Vamps, Eintaenzer, and desperate housewives: Social dance in Weimar literature and film

In this work, I demonstrate that during the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), social dances like Charleston and Foxtrot are a significant venue through which passion and pleasure are included into reason. Traditionally, the relationship between passion and reason has been articulated as one of mutual exclusion. I argue that with the emergence of the subgenre of romantic dance comedies, there is a shift from excluding to including passion into reason.;In the sources which I examine, such as prose, autobiographical writings, melodramas, and romantic comedies, passion is expressed through social dances, while reason is signified through marriage, and functions as a domestication of passion. I assert that the shift of incorporating pleasure into marriage is genre specific. Thus, in the autobiographical writings of Billy Wilder and Heinz Malten as well as in the prose of Hans Janowitz, through the figure of the Eintanzer, who is a dancer-for-hire, passion does not disturb reason. In melodramas of the time, through emblematic changes of the figure of the vamp, there is a gradual transition towards placing pleasure into marriage. However, this transition is gendered: only man's passion is allowed into marriage. Only with the emergence of the subgenre of romantic dance comedies does passion find a way into marriage, irrespective of gender. This creates what I call symmetric gender relationships, which stand in contrast to the extant Weimar scholarship that characterizes gender relationships of the time primarily as confrontational.