Eccentric Modernism, Or: George Grosz’s Gramophone Goes Meschugge 1 JONATHAN WIPPLINGER UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE A curious, if enigmatic figure referred to as «Mister Meschugge» lies at the center of Dadaist George Grosz’s account of Berlin’s entertainment district on the eve of the First World War. One of the most important and recognized visual artists of the German avant-garde, Grosz returned to Berlin around 1912, the city of his birth, after studying in Dresden. Unable to afford more elegant dance halls, ultimately it was Berlin’s cafés and their promise to deliver everything he wanted «for the price of a cup of coffee» that served as his entree into the world of popular dance music and modern entertainment culture (Grosz, An Autobiography 90). 2 «It was at the Café Oranienburg Gate,» Grosz would recall years later in his autobiography, that I first heard something like a jazz band. People called it a noise band [Radaukapelle]. It was not a jazz band in the contemporary sense, but more of a café orchestra gone crazy. Two or three musicians with saws and cowbells would parody the general melody with rhythmic interruptions. The conductor called himself Mister Meschugge and acted like a madman. He would pretend that he had lost control, would break his baton to pieces and smash his violin over the head of a musician. At the end he would grab the bass and use it as a weapon in the ensuing battle, finally throwing the splinters into the audience that screamed with delight and threw them back (90; translation slightly altered by author). Grosz’s intent, at least in part, in offering this anecdote was to relate this experience from his youth to the rise of National Socialism in Germany, when, as Grosz writes, a «different conductor Meschugge would direct a dance of death, beat his musicians with their own instruments until they were senseless, and reap thundering applause» (91). Nonetheless, Grosz’s depiction of Mister Meschugge has largely been put to other ends. Most notably, it has found resonance within scholarship treating music’s position within Dada as well as within considerations of jazz during the Weimar Republic (Goergen, «Dada» and «Apachentänze»; Robinson 120; Partsch 39; Anglet 61—62). Little attention, however, has thus far been paid to the actual performer named by Grosz, Mr. Meschugge, let alone to his significance for popular culture in pre-World War I Berlin. One major thrust of my work here is to correct this oversight. For while at present it remains the best-known version, Grosz’s eyeand earwitness account is but one example of many representations (visual, textual, and aural) of Mr. Meschugge, the most famous of Berlin’s eccentric Kapellmeister or bandleaders. In the following, I want to contextualize and historicize the case of Mr. Meschugge and the phenomenon of the eccentric bandleader within the auditory culture of early twentiethcentury Berlin (Morat; Alter and Koepenick; Feiereisen and Merley Hill). This will involve, on the one hand, an exploration of popular musical production and consumption during the period roughly around 1910, specifically in Berlin’s music cafés, and the reproduction of popular music on gramophone records. On the other hand, I will examine Mr. Meschugge’s performances at places like the Café Stern as significant moments in the creation of what I am calling «eccentric modernism,» an early twentiethcentury fascination and experimentation with the ideas and embodiment of the «eccentric» that one finds not only in Berlin, but on both sides of the Atlantic in this period. In focusing on the eccentric modernist qualities of Mr. Meschugge, I’m further seeking to highlight alternative modes and actors within German modernism, musical and otherwise, that have, for various reasons, remained on the margins of standard accounts of twentieth-century German cultural history. While my focus here is on Berlin and the eccentric bandleader, this specific case study has implications for much broader issues, including the position of popular music in German modernism between 1900 and 1945. In view of the increasingly interwoven sphere of popular cultural production uniting American, African-American, and European performers, scholarly exploration of long-forgotten musicians like Mr. Meschugge reveal them to be more than mere background details to the lives of those better-known (visual) artists like Grosz, who, for better and worse, have long determined our knowledge of their, in many ways, alien performance environment. Through greater attention to documents and descriptions of popular musical performance in the first quarter of the twentieth century, I hope to outline the modernist and eccentric, but hardly isolated, path taken by German popular musical culture in this period. I will therefore begin by reconstructing the use of the term «eccentric» within popular cultural discourse, tracing its development across German and American sources. Here I will highlight not only the theoretical weight given the eccentric performer by European writers like Moeller van den Bruck and Theodor Adorno, but also the role that race, and Blackness in particular, played within reception of the eccentric. Next, I will turn to the sites of Mr. Meschugge’s performances, Berlin’s music cafés, in order to contextualize eccentric performers and their popularity within the devel- 367 Eccentric Modernism opment of urban, modern, and popular culture in Berlin. Third, I will examine textual and visual strategies for representing eccentric bandleaders, focusing on how they became linked not only to the modernity of the city and the masses, but to European modernists like Grosz as well. Finally, addressing the question of the mechanical reproduction of such music, I will return to Grosz and Mr. Meschugge and offer a speculative reconstruction of Grosz’s gramophone collection and its potential relationship to a 1913 recording by the eccentric bandleader. Originally a term used to describe the orbits of celestial objects whose center was something other than the earth, the word «eccentric» has retained its connection to the nonstandard and atypical, as something that has lost or lacks a center, or as something that exists on the margins. