REVIEWS 467

Empire of Ecstasy. Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-

1935. By Karl Toepfer (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1997.
xvii plus 422pp. $50.00).

The decades from 1890 to the 1930s were the period ofllhigh modernity," marked
by unprecedented experimentation not only in literature and the visual arts, but
also in lifestyle. Dance all too frequently drops out of discussions of this seminal
epoch, yet as Karl Toepfer's fascinating study Empire of Ecstasy demonstrates,
dance is a well-suited medium for exploring the complex impulses and cul-
tural constellations that comprised modernism. For the modern dance forms
that emerged in those years powerfully united artistic experimentation with at,
tempts to create new modes of personal identity and communal life. Moreover,

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modem dance challenged traditional hierarchies of high and low culture, not
only through the influences of popular music, whether folk, tango, or jazz, but
through the participation of unprecedented numbers of people in dance schools,
rhythmic gymnastics, and the like. While elements of these phenomena can
be observed in all western European countries and North America during the
time, it isToepfer's claim that in Germany, modem dance developed in uniquely
close relationship to a "body culture" that reached levels of intensity and mass
involvement unparalleled in any other national context.
Dance and body culture converged on the pursuit of ecstasy, joyful release
from the constraints of modern society and bourgeois convention. Advocates of
the body culture hoped to create a unified ecstatic movement that would break
the iron cage of modernity. However, as Toepfer's richly detailed account shows,
the body culture produced instead a plurality of subcultures, competing theories,
and schools of dance and body movement. He attributes this pluralism to the
instabilities inherent in the appeal to the naked body itself as the crucial signi-
fier of modernity. A number of basic ambiguities run through the discourses and
practices that Toepfer presents. Was the naked body 'modern' because it exposes
primitive and instinctual forces that shatter convention or because nakedness is
itself the condition of modernity? Some dancers and theorists sought to accen-
tuate the materialism of the body, its visceral reality, while others, like Rudolf
Laban or the director of dance at the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer, explored the
body's potential for abstract form. The ecstatic body could be the sign of the
irrational, connecting the person to blood, libido, and self,transcendence in
community. Or ecstasy could be gained through rational movement. This im-
pulse animated the founder of rhythmic gymnastics, Emile [acques-Dalcroze, as
well as the feminist pedagogue Bess Mensendieck, who sought to emancipate
women through the rationalization of everyday motions. At least one con tern,
porary commentator recognized Mensendieck's proximity to Taylorism and the
fine line between liberation and regimentation. Toepfer holds that the naked
body also evoked a tension between innocence and modernity, although the
tension is perhaps better seen as a conflict between innocence and experience
within modernity. Isidore Duncan's 'barefoot modernism' and Anita Berber's de'
bauched bohemianism both circulated around modernism's search for a lost true
self, while Mary Wigman rejected early Nacktkultur's aura of innocence in favor
of a modernity steeped in tragedy, exposure, and loss.
The tension between innocence and experience ultimately revolved around
468 journal of social history winter 2002
eroticism. Once again, the body proved an unstable signifier. The publisher
and psychoanalytically influenced theorist Ernst Schertel insisted that nudity
always carries an erotic charge, and his writings probed the circuits of desire
between spectator and performer. Others, like the sun-worshipping nudist Hans
Suren, sought to neutralize sexuality in favor of therapeutic or communitarian
agendas, while Richard Ungewitter linked nudism to a reactionary racial ideal.
Turning from the field of theory and the broad Nacktkultur to dance itself, Toepfer
emphasizes that the question of eroticism was, if anything, even more charged.
Though many modem dancers were willing to dance nude in the name of art,
there was considerable unease about the accentuation of sexual difference and
eroticization that nudity entailed. This anxiety was one aspect of the gender
and sexual politics of dance. Although men dominated dance criticism and

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theory, and the audience for dance was equally male and female, it was almost
exclusively women who performed and flocked to the growing number of schools.
For women, modern dance was widely regarded as liberating. For men, modem
dance, particularly in the nude, was viewed as feminizing. Toepfer does a fine job
tracing the intricacies and contradictions of those gender dynamics in both the
discourse and practices, as well as in the institutionalization of modem dance.
He could have gone even further by relating men's anxieties to the crisis of
masculinity that numerous historians have detected in the early decades of the
century.'
Given the body culture's celebration of ecstatic movement, historians have
tended to associate it with irrationalism, antimodernism, and the totalitarian
movements of the inter-war years. Toepfer refuses to offer any grand thesis on
the political meanings of body culture. For one thing, he argues for continuity
across the divide of World War One, finding most of the elements of Weimar
Nacktkultur and dance already emerging in the last decade of the Kaiserreich. For
another, he stresses the pluralism of meanings that contemporaries attached to
dance and body culture, in contrast to the Nazi's attempt to homogenize the body.
The political ambiguities are most evident in choreographed mass performance,
which became an immensely popular genre. While one immediately thinks of the
Nazi spectacles filmed by Leni Riefenstal in the mid- 1930s, Toepfer maintains
that "during the 1920s the public consistently identified this aesthetic with left-
wing or emancipatory political aims sponsored by the social democrats, the labor
unions, the Nacktkultur clubs, the gymnastic organizations, and liberal bourgeois
cultural and religious associations" (301). He cautions that the scholar must
look to the content of specific mass performances, not the form itself, to read
the ideological message.
Empire of Ecstasy is a valuable contribution not only to dance history, but to
the social and cultural history of twentieth-century Germany. The dozens of sec-
tions devoted to specific theorists, pedagogues, cranks, bohemians, and serious
artists will provide fascinating details and many leads for scholars working on
the history of gender, women's movements, the body, urban culture, and alter-
native culture. However, if the strength of the book lies in these finely drawn
individual portraits, its weakness lies in the relative lack of broader contextu-
alization. For example, Topfer speaks enticingly about the institutionalization
of modern dance, the establishment of state subsidies for certain schools, and
the development of accreditation criteria, but he does not pursue those trends
REVIEWS 469
in any depth. Likewise, the ideological and intellectual sources of body culture
are passed over too quickly. The connection between sun,worship and nudism,
for example, had roots in the nineteenth-century fascination with myth and the
neo-paganisrn that was, in fact, a European phenomenon as readily observed in
Rupert Brooke's circle as in the counter,culture of Germany. More importantly,
the rhetoric of ecstasy is saturated in references to the "Dionysian," yet Toepfer
scarcely mentions Nietzsche and the pervasive influence he exercised upon the
avant-garde. German philhellenism, of which Nietzsche was a rogue devotee,
is also essentially absent from Toepfer's discussion, but the persistent appeal of
classicism helps to explain the striking strength of German body culture. For
that matter, more comparative study, especially in Scandinavia, is needed to
substantiate the claim about German uniqueness. It was, for instance, a Dane,

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[ens Peter Muller, who established himself as the fitness guru of the belle epoque,
purveying the body beautiful to enthusiasts as far-flung as Franz Kafka in Prague.
Instead of exploring the intellectual, cultural, and social origins of German body
culture, or seeking to weigh the strength of modem dance and body culture in
Germany against its expression elsewhere, Toepfer suggests that their powerful
appeal in Germany "has something to do with mysterious and as yet uniden-
tified features of the German language itself, with the ways in which language
constructs consciousness and thereby establishes some kind of inner or meta,
physical space within the body" (385). This is a piece of mystifying rhetoric that
one might expect from some of the more rhapsodic citizens of the empire of ec-
stasy. In a work of scholarship, it begs questions and falls below the high standard
of research and analysis that is the hallmark of this otherwise excellent book.

University of Pennsylvania Warren Breckman

ENDNOTE

1. For a recent discussion of that historical literature and an interesting application,

see Gerald N. Izenberg, Modernism andMasculinity. Mann, Wedekind, Kandinsky Through
World War I (Chicago, 2000).

Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai. A Social History, 1849-1949. By

Christian Henriot, translated from French by Noel Castelino (Cam,
bridge UK: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xiii plus 467 pp. $85.00/
cloth).
As far as subject matter is concerned, Christian Henriot's book on prostitution
in Shanghai can be seen as "killing two birds with one stone." The author
has deliberately chosen not to conceive of his subject as "women's history" or
"women's studies" (p.o), but the very nature of this work-a study of female
prostitutes-inevitably place it in the vibrant field of gender, sexuality, and
women's studies. The book also deals with another hot topic, Shanghai, a city
that has been an unusually favored object of research in the West for more
than two decades. In this regard this book is evidence of the unfailing zeal for