Seventy-nine years ago today, Christopher Isherwood said goodbye to Berlin.
Three days earlier he had witnessed the Nazi Youth looting his former lodgings, The Institute for Sexual Science, and the burning of Magnus Hirschfeld’s books on the Opera Platz.
“Shame” he shouted but not, he later admitted, very loudly.
He left Berlin and headed for the Greek island of St Nicolas with his new lover, Heinz.
The story continues in ‘Down There On A Visit’ published in 1961.
The Renaissance-Theater in Charlottenburg’s Knesebeckstraße is the only fully-preserved Art Deco theatre in Europe.
It was founded in 1922 by the Viennese writer Theodor Tagger, who wrote under the name of Ferdinand Bruckner, and is regarded today as one of the most important playwrights of the Weimar Era.
The first theatre production in the former cinema, was Ludwig Berger’s play Miß Sara Sampson and it was followed by productions of the work of many contemporary playwrights, especially Strindberg, directed by famous names such as Berthold Viertel and Karl-Heinz Martin. Famous actors were drawn by the quality of the work being staged and stars of the time like Helene Weigel, the wife of Bertolt Brecht, were often seen on stage.
In July 1926, architect Oskar Kaufmann was commissioned to re-design the venue and transform it into a ‘real’ theatre. He had already been responsible for the extraordinary Theater am Nollendorfplatz – now Goya.
In just five months the work was completed and on January 8th 1927, The Renaissance- Theater re-opened. The intimate 250-seat auditorium is a combination of rococo and expressionism. The huge curved back wall is inlaid with mahogany and rosewood, the work of artist César Klein.
This booming era of the arts was brought to a dramatic end in the mid 1930′s and the theatre lay ‘dark’ for most of the next decade.
In late 1946, The British Forces gave a licence to Dr. Kurt Raeck to re-open the theatre, and on December 11th, the first productions opened, a double-bill of Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Georges Courteline’s comedy Boubouroche.
For the next three decades, Kurt Raeck remained at the helm of the Renaissance cementing it’s reputation as the ‘actors theatre’ of Berlin, with many famous names regularly appearing on stage in classic productions.
The reunification of Berlin in 1989, changed the focus of The Renaissance Theatre. New contemporary drama was introduced to the audience and it now specialises in new writing and modern classics, produced by renowned and respected directors.
Emma Minna Hilde Hildebrand was born in Hannover on September 10th 1897.
The daughter of Julius and Louise Hildebrand, she first attended ballet school at the age of 8 and joined the ballet ensemble of the Residenz Theater in 1913. Her theatre debut came in 1914 under the name of Emmy Hildebrand.
By the end of the First World War, she was already well known as a star of the Revue stage and soon moved to Berlin, where, as Hilde Hildebrand, she became a huge hit, appearing in many Rudolph Nelson revues such as ‘Es hat geklingelt” and “Etwas für Sie”. Her style was said to be suggestive but never crude, erotic but never vulgar.
She soon moved into silent films appearing in over a dozen before the advent of the talking picture, where she really came in to her own, often being cast in roles that featured her impressive vocal talent in front of large orchestras.
She appeared in 108 films covering a 51 year period from 1920 to 1971 including, in 1933, the lead role in the original, German version of “Viktor, Viktoria”, a role reprised in later years by Julie Andrews.
In 1933, she became a member of the Nazi Party, although it is thought that this was more to do with her desire to continue working in Germany rather than any deeply held political convictions.
By 1941, she had fallen out of favour with party, and in particular Joseph Goebbels, and found her film roles greatly reduced, and work offers few and far between.
By the end of the war in 1945, she was part of a concert party entertaining troops in what is now the Czech Republic when she was captured and imprisoned by the Russians and, reportedly, very badly treated.
She eventually returned to Berlin in 1947, where she was able to continue her stage and film career. Her last appearance was in the cult T.V series ‘Der Kommissar” in 1971.
She withdrew from public life and spent her last few years alone in her apartment in Berlin’s Grunewald where she died in 1976, aged 79.
She is buried in Waldfriedhof Heerstraße, near the Olympic Stadium.
Occupying almost the entire Potzdamer Platz, one of the vast pleasure palaces of late 1920′s Berlin was Haus Vaterland.
The impressively domed, 6-storey building was constructed in 1911 by architect Franz Schwechten and opened as House Potsdam. Immediately to the east of the railway station, it initially housed offices, an ÜFA cinema, and a 2500-seater cafe on the ground floor.
In 1928, the building was acquired by the Kempinski family who set about converting it into an enormous ‘department store’ of pleasure. It housed 12 ‘themed’ restaurants, a cinema, a variety theatre, a Palm Court ballroom and the largest coffee house in Berlin. It was capable of seating 8,000 diners at any one time and had the largest catering kitchen in the world. Entry to the complex was 1 mark and, within the first year, a million people had come through the impressive marbled entrance hall.
The Löwenbräu, on the third floor, was a one-thousand seater Bavarian Biergarten complete with buxom barmaids in traditional dress and promenading musicians and entertainers.
Also on the third floor was the Rhineland Wine Terrace, a cavernous hall with an artificial river which flowed around the edges of a 70ft recreation of the Rheinish countryside. Once an hour, a simulated ‘storm on the Rhein’, darkened the room and showered the guests in rain before re-emerging into an equally fake sunburst, provided by a battery of electric lights.
In a corner of the wine terrace was a dimly-lit Turkish cafe.
The Wild West Bar on the fourth floor was a complete recreation of a American saloon. Customers entered through swinging doors and were greeted by waiters in ten-gallon hats serving pre-prohibition era American cocktails. Entertainment came in the form of a jazz band and showgirls, and black-face minstrel shows.
The Grinzing was a Viennese cafe with a diorama of old Vienna and the Danube. A tiny electric railway ran through the room, crossing bridges with equally tiny boats sailing along canals beneath.
For an extra 3 mark entry fee, nightly floorshows were on offer in the fifth-floor Palm Tree Room. Big name cabaret and variety acts of the time were accompanied by a chorus of showgirls and a succession of bands. The entertainment ran until 3am.
Also on offer at Haus Vaterland was a Spanish Bodega, a Hungarian pastry restaurant, a Japanese tea-garden, a student beer hall, and the Üfa cinema, still very much in operation .
The business continued operating successfully until 1943, when the building was bomb-damaged and caught fire, before a second devastating fire finally destroyed the building in 1953. The premises was simply made secure and left abandoned, and was then swallowed-up in the no-mans-land of the Berlin Wall. It was eventually demolished in 1976.
” Spring in Berlin received its official sanction as a season of merriment, with the opening of the enormous Luna Park, just beyond the Halensee Bridge, set by the Gods of sensations at the very end of the Kurfürstendamm, which seems like one never-sending promise of sensations. Here the fun becomes insane, the absurdity hyperbolic, the jollification both strenuous and harmless. There are infernal machines that cause bitter sweat before they rouse any joys: a deranged pyramid that tries to top its own summit. Undemanding fun becomes its own caricature. How strange that someone trying to have a good time will walk up an uncertain jazz band staircase, get stuck halfway up, unable to go up or down, and instead of laughing, finds himself laughed at by everyone else.”
Joseph Roth - Frankfurter Zeitung, May 16th, 1924
Between 1909 and 1933, Europes largest amusement park was Luna Park, in the Halensee area of Berlin at the far end of the Kurfüstendamm.
At the turn of the century, Wirtshaus am Halensee was a substantial guest house on the east shore of the lake, a popular outdoor swimming area. Daytrippers would travel by carriage down the forest path that is now the Kurfürstendamm toward the Grunewald and stop for refreshments and amusement. In the grounds of the hotel were fairground rides, stalls and even a water slide.
Sensing a larger opportunity, in 1909 the hotel was acquired by restauranteur August Aschinger and chef Bernd Hoffman, who set about transforming the grounds into a spectacular amusement park.
Very much modelled on New York’s Coney Island, the park featured all the typical attractions of the time. The water slide was enlarged and now ended in the lake itself, a shaking staircase (shimmy-treppe) that had a fan to lift ladies skirts and an elevated ‘mountain’ railway. There was also a swimming pool featuring the world’s first-ever artificial wave machine.
There were also theatres, jazz and cabaret stages, dance halls and boxing tournaments. The restaurants and bars could seat 16,000 people, there was a Bavarian-themed ‘beer village’ and nightly fireworks displays.
Within it’s first few years, Luna Park was attracting 50,000 visitors a day and already, by the end of the 1910 season, had welcomed it’s millionth visitor. The enormous success of Luna Park led to the rapid development of the Kurfüstendamm
” someone tries to cover a target with six flat rubber disks. He throws one after another, hoping to win himself a wristwatch. The desire to win impels his arm, the fear of losing holds it back, and his excited consciousness, the seat of prudence and of frivolity, wavers between the will to throw and the trembling arm. Meanwhile, any jewellery store would offer him the same ‘guaranteed 100 percent Swiss watch’ for the same money and with no exertion or risk.”
Joseph Roth, 1924
The park closed for the duration of the First World War but reopened in 1918. However, it’s glory days were behind it and, in the years that followed, it fell into disrepair. The hyper-inflation of the early 1920′s was disastrous and visitor numbers rapidly declined.
A major refurbishment took place over the Winter of 1928 and the park was relaunched to the public in May 1929, however, it never quite achieved it’s former success.
On taking power in 1933, the Nazis immediately closed the park and, considering it an eyesore, completely demolished the site in 1935 to make way for the Halenseestraße, in time for the 1936 Olympics
Situated in Auguststrasse in the Mitte district of Berlin, Clärchens Ballhaus is possibly the last original Weimar-era dancehall still surviving and, very much, in operation today.
It was opened in 1913 by Fritz Bühler as Bühler’s Ballhaus. It became known as Clärchens Ballhaus after Fritz Bühler was killed in the First World War and the business was taken over by his widow, Clara.
The business continued after the First World War and eventually came under the ownership of Elfriede Wolff, the stepdaughter of Fritz and Clara and then in 1979, it was taken over by her brother Stefan Wolff.
The German illustrator Heinrich Zille was a regular at the bar where he used to sit and draw, and the poster, still used today, was designed by Otto Dix.
Up to the 1940′s there were two dance halls. The ground floor was host to the popular music of the time, whilst the grand, mirrored hall on the first floor was a much more formal affair.
There was also a bowling alley in the basement.
In 1944, all music and dancing stopped, and it is thought the upstairs ballroom was commandeered as an officers mess.
After the war, the upstairs ballroom remained closed and would do so for the next 60 years. The bowling alley was used as a coal cellar.
The front building was so badly bomb-damaged that it had to be demolished, and was never re-built, providing space for the large courtyard and biergarten that is in use today.
The business finally left the family ownership in 2003 after 91 years.
In January 2005, after a substantial rent increase, the Ballhaus changed hands again. The new operators, David Regehr and Christian Schulz, have left the interior largely unchanged and, in 2005, re-opened the mirrored ballroom upstairs for the first time since the Second World War.
In 2008, the venue was used to film scenes for the movie ‘Valkyrie’, starring Tom Cruise, and Jake Gyllenhaal was spotted on the dance-floor during this year’s Berlinale Film Festival.
