Questioning the legend of "divine decadence" in Berlin during the 1920s, this study examines historical performance material from the German cabaret and popular entertainment scene to re-evaluate the presentation of gay and lesbian identity on the stage and on the screen. Examples from popular and literary song reveal ambivalences and hidden messages that suggest the complexity of the cabaret's Cultural negotiations between entertainment and satirical critique. The article also reviews the fates of several songwriters and performers who were persecuted during the Nazi era.
**********
Hier stehen die Manner vorm Spiegel stramm
und schminken sich selig die Haut.
Hier hat man als Frau keinen Brautigam.
Hier hat jede Frau eine Braut.
Here gentlemen crowd the powder room
and blissfully paint their hides.
Here as a woman one has no groom.
Here all the women have brides. (Busch 292-93) (1)
Erich Kastner's 1930 poem "Latter-Day Stew" ("Ragout Fin de Siecle") conjures up the popular legend of Berlin in the "Golden Twenties"--the so-called Weimar Republic of Germany's brief democracy between the world wars--as an age in which "anything goes" and everything went: prostitution, sadism, gambling, drugs, transvestitism, nudism, homosexuality, jazz, alcohol--any form of sensual and sexual excess found a niche here. "The American gay community in particular loves Berlin," a Frankfurt newspaper said in a report on the 2001 Christopher Street Day parade in Germany's new capital--the city of Isherwood, of Marlene Dietrich, of subcultures, and modern sensibilities. (2) "Profiteers and call-boys, dandies and demimonde, cocaine and corruption and copulation on an open stage--it was so outrageous back then" (Kunath). The cabaret in particular is remembered as a pivotal site of experimentation, taboo-breaking, and moral and intellectual revolution. In the harbor honky-tonk of the Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich sang that she was made for love from head to toe, and this vamp who lives out her desires without regard for the consequences has become an icon of modern sexual emancipation, especially when in her private life, and later in film, she appeared in men's evening dress. While Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939) was still oblique about the gay dimensions of Berlin, and the 1966 musical Cabaret ignored them altogether, the 1972 film with Liza Minelli put the breakdown and inversion of traditional sexualities in the foreground) Things came full circle when the 1998 revival of the musical made the ambiguity and unsettling "queerness" of Weimar-era Berlin a frontal assault on its audience.
Mel Gordon's richly illustrated book Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin of 2000 triumphs this freedom in all its gory glory. "Berlin means depravity," the author trumpets out proudly in his opening. We see here a city in which "decadence" was born with playful and sometimes haughty self-assurance (1). Today the condemnatory label of "degeneracy," assigned by the Nazis to malign progressive art and music, is worn as a badge of pride. In London/Decca's series of "Degenerate Music" CDs, Ute Lemper's English and German programs of Berlin Cabaret Songs from 1997 became international bestsellers: a window to a seductive scene of underworld revelry, a dance on the volcano often dreamed of, conjured up in films and novels, but seldom heard in its own voice. (4)
In this essay, I would like to look beyond the mythology, to go back to the historical sources and examine the ways in which cabaret artists of the twenties and early thirties in Germany dealt with issues of sexual orientation in their songs and texts. Combining thematic and biographical approaches, this study will review the strategies gay and lesbian performers used to thematize their own difference. In addition, I will recall the diverse and often tragic experiences of these men and women after Hitler came to power.
This is a tale of a brief but vital period of exploration, freedoms, and challenges to tradition that were obliterated by authoritarian oppression and violence. Although paragraph 175 of the German penal code, prohibiting sexual activity between men, had been in place since 1871, the period after World War I saw a striking opening of boundaries and a new tolerance with regard to morality. Scientific and political movements for the emancipation of homosexuals took on increasing visibility, while the new liberal spirit was particularly evident in entertainment, as satirical cabarets and gay locales became notorious haunts of the avant-garde. But the situation changed drastically in 1933, when the Nazis closed down same-sex bars, organizations, and publications, sharpened paragraph 175, and arrested, incarcerated, tortured, and murdered gay men. This startling juxtaposition of the extremes of openness and terror has made the sexual culture of early twentieth-century Germany an enduring focus of both fascination and outrage.
"Das lila Lied" (the "Lavender Song"), claimed to be the unofficial anthem of the gay rights movement in 1920s Berlin, is doubtless the most striking and sensational rediscovery on Ute Lemper's recent cabaret album. The song was probably performed on the literary-political stage Schall und Rauch ("Noise and Smoke") in 1920; the lyrics are by Kurt Schwabach and the music is by Mischa Spoliansky, published under the pseudonym Arno Billing. (5) The "Lavender Song" was highly topical in 1920, for the opening of its refrain quoted the title of the recent scandalous "enlightennaent film" Anders als die Andern ("Different From the Others"), which demonstrated the dangerous effects of the legal prohibition of homosexuality in the notorious paragraph 175. (6) The sheet music was dedicated to Magnus Hirschfeld, the Jewish sexologist who founded the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin and worked tirelessly for gay rights; he also appeared in the film and functioned as its scientific advisor. (Hirschfeld and his Institute were to be foremost objects of Nazi violence in 1933.)
"Das lila Lied" addresses its audience with a frontal assault on traditional notions of morality and "culture," arguing in the first person plural that homosexuals are intelligent, good, playful, and loving people and that narrow-minded Philistines must learn to accept and appreciate them. The song plays with notions of individualism: in a society where everyone wants to be unique, why is it that those who are different in their own way are suddenly made outcasts? The fantasy and courage of homosexuals is played off against the banality and lack of imagination of the conventional bourgeoisie. Indeed, the song asserts the pride of the outsiders, who refuse to be converted or persecuted and predict the day when they win both equal rights and tolerance. It is one of the most explicitly political songs of the 1920s and is legendary in gay histories, but it appears to have been seldom performed or recorded in its day, and only one historical recording offers so much as a sung refrain:
Wir sind nun einmal anders, als die Andern,
die nur im Gleichschritt der Moral geliebt,
neugierig erst dutch tausend Wunder wandern,
und fur die's doch nut das Banale gibt. (Schwabach) (7)
We're simply different from the rest,
Who only march in the lockstep of morality,
Who only become curious when they wander through a thousand
miracles, And for whom there is ultimately nothing but
banality. (8)
The old recording of 1920 is disconcertingly stiff and plodding, but the music was popular enough with dance bands that the song was republished with a teasingly promiscuous lyric directed to a woman--"Be My Wife for Just 24 Hours" ("Seimeine Frau auf vierundzwanzig Stunden"). (9)
However, the confrontational, even militantly impudent tone of "Das lila Lied" was, I would argue, an exception that proved the rule. Typical cabaret performances often displayed a more complex and ambivalent attitude toward modern sexual freedoms and new gender identities. It is a tentative fascination that hovers between admiration and sensationalist voyeurism, ironically exploring and exploding taboos and searching for novel images and values.
