The Political Cabarets: Source of Berlin's Satire

THE desire to poke fun at authority is a characteristic of city people, and the bigger the city, the stronger and thicker the pressure of officialdom, the sharper the joking. There are evils in every society, but where authority and privilege are very strongly entrenched they cannot be directly attacked with safety. The tension between the wielders of power — not necessarily in government — and the rest of any social group must have an outlet, and barbed joking is one of the most natural of these outlets. It is a reaction to those who have power and a valuable safety valve to mass feelings of inferiority or resentment.

In a spontaneous form, this resistance can be seen today in Russia. A whole series of jokes is passed about, privately, concerning an apochryphal radio station in a distant province, a station whose deadpan announcements of local news are obviously at variance with the facts of life. Here are two examples which might find their way into announcements from this mythical radio station. In Hungary, some time ago, a newspaper editor was sacked. Why? He reprinted with evident pleasure the news story from the United States that automobile production had fallen from, let us say, six million to less than four million cars per year. A failure of

capitalism! Unfortunately, he did not stop to think that the lower figure was still many times the entire automobile production of the whole Eastern bloc for a year. This irony need not be spelled out; the hearer would grasp it at once. Then, recently in a provincial Russian town the manager of the railway station restaurant invented a mechanical fryer for those little patties the Russians are so fond of, a sort of Muscovite hamburger. This reduced costs, and the manager made a profit. He was condemned to death.

If the censors and the police get lazy, as occasionally happens even in Moscow, then the satirists who invent jokes about such snippets of news gather in a local café, and people find out that they are there, telling their stories, and perhaps singing them as ditties. This is the way a political-satirical cabaret starts.

The next stage, as in present-day Poland, or as in the past in imperial Germany and Hapsburg Austria, comes when the laziness, corruption, or stupidity of the guardians of the established order allows considerable latitude to the jokesters. Provided they stay within limits, they can make serious criticisms, and the limits can be extended by persistence and wit. For instance, the critics can attack local evils such as bureaucracy, waste, or embezzlement by officials, in the name of loyalty to the established order; they can make jokes with hidden meanings; or they can recount fantasies about mythical or historical persons. In the East Berlin cabaret Distel (“Thistle”), a sketch of Otto Reutter’s revived from the Kaiser’s day would be just as applicable to the idle workmen of the “workers’ paradise” as it was to their grandfathers. Soon after the Nazis came to power, a song by Kurt Weill (he wrote a number of songs for Bertolt Brecht, but this was not one of them) caused an uproar. It was about the assassination of Julius Caesar The Nazis were not so stupid as to miss that, and the show was closed.

The trick of making jokes with double meanings was brought to a pitch of genius by Brecht, who started his career writing for cabaret. Later he wrote and produced as great art a number of very long and complicated jokes of this kind, which can be understood equally well at their face value or with an underground and subversive meaning. His play Furcht und Elend des dritten Reiches (Fear and Misery of the Third Reich) is an indictment of Hitlerism. The political cabaret Stachelschweine in West Berlin (the word means “Porcupines”) picked it up from its production in East Berlin by Brecht’s widow, a dedicated Communist, and it presented excerpts from the play, changing only one thing: the “Third” in the title was crossed out and “Fourth” written over it. Frau Brecht at once brought an injunction — unjustly, because the performers were perfectly ready to pay royalties and had not altered the text. The reason for the lawsuit was simply that the change of that one word made Brecht’s joke obvious and therefore dangerous; at that time Berlin was not divided by force, and the story spread like wildfire. The Stachelschweine withdrew Brecht’s play because it could not stand the financial strain of a long lawsuit.

THE two cities where political cabaret has flourished are Vienna and Berlin, and this is not chance. What Central Europeans lacked was not order and the protection of the weak so much as personal and political responsibility and a voice in their own government. This lack was especially apparent in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where men promised themselves that they would cure everything if they could get political power in their own hands. This statement is an oversimplification and meant to be one, but it is by and large true, and it explains why intellectual pursuits in the major cities of Central Europe were largely political.

