Although cabaret was born in France and there is found its first sparkling popularity, in was in Germany – no, in Berlin! – that it found its fullest form of expression. Why is that?

At its core, cabaret was always a form of art that offered many different presentations in as many different registers. Song, monologues, jokes, acrobatic stunts, skits. In just a few hours, the audience could taste a bit of everything. This kind of language agreed particularly well withthelife of the young metropolis.

The youngest metropolis in Europe

Berlin was one of the last European capital cities to come to the fore and in many ways, it can be considered younger than Paris or London. It started to grow only after the Thirty Years’ War, drawing people from all Central Europe and in the XVII century Berlin welcomed Jews expelled from Vienna and Huguenots driven out of France. As the city found her industrial aspiration at the beginning of the XIX century, she became hungry of workers, who came from all German speaking countries and beyond., until in the Wilhelmin Era, at the peak of her Pangerman dream, Berlin exploded as a vibrant, modern capital.

In a matter of few decades, Berlin became a modern, young capital, forever changing, forever growing, forever hungry of new things and her population, so heterogeneous slowly melted together… but not completely.
At her very heart, Berlin was always a city of many souls, where the fragmentation and diversity was great and sometimes conflicting.

City dwellers, who mostly worked in the new factories that offered good wages and long working hours, became accustomed to the frantic rhythms of industry as well as to the possibility to buy what they wanted. They became consumers as well as citizens, and because they were accustomed to the fast pace, they bored easily. They sought change, they were anxious and dissatisfied, always wanting.

Cabaret and the anxiety of metropolitan life

At the end of the 1800s, novelist had tried to capture this new state of mind, this deeply new feeling, but the very length and complexity of the novel made it inadequate to express city life.
It was theatre in the end that offered that kind of fragmented language that was the metropolis’s own. The one-act play as well as the ‘station drama’ – where an individual’s progressed from one incident to another without any overarching structure – became more popular. The variety show – which offered many different short skits in one night – was born in London. The cabaret – which offered short, satirical comments on everyday life – was born in Paris. But it was in Berlin that these two forms of entertainment met and merged in a unique way.
The structure of the variety show merged with the idea of the cabaret’s confériencer who would strung all acts together and guided the audience through the show. And everything held a sense of ‘becoming’. Nothing was ever sure in cabarets. Improvisation was king, reaction and counter-reaction fuelled each other. In Berlin, this tightly merged with a strong sense of rebellion and political involvement that was characteristic of the Weimar time.

Not just pure entertainment, cabaret in Berlin became in many instances social awareness. A form of expression and social commentary that was between the mindlessness of the variety show and the esoterism of the avant gardes which spoke the people’s true fragmented language.

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RESOURCES

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993

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