Empire of Ecstasy offers a novel interpretation of the explosion of German body culture between the two wars: nudism and nude dancing, gymnastics and dance training, dance photography and criticism, and diverse genres of performance from solo dancing to mass movement choirs. Karl Toepfer presents this dynamic subject as a vital and historically unique construction of "modern identity," which stimulated often contradictory impulses, desires, and ambitions in participants and enthusiasts.

Through the presentation and analysis of unpublished archival material (including many little-known photographs) and the reclamation of forgotten discourses of fashion, gymnastics, nudism, and the visual arts, he investigates the process of constructing an "empire" of appropriative impulses toward ecstasy. Toepfer presents the work of well-known figures such as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and Oskar Schlemmer, as well as many obscure but equally fascinating practitioners of German body culture.

His book is certain to become required reading for historians of dance, body culture, and modernism.