THE DISEUSE: FROM THE SEARCH FOR A CONCEPT AND ITS DEFINITION

The tenth muse is that lady from the entourage of Apollo, to whom the patronage of the
cabaret was entrusted. She does not wear the long peplos of her more serious sisters. If Thalia
has allowed a foot-free skirt, and in Terpsichore a half-slit, possibly even a translucent garment
seems to be excusable, because this gives her the freedom of movement necessary for
dancing, you must imagine the tenth muse with a knee-skinned skirt A lot of blush on the lips,
plucked eyebrows, pretty, very pretty, at any rate of an extremely conspicuous tenderness, not
to say helplessness, a bitch who is the most serious of peopleHeads, and who will forgive
much, because she has so much enthusiasm in all her boldness. She is well aware of the fact
that her area is quite indistinctly different from that of her colleagues, but it is not difficult for
her to remedy this defect by vigorous and unauthorized bonds from neighboring regions. She
is well aware of the fact that her area is quite indistinctly different from that of her colleagues,
but it is not difficult for her to remedy this defect by vigorous and unauthorized bonds from
neighboring regions. And how often Klio, who protected the historians, instead of preventing
their counterfeiting, was almost offended when she had to see how the cabaret was
competing with her efforts to interpret the timelines. But it is the worst of the two brothers
and sisters of Parnassus who were appointed for the Department of Music. You do not have to
laugh. Their arts are just good enough to do hand-held services, whether or not they are done
according to the rules of art. Does Eu terpe or Polyhymnia of her youngest sister reproach,
what do you think what this loose girl answers? "But go, it does not come soOn it! ' So she
tricks drollly and leaves her standing. Naughty, is not it? "14

The characterization of the cabaret by Edmund Nick - even cabaret artist and cabaret
director, composer and music critic - leaves no doubt open: this genre is feminine, intelligent
and erotic. It is both timely and fashionable, at the same time taking back history and re-
constructing it. The tenth muse has borrowed appearance and attitude from the New
Woman. Knee-length skirt, kisses, erotic and factual, cheeky. Nick's description of the
cabaret is not only in a line with those of the Greek goddesses, but also with metaphors from
the great whore Babylon, the numerous Femmes fatales and Vamps, which as muses
repeatedly appear in the literature and art history. At thisClad load of femininity, which
obviously characterizes cabaret, it is obvious that the quite real and numerous female actors
on the cabaret stage have inspired Nick to his fabulations. In addition to composers and
lyricists, the singing actresses gave the cabaret its perceptible face. Of course, men's chansons
also featured on the so-called Überbrettl, such as Frank Wedekind, Hugo Ball and Bertolt
Brecht, and others, such as Wilhelm Bendow, Curt Bois, Kurt Gerron, and Paul Graetz. The
women were, however, more prominent. They were the original focus of the great and small,
political and literary cabaret, the beer cabarets for mere amusement and the so successful
cabaret revivals in the Weimar Republic. They were the first to convey the primary genre of
the cabaret between the authora and the author, the composer, and the audience:

Creation is irreplaceable as a foreign word in its brevity in the chanson. This means that text
and music must be presented for the first time in a specific, valid sound form. But most of the
time there is something in the word 'discover', that is, to discover a text for the audience as a
chanson. orig.
Since their first appearance in France in the late 19th century, these important actors of the
cabaret have been devoted to a variety of contexts. For example, Blandine Ebinger, Käte
Erlholz, Annemarie Hase, Trude Hesterberg, Hilde Hildebrand, Kate Kühl, MargoLion, Rosa
Valetti, Claire Waldoff and many more were called Diseusen, Chansonettes, Chanansonnièren
or Chan teusen.

Sabine Renken, for example, chooses the concept of the chanteuse to dedicate herself not only
to singing actors, but also to dancers such as Valeska Gert or Josephine Baker. In the Metzler
Ka beret lexicon one searches for an entry 'Chanteuse', however, in vain. For this reason, the
entry "chansonniers, chansonniers", which are the usual names for speakers of chansons in the
German language, means that the actually correct designation is "chanteur" or "chanteuse."
17 The term "chansonniere", on the other hand, repressed. In his own entry to the latter,:

Obsolete name for a lecture artist in cabaret (male form: Diseur), now generally replaced by
'chansonniere'. False is their name as 'chanso nettes', because this in French is a 'little song'
(and not the speaker). "18

But these two short lexicon articles testify to the conceptual confusion of French and German
names. The MGG and New Grove encyclopedias in the field of musicology also do not allow
any clarification, instead they reveal a desideratum - there are neither entries to the Diseuse
nor To Chanteuse, Chansonniere or Chansonette. And in the manual of the pope-like music,
the definition "Chanson interpreters" ("Chansonnette / Interpretinnen") and "Diseuse" in the
entry "Chansonnette" are only limited to the female form (" For female chanson interpreters
"20).

The literature, which is dedicated to the cabaret, seems to be hardly helpful at first. Alone in
Klaus Budzinski's first cabaret story The muse with the sharp tongue of 1961, the concepts of
chansonniere and disease intersect for one and the same artist wildly. Thus, as a serious,
political "chansonnier nature" (together with Rosa Valetti and Ernst Busch), Kate Kühl is
presented to the bloodthirsty and specialized chieftains (Käte Erlholz, Gussy Holl, Trude
Hesterberg, Claire Walffffff) In the next page, however, as a disease with "handfeste
eroticism." On such a scale from frivolity to SeRainer Otto and Walter Rösler also classify the
concepts of the disease and the chanteuse, but it is entirely contrary to Budzinski. The
"Famous Disease of Fin de siècle" 22 and the model of many successors, Yvette Guilbert:

"Wanted to be different from the Chanteuses she met in the Café Concerts, made her
differently [...], did not perform the mischievous movements of her colleagues, but let her face
and hands speak almost immovably, and she had a demanding repertoire , Their suggestive
creative power, their ability to create a type with a single gesture, have often been praised by
their contemporaries. "

Here, the concept of the disease obviously describes a performance style, which stands for
claim and is distinguished from the merely entertaining and trivial perfor- mances of the
Chanteuses On the emotional and erotic level, Rudolf Hösch brings the concept of Chansonette
into play: "For heart and soul were the diseuses and soubrettes, the chansonettes for frivolity,
and came from Paris Yvette Guilbert with a salary of ninety thousand marks a month "24. In
addition to the exposed position that Hösch Guilbert affords by her popular status, measured
by her salary, his use of the term 'chansonette' is interesting. While it seems to be a consensus
today that this term is misleading as a title for the up-and-coming cabaret artist (since he is
translated as "little song"), Hösch does not seem to be too far removed from the
contemporary discourse of the Weimar Republic. The magazine The magazine explains the
term "Diseuse" first etymologically and borders it on theFrivolous chansonettes from:

"In front of the 'Diseusen' - who, in contrast to the singer, performed their songs in half-spoken
- there were only 'chansonettes' (singers), singing little songs mostly comic or frivolous. The
pacemaker of this new genre, rooted in Bohême poetry, was Yvette Guilbert, one of the most
popular Parisian personalities in the nineties, with her burning red hair and the inevitable
black, long gloves. Today, the Guilbert, still a guest game, is a phenomenon well known far
beyond the borders of France. Some,Came after her and made a name for themselves on the
boards of the cabaret, we bring here with their favorite songs. orig]. "25

The nineteenth-century periodical, directed by a male audience, with erotic content, leads on
the following pages: Yvette Guilbert, Marya Delvard, Claire Waldoff, Julisca Nemeth, Maria
Ney, Mistinguette, Ilsebois, Trude Hesterberg, MargoLion and Voni Miriame as Diseusen on. As
a disease, which sings her songs in half, the first, often mentioned, Diseuse Yvette Guilbert:

"I am primarily an actress and not a singer in the common sense of the word, and the
musician, the composer, is of secondary importance to me as a poet, which is why I am also
called 'Diseuse'. orig.]. "26

Even the most recent definition of the disease draws the same style for its nearer definition. In
her article "Diseuse" Carolin Stahrenberg sums up so different women from the cabaret as Ma
rya Delvard, Rosa Valetti, Emmy Ball-Hennings, Gussy Holl, Trude Hesterberg, Blandine
Ebinger, Kate Kühl, Margo Lion and Marlene Dietrich, Gisela May, Helene Vita, and Georgette
Dee. The criteria for this selection are, obviously, the common origin of the French tradition
and the common style coined and modeled by Guilbert, Too little noticed criterion -The
common place of treatment: "The Diseuse is a lecturer who performed especially in the
cabaret, but also in the Café Concert, Varieté, or in the Music Hall, and interpreted chansons,
which are usually not By their own self. "28 Stahrenberg refers to the definition of the disease
as it was characterized by Guilbert.

In her guide to the art of singing a chanson, Guilbert makes clear in several passages that the
disease is concern

"To make words glow, to extinguish them, to dive into light and shadow, to reinforce or to
expose them according to their meaning. In short, it includes all that makes a text fill with life
or let it die, bring it to life with force, color, style, grace or stubbornness. For this we need a
special diction: the active use of the verb, the deliberate structuring of the text, the painterly-
plastic design of the word, the emphasis on the striking structure, and the exposure of the
indwelling meaning. The art of acting at the service of a singer without a voice, who, however,
is able to 'sing' an orchestra or the accompanying piano in her steadLet this be my art. orig.]
"29

The specific alternation between the vocals of the voice and the vocal part, which is in the
service of the text interpretation,

"If it is your wish to become a chanson interpreter and to make a great career in this capacity,
you must first of all undergo a longer voice training, A special training for this career. In your
case it is not about being a sopranist, altist, tenor, bass and baritone - nothing of all this. And
yet all this is necessary, for the soprano, the alto, the tenor, the bass, and the baritone must be
in one. This is an indispensable basic condition. A singer who is said to have a single register in
a normal position, which is true for most singers, will never be able to master the art of a good
choral performance, even if she has the most beautiful voice of the World. [...] We are, in fact,
painters, sculptors, and our organ is, so to speak, our ownPalette. Through the mixed use of
the voices and vocal voices and the diversity of the 'Nuan cen', we bring color into the
chanson, illuminate our figures, the subjects, their atmosphere and the epoch. "

The textbook of the Sandra Kreisler, which is nowadays known as Georgette Dee, shows that
such a definition of the disease has not only characterized the style of Guilbert's followers in
the 1920s and 1930s, but still exists today. She also writes that singing is "only a part of the
call, and not necessarily the main part," and that many chanson interpreters and interpreters
use the terms "disease" or "disease," because they carry the "saying" in the name.

