On the occasion of our book’s release
Today is the release date of a book project I’ve been working on with Esther Leslie for around five years: on the radio-producer, composer, anti-fascist, translator, poet, conductor Ernst Schoen (1894-1960). To mark the day I thought I’d sketch some things you can find inside that relate to hands, heads, and haircuts.
Schoen was friends with Charlotte Wolff (the historic subject of this newsletter) at various points in the early- to mid- 1920s. According to one of her memoirs, they would visit lesbian bars in Berlin’s Schöneberg, particularly Verona Diele on Kleiststraße and Top Keller on Nollendorfplatz. Schoen would chaperone her, only to disappear at some point in the evening, as a ruse against police surveillance. When we first met Sasha, Ernst’s son, then in his late 80s, I told him this anecdote and he emotionally replied (at least to my memory) that “he was always an ally”. It is to him and his wife Leda that we dedicated the book.
Wolff never read Schoen’s palm, but she might have if he had ended up in Paris rather than London after 1933. After days sitting in front of a glowing orb of a microfilm machine at the Stabi, I came across an issue of Frankfurt radio’s newspaper, the Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkzeitung dated 27 December 1925, from when Schoen was working there. On the front page ran an article on the best (or most appropriate) haircut to have when wearing the new generation of headphones. To avoid knots and tangles, the Bubikopf (literally ‘lad-head’) was named. With the invention of the domestic loudspeaker a number of years later, radio reception changed, as did haircuts. You could listen with others, but also move around and away from the apparatus. (Unlike me, strapped to the machine.)
More hands: A 1930 radio year book ran a feature by the photographer named Sentke of hands cut from bodies plucking, bowing, playing, conducting, and striking various musical instruments. The previous pages, also tinted in blue ink, are occupied by the words of Hans Flesch, who hired Schoen in Frankfurt. As I tried to write about in a previous newsletter (some faggy piano gestures), Wolff had a particular interest in musicality and it’s place on the hand. In her study The Human Hand (1940), she argued that spatulate finger-tips might be due to a professional deformity, such as being in pianist, a string player, a sculptor, but also an artisan.
Touch things in a certain way and your hands might change, or they might have told you to be a pianist all alone. For Wolff, Maurice Ravel’s little finger (the finger of mercury that is also the finger of music) is very straight and inclines backwards away from the hand, and its spatulate tip expresses creative ability, wait for it, in the sphere of music. Armande de Polignac’s little finger, according to Wolff, was also well-shaped, with a well-developed bump at its tip, which connects, once again, with her musical abilities. Elsewhere she says that the passive and decorative fingers are the ones that wear rings – i.e. the fourth and the fifth. This translates also to the affective and imaginative manners they enable, such as lifting the little finger up when drinking from a cup.
Schoen was an early pupil of the performers and composers Ferruccio Busoni and Edgard Varèse, and throughout his life he wrote music: for children, for radio, for friends. Many of his songs for children were modernist, funny and jolting. The final in the cycle includes fingers and toes:
Say ‘a’ with the finger
Say ‘b’ with the toe
Say, what the little thumb
caught with the little finger
a, b, c, d, e;
c, d, e, f, g
Other hands present in our book are Henri Châtin-Hofmann’s, who was the third husband of the dancer and cabaret artist Anita Berber. Henri, in a dazzling jumpsuit, performed to Schoen’s music and jumped out at us when we came across him in the archive. A reviewer of the performance remarked, in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung on 28 October 1923, on his womanly appearance, and the ‘eloquent language of the hands’. A demarcation of what is proper to Germany creeps into the review: ‘The particularly prominent feature of this dancer, which manifests coquetry, all manner of make-up and other grooming arts […], is admittedly uncongenial to the German sensibility’. After a number of years in Berlin, Henri went back to Baltimore, where he died in 1961, one year after Schoen.
We never wanted to treat Schoen just within a historical records, but him into new contexts and forms; to think how his generation won and lost, and how those wins and losses still cross our lives today. For that reason, I leave you with a short video of Alka Nauman and Lucie Palazot preparing their re-imagining of Henri’s dance, that we organised at Curie City in Warsaw in September 2020, to music selected by Samuel Draper and in costumes made by Alicia Gladston, based almost entirely on the flyer. There, old hand gestures entered new context and new struggles.
Thank you to everyone who supported the project over the course of the years. You can hear other parts of Schoen’s music here and see other related projects here. Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the 20th century is published by Goldsmiths/MIT and is available today wherever you get your books. Enjoy if you get it!!!