Today there are weekly dances plus regular dance classes in Ballroom and Latin. The mirrored ballroom is available for private hire and the restaurant and bars are open every day from 10am.
In 1928, Ruth Margarete Roellig wrote a guide book for visitors to Berlin. But this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill guidebook. This was “Berlin’s Lesbische Frauen” a comprehensive guide to the hottest and most happening lesbian bars and clubs the city had to offer.
With an estimated 85,000 living in the city, Berlin was the lesbian capital of the world, and visitors were flocking in to experience all the city had to offer, and there was plenty! Lesbian life in Berlin at the time boasted two weekly newspapers, twelve social clubs, two ice-skating leagues, a nudist retreat, three outdoor sports associations, six magazines and as many as fifty bars and clubs.
In the cabaret theatres of the Kurfustendam, Marlene Dietrich and Margo Lion were thrilling the crowds with their flirtatious duet “Wenn Die Beste Freundin” just a few years after Mischa Spolianky’s smash hit ‘Das Lila Lied” – both songs were to become the gay and lesbian ‘anthems’ of the city.
Roellig’s guidebook focussed on twelve of the most well known venues, surprisingly, nearly all of them in the Schöneberg district of the city. A district now assumed be almost the exclusive preserve of the gay male scene. But in the late 1920′s the two scenes co-existed, and often merged, with apparent ease.
A great example of this was the newly-opened Dorian Gray, at Bulowstrasse 57. The nights of the week here were very fairly divided up between the boys and the girls – Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays were men only; Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays were women only. Wednesdays were host to a very specialist S & M night, and the only night that straight men were admitted!
It was a different story across the road at Bulowstrasse 37 , which was the home of The Violetta, owned by Lotte Hahm, a successful and well liked women-only club with over 400 members.
Further up Bulowstrasse and a turn to the left brought you to Schwerinstrasse and The Topkellar. Described at the time as “dangerous, fun, sexy and bohemian”, The Topkellar was tucked away in the second Hof, through three gates and up a narrow staircase. Flamboyant owner Gypsy-Lotte actively encouraged straight men into the venue to keep the bar takings up and to maintain the club’s reputation for wild nights and excess. Tourists were also encouraged to visit and English travel company Cooks would send a bus around the top hotels at midnight collecting thrill-seeking visitors for their “only in Berlin” experience of The Topkellar. Monday nights, however, were women-only.
Sitting cheek by jowl back on Bulowstrasse were Cafe O La La and The Hohenzollern Cafe. The former dressed it’s bar staff up as French maids but the windows were so dirty you couldn’t see in and the latter was a homely affair for long-established couples .
Past Nollendorfplatz U-bahn, on Kleistrasse was The Verona Lounge, a pleasant and chic place in the afternoons and evenings but also an outrageous and tense after-hours hangout for expensive lesbian prostitutes. Equally chic, but definitely more late-night was Le Garconne on Kalkreuthstrasse, owned by Susi Wanowski, the former wife of a Berlin Chief of Police but now the lover and manager of Wiemar-era wild-child, Anita Berber.
A permanent sign on the door at Mali and Ingel’s at Lutherstrasse 16 read “Closed for Private Party” and inside was an exclusive reservations list. Limited to no more than 60 guests at any one time, this was the preferred hangout for women artists, intellectuals, singers and stage actresses.
Twice yearly, Mali and Ingel joined forces with the 600 member Club Monbijou Of The West for an extravagant women-only ball at the nearby Scala, tickets were highly sought after and the event always sold out.
Tragically, none of these venues survived past the political turmoil of the early 1930′s and all were closed when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The new-found financial and personal freedoms that had been enjoyed by women during the late 1920′s were rapidly eroded and it’s safe to say that the Berlin lesbian scene was never the same again.
Ruth Margarete Roellig’s book was reworked and reprinted in 1994 by Adele Mayer and is now called “Lila Nächte, Die Damenklubs Im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre” and published by Edition Lit.europe
This article was originally written for, and published by, www.slowtravelberlin.com
“Any Berlin lady of the night might turn out to be a man: the prettiest girl on the street was Conrad Veidt, who later became an international film star”
Anita Loos 1923
Hans Walter Conrad Veidt was born in Berlin on January 22nd 1893.
In 1914 he was drafted into the German Army and then in 1915 sent to the Eastern Front, where he contacted jaundice and pneumonia. A pre-war relationship with the actress Lucie Mannheim, encouraged him to go into the theatre and having been given a full discharge from the army in 1917, he returned to Berlin to pursue an acting career.
He appeared in over 100 films from 1919 until 1943, including two of the most well-known of the silent era: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and The Man Who Laughed (1928)
Stills from The Man Who Laughed are thought to be Bob Kane’s inspiration for the creation of comic book character The Joker.
(The Man Who Laughed, 1928)
In 1919, he starred in the groundbreaking film Anders als die Andern (Different From The Others), alongside Anita Berber. It was written by Richard Oswald with the assistance, creatively and financially, of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and is noteworthy as one of the first sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals in cinema.
(Anders als die Andern, 1919, Anita Berber is on the far right)
Anders als die Andern was reworked into the 1961 British film, Victim, starring Dirk Bogarde.
In 1926, and by now one of the highest paid actors in Germany, he was tempted to Hollywood to work with John Barrymore on films like The Beloved Rogue (1927). But it was the advent of talking movies, and his poor English, that took him back to Germany in 1929.
Attending a men-only costume ball at Magnus Hirshfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in 1929, Christopher Isherwood observed:
“The respectability of the ball was open to doubt, but it did have one dazzling guest: Conrad Veidt. The great film star sat apart at his own table, impeccable in evening tails. He watched the dancing benevolently through his monocle as he sipped champagne and smoked a cigarette in a long holder. He seemed a supernatural figure, the guardian god of these festivities, who was graciously manifesting himself to his devotees. A few favoured ones approached and talked to him but without presuming to sit down”
Christopher and His Kind
He was married three times. Firstly to Augusta Holl, a cabaret artist known as ‘Gussy’, in 1918. This was short-lived and ended in divorce in 1922. His second wife was Felicitas Radke in 1923 with whom he had a daughter, Viola, in 1925.
He fled Germany in 1933 with his third wife, Illona Prager, and settled in England, becoming a British citizen in 1938.
He continued making films in Britain, and then in the 1940′s, moved once again to Hollywood where he was cast as Major Heinrich Strasse in Casablanca in 1942.
It would seem that having fled from the Nazis, he was destined to spend his film career playing them.
He died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1943, aged just 50. In 1998 his ashes were interred at Golders Green Crematorium in London.
Sally Bowles was the fictional character who featured in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin and the subsequent adaptations into the stage and film production, Cabaret.
She was loosely based on Jean Ross, a British actress and singer Isherwood met and lived with in Berlin in the early 1930′s.
Jean Ross returned to England in 1932 and later married the Journalist Claud Cockburn with whom she had a daughter, the writer Sarah Cockburn, also know by her pen name Sarah Caudwell.
Jean Ross was Claud Cockburn’s second wife.
Claud Cockburn’s first wife was Hope Hale Davies with whom he fathered Claudia Cockburn.
Claudia Cockburn married Michael Flanders, one half of the double act Flanders and Swann.
Together they had two daughters, US-based journalist Laura Flanders and the BBC Economics Correspondent Stephanie Flanders.
One of the most successful shows from the writing partnership of Marcellus Schiffer and Micha Spoliansky was ‘Es Liegt in Der Luft’ ( It’s In The Air)
It is a short revue, consisting of 24 short stories told in the setting of a large Berlin Department Store and premiered at The Comedy on The Kurfüstendam on 15 May 1928.
One of the most notable scenes featured a relatively still unknown Marlene Dietrich duetting with rising-star Margo Lion. The pair play two affluent women on a shopping trip. As the song unfolds it becomes clear that they are both dissatisfied with their husbands and their relationship with each other is more than a little intimate.
The song ‘Wenn die beste Freundin’ ( When My Best Girlfriend) was a big hit and became an anthem for German lesbians in the late 20′s and early 30′s.
When the best girlfriend
With the best girlfriend,
for shopping,
for shopping,
going for a walk,
tramping the streets,
blabbing about everything,
says the best girlfriend
to the best girlfriend.
My best girlfriend.
o my best girlfriend,
o my pretty girlfriend,
o my faithful girlfriend,
o my sweet girlfriend!
Walks the best girlfriend
With the best girlfriend,
says the best girlfriend
to the best girlfriend:
My best, my best girlfriend.
-Yes, what does the best girlfriend say?
Tell me what crosses your mind!
- Also, I can only tell you one thing, if
I didn’t have you, we get along so well…
- Yes, we get along terribly well.
- How good we get along!
- We can hardly bear how great we get along,there is just one person I
get along with equally well, and that is my little cute husband.
- Yes, with your little cute husband
Yes, my husband is a man!
What a man, like my husband!
Like the husband of the wife,
like the husband of the wife
We used to have paramours,
but they exist no longer!
Today instead of paramours,
we have girlfriends!
- Your little man is a bit pushy!
-So?
-Yes.
- Why?
- Well, I find
- Well, why?
-Why I find …?
- Why you find?
- He does those things…
- I don’t like that!
- Hmm. Okay,. Let’s make up! (Kisses)
- Okay, we make up! (Kisses)
(thanks to Jill for the translation!)
Paul Morgan was one of the biggest stars of the Berlin Weimar era.
Born Georg Paul Morgenstern in Vienna 1886, he came to Berlin in 1917 to perform at The Lessing Theatre. By the 1920′s he was a well-known Conferencier (MC) on the Berlin Cabaret circuit and in 1924, together with Kurt Robitschek and Max Hansen, he founded the Kadeko, Berlin’s famous Cabaret of Comedians.
Between 1919 and 1933 he acted in over 50 films, including German versions of American films in Hollywood after fleeing Germany during 1930. Returning to Europe later that year, he tried out the cabaret scene in Switzerland but ultimately returned to an increasingly dangerous Vienna. His film career was virtually finished but he continued to perform and write.
After the annexation of Austria in March 1938 he was arrested and sent to Dachau. Soon afterwards he was transferred to Buchenwald Concentration Camp, where he participated in informal cabaret shows put on by the other prisoners. Sometimes with, but often without, the permission of the guards.
After a prolonged series of ‘punishment exercises’ in the bitter cold of December 10th 1938, he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He was 52.
Paul Morgan & Alice Hechy film montage here.
The most successful cabaret of the later Weimar years was the Kabarett der Komiker or Kadeko (Cabaret of Comedians)
It was established on December 1st 1924 by Paul Morgan, Kurt Robitschek and actor/singer Max Hansen at a venue called Rakete (the Rocket) in Berlins’ Kantstraße. The venture was immediately successful and a year later moved to the 450 seat Theater am Kurfürstendamm. By 1928, a new venue was needed and Kadeko moved into the brand new cabaret theatre of the ‘WOGA’ complex in Lehniner Platz. A 950 seat venue designed by the famous modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn.
Never known to shy away from political satire and parody, the Kadeko played host to some of the sharpest and wittiest Conferenciers of the day, most regularly Paul Nikolaus.
An early production of a mock operetta by Morgan and Robitschek called Quo Vardis, parodied not only the film of that name but also Hitlers early attempts at power. It ran for over 300 performances.
