The Goddess Pose

by Michelle Goldberg

  For ordinary Germans, though, inflation meant financial calamity. The middle class found its savings wiped out overnight, even as a few speculators became fantastically rich. A great many women were forced into the sex trade: by the mid-1920s, there were around one hundred thousand prostitutes in Berlin, ten times as many as in present-day Amsterdam. Whatever money people had, they wanted to spend as quickly as possible, before it lost value. An orgy of consumption commenced amid crushing poverty. Because it was impossible to save for the future, everyone was forced to live in the garish, whirling present.

  Many people expected imminent Communist revolution—some with dread, some with thrilling hope. Right-wing paramilitary groups operated with impunity, often receiving support from White Russians whose loathing of Bolshevism burned with religious intensity. Between 1918 and 1922, there were nearly four hundred political murders, the vast majority committed by reactionaries, who targeted leftists and moderate leaders alike. “The indifference with which one greets political murders and the victims of turbulent street demonstrations today in Germany is to be explained by the fact that the war has numbed us to the value of human life,” despaired the economist Emil Julius Gumbel.

  Amid the economic and political chaos, Berliners sought relief in frantic, end-of-the-world binges of sex, drugs, and dancing. There was a mania for jazz, the music of anarchic modernity. Jazz “unifies within itself everything that remains from the great collapse of the world and humanity, dances with it over the abyss,” wrote one critic.

  The end of the Kaiserreich meant the end of most forms of censorship, so all over the city, seedy variety shows featured rows of naked women. The cabaret number “Take It Off, Petronella!” satirized the craze for stripping: “Of your talent we’re adoring / But we find the theater boring / If you don’t want us to yawn or snore or cough / Take it off, Petronella, take it off!” The proto-performance artist Anita Berber presented her dark, wild expressionistic dances naked or nearly so on Berlin’s cabaret stages, sometimes appearing bound by ropes in sadomasochistic duets with her openly gay second husband, Sebastian Droste. In her off-hours, she hung out in nightclubs and casinos, often dressed in nothing but a sable wrap, heels, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.

  The flip side of this aggressive dissoluteness was a widespread longing for purity and divinity. Given Eugenia’s interest in esoteric religion, she must have enjoyed Berlin’s vast buffet of alternative spirituality. In Russia, dabbling in the occult was limited mostly to elites. In Weimar Germany, it was a mass phenomenon. An anxious representative of the Catholic Church noted in 1923 that more than ten thousand families in Munich alone had held séances. Police departments all over the country hired clairvoyants for help in solving crimes. Hypnotists and stage magicians often wrapped themselves in Eastern religious garb. Some Jewish occults claimed Indian heritage “and swore on their mezuzahs that they were Brahmins,” in the words of historian Mel Gordon.

  There was enormous interest in yoga and other Indian religious practices. “Aspiring occultists who…studied with the Berlin magnetist and Theosophical publisher Paul Zillmann learned to maintain purity of both spirit and flesh by opening their day with a snort of cold water through the nose, doing their occult exercises while taking deep breaths of fresh air, and sharply limiting their intake of such spirit-disturbing substances as alcohol, strong spices, and caffeinated drinks,” writes historian Corinna Treitel. Much of this will sound familiar to hatha yoga practitioners: Snorting water to clean out the sinuses is a well-known kriya, or cleansing practice, and exercises coupled with deep breathing are known as asanas. Many yoga teachers recommend what’s called a sattvic diet, which abjures not just intoxicants but strong spices as well.

  Germany’s fascination with magic and Eastern religion combined with the indigenous craze for Lebensreform, or “life reform,” a sort of countercultural back-to-nature reaction to modern urban life. Lebensreform emphasized bodily purity through diet, rhythmic gymnastics, homeopathic medicine, nudism, and communion with nature. It was deeply mystical—writing in 1927, the critic Wolfgang Graeser celebrated the development of “new, influential metaphysics” based on self-discovery and “a search for physical and spiritual unity.”

