Dance under the Swastika:
Mary Wigman and Gyp Schlicht (1917-2015)
Sabine Rollberg, Freiburg

View a recording this event HERE

EXCLUSIVE: Watch Annette von Wangenheim’s German language documentary film “Tanz unterm Hakenkreuz” from 2003 HERE. Big thanks to Annette von Wangenheim and Sabine Rollberg for making this possible!
Gyp Schlicht speaks at 38:02 min.

Lecture featuring
Sabine Rollberg, Professor Emeritus of Documentary Film at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and former ARTE Representative and ARTE Commissioning Editor for WDR
Moderated by
Rachel Stern, Executive Director of the Fritz Ascher Society in New York

In times of Nazi Germany, becoming an artist was not the typical career path for women. The „deutsche Frau“ was supposed to represent the “good housewife”, as a mother of many children, not wearing make-up and fancy dresses. The Nazis were refuting what they considered the decadency of the Weimar Republic, producing self-reliant, smoking, smart women. But to establish an image as a modern, future-oriented nation vis-a-vis other countries, they needed some modern women like Leni Riefenstahl, Marika Röck, or Ilse Werner, who amused and distracted the German audience from seeing the committed cruelties.
My mother, a daughter of an assimilated German Jew and an Italian Catholic mother was a dancer in these days, a student of Mary Wigman, who is considered the founder of the German expressive dance. In this talk, I will try to describe their professional lives not as an academic researcher, but as a daughter and journalist, hoping to find answers to how they pursued their career while their friends or relatives were deported or killed in concentration camps.

Prof. Sabine Rollberg was born in Freiburg in 1953 and studied History, German Language and Literature and Political Science to doctorate level in Freiburg and Bonn. Freelance work: SWF (radio/TV broadcaster), Badische Zeitung (newspaper) and Frankfurter Rundschau (newspaper). After training at WDR, she was appointed editor of International Programming (World Review, World Review for Children, Cultural World Review, International Studio, Burning Issues, Reviews), Culture and Science; reporter for TV programmes Weltspiegel (World Review), Auslandsreport (International Report) and Auslandsstudio (International Studio), moderator of Treffpunkt Dritte Welt (Third World Meeting Place) and talk show Leute (People) for Berlin-based broadcaster SFB.
From 1995 to 2005 she was on the media advisory board of the Goethe-Institut and Jury Member of the European Journalism Award at Freie Universität, Berlin. From 1989 to 1994 Sabine Rollberg was ARD’s correspondent in Paris and was ARTE Editor-in-Chief in Strasbourg between 1994 and 1997. From 1999 to 2019 she was ARTE representative and ARTE Commissioning Editor for WDR. From 2007 to 2019 she was Professor of Documentary Film at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.
Among other things, she was responsible for overseeing many WDR/ARTE documentary films which won numerous international awards, including two Oscar nominations, among them „Darwin’s Nightmare“, „Lost Children“, „Losers and Winners“, „Chernobyl: The Invisible Thief“, “The Picture of the Napalm Girl”, „The Green Wave / Iran Elections 2009“, “I Shot My Love”, “The Boy Mir – Ten Years In Afghanistan”, “7 Or Why I Exist” and “Burma VJ – Reporting From A Closed Country”.
Sabine Rollberg is board member of Freiburg University and teaching professor at the Freiburg University College for Liberal Arts and Sciences.

The event is part of our monthly series
Flight or Fight. stories of artists under repression.

Sponsored by Allianz Partners.

Tanz unter der Swastika: Mary Wigman und Gyp Schlicht (1917-2015)

In Zeiten des nationalsozialistischen Deutschlands war es nicht der typische Karriereweg für Frauen, Künstlerin zu werden. Die „deutsche Frau“ sollte die „gute Hausfrau“ als Mutter vieler Kinder sein, die kein Make-up und keine Kostüme trug. Die Nazis widerlegten, was sie als Dekadenz der Weimarer Republik betrachteten, die eigenständige, rauchende, kluge Frauen hervorgebracht hatte. Aber um ein Image als moderne, zukunftsorientierte Nation gegenüber anderen Ländern zu etablieren, brauchten sie einige moderne Frauen wie Leni Riefenstahl, Marika Röck oder Ilse Werner, die das deutsche Publikum amüsierten und davon ablenkten, die begangenen Grausamkeiten zu sehen.
Meine Mutter, eine Tochter eines assimilierten deutschen Juden und einer italienischen katholischen Mutter, war in diesen Tagen Tänzerin, eine Schülerin von Mary Wigman, die als Begründerin des deutschen Ausdruckstanzes gilt. In diesem Vortrag werde ich versuchen, ihr Berufsleben nicht als akademische Forscherin, sondern als Tochter und Journalistin zu beschreiben, in der Hoffnung, Antworten darauf zu finden, wie sie ihre Karriere verfolgten, während ihre Freunde oder Verwandten in Konzentrationslagern deportiert oder getötet wurden.