Valeska Gert

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Valeska Gert, Munich, 1918

Valeska Gert ; Born Gertrud Valesca Samosch , (born January 11, 1892 in Berlin ; † between March 15 and 18, 1978 in Kampen (Sylt) ), was a German modern dancer , actress and pantomime (or all in one) who also worked as a cabaret artist .

life and work

Beginnings and times of the Weimar Republic

Valeska Gert was the oldest child of the Berlin merchant Theodor Samosch and his wife Augusta Rosenthal. At the instigation of her mother, she received dance lessons from the age of seven. In 1915/1916 she took acting lessons from Maria Moissi and Alfred Breiderhoff . She made her debut as a dancer in February 1916. A little later Gert received an engagement at the Münchner Kammerspiele . In the following year she was already very successful as a solo dancer in Berlin and Munich. Her eccentric dance pantomimes , in which she analyzed subjects such as boxing , nervousness , matchmakers , politicians and prostitution and implemented their complexity as a unit, ultimately made her a star shrouded in scandal. In Canaille she danced a prostitute including "the cramp (orgasm) that comes next", as she told the director Volker Schlöndorff in his documentary film in 1976, when she was 84 years old . As is often the case in modern podium dancing, Gert developed her own dance numbers based on topics of her own choice.

She used her unconventional appearance for a dancer to perform a wide range of dance themes such as greetings from the mummy cellar , Spreewald wet nurse or Opus 1, composition on the worn-out piano at a great distance . In the 1920s she also realized more radical dances such as death : a dance about the last breath of a person who consists almost of immobility and whose radicalism was unique in modern dance or the performance of the time. As early as the 1920s she presented the young medium of film in a performative manner by dancing time-lapse, slow-motion and even the film editing itself, the latter as modern road traffic . After premiering Walter Ruttmann 's second abstract film in the opening act , she showed a revolutionary Salome production in the Berlin grandstand on April 23, 1923 , in which she herself played the leading role in "the rhythmic, fervent howls of some women behind the stage" danced. As early as 1931, in her book Mein Weg , she called for noise music and the cut-up process. There is also vocal music that consists only of the sounds of the larynx.

In 1925 she was first seen in a silent film: In Hans Neumann's parody of A Midsummer Night's Dream , she embodied the puck. Shortly thereafter, Georg Wilhelm Pabst used her with great profit in his street film Die joudlose Gasse (1925), which was set during the inflationary period , in which she was a greasy matchmaker. Then she was seen in Mandrake and the German-Czech drama So ist das Leben . In 1929 there was another collaboration with Pabst: he engaged her for the diary of a lost woman . Here she shone as the sadistic director of a home for fallen girls. It is above all the scenes with Valeska Gert that the viewer will remember: While she encourages her scantily clad wards to do gymnastics, she drives herself into a terrifying ecstasy by beating a gong, which leads to a veritable orgasm . A year later, she achieved greater fame with her appearance as Mrs. Peachum in the Threepenny Opera, also staged by Pabst . It also caught the attention of the artists of the time: The Bauhaus student Wassiljef painted it in death in 1925 , Jeanne Mammen immortalized it as a chansonette in 1929 and Charlotte Berend-Corinth recorded it dancing in a series of graphics in 1920. In 1932 Valeska Gert opened her first cabaret Kohlkopp in Berlin .

emigration

After 1933 Gert, defamed as " degenerate " by the Nazis , had no other performance opportunities in Germany except in the Kulturbund Deutscher Juden and stayed longer in France, the USA and above all in England, but kept returning to Germany. In London she was involved in the experimental short film Pett and Pott . It was her last film for a long time. On April 24, 1936, she married her second husband, the writer Robin Hay Anderson, in London. At the beginning of 1939 she emigrated to the USA. Here she found it difficult to work in her previous profession and worked as a nude model in Provincetown for a few weeks or months . In 1939 she temporarily hired 17-year-old Georg Kreisler as a piano accompanist for rehearsal performances . In 1941 Gert opened the Beggar Bar in New York , an artistic cabaret with simple entertainment, which it had to close again in 1945 due to official requirements. There u. a. Kadidja Wedekind with recitations of the poems of her father Frank Wedekind ; one of their waiters was Tennessee Williams , who later became world famous as a playwright and who also recited his own poems here. Judith Malina , who later became famous through the Living Theater, worked on the cloakroom . In Provincetown , Massachusetts, Gert opened Valeska’s cabaret for one summer in 1946 .

