“Of course there is no such thing as a socialist handstand, but …”: Socialism, Humanism, and Virtuosity in East German Variety Theatre Practice during the 1950s and 1960s
Andy Machals
“Of course there is no such thing as a socialist handstand, but …”: Socialism, Humanism, and Virtuosity in East German Variety Theatre Practice during the 1950s and 1960s - Volume 58 Issue 1
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While researching the history of performance at Berlin's Friedrichstadt-Palast I had come across this rejection of the idea of “a socialist handstand” many times, before I realized the extent to which the judgment had been qualified:

The author of this statement was Gottfried Herrmann, artistic and managing director of the variety and revue theatre Friedrichstadt-Palast in East Berlin between 1954 and 1961. In the 1920s, the theatre was known as the Großes Schauspielhaus, and it was where Max Reinhardt staged his large-scale productions of classical dramas and Erik Charell created the most lavish revue extravaganzas of Weimar Berlin.Footnote 2 It was Charell's revue productions that gave the theatre its founding myth and secured its place in the public imagination. Today it still produces large-scale theatrical entertainments, albeit in a new theatre building built by the socialist government in the early 1980s and located on Friedrichstraße, just across the street from the old theatre, the location for the productions this essay discusses.

I had never come across Herrmann's remark in its entirety because I had mainly been reading literature about the Palast's history written after German reunification in 1990. These writings were part of what Marion Kant described as a “deliberate writing and rewriting of German history since 1945,” in which the cultural history of East Germany, that is, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), had been “shredded, assessed, reassessed, and reconstituted.”Footnote 3 East German (theatre) history was examined mostly in terms of the failed state narrative that dance scholar Jens Richard Giersdorf attributes to East Germany's unique situation of having been “subsumed into the West German national structure”Footnote 4 after the fall of the wall. Accounts of the country's performance history, including those of the socialist handstand, were written as though they were merely part of this systemic failure, rather than being analyzed in relation to what they actually sought to achieve. The emphasis on a so-called failed project produced ideologically motivated and ahistorical readings of performance practices that failed to account fully for the potential of a range of socialist aesthetic experiments.

Five years after reunification, in his book on the history of the Friedrichstadt-Palast, Wolfgang Schumann dedicated a chapter, entitled “The Socialist Handstand,” to Gottfried Herrmann's tenure. In his ideologically motivated reading of Herrmann's invocation, he denied its aesthetic dimension. Schumann claimed that “there can't be a ‘socialist’ handstand, because there also isn't a ‘capitalist’ one.”Footnote 5 He used a political—not an aesthetic—opposition to demonstrate the absurdity of a capitalist, and thus also socialist, handstand. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the New Friedrichstadt-Palast in 2004, Birgit Walter, theatre critic for the Berliner Zeitung, used Herrmann's phrase in abbreviated form—”Of course, there is no such thing as a socialist handstand”—to endorse her view of socialist entertainment theatre as apolitical, a view that she ascribed to the official party line. Entertainment theatre, in her reading, resisted the socialists’ drive to control culture, because it simply lacked the kind of content that could be censored and controlled. She further explained that “[e]ntertainment in the GDR was basically known as entertaining arts. It belonged to socialist everyday life like canteen food and was taken seriously.”Footnote 6 By linking the production of art to the making of canteen food, she understands the East German revue as merely mundane, rather than participating in the extradaily dimension of life normally associated with the aesthetic. Although the theatrical productions of the 1950s embodied hopes for the country's futures, Walter's historical perspective disguises these hopes by projecting the spirit of the country's end phase back onto its past. Neither Schumann nor Walter considered from an aesthetic point of view what Herrmann outlined after the “but.” This misunderstanding fails to ask the more interesting question of what was it that really made socialist bodies move.

This article is about the aesthetic interpretation of the socialist handstand and its application to a wider set of physical practices at the Friedrichstadt-Palast. It argues that Herrmann's coinage of the socialist handstand was in fact a turning point in how bodies were understood in East German socialism and that this contributed to the development of a distinct Marxist physical practice. In considering the relationship among Marxism, theatre, and virtuosity by way of a humanist understanding of the capacities of the human body, this essay proposes to rethink the socialist handstand in terms of what I call “socialist virtuosity.”

