KRACAUER AND T H E DANCING GIRLS

James Donald

BERLIN 1927

In 1927 Siegfried Kracauer was a thirty-eight-year-old journalist editing

the feuilleton section of the left-leaning Frankfurter Zeitung. He was also an
intellectual with a solid training in Kantian philosophy and, having studied
with Georg Simmel, in the still comparatively young discipline of sociology.
At this stage of his career, he was using his position on the newspaper to work
his way from his formation in German Idealism towards an idiosyncratically
materialist cultural criticism. A defining experiment in this new style of writing
was an article published in the Frankfurter Zeitung over two days in J u n e of
that year. In 'The Mass Ornament', Kracauer took as his object of analysis
a popular dance troupe, the high-kicking, precision-schooled Tiller Girls,
whose performances he linked to a fashion for elaborately choreogiaphed
mass gymnastic displays.
Although Kracauer symptomatically assumed that the Tiller Girls were
the 'products of American distraction factories' - if it's m o d e r n it must be
American - they were in fact the brainchild ofJ o h n Tiller, a turn-of-the-century
Lancashire cotton broker, who hired young women from towns like Manchester
and Blackpool and trained them in a style of formation dancing that owed
more to miUtary drills and displays than to classical ballet. By the Teens and
Twenties, Tiller was despatching his girls on order to cities around the world.
O n e sign of the success of this prescient supply strategy was a contract for
a Tiller troupe, renamed the Empire Girls for the occasion, to perform in
the famous Ziegfeld Eollies on Broadway. Here they were seen by H e r m a n
Haller, a former operetta director who became the creative force behind a
series of annual revues at the Theater am Admiralspalast in Berlin between
1923 and 1929. Haller immediately decided to hire the Empire Girls away
from Ziegfeld to perform in his 1924 revue Noch und Noch {More and More),
where they were a hit with both critics and audiences. (This roundabout
route from the North West of England to the German capital via New York
no doubt added to the confusion about the Girls' nationality. After their
first season, the Empire Girls were renamed the Lawrence-Tiller-Girls after
the founder's son. J o h n Tiller himself died in 1925.) Haller's main rival in
Berlin was Eric Charell, a dancer who staged three revues between 1924 and
1926 at the Grosses Schauspielhaus, which he took over after the theatre had
been bankrupted by a number of hugely elaborate spectacles staged by the
director Max Reinhardt. Charell's shows were famous for their extravagant
choreography and expensive production values, and to compete with Haller
he felt that he too needed his own troupe of dancers - which he named the

KRACAUER AND THE DANCING GIRLS 49

 John-Tiller-Girls, Other imitators soon appeared, including the Hoffmann
Girls and the Jackson Girls. In response, Haller's Tiller Girls adopted the
1. Siegfried slogan 'Ofi kopiert - nie erreichtV; 'Often copied - never equalled!''
Kracauer , 'The
Mass Ornament', There was, then, nothing especially novel or out-of-the-way about Kracauer
in Thomas Y Levin lighting on the Tiller Girls as a topic for a think piece, nor in presenting them
(ed) The Mass
Ornament: Weimar as in some way a sign of the times. In the same year that Kracauer published
Essays, Cambridge 'the Mass Ornament', the Girls - or a troupe of Tiller-clones - made a brief
MA, Harvard
University Press, but pointed appearance in Walther Ruttmann's film Berlin - Symphony of a
1995, p75; Peter Great City, A cartoon from tbe previous year had shown Tiller Girls rolling off
Jelavich, Berlin
Cabaret, Harvard, Henry Ford's mass production line. The leading theatre critic of the period,
Hai^'ard University
Press, 1993, 165-6, Herbert Ihering, had already made a connection between the rhythm of the
176 fr. revues and 'the needs of tbe modern metropolis.' Again prefiguring Kracauer,
Ihering saw the asexual athleticism and precision of their dancers as tbe key
to the modernity of the performance.

For the audience reacts to movement, to tempo. The applause for

comedians is often weak, but for the Empire Girls it thunders right on into
the intermissions. The rbythm, the lightness, the exactness are electrifying,
Tbe American Girls are a sight worth seeing and a standard to follow ...
2. Jelavich, op. cit., Beauty on stage, not through its nakedness, but through motion,^
pl77.

Although Kracauer was picking up on a theme that was already in the air,
'The Mass Ornament' did have something new to offer: that is, a distinctive
angle of vision and Kracauer's emerging method of its cultural analysis.
When he started writing bis Weimar essays, Kracauer had just completed
a study of the detective novel, and like a good detective he would start off by
identifying often apparently banal phenomena or events as the royal road to
explaining the logic of the times. Just as Freud saw slips of the tongue, dreams,
and repeated patterns of behaviour as clues to the individual unconscious, so
Kracauer treats these ephemera as clues to a social unconscious, (In his final,
uncompleted book. History: The Last Things Before the Last, Kracauer claimed that
tbe goal of his life's work bad been 'the rehabilitation of objectives and modes
of being which still lack a name and hence are overlooked or misjudged,') To
link together these clues, and to decipher the social tendencies of which they
were symptoms or manifestations, Kracauer relied less on tbe dutiful application
of methodological recipes than on a flash of recognition and insight as bistory
reveals itself in the form of an image: in the case of 'Tbe Mass Ornament',
the formal patterns created by tbe Tiller Girls or the mass gymnastic displays.
The opening paragraph of the article is effectively a manifesto or a statement
of intent for tbis emerging perspective.

