Still Motion: Dance and Stasis in the Weimar Operetta Film

There can be little doubt that the figure of the dancer – and dance more generally – took a central role in efforts to articulate the experience of modernity in Weimar culture. As Isabel Capeloa Gil remarks, "the cult of movement symbolized Weimar Germany's own sense of modernity" and "woman, dance, and modernity" served as "interconnected self-referential signifiers" (218–19). For Gil, this was true irrespective of the school of dance: thus the bold, androgynous choreography of Mary Wigman was understood to represent the spirit of a modern age just as much as Anita Berber's scandalous sexualized performances, not to mention the various social dance crazes that swept US and European societies. Modern dance – in its myriad forms – came to be seen as the quintessential expression of the new culture of motion. While some critics viewed dance as a liberating art, with the capacity to free the body or empower the lower classes, others took a more pessimistic view, framing the new dance as yet another manifestation of the soul-deadening mechanization of everyday life. In his 1925 essay "Die Reise und der Tanz," Siegfried Kracauer reflected that these current "spatio-temporal passions" had reached a new level of significance (288). More than simply an extension of contemporary "traffic" ("Verkehr"), dance and travel had come to represent the spirit of the age – embodying the contemporary longing for dissipation ("Abgelöstheit") and the current ideal of "Vagabondage," which, in Kracauer's dim view, bespoke the era's lack of authentic presence and meaning (289, 291).

Although Kracauer does not explicitly take up the issue of class in his essay – being more concerned with spatio-temporal rather than economic mobility – his remarks offer a point of entry for one of the central topics that this article will address: the representation of social hierarchy and its traversal through dance in the cinema of Weimar Germany. For the rootlessness that he describes in his essay – this "vagabondage" that wants for any deeper connection to "eternity" or "infinity," that results from a rationalization of life that leaves the modern individual "as smooth and spit-polished as an automobile" – not only evinces a spiritual homelessness, but also echoes the era's debates about social mobility and the breakdown of class structure (291–92). Consider for example the cautionary words of sociologist Theodor Geiger, who in 1932 identified the "ideological insecurity" of the "new middle classes," who, "lacking genuine class traditions" and prone to "inferiority complex[es] produced by the absence of solid professional moorings," were like "settlers in a new social territory" (192–94).

As the incorporation of the era's spirit of motion, dancers often appeared in the films of the Weimar period as figures that could move through traditional class structures. This movement could go up or down the social ladder: for example, in Richard Oswald's Der Reigen (1920), Asta Nielsen plays a young woman from a good family who, seduced by her piano teacher and then rejected by her parents, falls into the clutches of a pimp (Conrad Veidt) and winds up working in a "Tingeltangel" – a fall that prompts her to murder her procurer and take her own life. Or consider the case of Lulu, immortalized by Louise Brooks in G. W. Pabst's Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), whose dancing serves as a key expression of the incipient chaos and threat to order that her character embodies and which inevitably leads to tragedy for her partners. In E. A. Dupont's Picadilly (1929), dancing leads Shosho (played by Anna May Wong) out of the scullery and into instant stardom, as well as across racial boundaries, but also brings about her demise at the hands of her jealous lover.

Just as common as the narrative of the fallen woman, however, was the filmic representation of the dancer as a new sort of royalty – as the embodiment of the emergent cult of celebrity and the star. Thus we find a number of Weimar-era works that present the love affair between a lowborn dancer and her aristocratic admirer – films like Frederic Zelnick's Heut...