Louis Douglas and Jonny spielt auf: performing Blackness in interwar Germany
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Abstract
This dissertation, “Louis Douglas and Jonny spielt auf: Performing Blackness in Interwar Germany,” traces the reception of traveling and expatriate Black American performers in Germany during the interwar period and the cultural productions made by Germans in response to this interaction with the New Negro Renaissance. The performances of Black Americans challenged German views of the European colonizer and the colonized Other. Blackness played an important role in altering conceptions of race and culture during one of the greatest transitions in modern Germany, framed by the extraordinarily open and heterogeneous aesthetic of the Weimar era on one end and the harsh racial stratification of the Nazi regime on the other. Black arts provided a deeply decentering experience, forcing Germans to reassess their conceptions of Black people.
Chapter One offers a theory of Black performance that explores how blackface minstrelsy became the referent for Black performance in the twentieth century. Chapter Two examines satirical magazines which introduced working and middle class Germans to Black people in the period between the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. Chapter Three reveals how the first Black American traveling revue, The Chocolate Kiddies, altered German conceptions of Black identity through performances that highlighted the importance of the Great Migration and the performance culture of Harlem. Chapter Four introduces Louis Douglas, a Black American performer who helped to bring Josephine Baker to Europe, and created a revue designed to present Black Americans to French and German audiences. Chapter Five explores how Louis Douglas developed a persona of the modern Black dancer in Germany following Baker’s return to France. Chapter Six examines Ernst Krenek’s blackface “jazz opera” Jonny spielt auf as an exemplary German appropriation of the Black American male body showing how Krenek’s opera created a transnational discourse on the modern Black American man.
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Attribution 4.0 International