In February 1913, eighty-seven couples competed for the so-called Meisterschaft of Great Berlin in four cutting-edge dance styles: the Boston, the two-step, the one-step, and the tango. The son of the former Serbian prime minister won first prize (a golden watch and a suitcase), and an American professional tennis player the third, with their respective (but unnamed) female dance partners. This anecdote illustrates that by the eve of World War I, tango had already become an integral part of Berlin's high society and its fashionable, international dance scene. Kerstin Lange explores in her book how the tango arrived in the European metropoles Paris and Berlin, and how it was received and subsequently appropriated by all classes of urban society. By comparing two cultural transfers and their interdependencies, she is able to show the conflicts that arose around the appropriation of tango in these two cities. It was especially in prewar Berlin that the dance was singled out and combated as morally objectionable and culturally inferior.

Tracing interdependencies among different countries and between globalization and nationalization, the author anchors her research very strongly in the heavily French- and German-dominated context of cultural transfer research. This is a very German book in the sense that it presents many pages full of theoretical considerations about this field of study, pondering its pros and cons while carefully developing a number of hypotheses. Though the narrative itself is very clear, the book would have benefited from shortening. It is nevertheless an interesting study that draws on a great deal of primary source material, mainly newspaper and magazine articles, as well as dance manuals. Lange treats tango as a dance and identifies dance instructors as the main actors who appropriated tango in both capitals. Tango is a dance, of course, but it is also a form of popular music. Tracing how tango the dance arrived in Europe is a worthy subject, but there is no reason to neglect completely the musical side. In fact, popular collections of piano pieces, salon music, and light ensemble music from this period show the influx and impact of new types of music from around the world just as much as contemporary dance material does—and might even have been more easily available as sources. Combining her research on tango the dance with insights into tango the music would, in short, have rendered a more complete picture of a time when entertainment became globalized.

What is especially striking in Lange's book are the multiple interdependencies between Buenos Aires, Paris, and Berlin, mirrored primarily in discussions about tango. While most Parisians and Berliners seem to have embraced every new type of dance and music that arrived, there were also many who opposed this influx in both capitals. The Argentinian community in Paris, proud of the one Argentinian product that had made it to (and in) Europe, nevertheless shuddered at the same time at the thought that tango was perceived as somehow typical of their nation. While some noted that tango had become frenchified and thus “civilized” in France (“notre tango c'est civilisé”), others railed against its perceived obscenity, fearing that tango, a “brothel reptile,” would damage the image of the Argentinian nation (85). The latter view vilified tango as popular entertainment just for the lower classes and thus not typical of Argentinian culture. Whereas Parisians argued in 1913 about “invasions de barbares” (101) and whether cultural goods lost their exotic appeal when frenchified too much, dance instructors in Berlin insisted on the national character of their own dances and refused to include tango in their curriculum because there was no agreement about how to choreograph it. Berliners also mixed the tango question with existing discussions about “Schiebe- und Wackeltänze”: these dances, also deemed deeply immoral, were similarly associated with the urban and suburban lower classes and thus reviled by these self-appointed guardians of public morals. The conviction—expressed in the Berlin Cabaret-Revue in 1913—that the tango had crept out of the “most horrible crime-ridden quarters of the Argentinian capital,” where it was propagated mostly by “depraved Italian immigrants,” complicated matters even further (170-71): tango was not even a real Argentinian thing, but rather a dance (and popular music style) associated with the culture of the poor European proletariat, which was seen as dangerous.

As Kerstin Lange shows in her book, dances and popular music quickly transcend social class, and tango swept from Paris to Berlin to many other places as well. It was quickly appropriated everywhere by the upper classes in fashionable clubs and dance competitions, as well as by the (sub-)urban lower classes in dance halls. The dancers themselves did not care much about tango's origins or about the controversies surrounding it. As a result, neither conservative Prussian dancing instructors nor the Berlin police nor enraged Argentinians in Paris could do much to halt its spread and dampen its popularity.