Continued from page 1.
In the first decades after its inception in 1901, the German cabaret featured little political satire, thanks to the strict eye of the censor, but instead exercised its critique indirectly through erotic texts mocking modern morality and social relationships. Tales of willful seduction and sexual freedom tore at the moral corset of the bourgeoisie, and witty, at times bitter, songs of adultery and double standards lambasted the corruption and hypocrisy behind the stolid appearances. Prostitution became a metaphor for the commodification of the individual and a painful loss of self-determination. Even after the end of the monarchy and censorship in 1918, the texts of the cabaret remained primarily erotic, though they were enriched by new tones--songs heralding the metropolis, jazz, and the newest dance crazes, fashions, and modern morality. The tiny stage of the Kabarett was a forum for a plurality of lifestyles, a sort of waxworks chamber of taboos and abnormalities, both celebrating diversity and lambasting eccentricities.
Of the performers in Berlin's major cabarets of the twenties, only a few were openly gay and thematized their sexuality through cross-dressing and performance texts: Hubert yon Meyerinck, Curt Bois, or Hans Deppe. The best remembered is the comedian Wilhelm Bendow, who starred in Berlin's top cabarets and ran his own, albeit short-lived, stages: TuTu and Bendows Bunte Buhne ("Bendow's Colorful Stage"). His most notorious number was surely the scathing satirical monologue of the tattooed lady (Die tatowierte Dame), whose body art reflected the social, cultural, and political chaos of the day. Featuring a huge plaster costume and heavy makeup, Bendow's sketch reveled in ribald and disrespectful humor--but not openly homosexual themes. Bendow wrote the text together with the famous left-wing satirist Kurt Tucholsky, but he kept it in his repertoire and constantly updated it. Today, many of the jokes are dated or incomprehensible, but the raucous satirical tone still hits a nerve and calls forth countless contemporary associations.
Good evening, Ladies and Gentlemen, and welcome to my establishment.
Allow me to introduce myself as air original living work of art. My
name is Lydia Smith, from the state of Orania.... Until further
notice, I am seventeen years old. Already as a little girl I could
bear terrible pain without grimacing or twitching. And so one day,
the famous professor Dr. Frotzquell gave me a little prick, but I
never grimaced or twitched. And then I became a tattooed lady! The
professor told me that I would soon be earning millions because
there aren't many women who can take so much poking....
The political part of nay artworks is for the most part to be found
on nay breasts. Up here I have a portrait of our president with his
family. Once the entire family of the Kaiser was to be seen here,
but they've been erased because they're no longer relevant in light
of political developments.... Here on this white spot, we will one
day have the man who gets Germany's finances in order. But for the
moment, that spot has been left blank. (Kuhn, Hoppla 126) (10)
In the cabaret Wilde Buhne ("Wild Stage"), Bendow also performed the "Lavender Song" dressed in a purple tuxedo (Hesterberg 123-24). (11) Today his fame rests on his recordings of comic dialogues, in which he played a mincing, naive fellow utterly dependent on a strong, self-assured male partner or "straight man"--rather reminiscent of the double-edged Jerry Lewis-Dean Martin dynamic. His famous horserace routine, which he first recorded in 1926 and repeated after World War II, contained the immortal whine: "Ja, wo laufen Sie denn, wo laufen Sie denn hin?" (Where are they running, where are they running to?). (12)
In a more explicit number, the song "Eine bessere Sache" ("Something Better"), Bendow played a male prostitute, "the misunderstood man," who mocks how the men around him are fascinated by his display but afraid to act on their impulses:
Die Affen promenieren--nur um den warmen Brei!
Anstatt es zu probieren! Wets kennt--der bleibt dabei!
Zivil, Matrosen, lrafen--beaugeln sich den Spass!
Dann legen sie sich schlafen--und traumen gratis was!
(Schiffer, Kinder 5) (13)
The monkeys dance the beat around the bush
Instead of giving it a try. Whoever knows it sticks with it.
Civilians, sailors, counts soak it all up with their eyes,
Then they go to bed and dream about it, for free!
Lesbian themes were to be found on the cabaret stage as well, most famously in Marcellus Schiffer and Mischa Spoliansky's 1928 revue duet "When My Best Girlfriend" ("Wenn die beste Freundin"), sung by Margo Lion and, still early in her career, Marlene Dietrich. No longer does a wife have a boyfriend, they say--now she has a live-in girlfriend. As they giggle and quarrel, the husband appears and they engage in a merry musical menage a trois (Schiffer, Heute nacht 197). (14) "Everyone Gets a Turn" ("Es kommt jeder dran"), the title song of another 1928 revue proclaimed, as the show spoofed modern character types in Berlin. Friedrich Hollaender, later the author/ composer of Marlene's classic Blue Angel songs, wrote another titillating revue song, "Just Suppose" ("Gesetzt den Fall"), telling how two rival women discover new meaning in the passions of jealousy: both involved with the same man, they meet to battle it out but instead have an affair themselves (Hollaender).
The off-color play of these sophisticated revue songs was a winking joke, but hardly a spirited argument for emancipation of the likes of "Das lila Lied." And most of the cabaret's erotic transgression was more between the lines than on the stage. Even the gay performers usually concealed their nonconformist desires in heterosexual narratives. The singer Paul O'Montis, who has lately become a cult figure, offered traditional and slightly off-color love songs in a high, almost whining tenor voice, with an insinuating stylishness and occasional affectation quite unlike the brash bravado of traditional "manly" singers. His songs were often directed to women who were inexplicably uninterested in him, and sometimes he mentioned a wife, on whom he seemed to be cheating with various women. In "Ich bin verruckt nach Hilde" he confesses:
Ich bin verruckt nach Hilde
Die kusst wie eine Wilde
Ja darin ist das Madel colossal! ...
