Cabaret (Weimar Germany Series)
Weimar culture is often identified with its cabaret culture, and rightly so. In the cabarets springing up in every big cities (in Berlin more numerous than anywhere else), the extreme, modern, free post-war lifestyle found its fuller form of expression.
Cabarets were born in France in the late 1880s and from the beginning were associated with sexual innuendo and bawdy shows. This form of entertainment arrived in Germany right at the beginning of the 1900s, although the authoritarian imperial society didn’t allow the liberty French shows offered. German kabarett were mostly restaurants or nightclub were a show of singers, dancers or comedians were offered from a small stage.
But as the Empire died out and the republic surged, kabarett changed the same way German urban society changed. As the republic lifted the old form of censorship, shows became bolder and more salacious. Dancers became more and more scantily dressed and their dances and songs ever more suggestive. Cross-dress wasn’t uncommon. Harsh political satire was so popular that some kabarett specialised in it.
It was indeed a subversive form of art, where modernism and non-naturalistic (therefore non-patriotic) expressions found a place. Everything was grotesquely distorted and still it was perfectly recognizable. Characters belonging to the lower life (prostitutes, gangsters, corrupted politicians) became very familiar and even loved by the public. Expressionist décors, with their odd angles that suggested anxiety and represented the displacement of the new urban life and industrial war were common. So was extreme makeup, which deformed the actors’ faces.
The life that kabarett depicted was outrageously modern, extremely subversive and — in the eyes of some — utterly decadent. There was enough to make this sort of show something not enough German and altogether too degenerated in the eyes of the right-wing thinkers, something dangerous that could taint and destroy the true German spirits. And if this was not enough, kabarett entertainment was mostly Jewish. Owners and managers were Jews more often then not. Actors, singers, musicians and more importantly playwrights and authors were Jews. For the Right, this made them too powerful manipulators of German culture at large. Kabarett culture, popular as it was, often became the aim of their hatred and blame.
Jazz
“The city had a jewel-like sparkle, the vast cafés reminded me of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras. There was music everywhere.”
– Josephine Baker
In the 1920s, jazz in Germany was almost as popular as in America. To many people, it sounded like the modern time they were living and in a way, it was a kind of natural counterpart to expressionist visuals.
It started very early, as early as the end of the war, when many African American musicians who had fought in WWI chose to stay in Europe and work there, since Europe was discovering jazz and the social environment was more favourable to them. But as jazz became more an more popular, many famous jazz players and singers came over to Europe to perform and most of them passed — as it was obvious — from Berlin, the hotbed of European jazz.
Later in the decade, many German bands were born together with the first school of jazz in the world — in the US, the cradle of jazz, the first school only opened in the mid 1940s. While in America jazz was consider a lesser form of music, in Germany — maybe for its affinity with the expressionist movement — jazz was incorporated by many composers into their own music and many kabarett authors — including Bertold Brecht — used it in their plays.
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