It is thus shown that the term "Diseuse" is by no means obsolete, as Budzinski and Hippen
maintain in their cabaret lexicon. On the contrary, as the examples of Stahrenberg and Kreisler
show, Yvette Guilbert, in the 1920s and up to now, had been current and familiar, and
everyone understood that the different actors in the cabaret were caught. For these reasons
and in the sense set out, I describe Margo Lion and Blandine Ebinger as diseuses, without an
aesthetic restriction or categorization.

The search for a concept and the diversity discovered in it as the diseases were described in
the course of time reveals two things: on the one hand, it is simply not possible to categorize
the many female actors in the cabaret on the basis of individual concepts and to give them an
idea Matching label. This can only provide orientation, so that it can always be interpreted
anew. On the other hand, it is obviously not but the voice, the style and the place of action,
which must be attracted to the definition and which characterize a disease, but the individual
emanation and the values for which each individual stands - that is, their image. This shows
impressively Walter Rösler's assessment of the different styles of presentation within the
cabaret of the Weimar Republic:

"The contradictory lecture styles of the cabaret of the Weimar Republic are evident when, for
example, we compare the interpretations of MargoLion, Kate Kühls, and Hilde Hildebrand. The
persuasive, cheeky, neo-sub-chilled lecture of the Lion had quite the cut, which corresponded
to the mundane skirmish revue, Käte [sic!] Kühl, on the other hand, bloody, vital and direct,
both in the erotic eroticism and the time-critical aggressiveness. Hilde Hildebrand, the star of
the Nelson Revues at the beginning of the thirties, brought a vamp type with ro mantic fluid to
the cabaret stage, replacing impudence and aggressivenessSensuality and sentimentality, and
thus tended to form a kind of chanson lecture, as we find it a little later in the UFA star Zarah
Leander. "

The above-mentioned maxims for the chanson interpreters, actresses, and singers evoke to
this day an image saturated with emotionality and values that emphasizes their individuality
and which recalls the introductory remarks of Edmund Nick, as also the following description
concludes :

"Chanteusen are women of their time, and in their own way every one of them is
uncompromising. Lustfully, they stage their individuality and combine sensuality with wit and
wit. Without an elevated moral point finger and without sinking into sentimentalities, the
Chanteuse sets a stage in her life and asserts herself as a woman in the rich spectrum between
fighter and vamp. With her singular singing, her eroticism, and catchy melodies, the chanteuse
seducer, who is part of the covenant of paradise, is the 'caterpillar of the goddess reason', as
described by Ernst Bloch in connection with the pirate jenny. "
And so the conceptual diversity in cabaret literature can also be read quite differently, not
necessarily only critically. Even if there is no uniform terminology, it is clear what the diseus
called here are, at least in the memory, perception, and meaning: lecturers of the cabaret who,
with many other lecturers, have a dynamic, even diffuse and yet always recognizable Image -
the self-assured and self-concerted artist with a radiance - and at the same time to convince
the public with his own highly individualized image construction.

Margo Lions Image of the Grotesque New Woman: A diachronic overview p.59

Margo Lion, with her performance "The Line of Fashion" in the Wild Stage in 1923, blended the
femininity of the New Woman and the collective image of the Diseuse to her own grotesquely
broken version. The success of this performance was immediately conceived by the public
from the conglomerate of the chanson protagonist and Lions stage persona directly Lions Ge
samtimage. Their ensuing chansonperformances in Kaba retts and Kabarettrevuen deepened
and established this by repeatedly using different aspects of the discursive environment of the
New Woman with her repertoire. Thus, the stage characters and chanson protagonists Lions
become more and more clear in modernity and modernityUrban discourse at the beginning of
the 20th century.

Unfortunately, an exact documentation of Lions's career has not yet been done and is also
difficult to reconstruct. On the one hand, it is possible to draw conclusions about their stage
productions on the basis of announcements and reviews in the daily newspapers of Berlin. In
addition, the Stiftung Deutsches Kabarettarchiv Mainz e. V. and the Akademie der Künste
Berlin received some scene photos and stage manuscripts by Ka barettrevuen as well as a few
loose program slides of cabarets, which are not always exactly or often not even dated.

In the following table Lions premiere performances are recorded with chansons, which can be
reconstructed from such documents. Since this is the first attempt to record their work in the
cabaret culture of the Weimar Republic, the list has no claim to completeness and is rather
intended to do so To be supplemented and expanded. Due to the research focus of this work,
Lions did not perform actorial activities in theater pieces2 and later in the sound film3. It is also
noticeable that Lion, in her own list of engagements, with the exception of her roles in a
Russian play and George Bernhard Shaw's The Emperor of America herself, takes up only her
activities as a disease until the death of her husband and chancellor Marcellus Schiffer in 1932.
Such a selection could already point to their self-understanding as a disease.
In the publications on cabaret culture and history, this number of Lions engagements, which
are certainly still incomplete, will not be discussed here. The Wild Stage with the chanson "The
line of fashion" as well as her duet with Marlene Dietrich "When the best friend" in the cabaret
revelation It is in the air.4

The fact that Lions image of the grotesque new woman has prevailed is made clear by the
chanson and program titles as listed in the table. After her performance with "The Line of
Fashion" was a successful success, followed in the ramp, in the Tü-Tü, the carousel, the sound
and smoke, the Roland of Berlin and others of the numerous Kaba Kaba of the time. There,
Lion retained her style as a grotesque parody of the New Woman in chansons (eg "The
Perverse" or "The Mighty One") and programs (eg "Woman in the Caricature", "Woman in the
Fourth Dimension "Or "Fashion in Cartoon"). In the image construction of Lions, these
appearances in their totality form the basis for a continuum of characteristics that were
interdependent and interdependent, resulting in the image of the grotesque New Woman. A
glance at their roles in the Kabarettrevuen by Rudolf Nelson, Marcellus Schiffer, Friedrich
Hollaender, to which the latter and above all Mischa Spoliansky composed the music, then
shows the continuity of this image. Since the cabaret revivals in the Berlin Weim of the
Weimar Republic were a sensation on a small scale, they were able to appeal to a larger
audience than the programs in small, intimate cabaret locales, without theirCharacterization.5
In this way, Lions Image could be effectively disseminated and supported.
 ]

A look in the tables shows that Lion almost exclusively texts of her husband Marcellus Schiffer
has listed. He wrote their first chansons and prepared them for their first performances.6 With
his chanson "The Line of Fashion" she celebrated her breakthrough in 1923 and her greatest
successes with cabaret performances. After his suicide in the night from the 23rd to the 24th
of August 1932 left She went to Berlin and went back to her home country France. Lions'
career in Berlin is only a total of nine years, but a strong image could still be felt during this
period, which still characterizes the perception of this disease. In order to pursue this
phenomenon, the thesis that Lions Chan son protagonists and their stage persona reacted to
the femininity of the new woman is to be proved beyond the naming of the chansontitel. In
the Lions stage characters and chanson protagonists play with this feminine type, break it, and
grotesquely distort Lions' self-image is classified into a relevant and relevant context for
consumers and consumers. At firstLook, it offers an identification offer, at second glance it
invites, as will be shown, to a critical distance.

The analysis of published photographs and caricatures of Lion, which densify the invariants of
their self-image at a pictorial level, shows that image construction is necessarily a plurimedial
one. In addition, the results can provide conclusions about the extent to which Lion can be
included in the collective education of the disease, or specifically targeted at it. However, since
an overall picture can not only exist out of its effect of action, but only when it is perceived by
a broad public as such, the next step is to investigate the aspects of Lions Performances and
the invariant picture They were put together.What characteristics were attributed to her? In
an evaluation of 300 reviews from daily newspapers, published between 1923 and 1932, the
themes and values that portray Lion's image are to be worked out. Finally, it is possible to
show the central function of music in this medially complex image construction.

Afterwards an in-depth investigation of this image construction is to be carried out. To this

end, I use two exemplary points in Lions' s carriages - on the one hand their breakthrough on
the cabaret stage with the Chan son "Die Linie der Mode". Since their image could be pro
filmed mainly in the cabaret revision, on the other hand one must look at typical features of
this literary-theatrical-musical genre, which reveals imagerelevant factors. The subsequent
analysis of Mischa Spoliansky's and Marcellus Schiff's cabaret revision. It is in the air of 1928
that the previous theoretical statements will be made tangible.

This selection is based on the intention to place the cultural action of the Diuse at the center of
this work and to use the image analysis to get closer to its meaning and effect. It is precisely
because Lion, as a interpreter of chansons in the cabaret, especially with the selected plays,
has entered into the cultural memory, that these performances seem more relevant to the
image construction than their films and theatrical performances after 1932 No consideration.