  Both Lebensreform and German occultism more generally would branch out in terrifyingly reactionary directions. Nazi ideology, with its obsession with bodily health and purity, appropriation of Hindu symbols, and faith in the mystical destiny of the Aryan race, incorporated elements of the two movements. Indeed, even though Theosophy championed the worldwide brotherhood of man, in Germany and Austria a racist spin-off called Ariosophy developed. Ariosophy borrowed Theosophy’s cosmology but turned its morality upside down, and it ended up playing a small but important role in the advent of Nazism. As Treitel points out, it was an Ariosophical circle that hosted the meeting during which the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Workers’ Party), the predecessor to the Nazi Party, was founded.

  Yet Lebensreform wasn’t inherently reactionary: politically, its adherents, like those of the occult milieu more generally, were all over the map. “[A]gainst every instance of völkisch or Nazi enthusiasm for alternative medicine, including occult medicine, one could proffer a counterexample,” writes Treitel. She cites the healer Alexander Müller, whose book Cosmic and Earthly Rays as Disease Pathogens ends with a call for human unity to triumph over racist nationalism. More often still, Lebensreform and occultism were simply apolitical, promising personal salvation rather than systemic change.

  Ultimately Lebensreform, which saw the cultivation of a healthy body as the road to spirituality and self-realization, prefigured modern yoga culture in the West. It would have an obvious influence on the future Indra Devi. Yet, at the moment, Eugenia was less concerned with transcendence than with artistic exploration. Eager to establish her identity as an actress, she was naturally drawn to the city’s scintillating cabarets.

  Cabaret, of course, was the prototypical art form of Weimar Berlin. Though Cabaret, the Broadway musical and film that immortalized the genre, is set during the rise of Nazism, Berlin cabaret actually peaked in the early 1920s. Miniature festivals of urbane nihilism, the cabarets were customarily held in small, intimate theaters, where guests could drink champagne and dine. Usually a smooth, tuxedoed conférencier presided over the show, which consisted of songs and sketches that knowingly eviscerated the city’s fashions, its mania for sex and film stars, and its politics.

  In one Dadaist cabaret, grotesque puppets created by the painter George Grosz imitated stars of the political scene. One representing Kurt Eisner, the socialist prime minister of Bavaria who’d been assassinated in 1919, offered a bitter monologue: “The whole thing’s lost every trace of romance, / The hero’s pose, the stately stance. / There’s no more crown and no more throne, / In short, it’s just not worth a bone.”

  Dirnenlieder, or whores’ songs, were a cabaret staple. At once titillating and sentimental, they often began with a woman standing in a pool of red light and announcing, “Ich bin eine Dirne” (“I am a whore”). She’d recount her miseries and degradations in song, all for the delectation of stylish audiences who’d come to fetishize their city’s criminal underworld.

  In this caustic, numbing atmosphere, the Russian cabaret Der Blaue Vogel was an oasis of sweetness and delicacy. Opening in 1921, it became a Berlin sensation precisely because it was so different from most of what made Berlin sensational.

  Der Blaue Vogel—the name means “the Bluebird” in German—was a colorful, elaborate fairy-tale spectacle, a children’s book come to life, though with a touch of winking adult irony. The company’s founder, Jascha Jushny, had occasionally performed as the conférencier at the Bat, a prerevolutionary cabaret in Moscow, and he drew on his experiences there for his new venture. Yet techniques that had seemed avant-garde in pre–World War I Russia—actors rebelling against naturalism by impersonating mechanical dolls; songs and sketches that drew on the colorful primitivism of Russian folk culture—seemed mag
ically quaint in postwar Berlin.

  Der Blaue Vogel appealed both to the pained nostalgia of the émigrés and to the locals’ lust for novelty. Sets featured elaborate, riotously colorful, and graphically extravagant backdrops by leading theater artists who blended Art Nouveau, Cubist, and Constructivist influences. The shows were playfully surreal, with heads popping out of furniture to sing, or toys coming suddenly to life. Sometimes actors were positioned behind paintings with life-size cutouts, so that the murals seemed to talk. There were numbers based on old Russian legends and on life in czarist Russia, and more modern sketches such as “Time Is Money,” about the hectic mechanized rush of modern society. Somehow, it was all imbued with a sense of ethereal naïveté, a deliberate innocence.