Cabaret in both Vienna and Berlin sprang from two roots. The longing for political responsibility was intensified as universal schooling was established and workmen were educated through their increasingly complex work routines. This longing grafted itself naturally on an old tradition of clowning in street shows and suburban summer theaters and, in Vienna, on the ancient tradition of dialect singing in the wine gardens. The audience sat at little tables and drank and smoked, joining in the songs and applauding the ever-changing and partly extempore wit of the performers.

In Berlin the serious theater held a special place in the respect and affections of ordinary people for class reasons. Most of the German aristocracy lived at a multitude of tiny courts, and the Imperial Court at Berlin, which was only in existence for two generations, was never able to attract to itself a real world of courtiers. The two German Emperors were surrounded by their ministers, civil servants, and, above all, by the wellborn officers of the army. The officers’ corps was reduced to absurdity by the demands made upon it as an arbiter of taste and fashion, and the ordinary people never shared their rulers’ admiration for the military. The respect of the populace was reserved for scholars and theatrical personalities, an elite of achievement rather than of birth or wealth. The middle classes adored the artificial court from afar, but the people went to night classes and voted for the Social Democrats, whose party became the largest in the Reichstag after the 1912 elections. The crowds would recognize and make way in the street for a university professor of whose work they could not understand a single word; they would cheer themselves hoarse for a great actor; but military officers had to push their way through a crowd, and the real feeling between the upper and the lower classes was of resentment and mutual fear. The arbiters of popular taste and fashion were theater people. This profound attitude of disrespect for the military and the higher classes is typical of the Berliners; it may have something to do with their wonderful climate, but it has always existed, largely unknown to the outside world, and it was not mere chance that Hitler could never stand either Berlin or the Berliners.

This is the public which made the cabarets and the theaters. As in Vienna, they rose from the people and belonged to them.

The heyday of Berlin cabaret was the period of William II’s reign, when the censors were still present but were lenient. A popular singer had only to pretend to stick a monocle in his eye and take a few steps with the swaggering mannerism of a guards officer and the audience was with him in a roar of laughter before a word was said. An exaggeratedly patriotic ditty had a quite different meaning to that audience from the one it would seem to have now, if the words were read. This reaction did not mean a lack of real patriotism, as the disaster of the First World War proved; but it did mean that when the military had been defeated the widespread feeling against them was all the more savage and the ordinary people did not feel that the defeat was theirs. After the First World War this was one of the many strands of feeling in Germany that were widely misunderstood abroad.

In the twenties, with the censors gone and with fresh disasters and political failures almost every month, the cabarets had plenty of material. The Berlin cabarets then became world-renowned, because more strangers saw them and because so many of their performers were to be exiled. But the subtlety that went with the need to fool the censors was gone, and the humor suited the violent times; it was savage and anarchic, sliding both left and right toward nihilism, as the ferocious class hatreds and economic chaos stripped the last hopes from performers and audiences. This was the time of Erwin Piscator’s proletarian theater and of the first successes of Brecht and his collaborators. That world can be seen now only in the drawings of George Grosz or Käthe Kollwitz. Very few of the cabaretists are still alive; Werner Finck is one of them, and I myself heard Valeska Gert many times after her return from New York, singing her harsh, crude parodies in a cellar café.

Werner Finck was famous for his baiting of the Nazis after their seizure of power. His performance was a monologue, after the manner of Karl Kraus in Vienna, and his style was cool and urbane, the poison tasting like milk. He was constantly raided by the police, and one night, almost his last in Berlin, he said to his audience: “Last night we were closed and tonight we are open, but if we are too open, we shall be closed again.” And so they were.

