More than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Jens Richard Giersdorf investigates a national dance history in the German Democratic Republic, from its founding as a Communist state that supplanted the Soviet zone of occupation in 1949 through the aftermath of its collapse forty years later, examining complex themes of nationhood, ideology, resistance, and diaspora through an innovative mix of archival research, critical theory, personal narrative, and performance analysis.

Jens Richard Giersdorf is assistant professor of dance at the University of California, Riverside. Prior to his academic career he was a dancer and dramaturg with Tanzbühne Leipzig, in the former German Democratic Republic.