ticulation of what in Marxist theory is calledKlassenstandpunkt(class stand-
point).¹
In the increasingly polarized atmosphere of the lateWeimarRepublic, the
manyacts of standing in political or politicized settingsfunctionedasthe
most visible manifestation of what dance historian HannahKosstrin calls em-
bodied ideology.²As aphysical activity,standing signifies the opposite of mov-
ing (or sitting,for that matter),but it also marks the beginning and end of any
movement.For the communists,takingastance under the condition of intensi-
fied class struggles meant to define movement in the literal and figurative sense.
During the early1930s, KPD agitators appearedonthe streets to articulate their
own stance in the confrontational terms both of class struggle and party politics,
includingagainst Nazis and Social Democrats. In the groups and initiativesdo-
minated by the KPD,athus definedKlassenstandpunktfunctionedvery much in
the sense of what PierreBourdieu calls embodied habitus,a“politicalmythology
realized,em-bodied,turned intoapermanent disposition,adurable manner of
standing,speaking,and thereby offeelingandthinking.”³In relying so heavily
on such embodied performances of class consciousness,communist artists, ac-
tors,musicians, dancers,and agitators wereable to draw on along tradition of
embodied habitus and its rhetoricaluses in religious, political,and legal con-
frontations.Thistradition can be traced from MartinLuther’s(apocryphal) dec-
laration“HereIStand”at the Imperial Diet ofWorms, which expressedhis un-
willingnessto yieldto authority andrenounce his faith, toalegal term likelocus
standi(literally“place to stand”), which denotes the right to be heard and appear
before an official bodyand, moregenerally, to claim the rightsto free speech.
The sameconnections between physical bodyand religious or political convic-
tion informthe meaning of words, such as stand, stance, standpoint,standing,
and so forth.
“Habitus”is closelyrelated to the GermanHaltung,aterm denotingposture,
bearing,attitude, or demeanor.Significantly, thegestural codes that produce
Haltungon the theatrical stagehaveplayedakeyrole in the development of an-
tipsychological approaches favoring mechanisticmodels in Soviet psychology
and modern performance practices.Delineating its potentialities inBertolt
The ways in which these modalities also informed the mass spectaclesofworkers’sport and
continued in Nazi organizations such as the Reich Labor Servicewill have to be examined in
greater detail in the secondvolume.
HannahKosstrin,“Inevitable Designs: EmbodiedIdeology in Anna Sokolow’sProletarian
Dances,”Dance ResearchJournal45.2 (2013): 5–23.
PierreBourdieu,Outline ofaTheoryofPractice(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1977),
93 – 94.HereBourdieu uses the Greekwordhexisto describe the embodied habitus.
TakingaStand: The Habitus of Agitprop 239