Valeska Gert - Biography

Valeska Gert (11 January 1892 – circa 16 March 1978) was a German Jewish dancer and cabaret artist. She was also active as an actress and artists' model.

Life and career

Gert was born as Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin to a Jewish family. She was the eldest daughter of manufacturer Theodor Samosch and Augusta Rosenthal. Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work, Gert began taking dance lessons at the age of nine. This, combined with her love of ornate fashion, led her to a career in dance and performance art. In 1915, she studied acting with Maria Moissi.

World War I had a negative effect on her father’s finances, forcing Gert to rely on herself far more than other bourgeois daughters typically might. As World War I raged on, Gert joined a Berliner dance group and created revolutionary satirical dance.

In 1916, Gert made her dance debut in a Berlin movie house, performing between movie reels. The same year, she began acting at the Munich Kammerspiele. Following engagements at the Deutsches Theater and the Tribüne in Berlin, Gert was invited to perform in expressionist plays in Dadaist mixed media art nights. Her performances in Oskar Kokoschka’s Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919), and Frank Wedekind’s Franziska earned her popularity.

During this time, she also performed in the Schall und Rauch cabaret. During this time, Gert launched a tour of her own dances, with titles like Dance in Orange, Boxing, Circus, Japanese Grotesque, Death, and Whore. She also contributed articles for magazines like Die Weltbühne and the Berliner Tageszeitung.

By 1923, Gert focused her work more on film acting than live performance, performing with Andrews Engelmann, Arnold Korff, and others. She performed in G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street in 1925, Diary of a Lost Girl in 1929, and The Threepenny Opera in 1931. In the late twenties, she returned to the stage with pieces emphasizing Tontänze (sound dances), which explored the relationship between movement and sound.

London

In 1933, Gert’s Jewish heritage resulted in her ban from the German stage. Her exile from performance in Germany sent her to London for some time, where she worked both in theatre and film. In London she worked on the experimental short film Pett and Pot, which would long stand as her last movie. Also while in London, Gert wed an English writer, her second marriage.

United States

In 1938, she emigrated to the United States, where it was difficult for her to continue her previous career. She lived on the welfare of a Jewish refugee community and found work washing dishes and posing as a nude model. This same year, she hired the 17-year old Georg Kreisler as a rehearsal pianist to continue focus on cabaret work. By 1941, she had opened the Beggar Bar in New York, where Julian Beck, Judith Malina, and Jackson Pollock worked for her. Tennessee Williams also worked for her for a short time as a busboy, but was fired for refusing to pool his tips. Gert also commented that his work was "so sloppy".

By 1944, Gert had relocated to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she opened Valeska's. Here, she reunited with Tennessee Williams. She told him stories of hiring a seventy-year-old midget named Mademoiselle Pumpernickel who became jealous whenever Gert went on stage. During this period, Gert was called to Provincetown court for throwing garbage out of her window and failing to pay a dance partner. She called upon Williams as a character witness, which he did with pleasure, despite the fact that she fired him. He told incredulous friends that he "simply liked her".

Return to Europe

In 1947 she returned to Europe. After stays in Paris and Zürich, in 1949 she went to Blockaded Berlin, where she opened the cabaret Hexenküche in the next year. Following Hexenküche, she opened Ziegenstall on the island of Sylt.

In the 1960s, she made her comeback in film. In 1965, she had a role in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, the success of which caused her to market herself to young German directors in the 1970s. During this period, she played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's serial Acht Stunden sind kein Tag: Franz und Ernst and in Volker Schlöndorff's 1976 movie Der Fangschuss.

In 1978 Werner Herzog invited her to play the real estate broker Knock in his remake of Murnau's classic film Nosferatu. The contract was signed 1 March but she died just two weeks later before filming began.

On 18 March 1978 neighbors and friends in Kampen, Germany reported she had not been seen for four days. When her door was forced in the presence of police she was found dead. She is believed to have died on 16 March. She was 86 years old.

In 2010 the art of Valeska Gert was for the first time exhibited in Berlin Museum for Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof. The curators Wolfgang Müller from the art punk band Die Tödliche Doris and art historican An Paenhuysen present Valeska Gert in the exhibition "Pause. Bewegte Fragmente" (pause. Fragments in motion) including the yet unknown video "Baby", recorded by Erich Mitzka on video, which shows her performing in 1969.