return

In 1947 Gert returned to Europe. After stops in Paris and Zurich, where she opened the Cabaret Café Valeska and her kitchen staff , Gert traveled to Berlin, which was under blockade , in 1949 , where she first opened the Cabaret Bei Valeska and the following year the Cabaret Hexenküche , for which she opened the young Klaus Kinski committed. She herself played the concentration camp commander Ilse Koch , notorious for her cruelty , in the witch's kitchen , who was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 1949. In 1951 the night bar "Ziegenstall" opened in Kampen on the North Sea island of Sylt . In the bar, which was decorated with hay, the waiters not only took care of the physical well-being, but also entertained the guests. However, Valeska Gert did not perform here herself.

In 1965, the Italian film director Federico Fellini hired her for the film Julia and the Ghosts , in which she, wearing a white wig, took on the role of a factotum . On June 28, 1970 she received the gold film tape for her many years of outstanding work in German film.

In 1973 she worked in RW Fassbinder's TV series Eight Hours Are Not a Day and in 1976 she was seen as Aunt Praskovia in Volker Schlöndorff's Der Fangschuß . Schlöndorff then shot the documentary Just for Fun, Just for Play , in which Gert talks about her life and performs some dances and performances like the concentration camp commander Ilse Koch . She also gives a taste of her vocal music with the Kummerlied , which consists only of whining, whimpering and howling. In 1978 she hired Werner Herzog to play the real estate agent Knock in his remake of the Murnau classic Nosferatu . On March 1, she signed the contract; but she died before filming began. On March 18, 1978, neighbors and acquaintances worried because Valeska Gert had not been seen for four days. When the front door was forcibly opened in the presence of the police, Gert was already dead. She presumably died on March 16, 1978.

Honorary grave of the city of Berlin

Valeska Gert was buried in her birthplace and favorite city of Berlin, where she still had an apartment for a long time after her remigration (parallel to Sylt). She was not buried “in a bright red coffin” as requested at the Ruhleben (Am Hain) cemetery in (West) Berlin, so the coffin was covered with a red cloth. The black tombstone bears her name as an autograph in pink. The grave site is in field XVI-175. Her estate came to the archive of the Akademie der Künste Berlin through her biographer ; The collection of theater studies at the University of Cologne and the German Dance Archive Cologne also have remarkable documents .

Valeska Gert is dedicated to a star on the Cabaret Walk of Fame ; "[T] he expressive grotesque dance pantomimes and suggestive chansons and poems by the girl from the mummy cellar , performed with physical effort, are among the most unusual things that have ever been seen on the cabaret stage." In the Berlin district of Friedrichshain , a street is named after her. A Valeska Gert visiting professorship for dance and performance has existed at the Institute for Theater Studies at the Free University of Berlin since 2006 .

But she not only danced for the theater audience, but also for photographers such as Lili Baruch , Suse Byk , Lotte Jacobi , Erna Lendvai-Dircksen , Elli Marcus , Otto Umbehr and Man Ray .

Catalog raisonné

A preliminary list of their dances up to their emigration can be found on the website of the German Dance Archive Cologne. The dance break is missing .

