Trivia

He was a dancer.

Louis Armstrong had some of his first engagements from Jean Weidt, and toured with the company across Europe between 1933 and 1936.

In his extreme old age Jean Weidt developed the "Dance Hour" series, in which all the top dance companies of the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) took part. It was by some criteria Jean Weidt's most successful post-war production.

In May 1933 Hans Weidt escaped to Moscow, from where he moved into Paris which was becoming the informal headquarters of the German Communist Party in exile. In Paris he got to know Jean Gabin, Maurice Chevalier, Pablo Picasso (for whom he on several occasion s sat as a model) and Josephine Baker.

In 1933 he founded the "Weidt Group" ballet company, which performed at Communist party sponsored rallies. Works included "Unter den Brücken von Paris" ("Under the Paris bridges"), "L'été aux champs" ("Summer in the fields") and "Sur la grande route" ("On the highway"). Some of his programme sheets included contributions from Jean Cocteau.

In November 1942 following the Anglo-American military occupation of what was known at the time as French North Africa Jean Weidt volunteered to join the British army, now taking an active role in the fighting against Nazi Germany in North Africa and, subsequently, in Italy.

Jean Weidt is identified in several sources as a pioneer of expressionist choreography.

The French and British governments declared war on Germany in September 1939 in response to the implementation of a German-Soviet agreement to partition Poland. It was not immediately clear to the inhabitants of Paris and London what war with Germany would involve, but for Jean Weidt, and for thousands of others who had moved to France or Britain as refugees from political and / or race based persecution in Nazi Germany, the period of waiting was relatively short. Weidt was identified as an enemy alien, facing arrest and internment. He was able to avoid arrest in Paris by escaping to (French) North Africa and ended up in Casablanca, but after the invasion of May 1940 and the installation of a new government in France, Casablanca came under the control of the Vichy government, and Weidt spent several months in a concentration camp in Algeria.

In 1938 Weidt established "Ballet 38" in Paris, becoming by now one of France's top dancers and choreographers, and heading up what he himself later identified, according to his son Andreas, as the country's "Undisputed Number 1" of the modern French dance scene.

In 1988, the year of his death, Jean Weidt was made an honorary citizen of Rangsdorf, a district of Teltow-Fläming a short distance to the south of Berlin where by this time he lived.

Jean Weidst was married to the painter and graphic artist Ursula Wendorff-Weidt. Through the marriage he acquired as a step son the photographer-artist Michael Weidt. In 1956 the couple had another son together.