Harry Graf Kessler was baffled. There she was, the beautiful woman only a few yards away - completely naked, except for a tiny red gauze.
Josephine Baker seemed to have a great time at the party in the house of the poet Karl Vollmoeller on Pariser Platz: she embraced, dancing with a small, pretty woman in a tuxedo - the host's lover. For hours, without getting tired, happy as a child.
"She does not even get warm, but retains a fresh, cool, dry skin - a charming creature," wrote Count Kessler in his diary on the meeting with Baker on February 13, 1926. The patron, publicist and diplomat was not alone his enthusiasm for the bisexual dance miracle from overseas: Berlin fell into collective snap-breathing when Josephine Baker, 19, guested in the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürstendamm.
"Your Popo is a chocolate semolina"
As a rising star of the imported from Paris "Revue Nègre" she was on New Year's Eve 1925/26 first seen in the German capital. With bared chest, little more than a few blue and red feathers in the body, Baker whirled across the stage. She grimaced, squinted, letting her pelvis circle. Once she stalked on all fours, sometimes she fell into a fast-paced Charleston. And shook so virtuously with the butt that the audience fell into ecstasy.
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Josephine Baker: The first black superstar"Your Popo, to announce with respect, is a chocolate semolina Flammerie of mobility," wrote in 1926, the cultural magazine "The cross section". And the German national journalist Adolf Stein on "this whole Hellgelichter from the jungle": "The feet trill like crazy." The belly twitches at sixty-four pace and snaps to the hips.The feathered rump has made itself independent and rotates like fireworks.
The Josephine Baker phenomenon inspired German critics to make a zoo comparisons. Adolf Stein likened it to a duck, a journalist of the "Berliner Börsenzeitung" with a kangaroo, and Fred Hildenbrandt, feature editor of the "Berliner Tageblatt", a "dark-skinned hummingbird". Other authors described her as a snake, giraffe or monkey.
"Triumph of lust"
In short: Baker was stylized as a cute little animal that seemed to serve the colonial longings of Europeans for sensuality and sex, for jungle and exoticism. In the "Negro Revue", the audience was especially excited about their "Danse Sauvage" ("wild dance") when Baker and her stage partner, the Senegalese Joe Alex, celebrated a highly erotic pas de deux to drum sounds.
"This dance of rare indecency is a triumph of lust - the return to the customs of primeval times," wrote the French writer Pierre de Régnier. With that wild mating, even before Josephine Baker tied the famous belt of 16 plush bananas around her hips in April 1926, the slim girl became the first black superstar overnight. A sex symbol that embodied like no other the symbol of the pleasure-seeking wild Zwanziger. And in Berlin the nerve of the time met.
"Let the popo play" - Josephine Baker in New York
"Wrist with the hips": dancer Josephine Baker performing in the "Ziegfeld Follies" show in the New York "Winter Garden Theater" (recording from 1936). Her banana skirt has traded her for a fearsome sting belt that plays on both the pelvis and the breasts. In her memoirs of 1927 ...
... she described her preference to use the buttocks in the dance as follows: "It is about wiggling your hips, turning right, turning left, moving from one foot to the other, playing the popo and the For some time, "says Baker," the popo is too hidden, but he's still there, the popo, I would not know what to accuse him! "
Homeland failure: Josephine Baker hoped to build on Parisian success with her bombastic Broadway revue - and was sorely disappointed. The magazine "Time" wrote that she was "nothing more than a young black woman with slightly protruding teeth, ...
... whose figure could be found in every nightclub show and whose singing and dancing outside of Paris should be surpassed practically everywhere "(in a" Time "commentary of February 10, 1936).
Another critic stated: The nudity cult and the "motto high-the-leg are no longer in demand!" When Baker, disappointed with the failure in her US homeland, took the ship back to Europe, she had to travel as a black artist on the lower deck. A year later she accepted French citizenship.
In no other city, Baker noted in her memoirs, she had 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 celebrated the nights, discovered in Berlin, as she wrote, "the best beer in the world." At a costume ball, she chose the most beautiful black-clad woman in the city, drove through the streets with an extravagant bunch of ostriches - and triggered a veritable Charleston hysteria.
Forcibly married at age 13
The often blatantly racist comments of the critics seemed more amusing to Baker, who later fought alongside Martin Luther King against discrimination and led a very unusual life (see photo gallery). "The fantasy of the whites is really in it when it comes to black people," quotes her biographer Phyllis Rose. Baker was amazed by the hype: "I am as surprised by the reaction that I trigger as a child playing with a ball unexpectedly landing in a windowpane."
Baker seemed to be one thing in those winter weeks in Berlin, eager to gain fame and fortune and finally shake off the grim past in the slums of St. Louis, Missouri. There she was born in 1906, as the illegitimate child of a black washerwoman and a Jewish drummer, who soon after birth made off. There she had to work as a maid already at the age of eight, experienced at age eleven one of the worst pogroms against blacks in US history, was married with thirteen by force.
At a young age, Baker had already endured so much that she bore it with composure, in Germany as a showcase blacks with "animal grin" to be begachten; in it was "the negro purest", so a comment of the "Berliner Börsenzeitung" of January 7, 1926. In Berlin, the dancer felt so well that she briefly considered staying there and not, as contractually provided, to return to Paris to the legendary revue theater Les Folies Bergère.
As a "half ape" ostracized
When the famous director Max Reinhardt offered the "black Venus" adored Baker an engagement at the Deutsches Theater and wanted to train her as an actress, she liked the idea well. Berlin seemed to her even more splendid and electrifying than Paris, the people found her looser and more humorous. But then the Varieté Folies Bergère put on 400 francs more per performance - and Baker disappeared to the Seine. Lucky for her. Because soon a completely different wind blew in Germany, and not only there.
Racist protests overshadowed Baker's major European tour at the end of the twenties: In the Vienna Paulanerkirche special services were held for three days on "Repentance for serious attacks against morality, committed by Josephine Baker." Right-wing groups demonstrated in Vienna against their "obscene" abused appearance; in Budapest stink bombs flew into the audience; in Zagreb their opponents threw bangers.
In Bieder-conservative Munich, the Baker guest performance in 1929 was banned altogether. In Berlin, the emerging Nazi leaves ousted the show diva as "semi-monkeys", sturgeon units of the SA blasted ideas.
Churned Baker returned to her tour in 1929 to Paris. "I'm black, but I'm French," the dancer, who assumed French citizenship eight years later, said in an interview, "It's my country." And: "the only one where a person can live in peace".