The position that an epocb occupies in tbe historical process can be

determined more strikingly from an analysis of its inconspicuous surface-
level expressions than from that epoch's judgments about itself. Since
these judgements are expressions of the tendencies of a particular era.

50 NEW FORMATIONS
 they do not offer conclusive testimony about its overall constitution.
The surface-level expressions, however, by virtue of their unconscious
nature, provide unmediated access to the fundamental substance of the
state of things. Conversely, knowledge of this state of things depends on
the interpretation of these surface-level expressions. The fundamental
substance oían epoch and its unheeded impulses illuminate each other
reciprocally.

Kracauer is offering a distinctively new methodological cocktail here. He

mixes together one part journalist's nose, two parts cultural detective work
and a splash of psychoanalytic interpretation with a generous measure of tbe
kind of post-photographic ontology Benjamin alludes to in his discussion of
tbe camera and 'unconscious optics'.^ 3. Siegfried
Kracauer, History:
Although the rhetoric of 'surface-level expressions' and 'fundamental The Last Things Before
substance' may sound like old-fashioned determinism, Kracauer sees the iMst, New York,
Oxford University
contemporary body culture as in some way hieroglyphic. Tbe dances and Press, p4. Kracauer,
'Mass Ornament',
displays of the mass ornament reveal more than they know. That is why a 1997, p75. Fora
psychoanalytical take is needed. Although the patterns displayed by dance more conventional
methodological
troupes and mass gymnastics may have lost any organic connection to nature objection to
and although their patterns of behaviour may bave bollowed out traditional Kracauer's
approach, see, for
forms of community and personality, they nonetheless reflect or, rather, example, Steve
enact a truth about tbe present. It is not a truth consciously expressed by the Giles, 'Cracking
the Cultural Code:
mass - 'Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved Methodological
in conceiving it' - nor is it one consciously perceived by tbem. Ratber, it is reflections on
Kracauer's "The
experienced in an attitude of distraction, or Zerstreuung; tbat is, tbrough an Mass Ornament'",
aesthetic of 'pure externality' based on a 'fragmented sequence of splendid Radical Philosophy 99,
Januai-y/February
sense impressions' that enabled tbe true structure of modern reality to reveal (2000): 31-39.
itself. In tbis new mode of aesthetic production, tbe dancing girls become an
assembly of body parts, interchangeable components in an automaton that is
also a new kind of commodity. They form human chains with arms around
each others' waists, and synchronise their bigb kicks exactly. Tbe line moves
up and down staircases, breaks apart, regroups, and modulates from pattern
to pattern. As tbey go tbrougb these motions, the individual sexuality of
each female body is neutralised. In a Taylorised system of aggregation and
ornamental arrangement, tbese buman bodies have been transmuted into
raw material and tbe experience of the mass has become the product.

The human figure enlisted in the mass ornament has begun the exodus
from lush organic splendour and the constitution of individuality toward
the realm of anonymity to which it relinquishes itself when it stands in
truth and when the knowledge radiating from the basis of man dissolves
tbe contours of visible natural form. In the mass ornament nature is
deprived of its substance, and it is just this that points to a condition in
which the only elements of nature capable of surviving are those that do
not resist illumination tbrough reason. Thus, in old Chinese landscape

KRACAUER AND THE DANCING GIRLS 51

 paintings the trees, ponds, and mountains are rendered only as sparse
ornamental signs drawn in ink. The organic centre has been removed and
the remaining unconnected parts are composed according to laws that
are not those of nature but laws given by a knowledge of truth, which, as
4. Kracauer, 'Mass always, is a function of its time.''
Ornament', op. cit.,
p77 (translation
modified), p83. In this historically contingent truth, the choreography of the Tiller Girls
displays the rationality of a labour process in which the individuality of
the worker has become subordinated to the logic of the machine and the
production line. (Fritz Lang's Metropolis had appeared in 1926.) This is
a double-edged process. On the one hand, modernisation has reduced
embodied subjectivity to this level of abstraction and fragmentation.
On the other hand, the Tiller Girls embody the mass subjectivity and
the rhythm of existence that are tbe by-product of the capitalist Ratio -
aspects of modern life that remain inaccessible to traditional art or idealist
philosophy. The logic of the Tiller Girls' routine reflects that of'the entire
contemporary situation'; their legs correspond to the hands in the factory.
Four years after 'The Mass Ornament', in his essay 'Girls and Crisis',
Kracauer looked back on the way he had read the Tiller Girls. 'Like an
image become flesh', he had imagined that the Tiller Girls embodied 'the
fiinctioning of a flourishing economy.'

They were not merely American products but a demonstration at tbe

same time of the vastness of American production ... When they formed
themselves into an undulating snake, they delivered a radiant illustration
of the virtues of the conveyor belt; when they stepped to a rapid beat,
it sounded like 'business, business'; when they raised their legs with
mathematical precision over their heads, they joyfully afñrmed the
progress of rationalisation; and when tbey continually repeated the same
manoeuvre, never breaking ranks, one had the vision of an unbroken chain
of automobiles gliding out of the factory into the world and the feeling
that there was no end to prosperity.