Further "numbers", as Valeska Gert called her designs between dance, pantomime and drama, were created after the Second World War:

  • Ball memories of an aristocrat
  • The concentration camp commander Ilse Koch
  • Grieneisen's mannequin

Filmography

Silent films

Sound films

Contemporary appreciations

  • "A great number, an excellent dancer, an extraordinary woman." - ( Kurt Tucholsky )
  • “The device was the first to break dance out of yesterday's tutu-like template. Gloriously cheeky and disrespectful, she pulled what had been in the dust. Brashy meanness translated into dance. " - (Paul Marcus (d. I. Pem ): Die vom Brettl. In: Der Junggeselle , No. 23, June 2nd, 1926, p. 7.)
  • “A summary expression of our time is much more [than Elisabeth Bergner ] Valeska Gert, the dancer whose full body an inveterate drive whips up the image, the extract and the criticism of everything present: a contemporary theater in which we are more programmatic, more passionate than anybody The stage with its compromise schedule would have been able to see the tragedies, tragic comedies, spheres of pleasure, vices, torments, senselessness, glories of our last years condensed in unimaginable concentration. Gert plays the subways and underground feelings of the big city, the chaos of streets, drugs, film, junk bazaars, devastated street girls, demi-Vierge and dull wet nurses, expressionism and objectivity, East Asia and Western Europe. What Rops and Daumier , George Grosz and Balzac , Flaubert , Huysmans , Zola , Edward Munch , Picabia , Kollwitz , Callot , Barlach , Hogarth , Thakeray [sic], Swift , Hoffmann , Wilde , Kubin and Jaques Offenbach [sic] with drawing, painting , epically, musically and plastically, pulls them together intensively and revolutionarily into the tense excitement of moments. ” - ( Rudolf Frank : Das moderne Theater , 1927)

Awards

Posthumous appreciations

(without stage performances and film retrospectives)

  • 1978: Honorary grave of the city of Berlin
  • 2004: Star of Satire in the Walk of Fame des Cabaret, Mainz
  • 2006: Establishment of the Valeska Gert guest professorship for dance and performance at the Free University of Berlin
  • 2006: Naming of Valeska-Gert-Strasse in Berlin-Friedrichshain
  • 2009: Installation of the Valeska Gert stele on the art trail in Kampen on Sylt
  • 2012: Dedication of the Kampener Künstlerwein, Art Edition IV, in honor of Valeska Gert (with portrait; a Rioja )

Exhibitions

  • 1978: Valeska Gert , photo exhibition (portrait photographs of Valeska Gerts by Ulrike Ottinger and Herbert Tobias), Arsenal 2, Berlin, accompanying the film retrospective at Arsenal, Berlin.
  • 1985: Valeska Gert. Dancer, actress, cabaret artist. Galerie 70 in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; curated by Frank-Manuel Peter .
  • 1987: Valeska Gert - a portrait . Kaamp Hüs, Kampen / Sylt; curated by Johanna Eglau.
  • 1992: Valeska Gert. Diagonales en noir et blanc with quelques taches de couleurs vives. Center G. Pompidou, Paris; also shown in Montpellier (Center Chorégraphique National), Marseille (ancienne Salle des Ventes) and Bolzano (Maretsch Castle, 1996); curated by Maité Fossen.
  • 1992: Homage to Valeska Gert on her 100th birthday. Oil paintings, graphics, sculptures. Atelierhaus Eglau, Kampen / Sylt; curated by Johanna Eglau.
  • 1998: I want to live even if I'm dead. On the 20th year of Valeska Gert's death. Galerie am Scheunenviertel, Berlin; curated by Tatjana Hofmann.
  • 2010/2011: PAUSE. Valeska Gert: Moving Fragments , Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart , Berlin; curated by Wolfgang Müller and An Paenhuysen. There she enters into a dialogue for the first time with works by Marcel Broodthaers , Valie Export , Marcel Duchamp , Hanne Darboven and other artists whose art also deals with structures and phenomena of perception.
  • 2011: “I want to live, even if I'm dead.” Valeska Gert. An eventful life in dance, film and cabaret. House of Brandenburg-Prussian History, Potsdam; curated by Elke-Vera Kotowski and Franziska Buhre.
  • 2012: Valeska Gert. "The cat from Kampen". Gallery in Kaamp-Hüs, Kampen / Sylt; curated by Birgit Friese after the Potsdam exhibition (by Elke Vera Kotowski and Franziska Buhre).
  • 2012: Valeska Gert. The "cat" from Kampen. Sylt Heimatmuseum, Keitum / Sylt; curated by Ulrich Schulte-Wülwer and Sven Lappoehn.
  • 2017: Valeska Gert in the picture. Works by artists from GEDOK Schleswig-Holstein. Salon Utopia, Lübeck.
  • 2017: Valeska Gert. Face - Body - Movement , Filmarchiv Austria, Vienna, Austria.
  • 2018: Valeska-Gert-Saal in the exhibition Resonanz von Exil in the Museum der Moderne, Salzburg; curated by Christiane Kuhlmann.