THE FEMALE STYLE OF THE NEW WOMAN

His eyes were wide, his eyes were dark, his eyes were dark, his lips were fine-plucked, his eyes
wide, slender, waistless and without bosom, tight-fitting dresses or trousers, plain or glittery
glamor Cut and smooth He is hardly able to cross his ears: Lion, for example, looks at private
and press photographs of his viewers and viewers.8 Even if he does not know them, Lion
would spontaneously associate Lion with the allegedly golden and wild twenties of the last
century. For although the first two decades of the twentieth century, as well as the individual
"women's life in Weimar society [...] escape from one-dimensional evaluation," 9 the collective
image of the so-called new woman is still as strong as ever:
"In the 1920s, the City Girls conquer the cities and the media. They appear in a new look: with
a bobble head, a short skirt and a cigarette. They dance, drink, smell, stroll, and flirt as if there
was no tomorrow. They are young and sporty: they box, swim, ride, play tennis and golf, ride
bikes and skis, sit at the wheel of sleek sports cars and swing into the air. Then they hurry back
to the office, tap, make a phone call and run a book; Are industrious tip-maids, office-maidens,
or little shop-girls, who are standing behind the counter of the big department stores during
the day, after the end of their lives longing for the shop windowsAnd go to the movies to
dream. Sometimes they will also become gold diggers in the pockets of the men, enjoy the
new sexual freedom, show the leg, flirt, seduce, are no longer only sought but covet
themselves. "10

The feminine type of the New Woman, which is so vivid here, is characterized in the secondary
literacy of the last decades by the consistently constant attributes of sports, fashion, sexuality,
professional activity, leisure time and leisure The developing mass media. Not infrequently, the
phrases are the Garçonne, the Lady, the New Woman, the Girl, the Flapper, with all its
mundane and modern attributes and habits, which stylize the young women into types during
the Weimar Republic. Such descriptions evoke a mood of roaring twenties and draw A
stereotypical picture, which is also sated by expectations and fantasies. But already in the
Weimar Republic, the collective image of the New Woman was so sharpened that it became a
popular and amused object in caricatures, and was, as later, for nostalgic recollections, a
projection surface for extensive discourses.

However, the femininity of the new woman could only arise on the basis of tangible, hardly
perceptible developments, especially in the big cities that offered the women born around
1900 new life chances.12 Only through actual opportunities did numerous productive and
creative women become a collective image of the new Woman who was imitated,
disseminated, and eventually stylized as a type which, in turn, stimulated gender relations.

The concept of the New Woman, so striking and tenacious, before it was medially
transformed, first emerged from revolutionary movements, as, among other things, Katharina
Sykora and Gesa Kes semeier show: from the Femme libre, in the spirit of the French
Revolution, to the Declaration of a New Man And the woman of the future in the proletarian
women's movement until the struggle of the New Woman of bourgeois feminists. The
demands of all these female lawyers were the same: female self-determination, equal
education, professional activity, political suffrage and the rejection of a bigoted sexual
morality. By the end of the First World War, however, "a clear and substantial change took
place, As well as the extent and context of the spread of the associated social 'type' and its
image formation.

In the constitution of 1918 the equality of the sexes was anchored, and in 1919 the right to
women was introduced. The political co - operation and thus the (at least theoretical)
possibility of the official participation of the republic, the opening up of educational pathways,
but also the employment of the bourgeois women in factories, the new class of female
employees, The mass media's urgent divas and stars made the woman public in an
unprecedented extent. Such developments, initiated by the First World War, created the
perception of a generation of women who "Status of the "new women." 15 The illusion of
returning, laureate-worshiped soldiers had to be abandoned after the lost war, and the
bourgeois image of the male heroes faced "a hitherto unknown type of femininity". The
feminine type of the New Woman dissolved the male hero of the imperial age, with the
adjective being 'new' for a 'unused' Uto pie ': the' image of a new woman ', immaculate and, as
it were, a secularized Madonna Strong hope-bearer "after the lost First World War.17

Many women, through their necessary employment during the First World War, had
accumulated experience of "acting and proving themselves outside their own four walls" 18
and were inevitably resolved from their family environment. A part of the women who
acquired this horizon of experience consistently opposed the radical women movements of
the proletariat, the bourgeoisie, suffragettes and 'Blaustrümpfe', the rejection of the
Wilhelminian era, with the new possibilities and the expectations addressed to them
originated.

In all these statements, a differentiation between individually acting women and discursive
transformations as well as resulting collective images must be taken into account. I thus agree
with the distinction between Christina von Braun between the individual and the collective
body,

"To see the interactions between the collective feminine images and the individual reactions
to these images. Above all, however, it is important to bear in mind the historical view of the
gender images that the feminine image, for example, of the Madonna, is not the woman or the
individual female body but the community or the collective one body. "19

The undeniable changes in the vitality of women crossed in the public of the Weimar Republic
with a flood of images that made the New Woman a projection surface. It became an
emancipating, fashionable, and sexual ideal, the "symbol of the new spirit of pleasure and its
products," 20 and was also a "metropolis of fascination" 21, as a sign of decay and urban
hysteria Was read. While female feminists from the late eighteenth to early twentieth
centuries acted as outsiders, were defined by their theoretical ideas and demands, and their
revolutionary potential developed, the new woman now became the center of society and her
attentiveness. The new forms of work and life were illustrated by illustrated press, reports,
advertising, photographs, processing in novels, presentation in films and commentaries in
guides, as well as on the different forms of the Weimar culture (revue, cabaret, operetta,
Zeitoper, Kino etc.). ). In the transition (and the mutual influence) of the "gratuitous
emancipatoryDesign into a formally determined iconographic system "23, the femininity of the
New Woman, which is handed down to this day, forms. "With a short haircut, a hanging dress
and a cigarette." 24 From such a mutual influence of individuals and discursive processes
(mimetical identification), a virulent medial presence of the New Woman emerged which is not
simply determined by a fashionable appearance, but also as a continuation of a History of
feminine images.

The Allegory of the New Woman, projected on the hopes of the First World War as well as
fears of modernity in the change of the 1920s, is a long tradition in which the woman has
repeatedly become a symbol of upheavals. Melanie Unseld, for the double motif of femininity
and death in music at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, comes to the
conclusive conclusion that the struggle for the 'woman' is not concerned with its unraveling o
make a self-assurance of the artists, composers, and poets in a world alien to them.25 The
feminine type of the New Woman is part of the "old picture-trade and transformation of
images," a fast-rotating gyro of projections and imaginations, Fears and longings are driven
and kept in motion "26.
MARGOLIONSREPERTOIRE: THE EQUALITY OF THE GROTESKEN NEW WOMAN

Margo Lion was able to play with the gyro of projections and fears for the New Woman and
catapult him out of his path. She made a "resting stock," as she called "the line of fashion" in
her chanson, and, with her chanson protagonists, gave up any refusal to identify or
compensate for the fact that, according to the theater critic Herbert Ihering , "At the same
time embodies and takes care of a whole rude mind". She was regarded as a parodist,
caricaturist and master of satire.28 And so her image was characterized by a collaboration of
the collective image of the New Woman and an aesthetic of theGrotesques, both of which
were part of "typical regularities, habits, desires, anxieties, short mentenities" of the Weimar
Republic and thus also found expression in music. Now, in his work on the theory of Kaba
salvation, Jürgen Henningsen contends that parody has only a weak effect because it has a
certain effect And the latter is underestimated and overlooked the effect and importance of
feminine types such as that of the New Woman, precisely because they are a mass
phenomenon and have become the grateful goal of parody on the cabaret stage as well , A
critic of the Frankfurter Zeitung and Handelsblatt clearly summed up this relationship between
the identification potential of the New Woman and her grotesque parody by Lion: "As her own
eccentric [sic!] She shows the lady in the stupidity; Puts on the game - and wins. A swan can
calmly go to the goose once; The goose bewareTo swans. The lion is a swan from the beak to
the fin. "31 On the one hand, Lion's stage personae are not to be separated from the feminine
discourse of the Weimar Republic as described above; on the other hand, they do not simply
take femininity types of the New Woman or Lady: Lion creates her grotesque versions of these.

The transformation from the swan to the goose, or from the bourgeois ideal image of a
woman to the fright of the bourgeoisie, is characteristic of almost every chanson protagonist.
According to the typical composition of the couple, Lions Chansons32 usually start with
general, harmless descriptions, which then develop into the groundlessness and sharpness in
the course of the verses and with the combination of their ever-biting counterparts. In order to
take a very striking picture of Henningsen, they bring the public's house of cards to a collapse:

"If we now take parody as a method by referring to the thesis that cabaret is a play with the
acquired knowledge of the audience, a typical" quasi-deceptive "tendency emerges: the
seeming connotation of the same conception of representation, Which the listener already
brings with him, in order to remain with the picture of the card house, seemingly every existing
card confirmed again. The listener can be guided in such a virtuoso way that he can, in a
stretch, entirely surrender to the illusion that he has the original in front of him. This illusion is
necessary Play space in the play, so that the intended effect can occur later; An irony signal
must not be given too early and not too clearly. The liberating effect of the laughter (after the
listener has shaken off the illusion of illusion) arises from the almost compulsive comparison
between the structure of the idea presented: the inherited structure thereby loses its stability,
becomes 'disengaged'. orig.]. "33

Henningsen's picture also makes clear in regard to Lion's stage personae, how they initially
invite to identification, in order then to step more and more clearly in relation to the
presented chanson protagonists. Moreover, he brings the circular process of mimetical
identification to the point. With cabarettic irony, feminine types are not simply imitated and
illustrated, but "disenchanted" and thus newly constructed.
Lions repertoire is distinguished by the (parodying) relation to the bourgeoisie, the middle
class and the new clientele, as opposed to Claire Waldoffs and Blandine Ebinger's focus on the
proletariat. Their chansons usually start with a description of the state of the metropolitan and
/ or bourgeois milieus. Illustrated are innocent girls (eg, "The Virgin," "The Prayer of a Virgin,"
"The Per verse"), virtuous, bourgeois women (eg "L'heure bleue", "The Bride" "The Society") or
harmless, low - key figures, which by their relation to the modern Berlin of the(Eg "The
Nefertiti", "The Never-Ending Fashion", "The Poodle", "Sexappeal", "The Hardworking
Reader"). The repertoire of Lions is not aimed at social-critical satire of poverty in the big city,
but at the break with bigoted morality and the de-construction of modern times. Thus the
ideal figures of the bourgeois women are taken to their innocence and their uncritical surface
in the course of the stroke. Madame X, in the chanson of the same name in the first stroke, still
characterized by elegance, admiration, and a future, turns out to be a thief, a murderess, and a
fallen woman. In the last refrain there is no longer a "woman who certainly has a lot to do and
behind her a lot of past!", But "A woman behind herFuture and before you - her past! ". Lola is
a virtuous girl in the "Prayer of a Virgin," whose favorite place is the grave of her parents,
whom she cultivates-until she meets a youth there. Together, the "Jungfraugrab" becomes the
most virtuous favorite. The fruit vendor sings in full innocence "Street song", until this is picked
up by passersby, frivolously interpreted, finally censored and as a result they and their fruit
business are desecrated. At the beginning of the chanson, "The Hardworking Reader" is just a
hardworking reader, one of many women with a passion for the illustrated Berlin prospering
press - until she then screens her walls with continuation romances, and the Bühnen-Persona
Lion, together with her chanson- Protagonist in a true raze in the listing of the many magazines
expires:

"The cross-section through the lady, the illustrated Berliner, the practical in weeks, the Uhu
without him! I turn I swim I hoppse, the whole Kladeradatsch, and a thousand words magazine
and every week: nonsense! End! "34

"Gigolo and Gigolette" are initially an admittedly vain couple who, because they are so
fashionably and sexually equal, do not invite each other to the food, in the second strophe
they are then also for paid love too stingy:

"He: You rich Gigolette, you soft Gigolette, pay me, you have money!

