by Michael Haas
During the 1950s, German historians decided that a distinction was needed between cabaret songs that were seen as sleazy and those which were socially critical, though no such distinction had been made during the years of the Weimar Republic. ‘Kabarett’ was taken to represent the political and socially critical, while ‘Cabaret’ referred to the rest.11 Peter Jelavich's book entitled Berlin Cabaret defines both variants as the following:
Cabaret/Kabarett consisted ‘of a small stage in a relatively small hall, where the audience sat around tables. The intimacy of the setting allowed direct, eye-to-eye contact between performers and spectators. The show consisted of short (five- or ten-minute) numbers from several different genres, usually songs, comic monologues, dialogues and skits; less frequently dances, pantomimes, puppet shows, or even short films. They dealt in a satirical or parodistic manner with topical issues: sex (most of all), commercial fashions, cultural fads, politics (least of all). These numbers were usually presented by professional singers and actors, but often writers, composers, or dancers would perform their own works. The presentations were linked together by a conférencier, a type of emcee who interacted with the audience, made witty remarks about events of the day, and introduced the performers.12
In German, cabaret was already being spelt with a ‘c’ and a single ‘t’ by 1900 to emphasise the connection with such outré Parisian venues as Le Chat noir, founded in 1881 by the poet, rogue artist, and erstwhile Montmartre hydropath Rodolphe Salis, Baron de la Tour de Naintré. It was an organic offshoot of the Naturalist and Realist movements represented by writers like Zola and it created the impression of a counter-cultural ‘salon’ of prostitutes, pimps and pickpockets, along with the many artists and Bohemian intellectuals who sought their company. A hint of Salis's ability to amuse can be gleaned from the Berlin journalist Paul Goldman, who wrote in Salis's obituary in 1897 that it was difficult to imagine how such a ‘good-time-lad would ever have tried to tangle with anything as po-faced as dying’.13 From Paris, cabaret moved to Barcelona's Four Cats and to Simplicissimus (known as ‘Simpl’) in Munich in 1903, providing naughty respite from straitlaced, Protestant Berlin. It took its name from the satirical publication Simplicissimus. ‘Destined to keep all of Germany high and low on its toes for several decades, Simplicissimus attacked the makers, purveyors and accepters of authority, literary kitsch and hypocritical morality. Its spirit made it the kin of cabaret.‘14
Simpl was frequented by such figures as Frank Wedekind, and eventually such literary luminaries as Joachim Ringelnatz and Karl Valentin were recognised as house poets. It was also allegedly the source of literary ‘Dadaism’, with the term ‘Dada’ used for the first time by Marietta di Monaco in a recitation by the poets Klabund and Hugo Ball.
The subversive ideas that formed the basis of what we now think of as Berlin Cabaret started in the Café des Westens,15 colloquially known as Café Größenwahn (‘Café Megalomania’). Opening as the first coffee house in Berlin's boulevard Kurfürstendam in 1893, it was initially called Das kleine Café before being renamed Café des Westens in 1898, where it became a meeting point for the city's Bohemian community. The first two official Cabarets in Berlin, Ernst von Wolzogen's Überbrettl and Max Reinhardt's Schall und Rauch (‘Wind and Froth’), were both conceived at tables in the Café des Westens. It provided a salon atmosphere for average Berliners who were not necessarily part of the ‘salonnière’ circles of Berlin's upper bourgeoisie, offering an informal meeting place where they could mingle with artists and intellectuals. Much later, it was where the idea for Brecht and Weill's Threepenny Opera was born as well as Friedrich Holländer's seminal chanson Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß (Falling in Love Again), immortalised by Marlene Dietrich in the 1930 film The Blue Angel.