By 1929, the necessity to fill over 900 seats every night caused Robitschek to adopt a more cautious approach. The bulk of political jokes remained the role of the conferencier , but the rest of the show was made up of songs, vaudeville acts and comic one-act plays.
The inexorable rise of the Nazi’s, and the now ever-present threat of street violence had a dramatic effect on the Kadeko, as patrons became afraid to venture out, especially onto The Kurfürstendamm.
In 1931 Robitschek reported “The box office has become a seismograph of political earthquakes” and in 1933, he fled Germany for the United States.
The Kadeko was taken over by Hanns Shindler and remained a successful, if ‘Aryanized’ cabaret under the watchful eye of the Nazi regime, eventually being taken over by Willi Schaeffers in 1938, until the eventual closing of all theatres in 1944.
The building was destroyed by bombing shortly before the end of the war, and is now the site of the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz.
Sally Bowles is a fictional character from the novels of Christopher Isherwood “Mr Norris Changes Trains” and “Goodbye To Berlin” (also known as The Berlin Diaries) published in 1935 and 1939.
She is a 19 yr old English actress and cabaret singer who has come to Berlin with dreams of stardom.
Isherwood’s description of seeing her perform for the first time, at a cabaret called The Lady Windermere off the Tauentzeinstraße in Autumn of 1930, is not a promising one:
“She had a surprisingly deep, husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides – yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse of what people thought of her,”
He later adds
” Sally’s German is not merely incorrect, it is all her own”
It is thought that the character was loosely based on Jean Ross, a cabaret singer and political writer who Isherwood met whilst rooming at Fraulein Thurau’s guesthouse at 17 NollendorfStraße during late 1920′s and early 30′s.
The character continues in the adaptation of the novels into the award-winning Broadway play “I Am A Camera’ in 1951, then further into the Kander and Ebb musical play “Cabaret” in 1966, with Judy Dench taking the role of Sally in the first London production.
Watch Judi Dench performing “Don’t Tell Mama” Here
The most famous incarnation of the character is in Bob Fosse’s multi-award winning film adaptation of “Cabaret” in 1972. By this stage the character is very much American to accommodate Liza Minnelli, whose iconic performance went on to win her an Oscar, one of eight Oscar awards the film received in 1973, along with seven BAFTA awards and a Golden Globe for Best Picture.
It is,without doubt, the definitive performance. Watch “Maybe This Time”.
Clara Wortmann was born in 1884, the 11th child of a family of 16, and grew up in Gelsenkirchen. She attended a girls’ High School in Hanover, from where it was expected she would graduate and go on to study medicine. But her father leaving the family made this financially impossible and allowed her to pursue her fascination with the performing arts.
From 1903 she started to get roles in various touring companies and by 1907 had arrived in Berlin.
” I fell passionately in love with Berlin. Not because the city was beautiful or the Imperial capital, but because it was Berlin, with its special atmosphere, its vivacious and curt character”
Shortly after arriving in Berlin, and with her new stage name of Claire Waldoff, she was spotted by Paul Schneider-Duncker of the Roland Von Berlin cabaret and made her debut there that autumn.
In her songs, she eschewed the conventions of other performers of using double-entendres and suggestion, preferring to get straight to the point leaving little to the imagination. This often caused her problems with the censors.
She was a revelation to cabaret audiences of the time, so used to stylish and well groomed cabaret divas, she was short and stocky with wild red hair and had adopted the gruff persona and brash slang of a ‘native Berliner’.
“I began to become the Berliner, a prototype of the Berliner, a representative of modern Berlin”
She rapidly became very popular and after being lured away from Roland Von Berlin after just a few months, became a regular at the Chat Noir in Friedrichstraße.
She limited her performances to just three songs, with no encores, allowing her to play several different venues a night, and establishing herself as a major star.
By the mid 1920′s, with a repertoire of 300 of her own songs, she was not only playing vast stages such as The Scala and The Wintergarten but also the more intimate venues such as The Eldorado alongside Marlene Dietrich.
Openly lesbian, she lived with her partner Olga Von Roeder in Berlin throughout the Weimar period and beyond . She was also a keen gardener and had a garden plot (allotment) in the Kissingen colony in the city
In a long strings of pearls, her luxuriant hair wreathed with paper flowers, or in a cheeky cap and suit, Claire Waldoff would sing in a Berlin slang as rich and gravelly as the city’s soil:
“Was braucht der Berliner, um gluecklich zu sein?”
” ‘ne Laube, n’Zaun und n’Beet!”
What does it take to make a Berliner happy?
An arbour, a fence and a flowerbed!
Joanna Robertson -BBC
There is now a path named after her in the colony she gardened.
She wrote her autobiography ‘Weeste noch…! Aus Meinen Erinnerungen’ in 1953 and died in 1957 in Stuttgart aged 73.
She has a star on The Cabaret Walk Of Fame in Mainz, and a memorial bust, created by Reinhard Jacob, at the site of the Freidrichstadt-Palast in Friedrichstraße, Berlin.
(image:Cabaret-Berlin)
(image:Cabaret-Berlin) At the other end of the spectrum from the vast stages of The Scala and The Wintergarten was the ‘tingeltangel’.
Often no more than a raised platform in a bar or restaurant, it featured both those at the very start and those at the very end of their cabaret careers.
The scenes featured in the Marlene Dietrich film of 1930 ‘The Blue Angel’ were typical of a tingeltangel, The material would be suggestive and risque and the female performers would often act as ‘hostesses’ mingling with the audience encouraging them to buy drinks and other services on offer.
The name is thought to be derived from the sound of the coins landing on a plate as it is passed around the audience.
(Image nfo.net)
A definition of a tingeltangel established by a German court in 1904 is intriguing:
” commercial presentations at a fixed place of operation, consisting of musical performances, especially vocal music, declamations, dances, shorter musicals and similar works, devoid of any higher artistic or scholarly interest, and which are capable through either their content or their manner of presentation, of arousing the lower instincts, in particular the sexual lust of the audience “
* Not to be confused with Friedrich Hollaenders’s Tingel-Tangel club of 1931, of which, more later.
Amusingly for today, the character ‘Sideshow Bob’ from The Simpsons is known in German as ‘Tingeltangel Bob’
(source: Berlin Cabaret by Peter Jelavich)
Kurt Gerron was born in Berlin on May 11th 1897. He initially studied medicine but after being wounded in the First World War became a stage actor in 1920.
(image usa.diplo.de)
Throughout the Weimar period Kurt Gerron was one of its’ biggest stars.
He appeared in every major cabaret and Revue of the era and appeared in over 70 films, both silent and sound.
He starred opposite Marlene Dietrich in ‘The Blue Angel’ and was an original cast member of ‘Die Dreigroschenoper’ in 1928 , premiering the song ‘Die Morität de Mackie Messer’ ( Mack The Knife) and making it his own
(image movieplayer.it)
When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he moved to Amsterdam and continued to make films and appear in Revues. He declined an offer from Marlene Dietrich to come to Hollywood believing that his certificate exempting him from deportation as a war veteran would be honoured. After the German occupation of the Netherlands he was interned in Westerbork transit camp in mid –1943 before being sent to Theresienstadt – the “paradise ghetto”, near Prague on 25 February 1944.
There he ran a cabaret called “The Karussell” to entertain the ghetto inmates.
In 1944 he was coerced by The Nazis into making a propaganda film on the ‘idyllic’ and ‘humane’ conditions at the camp entitled “The Führer Gives The Jews A City”
After completion of the film, Gerron and his wife were deported to Auschwitz on the final transport, and gassed in Birkenau on 28 October 1944.
Das Lila Lied (The Lavender Song) was written by the cabaret composer Mischa Spoliansky (under the pseudonym of Arno Billing) and songwriter Kurt Schwabach in 1920.
(image mischaspoliansky.com)
(image uwosh.edu)
It was dedicated to the German physician and ‘sexologist’ Magnus Hirschfeld, an early homosexual rights activist.
(image glbtq.com)
It is now considered to be the first ever Gay Rights anthem.
This first version is from the Marek Weber Orchestra from 1921
And in English, by contemporary cabaret star Ute Lemper.
Marie Magdalene Dietrich was born on December 27th 1901 at 65 Leberstraße ( then called Sedanstraße) in the Schöneberg district of Berlin.
Her body was returned to Berlin and she was interred at Städtischer Friedhof III , in the district of Friedenau, close to her mothers grave and her birthplace.
Both locations are on a Map here
Rosa Vallentin was born in Berlin in March 1878. She was an actress, cabaret performer and singer whose career started in suburban Berlin theatre and graduated to cabaret after meeting political satirist and writer Kurt Tucholsky.
(Image filmportal.de)
In 1920 she founded ‘Cabaret Grössenwahn” (Cabaret Megalomania) at the Theater de Westens in the Kurfürstendamm. It was very much a model of the great Parisian cabarets of the 1890′s and it’s work tended to reflect the plight of the Berlin working class. One of the earlier successes of the cabaret was the work of Friedrich Hollaender and his wife, the singer Blandine Ebinger.
Rosa Valetti herself also regularly performed, her most famous song being ‘Die Rote Melodie’ (The Red Melody) a powerful anti-war song written specifically for her by Kurt Tucholsky with music by Hollaender.
The state of the German economy and the rampant inflation forced the closure of Cabaret Grössenwahn in 1922, after just two years. She mostly returned to acting but was also the director of the Rakete cabaret venue and another of her own ventures, the Rampe Cafe.
In the late 1920′s she was among the founders of an umbrella organisation of Left-leaning writers and actors ‘Larifari” who promoted a ‘floating cabaret’, performing at more alternative venues and tending to avoid the commercial theatres of Western Berlin.
In 1928, she was part of the original cast of Brecht and Weill’s ‘Die Dreigroschenoper” (The Threepenny Opera) playing Mrs. Peachum.
Like many of her contemporaries she acted in films, numbering over 40 from 1911 through to 1934, most notably opposite Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel in 1930, and in Fritz Lang’s classic ‘M’ in 1931
(image u.arizona.edu)
She was married to the actor Ludwig Roth and they had one child, daughter Liesel Valetti. She emigrated to Austria in 1933 and then to Palastine in 1936. She died in Vienna in December 1937, aged 60.
(image film.virtual-history.com)
She has a street named after her in Berlin’s Malsdorf district ‘ Rosa-Valetti-Straße”
Christopher Isherwood first came to Berlin in March of 1929, for a weeks visit with his friend, the writer W.H Auden, at the age of 25.
By his third visit of that year, in November, he had decided to stay indefinitely and took a room at an apartment attached to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in The Tiergarten district of the City.
“I’m looking for my Homeland and I’ve come to find out if this is it”
By October of 1930, he had moved into the Attic apartment of the Wolffe Family, with whose son Walter he was romantically involved, at Hallesches Tor. Then a month later to the Admiralstraße in Kottbusser Tor. It was not until December of 1930 that he arrived at Fraulein Thurau’s boarding house at Nollendorfstraße 17.
(images: Cabaret-Berlin)
On his first visit, back in March, Auden had introduced him to a boy bar called The Cosy Corner, at Zossenerstraße 7. It was formerly a neighbourhood restaurant called Nosters and it’s interior was shielded from the outside world by a heavy leather curtain across the door.
