Vertigo - a new dance called the Shimmy.

Vertigo by Harald Jähner.

The years after the devastation of World War I brought a new dance craze—the shimmy:

“With the end of the war, a dance style had emerged from the USA which fascinated the European continent and revolutionised the world of dancing, particularly in Germany. Where previously couples had drifted across the dancefloor in skilful spinning motions, struggling not to stand on each other's feet and perform their practised steps with as few mistakes as possible, the shimmy brought an unimagined freedom to the parquet. Now people danced almost on the spot to whipped-up rhythms without touching one another. It saved on both space and embarrassment: if the hall was full enough, no one even noticed if someone didn't have a dance partner. The ballroom was conquered by a spirit of individualism, along with a desire to try new things out. Where in the old days it would have been unthinkable to step on a dancefloor without having first taken dancing classes, the new dances could only be learned by imitation.

People no longer had to practise fixed sequences of steps, constantly harried by strict dance teachers — they just threw themselves into the melee and got dancing; In 1922 dance teachers formed an association to wage a campaign against the 'misuse of dancing freedom', and to 'standardise' newly emerging dances. Young people had completely lost the 'dread of seeming unprepared', they lamented. In fact, the association managed to shape the equally new foxtrot, which had originally left a great deal of room for breaks, jumps, knee-bends, straddle steps and solos; into the slow and sedate version most commonly practised today.

“The shimmy consisted essentially of a shake of the shoulders combined with a slight back-and-forth movement of the torso. In terms of physical sensation, it's much closer to dancing in today's clubs than the social dancing that had previously prevailed.

The explanations, with which people tried to make sense, after the war, of the new patterns of movement of African-American origin, seem touchingly naive today. In the brochure Jazz and Shimmy, published in 1921, it was claimed that 'shimmy shake!' meant 'shake your nightshirt!' 'One needs only to try out the movement with which a night-shirt is shaken from the shoulders in order to have the characteristic shimmying motion.’

“The shimmy is supposed to have originated somewhere in the region of the present-day Congo, as it was thought that people danced on the spot with great brio and energy. 'Every part of the body can be activated independently. That immediately excludes the diametrically opposite capacity for "isolation" typical of the unified European ideal of movement,' the dance historians Astrid Eichstedt and Bernd Polster explain. Once you had more or less mastered the shaking of the shoulders you could start moving the pelvis, and already you had your shimmying down to a T.

“Many Germans enjoyed this liberating shake, but they also held it in considerable suspicion. From a historical distance, and with the benefit of hindsight, the dances of the disaster-threatened Weimar Republic look like grotesque dances of death, in which mask-like caricatures wave their fake limbs around; the ecstatic scenes on the dancefloor look like a kind of infernal spectacle in which a deeply divided society tried to forget its differences. Socially critical contemporaries such as Otto Dix, George Grosz and many others dubious about carnal pleasures portrayed the bustle of the dance halls as a repellent form of indulgence that contrasted provocatively with other people's misery. In one much-cited passage, Klaus Mann added his bit to the debate in 1942, looking back at the 'hopping addiction':

“A beaten, impoverished, demoralised people seeks oblivion in dance.

Dance becomes a mania, an idee fixe, a cult. The stock market humps, the ministers wobble, the Reichstag turns cartwheels. War disabled and war profiteers, film stars and prostitutes — everyone hurls their limbs about in gruesome euphoria. [People dance away their hunger and hysteria, fear and greed, panic and horror.

“Looking back, this vision is quite understandable; the First World War and inflation were already enough to make the dance craze look perplexing.

'The homeland is dancing on the skulls of its dead. Away with such undignified festivities!' the Reich veteran association demanded in the Catholic journal Volkswart in 1920.Revulsion at the new hedonism on the part of dancers made it impossible to paint them as anything but ugly, impertinent, greedy and lustful. But the dancers themselves felt free and enchanted in a historically new way. A hitherto unknown feeling of exuberance took hold of them. The draftsman and advertising designer Robert L. Leonard, a passionate dancer and ladies' man of the Wilhelmine style, had become incurably addicted to jazz after the war — even his dog drank to a shimmy beat, he claimed. 'Madness has won,' Leonard crowed:

‘the revolution, the expressionism, the Bolshevism in the ballroom. A deafening din, a wild dance and everyone is hypnotised. The oldest people succumb to the furious atmosphere, an unimagined joie de vivre skips through the hall. A waiter falls over with a full tray; and no one notices — it's part of the music. Two gentlemen slap one another — part of the music.’

“The author Hans Siemsen was a fan of the shimmy because it put people in a state of euphoria and allowed them to get out of themselves. It loosened them up and took away what in a hierarchical state might wrongly have been called their dignity. Writing in the Weltbuhne in 1921 he dreamed about what might have happened if Kaiser Wilhelm had danced the shimmy:

"‘And jazz has another fine quality. It is so completely undignified. It sweeps away any notion of dignity, of correct posture, of dash, of starched collars. Anyone who is afraid of making himself ridiculous can't do the shimmy. The German schoolmaster can't dance it. The Prussian reserve officer can't dance it. If only all ministers and privy counsellors and professors and politicians were obliged to dance to jazz in public! How cheerfully they would all be stripped of their dignity! How human, how nice, how comical they would become! If the Kaiser had jazz danced, none of it would ever have happened! But oh! he never learned it. Being the German Kaiser is easier than jazz dancing.’"

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