Cabaret Program Notes
The Cabaret
by Meron Langsner, Doctoral Candidate, Tufts University Department of Drama & Dance
Like many European cultural phenomenons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the cabaret was born in Paris. Cabarets were urban entertainments that existed on the fine line between the formal stage and vaudeville. They attracted and inspired such figures as Bertolt Brecht, Max Wendkind, and Max Reinhardt, not to mention Chris Isherwood and Sally Bowles. The defining characteristics of the form and content of this entertainment were: small stages for small audiences, which elicited the possibility of eye contact; a casual environment with plenty of talk and smoke (and often food and drink); and a direct relationship between performers and spectators. There was a sense of provocation linked to this performer/spectator relationship. The performances themselves could be of nearly any genre: songs, skits, monologues, dance, puppetry, and even film screenings. These shows were linked by the conferencier (called the "Emcee" in the Kander & Ebb musical), who would introduce and comment upon each performer and interact directly with the audience. The subjects were usually topical and often satirical. The targets of the satire ranged from sex to fashion to politics.
The first cabaret was the Chat Noir of Rudolphe Salis. Chat Noir opened its doors in the Montmarte area of Paris in 1881, making public the ongoing exchanges between artists and writers of the time. The term "cabaret," meaning tavern, was chosen by Salis because the variety of entertainments presented resembled a menu more than a typical theatre’s playbill. Several other cabarets soon sprang up. The Chat Noir relocated, and its old premises were taken over by Aristide Bruant (familiar to many of us today from his depictions in the work of Toulose-Lautrec), who founded Le Mirliton. Bruant became famous for his direct provocation of upper class clientele, who took his abuse gladly.
The idea soon spread beyond Paris, to Barcelona, Vienna, and, of course, Berlin. The precursor to cabaret in Berlin was the tingletangle, a popular entertainment that was essentially a bar with some live entertainment (usually a singer). The first cabaret in Berlin was Baron Ernst von Wolzogen's Überbrettl, which opened its doors in 1901. The presence of a member of the aristocracy on the stage was an offense to some and a welcome novelty to others. Wolzogen based his project on the Parisian models set forth by Salis and Bruant. His cabaret came at a time when there was a call among artists and intellectuals for a new form, one that reflected Berlin's place in the modern world and could inhabit the middle ground between popular entertainment and the inaccessible avant garde movements of the time. Supporters of the movement often invoked Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian and the need for dancing and laughter. Wolzogen envisioned his cabaret as upper class intellectual entertainment, in line with his own aristocratic background. However, the withdrawal of his financer and resulting reliance on the box office demanded more populist fare. The project was a success. Wolzogen repaid his startup loan in only ten days.
This new entertainment immediately took off in Berlin. Max Reinhardt's Sound and Smoke opened its doors not long after the Überbrettl, and other cabarets soon followed. But Berlin is not Paris. The kabarett, as it is now known in Germany, was a different animal than its Parisian progenitor. Berlin's citizens of the time were known for their cynicism, dry wit, and overall disregard for authority. Their cabarets both reflected and fed into these attitudes. Furthermore, Berlin's early cabarets were more structured than their Parisian examples. Improvisation was not smiled upon, and censorship was a larger concern. All scripts had to be approved by a government official beforehand, and any material deemed offensive towards the Kaiser or the public good was barred from the stage.
During World War I, cabaret took a decidedly nationalistic bent. Initially, theatres were closed, as Germany expected a short war. As it became clear that the war would last, the theatres reopened. Those entertainers who were not on the front lines needed the work, and the public needed to be diverted in the face of a harsh reality. French terms were banished from the stage, eschewing the form's Parisian roots. Songs became patriotic, and what one was able to laugh at was under greater scrutiny. Even though many entertainers were Jewish, anti-Semitic humor was commonly seen on the cabaret stage at this time.
The Weimar period (1919-1933) saw the end of censorship, and thus a proliferation of nudity on the stage. Sex has always been a topic, but now it was considerably more "out in the open," as it were. An Americanization of entertainment also occurred, mainly in the introduction and popularity of Jazz. Politics became more and more common on the stage, though a certain reactionary nationalism was still prevalent as much of the population was suffering under the terms of the armistice that placed all moral and financial responsibility for the war on Germany. Many liberal voices satirized Hitler and National Socialism, but few saw the enormity of the threat.
Cabaret in its true form disappeared from Berlin under the Third Reich, reverting back to the variety entertainments from which it began and losing all intellectual and social content. There were cabarets run by inmates in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt, which hold a complicated place in the history of the form. Cabaret, as discussed here, was very much a product of its time. Post war revivals of the movement, while valid endeavors in their own right, never quite recaptured the energy of the original.
