NUR ZUM SPASS – NUR ZUM SPIEL. KALEIDOSKOP VALESKA GERT (1976/77) //

Letter from Valeska Gert to VS. Kampen /Sylt, w.D. Transcript: 1c: “I never was a barkeeper, just Hofer said that. In New York and Provincetown did not even sell liquor, just cabaret, like in Berlin…” / Sidenote: “T. Photographs are good” // 1d: “ … Cabaret (from 1950) and in Kampen people merely come to look at me (but I do not perform in Kampen) and the singing waiter Dietmar is either dead or angry, because Kampen Lary told him, he better leave. I need Dietmar. He serves and acts very good, like a transvestite, when he is in the mood.” 1e: “Dear Volker: Thank you! The things you say are lovely, but what makes you think I wasn’t a great star? I was the expressionist dancer, the pantomime dancer, I invented that. I was the only German dancer who hosted dance performances in the big theatres and concert halls of Paris, London, Amsterdam, Den Haag, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Kiev …” 1f: “… Basel, Zurich. Though I stayed away for so long, so all this was attributed to Wigman (meant is Mary Wigman, german dancer and choreographer). Wigman was a modernised Duncan (meant is Isadora Duncan, US dancer and choreographer), I should have been engaged in the U.S.A. at the same time. ________ was with me, but my husband advised against it, I could not endure such (?) a tour physically. I firstly became physically ill at the time of emigration. Those pantomimes with words…” 1g: “… and vocals were my second (?) career, because I quit my dancing and started something new at the very moment, others tried to copy them. There, I became “barkeeper” just after emigrating, amongst the progressive and artistically educated audience I was still considered the dancer, Wigman was called “Mother of Dance” by the “Weltbühne” and had an unsteady audience…” 1h:”… she got rich on me, too. Ten[n]essee Williams came to me, after he won an art prize for one of his plays. I have been doing those performances with sound and words in New York and in my Berlin cabaret “Hexenküche”since 1950, ______ years after New York. Just then a critic wrote, that, when you look back, Bergner (meant is Elisabeth Bergner, Austrian-British dancer and director) seems like a thin jet of water. Dr. Rudolf Frank wrote in one of his books, that there are two important artists in Berlin, Bergner and me, but I’m the modern one etc. ______, why haven’t I told you all that, …” 1i: “ … the filming I did was incidentally, between the tours. I was paid the high star-fees, several thousand Mark for a single evening, _____ the highest fees at that time. Ivy Litvinof wrote in a Moscow Newspaper: What is it, that makes the most critical dance-audience frantic about her dances? It is, because she is a mixture of real classic and extravagant modernism. Please [speak] those two again with the ______ ______ Valeska.” 1j: “I just tried to call you, but Munich is always busy.”

Quelle: DFF / Volker Schlöndorff Collection //

Signature: 14_10_6_06_003