Her: You soft gigolo, you pale Gigolo, I do it and do not do it around the world!

He: I find that unreally

Her: I do not do it in principle.

Nós: I am too beautiful, you are too beautiful! The best thing is, we do not pay us both. "35

"The bride" is only the beginning of the chaste, ideal and beautiful woman, even if her march
appears of other dimensions - in the end, finally, she becomes quite openly ordained. And
"The Pervert" was a "girl without charms", until, because it was modern, she "morphed"
morphia. From then on, she was popular with all men - until the morphine pie and thus also
they came out of fashion. It can be summarized that the chanson protagonists are exposed to
Lions as fashion phenomena. Just as the pervert had been popular with the gentlemen for a
short while in her "me-schuggen" manner, in which she looked "like beer with spit"Madame X
has only a temporary future, the girl in "The Line of Fashion" is also a temporary phenomenon,
as even the "Nefertiti", with its "Nofretüte", only occasionally lures Berlin show and
sensational pleasure into the museum.

The chanson protagonists of Lion are all grotesque reflections of their own, just as Lion with
her stage persona makes a transition from swan to goose. And so Lions stages persona is a
long way from the ideal images to be broken, as shown in "The Line of Fashion" and "The
Bride". Even the narrative perspective, in which the chansons are written, prevents an
identification of Chanson protagonist and Lions stage persona. The latter is, above all, in the
cabaret choirs, at a safe distance from the chanson protagonists, mocking their fate from the
third person. Exceptions are some chansons of cabaret revivals, such as "DerPudel ", which, in
turn, distanced himself from his dog-face criticizes and ironizes human activity.

"Ask an interview what I say, for example, to the situation these days ?!

What I say to people and what else I complain about? If I say to his question, "I can lament for
hours, but then the muzzle of the muzzle!"

With her Persiflage of the New Woman, Lion represented her time in her "tragikomiische
Benchesels" 37. It has assumed the phenomena of its present environment, surrounded by its
surroundings, and, with a specifically modern construed understanding of bodies38, is
predominantly alienated from their female figures and depicted as broken projections. Lion
took up contemporary gender discourses and parodyed them in a manner which met the
modern art spirit of these years, which, as Thomas Mann formulated in 1926, understood life
as tragicomedy and the grotesque as its true style:

For in general and essential, the achievement of the modern art of art seems to me to be no
longer familiar with the categories of tragic and comical, or even the theatrical forms and
genres of the tragedy, and sees life as tragicomedy. This is sufficient to make the grotesque its
most actual style, to the extent that even the grandeur now appears to be scarcely different
from the form of the grotesque. It will be permissible to call the grotesque the proper anti-
bourgeois style; [...]. "39

The grotesque, as the aesthetic concept is used here by Thomas Mann, can be understood as a
stylistic device with which one's own but broken and threatening world, often by the emphasis
on the material and the physical, is depicted alienated Heinz Stuckenschmidt described Lion in
his essay "This is how it is today. Chorals from the mud "from 1930 to the goddess of such an
aesthetics of the grotesque, in which the" concept of the "beautiful" [...] was finally abolished
and pushed by the unquestionably cultic emphasis and glorification of sex. " Their
representations of women are "for thePresent, "the expression" of the time in which we live ".
According to Stuckenschmidt's opinion, the cabaret in the first decade of the twentieth
century had already been marked by viciousness, but the chancery's chancery at that time had
shown a longing for bourgeois solidity that would never reach it. In the time of the Weimar
Republic there was no more room for such a longing:

"Out. Past. The ethical crutches, worm-eaten for quite some time, have finally fallen. One has
become accustomed to look at naked bodies and souls. There is no room for moral
thoughtfulness in a world that has so far gone out of joint. The headlines of midday are more
important than the empty threats of the Apocalypse. "

Stuckenschmidt is referring here to the replacement of Expressionism with his O man-pathos

and his mood by DADA and Neue Sachlichkeit: the "ethical crutches" have been at the latest
since the fin de siècle Worm-proof", the world of expressionists have long since "come out of
the way". The warnings of an apocalypse could no longer shock anyone after the First World
War. In times of threats from infla tion, mass unemployment, and in a new-build country with
a new national, social, political and even moral situation, the headlines of the midday lemma
seem to have been more relevant than the designed submission visions. According to
Stuckenschmidt, the aesthetics of the diseuses also had to adapt to the break in ethics and
morality. They are the new incarnations of open and unleashed sexuality:

"The sentimental cocotte has gone to hell in the class of wood, as she deserves. And from the
mud was born, with a slight variation of the mythical facts, the new Ve nus vulgivaga, Greek
Pandemos, berlinisch hooker. In this type all attempts at moral classification fail because every
such assumption is lacking, even that of negation. [...] This sexually accentuated woman has
inspired a new form of the couplets, a kind of art whose features are becoming more and more
plastic from year to year. It is an abyssal glorification of the Venus type, which fascinates in its
clear exclusivity. [...] The sexual end goal is no longer shamefulembellished. The moral
envelopes have fallen off, and so the erotic couplet becomes the chorale of sensuality, the
almost pagan hymn to what Puritans call the lowlands of the world, the mud of the metropolis.
[...] Meanwhile Berlin has cultivated the type. Here, where the disintegration of social morality
takes place most tangibly, the spiritual basis is also the material for the cultivation of the
nanny cult. "

Just as the diseuses are generally associated with the "sexually accentuated woman" of the
present, and thus with the "mud of the big city", Stuckenschmidt finally arranges Lions
chanson "The Bride" from the review. It is in the air in this aesthetic , Which is characterized by
eroticism, stupidity, and ugliness.

Mann's and Stuckenschmidt's positions on the grotesque as an adequate form of expression of

the present, however, also found their antipodes with an absolute, cultural-pessimistic
rejection of such aesthetics.46 Hans Pfitzner, composer and representative of the anti-
modernists, gave the following to the contemporary music in the Weimar Republic
Cancellation: "We are cuddled, messed up, muddled and stuck deeply down the throat in lies,
filth and recklessness!" 47. In the subtitle of his book The New Aesthetics of Musical
Impotence, too, he polemically asks whether this state of culture is a "verminative symptom".
The terms used by Pfitzner speak of a profound rejection of modern forms of appearanceIn all
artistic areas. 'Decay' and 'impotence' originate in a culture-critical discourse, which has its
origins in the turn of the century, and has widened in the course of urbanization and political,
social and sexual-moral upheavals after the First World War.

For the philosopher and publicist Theodor Lessing, Lions Bühnen Persona, like cabaret culture
as a whole, is a symptom of the degenerate state of Berlin as a "city of insane".

"The thought which I lay down here is laughed at by the readers, answered with armpits,
hardly ever taken seriously, and nevertheless contains the core of all my life experience and
world observation. The development of man, the so-called 'Kulturprozess' Inevitable security
in the - madness. [...] [I have gained the impression that the present Berlin, in many of its
disciplines, is already a city of insanity, which, indeed, consider themselves to be the most
rational and, indeed, the only rational creatures of nature. orig.]. "49

Lessing sees the clearest expression of this insanity in the Kaba scene in Berlin, where, as a
grotesque element, he emphasizes his "own physiognomy" and the "specialty" of cabaret
performances. While the new body cult of nudity and eroticism appears to be an adequate and
only possible expression of the present, Lessing's remarks of rejection and hatred bear witness
to this new aesthetic:

"It would be easy to show that in every field of art the defect, so to speak, rendered a virtue,
that is, the emergency exit of some sort of weakening or" compensation "of the life-giving
powers. [...] [But] I want to limit myself here to exemplifying my observation in the area of art
which is most characteristic and most instructive for modern mankind: the most productive of
cinema and cabaret. If degeneracy is understood to mean the one-sided predominance of a
member or functional area over all others, the degeneration is the most perfect here; For the
highestThe law for the cabaret artist is to make a 'specialty', a 'personal physiognomy', and the
more unusual, crazy, consistently senseless it is, the better. "

Like Stuckenschmidt, Lessing, even if not mentioned by name, draws on grotesque comedy as
an example of his point of view, this time turned into the negative:

"A girl of grotesque ugliness, without a bust, without a muscle, a bully with a skull, powdered
herself, and painted herself completely abominable, and mimed to the delight of the new
sensual covetous, essentially heartless and disbelieving audience, the perverse overmorphinist
so impressive that the sight So mutilated, avenged in all senses. "

The fact that Lion is meant here is close to the fact that she appeared in various cabarets in the
form of the chanson "The Perverse" in the year under review by Lessing's essay (1924), which
is about the morphophile chanson protagonist. In addition, his descriptions correspond to the
collective perception of their bodies, which are compacted to their external perception.22 The
artistic avant-garde and cultural criticism, admiration for the Americanized mass culture and
anti-modernity stood side by side in the Weimar Republic. The fact that Lions Image, with the
components of the New Woman as a phenomenon of modernized mass culture and its
grotesque distortion, was able to establish itself precisely in this tension field, is shown by the
well-knownPublicists - different assessment of their style.