“Nothing could have looked less decadent than the Cosy Corner. It was plain, homely and unpretentious. Its only decorations were a few photographs of boxers and racing cyclists, pinned up above the bar. It was heated by a big old-fashioned iron stove. Partly because of the great heat of this stove and partly because they knew it excited their clients, the boys stripped off their sweaters or leather jackets and sat around with their shirts unbuttoned to the navel and their sleeves rolled up to the armpits”
(Christopher And His Kind)
(image source: Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon)
(images: Cabaret-Berlin)
Speaking in the 1970′s Christopher Isherwood said:
“Well, The Cozy Corner is now a dentists office, but I’ve heard the Kleist Casino is still the Kleist Casino”
The Kleist Casino was in Kleiststraße, between Nollendorfplatz and Wittenbergplatz, and just a short walk from Isherwood’s Nollendorfstraße lodgings.
“There are no windows on the blank wall. and the inside is dark and gloomy. In a small foyer, two nondescript young men lounge behind a counter. One of them demands that coats be checked for fifty pfennigs, while the other one , in boots, continues idly leafing through a magazine called Him. Inside, at the end of a corridor, the Kleist Casino turns out to be a parody of elegance. Striped blue and white awnings sag from the ceiling, bunches of faded flowers hang from the maroon wallpaper, and the bar is illuminated by two lamps supported by half-size torsos, without fig-leaves. About fifty young men sit around in morose silence, about a quarter of them affecting leather jackets, the rest in timid business suits. The two bartenders absent-mindedly twitch to the beat of a rather mild rock and roll and at the far end of the room, there are two couples engaged in a half-hearted twist. One of the dancers appears to be a girl, with long black hair, but if so, she would be the only girl here, and in the darkness it is hard to tell.”
(Otto Friedrich “Before The Deluge” 1970)
In the 1960′s, the operatic performance artist Klaus Nomi regularly performed arias there, whilst working as an usher at the Deutsche Opera
The Kleist Casino was operational until as recently as 2002, and is now one of Berlin’s most outrageous gay bars, Bull (open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week) and it is thought to be the site of the oldest gay bar in Europe.
Blandine Ebinger was born in Berlin in 1899, the daughter of pianist Gustav Loeser and the actress Margarete Wezel. Her theatre career began as early as age 8, with an appearance in Leipzig and then in many other stage productions.
(pic: filmnoirphotos.blogspot.com)
In 1919 she married the up and coming songwriter Friedrich Hollaender and became a major feature of the Berlin Cabaret scene with regular appearances at Cabaret Schall Und Rauch and at Rosa Valletti’s Cabaret Megalomania.
Over the years, she performed the works of many of the great songwriters and lyricists of the period including Mischa Spoliansky, Marcellus Schiffer and Werner Richard Heymann.
(pics: Archiv der Akademie der Künste, Berlin . Zander & Labisch; Debschitz-Urbach)
Her marriage to Hollaender ended in 1926. They had one daughter Philine. Hollaender emigrated to the United States in 1933, but problems persisted for Blandine and her ‘half-Jewish’ daughter and they both left for the USA in 1937.
She returned to Berlin in 1947, and then settled in Munich with her second husband, Helwig Hassenpflug, in 1961. They both eventually returned to Berlin where Blandine continued to work in numerous film and television productions. She died on Christmas Day 1993, aged 94.
Max Hansen was born Max Josef Haller on 22nd December 1897 in Mannheim, Germany. His mother was the Danish actress Eva Haller and his father was thought to be, Swedish Army officer, Schürer von Waldheim.
He grew up with foster parents in Munich and whilst still at school was performing at the Munich Opera House and had earned the nickname ‘Der kleine Caruso’ (The Little Caruso).
He studied music and voice and first appeared in cabaret at Munich’s Cabaret Simplizissimus at the age of 17. By 1914, he had moved to Vienna and was a well-known singer and comedian and it was here that he met the composer Franz Lehar.
In 1924 he moved to Berlin and regularly performed at The Metropoltheater am Nollendorfplatz (now Goya) and was a major name in operettas, revues, cabaret and radio.
( image: virtual-history.com)
(Karl Jöken (2nd from the left), Max Hansen (front), Paul Morgan (far right) and the Weintraub Syncopators in “Das Kabinett des Dr. Larifari” (1930) ( image: filmportal.de))
He was a co-founder of the Kadeko, along with Paul Morgan and Kurt Robitschek, also in 1924 and had a major success in the Ralph Benatzky operetta/musical The White Horse Inn, creating the role of Leopold The Waiter. A part he reprised in the 1926 film of the same name.
He appeared in more than 40 films from 1925 to 1956, including starring opposite the soprano Gitta Alpar in the film ‘She, or Nobody’ in 1932 and appearing as her in drag.
In 1932, he recorded the song “War’n Sie Schon mal in Mich Verliebt?” – a bitter parody of Hitler as a homosexual, which had unsurprising consequences.
In 1933, he left Berlin for Vienna and then emigrated to Denmark after the German invasion of Austria in 1938. He founded his own theatre in Copenhagen but returned to Berlin in 1951 to reprise his famous role in The White Horse Inn, back at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz.
He was married twice, firstly to Austrian actress Lizzi Waldmüller and from 1940 to Britta Hansen. He had three children and his son Max Hansen Jr, born in 1954, also became an actor.
He died on November 12 1961 in Copenhagen, aged 63
In 1932 the entertainer Max Hansen released the song
” War’n Sie Schon Mal in Mich Verliebt? ” (Weren’t You Once In Love With Me?)
It’s subject matter, inferring Hitler was gay, caused him a great deal of trouble. It was, however, a big hit but shortly afterwards Max Hansen fled Germany for Vienna.
A short English translation follows the German lyrics.
War’n Sie Schon Mal in Mich Verliebt?
Hitler und der Sigi Cohn
Kennen sich seit Jahren schon
Eines Tages gingn sie aus
Miteinand ins Hofbräuhaus
Doch schon bei der fünften Maß
Werden Hitlers Augen naß
Er umarmt den Sigi Cohn und stottert blaß:
Warst du schon mal in mich verliebt
Das ist das Schönste, was es gibt
Hast du noch nie von mir geträumt
Da hast du wirklich nicht versäumt
Ich bin nicht groß, ich bin nicht klein
Ich paß grad so nach München rein
Ich bin nicht dumm, ich bin nicht gscheit
Am größten Dreck hab i mei Freud
Die Freundschaft kannst du ruhig riskieren
Denn unter uns gesagt, ich hab nix mehr zum verliern.
Weren’t You Once in Love with Me?
(Note: The formal “Sie” is used; Lovers would use the informal “Du”)
Hitler and Sigi Cohn
Have know each other for years already
One day they went out
With each other to the Hofbraeuhaus
But by the fifth glass
Hitler’s eyes were rather damp
He embraced Sigi Cohn and spluttered out:
“Weren’t you once in love with me
That’s the most beautiful thing that there is
Have you never once dreamed of me
Well you’ve not missed anything
I’m not big, I’m not small
I just fit right into Munich
I’m not stupid, I’m not smart
But I just really love filth
You can risk this friendship
Because, between us, I have nothing left to lose
Erik Charell was dubbed ‘The German Mr Ziegfeld”. He was a legendary stage director and producer, and the creator of the glamourous stage revues of the 1920′s at the Grosse Schauspielhaus, a 3500- seater theatre at Friedrichstraße, the entertainment centre of Berlin. His revues were epic in scale and featured most of the big names working in Theatre and Cabaret at the time, including Marlene Dietrich, The Comedian Harmonists, Max Hansen , Paul Morgan, Claire Waldoff , Trude Hesterberg and many others.
(images: Wolff Freiherr von Gudenberg; Atelier Badekow-Grosz)
One of his biggest hits was ‘Im Weissen Rössl’ ( The White Horse Inn) which went on to become a world-wide success.
He moved into film in the early 1930′s and after fleeing Germany for America in 1933, continued to make films for Fox Pictures in Hollywood. He returned to Germany after the war and continued to work, creating the world-wide hit “Feuerwerk” in 1950 which spawned the hit song ‘O Mein Papa”.
He retired to Switzerland in the late 1950′s and died in 1974, aged 80. He left his entire estate to his long-term love Friedrich Zanner.
Glitter And Be Gay – Erik Charell and the Homosexuality of Operetta
Schwules Museum, Berlin from July 8th to September 27th 2010.
The exhibition, the first of it’s kind, will present costume and scenic designs by Ernst Stern, a 3D model of the Grosse Schauspielhaus, photos of the stars and productions and many documents relating to Charell’s life, with quotes from friends and colleagues giving a unique insight into the life and work of Erik Charell.
Schwules Museum
Mehringdamm 61
10961
Berlin
Opening Hours Mon, Weds, Thurs, Fri, 14.00 to 18.00 . Saturday 14.00 to 19.00
www.schwulesmuseum.de
Camilla Spira was born on March 1st 1906 in Hamburg.
At 13, she attended Max-Reinhardt acting school which lead to several theatre roles in Hamburg, Vienna and Berlin.
She made her film debut in 1924 at the age of 18 and went on to appear in several more silent films over the next few years.
It was in 1930 that she landed the role of Josepha in the Erik Charrell operetta “Im Weißen Rössl” (The White Horse Inn) to great critical acclaim. Also in 1930, she appeared in the Rudolf Nelson revue “Der Rote Faden” alongside a stellar line-up of Berlin Cabaret stars.
She continued to work in cabaret and film into the early 1930′s but her Jewish background forced her with her husband and two children to flee to Amsterdam in 1938. The whole family was deported to Westerbork Concentration camp in 1943, where, along with other great cabaret performers like Willy Rosen, Max Ehrlich and Kurt Gerron, they were ‘encouraged’ to perform for the other inmates in cabaret revues. Six cabaret revues were staged at Westerbork between June 1943 and June 1944. Eventually, aided by her mother’s lie that the actor Fritz Spira was not in fact her real father, and a hefty bribe from a Dutch friend, she was declared ‘Aryan’ and the family were released.
Camilla Spira performing at Westerbork concentration camp, shortly before her release in 1944
She survived the war and, in 1947, returned to Berlin, resuming her film career and was hugely successful over the next 20 years.
Her husband Dr. Hermann Lisner died in 1977 and one of her daughters Susanne Thaler became a well-known German politician.
Camilla Spira died in Berlin in 1997, aged 91.
(image xs4all.nl)
Sigrid Grajek, accompanied by Stefanie Rediske, presents a musical biography of the famous and much-loved Berlin Cabaret singer of the Weimar era, Claire Waldoff, at the Theater O-TonArt in Berlins’ Kulmer Straße, next month. Performances are Wednesday to Saturday – the 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st August at 19.30. The show also has four Sunday afternoon performances : 22nd August, 3rd October, 7th November and 5th December, all at 15.00
Tickets and further information at www.o-tonart.de or phone +49 (0) 30 99 19 19 119
Further information on Sigrid Grajek at www.projectorat.de
Wilhelm Emil Boden was born on September 29th 1884 in Einbeck, Germany.