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it also found use within the transatlantic network of European and American popular culture as a performance style. While clowns were closely associated with the term, as were similar performance categories of the «grotesque,» «freak,» or «comedic,» the appellation is best understood as a broad term for performers and performance styles marked by exaggerated, nonstandard styles. In this way, in both the American and European context, we find not only eccentric dancers and comedians but also eccentric bicycle riders, jugglers, and of course musicians. Summarizing the use of the term within American Vaudeville, music historian Brian Harker writes: «Bearing in mind that the original ‹unorthodox› or ‹idiosyncratic› meaning has never lapsed, we may add, as defining characteristics, a penchant for acrobatics, pantomime, a ‹rubberlegs› fluidity, and often an element of comedy» (71—72). Harker’s definition, as will become clear below, could just as easily have been drawn from German discussions of eccentric bandleaders, suggesting a significant degree of overlap in the interpretation of performance styles between North America and Europe. Also true for both the American and German contexts is Harker’s contention that the music and dance styles associated with the eccentric have for the most part been ignored. «Long regarded as vaudevillian corruptions of ‹real› jazz,» he writes, «eccentric music and dance mark out a forgotten world, recoverable only by turning a fresh gaze upon the photos and accounts overlooked by critics and historians, one sympathetic to the artistry of the vaudeville stage and the cultural richness it bequeathed to music» (70). The world of eccentric performance has been forgotten in the histories of both American jazz and German popular music, though for slightly different reasons. While deriving from a similar and overlapping popular theatrical milieu, it is important to recognize that Berlin’s eccentric 368 Jonathan Wipplinger bandleaders were not jazz musicians avant la lettre. Instead, the multiple intersections between the history of eccentric bandleaders and jazz are indicative rather of a shared transatlantic heritage and system of popular cultural exchange during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. An important part of this heritage is the long history of African American and Black diasporic performers (musicians, singers, dancers) in Germany and Europe (Lotz et al.; Campt; Aitken and Rosenhaft; Greene and Ortlepp). As the work of Astrid Kusser suggests, the period around 1900 specifically was one in which Black vernacular dance and musical idioms like the cake walk and ragtime circulated between Europe, Africa, as well as the Americas to engender multipositional and multivalent moments of encounter, transfer, and translation. This broader context of conflict and exchange bore directly on the emerging critical discourse of the eccentric performer in Wilhelmine Germany. One of the most significant examples of this intersection can be found in the writings of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a conservative cultural critic today perhaps best known for his early use of the term «Third Reich» in the 1923 book of the same name. Prior to this, however, Moeller van den Bruck had already produced a large body of work, one in which the variety theater acted as one focal point, most notably resulting in the publication of his 1902 monograph Das Varieté. There he subsumed discussion of the eccentric under a larger consideration of comedy and comedic styles, but in a later essay written from Paris in 1905, Moeller van den Bruck set about to determine the cultural significance of the eccentric performer for the contemporary moment. A key question in his 1905 essay «Der Excentrik [sic]. Eine Studie über die komische Figur unserer Zeit» is whether the eccentric performer signals cultural growth or decline - more specifically, whether eccentric acts should be understood as culturally productive and creative or as imitative and parasitical. Interestingly, he denies that the eccentric is imitative and instead defends its imaginative and «healthy» qualities. For Moeller van den Bruck, the eccentric’s originality lies not in the content of the act, but in its form. He suggests that rather than modeling the performance on the behavior of an individual person or even a specific class, the eccentric seeks to recreate experiences from the modern, urban landscape. He states that «instead of being modeled after fanciful people,» the eccentric came into being «archetypally out of fanciful times» («Der Excentrik» 57). 3 Such creativity is of an atypical nature, however. Moeller van den Bruck suggests, in a manner reminiscent of modernist montage practices, that «because the eccentric is not bound to a specific pattern, the details can be drawn from disparate areas and he can use them to the most contradictory ends» (57). His concrete 369 Eccentric Modernism example here is the performer Little Tich, a diminutive British entertainer famous across Europe for his «Big Boot Dance,» during which he performed seeming feats of contortion by wearing elongated shoes. For Moeller van den Bruck, Tich’s act is less about parodying fashionable footwear (its «content») than playfully and imaginatively improvising on everyday modern life (its «form»). Such playfulness contains a utopian element for him, specifically in its ability to question what is self-evident about modern custom, here how one walks down the street. He contends that the eccentric’s performance can serve to reorient the audience’s relationship to custom: [T]he insight we gain [is that] the most outlandish thing someone is capable of thinking still has an other side, one that is directed towards the realizable. The transformation of the irrational into something seemingly rational, yes, even extremely practical, or at least to the most simple and most mundane - this act constitutes the humor of the eccentric, who in some way is always answering the question: why should one not do something another way. (63) In sum, the eccentric enacts a form of cultural criticism, which serves, albeit implicitly, to promote change through atypical execution of everyday activities and erratic use of everyday objects and signs. While some of this interpretation is anticipated in his earlier work on the variety theater from 1902, a noteworthy addition to Moeller van den Bruck’s later analysis is the essay’s extended treatment of the role played by American and in particular African-American culture in the development of eccentric performance. For Moeller van den Bruck as well as other commentators on the variety theater such as Oskar Panizza, African Americans served as precursors not only to European popular culture, but modern culture more generally. Specifically, their state of subjugation vis-à-vis white Americans promoted parody and critique of the flaws of white culture. According to Moeller van den Bruck, the African American «exaggerated, twisted, bent these weaknesses [of white culture], only to show that there’s nothing special to the European or American when one has figured him out» (60). Still, any critical agency on the part of African-American culture and performers remains severely circumscribed. In a move typical of the period, Moeller van den Bruck binds the modernism and modernity of African Americans to their corporeality, writing: «To a certain degree, one can say that he [the African American] became the modern man par excellence - but only with his muscles» (59). While Moeller van den Bruck’s discussion of the eccentric does not treat music specifically, his understanding of the eccentric performer as quintessentially modern with origins in African-American culture reveals an important and long-lasting framework for the reception of the eccentric bandleader. Though it is beyond the scope of my argument to develop this 370 Jonathan Wipplinger line of thought more fully, much of this general framework can also be found in the later writings of philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who, yet again highlighting the overlap between the eccentric and jazz, made the former a centerpiece of his reading of jazz subjectivity in the 1930s (Adorno 96—99). The migration of eccentric practices into cultural production as described by Moeller van den Bruck, Panizza, Grosz, and Adorno can be related to more general tendencies in German popular culture in the early twentieth-century Berlin. One of these was the rise of large-scale entertainment venues. So while eccentric bandleaders depended for their existence on a number of specific conditions, such as the increasing internationalization of music production and circulation, any discussion of their popularity must additionally take account of the space of their performances, namely the music cafés. Even more so than the Café Stern referenced by Grosz, the popularity of the eccentric bandleader can be linked to another site: the Kerkau-Palast, which opened its doors in March 1910 («Kerkau Palast» March 20, 1910). Named after its initial owner and world champion billiard player, Hugo Kerkau, the location was a grandiose three-level establishment located at Behrenstraße 48. This site featured 60 billiard tables, a separate reading room for newspapers, a room for chess and card playing, nine-pin bowling, and dining facilities; its initial capacity of 4000 guests was then increased to 5000 through an expansion in 1911(«Kerkau-Palast» April 3, 1910 and April 1, 1911; «Der neuerbaute Kerkau-Palast»; «Der ‹Kerkaupalast›» Berliner Volkszeitung; «Der ‹Kerkaupalast›» Berliner Tageblatt). In terms of music, there were two large halls that featured three to four orchestras playing daily from 11 a. m. through the early morning hours («Kerkau-Palast» August 20, 1911 and November 1, 1912; Schmidl August 24, 1913). It was here that another famous eccentric bandleader of the day plied his trade, Mr. Glasneck, the so-called «Original-Kanone» - «canon» being one of two short-hand terms, the other being «bomb» (Bombe), routinely applied to these performers («Kerkau-Palast» March 7, 1913). 4 There he could be found alongside more familiar, if equally modern and international bandleaders like the Rumanian Giorgi Vintilescu («Kerkau-Palast» November 1, 1912) or the Italian Gabriel Formiggini («Kerkau-Palast» March 7, 1913). Audiences at the Kerkau-Palast and other similar establishments experienced a mélange of musical styles and presentation modes ranging from light operetta tunes to Viennese Schrammel music to cabaret songs and recitations, as well as new international styles of popular music (two-steps, ragtime, and tango) and novel modes of presentation, such as the use of unique electrical lighting (Schmidl February 4, 1912). 371 Eccentric Modernism There are two further points to be made regarding the sounds of the music cafés and their impact on auditory culture in Berlin more generally. The first concerns the sheer quantity of music: the number of pieces played and the number of concerts given across the city is difficult to imagine. The repertoire of individual groups could include more than 2000 pieces and was said to consist of classical and modern art music as well as German and international popular music («Internationales Salon-Orchester»; «Internationale Tonkünstler-Vereinigung»; «Künstler-Quartett»). Although, as I will discuss below, musicians moved regularly between music cafés, individual bandleaders could also perform so often at one venue that their 500 th , and, in extreme cases, 3000 th concert was celebrated (Schmidl April 20, 1913). If Berlin’s musicians suffused the city’s entertainment district with their sounds, their reach also extended far beyond. The relative concentration of Germany’s recording industry in Berlin meant that this city’s popular bandleaders had an amplified influence on German recordings writ large. This was due both to their proximity to major recording companies like Lindström as well as in some cases to their greater experience with the rigors of the recording process (Gauss, Nadel 53—69 and 180—81). More generally, the opening of the Kerkau-Palast belongs to the proliferation of entertainment establishments, including cafés, bars, Weinstuben, dance halls, and cabarets, during the first decade of the twentieth century (Edel). Typified by the latest amenities, technologies, and pleasures, wellknown establishments like the Josty, Piccadilly, Equitable, or Kerkau-Palast catered to a young, urban, and modern clientele. Many of these establishments marketed themselves not as German or even Berlin institutions but as international and global ones. A Welt-Café like the Kerkau-Palast saw itself as part of a Euro-American culture of artists, entertainers, entrepreneurs, and affluent tourists of major metropolises like Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna and New York (Becker; Becker et al.). Though clearly exaggerated, there was some truth to these claims and this internationalization of entertainment resulted in a number of first-hand encounters between Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders and foreign visitors. Of course such exchange also involved cultural translation, as historians Len Platt and Tobias Becker have shown for the theatrical crossings between Berlin and London. So if contemporaries regularly framed such exchange in terms of the fluidity of cultural boundaries, this was, according to Platt, «a problematic position not only because so much adaptation and transfer responded to economic contexts rather than aesthetics, but also because the cosmopolitanism of musical theatre coexisted with a powerful instinct for the local» (35). Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders became caught up in this international exchange and its seemingly inevitable localization. For 372 Jonathan Wipplinger example, when the American trade publication Variety reported on potential international tours to America by Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Glasneck («‹Crazy Orchestra› Coming»; «Mr. Meschugge as Director»), the reporter translated Glasneck’s act for an American readership with reference to Giuseppe Creatore, an Italian conductor made famous through his sensational conducting style in the US. 5 More concretely, the owner of the Kerkau-Palast, Josef König, traveled to Great Britain and returned with a new eccentric bandleader. The performer in question, Frank Groundsell, was an untrained variety theater musician from Southampton. In Berlin, however, he would become the American eccentric bandleader «Mr. Maseltop aus Chicago» (Groundsell 54—56; «Kerkau-Palast» October 1, 1913; «Im Kerkau Palast»). Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop as well as other eccentric bandleaders enjoyed a high public profile with Berlin’s pre-war public. In this period, «Mr. Meschugge» was a recognizable brand within Wilhelmine popular culture, known through his appearances in a variety of cafés as much as through the use of his name in the newspapers as well as on litfass-columns, postcards, stamps, and film. 6 Part of the reason for the eccentric’s and Mr. Meschugge’s ubiquity can be linked to broader developments in mass cultural advertising. Eccentric performers like Mr. Meschugge emerged during an age of advertising and commercial imagery, an age defined, according to David Ciarlo, by ubiquity and imitation rather than variability (20). These performers both profited and suffered from their visual and textual duplication. Although substantial evidence exists to suggest that «Mr. Meschugge» was in fact the German-Jewish composer and bandleader Robert Krüger, 7 his marketing as «Mr. Meschugge» led not only to this name’s proliferation, and thus recognizability, but also to numerous imitators as well. They ranged from those who presented themselves as acts «à la Meschugge» such as Mister Carri and Albertio to those who modeled their names after his, in particular through the choice of a name associated with Jewishness such as Mr. Maseltop or Mr. Schlemihl («Mister Carri»; «Albertio»; Schmidl September 7, 1913). In a report from the Berliner Börsen- Zeitung, an anonymous author notes that his name «attracted so many imitators that the title ‹Mr. Meschugge› developed into a type of moniker for the profession. It did not help ‹Mr. Meschugge› No. 1 at all that in his advertisements he called himself the original and real ‹Mr. Meschugge›» («Mr. Meschugge»). Indeed, into the early Weimar Republic performers and commentators continued using the name «Mr. Meschugge» as shorthand for wild, eccentric musical performance (Schmidl March 30, 1919). A second reason for the high public visibility of such performers has to do with the economics of live performance in the period. Competition was fierce 373 Eccentric Modernism amongst café proprietors for customers, and sought-after bandleaders, eccentric and otherwise, regularly moved between different cafés, as one can follow from March 1911 onwards in the bi-weekly reports on Berlin’s music formations by author Leopold «Poldi» Schmidl in Der Artist, a trade publication for musicians and variety and circus performers. In response, eccentric performers themselves advertised their attractiveness both in terms of their musicianship and their ability to draw in customers («Der exzentrische Kapellmeister»). Of course, for this they also demanded (and received) higher fees, something traditional musicians and bandleaders resented («Berlin» 352). For these latter groups, the popularity of eccentric bandleaders threatened to degrade German musicians to the level of «clowns,» thereby destroying the current favorable public reputation of musicians («Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikerverband»; Schaub). Already in 1910, an anonymous article in Der Artist warned musicians of the danger the eccentric bandleader represented for their profession. «Musicality, thank God,» the author begins ironically, «is a quality no bandleader needs anymore as long as he is a good gymnast. [. . .] What fortune that something as boring as music is being anaesthetized through the flexible arts of so many bandleaders» («Zukunftsmusik»). Continuing on, the author foretells of rubber nightsticks replacing batons, of conductors jumping into pianos, of violent acts against musicians, and of the show’s enormous success with the audience. This will continue, we are told, until someone questions «whether music is even needed for these performances. Perhaps it can all be done perfectly well without the inconvenient noises» (Ibid.). In other words, eccentric bandleaders threatened to eradicate not only the profession, but music itself. Given their medial presence and economic success, eccentric bandleaders thus quickly came to be viewed as part of the encroachment of modern culture and media, particularly film and cabaret, on traditional German music and musicians. Yet contrary to such hyperbole, music did remain important to the success of eccentric bandleaders, and it is important not to fall prey to the easy rhetoric of the eccentric bandleaders’ detractors. To be sure, owing to the acrobatics involved in their stage performances, music often received short shrift within contemporary accounts. Here, however, some perspective is required. Though Groundsell (Mr. Maseltop) lacked formal academic training, he was a devotee of the popular American conductor John Philip Sousa and, based upon recordings of his work, was familiar with the latest developments in American popular music. Mr. Glasneck and Mr. Meschugge, on the other hand, appear to have been classically trained musicians, with Krüger (Mr. Meschugge) receiving praise for his musicianship from the otherwise skeptical 374 Jonathan Wipplinger «Poldi» Schmidl on atleast two occasions. In his first report on Mr. Meschugge from July 1913, Schmidl says that he enjoyed the performer tremendously. Despite rejecting eccentric performance as music in the strict sense, he also suggests that it is not for a lack of ability, noting that «Mr. M[eschugge] is actually a very good musician» (Schmidl July 7, 1919 and April 6, 1919). In other words, while their showmanship was no doubt a major contributing factor to their success, their musical abilities and innovations, especially in the field of popular music, should not be underestimated. Indeed, all three major representatives of the genre, Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop made recordings in Berlin, though none of them can be said to have been an especially prolific recording artist (Kelly 697, 704, 710; Lotz, German Ragtime 230—31). Of the three, Groundsell (Mr. Maseltop) is not known to have recorded in the pre-war era. Still, his post-war recordings as the «American» bandleader of «The Eccentric Band» reveal a performance style more or less in the manner of popular European ragtime orchestras of the period, German or otherwise. Yet ultimately, it is not how, but what he recorded that is perhaps most significant here. Groundsell is responsible for one of the earliest non-American recordings of «Tiger Rag» (Original Excentric Band), one of the best-known and earliest documents of recorded jazz as released by the «Original Dixieland Jazz Band» in 1917. 8 More germane to the present context are the pre-war recordings of Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Glasneck. Indeed, as based on their recordings and songs referenced in contemporary reports, the musical repertoire of Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders was more typical than atypical. It included hits from operettas (Jean Gilbert’s omnipresent «Puppchen» or «Carlotta» from Millöcker’s Gasparone), Berlin-specific songs («Der fidele Rixdorfer») as well as international popular music («Dixieland» and «Cowboy Liebe»). Drawing on a somewhat older repertoire, Mr. Glasneck also recorded marches («Deutsche Eichen»), fitting for this performer whose centerpiece was the bellicose Schlachtenpotpourri (Kelley 704, 710; Schmidl August 24, 1913). If the significance of music to the success of the eccentric bandleader is clearly more complicated than their traditionalist critics would have one believe, before discussing the question of their musicality in further detail, it is first necessary to look at how the eccentric bandleader, Mr. Meschugge in particular, was represented within Wilhelmine culture and to what ends this image was put. While localized in Berlin’s music cafés, the eccentric bandleader’s presence was one solidified by Wilhelmine Germany’s mass cultural matrix of mediated duplication via newspapers, postcards, advertisements, films, 375 Eccentric Modernism and of course recordings. Within Berlin’s «word city» and its «industries of sensationalism» (Fritzsche 10) as well as within non-German discussions, we see elements both from Grosz’s later account as well as from Harker’s definition of the eccentric. While Mr. Maseltop and Mr. Glasneck are only rarely mentioned by name, the novelty of Mr. Meschugge’s name elicited translations of this Yiddish term: «crazy» for English readers («Mr. Meschugge as Director»; W. O.), and «gek,» «zot,» «krankzinnig» in Dutch («Mr. Meschugge» Niewe Rotterdamsche Courant). Though German-language explanations tended to assume knowledge of the term, they often invoked associated words like «verrückt» and «Blödsinn» in their descriptions («Mr. Meschugge» Berliner Börsen-Zeitung; Heuer). Somewhat unexpectedly, given that it is extremely likely to have contributed to the relationship of eccentric bandleaders and the modern and modernism, the word’s association with Jewishness does not figure explicitly in most reports. Instead, it was Mr. Meschugge’s visual appearance that demanded more lengthy remarks. Or at least this was the case for an American visitor, who reported on Mr. Meschugge in the Baltimore Sun in 1911, writing: «Picture yourself a man of small stature with a pale face, adorned with a mustache, goatee and short side whiskers about an inch long, a pair of gold spectacles fitted on the nose, and black hair about 18 inches long, descending over the shoulders, and in cases of extreme paroxysms of excitement covering the entire face, and the great and only Meschugg [sic] stands revealed» (W. O.). Regarding the aural experience, both foreign and local journalists routinely refer to the use of non-standard instrumentation in these bands and highlight the presence of pistols, toy trumpets, and megaphones (Grosz, An Autobiography 90; Edel 52—53). Vienna socialist Max Winter wrote of a performance by Mr. Maseltop: «You sometimes believe you’ve stumbled into a madhouse, the action on the small, open stage is so noisy and strange» («Mister Maseltop»). Noise, as might be surmised, is also a term deployed to describe their music and the general ambience of the scene, aided, of course, by the textual and often visual acoustics of the «bombs» and «canons» used to advertise for their appearances («Kerkau-Palast» April 8, 1916). Put differently, their musical performances and reception by critics are closely connected with the broader discussion of noise and modernity at the outset of the twentieth century (Goodyear). If the noise embraced by these groups represents an important element in descriptions from the period, writers paid equal attention to the physicality of their performances. Commentators tended to highlight the acrobatics of the bandleaders and generally describe them with the vocabulary of the contortion artist rather than the musician. To be sure, there may have been 376 Jonathan Wipplinger good reason for this. In what appears to have been a standard feature of his act, Mr. Meschugge conducted his orchestra with his head between his legs, allowing his long hair to hang down toward the ground (Grossmann; «Berlin»; Rumpelstilzchen 128). Eccentric bandleaders are further said to have jumped into their orchestras, on top of pianos, into drums, into the crowd, as well as to douse instruments with beer, tear flags, deploy sabers, etc. Though more extreme, these elements were by no means completely alien to representations of high-cultural performers and conductors in the nineteenth and early twentieth century like Franz Liszt, Hans von Bülow, and Gustav Mahler. Like Mr. Meschugge, their popularity was translated into caricatures of wild hair and wild gesticulations (Leppert 159). If the connection to these now canonical figures remains opaque within contemporary discussions, it is very likely that the imagery associated with Liszt, von Bülow, and Mahler was an important prism through which commentators (and in all likelihood Krüger himself) created the public image of Mr. Meschugge. At the same time, to reduce the eccentric bandleader into pop-cultural redux of European high culture would be a mistake. For commentators focused not primarily on the eccentric bandleaders’ wildness, but on their flexibility, their «rubberlegs» in Harker’s definition of the eccentric. Their bodies were said to undergo incessant movements and contortions, which led one writer to call Mr. Meschugge a «rubber ball conductor,» while another wrote of the eccentric bandleader as a «rubber man» (Edel 53; «Zukunftsmusik»). One might say then that these were performers who did not enact the precision of modernity or the relationship to the machine, but the individual’s ability to adapt and conform to their surroundings in novel ways. In this they can be called forerunners of Grosz’s 1917 call for the general adoption of a «rubber» subjectivity in response to modernity («Man muß Kautschukmann sein! »). Author Erich K. Schmidt offered an extended reading of the eccentric bandleader along these lines in a 1913 article «Maestro Kautschuk» that highlights the multifaceted effect of the eccentric bandleader on audience members. Entering an unnamed café, Schmidt and his wife are met first by an empty stage that is then filled with dark figures, from which a bandleader emerges dancing, shaking, moving to the sounds of Jean Gilbert’s «Puppchen.» Schmidt remarks: «Since we’d last been to a metropolitan café, the genus of the bandleader had increased by one specimen: by that of the rubber-clown, the rubber conductor, who not only conducts the melody, but performs it as a three-dimensional film» (Schmidt). Though the relationship to the variety theater is evident here, Schmidt’s remark regarding film should not be overlooked, in particular given Mr. Meschugge’s own appearances in films of the period as well as the 377 Eccentric Modernism treatment Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders receive in Ernst Lubitsch’s Austernprinzessin (1919). In the scene depicting a «foxtrot epidemic,» a young Curt Bois embodies the trope of the eccentric bandleader through wild gesticulations, gun shots, saws, slaps, and general disregard for musicianship. Much as Grosz would later do to connect Mr. Meschugge to jazz, Lubitsch here fuses this established, by 1918 somewhat outdated performance type with the new and American, here the foxtrot. As Astrid Kusser argues, the use of terms like «epidemic» served to foreignize dances like the foxtrot and cake walk through a forgetting of prior and current transnational connections and histories. As she writes, «This amnesia was an important factor in making it possible for the cake walk to appear as an ephemeral fashion in the European metropole, as a revenant caught between past and present» (51). Rather than reflecting anachronism within Germany’s post-war reception of American popular music, the foxtrot scene from Austernprinzessin enacts a similar form of forgetting in that it aligns the pre-war Berlin eccentric with the supposedly foreign and new American foxtrot. Beginning around 1910 and continuing through the war and into the early period of the Weimar Republic, eccentric bandleaders, Mr. Meschugge in particular, were routinely associated with the contemporary moment and modernist aesthetics, Grosz and Dada notwithstanding. For one, at the same time as Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders were recording hit songs from operettas, the city’s popular theaters and composers were themselves incorporating the eccentric bandleader into their own works. The Thalia-Theater’s 1912 production of Autoliebchen (Music: Jean Gilberg; Text: Jean Kren and Albert Schönfeld) featured a female singer pleading: «To the café concert. I want to see Monsieur Meschugge. Oh, he conducts so fine! » («Das haben die Mädchen so gerne»). The Metropol-Theater’s yearly revue for 1913, Chauffeur - Ins Metropol! (Music: Rudolf Nelson; Text: Julius Freund) went one step further, featuring the character «Mr. Meschugge» as one of the «typical figures from the most modern Berlin»(i.). Even before the war, their modernism, the modernism of Berlin was already American. As one pre-war commentator claimed of the Kerkau-Palast’s billiard room: «That isn’t even Berlin. That is one of the aspects of Americanism that has enthralled the Berliner» (Winter). In a critical article appearing in the socialdemocratic Volkswacht in late 1918 we read of «Mr. Meschugge»: «He is the idol of certain Berliners because he makes madness his method. His motto is: sensation. Sensation at any price. No day is allowed to pass on which the name Meschugge is not printed on the litfass-columns» (Raudi). Such hyperbole can also be found in fleeting uses of the name, where «Mr. Meschugge» appears as part of a litany of things wrong with modernism and 378 Jonathan Wipplinger modern artists. For example, one author sought to discredit a 1911 Max Reinhardt production of Jacques Offenbach’s La belle Hélène by arguing that a production constituted in this manner panders to the tastes of the plebs in the lowest way. In it, they have all sorts of useless things, great parades, variety, fat, noise, low comedy, eccentricities and, not least, the satisfaction [. . .] to receive the same enjoyment from Reinhardt, Fried, and Offenbach that is otherwise delivered by Richard Schultz, Monsieur Meschugge, and Victor Hollaender («Die schöne Helene» 168). Another author uses a similar tactic, writing: «It is the same contemporary tendency that Mr. Meschugge conducts and Frank Wedekind acts» (Schlaikjer 422). Equally telling in this regard is a false report in the Prager Tagblatt from 1916. There it is claimed that Mr. Meschugge had left Berlin to become a music critic for the Dutch periodical De Telegraaf, where he took up the new name Matthijs Vermeulen («Mister Meschugge als Kritiker»). Vermeulen, of course, was no new Mr. Meschugge, but a very real modernist composer and critic whose anti-German (and pro-French) stance made him a controversial figure at the time and thus an easy target of nativist critique during the war (Samama 77—78). Such ideological use of Mr. Meschugge could also be found with a diametrically opposed intent, namely by modernists who used Meschugge’s name to valorize their work by association. For example, in a 1920 advertisement for works by author Alfred Richard Meyer, better known as Munkepunke, a review of the work proclaims: «Munkepunke is the cubist of the neo-Berlin poets. He is the Mister Meschugge, the poet, and the mbret of the Café des Westens» («Munkepunke»). Taken together, these references suggest that by 1914 at the latest, the eccentric bandleader’s connection to modernism and mass culture was well established. In this sense, though first appearing after the Second World War, Grosz’s account of Mr. Meschugge cited at the outset ought to be read less as a reminiscence of a specific experience than as the deployment of a well-worn interpretation from the 1910s. If music and sound were more than the mere ancillary components to the success of the eccentric bandleaders, closer inspection of gramophone recordings produced by these performers offer potentially new forms of evidence and information about Mr. Meschugge and eccentric bandleaders more generally. One difficulty here is that during the First World War, eccentric bandleaders receded into the background as did the modern popular music that had accompanied them during their heyday. Yet the popular music they performed could still be heard during wartime in the 379 Eccentric Modernism form of recordings, in part explaining the longevity of their popularity in Germany. It is at this point then that I want to turn to a new set of writings by Grosz, this time poetic and epistolic, from 1917 to 1918. While Grosz’s later autobiography would focus on the visual, physical performance of Mr. Meschugge at the Café Stern, his letters and poems written during the First World