In the years leading up to the First World War, Café Größenwahn, as Café des Westens more commonly came to be known, was the meeting point for Berlin's Expressionist writers and painters, and only began to fall apart when the right-wing press started to make claims that the ‘vermin of Berlin's arts crowd’ were turning the Western districts into ‘a swamp’. In 1913 the café's owners moved further down the Kurfürstendam, while the artists and intellectuals largely stayed put until 1915. In 1920 a cabaret Größenwahn was opened where the original café had stood until 1913. The cabaret continued until 1922 and its accompanying café was described by the journalist Stephan Grossmann in 1921 along the following lines:
There has never been a meeting place for artists that takes itself quite as seriously as Café Größenwahn, also known as Café des Westens. One hardly ever hears any laughter as it's expected that you sit and stare straight ahead or abruptly toss your head with a frozen look in the opposite direction. Ordinary people arrive in the evening to have a look at the many ‘Megalomaniacs’, but soon realise that outer and inner differences between themselves and such geniuses are surprisingly small. Arguments ignite easily. The Berlin native is a child of reason and his idea of an orgy is ‘the conversation’. In other places, people may have more music in their souls or a sense of exuberance or, at the very least, a philosophy arising out of personal experience. […] In Berlin, however, everything is argued about – naturally they argue over ‘questions’, and the worst aspect of this dreadful place was their arguing over the question of sex. My God! Elsewhere people simply get on with it, especially the young; here, they debate sexual relations. Women in high-boots and masculine waist-coats stride alongside long-haired youths who wish to project their femininity: Strindberg's Miss Julie or Wedekind's Alwa Schön.
There would, however, have been a fail-safe means of achieving total silence in this din of continuous yakety-yak. All it would take is to have someone standing at the entrance threatening to throw out anyone if they so much as breathed the following references: ‘Tilla Durieux’, ‘Strindberg’, ‘Professor Freud’, ‘Herwarth Walden’, ‘Rosa Luxemburg’, ‘Magnus Hirschfeld’ or ‘Arnold Schoenberg’. Before you knew it, all of the gasbags would be chucked out the door! These people only live for today and would be condemned to a Trappist existence if their weekly theatre guide suddenly went up in smoke. It was dear old Johann Nestroy who said of such creatures: ‘Zeitgeist – nothing but Zeitgeist.‘16
Berlin may have been more straight-laced and aggressively censored than Munich, but it did have two important Cabarets. The first to appear was Ernst von Wolzogen's Überbrettl in 1901. In English, ‘Rickety Boards’ is perhaps the closest translation to the German diminutive ‘Brettl’ and the name designated a makeshift stage where someone would stand up and sing a bawdy song. Thus Überbrettl implies a more exalted version of a temporary stage. It was while the ensemble of Überbrettl was performing in Vienna in 1901 that its house composer, Oscar Straus, introduced Wolzogen to Schoenberg, who had already composed eight Brettl-Lieder. These songs had been taken from a collection of poems called Deutsche Chansons compiled by Otto Julius Bierbaum and included not only verses by himself but also by writers such as Frank Wedekind, Richard Dehmel and Gustav Falke. Bierbaum, in his introduction to the published collection, called for Germans to use poetry in the same way that applied artists were producing furniture. Through such functional means, Bierbaum wanted to elevate German proletarian tastes beyond the seedy dives that were referred to as ‘Tingeltangels’. But it was in appealing to a sense of Teutonic self-improvement that he lost a good deal of the Latin abandonment found in the cabaret texts and songs of Paris and Barcelona. Wolzogen's Überbrettl would provide Schoenberg with early conducting experience and it is also likely that at least one of his Brettl-Lieder, Falke's ‘Nachtwandler’ (‘The Somnambulist’), was performed before Schoenberg's departure in 1902. Paul Goldman explained the origin of Überbrettl and offers an account of its opening:
The Überbrettl has finally opened at the Secessionist Theatre and was the most successful event that this Alexander-Platz venue, uniquely dedicated to Secessionist celebrations, has thus far witnessed. In fact, the box-office confounded us with that most astonishing of Sec
essionist contradictions: a sign reading ‘Sold Out’. An extremely glittery public including the entire artist community of Berlin arrived in droves. […] At this point, it's worth explaining what exactly is meant by the term ‘Überbrettl’. In all likelihood, it probably doesn't mean much of anything. It's just a name. One planned a show to put on and then hunted around until a silly name could be found: ‘Überbrettl’. Wolzogen, the founder himself, explained: ‘There is the Über-Mensch … why can't there be an Über-Brettl?’ … It's best simply to note that its self-proclaimed main purpose is to elevate the general taste of society. […] Some have referred to the Überbrettl as ‘literary Variété’, as if only the ‘literary’ had any innate value. […] The short introductions spoken at the start of each act were exactly right inasmuch as they were scrupulously absolved of any literary pretentions. [Wolzogen] took the good where he could find it and succeeded in using silly patches and scraps to make a jester's tuxedo. This was gaudy theatre made from an arrangement of short pieces. In fact, this is exactly the right expression and it need only have been printed on the programme: ‘Überbrettl is gaudy theatre, in which a lot happens and much more besides.’ It's mimed and sung, declaimed and danced. Gaudy, gaudy, gaudy is the solution. Lovely women; lovely German lyrics; a lot of lovely light, a lot of lovely colour; a bit of circular poetry; a drop of genius and pinch of nastiness; politics; literature; a shadow-dance; a waltz and, at long last, our long-awaited friend Pierrot, who, once again, out of unrequited love commits suicide. Gaudy Theatre! The thinking seems to be, that whatever you may have seen on a stage before, you can see here! Gaudy theatre is called in French variété. Actually, there can be no more literal translation. So as far as I'm concerned, the Überbrettl is variété. Or it's just the Brettl, since for the most part the programme consisted of songs, just as they should be sung while strutting over the boards. Only this selection of songs is a bit more tasteful than the ones heard on most ‘boards’. […] The Gaudy Theatre is actually a better set of boards, a Tréteau supérieur – an Above-board! So the word ‘Überbrettl’ has a meaning as well, which means we can finally sit back and relax.17
The second venue, Schall und Rauch, was opened at almost the same time by the theatrical genius of the day, Max Reinhardt, offering a parody of Schiller's Don Carlos (much admired by Thomas Mann) in its first season in 1901. In fact, in its initial formation it only lasted a single season before moving to a small theatre in Berlin's Unter den Linden, where it began a steady migration away from parody and satire towards conventional theatre. After the war, Friedrich Holländer, along with his wife, the singer Blandine Ebinger, established their own cabaret ensemble which they named after Schall und Rauch in the cellar of Reinhardt's Großes Schaupsielhaus, where they were joined by notables such as the composers Werner Richard Heymann and Mischa Spoliansky, and the writers Walter Mehring, Kurt Tucholsky and Joachim Ringelnatz.
German society experienced a number of changes during the interwar years that provided fertile ground for the unique genre of Berlin Cabaret. These included the official lifting of censorship, extreme poverty, and the general seediness that permeated the bourgeoisie. By this time, it wasn't just Bohemian artists who were choosing to spend time with pimps, prostitutes and pickpockets. Girls and boys from the best families were working the streets and clubs to pay for their next meal. Social Realism was no longer an artistic movement but day-to-day reality. The American composer George Antheil, arriving in Berlin in 1922, offers the following account:
Almost the very first night I came to Berlin I met a young prominent German newspaperman and his pretty and intelligent young wife. It was obvious that they were very much in love with each other. It was also rather obvious that they were both starving. It did something very queer to me when, three nights later, I saw this girl in another quarter in Berlin, soliciting. When she saw me she was horrified, turned and ran.18
A theatrical venue where performer and spectator were virtually interchangeable chimed well with the Neue Sachlichkeit ethos of ‘Lehrstück’ and Gebrauchsmusik, but satire was also a way of coping with the conflicts that arose between grim reality and face-saving respectability. Hanns Eisler's critique of Friedrich Holländer's 1927 revue Rund um die Gedächniskirche (Ring-Round the Memorial Church19) in the Communist publication Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag) takes these issues to heart in what he sees as frivolous treatment of a serious subject. ‘Today, every sensible banker and factory owner counts himself a democratic republican with capitalism along with modern finance making up the superstructure perched on top of our democratic republic.‘20 Eisler is furious that the enforced prostitution of young girls is sanitised in Holländer's revue:
Cleverness, spirit and satire need a true enemy in order to grow and be effective. Where there is cleverness and spirit, there must also be both conviction and an enemy against whom one unleashes cleverness and spirit, since all other weapons are pointless. Cleverness and spirit are the characteristics of the oppressed, of the fighters, not however of those who flirt with our rulers. […] These were the thoughts that sprang to my mind while watching the revue Ring-Round the Memorial Church for which Friedrich Holländer has written some fairly lame music. It is of course possible to pull off such petit-bourgeois satire with acts that brim with more, or perhaps less, talent. Holländer and his author, Moritz Seeler, have chosen to get by with less. The Haller revue A Thousand Sweet Legs or James Klein's Everybody Naked! appears profound in comparison with this boring rubbish, as at least they're more honest and don't pretend to possess any sort of conviction and actually only want to earn lots of money with lots of naked girls.21
This judgement was harsh on Holländer, who had studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck long before establishing himself at Schall und Rauch. Even before becoming widely known as the composer of the film music for The Blue Angel, he had spent the years 1921 to 1923 composing for the singing actress Trude Hesterberg and her cabaret Wilde Bühne (Savage Stage) in the cellar of Theater des Westens, before opening his own highly successful theatre in 1931 in the same location which he called, pace Bierbaum, Tingel-Tangel. Holländer went on to set texts by Macellus Schiffer that were made famous by Schiffer's wife Margo Lion on whose vampish appearance the young Marlene Dietrich modelled herself.