He began his stage career as a serious actor at Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, but by 1906 had moved to Berlin’s Schiller Theatre and found himself drawn to the city’s vibrant cabaret scene.
He first appeared in cabaret in 1919 and was one of the first ‘discoveries’ of Trude Hesterberg’s Wilde Bühne at the Theater De Westens in 1921.
He portrayed an outrageously camp performer and was ground-breaking for the time. This character, and it’s lack of sexual threat, allowed him licence to mock prominent names and current events and was a huge hit with audiences.
” his exaggeratedly “faggoty’ intonations turned everything into a double-entendre, and yet his pudgy, prissy exterior played down any sexual threat by suggesting an hermaphroditic neutrality. Moon-faced, nasal-voiced, bespectacled, he delivered his commentary in a languorous sing-song that was the oral equivalent of a limp-wrist. He became a great favourite of both heterosexual and homosexual audiences”
Laurence Senelick – The Good Gay Comic Of Weimar Cabaret.
One of his most popular characters was “Lydia Smith, The Tattooed Lady”- also known in later years as “Magnesia, The Tattooed Lady”
(image: schwulesmuseum.de)
” Wearing an illustrated body cast, “she” pointed to various pictures on her body, and made comments with sexual overtones about political figures and other celebrities of the day – the assembled impotentates of Europe”
Peter Jelavich – Berlin Cabaret
He went on to play the whole gamut of cabaret, revue and theatre shows throughout the 1920′s, opening his own stage TüTü , which featured Mischa Spoliansky at the piano, and appearing in revues by Rudolf Nelson, operattas by Erik Charrell at the Grosses Schauspielhaus and in cabaret at The Scala and The Wintergarten.
Wilhelm Bendow with Margo Lion in “Was Ihr wollt, Nachrevue in Neunzehn Bildern”1927
(Image: Archiv der Akademie Der Künste, Berlin )
Wilhelm Bendow as a female martian in the comedy revue “Zeppelin 1000 auf dem Mars” 1929
(image: Ullstein Bild)
Wilhelm Bendow with Paul Morgan 1926
In 1932, he opened a second cabaret venue Bendow’s Buntes Bühne (Bendow’s Colourful Stage) at Kottbusser Straße 6, near Kottbusser Tor, which regularly featured the biggest names of the Berlin cabaret scene such as Claire Waldoff, Max Ehrlich and Paul Morgan.
“Wilhelm Bendow , the swishy transvestite comic, enjoyed a National Socialist following at his own cabaret house in Berlin East. The government-approved Grieben’s Guide Book for the 1936 Nazi Olympics magnanimously placed “Bendows Bunte Bühne” on the ‘highly recommended’ list for nighttime pleasures”
Mel Gordon – Voluptuous Panic
As with many cabaret artists and theatre actors of the time, he also worked in film, appearing in nearly 100 movies from 1921 to 1947, an achievement to rival many of Hollywoods biggest names of the period. His biggest film role was as The Man In The Moon in the 1943 movie ’The Adventures of Baron von Münchhausen’.
He retired from public life in 1948, after an accident left him with failing eyesight and died two years later on May 29th 1950 in his home town.
He has a school and The Wilhelm-Bendow Theater, named after him in Einbeck
The Weisse Maus (White Mouse) opened in 1919, at Jägerstraße 18 in the busy Friedrichstadt area of Berlin, famous for it’s numerous cabaret clubs and revue theatres.
It is rumoured to have acquired it’s name as it was across the Friedrichstraße from Rudolph Nelson’s cabaret Chat Noir (The Black Cat.)
It is described as a “beautiful 98-seat cabaret venue with a curtained stage” and was frequented by all manner of people from travelling salesmen on expense accounts to members of the criminal fraternity, alongside elderly couples from the provinces and a smattering of Berlin intellectuals.
In addition to the standard cabaret fare, naked ‘beauty dances’ were staged after midnight, with the proprietor Peter Sachse insisting before each performance that there was absolutely no pornographic content ” We come here for beauty alone”
Customers who wished to conceal their identities were given a choice of a black or white mask to wear.
In the Autumn of 1923, the outrageous and provocative naked dancer Anita Berber was performing here regularly, along with her own troupe of six teenage dancers.
” After midnight, the guests were ready for the apocalyptic moment when the blouse-less girls pranced up the stage ramp. Anita’s girls were powdered in deadly pallid shades and appeared like figures of death incarnate. But Anita performed with bitter sincerity. Each intrusion annoyed her. She responded to the audience’s heckling with show-stopping obscenities and indecent provocations”
“Berber had been known to spit brandy on them or stand naked on their tables, dousing herself in wine whilst simultaneously urinating”
” It was not long before the entire cabaret one night sank into a groundswell of shouting, screams and laughter. Anita jumped off the stage in fuming rage, grabbed the nearest champagne bottle and smashed it over a businessman’s head.”
“It was Anita’s last evening , she was sacked without notice”
( Mel Gordon – ‘Voluptuous Panic’ and ‘ The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber)
In 1926, the venue was to become the Monbijou Cabaret and home to Erich Lowinsky’s infamous Monday-night venture ‘Kabarett der Namenlosen ‘ – The Cabaret Of The Nameless.
Elfriede Katharina Nehrupt was born December 16th 1899 in Cologne, Germany.
Encouraged by her doctor father she came to Berlin aged 19, shortly after the first world war, to study classical music and song at the Stern Conservatory.
Fiercely political and drawn to the bohemian world of the west Berlin cabaret scene she was soon discovered by Rosa Valetti, and four days after her 20th birthday appeared for the first time at the Cafe Megalomania, to great acclaim.
Also around this time she met and married the sculptor Karsten Kühl.
Nicknamed ‘The Red Nightingale’, over the next ten years, she went on to perform in all the major cabaret venues of the time including the Wilde Bühne, Kadeko and the Katacombe.
( image – Ullstein Bild)
Described by Felix Joachimson as ‘The Mother Courage of the Literary Cabaret’, she was famed for her interpretations of the works of some of the greatest songwriters of the period, Friedrich Hollaender, Werner Richard Heyman and most significantly Kurt Tucholsky. She was also highly regarded by writers such as Erich Kästener and Bertolt Brecht.
So much so that she was cast as ‘Lucy’ in the premiere production of Brecht and Weill’s ‘ Die Dreigroschenoper’ ( The Threepenny Opera) in 1928.
In 1933, she fled Berlin and survived the war working in provincial radio. Returning to Berlin in 1945, she became a member of one of the new breed of cabaret troupes “den Außenseitern” performing works by Brecht. She began recording her material and also appeared in productions by the Berliner Ensemble, founded by Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel.
She remained artistically and politically active right through the 1950′s and early 1960′s and could still be found performing in midnight cabarets in the city in 1961.
During the latter part of the 1960′s she withdrew from performing and political activities and, after the death of her husband in 1964, lived a very secluded life in an apartment in Berlins Westend district, suffering from diabetes.
She died on January 29th 1970, aged 70, and is buried in the Friedhof Heerstraße.
She has been honoured with a star on the Cabaret Walk Of Fame in Mainz.
“Kate Kühl, with her dumpling cheeks and big, amusingly startled eyes, and with a voice that sounded like a scratchy clarion. She could trumpet straight into people’s hearts. She sounded so full of optimism, with a lovely, severe, and terse freshness… A queen with her hands on her hips.”
- Friedrich Luft
Kate Kühl performs Tucholsky’s Red Melodie here
Marguerite Hélène Constantine Barbe Elisabeth Lion was a French Singer and Actress, born in Istanbul (then Constantinople) on February 28th 1899.
She first came to Berlin in 1921 and made her debut at Trude Hesterbergs cabaret ‘Wild Bühne’ (The Wild Stage) in 1923. She performed the songs of her long-term boyfriend, the lyricist Marcellus Schiffer, who she married in 1928.
(Image: Archiv Der Akademie der Künst, Berlin)
(Image: Archiv Der Akademie der Künst, Berlin)
Her appearance and style was thought to be a huge influence on her friend, the young and then unknown, Marlene Dietrich.
She performed the controversial duet “Wenn Die Beste Freundin” with Dietrich in the revue “Es Liegt In Der Luft” in 1928. She also appeared in the famous Friedrich Hollaender Revues “Das Bist Du” (That’s You) in 1927 and “Bei Uns um Die Gedächtniskirche rum” (With Us ’round The Memorial Church) in 1928.
(Image: Archiv Der Akademie der Künst, Berlin)
(Image: Archiv Der Akademie der Künst, Berlin)
She appeared in 10 films between 1926 and 1932, and in 1931 was cast as Jenny in the French language film adaptation of Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera ” L’Opera des quat’sous”.
In 1932, her husband, Marcellus Schiffer committed suicide and by 1933, with the rise to power of the Nazi’s, she left Berlin for Paris.
She continued to work as a singer and actress, specialising in the work of Brecht on stage, and made a further 18 films from 1935 to 1976, appearing again alongside Marlene Dietrich in the French film ‘Martin Roumagnac’ in 1946.
She made a return to Berlin in 1977, appearing at the Berlin Festival, performing ‘Es Liegt In Der Luft” accompanied by Mischa Spoliansky on the piano.
(image: Kabarett.es)
She died in Paris on February 25th 1989, 3 days before her 90th birthday.
The extensive Marcellus Schiffer/Margo Lion archive is located in Der Archiv Der Akademie Der Künste in Berlin.
It is believed that the only time Bertolt Brecht ever appeared in person on a Berlin Cabaret stage was in January 1922.
Six years prior to his triumphant collaboration with Kurt Weill on The Threepenny Opera, the 24 year old budding writer and director, took to the stage of Trude Hesterberg’s ‘Wilde Bühne’ at the Theater de Westens for just six nights.
He performed his songs ‘Jakob Apfelböck’ – about a boy who murders his parents- and the grotesque war song ‘Die Ballade vom totem Soldaten’ (The Ballad of the Dead Soldier).
The song, written in 1918, describes how the German Army, short on manpower in the last months of the First World War, dig up a soldier who has already died in battle and, filling him with schnapps and dousing him in incense to cover up the smell, send him back to the Front to once again die a ‘hero’s death’
‘This bitter work, which also attacked military doctors, churchmen, and chauvinist citizens, caused a scandal at it’s first performance, and Hesterberg had to drop the curtain until the audience quietened down”
Peter Jelavich – Berlin Cabaret
‘Die Ballade vom toten Soldaten’ performed by Ernst Busch
Curt Bois was born on April 5th 1901 at 28 Ansbacherstrasse, in Berlins Schöneberg district. He was one of four children, his elder sister being the actress and comedian Ilse Bois, brought up by his single mother after their father had left them.
He began acting in 1907, age 6, and was one of the worlds first child actors in film. His first film role was in the silent movie ‘Bauernhaus und Grafenschloß’. In 1909 he played the title role in Der Kleine Detectiv (The Little Detective), and in 1911 he appeared alongside his sister in Shakespeare’s ‘Richard ll” at the Circus Busch.
Throughout the Weimar years he toured in vaudeville and cabaret through Germany, Austria, Hungary and Switzerland and in Berlin performed extensively at Trude Hesterberg’s ‘Wilde Bühne’. His style of humour and slapstick often being compared to Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd.
