The interwar Weimar Republic period is often referred to as a "Golden Age" of culture and creativity in Germany. It was a time when groundbreaking movements, from Bauhaus architecture and experimental cinema to avant-garde art and theater, flourished against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and extreme political polarization.
In cities such as Berlin, where speakeasies, cabarets and hedonistic nightlife were the norm, a radical new genre of music became immensely popular. Jazz, which emerged from African American communities in the Deep South, was first brought to Germany by pioneering artists from the US, UK and France after World War I.
Josephine Baker, the US-born dancer, actress and jazz artist who found fame in 1920s Paris, became a huge star in Germany after her sensational debut as the "Black Venus" in Berlin in 1926. By the 1930s, records by jazz icons such as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington were being played all over Germany.Baker would become known for her civil rights activism in the USImage: Keystone Archives/HIP/picture-alliance
But after the Nazis seized power in 1933, modern art forms like jazz came under extreme pressure. The white supremacist Nazis, who believed that Germanic peoples belonged to a superior "Aryan master race", sought to align German society through a process known as Gleichschaltung (synchronization).