Doch wen sie kusst das ist ihr einerlei. (Raber, Wir sind 48) (15)
I'm crazy about Hilde
She kisses like a wild woman,
Yes, in that regard, she's fantastic! ...
But she doesn't care whom she kisses.
Yet he discovers to his horror that not all the women he had himself tried kissing were women, for as the punch line to the second verse reveals: Mary Ann ... turned out to be a man.
"Paul O'Montis can perform even the most trite popular songs in such a way that even sophisticates can enjoy them, because he rises above them and simultaneously makes fun of them," a critic wrote (Hermann-Neisse 226). (16) He was a master of silly novelty songs as well as clever parodies, and he recorded more than 140 numbers. While pretending bewilderment at the new moral freedoms of the twenties, O'Montis mocked the rites of courtship and the wiles of seduction, sometimes implying that men and women just aren't made to be together. The brazen number "Die zerbrochene Schallplatte" tells how a man gives his girlfriend a broken record, which hurls insults at her, especially after she jilts him--but they turn out only to be misunderstandings due to the needle's sticking in the grooves. This is a typical example of the cabaret's technique of playing with the audience's expectations, deliberately misleading them to comic and even embarrassing effect, satirically unmasking the listeners' own lurid imaginations and fantasies (O'Montis).
A popular song of the day confessed "Ich bin so schtichtern Madame": "I'm so shy, ma'am, I don't know what to do, oh give me a hand, I just can't help it." In his only slightly altered parody rendition, O'Montis implies between the lines that the reason he hesitates to approach women is not just his timidity--for him, women just don't quite seem to be the proper object of his attention. O'Montis just changes a little word--"[es] wird mir komisch ums Herz" becomes "wird mir anders ums Herz" ("when the lights become murky, my heart turns a little different")--an oblique remark recalling the gay-rights film Different from the Others, already referred to in "Das lila Lied." The rest he accomplishes with his double-edged mannerisms (O'Montis).
Continued from page 2.
The playful ambiguity, the veiled and yet open secret, make his acts so intriguing: "What kind of feelings do you have, Moritz?" he coyly asked in his song of the stylish but devilishly evasive dandy who has all of Berlin at his feet. "You don't say yes, you don't say no--there's something funny going on here," people grumble. And when he pays a visit to the aging starlet Frau Camilla, she becomes quite concerned when he fails to succumb to her charms, however explicitly they may be offered up to him.
Was hast du fur Gefuhle, Moriz, Moriz, Moriz?
Sind's kuhle oder schwule, Moriz, Moriz, Moriz?
Du sagst nicht ja, Du sagst nicht nein,
Du bist so rein und doch gemein! (Beda) (17)
What kind of feelings do you have, Moritz, Moritz, Moritz?
Are they cool ones or muggy ones, Moritz, Moritz, Moritz?
You don't say yes, you don't say no,
You're so fine and yet so cruel!
One of the great stars and symbols of Berlin already before the war was the rugged and boisterous Claire Waldoff, but never did she reveal her own lesbian desires in her songs. Like O'Montis, she sang heterosexual songs, about her boyfriend or her husband, but often mocking him or ironically lamenting her dependence on him. Yet even where Waldoff attacked the ignorance and crudeness of men and lauded the integrity and independence of modern, emancipated women, her songs ended with the confession that, at the end of the day, women could not--and would not--do without their boyfriends. (18) "Oh, God, men are so stupid" ("Ach Jott, wat sind die Manner dumm"), she complained in a 1917 operetta song in Berlin dialect that remained a hallmark of her repertoire throughout the twenties:
Wir wollen tins vom Mann emanzipieren,
Wir woll'n keen Wort an keenen mehr verlieren,
Wir woll'n euch hassen, wenn det Herz ooch bricht,
Jawoll, det woll'n wir, doch wit konnen's nicht.
(Bemmann 24-25) (19)
We want to emancipate ourselves from men,
We don't want to waste a word on a one of you.
We want to hate you, even if it breaks our hearts-Yes,
that's what we want to do, but we just can't do it.
At most, there was a winking suggestion of bisexuality in her song of lovely Hannelore, with whom all Berlin was in love: nobody can tell whether she is a man or a woman. Sporting the androgynous pageboy haircut, she enjoys the latest fashions--going to balls, slumming in the underworld pubs, sniffing cocaine--and some say she has both a bride and a groom on the side (Bemmann 42). (20)
Waldoff herself dressed in an intermediate fashion between traditional man and woman--with short hair, often in a blazer and tie, sporting a monocle, but still obviously a woman. As one might expect, she and Marlene Dietrich were close friends, and Dietrich recorded a number of Waldoff's songs on her favorite album, the 1965 LP Marlene Dietrich's Berlin. One of the songs from Waldoff's repertoire that is still breathtakingly topical insisted that women needed a room of their own--but for her, that room was the parliament. "Get Rid of the Men!" ("Raus mit den Mannern!") she challenged.
Die bekommen Orden, wir bekommen Schwielen-Liebe
Schwestern, es ist eine Schmach!
Ja, sie traun sich gar, die Politik zu spielen,
Aber na, die ist ja auch danach! (Kuhn, Hoppla 163) (21)
They [men] get medals, and we get calluses.
Dear sisters, this is a disgrace!
They even dare to play politics,
But in the end, that turns into a mess, too!
