
Berlin: when life was a cabaret
By James Aitchison
Germany between the wars. The Weimar Republic replaced the old monarchy. In the golden 1920s, Berlin became a glittering world city, a melting pot of culture and counterculture, of science, philosophy, art, design, architecture, music, film and, above all, sheer decadence — a city that was both an intellectual’s and a hedonist’s paradise.
Tragically, it was also where Jewish writers, filmmakers and musicians achieved new heights in creativity before Hitler extinguished all Jewish cultural life and society.

Nothing, it seemed, was off limits. More than 500 erotic nightclubs and cabarets catered for every conceivable taste. Cocaine and heroin fuelled the underground culture.
Provocative themes were often the focus of Weimar cinema — prostitution, white slavery, homosexuality and homicide — pioneering the earliest examples of film noir. In fact, while Hollywood arguably produced more “shallow” films, Weimar directors focused on darker themes: social decay, immorality, and the destructive power of wealth.
1927 saw Fritz Lang’s silent masterpiece Metropolis explore a future urban dystopia. It remains one of cinema’s most influential films to this day. In 1930, Josef von Sternberg directed newcomer Marlene Dietrich as the young cabaret singer Lola Lola in Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). Lang and von Sternberg, along with other German directors such as Wilhelm Murnau, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder, and stars Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, emigrated to America as the Nazis rose to power.

Intellectual productivity soared in music, theatre and cabaret. The modern, atonal music of Arnold Schoenberg made its debut. Playwright Bertolt Brecht and director Max Reinhardt experimented with avant-garde theatre, the most advanced in Europe. Composer Kurt Weill collaborated with Brecht to create The Threepenny Opera, which featured the song Mack the Knife. Many years later, the song would be a major hit for both Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin.

While chaos, creativity and decadence reigned, Berlin literature entered a golden age. In 1928, Erich Maria Remarque wrote his anti-war masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front, later condemned by Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels as “unpatriotic”. The brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann were fierce critics of Nazism, Thomas winning the 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Berlin’s dynamic culture drew English writers such as W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. Isherwood’s play I Am a Camera was later adapted into the musical Cabaret, starring Liza Minelli. He depicted the character Sally Bowles as “a child-woman, a new kind of Artful Dodger”.
Berlin’s literary glories came to an end with the public burning of books in 1933, and the exodus of writers who feared retribution at the hands of the Nazi Government.
Likewise, the University of Berlin, a major intellectual powerhouse in Europe between the wars, saw a similar exodus of teachers and thinkers. Albert Einstein’s work earned him the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921, before anti-Semitic Nazis forced him out. Analytical psychologist Karl Jung lectured in Berlin, before he too departed Hitler’s Germany. Jewish sociologists Karl Mannheim and Erich Fromm, philosophers Ernest Cassirer and Edmund Husserl, and political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer gained recognition in the Weimar years.
Philosopher Rudolf Steiner pioneered the early childhood pedagogy known today as the Steiner Method, while Joseph Pilates developed his system of physical training.
Altogether, nine German citizens were awarded Nobel Prizes during the Weimar Republic, five of whom were Jewish scientists, including two in medicine. Many intellectuals and cultural figures fled the menace of Nazism.
Meanwhile, physician Magnus Hirschfeld established the curiously named Institute of Sexology, researching homosexuality through science. Mystical arts — Buddhism, astrology, the occult, and many off-beat religions — also thrived in Weimar Berlin.
Design and art flourished in the turbulent Weimar years: German Expressionism, Dada, New Objectivity, and arguably the most influential art and design movement in the history of the world, Bauhaus. Walter Gropius was a founder of the Bauhaus School, which revolutionised architecture and the design of furniture. The Bauhaus School believed “form follows function”, and design should be minimalist.
Needless to say, Hitler loathed it.
From the 1920s to 1933, Berlin was the world’s most exciting city. A heady mix of the degenerate and the futuristic, a cutting-edge cocktail of cultural and intellectual life. For that brief flicker of time, Berlin glittered with possibility — until, inexorably, it toppled into the abyss of Nazism.