Cabaret
Sharp-Tongued Muse
By WILLIAM GUTTMANN THE appearance of The Estab- lishment has made it fash- ionable to talk about the con- tinental cabaret and especially its heyday in pre-Nazi Ger- many. These discussions are often based on little more than vague memories and remote hearsay and show scant knowledge or under- standing of the facts. Fortunately a very thorough and scholarly book on the subject has just been published in Germany : Die Muse mit der scharfen Zunge (The Sharp-tongued Muse) by Klaus Budzinski (Paul List, Munich). The book touches on the French cabaret of earlier days, and also covers the 1940s and 1950s; but its main theme is the rise and decline of German- speaking cabaret during the first third of the century. Much of the book, inevitably, is con- cerned with the details of forgotten events, and most English readers may be familiar only with a handful of names such as Max Reinhardt, Dietrich, Weill, Brecht, Erich Kaestner (Emil and the Detectives), together with a few song hits which crossed the frontiers and have sur- vived the years. But some of Mr. Budzinski's conclusions and observations have a general sig- nificance and should help to inject realism into today's discussions about continental cabaret.
What are the pre-conditions for a flourishing cabaret? What kind of society and political regime offer the best soil for it? Obviously not a dictatorship; the instances in which cabaret artists showed much admirable courage in Hitler's Reich are only the exceptions which prove the rule. But neither, Mr. Budzinski maintains, the settled democracies where, as ex- perience shows, a cabaret tradition has never developed; the success of cabaret in Switzerland in both world wars is ascribed mainly to the influx of refugee artists who found there a temporary home for their talents and their im- ported grievances. The best ambience, he thinks, is 'the democracy without a deep-rooted demo- cratic consciousness'—a combination of dimin- ished pressure from above with the lack of the habit of political responsibility below.
But even where this favourable climate pre- vails—as it did in the Weimar Republic—the fortunes and the very character of the cabaret depends on other factors too. English critics are in the habit of equating continental cabaret quite wrongly with 'political' or 'satirical' cabaret— what Mr. Budzinski calls Zeitkritisches Cabaret. German cabaret was both more and less than this. It was a member of a vast family including such forms of entertainment as variety, little revue, short operetta, etc., in which alliances and incestuous marriages freely took place. There was rarely a cabaret programme that was exclusively devoted to political or social satire. What de- termined the element of satire and aggressive- ness was the prevailing economic and political atmosphere—the more unsettled the times were, the more prevalent the aggressive note and the satirical character of the performance. One of the hottest spots of this kind was the 'Wilde Buehne' in Berlin during the inflation, when the performers were paid with a good meal and a multiple of the admission charge (according to the ever-sliding value of the Mark), with their fat and prosperous victims filling the auditorium.
When the Berliners began to have it good after the stabilisation of the currency in the mid- Twenties, the satire tended to be sweetened and replaced by a song and dance schmalz. Yet a satirical component always remained, and mainly in its traditional form, represented by the conferencier, or announcer. In theory the conferencier's task was to announce each turn; in practice he had the complete freedom of the interval between acts. He had to be an accom- plished conversationalist, witty, well informed and up-to-date : one of the leaders in the pro- fession, Paul Nikolaus, owed his rise to fame partly to the fact that at late performances be had the early editions of the following morning's papers delivered to the stage.
The programme itself was of the utmost variety, and even in cabarets which stay in the memory as the real 'satirical' ones, the acts would include chansons sentimental, satirical, risque or merely shocking, poems of the same species (Gebrauchslyrik, utility poetry), essayists reading their essays, reporters reading their re- portages, clowns, dancers, magicians, and there was no saying in advance if and where satire would come in. Willy Rosen, at the piano, would sing 'lyrics and music by me,' and one senti- mental number in which he implored his adorata, 'if ever you give away your heart, give it to me' would overnight become a biting attack by replacing `herz' with `nere—the mink coat which at that time played the same part in a political scandal as Sherman Adams's vicuna coat. Or Kate Kuehl, who used to sing in the cabarets a Kiplingesque ballad by Bert Brecht, `Surabaya-Johnny,' would not hesitate to carica- ture both Brecht and herself by singing a parody by Erich Kaestner:
You have lied, Johnny, you are not true, You did not travel, Johnny.
You are not by Kipling, Johnny— Take your pipe out of your mouth—
You are by Brecht!
In all this the important thing was the close contact between the performer and the audience. Although it was not the rule, especi- ally not in later days when the cabarets became bigger and more like theatres, in some places the artists sat in the auditorium and talked with the audience when they were off stage. 1 re- member once having to help Joachim Ringelnatz to scramble on to the podium after he had drunk too much at our table. But apart from this sort of occasional fraternisation, it was always the conferencier who had to establish the atmosphere. He addressed the audience, of course, directly, taking them into his confidence, cajoling them or being outright rude to them and always ready to answer back when the audience attacked him. One famous con- ferencier, Helmuth Krueger, was well known for his habit of speaking very fast; once, when somebody in the audience shouted, 'Talk more slowly,' the answer came back like a shot, 'Think more quickly!' And when, during the Nazi regime, somebody shouted 'Jewish lout' to Werner Finck, he was prompt with his reply, 'You are quite wrong, it is only that my face looks so intelligent!' That was, at that time, a brave act, one of many performed by him and some of his colleagues. It was in the true spirit of the German cabaret and for this, if for nothing else, the German cabaret deserves a niche in history.
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