But Waldorf did not propose that a woman was ultimately happier with another woman--even though she herself lived openly with her female lover, a woman of nobility, Olly von Roeder, and circulated in lesbian bars and clubs. Her private life and her public persona were two different worlds, yet those who wanted to could recognize the subtext. Occasionally she did play the young man infatuated with a woman, though the gender of the singer was not always explicit. On the occasion of her very first cabaret performance in 1907, Waldorf had been forbidden to appear in men's dress, for women on stage in male attire were banned after 11 p.m. Indeed, in her very first recording from 1908, she played a robust young man who is infatuated by the legs of every woman in Berlin: "The Best Part Is the Legs!" ("Det Scheenste sind die Beenekens!"). To his horror, the fellow discovers a legless torso on display at the carnival freak show--"she ain't got no legs," he wails! (22)
The literary cabaret's playful strategy, of undermining gender roles is perhaps best evidenced by Marcellus Schiffer's tale of the uneasy mating of an effeminate "Masculine" and a masculine "Feminine" ("Maskulinum-Femininum") who seek complementary companionship but still find their symbiotic union unsatisfying, for neither can suppress who they really are. Ultimately, their child turns out to be a hermaphroditic Neuter, a tragicomic symbol of modern gender confusion. Such songs thematize and parody gender, but one can hardly say that they openly challenge it; here the narrative ironically discredits itself as a nonsensical closure dissolves the disrespectful banter of the song (Schirfer, Kinder 20). (23)
The cabaret walked a precarious tightrope, for, despite its occasional literary and countercultural ambitions, it was first and foremost a commercial venue dependent on the applause of its paying guests. Radical gestures and direct challenges to the audience's values wouldn't pay the bills. "The cabarets are seized by the odd ambition of being aggressive without offending anyone," Kurt Tucholsky commented (102). Where gender issues did play a role, they were generally subtle, between the lines, ironic. (24) The revolt of the cabaret was one of reckless theatricality, parody, and playful wit. Through the spoofing of conventional roles and behaviors, sexuality itself was turned into a conspicuously artificial construct. But the in-your-face revolt we today associate with "wicked Berlin" (as Gordon [206] calls it) is, I propose, more of a modern legend with its own social and ideological agenda.
Today, we encounter a new cult of "gay" song and performance traditions. A recent CD widely marketed in Germany, though produced by a tiny firm, proclaims in the words of Zarah Leander: "Es ist ja ganz gleich, wen wit lieben" ("It doesn't matter whom we love"). In historical recordings from the twenties and thirties, this collection purports to document the tolerant, witty, subcultural sensibility of a bygone era--singers who were boldly individualistic and proud of their difference. Another disc produced in Germany and France, named after O'Montis's song "Was hast du fur Gefuhle, Moritz?" bears the subtitle 'Schwule' Schlager der 20er and 30er Jahre ("Gay Hit Songs of the Twenties and Thirties"). But these CDs must disappoint all but the most gullible, starry-eyed homophiles, for they merely contain dance-band renditions of popular songs with lyrics for women, but sung by the ubiquitous male band singers often only as a refrain. In their day, these renditions were hardly intended to be gender bending or to have any homosexual connotations. (25) Such publications are a sad testimony to the cynical, commercial exploitation of "queer fashionability" the likes of the "Out Classics" series.
Even in the twenties, the legend of Berlin's gay decadence lured throngs of tourists to its pleasure palaces and seedy dives such as the Eldorado, the Adonis, and the Moustache Lounge; but, as Curt Moreck reminds us in his 1930 Fuhrer durch das "lasterhafte" Berlin ("Guide to the Vice-Ridden Berlin"), much of this degeneracy was staged for moneyed thrill-seekers and tourists--the genuine gay culture of the day was comparatively bland and pedestrian (132-33). Yet, if we can manage to cast off those beloved but historically dubious cliches of "divine decadence," we can instead appreciate the complexity of these flesh-and-blood artists--the composers, the lyricists, the singers, the musicians--their wit and their often tragic end.
The fates of these singers and writers are varied. Marlene Dietrich left Germany on the night of the Blue Angel's premiere in 1929 and went to Hollywood, becoming an American citizen. Her career as a film star, a frontline entertainer of the American troops, and ultimately a nightclub and concert singer is legendary and need not be retold. The songwriter Friedrich Hollaender soon followed her, as one of the first escapees from Hitler's Germany to land in Hollywood, where he wrote more classic songs for Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, and others. In 1955, he returned to Germany but never enjoyed the comeback he dreamed of--his glory days of the 1920s were too far away to be revived.
Continued from page 3.
Surprisingly, Wilhelm Bendow was able to stay in Germany through the Third Reich, though he had to play down the more transgressive dements of his act. He was just too popular a comic, and beloved by many Nazis as well, to lock up, and his campy humor was too outrageous to be considered dangerous. When he was questioned by the Gestapo with a direct reference to whether he was a homosexual, he responded bluntly: "Yes, I am, but I don't practice it, the Fuhrer doesn't want me to" (Luga 53). Toward the end of the war, he was arrested for an improvised political joke on stage: "We're saved, we're saved!" his partner cried out in a sketch about two shipwreck victims. "Isn't it too late to save us now?" Bendow quipped (Kruger). The house roared and Bendow landed in a work camp. (26) Today, his home town of Einbeck boasts a "Wilhelm Bendow" theater, but the memorial exhibit the city sponsored on the occasion of his 100th birthday scrupulously avoided all mention of Bendow's homosexuality, though it included several photos of his drag roles (Plumer). Bendow hosted a children's radio show after the war and died in 1950.
Marcellus Schiffer, who had written daring lyrics for Bendow and Dietrich, was spared the ordeal of the Third Reich: disillusioned by his lack of success, despondent over the rise of anti-Semitism, addicted to drugs, terminally frustrated and bored as he wandered through the margins of Berlin's high society and underworld, he committed suicide in 1932. "A man of nerves, of style and wit--the times only seem to hold on to the crude talents," critic Herbert Ihering lamented in his obituary for Schiffer (Schiffer, Heute nacht 65). (27)
Paul O'Montis performed and recorded widely, but, regrettably, we now remember too little about him. As a Jewish artist, his fate was markedly different from Bendow's. In late 1933, he fled from Berlin to Vienna and from 1935 was banned from performing in Germany. After the Nazis annexed Austria, he escaped to Prague, where he was arrested. After a grueling odyssey across Eastern Europe, he arrived in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin in 1940, where, wearing the infamous pink triangle, he was subject to particularly harsh treatment and imprisoned in a special isolation block. Records indicate that he died by hanging that July, presumably forced to commit suicide by the brutal block elder, or just as likely murdered outright during the night (Muller 102-03).