By 1931, Kracauer saw that Utopian potential as a dream of the past. In his
5. Siegfried study of office workers, published as The Salaried Masses in 1930, he shifted
Kracauer, 'Cirls and from the nuanced pbenomenological analysis of the Weimar essays towards
Crisis', in Anton
Kaes, Martin Jay and an ideological critique that saw mass culture as no more than an instrument
Edward Dimendberg of class rule and collective repression. When sales clerks and stenographers
(eds), The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, resort to the 'pleasure barracks' of tbe leisure industry, he came to believe,
Berkley, University tbat is the sign of an ideological homelessness and existential despair born
of California Press,
1994, pp565-6; of'a life which only in a restricted sense can be called a life'.^
Siegfried Kracauer,
The Salaried Masses, When he wrote 'The Mass Ornament' in 1927, however, Kracauer
introduced by still saw signs for hope in all this corresponding, mirroring, embodying,
Inka Mülder-Bach,
London, Verso, demonstrating, sounding like, and affirming. The masses spontaneously
1998, pl3. recognised and responded to tbe patterns of the mass ornament - the Tiller

52 NEW FORMATIONS
Girls and the gymnastic displays - as a screen onto which their hopes and fears
regarding modernity could be projected. In so doing they showed themselves
to be 'superior to their detractors among the educated class to the extent that
they at least roughly acknowledge the undisguised facts'." 6. Kracauer, 'Girls
and Crisis', op. cit.,
pp565-6.
BERLIN AND PARIS, 1926

Not long before Siegfried Kracauer published his speculations about the
cultural significance of the Tiller Girls, Berlin intellectuals had been discussing
another phenomenon of popular modern dance. In December 1925, less
than three months after their sensational opening in Paris, the two dozen
African-American performers who made up the company of La Revue nègre
took the train to the German capital. Among them were the clarinettist
Sidney Bechet, the dancer Louis Douglas, the blues singer Maud de forest,
and Claude Hopkins's seven-piece Charleston Jazz Band, The show's new
star, the nineteen-year-old Josephine Baker, immediately fell in love with
Berlin. 'The city had a jewel-like sparkle, especially at night, that didn't
exist in Paris, The vast cafés reminded me of ocean liners powered by the
rhythms of their orchestras. There was music everywhere'.' On New Year's 7. Josephine Baker
. . ^ f, t in •,iT 1 - 1 1 and lo Bouillon,

Eve, a special performance of the revue before an mvited audience kicked Josephine, London,
off a run of several months at the Nelson Theatre. W.H. Allen, 1978,
German audiences - especially, as in Paris, intellectuals and artists, but
also wealthy industrialists like the Krupp family - were mesmerized both by
Baker's supposed African primitivism and by her American modernism, 'In
her the wildness of her forefathers, who were transplanted from the Gongo
Basin to the Mississippi, is preserved most authentically; she breathes life,
the power of nature, a wantonness that can hardly be contained', raved an
over-excited reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt. The cultural commentator
Ivan Goll had already sent despatches to Die literarische Welt from the Paris
front, warning Berliners what was coming.

The Negroes are conquering Paris, They are conquering Berlin. They
have already filled the whole continent with their howls, their laughter.
And we are not shocked, we are not amazed: on the contrary, the old
world calls on its failing strength to applaud them ,., One can only envy
them, for this is life, sun, primeval forests, the singing of birds and the
roar of a leopard, earth ..,

Goll, however, was at least alert to the parodie nature of much of La Revue
nègre, and scoffed at the assumption that what it offered had anything to do
with Africa.

These Negroes come out of the darkest parts of New York. There they
were disdained, outlawed; these beautifiil women might have been rescued
from a miserable ghetto. These magnificent limbs bathed in rinse water.

KRACAUER AND THE DANCING GIRLS 53

 Tbey do not come from the primeval forests at all. We do not want to fool
ourselves. But they are a new, unspoiled race.

More pragmatic in his response, and with an eye to how the talents of the
American 'Negroes' might be put to use, was Max Reinhardt. He had already
seen Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake's phenomenally successful musical Shuffle
Along on a visit to New York in 1924, and he had been impressed not just by
tbe mobility and control of the dancers, but above all by the expressive body
language of the comedians. In this physicality Reinhardt saw a potential
resource for European theatre, and he wanted Baker to take up a 'serious'
career on the stage.

The expressive control of the whole body, tbe spontaneity of motion,

tbe rbythm, the bright emotional colour: these are your treasures - no,
not yours alone - these are American treasures. With such control of the
body, such pantomime, I believe I could portray emotion as it has never
been portrayed.

Reinhardt introduced Baker to his friend, the wealthy but politically radical
aesthete Gount Harry Kessler. Kessler too was captivated. His diary entry
after seeing her dance naked at a bobemian party makes more explicit
tbe ambivalence inberent in Reinbardt's response to ber combination of
spontaneity and control.

Baker danced with extreme grotesqueness and purity of style, like an

Egyptian or an archaic figure that performs acrobatics without ever losing
its style. The dancers of Salamo and Tutankhamen must have danced
this way. She does this for hours, apparently without getting tired, always
finding new forms, as if in a game, like a playful child.

Kessler, Reinhardt and the Tageblatt reviewer all tried to 'read' Baker's body,
but tbey got mixed signals: something controlled yet spontaneous, something
modern yet archaic, something both American and African, and so somehow
something more authentic than European modernity. The next week Kessler
was drawn back to tbe show.

Went again to the Negro revue at the Nelson in the evening (Josephine
Baker). They are somehow between the jungle and the skyscraper.
The same is true of her music, jazz, in its colour and rhythm. It is
ultraprimitive and ultramodern. Their tension generates their forceful
style; the same is true of the Russians. By comparison, our own culture
is tame - without inner tension and therefore without style, like a limp
bow string.

