Vom Salon ins Leben

'One must be absolutely modern!' - this premise hung like a guiding star above numerous avant-garde movements of the 1910s and '20s. From the salon to the street, from esoteric milieux into life, preferably the night-life: as border-crossers between cultural lifeworlds, in a casual suit and with a tightly clamped monocle, the new artist type headed out to proletarian boxing fights or to popular variety shows. He played in a jazz band, collected records, danced the foxtrot and the Charleston, and raised as such not just the claim of the artistic principle, but he also knew how to cleverly use proven PR strategies from the entertainment industry for his own purposes. Anke J. Hübel goes looking for traces of this amongst the protagonists of the avant-garde movements of the time, and in doing so, focuses in particular on the multilayered relationship which the artists had with the extremely popular jazz music of the time. This interdisciplinary essay is equal parts a work of media history, and of modern history more broadly.