In 1935, the emigre press reported that Claire Waldorf had been arrested by the Nazis and committed suicide in her cell, but, in fact, she lived through the Third Reich, though she was pushed into oblivion and poverty. Although the Nazis did not systematically persecute lesbians, they mistrusted Waldoff's populist spirit, as well as a popular underground parody of one of her songs that made fun of Goring, though she always claimed that she herself had nothing to do with it. Goebbels particularly hated her and demonstratively walked out on her January 1936 performance in the Berlin variety theater Scala. Soon, one of the greatest stars of Berlin in the empire and the twenties had difficulty getting a job anywhere; she left Berlin and moved with her lover to a village in Bavaria. The records she had made of Jewish authors and composers like Hollaender and Tucholsky were destroyed, and her friends were gone. On a postcard for a fan, she wrote the motto: "Bear your happiness with modesty, and your misfortune with pride" (Koreen 224). (28) The former symbol of Berlin's brash impudence died impoverished and almost blind, out of the way in her little rural house, in 1957.
A few young talents grew out of the rich cabaret culture of the twenties and went on to have important careers in the thirties and even on into the forties, although, as gay men, they had to tread very carefully.
Robert T. Odeman had hoped to become a concert pianist, but owing to a hand injury instead found work as a musical director in a Hamburg theater and then opened his own cabaret in 1935, which was shut down by the Nazis the following year. In 1936 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as an accompanist for singers and cabarets. After his arrest for homosexual liaisons in 1937, he was sentenced to two-and-a-half years in prison; intimate correspondence with a half-Jewish friend, intercepted from his mail, further incriminated him. In 1942, while still on probation following his early release, he was again arrested, charged with immorality and seducing a minor, and sentenced to another year-and-a-half in prison. However, this time on his release he was sent to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, where he survived as a block secretary and even performed cabaret material for his fellow inmates. He escaped during a transport march by falling in a ditch and pretending to be dead. (29) After the war, he returned to Berlin, where he continued to perform his own silly and occasionally outrageous verses, such as the story of a worm who falls in love--only to discover that the object of his affection is his own bottom end (Odeman 248-49). As Odeman said himself: "My goal is to give people pleasure, even mixed with some seriousness, and so I'm happy when my texts, regardless of literary quality, fill up a theater of 750 people, and they're all with me!" (Bendorf 5). (30)
The leaders of the cabaret and popular song culture of the twenties had also been pioneers in the early sound films, such as Hollaender, Heymann, and Spoliansky, all of whom fled Germany in 1933. The most famous figure to continue this song tradition was the lyricist Bruno Balz, who wrote songs for the gender-bending film comedy Victor and Victoria (Viktor und Viktoria), a swansong of the Weimar cinema that premiered early in the Third Reich. In the twenties, he had provided articles for the pro-gay Blatter fur Menschenrechte ("Magazine for Civil Rights") and written prose (and even posed nude) for Adolf Brand's homoerotic periodical Der Eigene ("His Own Man"). (31) Balz's many hit songs include one number clearly in the Paul O'Montis tradition, sung by Heinz Ruhmann: "Ich brech die Herzen der stolzesten Frau'n" ("I Break the Hearts of the Proudest Women") the bashful, diminutive man sings in a trembling, almost whiny drone. (32) Balz landed in a concentration camp for a homosexual encounter, but he was released in order to write badly needed film songs for Zarah Leander, star of the grand Nazi Ufa musicals until she fled the Third Reich in 1943 to her native Sweden. Like Dietrich, whom she was meant to replace in the German film industry, she later became a gay icon, thanks in part, no doubt, to her deep voice, which made her a favorite theme for drag artists, but also on account of her campy sentimentality, thrown on with a trowel, and her disturbing moral ambivalence. In Balz's 1938 classic "Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein?" ("Can Love Be a Sin?"), Leander sang of love as the only law of life, an individual code free of society's morals and conventions. (33) As she declared in the verse:
Every little Philistine makes my life miserable, for he's always
talking about morality. And whatever he may think and do, you can
see that he just doesn't want anyone to be happy.... Whatever
the world thinks of me, I don't care, I'll only be true to love.
Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein?
Darf es niemand wissen,
wenn man sich kusst,
wenn man einmal alles vergisst
vor Gluck? (Sperr 198) (34)
Can love be a sin?
Can't anybody know when you kiss,
When you forget everything out of happiness?
Leander sang songs that were obviously intended to keep up morale during the war, such as the notorious scene in The Great Love (Die grosse Liebe, 1942) when she cheered "That won't bring the world to an end" to a crowd of rocking soldiers in uniform: "Davon geht die Welt nicht unter!" Yet, in its typically double-edged, between-the-lines strategy, the retreat into private life in the face of political hardship and social isolation, the cult of fantasy and romance, were in their own way a form of personal, though limited resistance for songwriters like Balz, who married a distant cousin in order to cover himself from Nazi persecution. His lyrics thematize the painful rift between the private and public persona, the heartbreak that grows from a passionate romance that founders on the incomprehension or outright hostility of an insensitive culture. The love song becomes a survival tactic of suppression and duplicity: no matter what you are feeling, never reveal your true soul, sang the silent film star Pola Negri, now making a comeback in Nazi musical films.
Continued from page 4.
Zeig' der Welt dein Gesicht,
deine Seele, die zeig' ihr nicht,
wenn du noch so traurig bist,
keep smiling, my dear, keep smiling! (Balz) (35)
Show the world your face,
But don't show them your soul.
No matter how sad you are,
Keep smiling, my dear, keep smiling!
It is striking how relevant and modern many of the songs from the twenties and thirties remain today in their youthful questioning and exploration. They have an unmatched flair for combining wit and melancholy, playfulness and freedom, as they expose our follies and bare the soul of the times. These tales of life fighting its way out of the shadows are often only fragmentary relics, but they cannot be forgotten--not only because these people were victims of oppression and barbaric persecution, but also because they were clever and original artists whose songs rise above and beyond their sufferings and still touch us.