War drew instead on such music’s existence as phonographic document. Beginning in the spring of 1917, Grosz’s letters to his friend and fellow artist Otto Schmalhausen repeatedly allude to gramophone records. In an almost telegraphic style, Grosz notes of listening to records late into the early morning: «Quarter to five and the gramophone moans plaintively, (Affenliebe by Theo F. Morse) No. 2 rises - Albert’s - Chorus - Oz - (Waiting for Rob. E. Lee - Medley Ragtime-Twostep by Abraham and C. L. Meir). Oh! You yellow sounds - full of banjo music! » (Briefe 68). In this and other letters, Grosz remains silent on the names of the performers of these pieces, instead confining himself to referencing tremendously popular pre-war titles such as «Alexander’s Ragtime Band» or «Rum Tum Tiddle» (Goergen, «Dada» and «Apachentänze»). Or, as he does in poetic works such as his «Gesang an die Welt,» he elaborates on these references by naming not the performers but their composers and songwriters. Although Grosz spatters his letters with Anglicisms, English-language titles and names, in all probability he possessed recordings produced in Germany, i. e., in Berlin. More specifically, Grosz’s gramophone collection during this period likely contained works recorded by Giorgi Vintilescu, a performer previously encountered at the Kerkau-Palast. In addition to «Alexander’s Ragtime Band,» Vintilescu recorded two further songs alluded to by Grosz in his letters, «Mariette» and «Laughing Waters,» the latter referenced by Grosz in its translated title, «Quellengeister,» the same title as can be found on a contemporaneous recording by Vintilescu (Grosz, Briefe 65—66; Zwarg; Lotz, German Ragtime 237—38). 9 All this suggests that while Grosz no doubt consumed and experienced American popular music in the form of gramophone records, he did so through the mediation of German and international musicians and recording artists active in Berlin’s entertainment district between 1910 and 1914. As discussed above, the three best-known eccentric bandleaders, Mr. Meschugge, Mr. Glasneck, and Mr. Maseltop, all produced recordings in Berlin. Taken as a whole, however, their production was rather limited, especially when compared to the broad popularity and recognizability of artists like Vintilescu. It is thus perhaps unsurprising that Grosz does not reference any recording by an eccentric bandleader in his letters. At the same 380 Jonathan Wipplinger time, the question of why they recorded so few titles remains. One possible explanation for this is that their predominantly visual and corporeal performance style could not be successfully translated into the realm of the sound recording. Indeed, the ideal situation for recording at this time would seem to represent the very antithesis to their eccentric performance style. As cultural historian Stefan Gauss explains: «For the artists, sound recording meant, first of all, acquiring and practicing discipline and control of their emotions. Since a recording could neither be ‹edited› nor reworked, the participants could not let any mistakes slip through during the entire recording period» (Gauss, «Listening» 81). Yet while this was the ideal of the recording process, as Gauss notes elsewhere, bandleaders of the period could in part break with such controls (Gauss, Nadel 179). One example of the violation of the ideal sterility and perfection of the recording session, I would like to suggest, can be found in the 1913 recording of «Dixieland. March and Two-Step» by Krüger’s Kapelle Meschugge. 10 This 1902 composition by the American composer Chauncey Haines was recorded at least two times by American groups, once in 1903 by the Columbia Orchestra, then again in 1913 by Conway’s Band. It was in this same year that Krüger recorded it with his band from the Rheinische Winzerstuben, another Berlin establishment where he performed. Haines’s work is a good example of the type of American popular songs performed by eccentric bandleaders throughout the period and, of course, of the recordings favored by Grosz in his ragtime letters. It is up-tempo, syncopated, and indebted to African-American musical idioms and their commercialization within (white) American and European popular culture. Haines draws in this piece not only generally on the imagery and associated acoustics of «Dixie,» but also specifically from Stephen Foster’s «Old Black Joe» from 1853. Indeed, Haines’s composition undergoes a strong and sustained shift, in instrumentation and melody, roughly midway through in its transition to the melody of «Old Black Joe.» As noted, two American recordings of the song were issued and each contrasts sharply with Mr. Meschugge’s eccentric version from Berlin. Krüger’s recording is overall much slower in tempo, though the reason for this remains unclear. More significantly, this recording displays a number of eccentric elements or «effects,» as they were labeled at the time. Though more often used by recording technicians to increase sales, artists themselves were also known to use such «effects» to their own ends and often against the wishes of the technician (Gauss, Nadel 179—80). According to a discussion in the Phonographische Zeitschrift from 1908, some such effects included the use of percussion instruments, in particular the drums and the glockenspiel, 381 Eccentric Modernism but also bird chirps. Another example of these effects is the use of nonprofessional singers (because it was said to lead to poor comprehensibility) (Kongert). The Berlin recording of «Dixieland» contains elements of all these «effects.» It prominently features a variety of atypical instruments, including percussion, musical chimes and what is possibly a kazoo (or a comb). While from today’s perspective such elements are relatively unremarkable, their presence lends the recording an unconventional sound. The most important, unique, and eccentric attribute of this recording, however, is Mr. Meschugge’s own voice. Haines’s original score contains no lyrics and American recordings follow suit in offering up strictly instrumental versions. The recording from Berlin, by contrast, features Mr. Meschugge’s voice throughout, as he issues a mixture of grunts, growls, shouts, and a loose approximation of English, one no doubt influenced by African-American performers then present in Germany. The language spoken here is neither German, nor English, but something in-between, or rather outside of these, a Berlin, stereotyped translation of the African-American voice. It is a voice that is imperfectly articulated, a halting, though vigorous declaration of the overlapping, intersecting, and conflicting elements of American, African American, German, European, and, of course, Berlin popular culture. Despite being set in the controlled environment of the recording studio, Krüger