Whether it was Oskar Straus, Arnold Schoenberg or Max Reinhardt, there was a strong Jewish presence from the outset in German cabaret. If, at the beginning of the century, the non-Jewish Bierbaum had a feeling that the common man should be lured away from the sleaze of the ‘Tingeltangel’ with edifying poetry, by the interwar years Jews had recognised that cabaret, revue and variété were entertaining ways of earning a living. Holländer, Franz Wachsmann (pianist with the fashionable jazz ensemble the Weintraub Syncopators, and Holländer's orchestrator for The Blue Angel), Mischa Spoliansky, Werner Richard Heymann and Rudolf Nelson were making enormous contributions to a genre that was socially critical as well as amusing. But penning hit-songs with funny lyrics, cabaret, light music and operetta also offered a good number of talented young Jews a pleasurable and lucrative means of moving seamlessly out of the distinctively Jewish cabarets and theatrical troupes of Eastern Europe. With German as a second household language, these performers often grew up with an irreverent means of turning the language's complex syntax upside down, or spinning puns from unlikely linguistic combinations.
When Eisler wrote of ‘cleverness and spirit’ as characteristics of the oppressed, he did not need to use the word ‘Jew’. Indeed, he probably wouldn't have, since, to his generation, there was an uncomfortably close relationship between Communists and anti-Semitic propaganda which often ignited Jew hatred even among young Jewish Communists. At one point, Eisler's sister Elfriede had to be warned against making anti-Semitic pronouncements in political speeches.
Emblematic for both time and place was the extravagant 1927 revue Hoppla, Wir Leben! (Hey! We're Alive!) by the Jewish political writer and revolutionary Ernst Toller. During the short-lived days of Bavari
a's Soviet Republic in 1918–19, Toller had been placed in charge of assembling a ‘Red Army’. Its fall left Toller serving a five-year prison sentence, grateful that a series of legal coincidences had saved him from execution. His trial was a sensation and he became not only a public darling, but also an avowed pacifist and an influential social critic. Hoppla, Wir Leben! opened in Hamburg before transferring to the theatre on Berlin's Nollendorfplatz run by the avant-garde director Erwin Piscator. It would become the essence of the Weimar Republic's zeitgeist. Hoppla, Wir Leben! tells a largely autobiographical story of a revolutionary, spared from execution and subsequently released from a lengthy prison sentence into the present. It offered a satire of the new world of financial stability brought about by Germany's central statesman of the day, Gustav Stresemann, and by showing a panorama of the Republic's betrayed principles, hypocrisy and corruption. At the end of the revue, the main character is returned to prison, having been falsely accused of murdering one of his former revolutionary comrades, who had himself become a corrupt government minister. The sequence of scenes offered a journey through all of Weimar Germany's social and political permutations.
Felix Salten reviewed its Viennese premiere at the Raimund Theatre in November 1927 and, perhaps compelled by local loyalties, mentions that in many respects, this production was superior to its Berlin run. He then proceeds to explain various key moments:
‘Hey! We're Alive!’ The phrase which lends this revue its name is heard five times emanating from various quarters of the stage: from the broadcasting console of the radio studio, from the private dining room where a government minister is taking a bribe, from the office of a journalist, from a brothel where a young girl is being taken by an elderly count, and from the dingy dive of a group of workers having a meal. The stage is assembled in such a way that all of these venues are instantly visible and the actions are all concurrent. Various other dramatic devices are employed throughout, such as actors mixing with the audience, newspaper-sellers shouting from the top balcony ‘Extra! Extra!’ before tossing sheets of newsprint on top of the audience seated below.22