Acknowledgments
This essay is based on a lecture-demonstration held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 2003 and repeated for the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust in May 2003. For material and advice received, I express my gratitude to Manffed Baumgart (Schwules Museum Berlin), David Chisholm, Evelin Forster, Chaim Frank, Dean Hutchinson, Andreas Kling, Maegie Koreen, Karsten Kramer, Jeremy Lawrence, Daniel Neubauer, Matthias Thiel (Deutsches Kabarettarchiv, Mainz), and Gerhard Zeyen. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of Figures 1, 2 and 3. The author will be happy to make arrangements with any copyright holder should they come forward.
Notes
[1] English translation by John Simon.
[2] A four-CD set of recordings made in 1997 documenting the gay tradition in music pays homage to its model of 1920s Berlin in the lurid title Club verboten and a cover illustration recalling Marlene Dietrich.
[3] On the reception and transformation of Isherwood's Berlin Stories through Fosse's film Cabaret, see Mizejewski. The new revival of the stage musical, which is in part a revision, is documented with the script and photos in Masteroff.
[4] Two historically grounded publications deserve special notice here. Peter Jelavich's English-language history of German cabaret from 1901 to 1945, Berlin Cabaret, studies the treatment of fashion, sex, politics, and race on cabaret and revue stages from a cultural-historical perspective, but, although he emphasizes transformations in the portrayal of femininity (particularly in the image of the kick-line girl), he does not explicitly address the issue of homosexuality. More recently, Wolfgang Ruttkowski examined the international cabaret song primarily as a performative form through the analysis of both narrative themes and communicative dynamics. His study reveals the ironic or "camp" style of these songs in text and delivery.
[5] Neither of the authors was associated with the gay subculture of Berlin; the lyricist Schwabach (1890-1966) was an author of popular songs, revues, and operettas, and is remembered today as a collaborator for the American hit song "Danke schoen." A postcard from Spoliansky to Schall und Rauch director Hans von Wolzogen (in the Deutsches Kabarettarchiv, Mainz) suggests that "Das lila Lied" was performed there, for it shows the refrain of the song in a drawing of the cabaret.
[6] The film opened on May 24, 1919. For background on the film, see Steakley.
[7] For recordings, see Schwule Lieder, Die schwule Plattenkiste; Wir sind; and Lemper in the Discography.
[8] Unless otherwise indicated, the translations are my own.
[9] Senelick (Cabaret) offers a weak translation of "Das lila Lied" and incorrectly attributes the lyrics to Marcellus Schiffer, although in the introductory text he correctly says that they are by Schwabach; he is also inconsistent about the dates, giving both 1920 (the correct date) and 1928. Jeremy Lawrence's translation, as sung by Ute Lemper, captures the spirit of the original much more effectively. On the history of the song, see Klein.
[10] A later version of the sketch, as well as a drawing, is in Bendow and Schiffer (80-85).
[11] Bendow performed regularly in Hesterberg's cabaret from November 1921 on and later opened his own stage, TuTu, in the same hall.
[12] In the Discography, see the recordings by Bendow (Auf der Rennbahn, Ein Komiker). On Wilhelm Bendow, see Plumer. A discography of his early recordings until 1936 can be found in Weihermuller (35-37).
[13] The original music by Hermann Krohme is lost.
[14] The music is by Mischa Spoliansky (in the Discography, see Schwule Lieder, Die schwule Plattenkiste; Wir sind; Lemper).
[15] See Schwule Lieder, Die schwule Plattenkiste; Wir sind; Malheur; and O'Montis in the Discography.
[16] For a short biography of O'Montis, see Raber ("Elegant gekleidet").
[17] See Schwule Lieder, Die schwule Plattenkiste; Was hast du; Wir sind; Malheur; and O'Montis in the Discography (the contemporaneous recordings of this song use the spelling "Moritz").
[18] For example, "Das moderne Madel" (Claire Waldorf/Erich Kersten), recorded in 1930.
[19] The text is by Rideamus, and the music is by Walter Kollo (Duran).
[20] Text by Willy Hagen, music by Horst Platen (Schwule Lieder;, Die schwule Plattenkiste; Wir sind; Waldorf, Claire Waldorf: Es gibt).
[21] Text and music by Friedrich Hollaender (Lemper; Waldorf, Claire Waldoff 2).
[22] Text by Claire Waldorf, music by Walter Kollo (Waldorf, Claire Waldorf 3, 26 Gramophone).
[23] Trude Hesterberg sang this song in her Wilde Buhne, with music by Mischa Spoliansky (Lemper). Jeremy Lawrence's English version of the song, on Lemper's CD, has a clever punch line that is even funnier than the original: They're "back in bed again and making more." Marcellus Schiffer, author of this song and other chansons with gay themes, was married to the singer and actress Margo Lion. Her picture spooks throughout the literature on lesbians in Berlin, thanks to her grotesquely tall, skinny appearance and short hair. She also created "Wenn die beste Freundin" with Marlene Dietrich in 1928, a photograph widely reproduced as an icon of lesbian Berlin in the twenties. In extrapolation of this song, Josef Vilsmaier's film Marlene portrays Dietrich and Lion necking in a wild Berlin bar party, to the consternation of Marlene's future "secret lover" (a fictional figure). Another photograph shows Lion singing with Claire Waldorf, which today appears a comical iuxtaposition of absurd gender confusion. It is perhaps tempting to read the song lyric "Maskulinum-Femininum" as a camouflaged confession of Schiffer and Lion's marriage, as they were both rumored to have been homosexual, according to Ute Scheub (80).
[24] One can see, for instance, from the hefty collection of Hermann-Neisse's monthly articles from 1921 to 1930 in Kabarett, that gender-crossing and homosexuality were not really prominent themes on the Kleinkunst stage. Volker Kuhn's five-volume anthology (Kleinkunststucke) of the cabaret "canon" includes virtually no material on gay or cross-gender themes.
[25] The American CD Can't Help Lovin' That Man contains a similar program of "cross-gender" dance-band renditions, but at least the booklet notes are honest about the innocent character of the performances, even if the compilers strive to read the renditions against the grain.
[26] On Bendow, see also Senelick ("The Good Gay Comic").
