Читаем Berlin полностью

Berlin’s response to Josephine Baker, the black American dancer who sometimes performed in nothing but a banana skirt, reflected the capital’s romance with America, in particular with its Negro culture. Baker arrived in Berlin from Paris in 1925 with her traveling show, La Revue Nègre. She instantly took to Berlin, declaring that it had “a jewel-like sparkle, especially at night, that didn’t exist in Paris.” The huge cafés reminded her “of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras.” From her own account, the city also took to her. “It’s madness, a triumph,” she claimed shortly after her first performance on New Year’s Eve at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürs-tendamm. “They carry me on their shoulders. At a big dance, when I walk in, the musicians stop playing, get up and welcome me. Berlin is where I received the greatest number of gifts.” But contemporary assessments of her performances and persona suggest that while there was plenty of fascination there was also a strong undercurrent of racism and cultural condescension. Applauding her dancing as the “victory of negroid dance culture over the Viennese waltz,” a reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt added: “In her the wildness of her forefathers, who were transplanted from the Congo Basin to the Mississippi, is preserved most authentically: she breathes life, the power of nature, a wantonness that can hardly be contained.” Oscar Bie, the dance critic of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, saw in her dance company “the remains of genuine paganism, of idol worship, of grotesque orgies.” Baker may have felt welcomed in Berlin, but she was welcomed only as an exotic outsider who provided the thrill of the forbidden without demanding serious or long-term acceptance.

In her Berlin performances Baker was backed by Sam Wooding’s all-black eleven-piece jazz band, which also supported another American Negro review that was then big in Berlin, The Chocolate Kiddies. Along with the jazz came new American dances like the fox-trot and the Charleston. Like the rock music of the 1960s, this craze was seen to have political implications—to connote a rejection of previous authoritarian ways. As one enthusiast claimed: “If only the Kaiser had danced jazz—then all of that [World War I] would never have come to pass.” Predictably, however, cultural conservatives were horrified by the American imports. According to the arch-nationalist composer Hans Pfitzner, the “jazz-fox trot flood” represented “the American tanks in the spiritual assault on European culture.”

Josephine Baker in her famous “banana skirt”

Whatever its spiritual import, jazz turned out to be more than just a temporary fad. In 1926 Deutsche Gramophone created a special label to promote American jazz; this helped to spread its popularity and to give it permanence. So did the proliferation of native (or mostly native) jazz bands, virtually all of which imitated famous American groups like Bix Beiderbecke or Red Nichols. Improvisation did not come easily to classically trained German musicians, and to achieve greater commercial appeal some actually claimed to be American. Such was the case with “Herr Mike Sottnek aus Neuyork,” who advertised his outfit as “Die amerikanische Jazz-Tanzkapelle.” Eventually the native musicianship improved, and Germany (especially Berlin) developed a thriving indigenous jazz culture.

American influences also helped to reshape Berlin’s music hall scene, providing the impetus for a new kind of production, the seminude all-girl chorus line. Admittedly, the “jazz” in question here was no more spontaneous than the Rockettes-style kicklines performed by troupes like the “Tiller Girls,” who actually hailed from England. As historian Peter Jelavich has noted, the kicklines represented for the Berliners the technological promise of American society. “Whereas the black entertainers embodied one aspect of America—something spontaneous, wild, uncivilized, unencumbered by European culture—the Girls represented the flip side of the dollar: energy, efficiency, productivity.” These acts were choreographed so precisely that their erotic potential was often lost—unless one experienced a masochistic frisson at the prospect of being trampled by a giant millipede. In essence, the kicklines were just body parts in mechanized unison, the show business equivalent of busy hands over a factory conveyor belt.