The German circus star Camilla Mayer was, in a word, inimitable. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, her fame extended from Berlin to Atlantic City, from Paris to Rio, from Vienna to the British seaside. Tens of thousands held their breath when she glided on the high wire or contorted atop a towering acrobatic mast without any safety precautions. The question of whether she was an example of reckless risk-taking or a paragon of virtuous self-sacrifice vexed Nazi functionaries. For their part, Max Frisch, Erich Kästner, and other postwar luminaries marveled at her ghost-like presence hovering over the abyss of Germany's ruins. Jean Genet elevated her to the status of a queer muse. Except Camilla was not one woman but many-each inimitable, and yet fungible. Yuliya Komska's book tells two stories.

The first is a quest for the "real" Camilla Mayer, which in turn unearths a biography of the troupe named after her. The collective persevered through every political order of its lifetime-the Weimar Republic, Nazi dictatorship, the divided Germany of the early Cold War-by entangling itself with each of these systems in often improbable ways. The second explores how the meaning of the high wire keeps changing in a world defined by an ever-increasing number of abysses. It traces how over the last century alone, wire walking has transformed from a rarified art to a collective destiny, a philosophical dare, a litmus test for measuring empathy, and a metaphor to survive by, making both the artistry and the politics of real-life acrobatics more remote and more difficult to grasp. Komska clears this figurative patina to recapture the tightrope walker, not as an every- or superman but as a mesmeric entertainer tightly enmeshed in the social upheavals of the day.