Cabaret

Berlin, decade of the 30.

The nazi Party

Kit Kat Club

Le Chat Noir opened in Montmartre in 1881, founded by Rodolphe Salis, and it set the template: a bohemian crowd, satirical songs, shadow puppet shows, and Salis himself acting as a kind of proto-emcee, mocking his own customers as they walked in.

Montmartre at the time was full of cheap rent and cheap wine, which drew poets, painters, and anarchists together in the same rooms.

The Moulin Rouge (1889) leaned more toward can-can and spectacle than the intimate satire of Chat Noir, showing how quickly the form started to branch.

such as Eric Satie in Le Chat Noir () and the Moulin Rouge (the Red Moulin)

The Moulin Rouge (the Red Moulin) such as Toulouse-Lautrec.

Cabaret is a style of entertainment—and the type of venue it happens in—that mixes music, song, dance, comedy, and sometimes theater into a single intimate show.

Cabaret traditionally happens in a small, intimate space —a nightclub, restaurant, or bar— rather than a formal theater. Audiences usually sit at tables, often eating or drinking during the performance, and there’s little separation between performers and crowd: personal and spontaneous rather than polished and distant.

The show is typically a varieties spectacle: a sequence of different acts (a singer, a comedian, a dancer, maybe a magician or drag performer…) stitched together, often by an emcee (a “compère”) who banters with the audience between numbers.

It is flexible: the same venue might host wildly different lineups night to night.

Cabaret emerged in late 19th-century Paris (Le Chat Noir, 1881, is often cited as the first true cabaret) as a place where artists, writers, and performers could be irreverent, satirical, and sexually frank in ways more formal theater wouldn’t allow.

That spirit carried into Weimar-era Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s, where cabaret became a vehicle for political satire and social commentary.

Ïn Weimar Berlin cabarets like Schall und Rauch mixed sharp political sketches with music from composers like Kurt Weill and Friedrich Hollaender.

It was a genuinely dangerous kind of comedy, mocking politicians and social hypocrisy at a moment when Germany’s politics were curdling badly.

When the Nazis took power in 1933, cabaret was an early target: many performers were Jewish, queer, leftist, or all three, and the genre’s whole ethos was incompatible with the regime.

Vienna had its own literary cabaret scene (Nachtlicht, Fledermaus) with a more absurdist, dadaist bent.

New York developed supper clubs and piano bars in the 20th century: a lineage that runs through Cole Porter–style songbook performance into today’s cabaret rooms.

Modern cabaret is genuinely fragmented in burlesque revivales (tease-and-spectacle), Drag cabaret (gender-bending irreverence), piano bar and jazz cabaret (intimate singer-songwriter tradition) and dinner theater (variety-show structure).

The Weimar Constitution created a semi-presidential system: a Chancellor led the government day-to-day, but the President held significant emergency powers under Article 48, which let him rule by decree “to restore public order” without needing parliamentary approval. This clause was meant as a safety valve for crises, but it became a loophole that Hitler exploited once in power — it’s a big part of how democratic institutions got dismantled from the inside rather than overthrown outright.

The Reichstag (German Parliament) was elected by proportional representation. That fragmented politics into dozens of small parties. Coalition governments were constantly forming and collapsing: the republic went through over 20 different Chancellors in 14 years.

The main political parties where the following ones:

• Social Democratic Party (SPD): moderated, main during the Republic
• Communist Party (KPD): far-left, wanted a soviet-style revolution
• Zentrum: catholic, centrist, often key to coalitions
• German Democratic Party: liberal, pro-republic middle-class
• German People’s Party: conservative liberals, business interests
• German National People’s Party: monarchist, nationalist conservative
• Nazi Party (NSDAP): far-right, fringe initially.

), gobernado por el Káiser Guillermo II (Wilhelm II). No había ninguna “república” todavía — eso viene justo después, cuando el imperio colapsa en noviembre de 1918.

After loosing the First World War, the Deutsches Kaiserreich (German Empire) of Káiser (from Caesar: Emperor) Wilhelm II.

Paul von Hindenburg was a field marshal, militar hero from the First World War (mainly by the Tannenberg Battle against the Russian Empire in 1914).

During the Weimar Republic he was elected President of Germany twice: in 1925 and 1932.

Así que Hindenburg conecta ambas épocas: general del Imperio, luego presidente de la República.

the Axies ruled by Germany .

By the Treaty of Versailles (1919) was a peace treaty signed on 28 June 1919. As the most important treaty of World War I, it ended the state of war between Germany and most of the Allied Powers.

It was signed in the Palace of Versailles, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the proximate cause of the war. The other Central Powers on the German side signed separate treaties.[iii] Although the armistice of 11 November 1918 ended the actual fighting, and agreed certain principles and conditions including the payment of reparations, it took six months of Allied negotiations at the Paris Peace Conference to conclude the peace treaty. Germany was not allowed to participate in the negotiations before signing the treaty.[4]

After the Versailles Peace (1919), the Republic was founded. In 1920 right-wing paramilitaries did The Kapp Putsch: an attempt to seize Berlin which was defeated by a general strike. In 1923 the French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr industrial region over missed reparation payments, hyperinflation peaks (prices doubling every few days).

Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed in Munich, landing him to prison (where he wrote Mein Kampf: “My Fight”).

Between 1924 and 1929 there was an stabilization period under Gustav Stresemann, a new currency, American loans (Dawes Plans), and relative prosperity.

However, during the Wall Street Crash in 1929, American loans get recalled and the economy collapsed again. Unemployment soars past 6 million by 1932.

Between 1930 and 1933 there was a political paralysis. Chancellor BrBrüning governs largely by emergency decree rather than through parliament. Nazi and Communist support explodes as centrist parties hemorrhage voters.

In January 1933, Hindenburg, under pressure from conservative advisors who thought they could “control” Hitler, appoints him Chancellor. Next month, the Reichstag was incendiated, which gave Nazis a pretext to suspend civil liberties.

In March, by The Enabling Act let Hitler’s cabinat enact laws without the Reichstag.

Weimar is a study case in how democracies can fail because a trade freedom for a promise of order.

because a mix of economic shock, institutional loopholes, elite miscalculations, and a public exhaustion by instability

• Burlesque revivals (Dita Von Teese being the most visible figure) lean into the tease-and-spectacle side.

• Drag cabaret carries forward the gender-bending irreverence that Weimar cabaret also had, especially through emcee/host figures.

• Piano bar / jazz cabaret keeps the more intimate, singer-songwriter tradition alive — this is closest to what people mean by “cabaret singer” as a vocal style.

• Dinner theater versions strip out most of the edge and keep the variety-show structure and audience proximity.

• Weimar’s legacy in musical theater shows up directly in Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret (1966) and Weill/Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera, which borrows cabaret’s cynicism and directness even though it’s staged as book theater.

Many cabarets of that era were shut down or performers persecuted once the Nazis came to power, because of their genre’s boundary-pushing nature.

Today “cabaret” covers a lot of ground: burlesque shows, drag cabaret, jazz or piano bar performances, comedy cabaret, and dinner-theater variety shows. What ties them together is usually that mix of intimacy, variety, a bit of irreverence, and direct engagement with the audience.

Berlín, años 30. El partido nazi domina una ciudad donde el amor, el baile y la música se mezclan en la animada vida nocturna del Kit Kat Club. Un refugio mágico donde la joven Sally Bowles y un divertido maestro de ceremonias hacen olvidar las tristezas de la vida. (FILMAFFINITY)