[27] The new volume of prose and verse by Schiffer, Heute nacht oder hie, includes some of his erotic and homosexual drawings.
[28] Schoppmann's portrait includes rare information from Waldoffs Nazi police file.
[29] Odeman's story is recounted by Sternweiler, who recounts that Odeman was not initially sent to the isolation block as O'Montis had been; likely this was because he was not Jewish in addition to being homosexual.
[30] There is no thorough or reliable biography of Odeman, although his works have appeared in two large collections, and the short portraits that do exist are spotty and contradictory, especially in regard to his career during the Nazi years. Another important gay cabaret artist to grow out of the Nazi years was Joe Luga, who was a female impersonator in frontline entertainment troupes and after the war became a leading chanson singer in Hamburg (see his autobiography So bin ich).
[31] Balz was arrested even before the Nazi years, denounced by a male prostitute.
[32] Lyrics by Lothar Bruhne, from the film Funf Millionen suchen einen Erben (see Der Wind in the Discography).
[33] On Leander's relationship to gender issues, see Kuzniar.
[34] Music by Lothar Bruhne, from the film Der Blaufuchs (see the recordings Leander; Bruno Balz; Der Wind).
[35] Music by Lothar Bruhne, from the film Die Nacht der Entscheidung (see recordings Bruno Balz; Der Wind).
Works Cited
Continued from page 5.
(In references to sheet music, the lyricist is listed first and then, separated by a diagonal slash, the composer.)
Balz, Bruno/Lothar Bruhne. Zeig' der Welt nicht Dein Herz. Sheet music ed. Berlin: Caesar R. Bahar-Edition, 1938.
Beda [Fritz Lohner-Beda]/Richard Fall. Was hast Du fur Gefuhle, Moriz?. Sheet music ed. Vienna: Wiener Boheme, 1927.
Bemmann, Helga, ed. Die Lieder der Claire Waldoff. Berlin: Arani, 1983.
Bendorf, Karl-Heinz, "Robert T. Odeman: Portrat eines Bettldichters." Manuscript, 1997. Stiftung Deutsches Kabarettarchiv, Mainz.
Bendow, Wilhelm, and Marcellus Schiffer. Der kleine Bendow ist rom Himmel gefallen. Berlin: Efra, 1925.
Busch, Wilhelm, Christian Morgenstern, Kurt Tucholsky and Erich Kastner. German Satirical Writings. Ed. Dieter P. Lotze and Volkmar Sander. New York: Continuum, 1984.
Gordon, Mel. Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Venice, CA: Feral House, 2000.
Herrmann-Neisse, Max. Kabarett: Schriften zum Kabarett und zur bildenden Kunst. Ed. Klaus Volker. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 1988.
Hesterberg, Trude. Was ich noch sagen wollte: Autobiographische Aufzeichnungen. Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1971.
Hollaender, Friedrich. Gesetzt den Fall. Sheet music ed. Berlin: Rondo, 1928. Jelavich, Peter. Berlin Cabaret. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
Klein, Hans-Gtinter. "'Wir sind nun einmal anders als die Andern': Mischa Spoliansky's 'Lila Lied.'" SG--Schwule Geschichte 2 (1998): 3-6.
Koreen, Maegie. Immer feste druff: Das freche Leben der Kabarettkonigin Claire Waldorf. Dusseldorf: Droste, 1997.
Kruger, Franz-Otto. Jacket notes. Wilhelm Bendow: Ein Komiker lasst grussen. LP, Telefunken C039 28 988, approx. 1976.
Kuhn, Volker, ed. Hoppla, wir beben: Kabarett einer gewissen Republik, 1918-1933. Weinheim: Quadriga, 1988.
--, ed. Kleinkunststucke: Eine Kabarett-Bibliothek in funf Banden. Frankfurt am Main: Zweitausendeins, 2001.
Kunath, Wolfgang. "Ganz normal verrucht." Frankfurter Rundschau. (Clipping collection Melodie Hollander, Los Angeles.)
Kuzniar, Alice A. "Zarah Leander and Transgender Specularity." Film Criticism 23.2/3 (1999): 74-93.
Luga, Joe. So bin ich: Bekenntnisse yon Inge und Joe. Hamburg: Himmelsturmer Verlag, 2000.
Masteroff, Joe. Cabaret: The Illustrated Book and Lyrics. New York: Newmarket, 1999.
Mizejewski, Linda. Divine Decadence: Fascism, Female Spectacle, and the Makings of Sally Bowles. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1992.
Moreck, Curt. Fuhrer durch das "lasterhafte" Berlin. Facsimile reprint of 1931 ed. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlags-Buchhandlung, 1996.
Muller, Joachim. "Wohl dem, der hier nur eine Nummer ist: Die Isolierung der Homosexuellen." Homosexuelle Manner im KZ Sachsenhausen. Ed. Joachim Muller and Andreas Sternweiler. Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000. 89-108.
Odeman, Robert T. Das grosse Robert T. Odeman Buch. Berlin: Universitas, 1985. Plumer, Erich. Wilhelm Bendow--Schauspieler und Kabarettist: Eine Dokumentation zu seinem 100. Geburtstag. Einbeck: Stadt Einbeck, 1984.
Raber, Ralf Jorg. CD booklet. Wir sind, wie wir sind! Homosexualitat auf Schallplatte, Teil 1: Aufnahmen 1900-1936. Bear Family Records, BCD 16055 AS, 2002.
--. "Elegant gekleidet und grazios in seinen Bewegungen: Der Sanger Paul O'Montis." Homosexuelle Manner im KZ Sachsenhausen. Ed. Joachim Muller and Andreas Sternweiler. Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000. 207-10.
Ruttkowski, Wolfgang. "Cabaret Songs." Popular Music and Society 25.3/4 (2001): 45-71.
Scheub, Ute. Verruckt nach Leben: Berliner Szenen in den zwanziger Jahren. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rohwohlt, 2000.
Schiffer, Marcellus. Heute nacht oder hie. Ed. Viktor Rotthaler. Bonn: Weidle, 2002.
--. Kinder der Zeit: Chansons. Ed. Alan Lareau. Siegen: Universitat-Gesamthochschule Siegen, 1991.