Goll expressed this somewbat eugenic view in more apocalyptic terms, while

54 NEW FORMATIONS
at the same time plugging his wife Claire GoU's latest novel The Negro Jupiter
Robs Europe.

But the leading role belongs to Negro blood. Its drops are slowly falling
over Europe, a long-since dried-up land that can scarcely breathe. Is that
perhaps the cloud that looks so black on the horizon but whose fearsome
downpours are capable of so white a shine? Der NegerJupiter raubt Europa
is the name of a modern German novel just now coming out. The Negro
question is pressing for our entire civilization. It runs like this: Do the
Negroes need us? Or are we not sooner in need of them?^ 8. Berliner Tageblatt
quoted in Nancy
Nenno, 'Femininity,
Although at this time Josephine Baker preferred Berlin even to Paris, she the Primitive and
Modern Urban
resisted Reinhardt's offer to work for him, and eventually returned to honour Space: Josephine
her contract to star in the Folies-Bergère revue for 1926, La Eolie du Jour. Baker in Berlin',
in Katharina von
This would be the first occasion on which she wore the skirt of bananas that Ankum, Women
was to become her trademark. In the supporting cast were the Tiller Girls, in the Metropolis:
Gender and Modernity
appearing on this occasion in an implausible variety of roles: men in dinner in Weimar Culture,
jackets, flagellants. Pacific prawns and transported slaves as well as rabbits. Berkeley, University
of California Press,
Members of the troupe later remembered Baker as being unusually friendly 1997; Ivan Goll,
mie Negroes Are
for a top-of-the-bill performer. Although she was about the same age as Conquering Europe',
them - they would for the most part have been in their late teens or early Die literarische
Welt, 2, 15Januai-y
twenties - and she had only been a star for a few months, they recognised that 1926, in Kaes etal,
they were 'worlds apart as women and as performers'. Trained to 'sink their Weimar Republic, op.
cit., p559-60; Max
personalities into the line', these Tiller girls were 'filled with admiration for Reinhardt quoted
her highly individual personality'.^ in Phyllis Rose, Jazz
Cleopatra: Josephine
At the Folies-Bergère on opening night to write up the show for Vogue was Baker in her Time,
Nancy Gunard, the shipping heiress, culture vulture, and arch-negrophile London, Chatto
& Windus, 1990,
who would publish the weighty Negro anthology in 1934 and who at this time p85; Hariy Kessler
quoted in Hans
was scandalously involved in a very public affair with the black American jazz Ulrich Gumbrecht,
pianist Henry Growder. La Folie du Jour 'might very easily be called rotten,' In 1926: Living at
the Edge of Time,
reported Gunard, 'but can be sat through, even to twelve-thirty, because of Cambridge MA,
the perfect delight one gets from Josephine Baker. She makes all the nudity Hai-vard University
Press, 1997, pp66-
and glitter of the rest (even the so-well drilled Tiller Girls) curiously insipid by 67; see also Kessler,
comparison.' Others in the audience, either then or in the following weeks, Berlin in Lights: The
Diaries of Count Hairy
attempted to account for the special fascination of Baker's performance - the Kessler, New York,
Tiller Girls seldom rate a mention. André Rouverge, the reviewer for the Grove Press, 2000,
p282.
Mercure de Erance, managed to convey some sense of what Baker's dancing
was like. He noted not just its rhythmic complexity and its abrupt changes 9. Dorothy Vernon,
in dynamic and tone, but also - like Ivan Goll - the self-knowing and almost Tiller's Girls, London,
Robson Books.
self-parodying jazz humour she injected into her performance of the tango 1988, p78. quoted in
and the Gharleston at the climax of the show. Ramsay Burt, Alien
Bodies: Representations
of Modernity, 'Race'
This girl has the genius to let the body make fun of itself. Her movements, and Nation in Early
Modem Dance,
while making a strikingly original rhythmic structure, go from one extreme London, Routledge,
1998.
to the other. What we would call 'soul' or sensation is banished. To be

KRACAUER AND THE DANCING GIRLS 55

 sure, her body shakes as if in a trance, but with such remarkable humour
... tbe tango takes on a burlesque element and the Charleston, as danced
by La Baker, fairly boils over with diabolic intensity.

Tbe American sculptor Alexander Calder was certainly enchanted. Amazed

by the way different parts of Josephine Baker's dancing body could move in
so many different directions and to so many rhythms at the same time, he
raced back to bis studio on tbe rue Daguerre and produced an articulated wire
portrait of her that was the first in his long line of experiments with mobiles.
Tbe poet e. e. cummings tried to capture tbe essence of Baker's performance
in the famous Fatou sketch, in which Baker as a 'native girl' materialises before
a dreaming French explorer asleep by a river in the jungle.

She enters through a dense electric twilight, walking backwards on hands

and feet, legs and arms stifF, down a huge jungle tree - as a creature neither
infrahuman nor superhuman but somehow botb: a mysterious unkillable
Something, equally nonprimitive and uncivilized, or beyond time in the
sense that emotion is beyond arithmetic.