Lion has escaped an aesthetics of ugliness, decadence, and grotesque - it was "an expression of
a whole morbid, transcended time" 53, a "decadent sign of the time" 54. With the attributes of
ugliness, sexuality and grotesque, their chanson protagonists (the whore, the per verse, the
hysterical, the pale, the hungry and the addicted) have become, on the one hand, icons of
modernity, they stand "for the modern A sense of life of volatility, of murmurs, of sensual
peril, but also of death, as it denies the life-promoting principle of fertility. "55 On the other
side,Lion did not weave into the aesthetics of the grotesque permanent features of the mass-
established and established new woman. Lions Image, as the tragicomic master of the
grotesque, has been so successful because it took up the everyday phenomena of pop and
mass culture - in the form of the New Woman - and integrated itself into the anti-social,
intellectual and, indeed, artistic culture of cabaret , And finally The success of their image can
also be traced back to their critics, according to the motto "any publicity is good publicity".

PICTURE INSPECTION: THE "ULLSTEINBILDER" AND CARTOONS

As an actor of a popular culture, Lions image construction was also determined by

photographs published in magazines and newspapers, as well as cartoons that played a central
role in the prospering press landscape and the aesthetics of modernity. At the same time
photography took a particularly important, permanent position in its image design from the
stage persona of the chanson "The Line of Fashion".

But also a look at other photographs and caricatures of Lion is worthwhile, as they hold the
characteristics of their stage personae and their image as a whole. The sources for such an
analysis are, on the one hand, the caricatures of Lion published in the daily press in their
cabaret novels and the photographs archived at Ullstein Bild, as they represent a cross-section
through Lions Berlin years. The special value of these photos is that they have the certainty
that they have been published for a mass audience. For the photographs58 which had been
archived in a separate section of the publishing house58 - were also published online in the
various journals and newspapers of UllsteinSuch as, for example, in the Boulevardblatt BZ at
noon, in the entertainment newspapers of Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung, UHU, Tempo or Die Dame,
or in newspapers which were more oriented towards an intellectual and artistic intellectual
class such as the cross-section or the Vossische Zeitung In the rather social-democrat-shaped
Berlin Morgenpost published. The photos are taken from various studios and photographers
commissioned by Ullstein, such as Atelier Binder (see figures 2 and 3) or the photographer Rolf
Mahrenholz (Fig. 6).

Some written reviews refer to Lion as a primadonna and a diva of the cabaret.59 In their
photographic staging, such an attribution is a taper without losing the perspective of Lions'
core image of the grotesque. Rather, the aesthetics of the grotesque fits perfectly with what
Silvia Eiblmayr "The injured Diva [Emphasis. orig.] "lists. This was the interface in which the
"crisis of the subject", processes of "automation, mechanization and electrification", which
also mainly affected the development of the image, speech and sound media, in the
rationalization process of the late 19th century, and " A phantasy of "femininity." 60 The Diva
embraces the artistic concepts of the twentieth century "paradigmatically." In such
representations of modernity, 'woman' becomes the symptom figure, with her (hysterical)
body playing the role of a venue for technological progress and staged gender relations.

"The woman" symbolizes in an ambivalent way the threatening and at the same time the
innovative and revolutionary potential with which the (male) subject of modern, technologized
civilization in general and the artist through the specific challenge of photography, film and
film The new production and reproduction techniques in particular. "63

According to Eiblmayr, the Diva is the mass-media version of the goddess Venus, who splits up
in modernity in Olimpia, the automaton, and Olympia, the prostitutes.64 Without going into
details in detail, here is the characterization of Lions, which has already been cited By
Stuckenschmidt, who explained it to the new urban type of "venus vulgivaga", "berlinisch
hook". The portraits portrayed in the UHU and in the cross-section take on such a mystification
by likening lion as a new woman in a mixture of creaturely femme fatale and its modernity and
lunacy (Fig.2-4).

P.122 THE PARODISTIC FUNCTION OF MUSIC: BREAK WITH A HETERONORMATIVE FEMINITY

"The extraordinary, tragic, comic, evil, glamorous, provocative, sentimental, and sharp woman
is usually a more or less heterosexual but never quite heteronormativa woman. Dante, as
Bette Midler, Joan Crawford, Bette Midis, Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, Greta Garbo, Zarah
Leander, Maria Callas, Birgit Nilsson, Barbra Streisand and Madonna are women who have
provoked not only their surroundings but also the Heteronormative femininity. "
According to the previous considerations, this series can be extended by the name Margo Lion,
because the reflections from Lions Reper toire, for example, showed how their chanson
protagonists were conceived outside a heteronormative femininity. The reviews that were
evaluated confirmed such an impression, as Lion's stage characters were perceived as
extraordinary, evil, tragicomic and, above all, grotesque. For this reason, not only the lyrics of
their chansons are responsible, but also, as with all these divas, their voice and the specific
composition of their chansons. For the music is also an essential element in addition to the
relationship between chanson protagonists and stage personaeFor the image construction of
Lion. Even if in the chanson the text is more than the music in the foreground of the overall
composition and the performance, Walter Rösler would be simplistic "to speak of the"
subordination "of the music under the text" 209.

"The presentation of the text is dependent on the music, the text is designed for the lecture
with music, the performance is only achieved by the combination of text and music - and by
the interaction of the two artistic planes - their meaning and their artistic statement." 210

Be careful. But because music, text, and performance can not be separated from each other,
according to Rösler, it is not at all productive to examine a chanson "primarily from the point
of view of the musical material used" .21 Even though I also agree with regard to the image
analysis Neither the self-expression of Lion, the femininity of the New Woman, or the
collective imagery of the disease can be discovered beyond a certain chord, a particular motive
or theme, a specific rhythm, or a particular musical style, it can nevertheless be assumed as to
how far In the individual chansons from Lions repertoire a common musical characteristic is
presentHer image of the grotesque new woman.

While Tilo Hähnel, Tobias Marx and Martin Pfleiderer develop methodical approaches to the
analysis of vocal design in pop music, which are mainly based on computer-assisted evaluation
methods of digitized sound recordings, in order to trace the characteristic personal style of a
musician, among other things I consider it more productive to use the function of the music in
individual case studies in a concrete, individual connection with other constituents such as the
texts, the performances and the performance rooms. This does not lead to a systematic, time-
dependent method which could be applied to any actor or actor of a popular culture. The
individual and inductive approach, however, escapes a schematization and becomes more
equitable to a discursive image conception.

In so far as the music (in the form of notes, original or later recordings) of Lions repertoire is
preserved, it also bears witness to a distant narrative as well as to Lions Bühnen-Persona
against their chanson protagonists, the composers falling back on popular forms of the
Schlagerindustry attacked. Frequently Allan Gray, Mischa Spoliansky, Friedrich Hollaender and
Rudolf Nelson laid the foundation for the Lions chansons. This may, of course, be justified in
time, the foxtrot as a form of expression of jazz in the 1920s had just reached its heyday, and
hardly a Schlager dispensed with this simple and popular form.213 The Schlager, thanks to its
simple structure,That is, the frequent repetitions in the choruses and the melodies, which
provided for courtesy and a 'earworm quality'. At the same time, the simple structure of the
texts, which were made by the melody, could be recognized. The characteristics of the
Schlagers provided an ideal marketing of Lions Image, which was transported in their
chansons. Foxtrot, by his rhythm and metric orientation, came to the forefront of the text in
the chanson and the chanting of the choruses. However, Lion took over the forms of the
percussion, the rhythm of the foxtrot, and the modernity of his image, just as little as the New
Woman simply illustrated. youAlienated their chansons from the Schlager, by using the
Foxtrott parodistically:

"Parodies are parasitic [...]. The attribute "snappy," which is often used in the context of Pa
rodien, is therefore to be understood in a completely plastic and concrete manner. Moreover,
just as a parasite is adapted in every respect to the host, the structure of the model also
assumes the structure of the model, but always maintains a certain distance, realizing an over-
arching deviation that distorts the model. "

Lions Chansons are not made to join them in community or to sing them like a groom, always
and everywhere. The emphasis on rhythm is not to make the chanson danceable, but serves as
the basis for the linguistic message to be transmitted. The popular music genres from the
foxtrot to the tango are picked up in order to deconstruct them in their combination with the
parodistic text. A parody has a "revealing function", ie, it reveals the structures of the imitated
model, it makes conscious and makes it possible to think about it ". The genre, which is close
to jazz, is suitable for Lion as an ideal reasonTo parody bourgeois culture with their habits and
gender images, for they can no longer be separated from the all-encompassing urbanity and
modernity discourse, which was fought between cultural pessimists, avant-garde artists, and
representatives of the New Objectivity. Because of its origin from the jazz, or as the Ragtime
and the Onestep, the Foxtrott was characterized by its grotesque forms of expression of
American culture. For both his followers and his critics, he stood for "baseness", modernity,
tempo, urbanity, and factuality. He received "the image of the lunamar", 218 which also
parodied Lion'sWomen. Within the Schlagerindustrie, he concentrated on the middle class, the
clerks, the revuepublikum, the big cities and the great as well as the Lions, and broke down as
an expression of "vital freedom" at the same time with bourgeois norms. For instance, Lion of
Foxtrott did not serve in the sense of Siegfried Kracauer solely "to entertain the frustration of a
monoto and its audience simply to suppress workdays," 220 but to keep this behavior as well
as their gender projections in a distraction mirror.