What Good is Sitting Alone in Your Room?
by Adrienne Boris
"In those days, one spoke of Berlin as one speaks of a highly desirable woman, whose coldness and coquettishness are widely known. Everyone wanted her, she enticed everyone. The man who had Berlin owned the world. It was a city of crooks and cripples, a city of hit songs and endless talk; Berlin tasted of the future, and that is why we gladly took the crap and the coldness." – Weimar playwright Carl Zuckmayer
Freewheeling, sexy, and liberated, no European city rivaled Berlin in its prime. By 1930, when Cabaret takes place, however, Berlin was economically ravaged, exhausted, and disillusioned, merely a shadow of its former 1920's self. Its citizens lived in fear of the future – and rightly so. The Nazi party would soon come to power. How did the Berlin of Sally Bowles become the Berlin of Adolph Hitler?
Time for a Holiday
During its "roaring twenties," Berlin was not only the republic's political capital, but also its cultural headquarters, drawing artists and intellectuals from Prague, Vienna, England, America, and beyond. The city's new creative culture emphasized physical pleasure and self-expression – and de-emphasized politics and practicality. The Viennese writer Stephan Zweig wrote:
Berlin transformed itself into the Babel of the world. Bars, amusement parks, pubs shot up like mushrooms. Made-up boys with artificial waistlines promenaded along the Kurfustendamm – and not professionals alone: every high school student wanted to make some money, and in the darkened bars one could see high public officials and high financiers courting drunken sailors without shame. Even the Rome of Suetonius had not known orgies like the Berlin transvestite balls, where hundreds of men in women’s clothes and women in men's clothes danced under the benevolent eyes of the police … Young ladies boasted that they were perverted; to be suspected of virginity at sixteen would have been considered a disgrace in every school in Berlin.
As Zweig observed, Berlin more than tolerated sexual deviance. Those who had experimented with homosexuality, like Cabaret's Cliff, would indeed have been drawn to a place where they could do so without fear of governmental persecution.
Chancellor Gustav Stresemann, the Weimar Republic's most successful and liberal leader, took office in 1924. He believed in funding Germany's cultural identity and in repairing the country's middle class. During this time, artists of all mediums explored modernism, a movement sprung from post-war bitterness and disillusionment with modern society. It avoided realistic depictions of daily life, instead focusing on creating new ways to express the human condition. For example, Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg, among others, revolutionized the form of music by pioneering atonality—music without a formal key signature.
Visual artists like Wassily Kandinsky used disjointed colors, shapes, and textures in place of photographic realism. Artist George Grosz remains famous for his political cartoons and paintings, in which he combined the mundane with the ridiculous—perhaps in order to express the public's aggression toward a government from which it had long since begun to feel alienated. Literature also saw major developments: the magic realism of Herman Hesse and Rainier Maria Rilke, the political satires of Kurt Tucholsky, and the novels of Christopher Isherwood became very popular. Cabaret is based on Isherwood’s story, "Sally Bowles." Isherwood based the character on his friend Jean Ross, an English cabaret performer with whom he shared a boardinghouse in 1931.
Despite the rich culture that flourished under Stresemann, his conciliatory policies infuriated the right, who felt that he had taken steps away from regaining Germany's former military might. Crime had risen due to cuts in police funding, and the right pointed to Jews and liberal artists as culprits in the collapse of Germany's moral fiber. Meanwhile, the Nazis and their chosen figurehead, Adolph Hitler, had been busily campaigning among the rural, working class. Alienated by Stresemann, their Christian, nationalistic beliefs aligned perfectly with the Nazi's anti-Semitic, pro-Germany agenda. In 1929, Gustav Stresemann died, and the Great Depression hit Germany's urban, middle-class the hardest with unemployment rising above two million. Many Berliners believed that that the economic crisis would eventually mean the loss their businesses, leaving them vulnerable to an encroaching communist threat. Immediately, the Nazis capitalized on the country's economic paranoia with stronger, more aggressive attacks on the Jewish left. Germany, torn between the threat of a communist takeover and total economic extinction at the hands of the socialist liberals, began to listen.
Some Prophet of Doom
Once in power, Hitler set to work destroying the constitution he had taken an oath to defend. He and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, portrayed Germany's Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities as cultural and economic parasites. He championed the "Aryan" – native, Christian Germans of Nordic descent and fair complexion, and vilified all minorities.
An amateur painter himself, Hitler also had particularly strong views on the arts. In favor of "realistic" depictions of the pleasures of life in an Aryan nation, he removed all modernist and expressionist work from galleries, and had over four thousand pieces publicly burned in 1939. He closed cabarets and cracked down on prostitution and public displays of nudity, demanding that depictions of sex only be used to teach moral lessons. As a result, many of Weimar’s artists and intellectuals fled the country, and those who did not were forced into Nazi compliance or interred in concentration camps.
Throughout the 1930s, Hitler gradually stripped non-Aryans of all human rights. Some examples particularly relevant to Cabaret include the compulsory Aryanization of Jewish businesses (like Ernst's fruit stand) and the yellow stars and pink triangles, respectively, which the Nazis required Jews and homosexuals to wear.
From Cradle to Tomb
Although none of the characters in Cabaret can control the future, they can control the choices they make at its outset. The fear they contend with, the obstacles they encounter, and the choices they ultimately must make provide a fascinating glimpse into the lives of so many terrified Germans on the brink of one of the worst tragedies in human history.
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