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Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910-1935 (review)

Karl Toepfer’s Empire of Ecstacy is an informative book, exhaustively researched and extensive in its scope. It documents the breadth of movement practices in early twentieth-century Germany, with particular attention to ones which used nudity or dance. There is a deeper goal here, however, than merely posting a list of dancers and forms. Toepfer states that his “main concern is to offer a fairly comprehensive description and interpretation of specific achievements peculiarly associated with Germanic ideas about what makes the body modern” (6). In the end, he says, the “empire of ecstacy” which the book documents is revealed as “a great constellation of competing schools, individuals, societies, and performances, and its appeal rested upon its power to align ecstacy with modes of difference rather than with modes of unity” in which “the body was an empire in itself” (384).