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The archives in the ADA include folders on the major art movements of the 20th century - the so-called artisms - as well as on more universal topics, such as dance. One of the dance folders contains a photograph with an autograph by Valeska Gert. This photograph was taken by Alexander Binder at the end of the 1920s and shows the dancer in the costume of her piece Vergnügte Verzweiflung.

Valeska Gert initially studied acting with Alfred Breiderhoff, among others. She then took lessons with the dancer Rita Sacchetto and developed her own form of expression from acting and dance, dance pantomime, with which she became famous. In her short solo pieces, she critically reflected the spirit of her time. She described her artistic approach as follows: "The old world is rotten, it's cracking at the seams. I want to help break it. I believe in the new life! I want to help build it." This critical approach is characteristic of avant-garde art.

In the 1920s and 30s, Valeska Gert performed in Paris and London and travelled to the Soviet Union, where she met the director Sergei Eisenstein. In Germany, she worked with the dramatist Bertholt Brecht. She choreographed, worked as a theatre director, designed costumes and ran cabarets. Her circle of friends and acquaintances also included visual avant-garde artists. She worked performatively with George Grosz and the artist Jeanne Mammen painted portraits of the dancer.

After the National Socialists came to power, she was increasingly threatened and persecuted due to her Jewish origins and her work as an independent artist. In 1936, she fled to London and later to the USA. In 1941, she opened the Beggar Bar in New York, where artists and bon vivants found a home. From 1950, she ran the cabaret Die Hexenküche in what was then West-Berlin, followed by the Ziegenstall cabaret in Kampen on Sylt in 1956. From 1965 until her death in 1978, she appeared in films by Fellini, Fassbinder and Schlöndorff.
Text: Eleni Trupis, Archivist