When Herrmann referred to humanism he alluded to a twofold argument that was prevalent at his time. Humanism in East Germany was employed as a way of marking a clear break with the Nazi past, and was at the same time part of an enduring German tendency to value the formation of “the whole human” through a combination of spiritual and bodily practices.Footnote 7 In order to illustrate the artistic manifestations of the political and cultural conception of the moving body in socialism, the essay revisits what Giersdorf has described as the “vanished East German choreographic landscape”Footnote 8 —in this case the Friedrichstadt-Palast's repertoire of the 1950s and 1960s, and the contemporaneous discourses in the circus and revue arts—to start a conversation about the world-making potential of socialist aesthetics in circus and variety performance. Herrmann's observation thus provides the starting point for a discussion of the late 1950s as a time when socialist theatre makers at the Friedrichstadt-Palast moved from a socialist theatre practice dominated by narrative to one grounded in the body and its physical practices. Consideration of the aesthetic dimensions of the socialist handstand also challenges the current periodization of GDR theatre, because it suggests that the revue prefigured a nationwide turn in the theatrical arts to thinking beyond narrative by about a decade. It also explains why the Palast took a detour via variety and circus performance in the 1950s and 1960s, embracing the revue practices of the grand production show that conveyed meaning through its socialist bodies, rather than its narrative.

In the 1950s, the GDR had just embarked on its socialist trajectory.Footnote 9 Like all performing arts institutions of the time, the Palast scrutinized its institutional history in order to develop its practices in a socialist fashion. This was achieved through appropriation, which involved consideration of specific inherited objects and practices and how they appeared to the senses. The cultural appropriation was considered successful if ideologically inappropriate aspects had been silenced.Footnote 10 In performance studies, and with reference to cultural memory, Richard Schechner discusses similar ideas in terms of restored behavior: “the processes of framing, editing, and rehearsing; the making and manipulating of strips of behavior.”Footnote 11 Reconstructions in a Marxist context are about rethinking the “as if” of what Schechner describes as subjunctive nonevents. Socialist futures always contained a good proportion of what had come before them, but these reconstructions happened in a specific context and to a certain end, rather than replicating a true original. In the 1956 revue Kinder wie die Zeit vergeht (Oh Boy, How Time Flies), for instance, the Palast revisited Berlin's most famous revue theatres of the 1920s, for example, the Scala and the Wintergarten. Although the show lacked a coherent character-based narrative, the revue reimagined in eight tableaux Berlin's variety and revue history in chronological order. In the revue's last scene, set in the year 1960, the Palast staged an image of how it imagined its own future as a socialist revue theatre. The revue's narrative structure implied the Marxist conception of history as a gradual development toward socialism and thus linked the Palast's own past to its socialist present and the future that East Germany was in the process of creating. In this way, some revues in the 1950s and 1960s devised new narrative structures that gave aesthetic expression to prevailing cultural dynamics. But since the majority of Palast revues were not structured as journeys through time but merely illustrated a specific locale (e.g., backstage areas or European cities), the bodies of the revue became the focus of attention. In this context, the reconstructionist dramaturgies mentioned above can be regarded as a prototype of how Marxist critical thinking became translated into revue-specific theatrical expressions. Herrmann's focus on the body must therefore not be misunderstood as a rejection of narrative, but rather as an attempt to find a different way of narrating socialist principles on the stage. The moving body just added another layer of conscious storytelling, and Herrmann's handstand marks the moment when socialist realist aesthetics passed into movement.

Herrmann used the handstand idiom to look at how the body participates in this process of cultural appropriation. The handstand is situated in a historical continuum of German movement culture and is indebted to German traditions of Gymnastik, physical exercise, and its nationalist manifestations in Turnen, which “focused on the education of a German, healthy, muscular, patriotic male battle force”Footnote 12 in the mid-nineteenth century. Gymnastik as a communal system fostered a body's abilities to form a physical national culture at a time when Germany was moving toward the formation of a nation-state. Herrmann alludes specifically to bodily control and to sets of exercises that aimed at “monitoring the production of the movement in the limbs … at the greatest possible concentration of all capacities on the production process.”Footnote 13 This context shifts the focus of Herrmann's quote to his realization that “[a]n artistic presentation can be of humanistic character.” The handstand, or any other physical practice, makes itself available to a project of cultural appropriation once it is understood as restorable behavior and subject to humanist fashioning. Here, Herrmann alludes to a third function of humanism that is unique to socialism. Besides the political dissociation from its Nazi past and its cultural ambition to form a whole human, the socialist aspect of humanism alludes to “the standardization of all our measures in matters of the whole human.”Footnote 14 When Herrmann recalled Gymnastik’s community-forging powers and humanist qualities, he implied that physical practice might also be used as a means to standardize bodies. In the course of the 1960s, his coinage was further explored by cultural scholars, whose concepts offer evidence of the cultural impact of Herrmann's idea of a socialist handstand as an embodiment of cultural, political, and socialist dimensions of humanism.