literature

Primary literature, monographs by Valeska Gert

  • Valeska Gert: My way . Leipzig 1931. (2nd slightly changed edition, self-published oOuJ, approx. 1950; Reprint: In: Wolfgang Müller: Valeska Gert. Aesthetics of Presidencies. Schmitz, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-927795-51-8 .)
  • Valeska Gert: The Beggar Bar of New York. arani-Verlagsgesellschaft, Berlin-Grunewald 1950 (2nd edition self-published oOuJ, approx. 1958; 3rd edition: LSD in Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2012, with envelope vignette by Karl Lagerfeld , ISBN 978-3-86930-368-0 ) .
  • Valeska Gert: I am a witch. Kaleidoscope of my life. Schneekluth, Munich 1968 (various new editions).
    • Revised, newly illustrated edition with index and an afterword by Frank-Manuel Peter, Alexander Verlag , Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89581-511-9 .
    • Valeska Gert: Je suis une sorcière. Kaléidoscope d'une vie dansée. Edition Complexe, Paris 2004, ISBN 2-8048-0004-0 (translation of I am a witch. Comments and preface by Philippe Ivernel)
  • Valeska Gert: The Kampen Cat. Schulz, Percha u. a. 1973, ISBN 3-7962-0002-8 .
  • About 20 articles by Valeska Gert are listed in the bibliography by Frank-Manuel Peter (1985).
  • Record (Vinyl 7 "EP) Absurd Cabaret - Guest of Valeska Gert. 1962
  • Gramophone record (vinyl 7 "single) Baby. (1969), released 2010.

Secondary literature, monographs on Valeska Gert

Secondary literature, in monographs Valeska Gert's dance style was recognized early on in contemporary books. Selection:

  • Paul Nikolaus: dancers. Delphin-Verlag, Munich 1919.
  • Ernst Blass : The essence of the new dance art. E. Lichtenstein, Weimar 1921.
  • Werner Suhr: The face of dance. R. Laurer, Egestorf district Hamburg 1927.

In more recent biographies (selection):

  • Hans-Juergen Fink, Michael Seufert: Georg Kreisler. Doesn't exist at all. The biography. Scherz, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-502-15021-4 , pp. 96-97.

Embedding in the scientific discourse:

  • Gabriele Brandstetter : Dance Readings. Body images and spatial figures of the avant-garde (= Fischer pocket books No. 12396 ISSN  0173-5438 ). Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12396-8 .
  • Dianne S. Howe: Individuality and Expression. The Aesthetics of the New German Dance, 1908-1936 (= New Studies in Aesthetics. Volume 24). Lang, New York NY et al. a. 1996, ISBN 0-8204-2656-3 .
  • Ramsay Burt: Alien bodies. Representations of modernity, “race” and nation in early modern dance . Routledge, London a. a. 1998, ISBN 0-415-14594-5 .
  • Christiane Kuhlmann : Moving Body - Mechanical Apparatus. On the media entanglement of dance and photography in the 1920s . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-631-51669-X .
  • Yvonne Hardt: Political Bodies. Expressive dance, choreographies of protest and the working-class culture movement in the Weimar Republic . Lit, Münster 2004, ISBN 3-8258-7995-X (= dance studies. Volume 1, also dissertation at the FU Berlin 2003).
  • Amelie Soyka: Loud hissing little rockets: Valeska Gert. In: Amelie Soyka (Ed.): Dancing and dancing and nothing but dancing. Modern dancers from Josephine Baker to Mary Wigman. AvivA, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-932338-22-7 , pp. 123-137.