In 1924 he performed in “Quo Vadis”, the opening production at the Kadeko alongside Margo Lion and Kurt Gerron. The production was an early satire on Nazism and Hitlers ‘Beerhall Putsch’ of the previous year. It played over 300 times until May 1926.
Kurt Gerron with Curt Bois 1931
(image: Archiv der Akadamie der Kunst, Berlin)
From cabaret he moved into Operetta, working with Max Rheinhardt, Mischa Spoliansky and Friedrich Hollaender.
His biggest hit was in the adaptation of Brandon Thomas’s play ‘Charleys Aunt’ in 1928/29 and together with Max Hansen, co-wrote the stage comedy ‘Dienst am Kunden’ (customer service) in 1931
He fled Germany in 1933, first for Vienna and then Zurich to join Trude Hesterbergs cabaret, Corso. From there he and his wife, the singer Hedi Ury, went to Paris to visit Ilse. Here the decision was made to go to America, firstly to New York and eventually to Hollywood, making his US film debut in 1937 in ‘Hollywood Hotel’. His most famous film role of that time was as ‘The Pickpocket’ in the classic 1942 film ‘Casablanca’.
He returned to Germany in July 1950, returning to the stage in Gogol’s ‘The Government Inspector’. In 1951, he again met Bertolt Brecht and they worked together on the film production of ‘Mr Puntilla and his Man Matti’
He continued to work in theatre and film throughout the 1950′s and 1960′s and then in television during the 1970′s and early 1980′s.
(image: cyranos.ch)
His final role was in the Wim Wenders film ‘Wings Of Desire’ (Der Himmel über Berlin) in 1987, for which he received the award for Best Supporting Actor at the European Film Awards. It was presented to him at The Theater De Westens, where he had first performed 80 years previously.
His 80-year acting career is longer than any other actor in history and he appeared in over 100 films in both Germany and the US.
He died on Christmas Day 1991, aged 90, and is buried in Berlin’s Friedhof Wilmersdorf. Strangely, his grave is unmarked.
Surprisingly little is known about the life of the comedian and actress Ilse Bois, possibly due to being overshadowed by the stellar career of her younger brother Curt Bois.
She was born in Berlin around 1900, and from an early age was acting in children’s theatre to assist her mother, who was left to bring up 4 children on her own after their father deserted them. Her mother was re-married in 1907, to the playwright and librettist Albert Bernstein-Sawersky.
In 1911, she appeared alongside her brother in Shakespeare’s Richard II at the Circus Busch in Berlin, and from 1913 to 1918 she appeared in 11 films, alone and with Curt. Most notably, several dramatic fantasy-action films directed by Joseph Delmont; “Das Rechts aufs Dasein” and “Der Geheimnisvolle Klub”
(image: film.virtual-history.com)
She spent part of the First World War touring in a cabaret troupe performing in military hospitals and by the mid 1920′s was a regular performer at the Kadeko, and appeared in revues by Friedrich Hollaendar, such as “Es Kommt jeder dran” in 1928.
Ilse Bois as a Chicago Moll in “Achtung Aufnahme” at the Kadeko
(image: Galerie Bodo Nieman Berlin)
In 1927, she appeared as Miss Bourne in the Anglo-German film adaptation of Arnold Ridley’s classic play ‘The Ghost Train’ (Der Geisterzug), which premiered in Berlin in October of that year.
(image: venyoo.de)
She continued performing at the Kadeko right up to 1933, when she fled Germany for Austria. She later moved to Paris and then to London.
She was seen on stage in New York during the 1940′s, in the “Kabarett der Komiker” in 1942, the “Kleine Bühne” in 1945 and at the Carnegie Hall in a memorial show for writer Karl Kraus in 1947.
She died on March 5th 1961 in London.
* Any further information on Ilsa Bois would be very welcome, please contact info@cabaret-berlin.com. Many thanks.
Construction started in 1905 on the new centre-piece of western Berlin’s Nollendorfplatz, the Neues Schauspielhaus.
The huge theatre and concert hall, designed by architects Boswau & Knauer, opened in 1906 with a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in the 1260-seat theatre. By 1911, the Mozartsaale concert hall had been converted into a cinema, seating 1364.
(image: Architekturforum.net)
From the beginning of the First World War, the venue staged mostly operettas, but from 1914 to 1923 was run as the Theater am Nollendorfplatz under the leadership of author and theatre director Herman Haller. In 1927, the venue was taken over by the director Erwin Piscator for his Piscator-Bühne stage company. Piscator created ground-breaking time-critical performances commissioning writers such as Ernst Toller, Walter Mehring, George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht.
In 1928, the cinema was redesigned by Georg Leschnitzer and the seating capacity reduced to around 900. It was here on December 6th 1930 that the German premiere of the American anti-war film ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’ took place. Despite having been cleared by the censors, the Nazi party, and in particular Goebbels, took a dislike to the films portrayal of weariness and defeatism among the soldiers of the Great War.
“Goebbels sent bands of Storm Troopers to the theatre to threaten and harass anyone who wanted to see the movie. When that failed to stop the movie, the Nazis invaded the theatre itself and started shouting and booing. They set off stink bombs. They even brought cartons of white mice and released them under the seats.”
Otto Friedrich – Before The Deluge
The protests at Nollendorfplatz lasted three days. Eventually the Board Of Film Review reversed it’s decision and the film was banned from further showings.
After Erwin Piscator fled Germany in 1931, and for the duration of the Nazi regime, the theatre once again became a home to light opera under the direction of actor Harald Paulsen.
The main auditorium was destroyed during the Second World War, but the facade and the cinema remained intact.
In 1951 the venue was renamed The Metropol and throughout the 50′s, 60′s and 70′s was known mainly as a live music venue and in the 1980′s as a discotheque. A host of well-known names have played the Metropol over the years including Depeche Mode, The Human League, Joe Cocker, Eurythmics, The Jam and a very youthful U2.
For a short time in 2000, the venue became the home of Berlin’s legendary, boundary-pushing nightclub The KitKat Club.
In 2005 the interior of the venue was remodeled by the architect Hans Kollhoff, at a cost of 11 million euros, into what is now Goya. It is used for one-off club nights and private hires and has an exclusive restaurant on the first floor called The Elephant Food Club. Over the weekend of the local “Strassenfest” every June, the venue is open to the public.
Anita Berber was born in Dresden on June 10th 1899 to Felix and Lucie Berber. Felix was First Violinist with the Municipal Orchestra and Lucie, an aspiring actress and singer.
She was raised, mostly, by her grandmother in her early years and then exclusively so after her parents divorced in 1901 and, four years later, her mother left for Berlin and Rudolph Nelson’s Chat Noir cabaret stage.
At the age of 10 she was enrolled at the Jacque-Dalcroze Institute in Hellerau and thrived on its’ strict regime of physical training and Eurythmics. At 14, she re-joined her mother, now in Weimar, and studied French and Confectionary at an expensive girls’ boarding school. This was rapidly curtailed by the outbreak of the First World War that summer.
In 1915, both Anita and her mother moved to an apartment in Zähringer Strasse in Berlin’s Wilmersdorf district . Anita enrolled in acting classes and was spotted by the Avant-garde choreographer Rita Sacchetto. She made her debut with the dance-troupe in February 1916, alongside the young performance artist Valeska Gert.
Through 1916/17, Anita’s star was rising and she not only toured throughout Germany and Austria with the Sacchetto Troupe but also performed solo at the Berlin Wintergarten and was featured twice on the front cover of glossy women’s magazine Die Dame. By 1918 she had made her first of nine silent films, was becoming a sought-after model and was touring her own solo programme.
(image: Atelier Alex Binder)
( Die Dame magazine 1917)
(Die Dame magazine 1918)
It was during an after-show party at a Vienna hotel, that a drunken Anita Berber danced naked in public for the first time.
In January of 1919, Anita married the wealthy young screenwriter Eberhard von Nathusius. Her film career was blossoming and in the spring of that year she appeared, alongside rising-star Conrad Veidt, as Else in the ground-breaking Richard Oswald film ‘Different From The Others” (Anders als die Anderen).
Meanwhile her personal life had begun spiralling out of control with tales of lesbian affairs and S&M sex emerging from her tour to Vienna and reaching the daily newspapers of Berlin.
Back in Berlin in the winter of 1919, Anita occupied a suite at the Adlon Hotel, spent wildly on furs, shoes and jewellery and indulged heavily in cocaine, cognac and all-manner of illicit narcotics smuggled from around Europe. She would spend her nights touring the hotels and elegant restaurants of the city, wearing nothing but a sable coat, and with her pet monkey around her neck along with an antique brooch packed full of cocaine.
Her cabaret career was flourishing alongside her growing reputation, and she was performing regularly at Max Rheinhardt’s literary “Schall und Rauch” stage, but her film career was not so stellar as her behaviour and addictions were making her a liability to work with.
By 1921 her sham marriage had collapsed completely, Von Nathusius divorced her and she dated a string of beautiful women, including, allegedly, the young Marlene Dietrich. But it was stylish bar-owner Susi Wanowski who won her heart and very quickly became her lover, manager and secretary.
Cabaret and film appearances continued unabated: in Rudolph Nelson’s revue ‘Bitte Zahlen” (Please Pay); in Fritz Lang’s film “Mabuse” and midnight shows at the tiny Weisse Maus cabaret in Friedrichstrasse.
(“Bitte Zahlen” 1921 image: Ernst Schneider)
In June 1922, Anita met the dancer and poet Sebastian Droste during a particularly wild night out at a Berlin casino. It was to be a life-changing encounter.
Anita and Sebastian were immediately drawn to one another and convinced they could create something bold, new and shocking.
Rehearsals began immediately with a fervour only matched by the pairs’ cocaine consumption. Very quickly Droste had replaced Susi as Anita’s manager and, by July of 1922, a series of performances of their new production “The Dances Of Depravity, Horror and Esctasy” had been booked for Vienna in November.
(image: Atelier D’ora)
The next few months were filled with incident. Five weeks into rehearsals, the schedule and drug consumption took its’ toll and Anita checked into a Vienna Sanitorium. At the beginning of October her latest film with Richard Oswald “Lucrezia Borgia” was released to huge acclaim and a whistle-stop two week warm-up tour took her and Sebastian to Italy, Spain and France before their grand production opened in Vienna on November 14th.
(image: Atelier D’ora)
Drostes less-than honest dealings with theatre promoters and the huge depts they had both run up were soon to cause them huge problems. Multiple bookings of ‘exclusive’ performances and several breaches of contracts with promoters soon got them both expelled from the International Artists Union and no variety stage in Europe, Britain or Turkey could book them for the next two years. By the end of the year, Anita had violated the ban several times, been arrested for assault and theft, and was expelled from Vienna.
(image: Atelier Eberth)
In January 1923 Anita and Sebastian were married.
The IAU ban severely restricted their work, and so in March 1923 they undertook a five-month nightclub tour of Italy and Yugoslavia. They returned to Berlin in September but their relationship had reached a low and both were now hopelessly dependant on Cocaine. A month later, Sebastian stole Anita’s furs and jewellery, sold them and fled to New York.
