’ and ‘niggers’. Even the Dadaist verse of George Grosz and Walter Mehring was replete with those words, albeit apparently without any ill intent, since the terms were used in contexts that approved of blacks and their culture. Not only were seemingly well-meaning Germans insensitive to the denigration and abuse embedded in those words; they also failed to note the more fundamental problems in their disquisitions on the “Africanness’ of American blacks. Many liberal German observers  attributed a primitive spontaneity to lacks, whose blood supposedly boiled from the heat of the ancestral jungle. A reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt, who applauded the ‘victory of negroid dance culture over the Viennese waltz,’ said Josephine Baker: ‘In her the wildness of her forefathers, who were transplanted from the Congo Basin to the Mississippi, is preserved most authentically; she breathes life, the power of nature, a wantonness that can hardly be contained.’ Oscar Bie, the respected dance critic of the Berliner Borsen-Courier, saw in her troupe ‘ the remains of genuine paganism, of idol worship, of grotesque orgies.’  He imputed a similar chthonic feeling to the Chocolate Kiddies, who expressed a ‘true joy of the earth drumming, shouting, dancing, singing, and jumping, totally devoid of message, just the earth itself.’ He considered their music ‘barbarically beautiful, full of primitive improvisations.’

At the same time that black entertainers were considered primevally primitive, they somehow seemed to be paradigmatically modern. Bie believed heir performances could serve as a model for the revitalization of Germany: ‘They have brought us our culture. Humanity has returned to its origins in the niggersteps, in the shaking and loosened bodies. Only that can help us, we who have become too erratic. It is the deepest expression of our innermost longing.” Such words echoed the works of the Expressionist artists a generation earlier, who had  displayed their desire for primitive authenticity by painting imaginary scenes of African dancers. While imputed  to blacks a vitality German’s lacked, Fred Hildenbrandt, a noted critic of the Berliner Tageblatt contended that their performances gave perfect expression to the actual condition of European civilization: ‘What is it other than the te\mpo of our times, these fast-paced wild times, whose symbol is truly embodied best of all in a rollicking negro theater.’ Hildenbrandt here echoes another cliché: that industrial and metropolitan civilization had stripped away cultural constraints and returned its citizens to a primitive wantonness. Count Harry Kessler, whose diaries provide one of the most perceptive accounts of Weimar Berlin, imagine a connection between ‘Africanness’ and modernity. After seeing Baker’s troupe at Nelson’s theater on February 17, 1926, he wrote:’ They are a cross between primeval forests and skyscrapers; likewise their music, jazz, its color and rhythms. Ultramodern and ultra-primitive.’

Josephine Baker was nonchalant about such verbiage. In her memoirs of 1928, she wrote: ‘In Berlin’s journals and newspapers they wrote that I was the embodiment of German ‘Expressionism” today, of German ‘Primitivism’ etc . . .Why not? And anyway, what is the meaning of all that?’ Despite such dismissive words, black entertainers were at least partially complicit in sustaining the belief that they represented primitive vitality. In the United States generations of black performers had been forced to conform to comic stereotypes expected by white audiences. When black troupes crossed the Atlantic, they had to take prevailing prejudices there into account. The Chocolate Kiddies and the Baker-Douglas revue were commercial ventures that toured Europe and presented clichés about America in general, and America blacks in particular. The shows staring Baker and Douglas, for example, featured scenes entitled ‘Steamboat Race on the Mississippi,’ ‘New York Skyscrapers,’ ‘Wedding in Charleston,’ ‘Florida Cabaret,’ ‘The Strutting Babies,’ and ‘Shake, Rattle, and Roll’. The Cholate Kiddies also exhibited cliché-ridden scenes of black American life.

While the black performers my have reinforced some stereotypes about their race, at times they succeeded in subverting those same images. Iwan Goll, a talented Expressionist writer ,took note of the self-parody involved in Baker’s ‘African’ numbers. He believed that there was something intentionally ludicrous in the fact that an urban black woman performed a ‘Dance of Savages’ while wearing a loincloth. Baker’s most obvious send-up of African clichés was also her most famous number: the dance in a banana skirt, which she performed during an appearance at the Theater des Westens in 1928. At the same time that black entertainers exploded stereotyped images of Africa, they also parodied European society and culture. Douglas performed what he considered ‘German’ ways of talking and walking, to the delight of his audience. He also danced a  number that parodied Pavlova’s rendition of Tchaikovsky’s dying swan. Such acts underscored the stiffness of Europeans and the artificiality of their culture.