  One critic called Der Blaue Vogel a “pearl of the light genre…On seeing these things, one swears by cubism. Here the pattern fits. It produces modernism of a fairy-tale-like pithiness—irresistible.” Another described it as “a world, glowing in colours, animated with creatures, gigantic or dwarfish, full of music, bizarre ideas, fun improbability and surprise.” The poet Else Lasker-Schüler, a well-known figure in avant-garde circles, enthused, “Der Blaue Vogel is the most wonderful thing here in the world one can see.”

  Naturally, Eugenia had to experience the cabaret that all Berlin was talking about. And when she did, she was enchanted. She felt its spirit “completely in tune with my own,” at once whimsical and sophisticated, avant-garde and innocent. She was determined to become part of it.

  Joining Der Blaue Vogel, however, wasn’t easy. Places in the cast were much sought after, and besides, there weren’t any openings. Before long, though, Eugenia learned that Jushny was assembling a touring company. She auditioned and, thrillingly, was cast. It was, for her, an incandescent moment. After the miseries and terrible dislocations of the war, life was opening up in front of her. She had finally emerged from her mother’s shadow, becoming an actress in her own right.

  Soon her happiness was compounded when, after years of mourning Vava, Eugenia fell in love again. The object of her affection was Fryderyk Járosy, an aristocratic ex-journalist who wrote songs and sketches for Der Blaue Vogel and served as conférencier when Jushny was absent. “When I met him, I felt the storm clouds obscuring my life lift,” she writes.

  It’s easy to see why she was smitten—most people who met Járosy were. Ten years older than Eugenia, he had fine, elegant features; an ironic gleam in his dark eyes; and impeccable manners. He spoke five languages fluently. Back in Moscow, the famous Russian actor Michael Chekhov, Anton Chekhov’s nephew, had found Járosy impressive even though he was sleeping with Chekhov’s wife. “He was an adventurer of the sort about which my father had recounted many fascinating stories,” Chekhov writes. “Elegant, good-looking, charming and talented as he was, he had at his disposal a great inner strength, which made him irresistible.”

  Járosy was born in Prague, son of a half-Hungarian, half-Croat father and an Austrian mother. He married into an aristocratic Russian family—he met his wife, Natalia, at the Swiss sanitarium that served as the inspiration for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. The two seem to have been separated in the chaos following the Russian Revolution, when Járosy became involved with the ravishing young Olga Chekhova.

  At the time, Olga was trapped in a miserable marriage to Michael Chekhov, a celebrated actor but an unstable alcoholic who was tumbling into a nervous breakdown. He couldn’t take care of Olga when the revolution came, and she wasn’t used to taking care of herself.

  Járosy, evidently, stepped in to help, his ironic sangfroid a tremendous comfort. “It was a period during which battles were still being fought on the Moscow streets, artillery shells exploded in the distance and bullets whistled past people’s houses, often shattering their windows,” writes Michael Chekhov’s biographer, Charles Marowitz. “But Jaroszi, who came courting Olga, blithely walked the streets, visiting the family daily, imperturbable and consistently entertaining. He claimed that he couldn’t be killed. ‘If you can hold your life in contempt completely,’ he said, ‘then it is out of danger.’ ”

  In 1920, Járosy helped Olga formulate a plan to escape from Moscow. According to her account, she dressed like a peasant woman, with a head scarf, felt boots, and a bulky overcoat, and took a train from Moscow’s Belorussky Station with a diamond ring hidden under her tongue. Soon after arriving in Berlin, she threw Járosy over and went on to have an extraordinary career in European cinema, working with directors including F. W. Murnau, Alfred Hitchcock, and Max Ophüls. (During the Nazi years, she became a favorite of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels—the latter’s diaries refer to her as “eine charmante Frau” [a charming woman]—all while working as a Soviet spy, though the extent of her intelligence activities remains something of a mystery.)

  Járosy, meanwhile, found work in a publishing house and began writing newspaper articles, and numbers for Russian theaters. By 1921 he was part of Der Blaue Vogel. In an essay for the theater’s first program, he described how the troupe was rooted in the Russian experience: “Tired of politics and everyday life, the Russian sought in his cabaret visit a complete release of the reality of life. He looked for merry self-abandonment in music, color, and playfulness…Whether it was the production of a Chekhov humoresque, the stylization of everyday phenomenon [sic], the parody of an artistic genre, the dramatization of a chanson—it was always a close cooperation between the painter, musician, actor, director, and the muse of good taste.”