By early 1924, a rested and rejuvenated Anita was back living at Zähringer Strasse with her mother and ready to work again. In August, she attend a performance by the American dancer Henri Chatin-Hoffman at Berlin’s Blüthne-Saal, fell instantly in love with him and they were married two weeks later.
Although working regularly at the Rampe, Schall und Rauch, and Cafe Grössenwahn, Anita and Henri premiered their first collaboration “Shipwrecked” in Stuttgart in April 1925.
In October the duo began a nationwide tour of their production and it was whilst they were in Düsseldorf that the artist Otto Dix painted his, now iconic, portrait ‘The Dancer Anita Berber’
In June 1926, Anita and Henri were on tour with their new production “Dances of Sex and Ecstasy”. Whilst in Zagreb, Anita publicly insulted the King of Yugoslavia and was imprisoned for six weeks. Back in Berlin, both Anita and Henri were now broke and Anita returned to the cabaret circuit.
(image: Atelier Alex Binder)
Friends urged them to come to the Netherlands to perform in a new revue which opened that October and lead to them both undertaking a considerable tour, keeping them away from Berlin for nearly the next two years. A Middle Eastern tour began in Athens and took them to Cairo, Beirut and Damascus where Henri pleaded with Anita to give up drinking.
On the night of July 13th 1928, Anita collapsed whilst performing at a Beirut nightclub, and was diagnosed with an advanced state of pulmonary tuberculosis. She desperately wanted to go home.
The journey home took four months, with Anita needing time to recuperate at each stage. Their money had been swallowed by the costs of transport, and in Berlin collections were being made backstage at cabaret venues to fund the last stages of the journey. Finally arriving in Berlin from Prague, Anita was taken straight to the Bethanien Hospital in Kreuzberg.
Four months later, on November 10th 1928, she died and was buried in a paupers grave at St. Thomas Friedhof in Neuköln.
She was 29. The graveyard is now disused and her grave, gone.
Mel Gordons’s compelling biography “The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber” is available from Amazon.co.uk here
On 4th November 2011, William Thirteen kindly posted:
“actually the cemetery is still there and still being used. Unfortunately there is no sign of Berber’s grave – the location can be narrowed down to a relatively small area in Section 2, Row 21″
Gertrud Johanna Dorothea Helene Hesterberg was born on May 2nd 1892, in Berlin.
She was first taught to sing by her opera-singer aunt and began her formal classical training in August 1911 at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. She made her stage debut in a production by Moliere in 1912 and, also in that year, her first silent film ‘Im Goldenen Käfig’.
(image: virtual-history.com)
Over the next few years she made many appearances on theatre and cabaret stages in Berlin, including The Wintergarten and Schall und Rauch performing works by Kurt Tucholsky, Friedrich Hollaender and Erich Kästner.
Her film career continued flourishing to the extent that in September 1921 she opened her own cabaret ‘Wilde Bühne’ (the Wild Stage) in the basement of the Theater De Westens. It was the first truly political-literary cabaret, and discovered some of the very best artists of the time, including Wilhelm Bendow, Walter Mehring and, for six nights only in January 1922, a young Bertolt Brecht.
By May 1922, Hesterberg was forced to take a break from the venue due to exhaustion and by 1923 the extraordinary hyper-inflation of the period had forced it to close.
Seven more silent movie appearances followed between 1925 and 1928, and Hesterberg was also now a regular feature at the Kadeko and in Erik Charrel revues at The Großenschaulspielhaus.
It is thought that she was an early consideration for the lead role in The Blue Angel, before it was given to Marlene Dietrich.
(image: Ullstein. Becker und Maass)
The sudden and dramatic changes of the early 1930′s often compelled non-jewish artists into dramatic compromises.
In January 1933, Trude Hesterberg joined the Nazi Party and The Fighting League For German Culture and became a member of an SS support group.
” As a woman and an artist I naturally have been influenced by all tendencies of the times, but I never became a politician. I have always instinctively considered my art as a megaphone of the popular opinions of the day. Out of this sense of artistic duty, I became a member of the Nazi party and the Fighting League”
Her sudden political change of heart was viewed as opportunism ,at best, by the authorities and she was placed under a great deal of scrutiny over the coming months.
By November of 1933, she had opened a new cabaret venue in Berlin, ‘Musenschaukel’ (The Muses Swing) but its’ aims to provide ” a popular cabaret which contains nothing foreign…. only numbers that are anchored in our nature and whose music is derived from folk songs” may have appeased the Nazi authorities but proved commercially disastrous and the venue closed in February 1934 after just two productions.
By March 1934 Trude Hesterberg and her troupe had returned to The Kadeko where she would continue to perform throughout the Nazi era, whilst also concentrating on her film career.
She appeared in 89 films between 1917 and 1964 and in 1962 was one of the first recipients of the ‘Filmband in Gold’ for outstanding commitment to German Film.
She died of heart disease on August 31st 1967 , aged 75, in Munich.
She has a star on the Cabaret Walk of Fame in Mainz.
Paul Graetz was one of the biggest male stars of the Weimar cabaret era. He was born on July 2nd 1890 in Glogau, in the west of Poland.
(image: virtual-history.com)
He made his acting debut in 1911 at the Neuen Theater in Frankfurt am Main and in 1916 joined the Deutschen Theater in Berlin. His first production was ‘The Merchant Of Venice’ directed by Max Rheinhardt, with whom he was to have a long association.
In 1919 he was one of the founding ensemble of Max Rheinhardt’s newly revived ‘Schall Und Rauch’ cabaret in the basement of the Grosses Schauspielhaus , performing songs and comic monologues by Kurt Tucholsky and Walter Mehring. The political and literary nature of ‘Schall Und Rauch’ proved unsustainable and it lasted just a little over a year.
(image: Markische Museum)
Paul Graetz’ career, however, was blossoming and in 1920 he made his film debut in ‘Sumurum’ a silent movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
By 1925, he had left the Deutschen Theater and was working successfully as a freelance stage and film actor, and as a cabaret artist was a regular performer at the Kadeko.He made a total of 44 films between 1920 and 1936 and, in 1930, worked again with Max Rheinhardt on a stage production of ‘The Tales Of Hoffmann’ at the Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin.
(image: Ullstein Bild)
In 1933 he fled Berlin for London where he starred alongside, a then unknown, Errol Flynn in ‘Murder at Monte Carlo’ in 1934 and in the title role in ‘Mr Cohen Takes A Walk’ in 1935. This role took him to Hollywood, but not to the success he hoped for.
He made just two more movies before his untimely death on February 16th 1937, aged just 46.
He has a star on the Cabaret Walk of Fame in Mainz.
Anita Berber
June 10th 1899 – November 10th 1928
Anita Berber, the 29 year old dancer, actress and ‘wild-child’ of the Weimar cabaret era, died on this day in 1928. She was buried in a paupers grave in St. Thomas Friedhof in the Neukoln district of Berlin. The cemetery is now disused and her grave, gone.
” Only thrill-seeking transvestite couples from the Eldorado nightclub, some sombre journalists and intellectuals in top hats, a couple of film directors, the German sexolologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, and immediate relatives from the Berber clan attended. Henri Chatin-Hoffman…. and his latest dance partner watched from afar. The intimate and bohemian ceremony that was planned had to be curtailed due to a nonstop rainfall”
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber – Mel Gordon
From the moment you walk into the vast tented structure that is The Tipi, you know you are on for something very special indeed.
Arriving an hour before curtain-up, the venue is already busy, and bustling with the sounds of people dining and drinking pre-show. As you are shown to your table by costumed ushers you quickly realise you are in the heart of The Kit Kat Klub at the tail-end of 1929.
With drinks ordered and atmosphere building, in no time at all the orchestra have taken their places and the lights dimmed as the first strains of ‘Wilkommen’ are heard. From then on the production numbers come thick and fast. The spoken scenes are a little jarring at first, in comparison to the frenetic energy of the musical numbers, but they will surely gain pace as the run continues. A relatively long first half of 90 minutes closes with an ensemble performance of ‘Tomorrow Belongs To Me’ that will stay with you for a very long time. My companions and I were very grateful for the lengthy blackout that followed to regain our composure and pass round the tissues!
The waiting staff whirl into action and interval drinks are delivered and desserts brought to those dining. A chance to take a breather.
The interval draws to a close with a surreal promenade by the orchestra through the venue and a chance for the Kit Kat ‘girls’ to get up close and personal with the audience, and indeed they do!
The second half of the show obviously has a very different feel as the excesses of the ’20′s give way to the impending horror of the ’30′s. Even so, stand-out moments are a heart-rending delivery of ‘Maybe This Time’ and an exquisite comic performance of ‘If You Could See Her’. The second half flashes by in a lightening 50 minutes and the finale brings the audience to their feet.
Whilst it is difficult and a little unfair to single out individual performances in an ensemble piece such as this, it is unavoidable. Michael Kargus is an extraordinary ‘MC’- very much in the Alan Cummings mould rather than that of Joel Grey. He is engaging and sexy with just the right amount of arrogance and disdain. Sophie Berner re-defines ‘Sally Bowles’ and makes the role her own. A herculean task faced with those that have gone before her. Mogens Eggemann is wonderful as “Frenchie’ – one of the Kit Kat ‘Girls’. He can high-kick and do things in heels that some ‘real girls’ can only dream of!
This production is truly a one-off and a must-see event. Whilst, not the cheapest night you will ever have in a theatre it is worth every cent. Get someone to buy you a ticket for Christmas!
http://www.tipi-am-kanzleramt.de/
“Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small back dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all around you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unholy ocean – sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the iron-work of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.
……. the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood – The Tiergarten. At this time of year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. It will not receive these boys. It has nothing to give. The cold drives them out of its streets, into the wood which is its cruel heart. And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their far-away cottage stoves.”
Christopher Isherwood – Goodbye To Berlin
In December of 1925 the American cabaret performer Josephine Baker brought her show ‘La Revue Négre’ from Paris to Berlins Theater De Westens.
Throughout the early 1920′s, Jazz was rapidly replacing the more traditional musical forms in Cabaret and Revue but it was not until after the stabilisation of the currency in 1924 that many Berliners had the chance to experience it live.
Josephine Baker became an almost overnight phenomenon from which it was said “the women of Berlin were never the same again.”
The black performers touring Europe at the time were perceived as both reinforcing and subverting racial stereotypes with Baker at the forefront. Typical examples being her intentionally ludicrous ‘Dance of the Savages’ which she performed in just a loin cloth and the blatant cliche of her most famous performance wearing a skirt composed of just bananas.
Another troupe performing in Berlin in the same year as Baker were ‘The Chocolate Kiddies’ performing music by Duke Ellington at the Admiralspalast.
The newspaper reviews of both shows were astonishing, describing the black performers as primitive and primeval whilst, at the same time, utterly modern.
” They are a cross between primeval forests and skyscrapers; likewise their music , Jazz, in its colour and rhythms. Ultramodern and ultraprimitive”
” They have brought us our culture. Humanity has returned to its origins in the steps, the shaking and loosened bodies. Only that can help us, we who have become too erratic. It is the deepest expression of our innermost longing”
Josephine Baker replied in her memoirs:
” In Berlin’s journals and newspapers they wrote that I was the embodiment of the German ‘expressionism’ of today, of German ‘primitivism’ …. what is the meaning of all that?”
