Valeska Gert (11 January 1892 – circa 16 March 1978) was a German Jewish dancer and cabaret artist. She was also active as an actress and artists' model.
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Gert was born as Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin to a Jewish family. She was the eldest daughter of manufacturer Theodor Samosch and Augusta Rosenthal.[1] Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work,[1] Gert began taking dance lessons at the age of nine.[2] This, combined with her love of ornate fashion, led her to a career in dance and performance art.[1] In 1915, she studied acting with Maria Moissi.
World War I had a negative effect on her father’s finances, forcing Gert to rely on herself far more than other bourgeois daughters typically might.[1] As World War I raged on, Gert joined a Berliner dance group and created revolutionary satirical dance.[2]
In 1916, Gert made her dance debut in a Berlin movie house, performing between movie reels. The same year, she began acting at the Munich Kammerspiele.[1] Following engagements at the Deutsches Theater and the Tribüne in Berlin, Gert was invited to perform in expressionist plays in Dadaist mixed media art nights.[1] Her performances in Oskar Kokoschka’s Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919), and Frank Wedekind’s Franziska earned her popularity.[3]
During this time, she also performed in the Schall und Rauch cabaret.[1][4] During this time, Gert launched a tour of her own dances, with titles like Dance in Orange, Boxing, Circus, Japanese Grotesque, Death, and Whore.[1] She also contributed articles for magazines like Die Weltbühne and the Berliner Tageszeitung.[2]
By 1923, Gert focused her work more on film acting than live performance, performing with Andrews Engelmann, Arnold Korff, and others.[5] She performed in G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street in 1925, Diary of a Lost Girl in 1929, and The Threepenny Opera in 1931.[1][2] In the late twenties, she returned to the stage with pieces emphasizing Tontänze (sound dances), which explored the relationship between movement and sound.[1]
In 1933, Gert’s Jewish heritage resulted in her ban from the German stage. Her exile from performance in Germany sent her to London for some time, where she worked both in theatre and film.[1] In London she worked on the experimental short film Pett and Pot, which would long stand as her last movie. Also while in London, Gert wed an English writer, her second marriage.[2]
In 1938, she emigrated to the United States, where it was difficult for her to continue her previous career. She lived on the welfare of a Jewish refugee community and found work washing dishes and posing as a nude model.[2] This same year, she hired the 17-year old Georg Kreisler as a rehearsal pianist to continue focus on cabaret work. By 1941, she had opened the Beggar Bar in New York, where Julian Beck, Judith Malina,[1] and Jackson Pollock worked for her.[6] Tennessee Williams also worked for her for a short time as a busboy, but was fired for refusing to pool his tips.[6] Gert also commented that his work was "so sloppy".[7]
By 1944, Gert had relocated to Provincetown, Massachusetts, where she opened Valeska's.[1] Here, she reunited with Tennessee Williams. She told him stories of hiring a seventy-year-old midget named Mademoiselle Pumpernickel who became jealous whenever Gert went on stage. During this period, Gert was called to Provincetown court for throwing garbage out of her window and failing to pay a dance partner. She called upon Williams as a character witness, which he did with pleasure, despite the fact that she fired him. He told incredulous friends that he "simply liked her".[6]
In 1947 she returned to Europe. After stays in Paris and Zürich, in 1949 she went to Blockaded Berlin, where she opened the cabaret Hexenküche in the next year.[2] Following Hexenküche, she opened Ziegenstall on the island of Sylt.[1]
In the 1960s, she made her comeback in film. In 1965, she had a role in Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits,[1] the success of which caused her to market herself to young German directors in the 1970s. During this period, she played in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's serial Acht Stunden sind kein Tag: Franz und Ernst and in Volker Schlöndorff's 1976 movie Der Fangschuss.[2]
In 1978 Werner Herzog invited her to play the real estate broker Knock in his remake of Murnau's classic film Nosferatu. The contract was signed 1 March but she died just two weeks later before filming began.
On 18 March 1978 neighbors and friends in Kampen, Germany reported she had not been seen for four days. When her door was forced in the presence of police she was found dead. She is believed to have died on 16 March. She was 86 years old.
In 2010 the art of Valeska Gert was for the first time exhibited in Berlin Museum for Contemporary Art Hamburger Bahnhof. The curators Wolfgang Müller from the art punk band Die Tödliche Doris and art historican An Paenhuysen present Valeska Gert in the exhibition "Pause. Bewegte Fragmente" (pause. Fragments in motion) including the yet unknown video "Baby", recorded by Erich Mitzka on video, which shows her performing in 1969.
Valeska Gert's bold new style of dance was recognized early by her contemporaries. Here is a selection of books: