Wigman’s Witches: Reformism, Orientalism, Nazism

This article investigates Hexentanz (Witch Dance)— Mary Wigman’s signature work—in the context of the radically changing political and ideological background to its creation. The piece was choreographed in three distinct versions, each during a different political system. The first was conceived in 1914 under a constitutional monarchy, the German Empire (although at the time Wigman was at the artist colony Monte Verità in Switzerland). The second was produced in 1926 against the backdrop of a liberal democracy, the Weimar Republic. And the third—a group dance—was fashioned in 1934 under the Fascist dictatorship of the Third Reich. The fact that Hexentanz was performed under three regimes is itself fascinating, with the third version often being unmentioned in secondary literature—as if, perhaps, to hush up its existence.

I argue that in constructing her dances Wigman partook in a widely disseminated and complex early twentieth-century German discourse on witchcraft and witch persecutions, which included interpretations ranging from anticlerical and feminist to racist and anti-Semitic. This discourse found its apex in the particular and curious interest afforded to witches by several Nazi figures, which ties in with a more general influence of occult and esoteric thought on the National Socialist weltanschauung.¹ Witch trials were heavily instrumentalized in the National Socialists’ propaganda, with senior Nazis such as Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg² viewing the persecution of witches as an anti-Germanic plot by Jewish and Catholic authorities. Impulses for and influences on the Nazis’ view of witches can be traced to the right-wing (so-called) völkisch³ movement dating back to the turn of the twentieth century, a movement that spanned both the Wilhelmine Period and the Weimar Republic.

By undertaking a rereading of the central figure of the witch, I shall examine how the cultural and political milieus of these different periods of German history have shaped, through Wigman’s imagination if not necessarily consciously, the form and iconography of the three works. In the process, the paper will address some puzzling related issues. For instance, how was it that Wigman’s Hexentanz was still performed after 1933—in a group version as part of her 1934 Frauentänze (Women’s Dances)— despite having been seen, in many contemporary reviews and more recent literature alike (e.g., Banes 1998), as containing a strongly feminist message? Would this not have contradicted the Nazis’ conception of women’s role as primarily one of domesticity and childbearing⁴ and made it impossible to dovetail the dance with their cause? Arguably, the Nazis must have recognized features in Wigman’s work they believed could be subsumed under or tied in with their own ideology and Kulturpolitik. I shall therefore investigate how Wigman’s witch figures—from her early experiments on Monte Verità to the version performed during the Third Reich—projected a sequence of neoromantic images and associations that garnered, at least in the first few years, the approval of the National Socialist cultural departments.

The article is structured in two main sections. In order to sketch the historical and ideological context of Wigman’s choreographies, I shall first present a thumbnail overview of the importance of the witch figure in German cultural and political thought. Starting achronologically with the extraordinary interest shown in the topic by senior Nazi officials such as Himmler, my discussion then modulates to earlier (nineteenth-century romantic) interpretations, noting both the continuity and variety of German ideas about witches. I shall then turn to Wigman’s three Witch Dance versions, offering analyses of each that emphasize their indebtedness to the cultural-political contexts within which they evolved. These three brief studies will touch on several underresearched but, in my view, important dimensions of the works: in particular life-reformist, oriental, and neopagan strands as well as links to National Socialism and its ideological antecedents. These studies will also draw out a common thread of neoromantic, völkisch, and antimodern thought that found different manifestations in the three political contexts.

Witch Discourses in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

In January 1945, as the Red Army advanced...