Within the Schlagerindustrie, he concentrated on the middle class, the clerks, the
revuepublikum, the big cities and the great as well as the Lions, and broke down as an
expression of "vital freedom" at the same time with bourgeois norms. For instance, Lion of
Foxtrott did not serve in the sense of Siegfried Kracauer solely "to entertain the frustration of a
monoto and its audience simply to suppress workdays," 220 but to keep this behavior as well
as their gender projections in a distraction mirror. That "L'heure bleu" as a rubato executed
Tango comes against the mondane, sleepy and decadent perfumers. In "Daffke" the fashions
and preferences ("No sooner was the new practicality / swarmed for the latest sensuality,"
"Shortly was popular the short dress / already the skirts are long and wide") and the absurd
action of the Berliners ("Daffke"), as Friedrich Hollander uses the child "Cuckoo, cuckoo calls it
from the forest", and Marcellus Schiffer uses the escapades of the Berliners ("You still find a
flat today, but cinemas are built around"Because no one wants to see operas today, we have
three opera houses"), faded, made up, and, last but not least, unleashed. In the chanson "It is
in the air", the march "Prussian Gloria" is cited, in order to render the uncritical pleasures and
tendencies of militarism of the Berlin metropolis absurd.

Like the melodies of most chansons, those from Lions repertoire are characterized by simple
quarter and eighth chords in tone repeats, pitch steps, or small steps. Comparing the recorded
music with recordings of Lion, it turns out that the notation of the chansons in many cases
lions interpretation mainly rhythmically fairly exactly reproduces - good examples of this are
"It is in the air" or "If the best friend ". In some cases, however, Lion interprets the composition
more freely, as in "The Line of Fashion" or especially in "L'heure bleu" - but never as extreme
as Blandine Ebinger, with which the notes to herSongs of a poor girl are simply a sketch for her
free parlando. A typical example for Lions repertoire is the duet "It is in the air" by her and
Oskar Karlweis from the eponymous revue.

"It is in the air" is as usual for Schlager as a second song form. The first four bars (including the
opening) of the melody frames consist exclusively of a repeating motif consisting of a
repeating g '. The piano voice has the typical form of the alternating bass. The next four bars
lead first into ascending musical steps (in the melodic piano, in the piano accompaniment in
octave parallels: E flat major [tP] - F major [S] - E flat major [TP] - c-minor [t]) to the double-
dominant D major, and then return to the starting point of the tonic with the repeating g '(D) -
[d] - As-major [sP] - It is important to note that this is not the case, ], C minor [t]). And the first
eight bars of the chorus are also characterized by the always repeated g '. Rhythmic and
'melody' are then repeated in the following eight bars a second higher on the a '. Lion and
Karlweis do not differ from such an interpretation, 221 their duet lives by the overcorrected
stress of the speech rhythm.

Even if the simplistic composition is typical for chansons and hits, Nils Grosch has also shown
how these characteristics are quite significant in the example "It is in the air". He interprets the
simple And monotonous tone repetitions in melody guidance, for example, as a
reinterpretation of the new-human feeling of life, as discussed in chanson.222 His plausible
interpretation can be expanded by analyzing the musical design also with regard to its function
for the image construction. The new-human feeling is not produced here by the performers
Oskar Karlweis and Lion, but is directly connected with the characterization of their stage
personae in the review. It is in the air and its total images. Following Grosch's interpretative
approach, the staccato, monotonous and fast pronunciation of Lions allows the audience to
blend them into the material aesthetics of the metropolisAnd to identify them as a new
woman. If one looks at their further chansons, similarities can be found in the musical design,
which not only characterize individual stage per sonae, but also create an image in their
totality and continuity.

For example, "The hard-working reader", "If the best friend" "L'heure bleu" and "Me is so after
you!" Are good examples for this simple melodic structure, which usually only consists of
seconds and thirds in short two - is composed of four-bar phrases and is always associated
with Lion's femininity of the grotesque New Woman. The simple melody trumpet also
corresponds to the rhythmic design of the chansons. Only a few are ternary phrases ("Der
Pudel", "Sex-Appeal", "Die Gesellschaft"). The majority follows a binary phrasing and uses
march- and polka-like stresses on the first and thirdCounting time ("The Bride", "When the
best friend", "No freed"). However, to repeat the example of "It is in the air": Jazz is found here
by switching between the repetitive quarters and every second measure between a
syncopation of the second beat time.

The syllabic style of their chansons is characteristic of the chanson in contrast to the art song,
but also the style of Lions. It is interesting not only that this syllable-tone ratio Lion, depending
on the statement and character of a chanson and his chanson protagonist, binds to a particular
rhythm or interprets the accents and lengths more freely, but also that melodious arches in
favor of course Acting pronounced words. Lions articulation is usually characterized by portato
and staccato. Lions stage personae are in no way lyrical, such as worn legato arches or a large
scale of voices. Always beCharacterized by tempo, clarity, practicality and a pointed, dry
expression. The range of the Lions chansons is the middle range with a tendency to the
soprano range (c'-a ''). As a surprise, her voice - as can be seen in the subject and analysis of
the reviews - was always perceived as a bass or at least as deep and rough. In the recordings,
however, it is noticeable that Lion does not fully express this range, but rather uses the
recorded melodies more strongly than the rhythm as an orientation, in order to always change
freely in the style of the choruses in the vocals, thus particularly the high notes avoid.

The parodic effect of the music is thus reinforced by Lions voice, character and texture. "The
voice, with its cultural, physical, and gender dimension, provides its bearer with possibilities of
representation, self-staging, and identity formation." 22 If one calls the physical appearance of
Lions before - thin, petite body - one expects In a supposed (culturally transmitted) cohesion of
body, gender and voice a bright soprano. Lions voice, however, is a "gender-dissonant voice"
224: she 'sings' in the old - voice, which differs from the gender - compliant sopranoAnd thus
does not fit into a feminine ideal image. If the thesis of the 19th century, which is based on the
art of music, is formed by the fact that pitch forms are formed and that "the assignment of
characteristic properties of roles" is followed, then the type of lion is not only visible, but also
Also makes audible. But because the voice can not be separated from their bodies, especially
since the chansons are made for (visible) live events, the question of the type is the question
of the specific break between Lions voice and her body takes place. It is precisely their
characteristic feature that their voice does not want to fit into their bodies at first glance and
the first impression of the hearing. Just as she plays with the break to the chanson protagonist
in her performance of the stage persona, she also stages the break between body and voice. If
Lion's delicate body and her deep voice begin to be incompatible with one another, it becomes
clear in the course of a chanson performance that both in their grotesque way coincide. Your
body is only superficial to the androgenic beauty side of the New Woman. It will be shown in
her, as can be seen from the detailed analysis of "The Line of Fashion"To the instrument of
distorting the physical body culture into the grotesque. And her voice is too grotesque. Her
body is so thin, her voice is so thin, and she sways between the extremes. As can be seen in
both historical and later episodes226, Lion articulates them intelligibly, leaves them Explodes
or uses them, as in the chorus of "It's in the air", to strangle the words and take them any
sound. The vowels always shape them in their extremes - either nasally, as, for example, in the
third stanza of "It is in the air" ("completely without facades") or in the back guttural region,
whereby also its (French) R '. As an ideal example of this louder tune between the extremes,
"L'heure bleu" can be seen (note 6).

The chanson comes from the cabaret rest It is in the air. The title of the chanson refers to the
fragrance "L'heure bleue" of 1912 - a fashion perfume, which with its heavy, sweet and
powdery fragrance is still today regarded as a distinctive perfume of the house Guerlain.
Schiffer, Spoliansky, and Lion took advantage of this fashion par fume as a hanger to caricature
the decadent lady, as can be seen in her extremes in the department store of the 1920s. The
deconstruction of this lady takes place here, inter alia, through Lions' orientation in spoken
language with only singular passages sung in a particularly exposing manner.227 When Lion,
however, expresses a melody explicitly, this never happens withoutExaggeration. The
corresponding texts are caricatured, and Lions Duktus is almost polemical. It emphasizes every
vowel of words in the stroPhen, the last word of the four-bar phrases in the verse pulls it ext
rem long. The recorded rhythm supports them by the fact that the vowels dotted eighth notes
or at the end of the phrase coincide with a quarter ("I eeesse not, I do not sleep, I do not
taaanze, I baaade not, I liiiebe not, I leeebe not, me Make me smile "). Thus, the nasal sound of
her voice is emphasized and the stage persona is also characterized as a decadent-mon dane
personality. The other extreme, their throaty tone, is particularly evident in the refrain (see
note 6). There, Lion gives the ideal image of a lady not only by the text, but also by herThe
vibrato imitated by an opera singer. She sings the first whole note according to the
composition, and also the transitions between the repetitive whole notes, which are now
reaching to the ae, intonate them with a seemingly full voice, and above all, these strings are
always conspicuous with vibrato Count time out in the rubato. But Lion never reaches the
imitated vocal line, and probably does not want to reach it either. Their vibrato is not formed
in the full resonance cavity of the mouth, but sits far back in the region of the throat, causing
the vibrato to sound almost mocking, and a gesture of the I-do-so-as-I-an- Would be '. These
caricature tips stand opposite to other small breaks of a different kind. So she throws the
"breath" of "Mille fleurs" in the fifth bar of the refrain, and intones him just as nasally as the
instruction "Then shake and shake again" in bars 33 and 35The melody is quite melodic, not
giving the quoted descending quartet, but the second syllable 'nasal' nasal grinds, as well as
the 'quit - hot - chore' instruction, 'Is almost audible. Just as the "Autoluft" (T. 30/31) is not
dynamically developed with vibrato over the full five beats, but is abbreviated and terminated
with a clear, even stuttering, t ', Lion also does not include the refrain Brilliant f '' as it would
easily do an operndiva, but gives the text thePriority and throws the sound away in the same
way as the perfume mixture.

