Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (review)

The decades from 1890 to the 1930s were the period of “high modernity,” marked by unprecedented experimentation not only in literature and the visual arts, but also in lifestyle. Dance all too frequently drops out of discussions of this seminal epoch, yet as Karl Toepfer’s fascinating study Empire of Ecstasy demonstrates, dance is a well-suited medium for exploring the complex impulses and cultural constellations that comprised modernism. For the modern dance forms that emerged in those years powerfully united artistic experimentation with attempts to create new modes of personal identity and communal life. Moreover, modern dance challenged traditional hierarchies of high and low culture, not only through the influences of popular music, whether folk, tango, or jazz, but through the participation of unprecedented numbers of people in dance schools, rhythmic gymnastics, and the like. While elements of these phenomena can be observed in all western European countries and North America during the time, it is Toepfer’s claim that in Germany, modern dance developed in uniquely close relationship to a “body culture” that reached levels of intensity and mass involvement unparalleled in any other national context.

Dance and body culture converged on the pursuit of ecstasy, joyful release from the constraints of modern society and bourgeois convention. Advocates of the body culture hoped to create a unified ecstatic movement that would break the iron cage of modernity. However, as Toepfer’s richly detailed account shows, the body culture produced instead a plurality of subcultures, competing theories, and schools of dance and body movement. He attributes this pluralism to the instabilities inherent in the appeal to the naked body itself as the crucial signifier of modernity. A number of basic ambiguities run through the discourses and practices that Toepfer presents. Was the naked body ‘modern’ because it exposes primitive and instinctual forces that shatter convention or because nakedness is itself the condition of modernity? Some dancers and theorists sought to accentuate the materialism of the body, its visceral reality, while others, like Rudolf Laban or the director of dance at the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, explored the body’s potential for abstract form. The ecstatic body could be the sign of the irrational, connecting the person to blood, libido, and self-transcendence in community. Or ecstasy could be gained through rational movement. This impulse animated the founder of rhythmic gymnastics, Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, as well as the feminist pedagogue Bess Mensendieck, who sought to emancipate women through the rationalization of everyday motions. At least one contemporary commentator recognized Mensendieck’s proximity to Taylorism and the fine line between liberation and regimentation. Toepfer holds that the naked body also evoked a tension between innocence and modernity, although the tension is perhaps better seen as a conflict between innocence and experience within modernity. Isidore Duncan’s ‘barefoot modernism’ and Anita Berber’s debauched bohemianism both circulated around modernism’s search for a lost true self, while Mary Wigman rejected early Nacktkultur’s aura of innocence in favor of a modernity steeped in tragedy, exposure, and loss.

The tension between innocence and experience ultimately revolved around eroticism. Once again, the body proved an unstable signifier. The publisher and psychoanalytically influenced theorist Ernst Schertel insisted that nudity always carries an erotic charge, and his writings probed the circuits of desire between spectator and performer. Others, like the sun-worshipping nudist Hans Surén, sought to neutralize sexuality in favor of therapeutic or communitarian agendas, while Richard Ungewitter linked nudism to a reactionary racial ideal. Turning from the field of theory and the broad Nacktkultur to dance itself, Toepfer emphasizes that the question of eroticism was, if anything, even more charged. Though many modern dancers were willing to dance nude in the name of art, there was considerable unease about the accentuation of sexual difference and eroticization that nudity entailed. This anxiety was one aspect of the gender and sexual politics of dance. Although men dominated dance criticism and theory...