The cabaretists scattered all over the world during the short eternity of the Nazi era — that is, those who got away. When they slowly raised their heads after the grossen Kladderadatsch (“the great disaster”), they were scarred for life by that experience, whether in Germany or abroad. The new, tentative Berlin cabarets after the war were obsessed with the past, with the evils of Nazi times, and with the survivals of Nazi mentality, so that the returned comedians sometimes seemed to be nagging at their audiences rather than sharing bitter jokes with them, and the millions who had stayed and suffered were shy of raising their voices. It is a curious fact that the immediate aftermath of the war is rarely mentioned in Berlin in any of the arts; perhaps that trauma was more than men could stand and remain sane, and they have buried it out of mind. After the blockade of 1948, when the Russian police could no longer openly threaten anyone in West Berlin, there were a number of anti-Russian and anti-Communist items in the cabarets, but the realities of the Occupation were on the whole untouched. The cabarets were still facing backward, and insofar as they were political and didactic, they expressed the profound fear of a return of Nazism, which is one of the deepest popular feelings in post-war Germany. So, in a way the cabarets ceased to reflect faithfully the contemporary feelings of their audiences for a time, and the wide field of humor offered by post-war corruption, including that of the allies, was largely untouched. This is understandable but regrettable, and it is still true that any cabaret sketch that concerns the relations between the Western allies will be the weakest part of the program.

THE Berlin cabarets to be seen today are totally different in atmosphere from those of even five years ago, and two things are responsible for the change: the widespread prosperity which benefits almost all the people, and the Berlin Wall.

Of course, whole complexes of jokes about Bonn and the Federal government still occupy a place in programs, for the elevation of this little provincial town to the capital is a joke to Berliners. But prosperity has reduced the social criticism of the cabarets, and the Wall has set up a huge new question about the East. Though Berlin was a major cold war battlefield, and though West and East Berlin are full of professional cold-warriors, the cold war was never fought in the hearts of Berlin’s people, for two reasons: it did not have to be, for they could see what was at stake for themselves; and they themselves were inside it — one half of a family using Eastern currency and subject to Eastern laws, and the other half of the same family using Western marks and obeying Western laws.

Though this was perfectly clear to Berliners, it did not come out into the open until the Wall had been built. Then, quite suddenly, and not least by means of cabaret songs and sketches, it could be seen that Berlin was an object in the cold war but that Berliners were not in the cold war. How can you talk about hostile people when one of them is your own grandmother? How can you say, give no help to Ulbricht, when your own sister may go hungry for lack of that help? You may know — everybody does know — that help to Ulbricht will go into the bottomless bucket of Communist maladministration, but you cannot refuse it if you think of your own brother or sister.

The two most striking things I saw in the Berlin cabarets this year were both essentially discussions on this moral issue. One is in a scene from the Stachelschweine, a dialogue between a Polish policeman and an escapee who has crossed the River Neisse from East Germany into Polish territory. The escapee is given dry clothes and a drink by his captor, who proves to have a German grandmother — nothing unusual in Poland. But the policeman must obey the law and return the refugee to Ulbricht’s “democracy.”What to do? The policeman suggests that perhaps the German had been in Poland during the war, perhaps had “done something.” The escapee recalls illegally exchanging a bottle of schnapps in a Polish railway station as he went through on leave from the army. Black marketing—that means a year or so in prison. But if he is wanted by the Polish police, he cannot be returned to East Germany. At the price of a couple of years in jail, the escapee has escaped. The interesting point, the idea that men are people and not political labels, is taken a stage further in this West Berlin nightclub than elsewhere in Berlin — Poles are people too!

This new effort to look at the Berliners’ own situation from the inside is a return to an older idea of cabaret which was given a strong impetus by a recent visit to Berlin of Helmuth Qualtinger, a Viennese who is probably the most brilliant cabaretist alive today. Like his master, Karl Kraus, he performs in monologue. Berlin audiences were enthusiastic over the visitor from Vienna and his ninety-minute soliloquy on “Herr Karl,” who is as unpleasant a man as one might find anywhere. West German audiences at first had not welcomed Qualtinger’s incisive portrait of themselves any more than the Viennese had, but the Berliners came to recognize the truth of their situation.