As she began to dance, tbe movement of ber bips and stomach made tbe
bananas on ber girdle bounce and swing in pballic animation. Cummings
wondered at Baker's new Parisian incarnation. He had last seen her a couple
of years earlier on Broadway dancing in the chorus of Sissle and Blake's
The Chocolate Dandies. Then she had been a 'tall, vital, incomparably fluid
nightmare which crossed its eyes and warped its limbs in a purely unearthly
manner', mischievously subverting tbe precision of tbe dance routines and
drawing attention to herself in a way that the stern Lancastrian disciplinarian
John Tiller would never have allowed. Now, implausibly, through the
mechanics of the revue, she had been transformed into the most beautiful
star of tbe Paris stage.

By the laws of its own structure, whicb are tbe irrevocable laws of
juxtaposition and contrast, tbe revue is tbe use of eveiything trivial or
plural to intensify what is singular and fundamental. In the case of the
Folies-Bergère, tbe revue is a use of ideas, smells, colours, In'ing Berlin,
nudes, tactility, collapsible stairs, tbree dimensions and fireworks to
10. See Rose./azz intensify Mile. Josepbine Baker.'"
Cleopatra, op. cit.,
pi00; Rouvei^e and
Cummings quoted Altbougb Siegfried Kracauer was not a member oftbat audience at the Folies-
in Biyan Hammond
and Patrick Bergère, it is impossible not to wonder bow be migbt bave reacted to tbe
O'Connor, Josephine sbow if be bad been there witb Cunard and Calder and cummings. Would
Baker. London,
Jonathan Cape, be bave read tbe Tiller Girls differently in the context of a comparatively
1989, pp41-42. intimate Frencb revue as opposed to Cerman variety sbows aimed at a mass
audience? Would be bave commented on tbe extent to wbicb tbey tailored
tbeir performances to different sbows, different spaces, and different

56 NEW FORMATIONS
national contexts? How, above all, would he have deciphered the hieroglyph
of Josephine Baker and her danse sauvage, especially in comparison to the
Tiller Girls? Would he have tried to translate her performance into a sign
of social relations? Or would he have concentrated more on the particular
combination of circumstances that produced the phenomenon of Josephine
Baker in Europe in the mid-nineteen twenties? If his focus had been on
that question, he would have had to look back to the explosive event that
inaugurated the Baker phenomenon: the Paris opening of La Revue nègre
on 2 October 1925." 11. Kracauer,
'Mass Ornament',
op.cit., p78; Nenno,
PARIS 1925 'Femininity, tlie
Primitive', op.cit..
pl49.
La Revue nègre was a simultaneously spiced-up and sanitised collage of African-
American life packaged for a Paris audience that made up the second half of
an evening's entertainment at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. In 1925, the
American journalist and film critic Janet Flanner was in Paris as correspondent
for the New Yorker. As she prepared her memoirs in the nineteen-seventies,
Flanner recalled that first night with both the benefits and the pitfalls of
hindsight. Her memory is touched by contemporary concerns (black is
beautiful, the gendered audience) that lead to a certain rewriting of history
(the danse sauvage was the finale, not Baker's first appearance, and she wore
a whole skirt of feathers.) Even if Paris Was Yesterday sometimes slides into
myth, Flanner's recollection of Baker's impact remains compelling.

She made her entry entirely nude except for a pink flamingo feather
between her limbs; she was being carried upside down and doing the
split on the shoulder of a black giant. Midstage, he paused, and with his
long fingers holding her basket-wise around the waist, swung her in a slow
cartwheel to the stage floor, where she stood like his magnificent discarded
burden, in an instant of complete silence. She was an unforgettable female
ebony statue. A scream of salutation spread through the theatre. Whatever
happened next was unimportant. The two specific elements had been
established and were unforgettable - her magnificent dark body, a new
model that to the French proved for the first time that black was beautiful,
and the acute response of the white masculine public in the capital of
hedonism of all Europe - Paris. Within a half hour of the final curtain on
opening night, the news and meaning of her arrival had spread by the
grapevine up to the cafés on the Champs-Elysées, where the witnesses of
her triumph sat over their drinks excitedly repeating their report of what
they had just seen - themselves unsatiated in the retelling, the listeners
hungry for further fantastic truths. So tremendous was the public acclaim
that for the first week's run the cast and the routine of the performance
were completely disorganized. Drunken on the appreciation they had
received, and on champagne, to which they were not accustomed, the
Negro choruses split up into single acts consisting of whichever males or

KRACAUER AND THE DANCING GIRLS 57

 females could still keep their feet, or had not lost their voices from the
fatigues of pleasure, all of them nonetheless alive and creative with the
integral talent of their race and training. Most of us in Paris who had seen
the opening night went back for the next two or three nights as well; they
were never twice alike.