A further typical feature in the chanson interpretation of Lion can be explained by this
chanson. It is conspicuous that the melody of the chorus never sound solistically, but is always
supported by the accompaniment. In the last verse of the stanza, even the violin takes over the
melodic arrangement alone, whereas Lions Bühnen-Persona has lost the interest in melody
and object again and falls into a nonchalant language. Lion is pushing a principle of the first
disease Yvette Guilbert to the top. This writes in her guide to the art of singing a chanson of
1928:

The art of acting at the service of a singer without a voice, who, however, is able to 'sing' an
orchestra or the accompanying piano in her stead - that is my art! It is up to you to develop
this art and, above all, to perfect it. "

In fact, Lion has adopted this style, so much so that, in combination with the new-faced subject
of her chansons, he led to the condensed form of her image of the grotesque New Woman. A
lyrical expression, the essence of the beautiful, is avoided in her favor in the clear, sharp
statement

Lions Chansons do not, as Theodor W. Adorno calls the jazz, the Schlager, and the foxtrot with
their verse-chorus structure, invite the individual to identify with the collective: "The individual
in the audience experiences himself primarily as a couplet-ego Then in the refrain, identifies
with the refrain collective, enters dancing, and thus finds sexual fulfillment. "In Lion, the
opposite is the case: only on the surface is an illustration of mass phenomena and modes
inviting to identify , Through the perspective of the third person, the refraction of ideal images
in the course of the chansons to their grotesquely distorted mirror images, LionsGender-
dissonant voice as well as the music supporting these tendencies is rather a critical distance
between the stage persona and the Chan protagonist. Whether a distance to an audience is
created, which according to Adorno is on pure identification, is to be questioned. Because of
her grotesque parodies, Lion has won her audience, which reckons not chantons confirming Kli
shees, but just Lions honors and demands sharp-minded breaches.

135 Margo Lions Image of the grotesque new woman: Synchronous insights
It would be too short to attribute Lions Image solely to voices by critics and their portrayals in
photographs and caricatures. In the introduction to this thesis, it has already been discussed
with reference to Silke Borgstedt that it is not possible to linearize processes of an image
construction either on the production or recipient side. Rather, it is a circular process in which
public expectations with media distribution and narrowing as well as artistic production are
mutually dependent. With the understanding of such a complex image construction, their
analysis must have both general discourses in view as well as deepening on the most different
areas of theAs well as their perception by recipients and recipients. This is best shown by
individual examples, which is why Lions Perfor mances is to be discussed in detail as follows. In
her chanson "The line of fashion" and her roles in It lies in the air paradigmatic their image
construction can be demonstrated. Discourse has already been dealt with in the new women's
environment.

From Lions Repertoire, it is now also necessary to show how she links up with her first
appearance of this type of femininity, how her chanson protagonist and her stage persona can
be arranged in the current gender discourse and at the same time interpreted her as his
product , On the basis of the review It is in the air can be subsequently connected to the
entertainment system of the Weimar Republic. Not only general, sociological, societal and
political discourses are interwoven with Lions Image, but cultural developments in the culture
of entertainment also influence Lions image construction. The genre revue was highly
successful in the Weimar Republic andcultural impact. Since Lion was celebrating success with
her cabaret repertoire, this genre can, with regard to its function for a Image construction. An
exemplary and deeper analysis of the revue is in the air beyond the designation of general,
theatrical principles, in order to show with the help of various sources, as well as the place of
representation, stage and costume design as well as a specific dramaturgical concept Lion's
image. Finally, with the analysis of the chanson "The Bride" from this review, a comparison
with Lions Chanson's "The Line of Fashion" takes place. Here, the variance of an image as well
as its continuity can be demonstrated.

MARGOLION'S BREAKTHROUGH ON THE CABARETTE: THE CHANSON "THE LINE OF FASHION" -

THE BASIS OF YOUR IMAGE

From the dressing-room, she appeared, then, wrapped in a piece of silk that she had brought
with her, and her appearance was immediately strapped and tied. Schiffer had discovered
MargoLion, a German-French woman, in a fashion salon. There stood an overly slender, even a
thin woman with a white-faced face on the small stage, and pondering Schiffer's verses from
the 'line of fashion' music Mischa Spoliansky

Strikingly similar to the memories of the cabaret founder Trude Hesterberg at Lions first
appearance on their wild stage also reports the journalist, film and cabaret critic Paul Marcus,
known under the pseudonym PEM, of their performance. It is reminiscent of a singular and
impressive stage presence, which has been repeatedly recorded in numerous press reports, in
the research literature on cabaret, and through other media such as CD booklets, coverings of
cabaret stories and printed photographs. Lion, for example, had a month after her
performance in the Wild Stage with a photograph of her in the famous, mundane and morbid,
close-fitting,Black dress for the article "Modern Berliner Kabarettypen" in the Berliner
Illustrierte Zeitung aus.2

The famous narrative of her singing in the Wild Stage suggests the initiation of the initiation to
the artist, as analyzed by Simon Obert as a typical feature in artists' anecdotes of Pop. His
statement to The Rolling Stones hit "I can not get no Satisfaction" can also be transferred to
Lions Chanson's "The Line of Fashion": "Just as a hit became a classic, more or less sober
information became anecdotes or, like One could say modern myths. The prerequisite for this
is repeated narration. "3 There is, therefore, an inseparable link between the success of the
chanson itself and the narrative about it. The success with this chanson and her memorable
performance in the striking costume became so much the Lions feature that it often reads in
the cabaret stories as if Lion was here for the first timeCabaret has occurred. Although she
actually celebrated her breakthrough with this chanson, she was already able to celebrate
small successes in cabarets, as Marguerite Hélène Constantine Barbe, Elisabeth Lion, also
established her name "Margo Lion

However, the recollection of PEMs quoted at the beginning covers more than the mere
description of Lions costume. He mentions where this "phenomenon" comes from. The house
poet of the Wild Stage, Marcellus Schiffer, had met Lion in a Modesalon. Why did PEM choose
this detail to characterize Lion? Obert's thesis on the function of the anecdote also explains
this:

"Their historical referenceity, their linguistic reference to the external language of a past lived
and experienced, can, but need not, be factual. Not that the narrative has taken place, but the
narrative makes the causes and consequences of a place plausible plausible, proves to be the
reference of the (auto-) biographical anecdote. "

The fact that the anecdote PEMs was invented about the learning of the Lion and the
boatman, as Marcus Bier suggests, 7 is therefore not decisive for their significance. The
readers of PEM's anecdotes learn not only where the later couple had apparently come to
know, but the picture of the new woman is suggested to her, above all, with the reference to
the Modesalon, no statement is made about private things. Even the mention of Lions' origin -
she was "German-French" - has nothing private about herself, this is also part of her staged
image, which is to be credited by this anecdote credibility and authenticity.

The attributes of the pronunciation and the costume, as well as their parodistic, "puzzling" 8
styles, were likened to Lion's trademark as well as their talent for the parodying grotesque.
With her chanson "The Line of Fashion", she founded her success9 and created an individual
image which is determined by modernity, fashion and internationality and is part of the
virulent femininity discourse of the Weimar Republic.

Lion was born in 1899/190010 and with this birthday falls exactly into the generation of the
young women who shaped the type of the New 11 woman in the Weimar Republic. Lion
appears with her chanson "The line of fashion". In 1923, Marcellus Schiffer's text, music by
Mischa Spoliansky, was the centerpiece of a projection circle around the New Woman as it was
introduced to this chapter, without being merely a passive recipient of ideas. On the contrary:
in the form of a black, morbid, and dizzy stage performance, she sings and judges in the third
person in the three verses of the chanson the central attributes of the new woman - fashion,
urban haste and entertainment, as well as the new-life love.

Tradução de die linen der mode

A music analysis of the chanson "The line of fashion" is unfortunately not possible on the basis
of a recording from the 1920s, but refers to Li's recording of 1976. One hears an old-fashioned
disease, however In comparison to other Chanson recordings from her early years, it is
assumed that she has retained the stylistics, which is why, with a certain limitation on the basis
of this recording, some insights can be gained regarding the design of the music. If there were
not the voice of Lion, the chanson "The line of fashion" would sound a relatively harmless
piece of piano music with singing: discreetly in the accompaniment, except for a few
exceptions no spectacular harmonic twists, a simple melody. The four introductory bars are
already written in this style. In the arpeggio, the dominant seventh chord and seventh chord of
the seventh chord are chorded over oneOr two bars (bars 3 and 4) act as the opening of a
lyrical, narrative song, which begins with the prelude to bar 5 on the dominant. The melody is
simple, based on the sound of the reeds, and the narrative gesture is confirmed by the more
tempting tempo of the piece (= approx. 120 bpm). The piano accompaniment is limited to
chords in quarters in the left hand as well as to the doubling of the melody, whereby the sound
reproduction of the note text is taken solely by the piano, not by Lion. Just as harmless as
melody and accompaniment are, so simple and without surprises is the composition of the
chanson in the 4/4 time: Three 16-bar stanzas (structured as a form of reprise [A-A-B-A])
Three-repeated 12-measure chorus (C-A '- D, where D uses motifs from C and A'), which are
performed without variation in the melody, harmonic or rhythmic form, thus producing a
simple verse / chorus form. 13Only the tempo increases during the course of the chanson.
Spoliansky composed a chanson with a classic pop structure. The simplicity and clarity in
melody, harmony and form, on the one hand, supports the singability and thus the potential
popularity of the chanson; on the other hand, however, it also lays the foundation for Lions
grotesque parodies because these interpretations and interpretations differ from these
situations can.

The word metric is determined by the three-pronged three-toned accents, and every second
verse ends with a syllable less and two-quarter notes, which mark the end of the 4-bar
phrases, thereby supporting the nibbling narrative gesture. Lions' free development of the
rhythm increases this still. She speaks more than she sings, and by her French pronunciation,
she expands the first syllable of the Dactylus beyond the meter (Ex. "She has no hips-she has
no desire" I, v. 7 and 8 ). Only in a few places such as "The substance has not been sufficient
for the cube" (I, v. 3) and "this residue of a woman" (I, 8) breaks the meterRequirements of the
language.

Lions voice pushes the harmlessness of the accompaniment quickly into the background and it
is difficult to give this still attention. Her heavy and deep voice, as well as her stretched
pronunciation, give the chanson a shameful character. The contrast between the chirping
beading accompaniment and her voice is especially created by the fact that the piano
accompaniment not only plays the melodic piano either doubly or alone, but plays it an octave
higher than Lions' voice. This also explains the findings from the analysis of values that their
voices were always perceived as particularly deep or even as bass voices. Your voice may also
provide great surprisesBecause their lean body and, perhaps, the knowledge of their French
origins suggest a bland and feeble voice. Already this surprise effect or at least this specialty
provided for the unmistakability of Lions and entered into its image.

