On the evening of February 22, 1924, two strange characters appeared on the stage of the Curio-Haus in Hamburg.
Their heads consisted of large triangles, cup-sized pupils peered into the audience, a girder bridge on top of the head bobbed with every movement.
The figures crawled, twitched, twisted their limbs, and music played with weird notes.
The audience applauded enthusiastically.
In the "Hamburger Anzeiger" a critic praised the "strict style" of the masks and the "exact bizarre" of the dance.
Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt, the dancers in full-body masks, were undoubtedly the stars of the »Cubicuria« artists' festival.
But this dance should be her last big performance.
Four months later the police found the two dead in their basement apartment - with revolver bullets in their heads.
The story of the two mask dancers is typical of the contradictions of the early Weimar years.
The avant-garde tried new forms of expression that were still unthinkable in the German Empire.
At the same time money lost value, millions of people went hungry;
the misery was so great that it drove many to their deaths.
Schulz and Holdt met in autumn 1919. She was 23 and he was 19 years old.
Together they played at the Kampfbühne, an expressionist theater group.
They probably fell in love at the first rehearsals.
Dragged by the hair through the auditorium
Both came from middle-class families.
Walter Holdt fell out with his family because he did not want to take over his father's business.
Schulz's father was a bank clerk from Lausitz.
Her parents supported Lavinia when she left her home country at the age of 16 to become a dancer.
In 1918 she caused a sensation at the Berlin Sturmbühne with a nude appearance in the drama "Sancta Susanna" - more or less naked, the "Vossische Zeitung" remembered "lovely storm swim pants and a breast holder".
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The expressionist group of artists moved to Hamburg, where the couple moved to a basement apartment near the main train station: one room, outside toilet, no hot water.
At night they slept in hammocks and wrapped themselves in horse blankets.
They earned their rent by sewing costumes for the theater and Holdt sometimes helping out in the family business.
The two argued violently over and over again.
They took the group name Kampfbühne literally and even attacked each other during a rehearsal.
"They both rolled on the floor," wrote stage director Lothar Schreyer in his memoirs, "after all, Lavinia was dragged through the auditorium by Walter by the hair."
A caricature showing Schreyer as a pig later appeared in Schulz's estate.
The couple reconciled - and later secretly married.
Together they started their own new project, the mask dance, and collected scrap from the street for their full-body masks: burlap, mattress fabric, cardboard, wire, plaster of paris, plywood, paper mache, metal sieves and a bucket of tar.
The masks they made in 1920 bore names such as "Toboggan", "Kipplefips" or "Skirnir".
Some weighed more than 40 kilograms, and almost all of them restricted vision and movement.
Nails and wires protruded inward from the wooden frames.
The dancers had to wrap their heads in bandages and put on thick shirts to prevent injuries.
Lavinia Schulz once wrote: Art must be exhausting - "otherwise it is no good".
"It bores into the world body"
They probably had their first appearance as a mask dancer on February 7, 1921. The occasion was a round table event;
this group of young expressionists met once a month in the back room of a café on Jungfernstieg.
There was also 19-year-old Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, who had just come to Hamburg and was looking for a place to stay.
The mask dancers recorded the composer and pianist in their basement apartment.
He played jazz with Holdt in a nightclub on St. Pauli to contribute to the rent.
Stuckenschmidt also accompanied the mask dances of his roommates on the piano.
His pieces were based on the twelve-tone music of the Viennese avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg and sounded crooked to the audience's ears.
The mask dancers soon had their first successes.
At the end of 1921 they played a solo evening in the Hamburg Museum of Art and Crafts, and in 1922 they appeared at the artist festival "Der Himmlische Kreisel".
A director invited her to perform at his theater in Düsseldorf.
The stage spectacle of the two can hardly be reconstructed, although Schulz had even invented his own notation for the dances.
The few descriptions resemble expressionist prose.
So it is said of Schulz: »It swells: steaming, snorting, gathers, curves, throws itself, flings, pushes itself, tears and sinks, breathing painfully to the ground.
Dead?!
It begins again, suffering-whipped, pain-tortured, snorting-burst.
It bores itself again saved into the labored, sore world-body. "
Thin soup, thin tea
In her own writings, Schulz struggled with the loss of identity in the industrial age, as the art historian Athina Chadzis describes.
Her place of longing was the Nordic world of legends, her "holy book" the Edda with mythical heroes and gods from Iceland.
Despite their artistic success, the mask dancers struggled with money problems.
As a matter of principle, they did not take any fees for the performances - so as not to corrupt their art.
Schulz once noted: "Spirit and money are two hostile poles."
Soon Holdt fell ill and had to stop performing nightly in smoky clubs.
The support of Schulz's family also dried up: the father had put his fortune in war bonds, which rapidly lost value due to inflation.
Then Schulz became pregnant and could hardly sew.
The artist friend Emil Nolde helped them out with the rent at times.
When Schulz gave birth to her son in the summer of 1923, Stuckenschmidt moved out of the one-room apartment.
The mask dancers were on their own.
They ate thin vegetable soup and drank thin tea.
At their “Cubicuria” appearance in 1924, the mask dancers probably showed their artistic skills one last time.
Holdt then fell into a deep lethargy.
As a friend of the couple reported, he hardly ever left his hammock and found no strength for work or art.
Her son lay between the corpses
The two broke their last sources of income.
A journalist friend wrote later that from May 1924 they had "literally starved";
Holdt's face "was hollowed out with wild violence and suffering."
On the morning of June 18, 1924, Lavinia Schulz took a revolver, placed it on Holdt's temple, and pulled the trigger.
She ran to a neighbor and said she shot her husband.
Then she went back to her apartment and turned the gun on herself;
she died of the injuries the next day.
The almost one year old son lay unharmed in the cot.
The newspapers routinely reported the incident - such desperate acts happened more often because of the economic crisis.
"Food worries are suspected to be the reason for the bloody act," wrote the "Neue Wiener Tageblatt".
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Restored mask: forgotten for 64 years
Photo: Artokoloro / imago images
A few weeks after the funeral, the director of the Museum of Arts and Crafts invited to a memorial service for Schulz and Holdt.
The full-body masks were also exhibited.
Then assistants packed them into three boxes.
In the attic, the works went to waste, the dancers were forgotten.
It wasn't until 64 years later that the boxes were opened again and, in addition to the costumes, sketches, notes and letters were found.
The museum had the masks reproduced and exhibited, and Deutschlandfunk researched the two of them for a radio feature.
The author Berit Glanz recently took up Schulz's biography in her novel "Pixeltänzer".
Today Lavinia Schulz is considered the most important avant-garde dancer of the Weimar years.
The son of the mask dancer grew up with relatives of the father.
He only heard the sad story of his parents as an adult.
Icon: The mirror