However foreign it may he to the cultural analysis of'The Mass Ornament',

Flanner'sjournalism is strikingly reminiscent of one of Kracauer's later works,
the biographical Ojfenbach and the Paris of his Time, written in the nineteen-
thirties with an exile's anxious eye on a broader market. Both the situation
and the characters are similar: a Paris premiere that is a succès de scandale, a
new star with a whiff of the grand courtesan about her, the flow of champagne,
and even the latter-day dandies spreading the latest gossip through the cafés,
Flanner's account shares the brilliance of some of Kracauer's passages in
Offenbach, particularly in her ability to capture the essential features of the
night as a social and historical event: the dramatic appearance of Baker's
body and the audience's response. At the same time, she also reproduces what
Kracauer's critics - notably his uncompromising friends Theodor Adorno
and Walter Benjamin - saw as fatal weaknesses in the Paris book. Primary
among these was its failure to ground cultural criticism in a musical analysis
of Offenbach's work. In similar vein, Flanner fails to observe that La Revue
nègre was not just an event, it was also z performance. Her blithe assertion that
'Whatever happened next was unimportant' cuts off the analysis just as it is
about to get interesting. What happened next in terms of how Baker danced
12. Janet Flanner,
- and what had happened before tbe opening that led to this performance
Paris Was Yesterday, of this dance - are profoundly important for understanding how European
New Vork, Viking,
1972, ppxx-xxi; audiences perceived, imagined, and embraced Josephine Baker,'^
Siegfried Kracauer,
Offenbach and the An emphasis on the particularity of a performance and its determinants - in
Paris of His Time, this case. Baker's danse sauvage - may also indicate a limitation to Kracauer's
New York, Zone
Books, 2003. For the method as a way of explaining and understanding dance: that is, his reading
response of Adorno of a dance performance not as dance but always as an allegorical symptom of
and Benjamin,
see Gertmd Koch, something else. An explanation of why the danse sauvage took the form it did
Siegfried Kracauer: really needs to take account of the vision and ambitions of both performer
An Introduction,
Princeton, Princeton and producers, the space of the theatre in which it was performed, its target
University Press, audience, and the publicity and marketing surrounding the show. In this case,
2000, pp66-69.
bracketing the other elements, the focus will be on the way that the dance
13. This account of came into being through a negotiation between Baker the dancer and one
de Mare and the of the revue's impresarios, the wealthy Swedish aesthete Rolf de Maré,'-^
Ballets Suédois is
indebted to chapters De Mare had the money, the eye and the prescience to become an early
2 and 3 of Ramsay
Burt's Alien Bodies:
collector of Picasso, Braque, and Léger, and he also accumulated a large
Representations of number of ethnographic artefacts on his extensive travels around the world.
Modernity, 'Riice'
and Nation in Early His interest in dance developed in the late Teens, and in 1920 he created the
Modem Dance, Ballets Suédois, largely as a vehicle for his lover Jean Börlin - one of many
London and New
York, Routledge, parallels between his story and that of Diaghilev, the Ballets Russes and
1998. Nijinsky, At the same time as setting up the new company, de Mare quietly

58 NEW FORMATIONS
bought the lease of the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées to provide it with a home.
The Ballets Suédois's uncompromising experimentation during the five years
of its existence produced both a degree of artistic success and unsustainable
commercial failure. By 1925 the company was suffering as a result of a
financially disastrous tour of the United States and a theatre manager who
had been systematically defrauding de Mare. At the same time, Börlin was
on the verge of collapse through overwork and had split from de Mare to
get married. Seeing no real financial or artistic future for the company, de
Male decided to disband it. This left him with the problem ofwhat to do
with the remaining year of his lease on the theatre. Possibly influenced by
Léger's enthusiasm for music hall, in January 1925 de Mare announced
that he would be changing the name of the theatre to the Opéra Music-Hall
des Champs-Elysées and presenting a broader and more populist range of
works. He hoped to combine the appeal of music hall with the quality of
opera, as well as providing a platform for non-western dancers and a series
of lectures on 'primitive' dance. By April, the stage had been converted to
that oí a théâtre music-hall, and in September the Revue nègre troupe arrived
from New York.
Years later, in the last of her several autobiographies, Josephine Baker
still recalled the sting of de Mare's first, appalled reaction to the show as it
arrived ofTthe ship from America. 'We had thought our show was marvellous
and Monsieur Rolf's verdict - "Catastrophic" - struck us like a thunderclap'.
In the time available for rehearsal - they had less than two weeks - the focus
and tone of the La Revue nègre were dramatically altered at the insistence of
de Mare and his artistic director, André Daven." 14. Bakerand
The improvised and sometimes panicky revisions in the frantic days that ^T'cit'^i^o"^ """'
followed, and the negotiations between producers and performers, reveal a
remarkable, although by no means unproductive, case of second guessing and
crossed cultural lines, especially about what constitutes authenticity and where
a line might be drawn between expressivity and mimicry. The performers
no doubt drew on African-American cultural traditions, but as professional
entertainers who had worked in the clubs of New York and in Broadway shows
like Shuffle Along, Runnin' Wild, The Chocolate Dandies and Dixie to Broadway,
they had learned to adapt to the tastes of white audiences formed in a culture
of racism and segregation. De Mare and Daven, by contrast, had been
schooled in the aesthetics of European modernism. They had worked with
Börlin, Léger and Milhaud on the Ballet Suédois's 'African' ballet La Création
du monde in 1923 and de Mare at least had taken part in the art collector
Paul Cuillaume's notorious 'Fêtes nègres' in 1919. They were therefore also
attuned to the voyeuristic nature of their Paris audience's interest in black
performances and black bodies. The show they were presented with seemed
to be making too many concessions, or maybe the wrong type of concessions.
There was too much tap, too much Tiller-style precision dancing from the
choms line, and to their ears the original star Maud de Forest's blues had
the ring of dirge-like and depressing spirituals. In short, there was too much

KRACAUER A N D T H E DANCING GIRLS 59

 Broadway in the show. It just wasn't sexy enough or black enough for the Paris
audience they were after.
De Maré took the lead in reshaping the show. 'He was an able and agreeable
taskmaster,' recalled Baker, 'and we did what he wanted although it meant
working night and day.' Daven also brought in his friend Jacques Charles, a
producer at the Moulin Rouge, to add his more populist expertise. Although
Charles liked to claim that he had totally revamped the show, plucking an
unknown Baker from the chorus and making her a star, his role was probably
always secondary to that of de Maré. It was a quick and collective decision
to make Josephine Baker rather than Maud de Forest the focus of the show.
Adding the danse sauvage to the final scene, however, probably was Charles's
idea. To partner her in the nevi/pas de deux, they hired J o e Alex, a West Indian
dancer already living and working in Paris. For the modernist de Maré this
addition presented the opportunity to inject that dash of primitivism that
would signify authenticity and cultural renewal. At the rehearsals, therefore,
de Maré and Daven asked Baker if she could perform an African dance.