  Eugenia’s affair with Járosy, whom she called by his middle name, Miroslav, unfolded in many of the great cities of Europe, as they traveled to perform in Geneva, Madrid, Prague, Budapest, and Vienna. The actors weren’t paid much, but they were put up in grand hotels, and Eugenia developed close friendships while on tour. Almost everywhere they went, the reception was rapturous, which surely helped morale. The Berlin critic Ferdinand Hager, who followed foreign newspaper coverage of Der Blaue Vogel’s tour, wrote, “[E]verywhere I read of victories, triumphs and cheers.”

  As long as Járosy was with her, Eugenia was ecstatic, but her dependence on him also became debilitating. One time, he was supposed to meet her and the rest of the troupe in Vienna. In her diary, she rhapsodized about the city’s old backstreets and grand avenues, its ancient churches and sweet air free of the choking industrial exhaust of Berlin. She felt wonderful, attuned to the world’s “sublime harmonies.” Then word came that Járosy was ill and couldn’t come as promised. Suddenly, she was shattered. Feeling as if she were going crazy, she shut herself up in her hotel room sobbing, terrified that he was lost to her.

  That night, she was playing the role of Katenka, a mechanical Russian toy come to life. Onstage, anxiety overwhelmed her, and she froze. After a few minutes, she was able to complete the scene, but with difficulty. The audience, feeling defrauded, barely applauded.

  She didn’t begin to shine until Járosy finally showed up. Once he arrived, she was again exuberant, her acting rejuvenated. The next time she played Katenka, she received fulsome applause. Later, in Zurich, she and Járosy took long walks in the nearby forests and meadows, surrounded by the Alps. In an almost mystical state of romantic bliss, she felt as if the violets were smiling at her.

  Her attachment to Járosy, though, would soon derail her career. In 1924 they were performing in Warsaw to enormous acclaim. Eugenia, said one reviewer, “captivated” the audience. The crowds adored Járosy—so much so that when Jushny arrived in town, he was irritated and more than a little jealous. According to several reports, Jushny pushed Járosy aside to become conférencier himself. Yet Polish audiences didn’t take to Jushny and demanded the return of their favorite. This sparked a row between the two men, which ended with Járosy being fired.

  Naturally, Eugenia took her lover’s side and remonstrated with Jushny. He responded by firing her as well: At first, the sudden expulsion from what had become a kind of surrogate family left her stunned. After a couple of days, Jushny reconsidered and sent a
n assistant to try to persuade Eugenia to stay after all. By then, however, she’d decided that her time with Der Blaue Vogel, one of the happiest periods of her life, was finished. “The only thing that remained was the love of Miroslav,” she writes.

  Yet even that was far from secure. Járosy treated his lovers with exquisite tenderness, but not fidelity. Indeed, though Eugenia didn’t know it, while in Warsaw he’d already begun an affair with the burgeoning Polish starlet Hanka Ordonówa, and soon the two were living together.

  After leaving Der Blaue Vogel, Eugenia decided to visit her mother, who had recently returned to Riga, and to apply for a Latvian passport, which would allow her to travel more easily than her provisional German papers did. So, in the summer of 1924, she went back to the city of her birth. There, she performed in some of the same cabarets as Sasha—both of them were on the bill for a New Year’s Eve celebration at something called the A.T. Café, which also featured actors from Riga’s celebrated Russian Drama Theatre, and an American jazz band that performed with kitchen utensils. Early the next year, Eugenia and Sasha formed their own theater company, which premiered at the end of March, though it appears to have been short-lived.

  Járosy sent her postcards from Paris, where he was looking for work, but once again the separation tormented Eugenia. Finally, at the start of 1925, he came to visit her. He was much changed—Eugenia thought the struggle to survive in the theater had worn him down. Nevertheless, they rekindled their affair, and her misery subsided, though when he left in February, it quickly returned. She had nightmares. Daily life was full of dark, even occult presentiments. Once, she found a brooch he’d given her on the floor; picking it up, she saw that it was cracked. Suddenly she was shot through with terror, convinced that this was an omen and that something unspeakable had happened to her love.