ABSTRACT

Kurt J ooss composed his greatest choreographies in the last years of the Weimar Republic . The Weimar period was deeply scarred by the unprecedented sufferings of the First World War and its bitter aftermath : a political and social dividedness that proved unresolvable and led directly to the Second World War . The far reaching dimensions of this political turmoil and instability greatly affected the cultural inventiveness and artistic originality of the period . It is necessary to comprehend the extent to which the Weimar culture was shaped by its politics in order to put Joos s ' s work in proper perspective . The Jooss aesthetic called upon the artist to present a clear and unblinking view of social reality . Nowhere has this been more dramatically realized than in the Jooss masterpiece , The Green Table, with its portrayal of wartime suffering and between-wars cynicism. Inevitably, the path to an understanding of Jooss ' s art begins with the Weimar Republic .

Germany lost World War I late in the summer of 1 9 1 8 . In the months that followed , political events moved fast . On September 30 , General Erich von Ludendorff and Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg informed Kaiser Wilhelm II of the defeat (Laqueur , 1 980 , p . 1 ) . The government formally asked for an armistice on October 3 . The Emperor temporized until November 9. Then , faced with a spreading navy mutiny at the North Sea port of Kiel and resulting unrest in Berlin , he reluctantly abdicated his throne and fled to Holland . In the prevailing political vacuum, the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann immediately proclaimed a Republic . After more than four years of a bloody and devastating war in which nearly two million Germans were killed and four million wounded (Friedrich , 1 972, p . 1 5) , the armistice was signed at Compiegne on November 1 1 . 1