Hans Brandenburg

The first major book on Ausdruckstanz was the enormously popular Der moderne Tanz, by Hans Brandenburg (1885–1968), which appeared in 1913, with subsequent, expanded editions in 1915, 1917, and 1921. It remains one of the finest books on modern dance ever published, and no other book produced during the era achieved its critical authority, even though, obviously, it did not examine most of the era's significant

achievements. The success of Brandenburg's book established the commercial value of the wave of dance books to follow and served as a model for representing modern dance as a historical force. Brandenburg, unlike Bie or Boehn, treated (in a few pages) the whole history of dance up to 1912 as but a prelude to the powerful, Dionysian achievements of the solo dancers who emerged just before World War I. He situated dance within a complex social context that had reached the conclusion that ecstatic experience of freedom depended on inner powers of the body, not on the materialistic accumulation of things. Yet the book's great achievement was its detailed, materialistic descriptions of dance performances.. He supplemented the text with numerous photographs and drawings, many by his wife (Dora Brandenburg-Polster), which further strengthened the perception of dance as a reality and established the necessity of vivid photographs for any book on dance. Dance was for him a reality that tested the authority of his perceptions and his capacity to articulate them. His most significant contribution as a dance theorist was to embed theory in performance, so that the aim of theory—to provide a systematic explanation of the body's modern, ecstatic potential—always emanated from material reality rather than a metaphysical ideal. But this example proved difficult for other theorists to emulate, with Laban being perhaps the most "metaphysical" of them all. At Ascona, Brandenburg wrote a kind of choric dance-drama, Der Sieg des Opfers (published in 1921), which Laban planned to produce in 1914, but the war prevented the project from happening. In the 1921 edition of Der moderne Tanz, Brandenburg aggressively favored Laban's ideas over those of Dalcroze yet still grounded critical intelligence in the reading of performance signs rather than the linguistic-diagrammatic signs and symbols of metaphysical idealism.

After 1921, Brandenburg never produced another book on dance. He resided in Munich, where he reviewed dance concerts for journals and newspapers, acted as adviser to the Münchener Tanzgruppe, participated in the dance congresses, and pushed for stronger theatricalization of dance art ("Zur Einführung!"). But he showed no inclination to expand his initial view of dance modernity to include the busy dance culture of the 1920s. Instead, he published literary studies of Schiller and Hölderlin (1924) and pursued a career as a novelist with In Jugend und Sonne (1917), Das Zimmer der Jugend (1920), Traumroman (1926), and Das Zaubernetz (1944). He achieved considerable success with Pankraz der Hirtenbub (1924), an idyllic tale of an alienated mountain boy's gradual integration into a skeptical village community. His sympathy for National Socialism apparently stemmed from the real condition of communal integration that both Naziism and theatre performance embodied. Dance absorbed him to the extent that it embodied a transformative historical force and always anticipated new forms of culture. At the conclusion of Der moderne Tanz, he remarked (236) that

"the 'modern dance' is already history; this book is the only one in which it will be inscribed and in which at the same time its broad material sense is recognized. . . . [T]he flowering of the solo dance, which constitutes [this history], that dance, although it reaches into the Dionysian communal feeling . . . is in spite of great talents which are still here and yet to come, apparently past; but it was perhaps just a late-blooming of a dying individualistic culture." The modern dance as he described it was "perhaps but a transition to a new social and super-social group and theatre art, whose realization calls us into a dawning era"—which, presumably, was not in reality either the Weimar Republic or the Third Reich.