Driven by dark forces I didn't recognise, I improvised, crazed by the music,

the overheated theatre filled to the bursting point, the scorching eye of
the spotlights. Even my teeth and eyes burned with fever. Each time I
leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed
to be mine alone.

Again, those 'dark forces' suggest history being written to fit the myth. What
was actually going on was a negotiation between Baker's experience and
training as a dancer in the black American entertainment industry, and de
Mare's vision of Africa mediated through a Parisian avant-garde aesthetic and
a degree of ethnographic connoisseurship. T h e danse sauvage that emerged
was more about cultural preconceptions, mimicry and pastiche, than it was
15. Ibid., pp54; about spontaneity or identity.'^
What Baker brought to this exchange was not just her hard-won athleticism
as a dancer, but also the nerveless mugging and a shameless ability to work
an audience she had learned in the hard school of vaudeville and Broadway.
T h e 'dark forces' that drove her were less a genetic trace of Africa than her
extraordinaiy will to succeed and a desperate desire to give the man what
he wanted. In formal terms, the moves she made may not have been much
different from the popular dances she had learned from childhood in the
streets of St Louis or the routines of chorus lines in New York, but if Monsieur
Rolf wanted African primitivism, then primitivism is what Monsieur Rolf
would get. However spurious the images of authenticity being bandied
around, however confused the signals between impresario and dancer, the
occasion actually drew from Baker a new and genuinely expressive form of
dance. It had precious litde to do with ethnic or racial authenticity, but this
expressiveness had a lot to do with the appropriation, mimicry and bricolage
from which newness is born.

60 NEW FORMATIONS
IF KRACAUER MET BAKER ...

In the thought experiment of second-guessing Kracauer's critical response

to Josephine Baker, the first question is whether his method in 'The Mass
Ornament' for analysing the routines of troupes like the Tillers can be
generalised to other dancers and other styles of dance, or whether it was sui
generis. His was not a mechanical base-superstructure determinism, but nor
did it embrace the emphasis on the particularity of the negotiation between
Baker and de Maré in determining the genesis of the danse sauvage proposed
here. Kracauer's hieroglyphic explanation assumed a determinate relationship
between the surface phenomenon (the Tiller Girls, Josephine Baker) and what
he calls 'the fundamental substance of the state of things.' Characteristically,
however, he offers no formula for reading back to that deeper, determining
level. It is only the formal flash of illumination within a materialist world-view
that allows 'unmediated access' to it.
Assuming for the moment that Kracauer had been struck by one of
these moments of inspiration and insight while watching the dancing figure
of Josephine Baker, is it possible to speculate about which aspects of 'the
fundamental substance of the state of things' in Europe in the 1920s might
have been revealed to him? At one level, what he saw in the Tiller Girls was
the simple and remorseless message of'business, business': the rhythms of the
assembly line, the formal patterns of factory machinery, and the repeated,
minutely coordinated choreography of automobiles gliding out of a factory.
But he intuited something more fundamental than that in their dancing. For
him, the Tiller Girls also embodied a mass subjectivity that was a by-product
of modern life.
So would he have seen another, perhaps more ambiguous sign of the times
in Baker's danse sauvage? Had he done so, he would hardly have been alone.
Against those reactionary commentators who saw in La Revue nègre only a
'lamentable transatlantic exhibitionism' that would produce a regression 'to
the ape in less time than it took us to descend from it', pro-Baker critics and
intellectuals (including Ivan Goll and Harry Kessler) believed - or hoped - that
she might bring a 'savage rejuvenation' to a weary and depressed European
culture. In this spirit, Ki acauer had himself initially welcomed the arrival of
jazz in Europe as a music of'untrammelled physicality' that might reinvigorate
and resensitise war-weary bodies. "" 16. Siegfried
But that eugenic perspective on culture is in the end surely at odds with Kracauer,
'Renovierter Jazz',
Kracauer's more 'hieroglyphic' criticism. The question of the relationship Schrifien, 5, 2,
Aufsätze 1927-32,
between modern subjectivity (or Persönlichkeit) and the capitalist Aatóo cannot Inka Mülder-Bacli
be reduced to a zero sum game of the authentic versus the ersatz or civilization (ed), Frankfurt am
Main, Suhrkamp,
versus primitivism, around which the progress/regression argument turned. 1990, p391;
Some commentators on Baker did seem to perceive that the possibility of quoted in Nenno,
'Femininity, the
Persönlichkeit in modernity was the issue. Here, for example, is the Russian Primitive', op. cit.,
emigré ballet critic André Levinson on the danse sauvage in the finale of the pi 54.
Revue nègre.