Stachelschweine is the oldest surviving cabaret in Berlin, but there are several others, not to mention Distel in East Berlin. Die Bedienten (untranslatable — roughly “We’ve had enough”) is a new cabaret and, for my taste, too new, too smart with its Scandinavian furniture. When I visited it, everything was so neat, the girls so pretty, the sketches so sure of their own rightness that it seemed as if the audience was congratulating itself rather than having a look at itself. But here the performers conferred together in front of the audience and decided that the usual anti-East number would have to be dropped. Berliners have a name for the once obligatory pieces of propaganda in newspapers, on the radio, and in cabarets; they call them Ost-Klamotten (“East junk”). By far the most impressive act was that of a speaker who read half aloud from a shabby book, the diary of one who lived behind a wall. Everything he read was what Berliners know about the Wall — its indignity, their humiliation, the stupidity and heartlessness of it. But the diary was written by a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. For an instant, as the reader looked up at the audience and for the first time read out the name of his book, there was an authentic shudder of recognition as the well-dressed, well-fed public saw its own image distorted in the broken looking glass of its own past actions.

Again, the next evening, there was the same idea at Die Wuehlmäuse (“the Voles”). There was a cruel and funny song about the practice of burning candles, introduced to Berlin by Mayor Ernst Reuter to show sympathy for East Berliners in the blockade; it is, of course, a Catholic practice to burn candles for the dead at All Souls. It has now become a Christmas habit in Germany and a tribute of conscience toward East Germans by West Germans, who then feel they need do nothing else — “candles are enough.” The Voles, burrowing away subversively in a large hall which might be used for the parties of local Christmas savings clubs, and which had a happy air of shabby unconcern and a balcony shored up unsafely by a timber beam, was much more in the old style of cabaret than Die Bedienten. The management clearly did not have much money, service at the tables was casual, and the audience was much younger, gayer, and poorer than at the two more established places. But the performance was biting and cruel, and the tunes were very catchy. A number of political sketches were directed more at the voters than at the men they put in power. There were even two items that made fun of the Western world. One, though it was weak, made an attempt to parody the difficulties between the Common Market members and Great Britain, and General de Gaulle — surely a gift to ironists — but it just failed somehow in the courage to be unkind to friends. The other effort was more effective; in fact, it was very funny. A spaceman, cluttered with absurd pieces of amateurish equipment, recounted his sensations in the capsule, insisting on how wonderful it all was and explaining some of the unpleasant things that happen to the human body under such enormous pressures — but wonderful, of course.

THE difference between West Berlin cabarets and the one cabaret in East Berlin is striking and pathetic. To begin with, the Distel is not a cabaret at all, but a little theater. The audience sits in rows, as in any other theater; there are no little tables; and since smoking is not allowed and one cannot order drinks, coffee, or frankfurters during the performance, the whole gemütlich atmosphere is lost. No one feels impelled to join in the choruses, or even to laugh very loudly. There is a feeling of discipline — not to be confused with the universal Central European solemnity about the arts — which is infinitely out of place and depressing, for a cabaret is just the place where discipline should be thrown to the winds.

Neither the Russians nor the Communist Party nor any other hard facts of life are ever mentioned, not even with the affectionate teasing with which the Western allies are commented upon in West Berlin. The only contemporary items are confined to diatribes against Bonn and Adenauer, the warmongers and revanchists. To a Western visitor this is simply boring, for most West German newspapers publish much franker and more pointed criticisms of their own government, as well as some very rude and funny cartoons; and the cabarets in the West devote about half their time to detailed criticism of aspects of Western life. But the repetitions about the warmongers, who are always about to attack the peace-loving peoples, do not raise much enthusiasm in the East Berlin audience, for they are recognized for what they are, a second price of admission to the rest of the program.

