Valeska Gert - Life and Career

Life and Career

Gert was born as Gertrud Valesca Samosch in Berlin to a Jewish family. She was the eldest daughter of manufacturer Theodor Samosch and Augusta Rosenthal. Exhibiting no interest in academics or office work, Gert began taking dance lessons at the age of nine. This, combined with her love of ornate fashion, led her to a career in dance and performance art. In 1915, she studied acting with Maria Moissi.

World War I had a negative effect on her father’s finances, forcing Gert to rely on herself far more than other bourgeois daughters typically might. As World War I raged on, Gert joined a Berliner dance group and created revolutionary satirical dance.

In 1916, Gert made her dance debut in a Berlin movie house, performing between movie reels. The same year, she began acting at the Munich Kammerspiele. Following engagements at the Deutsches Theater and the Tribüne in Berlin, Gert was invited to perform in expressionist plays in Dadaist mixed media art nights. Her performances in Oskar Kokoschka’s Hiob (1918), Ernst Toller’s Transformation (1919), and Frank Wedekind’s Franziska earned her popularity.

During this time, she also performed in the Schall und Rauch cabaret. During this time, Gert launched a tour of her own dances, with titles like Dance in Orange, Boxing, Circus, Japanese Grotesque, Death, and Whore. She also contributed articles for magazines like Die Weltbühne and the Berliner Tageszeitung.

By 1923, Gert focused her work more on film acting than live performance, performing with Andrews Engelmann, Arnold Korff, and others. She performed in G. W. Pabst’s Joyless Street in 1925, Diary of a Lost Girl in 1929, and The Threepenny Opera in 1931. In the late twenties, she returned to the stage with pieces emphasizing Tontänze (sound dances), which explored the relationship between movement and sound.