as Mr. Meschugge was able to translate his eccentric modernism into a shellac representation of his sound and style as a performer. Though there is little question that this recording of «Dixieland» is atypical and further testament to the uniqueness of Krüger, it nonetheless stands as an important artifact of this particular musical style. If in the end the recording begs more questions than it answers, it nonetheless underscores the need for a multidisciplinary and transnational approach to historical accounts of German popular music and culture. Doing so not only opens up to us the multifaceted, if still strange world of Berlin’s eccentric artists, it grants us the opportunity to recast our ideas about the development of German musical culture in this period and its place within the wider context of European and American popular music and culture. If there is thus much to be gained through such analysis, any insights achieved through examination of sound documents remain, on their own, insufficient, or better imprecise. In the case of Berlin’s eccentric bandleaders at least, the sights and sounds of their world were forgotten not only on account of the ephemerality of sound or of their «translation» into textual and visual representations. While one could potentially make this case for Krüger as Mr. Meschugge, Frank Groundsell as Mr. Maseltop was heretofore known exclusively via recorded sound documents. Well-known amongst 382 Jonathan Wipplinger discographers (Lotz, German Ragtime 230—31) and German jazz historians (Lange 20), as well as historians of popular music (Wicke 150), Groundsell’s eccentric recording of «Tiger Rag» has long been held out as a poor, yet chronologically early example of American jazz’s presence within Germany. What was missing in terms of contextualizing Groundsell’s work was therefore not only attention to sound documents itself, but a deeper appreciation of the historicity of auditory cultures like that of Berlin’s eccentric music culture circa 1910. Further testament to the cultural and historical determination of listening practices, to the necessarily symbolic, if indexical, status of early recorded sound, the different cases and histories of Groundsell’s and Krüger’s recordings demonstrate the need to investigate auditory culture in all its variability and unpredictability and most of all to not avoid this culture’s eccentric edges. Notes 1 The author wishes to thank the following people for their indispensible help in researching this article: Ulrich Biller, Konrad Nowakowski, Martin Songhurst, and Rainer Lotz. 2 Originally published as A Little Yes and a Big No in 1946, there remain slight differences between the original version published in English and the German version in 1955 (Ein kleines Ja) upon which the translation from An Autobiography is based. As the author has not had opportunity to examine Grosz’s original German manuscript from which the initial English translation of 1946 was apparently produced, the following will quote exclusively from the English translation by Hodges from 1998. 3 Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are the author’s own. 4 As opposed to the real identities behind Mr. Meschugge and Mr. Maseltop discussed below, the identity of Mr. Glasneck remains unconfirmed. It is unclear whether the name «Glasneck» is even a pseudonym, as a composer and bandleader Rudolf Glasneck can be found across a number of sources around the turn of the last century. 5 On Creatore, a potential forerunner of Berlin’s own eccentric bandleaders see, for example, Greene (39—42). Though it is beyond the scope of my argument, an even more likely forerunner to Berlin’s eccentric performers and further example of the transatlantic network is the German-American Sigmund Neuberger, who performed as «The Great Lafayette» and «Mr. Lafayette» in the US and Europe. Neuberger was an illusionist who famously impersonated conductors, including a «Hebrew conducting an orchestra» (Steinmeyer 229). Krüger aka «Mr. Meschugge» may have had opportunity to see Neuberger, when he performed as «Mr. Lafayette» in Berlin in October 1907 at the Circus Schumann. At that time, he brought along an orchestra of 50 musicians and in his act parodied both John Philip Sousa and Johann Strauss («Parodistisches im Zirkus»). Neuberger was, further, an international star and Groundsell aka «Mr. Maseltop» makes explicit reference to him and his influence in his autobiography (Groundsell 34—35). Neuberger died tragically in a fire in 1911. 383 Eccentric Modernism 6 Mr. Meschugge likely appeared in at least two films, Die zweite Tür links (1914, Dir. Henri Etiévant) and Der Golem und die Tänzerin (1917, Dir. Paul Wegener). For the former, he was featured in print advertisements as «The famous Berlin original: Mr. Meschugge» (UT Lichtspiele). An example of undated advertising materials for «Mr. Meschugge» at the Café Stern circa 1913 can be viewed at the online Veikkos-Archiv: http: / / www.veikkos-archiv.com/ index.php? title=Hauptseite (accessed 2 Sept. 2015). 7 Goergen includes an illustration that gives his name as «Mr. Meschugge alias Robert Krüger» («Dada»13). This corresponds to discographical evidence as well as references in Der Artist in which «Mr. Meschugge» is referred to as «Kapellmeister Krüger» (Lotz, German Ragtime 190). Krüger apparently served during the First World War (ek.), after which he returned to performing in Berlin, though without the same level of attention or notoriety. 8 Released in late 1919 or early 1920, Groundsell’s name had been misspelled on the label as «F. Groundzell,» making a definitive link between Groundsell/ Mr. Maseltop and this recording impossible until now. More extensive information on Groundsell’s career as well as a digitized copy of his recording of «Tiger Rag» recording is available online (Biller and Wipplinger). Though two of his recordings from this period, including «Tiger Rag,» state that they were recorded in London, it seems more likely that they were done in Berlin, as Groundsell was back at the Kerkau-Palast by August 1919 (Schmidl August 3, 1919). 9 «Quellengeister» was recorded by Vintilescu in 1911 and released as Parlophon P. 1162. A final example here is Grosz’s reference to Theodore F. Morse’s «Down in Jungle Town» under its German title «Affenliebe,» a piece recorded by Vintilescu in Berlin in 1912 (Grammophon 2 - 940703). 10 This recording has been made available on youtube by the Austrian discographer Wolfgang Hirschenberger under the username «Stompy»: www.youtube.com/ watch? v=nuAFRUBzHCE (accessed 2 Oct. 2015). Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W. «Über Jazz.» Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. 17. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. 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