Filmography

Silent

• 1924/25: Ein Sommernachtstraum (A Midsummer Nights Dream) — Germany, director: Hans Neumann
• 1925: Die freudlose Gasse – Germany, director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst
• 1926: Nana – Germany/France, director: Jean Renoir after Émile Zola
• 1928: Alraune — Germany, director: Henrik Galeen, after Hanns Heinz Ewers
• 1929: Der Tod (Experimental film) — Germany, director: Carl Koch ("Totentanz", part of Brecht's The Baden-Baden Lesson on Consent)
• 1929: So ist das Leben – Germany, director: Carl Junghans
• 1929: Tagebuch einer Verlorenen — Germany, director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst, nach Margarete Böhme
• 1929/30: Menschen am Sonntag. Germany, director: Robert Siodmak, Rochus Gliese, Edgar G. Ulmer

Sound films

• 1931: Die 3-Groschen-Oper – Germany, director: Georg Wilhelm Pabst
• 1934: Pett and Pott – United Kingdom, director: Alberto Cavalcanti
• 1965: Giulietta degli spiriti– Germany/Italy/France, director: Federico Fellini
• 1966: Die gute Dame (La bonne Dame) – France, Director: Pierre Philippe
• 1973: Acht Stunden sind kein Tag. Episode: "Franz und Ernst" (TV serial) — director: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
• 1975: Die Betörung der blauen Matrosen – Germany, director: Ulrike Ottinger
• 1976: Der Fangschuß – Germany, director: Volker Schlöndorff
• 1977: Nur zum Spaß, nur zum Spiel – Kaleidoskop Valeska Gert (documentary) – Germany, director: Volker Schlöndorff

Awards

• 1970: Filmband in Gold for life-long achievement in German film
• 2004: Honoured with a star on the Walk of Fame of Cabaret in Mainz

Bibliography

Primary sources, Monographs by Valeska Gert

• Valeska Gert: Mein Weg. Leipzig 1931. (2nd ed., self-published, s.l. & s.a., ca. 1950)
• Valeska Gert: Die Bettlerbar von New York. Berlin 1950. (2nd ed., s.l. & s.a., ca. 1958)
• Valeska Gert: Ich bin eine Hexe. Munich 1968 (various editions)
• Valeska Gert: Die Katze von Kampen. Percha 1974
• Valeska Gert: Je suis une sorcière. Kaléidoscope d'une vie dansée. Paris 2004 (Translation of Ich bin eine Hexe, annotated and a foreword by Philippe Ivernel)
• About 20 essays by Valeska Gert are mentioned in F.-M. Peter (1985)

Secondary literature, Monographs about Valeska Gert

• Fred Hildenbrandt: Die Tänzerin Valeska Gert. Stuttgart 1928
• Frank-Manuel Peter: Valeska Gert: Tänzerin, Schauspielerin und Kabarettistin. Eine dokumentarische Biographie. Berlin 1985, 2nd ed. 1987
• Susanne Foellmer: Valeska Gert. Fragmente einer Avantgardistin in Tanz und Schauspiel der 1920er Jahre. Bielefeld 2006. With CD-ROM (Dance films by Gert, Mary Wigman and Niddy Impekoven)
• Solo für ein Mannequin von Grieneisen, Homage to Valeska Gert, audi collage by Peter Eckhart Reichel with Monika Hansen and Gerd Wameling, duo-phon records, 2001
• Wolfgang Müller Valeska Gert. Ästhetik der Präsenzen, written by the founder of the West-Berlin performance group Die Tödliche Doris about the relations between the performances/art of the Proto-Punk Valeska Gert to the Post-Punk scene, Berlin 2010.

Secondary literature, Monographs mentioning Valeska Gert

Valeska Gert's bold new style of dance was recognized early by her contemporaries. Here is a selection of books:

• Paul Nikolaus: Tänzerinnen. Munich (1919)
• Ernst Blass: Das Wesen der neuen Tanzkunst. Weimar 1921.
• Werner Suhr: Das Gesicht des Tanzes. Egestorf near Hamburg 1927

Academic treatment

• Gabriele Brandstetter: Tanz-Lektüren. Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt a. M. 1995
• Dianne S. Howe: Individuality and Expression – The Aesthetics of the New German Dance, 1908–1936. New York 1996
• Ramsay Burt: Alien bodies: representations of modernity, ‚race‘ and nation in early modern dance. New York 1998
• Christiane Kuhlmann: Bewegter Körper – Mechanischer Apparat. Zur medialen Verschränkung von Tanz und Fotografie in den 1920er Jahren. Frankfurt a. M. 2003
• Yvonne Hardt: Politische Körper. Ausdruckstanz, Choreografien des Protests und die Arbeiterkulturbewegung in der Weimarer Republik. Münster 2004
• Amelie Soyka: "Lauter zischende kleine Raketen: Valeska Gert". In: Dies. (ed.): Tanzen, tanzen und nichts als tanzen. Tänzerinnen der Moderne von Josephine Baker bis Mary Wigman. Berlin 2004, p. 123–137

Secondäry literature, in Biographies

• Hans-Juergen Fink & Michael Seufert: Georg Kreisler gibt es gar nicht — Die Biographie. Frankfurt am Main 2005, p.  96–97

External links

• Valeska Gert (German language)
• Photos von Valeska Gert