The Body of the People: East German Dance since 1945

Notes

179 Notes Introduction 1. “Ostalgie” is a term made up of the German word “Ost” (“east”) and “Nostalgie” (“nostalgia”). As the term suggests, it refers to a nostalgic longing for aspects of East German life. The term has been exploited in selling memorabilia and replicas of East German products and brands, yet it also raises the question of the extent to which the culture of East German citizens has been lost or devalued. 2. The Sportmuseum Leipzig holds all documents relating to the mass choreog­ raphies for the opening of each of the East German Turn- und Sportfestes. The German Democratic Republic staged eight gymnastics and sports festivals in Leipzig. The first festival in 1954 drew thirty­five thousand participants who competed in familiar Summer Olympic–style events such as race and track, swimming, boxing, biking, gymnastics, soccer, and fencing, as well as more unusual activities such as marching band (Rodekamp, Sportschau, 31). 3. By “mass movements,” I am referring to an array of mostly synchronized choreographies with hundreds or thousands of participants. These mass movements are an important display of power and control in any dictatorial regime, and they have been staged in both fascist and socialist countries. Famously, Leni Riefenstahl documented the mass movements at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg in her Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will ). The choreographies at the Arirang Mass Games of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) are contemporary examples. Yet mass movements are also an important aspect of international sports events, such as during the opening ceremony of the Olympics. 4. Twenty­five thousand participants performed in nineteen different mass exercises for the one hundred thousand audience members. Traditional sports associations, soldiers, sports students, children, and representatives from various professions, such as postal workers and factory workers, presented these exercises in groups of around five hundred each and united in a final scene of twelve thousand creating geometrical patterns and human pyramids. In addition, twelve thousand citizens in the eastern bleachers (Osttribüne) raised and lowered flags in different colors to form propagandistic images and slogans such as “Honor the GDR,” “Value Labor,” or “Unity and Peace” as a backdrop for all these exercises. The exercise had been executed all over the country in factories, schools, and other institutions in the time leading up to the festival (Rodekamp, Sportschau, 32.) 180 Notes to pages 4–7 5. See Anderson, Imagined Communities. 6. See Foster, Choreographing Empathy, for the historical development of the concepts of empathy and kinesthesia in relation to choreography. 7. Documentation relating to East German dance is mostly housed in the Tanz­ archiv Leipzig, the Sportmuseum Leipzig, and the archive of the Akademie der Künste Berlin. In 2011, the Tanzarchiv Leipzig (the only East German dance archive) was not only threatened with restructuring by being integrated into the library holdings of the University of Leipzig but the head of the library also publicly mentioned that he was considering throwing out material that he deemed not valuable for storage. Such fate was avoided partly due to an international campaign that saw dance scholars from all over the world approaching the Saxonian government, the University of Leipzig, and the leadership of the Tanzarchiv to ask them to rethink their plans. At the time of writing the archive has been moved into the special collection of the University of Leipzig’s library as a whole and can be accessed again. 8. For instance, the material on the Erich­Weinert­Ensemble, the dance ensemble of the armed forces, is now located in a warehouse of the Militärarchiv Freiburg, the archive of the West German armed forces. It is neither archived nor catalogued, and it is not even clear what part of the former Erich­Weinert­Ensemble archive is stored there. After many phone calls, I was told by the archivist that in order to view the material, researchers would not only have to be able to cope with the cold temperatures in the climate­controlled warehouse but would also have to be accompanied by a second person, because the lighting turns off automatically and needs to be turned on every few minutes again. I find this state of affairs to be a very good allegory of the general state of the material on East German dance—not illuminated, undesired, carelessly stored, not archived, nonaccessible, and possibly just gone in a few years. 9. Wong, Choreographing Asian America, 5. 10. Each chapter’s subject matter requires a...