Not all responses to black culture were sympathetic. Conservative defenders of European high culture like Pfitzner were horrified by Americanization in general and ‘negrification’ in particular. Right-wing hostility to blacks dated back to Imperial times, when the Reich had large colonial holdings in Africa. German rule was particularly harsh and provoked the Herero and Hottentot uprising in German Southwest Africa and the Maui-Maui revolt in German East Africa. Both were suppressed with tremendous bloodshed; tens of thousands of Hereros were massacred in what became the first instance of genocide in modern German history. Complaints in the Reichstag about such brutalities led to a furious parliamentary campaign in 1907, the so-called Hottentot election, in which Chancellor Bulow rallied nationalist support behind the colonial policies. It will be recalled that the popular soldiers’ song, ‘Annemarie,’ was written for the Metropol revue in the wake of the campaign.

The colonial experience generated a discourse on the necessity ofn protcting German culture from black barbarism. That ideology was resurrected in World War I, when German illustrated newspapers mocked the French use of black colonial troops. Photographs of African soldiers on the Western front were accompanied by captions implying that the French were importing barbarism onto European soil. After the war, hostility to these colonial; troops burst forth with a vengeance when the French station Senegalese and other black soldiers in the occupied Rhineland. Conservative Germans regarded that as an impossible humiliation, and spread rumors that African troops were systematically seducing, even raping, German women. This story, dubbed the ‘black outrage’, gained credence in many circles.

Rumors of ‘black outrage’ even affected the cabaret stage. In early 1922 the police banned two nude-show numbers involving  black men with white women. The Lola Bach Ballet, appearing in the Potpourri and Weisse Maus cabaet, included a dance duet with a black man and a white woman. Although police conceded that the number was not sexually indecent, they prohibited it because they feared it might provoke disturbances. The police took passing note of the private travails of the black dancer, who was born in Cameroon, married to a German woman, and father of a three-year-old girl: ‘In light of the conditions in the western part of the country, he has already been subjected to the most unpleasant molestations when he has taken his wife on trips and gone out with her. In Dresden he and his wife were literally spit upon, even by workers.’ The police also prohibited the performance of a dance entitle ‘Erotik’ by the Erna Offeney Ballet, because it involved a scene in which four black men forced a white woman to dance herself to death. Again this number was not banned because of obscenity, but because the police feared for ‘public order.’ Rather disingenuously, the lawyer for the troupe argue that the work should be permitted precisely because it presented ‘to the German people, in an eye-catching and frightening manner, the black outrage.’ The USPD’s  Freiheit called that assertion a piece of ‘imprudence,’ in as much as ‘well-known members of the bourgeois parties and doctors in the occupied territories have reported repeatedly in the press that one cannot speak of a black outrage.’

Against such a background, it is understandable why opinion was so polarized over the spread of jazz and the appearance of black revues in the capital. For the right-wing mindset, black arts (or what passed for black arts) became a primary symbol of cultural degeneration. When Wilhelm Frick became the Thuringian minister of education in 1930- the first time a Nazi was appointed to a state cabinet- he promulgated a law entitled ‘Against Negro Culture,’ which was used to suppress all forms of avant-garde art. Likewise, when the Nazis mounted a ‘Degenerate Music’ exhibition in 1938, the poster featured a caricature of a black saxophonist sporting a star of David. Paradoxically, however, the Nazis who equated ‘Negro Art’; with degeneration shared some of the assumptions of liberal and avant-garde artists, who envisioned black culture as a form of healthy primitivism. Both the Nazis and their opponents made ideological statements about black culture, and in both cases, blackness was equated with barbarism – a racially degenerate and corrupt barbarism for the Nazis, a humane and liberating barbarism for the avant-garde.