Novel: “Life of a Dancer”: Living and Dying in the Bohemian Era

The earth was created so that she, Lena Amsel, could walk on it, said Klaus Mann, summing up her life’s maxim after her early death. The dancer Lena Amsel had a spectacular life and an equally spectacular death when she crashed her racing car near Paris in 1929. This young, somewhat exalted woman had all the prerequisites to become famous during the Weimar Republic: she was beautiful, talented and had an insatiable hunger for life.

In the Berlin and Viennese bohemians, she knew how to put herself in the limelight, appeared on theater stages and in night bars, and created dance evenings without actually having any recognizable technique. She made men fall in love with her one by one, but was always able to keep them at a distance. But she left none of them indifferent. She married one of her admirers four or five times and divorced just as quickly. Their moral concepts were different from those of men and good society. From head to toe she embodied the type of New Woman that emerged with the women’s movement after the First World War: independent and with the new self-confidence of those who were no longer just women one Wanted to be a man’s, let alone his property. Who wanted to make something entirely of themselves.

In 1933, Ruth Landshoff-Yorck told the story of the young woman Lena Vogel in a novel, behind which stands the authentic persona of the dancer and actress Lena Amsel from a Jewish family in Lodz. The book with the original title “Roman of a Dancer” could no longer be published in Germany at that time. The Rowohlt publishing house sent Landshoff-Yorck the proofs to Paris, where she stayed and added her corrections, including the final title “Life of a Dancer.” In the meantime, these proofs were discovered during research, and so Aviva Verlag is now publishing the new edition shortly before Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s 120th birthday in January 2024 (after the first edition was published under the old title in 2002). The author (1904–1966), a niece of the major publisher Samuel Fischer, made her debut in 1930 with the novel “The Many and the One” and had long since made a name for herself with her pointed feature articles when the Nazis put an end to everything.

In particular, the new image of women and the revolutionizing of gender roles were diametrically opposed to the ideal of the “German woman” as propagated by National Socialism. This couldn’t go well. Ruth Landshoff-Yorck not only had a connection with Lena Amsel because of their Jewish origins, they also knew each other personally during their time in Berlin. What they both have in common is this infectious love of life, which Klaus Mann once described as the “genius of life”. Last but not least, this included the joy of fast cars and fast driving.

When Lena Amsel finally lived in Paris at the end of the 1920s and frequented the popular meeting places of intellectuals in the Montparnasse district, the Café du Dôme or the Coupole, she soon found herself at the center of the artistic circles, which included painters and sculptors as well as the surrealist Aragon heard (in the novel under his real name). Her former lovers, even some of the divorced husbands like the aristocrat Cerni or the one known only as “the poet,” are attached to her, but most of all to their memories of her. She is a very sensual woman who affirms the enjoyment of life and consciously displays her changing roles in life. One who admits that she will only ever be faithful “as long as I possibly can.”

Ruth Landshoff-Yorck tells the story in a witty, quick and lively manner, in the special sound of the New Woman of this era. The special atmosphere of those artistic circles comes to life. The scene of the accident is quite masterful when Lena Vogel is traveling much too fast on a rain-soaked road in her sleek but too light Bugatti racing car; the car overturns. The impulsive, highly dramatic description of how the chauffeur feels death inevitably approaching: this is great, avant-garde literature.

Walter Fähnders, a proven expert on the literary scene of the time, made a contribution to the rediscovery of Ruth Landshoff-Yorck’s work at the Aviva publishing house, including the volume of feature articles from the 1920s “The Girl with Little Horsepower” and the novel “The Treasure Hunters.” of Venice”. In his detailed and very instructive afterword, he follows the threads of the author’s life from the beginning to her exile in the US from 1937. There, too, she carved out a public space for herself as a publicist, translator and playwright.

Ruth Landshoff-Yorck: Life of a Dancer. Ed. and with an afterword by Walter Fähnders. Aviva-Verlag, 160 pages, hardcover, €20.