Schoppmann, Claudia. Zeit der Maskierung: Lebensgeschichten lesbischer Frauen im "Dritten Reich". Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1993.
Schwabach, Kurt/Arno Billing [Mischa Spoliansky]. Das lila Lied. Sheet music ed. Berlin: Carl Schultz, 1920.
Senelick, Lawrence. Cabaret Performance. Vol. 2: Europe, 1920-1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1993.
--. "The Good Gay Comic of Weimar Cabaret." Theater (Yale School of Drama) 23.3 (1992): 70-75.
Sperr, Monika, ed. Das Grosse Schlager Buch. Deutsche Schlager 1800-Heute. Munich: Rogner & Bernhard, 1978.
Steakley, James. "Film und Zensur in der Weimarer Republik: Der Fall Anders als die Andern." Capri: Zeitschrift fur schwule Geschichte 21 (1996): 2-33.
Sternweiler, Andreas. "Als ein Beweis, dass wir zusammenhalten: Freundschaft und Solidaritat." Homosexuelle Manner im KZ Sachsenhausen. Ed. Joachim Muller and Andreas Sternweiler. Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 2000. 316-30.
Tucholsky, Kurt. "Auf dem Nachttisch" (1929). Gesammelte Werke in 10 Banden. Ed. Mary Gerold-Tucholsky and Fritz J. Raddatz. Vol. 7. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1975. 95-103.
Weihermuller, Manfred. Discographie der deutschen Kleinkunst. Vol. 1. Bonn: Lotz, 1991.
Select Discography
I. Thematic Collections (Various Artists)
Can't Help Lovin' That Man. Columbia/Legacy CK 52855, 1993. Club verboten. 4 CDs with book. DCC Compact Classics DZS(4)-135, 1997. Es ist ja ganz gleich wen wir lieben: Lieder rom anderen Ufer, 1926-1942. Mister Phono [Mister Phono c/o David Rohrer, Untersbergstr. 6, 81539 Munich, Germany; daroo@01019ffeenet.de], no number, ca. 2000. (Mainly dance-band performances of popular songs with male refrain singers.)
Schwule Lieder: Perlen der Kleinkunst 2 CDs. TIM [The International Music Company AG, Rahlau 4-6, 22045 Hamburg, Germany; info@timcompany.com; www.timcompany.com], 221324311, 2002. (An inexpensive collection apparently pirated from other discs listed here. The scant booklet is riddled with typographical errors, and the photo reproductions are crude.).
Die schwule Plattenkiste: Schwules und Lesbisches in historischen Aufnahmen 1908-1933--vom Hirschfeldlied zum lila Lied. Duo-Phon [Duo-Phon Records/Edition Berliner Musenkinder, Eislebener Strasse 4, 10789 Berlin, Germany; music@duo-phon.records; www.duo-phonrecords.de], 05 18 3, 2001. (Good selection of songs, in large part identical to Wir sind, wie wir sind! [below], but with a smaller booklet and no lyrics; more filtering of the sound makes it less scratchy but also less dynamic.)
Was hast du fur Gefuhle, Moritz? "Schwule" Schlager 1924-1935. Shimmy/Truesound Transfers [gunrem@aol.com; www.truesoundtransfers.de], SH-7003, 2002. (Again, largely dance-band renditions with male refrain singers.)
Wir sind, wie wir sind! Homosexualitat auf Schallplatte, Teil I: Aufnahmen 1900-1936. Bear Family [Bear Family Records, PO Box 1154, 27727 Hambergen, Germany; bear@bear-family.de; www.bear-family.de], BCD 16055 AS, 2002. (The best thematic collection on the market. Includes an 84-page, full-color booklet with lyrics in German; features three versions of "Das lila Lied" including an early vocal and recordings by Paul O'Montis, Claire Waldorf, Wilhelm Bendow, Marlene Dietrich, and others. Some of the songs allude only fleetingly or indirectly to homosexuality or gender crossing. The title suggests a sequel is forthcoming, but no further information is available.)
II. Individual Artists
Bruno Balz: Davon geht die Welt nicht unter. Ein Portrait in Originalaufnahmen, 1929-1947. Duo-Phon 05 22 2, 2002.
Der Wind hat mir ein Lied erzahlt: Hommage an den Textdichter Bruno Balz. 2 CDs. Monopol Records (Germany) [www.monopol-records.de], 938293/1-2 (2002).
Bendow, Wilhelm, Auf der Rennbahn (Wo laufen Sie denn?). ZYX (Publicdomain) (Germany), PD 5020-2, 1995. www.zyx.de.
Bendow, Wilhelm. Ein Komiker lasst grussen. Duo-Phon 01 21 3, 2001.
Duran, Angele. Lieder der Claire Waldorf. Bear Family BCD 12 006, 2001.
Leander, Zarah. Kann denn Liebe Sunde sein. [8 CDs with 116-page, LP-format book. Bear Family BCD 16 016 HK, 1997.
Lemper, Ute. Berlin Cabaret Songs. London/Decca 452 601-2 (German version), 1996; 452 849-2 (English version, translations by Jeremy Lawrence), 1997.
Malheur, Daniel, In der Bar zum Krokodih Daniel Malheur singt Paul O'Montis. Private issue [Daniel Malheur, Neuenteich 1, 24232 Lilienthal, Germany; salontenor@daniel-malheur.de; www.daniel-malheur.de.], no number.
O'Montis, Paul. Ich bin verruckt nach Hilde. Musik Antik [Musik Antik, Weidenstieg 14, 20259 Hamburg, Germany; www.musik-antik-records.de], Musant 002, 1997.
Waldorf, Claire. Claire Waldorf: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. Duo-Phon 01 20 3, 1999.
--. Claire Waldorf2: Immer ran an' Speck. Duo-Phon 01 32 3, 1999.
--. Claire Waldorf 3: Die Berliner Pflanze. Duo-Phon 05 11 3, 2000.
--. Claire Waldorf 4: Mensch, dir hangt'n Zipfel raus. Duo-Phon 05 29 3, 2002.
--. 26 Gramophone Co. Recordings (1908-1914). Truesound Transfers TT-1806.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group
|