The complex problem of producing any cabaret at all that still deserves the name of “political” has been solved in this year’s program by a clever idea: the great cabaretists of the past are being resurrected, their mannerisms and tone copied and bowdlerized. It has to be remembered that the East Germans are living under a regime in many ways more oppressive than that in modern Russia, and a false step can mean disaster, so that it represents an act of real courage to restage, even censored, a song of Kurt Tucholsky’s called “Der Graben” (the “trench” or “grave”). Tucholsky, a pacifist of the teens, wrote the song as an appeal to the soldiers on both sides in World War I to reach their hands in friendship over the trenches — and, of course, over the heads of their rulers. Today everyone who hears this song in East Berlin must feel that “over the trenches” means “over the Wall.” Further than such allusive hints, the Distel dares not go. Most of the program confines itself carefully to sentimental songs of Parisian and German cabarets of the past, or to satire on things of the past that have no bitterness today, such as the sugary takeoff on a czardas and a Viennese waltz. These anti-imperial sketches had some meaning before 1914; they mean nothing today.

Where Brecht, Werner Finck, and Claire Walldorf are resung, they have been so emasculated of their universal hatred of injustice and their feeling for the poor and oppressed that they are almost unrecognizable. Anger that uses laughter as a weapon against all injustice is dangerous to a ruling caste that is more oppressive than either of the imperial governments ever dared to be. And Claire Walldorf’s songs of the back streets of the Berlin poor before World War I are altogether too close to the living conditions of today to be really funny.

Not that there has been no improvement in living conditions — there undoubtedly has, especially in Berlin itself; and the rationing and bad housing are, in any case, not the things that make so many East Germans try to run away. What makes East Germany so dreary is clearly present in the performance at the Distel. The double constraint of having to watch your tongue and your glance every moment and of having to turn every aspect of living into politics is a constant threat, even during the intermissions.

A little incident that exactly illustrates this atmosphere occurred just before the performance I attended. I left some friends at the theater where Brecht’s plays are performed, and we stood in the vestibule for a few minutes, making arrangements to meet afterward and looking at a display of international posters of the Brecht company’s travels. One of them was a placard with the title of a play painted as if scrawled in chalk on a wall. When I commented that this design was effective but rather tactless in the circumstances, my companions laughed, but everyone standing near us looked blank and moved quickly away. From the speed of their reactions it was obvious that these people had seen the point before I spoke. It was my remark that was tactless to them; they accepted the wall in silence.

This feeling of hypocrisy and the falseness of the atmosphere are almost palpable in the Distel and take all the pleasure out of the highly professional and talented performance. It is a museum of humor, not a cabaret. There is no salt in it, for everything the audience would naturally want to hear lampooned is taboo. Even the mildest pleasantry about works councils that would label a good trade unionist as a tool of the bosses in Wigan or Wiener Neustadt is greeted not by laughter but by a gasp of wonder at its daring.

In spite of my interest in hearing old songs that cannot be heard anywhere else, it was a depressing evening. We left the hot little theater on the first warm night of the year and walked through the tidy gray streets to a restaurant, one of the few that remain open after eight o’clock, to eat Romanian food. The restaurant was empty, and the waiter turned out to be a natural comic, better than anyone at the Distel. “You must put out your cigarette,” he said to me. “No smoking allowed.” When I looked astounded, he pointed to a hideous painting on the wall. “You can’t see the notice. It’s behind the picture, so that we don’t seem illiberal.” Then he added sternly, “We know smoking is bad for you, you see.”

We greeted this labored joke with relieved laughter. But other guests appeared, and his good nature was clouded at once. When we commented on the inexpressibly ugly decorations to each other, and one of us said that they were an exact survival of Hitler’s taste, we instinctively dropped our voices. In spite of the foreign passports we all carried, the atmosphere infected everything.

The two halves of Berlin are growing apart. Even humor cannot cross the Wall.