Cabaret

For many foreigners "German cabaret" means a film with a bowler hat and a stage-door nightclub. The real thing was smaller, funnier and more political: a room with a piano, a master of ceremonies, a few performers and an audience close enough to hear every barbed line. This chapter follows cabaret from its start in 1901 through the Weimar Republic to its closure and control after 1933, and sets the real Berlin beside the one in the film. The Nazi period is covered factually: the focus is on what was documented, on the risks performers took, and on those who were driven out or killed. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

What Cabaret Is

The First German Cabarets, 1901

Cabaret thus arrived in the same years as Simplicissimus (Chapter 3), and from the same Munich and Berlin circles of writers and artists. Another famous cabaret was the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, where the Dada movement began (check), though it belongs more to art history.

Weimar Berlin: The Golden Years

• The setting. After 1918 the Weimar Republic gave Berlin a freer press and stage, and a large audience in a city of millions. Dozens of cabarets and revues opened (check the number).
• Kabarett der Komiker. Opened in 1924 on the Kurfürstendamm by Kurt Robitschek and Paul Morgan, as a larger, more commercial venue (check).
• Political and literary cabaret. Venues such as Rosa Valetti's Größenwahn (1920) and Trude Hesterberg's Wilde Bühne (1921) mixed songs by leading writers with sharp comment on the republic (check).
• Die Katakombe. Founded in 1929 by Werner Finck and colleagues in a cellar in Berlin. Finck became the leading master of ceremonies, known for hints, pauses and half-sentences that let the audience supply the meaning (check).
• The songs. The composer Friedrich Hollaender, the singer Claire Waldoff and the composer Mischa Spoliansky are among the names associated with the period's songs (check).

Kurt Tucholsky

• The limits in Weimar. Satire was freer than before 1918 but not free. In 1931 the editor of Die Weltbühne, Carl von Ossietzky, was convicted of treason for an article about secret rearmament, and later received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1935 while in a Nazi camp (check the details).
• Who the target was. The cabaret mocked militarism, judges, the clergy, nationalism and the republic's own politicians, and was not uniformly left-wing, though its leading writers mostly were (check).

The Real Berlin and the Film

After 1933

• The takeover. After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Jewish and left-wing performers lost their jobs or fled, and cabaret was brought under the new Reich Chamber of Culture, set up in autumn 1933 (check). The satirical edge was removed, and performers who did not conform risked their livelihoods or worse.
• Die Katakombe closed. In 1935 Werner Finck's cabaret was closed by the authorities, and Finck and colleagues were arrested and held for some weeks in a concentration camp, at Esterwegen, before release (check the details). He was later banned from performing and conscripted (check).
• Exile. The writer Erika Mann founded Die Pfeffermühle in Munich in January 1933, left Germany soon after the Nazi takeover, and took the show to Switzerland and then to America (check).
• Persecution. Many Jewish cabaret artists were driven out, imprisoned or killed. The Vienna performer Fritz Grünbaum died in Dachau in 1941, and the actor and director Kurt Gerron was forced to direct a propaganda film in Theresienstadt and was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944 (check the details).
• The ghetto stage. Prisoners in Theresienstadt, a camp used for propaganda, staged cabaret evenings, which is well documented and often discussed by historians as a form of resistance and of coping (check).
• A controlled "cabaret." Light entertainment under the name of cabaret continued under Nazi supervision, with mild jokes and no real satire.

Exercises