A blonde woman, wearing the Imperial crown and with her hair braided
in pigtails like a German _backfisch_, is whirling in the tango with a
skeleton partner. Her face is livid with terror and fatigue, her limbs
are drooping, but she is held by inexorable bony claws. On the feet of
the skeleton are dancing pumps, a touch which adds to the grimness.
This ghoulish dance does not lack its element of ghastly ceremonial.
The Dance of Death has long been the theme of the moralist in art, from
Orcagna’s fresco on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa to Holbein’s
great woodcuts and our own Rowlandson. In Germany especially have
these _macabre_ imaginings flourished. The phantasmagoria of decay has
haunted German art, as it haunted Poe, from Dürer to Boecklin. But the
mediæval Dance of Death was stately allegory, showing the pageant of
life brooded over by the shadow of mortality. In M. Raemaekers’ cartoon
there is no dignity, no lofty resignation. He shows Death summoned in
a mad caprice and kept as companion till the revel becomes a whirling
horror.
It is the profoundest symbol of the war. In a hot fit of racial pride
Death has been welcomed as an ally. And the dance on which Germany
enters is no stately minuet with something of tragic dignity in it. It
is a common modern vulgar shuffle, a thing of ugly gestures and violent
motions, the true sport of degenerates. Once begun there is no halting.
From East to West and from West to East the dancers move. There is no
rest, for Death is a pitiless comrade. From such a partner, lightly
and arrogantly summoned, there can be no parting. The traveller seeks
a goal, but the dancers move blindly and aimlessly among the points of
the compass. Death, when called to the dance, claims eternal possession.