Hitler's Dancers: German Modern Dance and the Third Reich

by Lilian Karina, Marion Kant, Jonathan Steinberg

The Nazis burned books and banned much modern art. However, few people know the fascinating story of German modern dance, which was the great exception. Modern expressive dance found favor with the regime and especially with the infamous Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda. How modern artists collaborated with Nazism reveals an important aspect of modernism, uncovers the bizarre bureaucracy which controlled culture and tells the histories of great figures who became enthusiastic Nazis and lied about it later. The book offers three the dancer Lilian Karina writes her very vivid personal story of dancing in interwar Germany; the dance historian Marion Kant gives a systematic account of the interaction of modern dance and the totalitarian state, and a documentary appendix provides a glimpse into the twisted reality created by Nazi racism, pedantic bureaucrats and artistic ambition.

400 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

Reviews

[Amber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm giving this book four stars because of the plethora of documentation provided to confirm the necessary critical look at certain key figures of German Modern and other concert dance styles.
I mostly did not appreciate the authors biased tone towards modern dance (this is how I heard/perceived it to be) nor the inclusion of their clear dislike for Laban, Wigman, et al. It is one thing to provide a personal take or perspective seperate from the evidential texts, and quite another to allow that personal perspective to clamor about the supposed objective material.
The most damning evidence provided by the author, pertaining to Laban's Nazi sympathy, is the chapter, "Jazz, Swing and the Nazis".
A lot of times I felt like I was listening to personal gossip, reading this book, a good deal of name dropping, name calling, and character assumptions. I do think it's too easy for us to condemn as Nazis, those who chose to remain and work in Germany during WW2. I don't think it was such an easy and binary decision.
Kant's book does definitively describe the absurdity of Hitler's totalitarian regime as it tried to control every aspect of the Aryan's racist life.

[Daniel]

La Jana.

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hitler's Dancers I have to admit that this book took me about two years to read - I was always picking something to read alongside it. This book is interesting in terms of how dancers, particularly modern dancers, in the early Nazi years were swift to embrace Naziism and its racist tenets. But it is not written for people with little knowledge of the major figures of German dance. For that to be the case, the book should have been set up with at least a concise description of some of the major figures, pictures of Laban and Wigman. I had heard somewhat of Laban from movement classes I took in theater school some 20 years ago, but beyond his name I knew nothing about him. Kant does backtrack a bit into her section to tell us about Laban and von Keudell, but she does not offer similar history about Mary Wigman or Gret Palucca. Perhaps if the setup of the book had been different I would have found this easier to get through. Karina's section is somewhat more interesting, being personal history, but she definitely has an understandable axe to grind, and without a more concise overview of the major players, it is rather difficult to follow who is who (the fact that I would go some weeks between readings probably also played into this). And the appendices, while interesting, are mainly documents supporting Kant's research and much as one might suspect when reading official documents -- extremely boring. In another way it is always interesting to have contemporary documentation - the book "The Nazi Years" by Joachim Remak is comprised mainly of translations of such, but is actually easier to read -- and a couple of the letters concerning Jewish children wishing to attend ballet school, and one dancer's arrest for homosexuality -- are much more interesting and strike the reader more for their personal, rather than academic and/or governmental tone. But for the most part this is a dry, academic book. People who like that would probably like Kant's section (They might find Karina's too "anecdotal") -- or maybe people with an already-large knowledge of Laban, Wigman and other leaders of modern dance (did you realize Isadora Duncan was basically a Nazi, or at least believed strongly in racist genetic theories?). It is a valuable book, proving that leading dancers readily embraced Nazi policies, but it is not super reading for the lay person.