Dore Hoyer’s Tänze für Käthe Kollwitz, a major cultural and commemorative event, premiered in the decimated city of Dresden in 1946. In the wake of mass devastation, death, and political upheaval, German cultural and theatrical production was at an impasse, and Hoyer sought to build a postwar Expressionist dance to articulate grief and unburden Ausdruckstanz’s appropriation by the Nazi regime. This thesis analyzes Hoyer’s efforts to rehabilitate Ausdruckstanz by fashioning it as the preeminent dance form in postwar Germany and linking it to Expressionist cultural productions of the Weimar Republic. The dance reintroduced Ausdruckstanz to post-war German audiences and employed visual and gestural motifs from the work of the celebrated and recently deceased Expressionist artist Käthe Kollwitz. Tänze für Käthe Kollwitz was one, if mostly forgotten, effort to foreground the individual human condition in order to revive modern German art in the face of its recent disastrous and collectivist past.
