With her cabaret turns decked out in swastika uniform and papier-maché Hitler mask and lurching and leaping grotesquely in time to circus music, Julia Marcus rubbed salt in the wounds of Weimar Republic society. But even in her earlier years the native Swiss dancer had been a headstrong personality, paying for her dancing lessons by sitting as a life model at the age of 16. She earned her diploma in 1927 under free-dance legend Mary Wigman and found an engagement in the ballet ensemble in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin, but never became a star.

When the National Socialists seized power, Marcus, a »half-Jew«, was dismissed from the opera house and escaped first to Warsaw and then to Paris, where she became part of the avant-garde and intellectual scene in Montparnasse. Protected from further persecution by virtue of marriage, after 1945 she earned a reputation as a dance critic and translator.