Scientific articles in journals

  • Kristen M. Hylenski: “I want to live, even if I'm dead”: Valeska Gert's Autobiographical Legacy. In: German Life and Letters. Volume 66, No. 1, 2013, ISSN  0016-8777 , pp. 39-54, doi: 10.1111 / glal.12002 .
  • Kristen M. Hylenski: “Kaleidoscope of my life”: Valeska Gert's Performances of the Self. In: Colloquia Germanica. Volume 42, No. 4, 2009, ISSN  0010-1338 , pp. 289-306.

Web links

Commons : Valeska Gert  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IMDb, filmportal.de and Kay Less: The large personal encyclopedia of the film indicate March 15th, Adolf Heinzlmeier and Berndt Schulz: Lexicon of German film and TV stars and Ulrich Liebe (ed.): From Adorf to Ziemann. The Bibliography of Actor Biographies 1900–2000 March 16, CineGraph March 15 or 16. - She was found dead on the 18th and the death certificate noted as the date “between the 15th and 18th”, whereby the 16th is considered probable, but not provable.
  2. ↑ Review of the new edition of her autobiography Valeska Gert: Ich bin ein Hexe , published by Peter Sampel on September 19, 2019
  3. ↑ Susanne Foellmer: Displaced bodies, grotesque bodies. The avant-garde Valeska Gert. In: Gabriele Klein , Christa Zippich (Ed.): Dance, Theory, Text (= dance research. Volume 12). Lit, Münster u. a. 2002, ISBN 3-8258-5901-0 , pp. 457-475.
  4. ↑ Valeska Gert: My way. Leipzig 1931, p. 47 f.
  5. ↑ a b See kabarettarchiv.de (PDF; 88 kB)
  6. ↑ She married her first husband, the doctor Helmuth von Krause (1893–1980), son of the lawyer Paul von Krause , on March 28, 1918. The two divorced on November 23, 1935.
  7. ↑ Hans-Juergen Fink, Michael Seuffert: Georg Kreisler. Doesn't exist at all. The biography. Scherz, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-502-15021-4 .
  8. ↑ Valeska-Gert-Strasse. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert )
  9. ↑ Valeska Gert Visiting Professorship for Dance and Performance ( Memento of the original from June 6, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at the Free University of Berlin, accessed on May 10, 2011. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de
  10. ↑ Preliminary catalog raisonné of her dances
  11. ^ Photo of the dance break by Valeska Gert. Photo: Käte Ruppel, Berlin. (in the material collection of Volker Schlöndorff for his film about and with Valeska Gert)
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Müller on Gert's dance break in: Wolfgang Müller, Ästhetik der Presenzen. Valeska Gert , Martin Schmitz Verlag, Berlin 2010
  13. ↑ These numbers are u. a. documented in the biography of Frank-Manuel Peter and / or mentioned or represented in the film by Volker Schlöndorff von Gert himself.
  14. ↑ Kinemathek, No. 55, May 1978, Valeska Gert.
  15. ↑ pause. Valeska Gert: Moving Fragments , Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin.
  16. ↑ “I want to live, even if I'm dead.” Valeska Gert. An eventful life in dance, film and cabaret. ( Memento of the original from February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. House of Brandenburg-Prussian History, Potsdam. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hbpg.de
  17. ↑ exhibition review by Edith Wolf Perez on www.tanz.at, 11.03.2017. Retrieved on August 24, 2020
  18. ↑ Review by Kirsten Reimers on Deutschlandfunk about the new edition of the autobiography Ich bin ein Hexe , November 8, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Gert, Valeska
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Samosch, Gertrud Valesca (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German dancer and cabaret artist
DATE OF BIRTH January 11, 1892
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH March 18, 1978
Place of death Kampen (Sylt)