KRACAUER A N D T H E DANCING GIRLS 61

 Certain of Miss Baker's poses, back arched, haunches protruding, arms
entwined and uplifted in a phallic symhol, had the compelling potency
of the finest examples of negro sculpture. The plastic sense of a race of
sculptors came to life and the frenzy of the African Eros swept over the
audience. It was no longer a grotesque dancing girl that stood hefore them,
hut the black Venus that haunted Baudelaire. The dancer's personality
had transcended the character of her dance. (Sa personnalité dépasse le
17. Joan Acocella genre.y
and Lynn Garafola
(eds) André I^vinson
on Dance: Writings Like Kracauer, Levinson had been schooled in Kantian aesthetics. The two
from Paris in the
Twenties, Hanover, men's politics were very different, however, and the next step in Levinson's
Wesleyan University argument was to the contamination of European culture rather than the
Press, 1991, p74;
quoted in Burt, Alien vampirism of the capitalist Ratio. But put that to one side, along with
Bodies, op. cit., p61, Levinson's predictable cultural allusions. What Kracauer might have found
Rose,ya22 Cleopatra,
op. cit., p31. persuasive in Levinson's description is the recognition in Baker's dance of a
sensual intensity that embodies the authenticity of experience that Kracauer
believed had been evacuated by the routinised aesthetics of modern capitalism.
In other words, implicit in the references to the ability of Josephine Baker
and 'the Negroes' to rejuvenate European culture is an investment in the idea
that she and they embodied the persistence or the promise of Persönlichkeit
even in the conditions of mass society.
That is the optimistic story. An alternative possibility might be deduced
from Kracauer's comments on jazz dance in an article publisbed in March
1925. His topic in 'Travel and Dance' is social dance rather than the
professional routines he would have seen in the Chocolate Kiddies revue at
Haller's Admiralspalast. Now, almost prefiguring Adorno's later comments,
Kracauer sees in jazz not a force for revitalisation but a symptom of the
degraded modern experience of time. Just as mass tourism reduced travel
to 'a pure experience of space', so the effect of jazz was to transform dance
into 'a mere marking of time'.

The secret aim of jazz tunes, no matter how Negroid their origins may
be, is a tempo that is concerned with nothing but itself. These tunes strive
to extinguish the melody and spin out ever further the vamps that signal
the decline of meaning, in that they reveal and perfect the mechanization
already at work in the melody. A shift has taken place here, away from
movement that refers to a meaning and toward movement that is solely
self-referential.

Particularly important here is Kracauer's off-hand aside 'no matter how Negroid
their origins may be'. Implicit in it is a rejection of the whole paradigm of cultural
authenticity that framed the reaction to Josephine Baker in Europe. Kracauer,
it seems, would have had little patience with the idea that she (or jazz, or
négritude) embodied a vital force that might renew an etiolated culture.
Origins, and especially 'racial' origins, were just not a good or relevant guide

62 NEW FORMATIONS
to cultural analysis. The logic of his comments about the Tiller Girls, tourism
and jazz dancing suggests that Kracauer could just as well have seen Baker as
another symptom ofthe capitalist Ratio. Even if the frenetic sensuality and
self-mockery of her dancing appeared to be the opposite of mechanical, it
too could be read as 'solely self-referential'. By evoking the desire or nostalgia
for Persönlichkeit, Baker's cod primitivism may have been confirming rather
than transcending its disappearance."* 18, Siegfried
Kracauer. 'Travel
A third possible approach to deciphering Baker à la Kracauer may in and Dance', in
some ways be more attuned to the account ofthe danse sauvage offered in this Kracauer, MÍLSS
Omameni. op, cit,,
article. Methodologically, this option looks forward from the Weimar essays, pp66-67.
beyond the sociology of The Salaried Masses or even the cultural history of
Offenbach in the 1930s, towards From Caligari to Hitler, written in the United
States just after the War. There, Kracauer submits a mass cultural form,
cinema, to diagnostic rather than hieroglyphic analysis. 'What films refiect,'
he writes, 'are not so much explicit credos as psychological dispositions
- those deep layers of collective mentality which extend more or less below
the dimension of consciousness'. From that perspective, might Kracauer
have seen the negotiation between Josephine Baker and Rolf de Mare as
both manifestation and symptom of the 'inner dispositions' of European
intellectuals and cosmopolitan audiences in the interwar years, and so as
part of a 'secret history' ofthe twentieth century? That starting point would
shift the focus away from the meaning ofJosephine Baker to the style in which
she was imagined, and so to the desires, hopes, anxieties and fears being
projected onto her,''-* 19, Siegfried
Kracauer, From
I end with a final guess about Kracauer and Baker, or rather with an Caligari io Hitler: A
observation on Kracauer's limitations as a commentator on dance as aesthetic Ptiychological History
experience as well as a cultural form. The great lesson of Kracauer the ofthe Gennan Film,
Princeton. Princeton
cultural critic is not so much to look behind the surface of things, as to be University Pt^ess,
1947, p i 1,
able to see woven into surfaces 'the fundamental substance of an epoch' ('The
Mass Ornament') or 'deep layers of collective mentality' {Caligari to Hitler).
No doubt, then, that he would have looked at Josephine Baker in order to
discern something beyond her personality and her performances. As he
did so, what would have been won and lost? Watching dance is a physical
experience before it is a visual, intellectual or hermeneutic activity. The
object of attention, insisted the Russian-American choreographer Georges
Balanchine who worked with Baker on several occasions, must be 'this dancer
who is now this moment under your eyes'. Would Kracauer have been able to
engaged fully with Baker the dancer, or would that mobile and insistent body
have disappeared to be transmogrified into Baker the cultural hieroglyph?

KRACAUER A N D T H E DANCING GIRLS 63