Wild dance in Berlin

Babylon Berlin S01E01

In the scenes at Moka Efti – first episodes of the succesful series "Babylon Berlin"  – we see a sparsely dressed girl performing what looks like a Brazilian Indian dance.

S01 E01

In the 1920s, that kind of cabaret numbers, called "wild dance" or "revue nègre" were popular in Berlin, and the credit for having started that trend is surely Josephine Baker’s. Josephine was immensely popular in Paris and in 1926 she visited Berlin for the first time. 

The premiere of her Revue Nègre in Berlin took place at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfurstendamn on New Year's Eve. At that time, Berliners lived a period of unexpected prosperity. The worst crisis, the inflation, seemed to be over. The Germans, if they made some marks, spent them at once. The new rich showed off their money in nightclubs which were Europe’s most feverish. The Moka Efti could have been one of them.

In spite of its strangeness, the Revue Nègre was almost as successful in Berlin as it was in Paris. After the finale, the public was so excited by the 19 years old Josephine that they invaded the scene and carried her in their arms. Although the stay of the Revue Nègre did not exceed two months, it was enough for giving Josephine’s name the magic aura reserved until then to Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich. The Berlin Illustrierte called her "a figure of contemporary German Expressionism". 

These were the years of "expressionist dance", whose principle was to show more emotion than virtuosity. The dance would be improvisational, uninhibited and provocative. Among its leading names were Mary Wigman and Valeska Gert (the later was also an actress, appearing in Joyless street, Diary of a lost girl and Threepenny Opera).

Mary Wigman

Valeska Gert

But, unwittingly, Josephine became the flag of another fashionable German movement: the Freikorperkultur, nudism. However, right-wing Germans regarded Josephine Baker as a threat to the Aryan ideal. The brown shirts distributed leaflets in which they attacked her, calling her "Untermensch", that is to say, an inferior human being. Thus, the evening of the premiere, an demonstration hostile to Blacks defiled in front of the theater.

Josephine's performance in Berlin allowed her to meet important people. Max Reinhardt was one of the most influential and original theatre directors in the world. He decided to take her under his tutelage: her talent was still raw and it needed to be trained, he maintained. He wanted her to follow a three-year program at his own drama school, with Marlene Dietrich among other students. After meeting members of the intelligentsia and the German avant-garde through Reinhardt, Josephine considered accepting the latter's proposal, as she thought Berlin a more vibrant place than Paris. However, she had given her word for the new review of the Folies-Bergere, so she left Berlin.

She danced at the home of poet Karl Gustav Vollmoeller (the author of the screenplay of the film The blue angel) "tirelessly and continually inventing new figures like a child at play". "She never even gets hot, her skin remains fresh, cool, dry. A bewitching creature," wrote Count Harry Kessler about this meeting with Baker, in his famous diaries. Kessler was so enchanted that he proposed to write a ballet for her, "half jazz and half Oriental", with music to be composed perhaps by Richard Strauss. Vollmoeller and Max Reinhardt (also present there) were thrilled with the idea. 

She shook her derriere with such virtuosity that the audience fell into ecstasy."Your bottom, with all respect, is a feverishly moving chocolate mousse," wrote in 1926, the otherwise highbrow cultural magazine Der Querschnitt.

One could think that Baker was seen as a cute little animal that came as an answer to the longings of Europeans for sensuality and sex, for jungle and exoticism. In the Revue Négre, what especially excited the audience was the "Danse Sauvage" ("wild dance") when Baker and her stage partner, the Senegalese Joe Alex, celebrated a highly erotic pas de deux to drum sounds.

In no other city, Baker noted in her memoirs, had she received so many love letters, so many flowers and presents: "Berlin, that's great! A triumphal procession, you carry me on your hands." Wherever she appeared, people cheered her. Baker went out on the town and discovered in Berlin, as she wrote, "the best beer in the world." At a costume ball, she elected the most beautiful black-clad woman in the city, drove then through the streets in an ostrich-drawn carriage and triggered a veritable Charleston hysteria.

Racist protests overshadowed Baker's European tour at the end of the twenties: in Vienna, special services were held for three days, asking for "Repentance for the serious attacks against morality, committed by Josephine Baker."

    

Movie poster from 1927