The first verse makes a parable from the chanson "The Line of Fashion": From the shop
window of a department store is here the "window of mankind". The Diseuse Lion discovered
in the Modesalon, according to anecdotes, does not show the latest fashion but the latest type
of woman. It has already been shown how Lion could play with a gyro of feminine images. In
her lecture of the chanson "Die Linie der Mode" ("The Line of Fashion"), she is now the
centerpiece of the circle, in which she presents, both on the textual level of her chanson
protagonist and in her performance of the stage persona, the new creation of women
"Remnant of a woman" (I, 8)- to bring him to a crash. This is what is said in the pre-chorus,
which at the end of each of the three verses leads into the refrain: "She spreads her arms - she
turns around in circles. What does she want? What is wrong with her? What can she do? -
Who knows? "- the last question melodically retarded with a fermata, elongated, discontinued
and open with a dominant effect (bars 21-24). If one now expects clear answers, the listeners
are disappointed in their expectation. After all, there are four questions in the refrain, the last
two of which are the Audience before two alternatives. The morbid connotation remains the
same "Who is this exclamation mark of need? What messenger of death? ". In the first chorus,
you can choose between the "starvation" or the "newest line of fashion". In the second is the
choice of the spirit death and the muse of fashion. With regard to the lady from the second
stanza, the statement here gets even a sharpness, which the other refrains do not contain,
because instead of a question there stands the exclamation: "The lady - that is the spirit
death!" (II, 8). In the last chorus, the described woman, in her lack of eroticism and romance,
oscillates between the alternatives Liebestod and theMost fashionable "chic of fashion".
Noticeable in this passage is the emphasis on hunger, spirit, or love death by a fermate on the
last syllable. Thus, not only death is emphasized, but the following alternative, which acts on
the question of the mode of death, is more spirited and leaner by the eighth-note triad. The
subsequent quarter-trios end the refrain by the pointed out "fashion". The fashionable
physicality of the New Woman is thus drawn through the whole chanson, both in the
sweepstroke as the embodied "exclamation mark of distress" and in the refrains, in which the
fashion is associated with the New Woman.

According to reviews, role-images, and memories, as the ones quoted by PEM and Trude
Hesterberg at the beginning, Lion, in her stage persona, takes up precisely this pose of the
chanson protagonist with spreading arms, as if she were asking the questions posed in the text
and thus that femininity For discussion in the public space. Despite the identical pose of
Chanson protagonist and stage persona, both are not cover-equal. If one reads or reads the
chanson alone, the dazzling and at the same time factual femininity of the New Woman, with
an androgynous body and scarce clothing, inevitably comes into this window of humanity.
However, on closer examination, the new -Feminine types ironically broken. The straight-cut
dresses up to the knee of the new women become a costume for which the fabric has not
reached (cf. I, 3), the androgyne body shape of the garçonne becomes a symbol for lack of
enforceability: "She can not boast - she Has no breast "(I, 5), and finally their leanness makes
them a" residue of a woman "(I, 8). Lions stage persona in this chanson is itself "a meager
woman immovable" (I, 2). She also went for a costume and the roles photos Lions
androgynous body. The story of the silk scarf used as a costumeHas now a further meaning.
Lion is thus characterized not only as an individual and original brand, but also as a caricature
of the chanson protagonist. Although the chanson, in the form of a couplet (the same chorus,
which has its [humoristic] meaning through the pre-stanzas), is categorized as a self-
presentation chant, without stages -Persona and Chanson-protagonist unbroken, neither in the
first person singular nor in their appearance. 15 It was only with the specific physicality of
Lions and her cheeky voice, as Hesterberg formulated it, that chanson gets its parodistic
meaning.Lion does not appear with a bob head, mini skirt and cigarette butts, but in the
already detailed black-morbid style. It takes the New Woman 's fashionable staging by
overpowering it and instead replacing it "The exclamation mark of the distress" of the
refrain.17 Lion does not represent the New Woman, but the criticism of her. Thus, the Berlin
stock exchange talks of "the most modern degeneration culture lured performances" 18. At
this point, the narrative break between the chanson protagonist and the stage persona takes
place without losing their associative relationship with one another. The semantic meaning of
the chanson arises in the performance through the physicality of Lions. Simon Frith outlines
the importance of the body for a musical performance as follows:

Performance art is a form of rhetoric, a rhetoric of gestures in which, by and large, bodily and
signatures (that is, the use of the voice) dominant other forms of communicative signs, such as
language andiconography. (Noun, masculine) (also: an object, an object, an object, an object,
an object, a social object) As an object, that is, as a willed or shaped object, an object with
meaning. " Simon Frith: Performing Rites, p. 205.

Lions body was also a fascinating, attractive and repulsive object, as well as a consciously used
medium to give a chanson its meaning.20 In the chanson "the line of fashion", the physicality
of the stage persona is a special one Close connection with the physicality of the chanson
protagonist. For the physical motif of the first stanza is adopted in the first verse of the second
verse and linked with a typical new woman's attribute, "A car rushes through thick and thin!"
With the tempo of the text content also pulls The tempo of the melody. With the car rase
theNew woman at the beginning of the season from the "Theater, the fashionable house" (II,
5), leaving as little traces as the seasonal phenomena of the mass media and the latest body
cult (whether thick or thin). The gentleman's license (Which Lion also owned), 21 was also the
expression of a new amusement pleasure outside the office, as well as the latest equipment
revisions by Erik Charell and Her man Haller. In the chanson, "The line of fashion", the
emphasis is placed on these features, inasmuch as they are merely a fashionable expression of
the mass and entertainment culture instead of artistic aesthetics - "we already sense the
advertising" (II, 6) .22

In the car, "no passenger is seated" (II, 4), or as the seventh verse says, "A passenger as well as
nothing rises". These verses, like the first strophe, can be understood as a reference to the
androgynous body cult of the New Woman as well as its transience and insignificance. Just as
the New Woman is staged in fashion and the media, or is staged there, she also has her period
of decay. Like the current review, it is a seasonal phenomenon that guarantees high attention
only in the short term until it is replaced by a new type - in this case, directly in the next verse:
"This nothingness - that was oneLady! "(II, 8). This type of femininity is announced in the
chanson by Lion, in that the preceding two verses prepare their appearance retardingly, and
the word "lady" is stretched for a long time, as well as in the subsequent refrain (vv. 5 and v.
Dame23 is another femininity of the Weimar Republic that precedes the stages Especially by
Fritzi Massary, 24 the Operetta Soubrette. It was also medially accompanied and constructed,
whereby, as the chanson shows by way of example, the transBetween a prostitute of the half-
world and the traditional image of femininity with "domestic spirit" (III, 4 and 6). Mode is, in
this respect, the leading topos, which coSignificantly, the last two verses of the last stanzas
also take advantage of the alleged sexual self-consciousness of the New Women: "This
prerogative is to be proved to show that even every nobility has limits" (III, 7 and 8). These
boundaries become boundaries of freedom and emancipation when a last time is passed into
the pre-chorus, which makes the new woman again the equipment.

This chanson, which was responsible for the breakthrough of Lion, already shows the typical
characteristics of its entire repertoire. From the New Woman over the Lady to the Whore, Lion
shows, on the one hand, the transience and the exchangeability, but also the same character
of these types of femininity, all of which serve as a projection surface. In addition, there is
always the same as the observed increase from the harmless to the grotesquely brittle. The
current type of woman present to the public is shown in his historicity by the bowing of the
lady from the first stanza to the second. This is then reversed, again, in the transition from
second to third stanzas to the opposite, into the prostitute. The new woman thus becomes a
substitute for old femininity images. She remains - "What does she want? What is wrong with
her? What can she do? - Who knows? "- a superficial phenomenon. With the "exclamation
mark of distress" in the chorus and the many excerpts and claims of the verses, invariants and
stereotyped stereotypes are built around the New Woman, which, as a result of the many
question marks in the pre-chorus andRefrain can be questioned.

With this structure, however, the chanson still provides an answer to the question posed by
Alexandra Kollontai a few years earlier:

"Who is that, the new woman? Does it exist at all? Is not it the product of the creative
imagination of modern Belletrists looking for sensational novelties? Look around, see you
sharply, think, and you will be convinced: the new woman is there - she exists. "

Collontaire, in these few questions, already reflects the nature of the New Woman by opening
up a continuum of fiction and reality. The New Woman, obviously, vacillates between ideal and
reality, and is also an example and an image.33 The chanson "The line of fashion" is not only
part of the discourse about the New Woman after the First World War, but also reflects it just
before the First World War Background of its potential fictionality. The chanson picks up the
individual components of the type of the new woman and parodies them in subversive, partly
also macabre ways. It shows that the revolutionary fashionable appearance of the women
does not make any feminists and the new woman asProtagonist of this chanson is not yet a
new heroine, as Kollontai had desired and expected it.34 Rather, she is a doll that can be
endowed with heart-

And so the new woman is designed, discarded, redesigned, altified, blended and
complemented, now commanded here, soon, there, sketched into the sky, pounded into the
earth, thoughtfully flowing, conscientiously thrown with old wishes Complained with new
hopes, sought with longing ... but the old designs, the well-known pictures, are supplemented
and varied by some new game styles.35

The New Woman is just the latest trend that has followed the Femme Fatale and soon the
Vamp will follow, for example in the form of Marlene Dietrich's stage persona. Lion is surely
part of this feminine discourse, and was heard by her hearers quite involuntarily within it - the
anecdote about her meeting with Marcellus Schiffer in the Modesalon probably controlled this
understanding deliberately. The temporal and local context, that is, their affiliation to the
generation of young women who were born around 1900 primarily in the entertainment
metropolis of Berlin, as well as the theme choice of the chanson, inevitably make the type of
the new woman part of their image. Lion sits downBut with its reflexive and distant grotesque
from the mass of the many new women. In this way she reaches a wide audience, who sees in
her familiarity and news, while at the same time ensuring the necessary individuality and
originality.