The German Cabaret Movement during the Weimar Republic

Abstract

The impudent muse, the muse with the sharp tongue--this is the image of the cabaret that historians like to present. All too often, they romanticize it as a watering-place for the avant-garde, a wild crucible for modern ideas and experiments, forgetting that these stages were at the same time commercial enterprises that were forced to make considerable concessions to audience taste. Many historians, especially in West Germany and the GDR, stylize the cabaret into a radical protest art, a satirical form of political and cultural opposition. Yet these portrayals often confuse form and method. Cabaret is a theatrical form using a mixture of small forms. It often makes use of satire, which critiques reality by contrasting it with a norm or ideal to usually humorous effect, but cabaret can be filled with any number of ideologies and is by no means an intrinsically left-wing form. In reality, the cabaret movement from the beginning of the century until the end of the Second World War did not : itself primarily as an art of political resistance or agitation. Instead, it was an attempt by intellectuals and artists to reconcile high art and popular culture, which had drifted far apart: an attempt to create a cultivated entertainment. But from the start, and especially in the 1920s, the cabaret's reform movement found itself in a state of crisis. This study investigates the artistic concepts and debates around the form between the end of the First World War and Hitler's seizure of power in order to highlight the problematic nature of the cabaret's cultural rebellion, caught between art and