The kicklines of girls consisted of 10 to 20 women who performed fast, perfectly coordinated dance steps. Not a novelty, since kicklines had been performing since before the advent of cabaret, by the 1920s they were extremely popular in Germany. They became the sparkling expression of the New Woman, as well as a more global outlook on life.

The Girl: the glamorous face of the New Woman

The kicklines of girls offered a radically different image of women which was almost the opposite of the passive, shy, demurred woman of before the war. This New Woman exuded strength and energy, had aspirations and sought personal success.
Her power didn’t come from her sexual allure. Women who performed had longed been associated with a form or other of sexual exchanged, on and off the stage. But the Girls were presented as always chaperoned, always watched over and therefore always behaving. Their charm didn’t reside in sex-appeal, but in a shocking modernity. The girls incarnated what was understood as a new breed a woman and an new female culture: the Girlkulture.

This new image of womanhood had emerged during the war years, when many jobs that were once reserved to men had been covered by women. When the war ended, women didn’t silently go back to the home and the family. Many continue to work, usually in white-collar position as secretary, typist or department-store salesperson. Popular culture and advertisement soon saluted the New Woman as self-assured, matter-of-fact girl who created her own life and possessed a large degree of independence. She earned money, pursued a career and engaged in many activities once reserved to men. The girls of the kickline were this kind of woman: modern, independent and hard-working.

But was this an accurate representation of women?
Away from the spotlight and the glamorous popular culture, the reality was that white-collar women were often dissatisfied. They received low pay, worked long hours at repetitive tasks and had no chance for a career advancement, since they were expected to leave the job once they got married. Far from creating equality, the promiscuity of the workplace often exposed women to sexual harassment.
At a closer look, this is exactly what the Girl represented: they were rigorously choreographed, they never expressed their individual personality; they worked long hours and lack a true chance at a career since they were often dismissed in their early twenties. In interviews that were probably prearranged (and so, once again, didn’t expressed the individual genuine ideas) girls expressed the hope to find a rich man who would marry them… and so get them back to the woman traditional role.

Just as they presented the image of modernity and advancement that women were really achieving in real life, the girls also revealed the same limitations all women were facing

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The Girlmachine

On a different level, the girls represented modernity because their perfect routines and fast rhythm of their dances resembled the efficiency of the machine, coupled with the efficiency of the military. The two keys to the domination of the modern world.

When the audience and the critics appreciated their precise movements and their dynamism, they were in truth appreciating the modern pull of the world that made the kicklines of girls possible. To some extent, the kicklines also represented the disembodiment and the alienation of the that modern, industrialised world. In the kickline, the unit of composition wasn’t the entire person, but the body parts. In this way, the kicklines expressed the depersonification of the urban life.

The kickline of girls was in nuce what the Weimar Republic was at large: it contained both the society’s aspiration for the future and the bonds the past still hold on that society.

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RESOURCES

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2007

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