Maria Magdelene Dietrich was born on this day, 27th December, in 1901 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin.
She was the second daughter of Louis Dietrich, a police lieutenant, and Wilhelmina Felsing, the daughter of a well-to-do Berlin family. Her sister Elisabeth was a year older than her. Her father died when she was 10 and five years later, in 1916, her mother married Grenadier Lieutenant Eduard von Losch who was soon killed in the First World War.
She initially enrolled in the Berlin School of Music with dreams of becoming a concert violinist but an injury to her wrist soon put paid to that. After a failed first audition at Max Rheinhardts acting school, and a job as a chorus girl in a touring revue, she applied again and joined the school in 1921 as Marlene Dietrich.
She made her film debut in 1922 and later that year met and married the young film director Rudolf Sieber. In 1924 they had a daughter, Maria.
She was not a major feature of the Berlin cabaret scene, mainly working in film, but it was in 1929 during her performances in the Mischa Spoliansky revue ‘It’s In The Air’ and Georg Kaisers ‘Two Neckties’ that she was spotted by the American director Josef Von Sternberg and cast in ‘The Blue Angel’
On the day ‘The Blue Angel’ opened in Berlin in 1930, Marlene was due to leave for Hollywood to begin her contract with Paramount. She attended the opening, took a bow at the end to thunderous applause and caught the train out of Berlin.
Elow was the stage name of Erich Lowinsky, a Weimar-era cabaret Conferencier.
He is perhaps most famous for his Kabarett De Namenlosen ( Cabaret Of The Nameless) which debuted in 1926 at the Monbijou Cabaret -formally The Weisse Maus- in Berlin’s Friedrichstraße. The concept was simple and would be easily recognisable to a modern-day audience. Anyone who applied was accepted to perform for the public. Elow received over 180 replies to his first advertisement for acts and hosted 15 acts at a time on Monday nights in front of a paying audience.
Inevitably, the acts were dreadful. Some convinced that the night would give them their ‘big break’ and set them on the road to fame and fortune, others just deluded amateurs, some mentally ill or schizophrenic.
The performers were greeted with laughter and heckling from the audience and many left the stage distressed and in tears.
The critics were outraged, describing the venture as “sadism” and “typical Berlin bad taste”
Unlike its’ modern-day ancestors, it was a relatively short-lived venture.
Elow is repeatedly, and incorrectly, referred to in books, journals and websites about the period as Erwin Lowinsky. His name was in fact Erich Lowinsky
I am indebted to his grandchildren Miriam and Steve Alexander for contacting me, supplying the above picture and allowing me to correct this oft-repeated mistake.
Norbert Schiller was born in 1899 in Vienna, Austria.
(photo – Judy Sutcliffe)
He was drafted into the First World War as a very young man, but his natural ability to entertain his fellow troops soon got him re-assigned to a Concert Party for the officers.
After the war, and with no formal training, he attended an open audition for young actors at The Vienna State Opera and was cast. He went on to join the Frankfurt Theater Ensemble and, whilst touring with them, met and fell in love with a very young Helene Mayer. She was at that time still in high school but was already a champion Fencer. She went on to become a Fencing World Champion and, controversially, the only Jewish athlete in the 1936 German Olympic Team.
Through touring the country, Norbert Schiller and his ‘matinee-idol’ looks very quickly achieved heartthrob status. He even played Romeo for an astounding 50 week run in Munich.
Throughout this time, and for the rest of his life, he wrote plays and poetry with much of his early material finding its way on to the Berlin cabaret stages.
When the Nazis took power he escaped Berlin, first to his mothers home in Vienna and then, shortly after she died, to England and then Los Angeles.
He lived in Ojai, California, for some time and it was here at the age of 45 he met and married his wife Mary. He kept working in film and television but never really learned English well enough to get parts beyond cameos and minor characters. Amongst many other roles, he played a recurring character in the 1960′s sitcom Hogans Heroes, the T.V movie version of Dynasty, and the 1974 Mel Brooks film Young Frankenstein. He is listed at IMDB with 95 film and television credits from 1922 to 1979.
(photo – Judy Sutcliffe)
Norbert and Mary settled in Santa Barbara, where he died in 1988 aged 89.
(photo – Judy Sutcliffe)
Huge thanks to Judy Sutcliffe for her help with this post and for her fantastic photos. Her book ‘A Collection Of Old Men’ is available from here www.sevengablespress.com
My Cabaret-Berlin blog is now a year old. What started as a way of me recording and sharing what I had found out about my adopted city and the fascinating (to me!) period of the Weimar Republic, has certainly grown up.
(Ice arena in the Admiralspalast 1922. Image :Ullstein Bild)
(Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel 1930)
The first post, on May 13th last year, was a short history of the Eldorado Nightclub, and involved me venturing no further than the street I live in. I believe that post took me almost a whole day to write and compose, wrestling with the complexities of a WordPress format and inserting the photographs I had taken. It still does!
Those first few weeks were a frenzy of writing and research, with 12 posts published in as many days, and I was overjoyed and amazed that, by the end of the month, 419 people had looked at the site.
Today, as I write, the site is just about to pass the 75,000 visitor mark. This is truly astonishing to me.
The average is about 350 visits a day and, fact fans, Mondays at 10pm CET is rush hour!
By far and away the most searched-for topic is the dancer Anita Berber, with 2000 hits alone. This, of course, doesn’t take into account other searches involving her name connected with other people or places, or misspellings.
Sally Bowles is second with 1000 hits and Christopher Isherwood is fourth with 600.
The BBC’s adaptation of Christopher And His Kind in March of this year caused a surge of searches around that topic that lasted over a week. And it only takes a quick scan of the statistics to figure out if the film Cabaret has been on TV somewhere recently!
The future:
A Website
I’m now not sure that a blog is the best way to present and store this material, and am looking into converting the site into a proper, grown-up website that would be easier to search and better-looking. This will hopefully happen over the next few months.
There are still so many more stories to tell, and fascinating stuff to find out about that extraordinary period of just 14 years between the tragedy of the First World War and the horror that was to follow.
A Trip
This summer, I hope to visit the city of Mainz, home to the Deutsches Kabarettarchiv and the newly founded Cabaret Walk Of Fame. Visit their website here
Isherwood’s Neighbourhood – A Walking Tour.
Starting and ending at Nollendorfplatz, this one-hour tour visits the neighbourhood Christopher Isherwood lived in during his time in Berlin and where he wrote his famous Berlin Diaries, which were to become the film Cabaret. Including readings from his novels and diaries, we will see the sights he wrote about, the bars and clubs he frequented and taste the city as he saw it in those uncertain times.
(Nollendorfplatz 1926)
The tour is available by advance booking on info@10777tours.com and is €10 per person.
Starting and ending at Nollendorfplatz, this circular one-hour tour visits the neighbourhood Christopher Isherwood lived in during his time in Berlin and where he wrote his famous Berlin Diaries, which were to become the film Cabaret. The walk includes readings from his novels and diaries, and takes in the sights he wrote about and the cafes, bars and clubs he frequented. Taste the city as he saw it in those uncertain times, where Cabaret was born, genders were blurred and a film caused riots!
The tour is available all day Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays and at 11am on Saturdays and Sundays and is €10 per person.Book by email to brendan@10777tours.com , or by text to +4915125220342 . Discounts available for larger groups.
Nollendorfplatz is in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, and is on the U-Bahn lines U1, U2, U3, U4.
The “Resi” was the nickname of a vast, luxurious dance-hall called The Residenz-Casino at Blumentrasse 10, just by Alexanderplatz. At various times in it’s history it has been known as Balhaus Resi, Tanzpalast Resi, Residenz Casino and just plain Resi.
It was built and opened in 1908 by Paul Baatz, but it was in the Weimar Period that the venue really came into its’ own.
The dance-floor was large enough for 1000 people and it’s ceiling made from reflective glass. There were four bars, private rooms and even a carousel.
Above the dance-floor were one hundred mirrored globes which opened and closed to the rhythm of the orchestra, and in 1928 a dancing water feature was installed. In the late 20′s the venue housed 86,000 electric lights!
Its’ most talked about feature were 200 private telephones fixed to tables and various stations around the venue, where customers could contact other tables or flirt anonymously with other patrons. Guests could also choose from a menu of 135 gift items and have them sent to other patrons via pneumatic delivery tubes (Rohrpoststation) suspended above the tables.
The venue closed just before the war in 1939, but was recreated in 1951 in Kreuzberg at Hasenheide 32, and was hugely popular with British and American servicemen and women. Once again, it featured the telephones on the tables, the rohrpoststation, and spectacular water shows created by Otto Przystawik, whose son Michael Przystawik still designs and installs water shows to clubs and venues around the world.
The venue closed in 1978 and the building demolished that same year.
The Stork’s Nest Cabaret is widely believed to be the inspiration for the cabaret venue featured in the iconic 1930 Marlene Dietrich movie The Blue Angel.
It was at 42 Oranienburger Strasse, close to the Friedrichstadt Palast and existed from 1923 to 1931. On the outside of the building was colourful canopy sheltering a glass display case featuring photographs of the performers and boastful reviews of the cabaret on offer.
The interior was way past it’s best and it’s patrons drunk and bawdy. On the stage there was a semi-circle of chairs on which the evening’s ‘chanteuses’ sat. As one finished their song, another would stand and make their way down-stage for their performance. The songs were often filthy and suggestive and the performers more likely at the end of their career than at the start.
It was not uncommon for large glasses of beer to handed up to the performers whilst they were on stage, and they all sold photographs of themselves to the audience during the intervals.
There would occasionally be some touring acts added to the regulars on the bill, the most notable being Torch Song singer Lola Niedlich, dancer Charlotte Corday and transvestite ventriloquist Paul Schiephacke.
It was also possible for customers to purchase seats on the stage , and to meet privately with the performers in side-rooms backstage. The possibilities were seemingly endless if the price was right. Unfortunately, unsuspecting tourists in the audience, would often leave to find they had been relieved of their wallets and watches.
This is the plaque on the house at Nollendorfstraße 17 where Christopher Isherwood lived during most of his time in Berlin. Unfortunately it is incorrect.
Christopher Isherwood did arrive in Berlin in March of 1929 but only for a weeks holiday to visit his friend WH Auden. He visited the city three times in that year and it was in November that he chose to stay indefinitely. His first permanent residence was in a room in an apartment at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science at In Der Zelten in the Tiergarten district of the city. He stayed there until October of 1930, when he briefly moved in with his boyfriend’s family to Wassertorstraße , near Hallesches Tor. From there, a month later, he moved into an apartment at Admiralstorstraße, near Kotbusser Tor.
It wasn’t until December of 1930 that he moved into the boarding house of Fraulein Thurau at Nollendorfstraße 17.
Visit the places he lived, socialised and documented in his Berlin Diaries of 1929 to 1932, the vibrance and edge of the Weimar Era. Accompanied by short readings from his works, see where 'Cabaret' was born, genders were blurred and films caused riots.
Duration: approximately one hour
Distance: one kilometre
Start and finishing point: Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn
Language: English
Price: 10€ per person; discounts for larger groups
To book, email Brendan or send an SMS to +49 151 25 22 03 42
