Then we take Berlin

CABARET:Weimar Berlin was famous for its risqué revue and variety cabaret acts. The second World War brought the curtain down on all that, but cabaret is back on the small stage in the city, writes DEREK SCALLY

THE STREET IS SUNNY but solemn. Between the fresh green leaves peek decorative plaster facades, as dusty as they were 80 years ago when Christopher Isherwood stared out of this same window, his eyes like a camera: “open, quite passive, recording, not thinking”. So began Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood’s celebrated portrait of the soiled Weimar republic capital just as it fell to fascism.

Today Nollendorfstrasse 17 is a place of pilgrimage for visitors looking for Isherwood’s Berlin. A memorial plaque was erected on the building’s cream facade in the 1990s thanks to the efforts of a committee of expats, including my Berlin predecessor, Denis Staunton.

Today the Isherwood flat is occupied by a journalist friend of mine who would prefer to remain nameless. Rest assured he is as much a British gentleman as his famous predecessor.

“You see groups outside the door discussing the book at all hours; once I came across a German teacher reading the first page of Goodbye to Berlin for his class. I took over,” he says over breakfast in the apartment he rented by chance.

With its high stuccoed ceiling and double doors, Isherwood’s former room – like the flat itself – is far grander and airier than the author implied. “I expect Isherwood played around with the truth in the books,” suggests the current tenant. “Everything is recognisable but it’s like looking through a distortion mirror: nothing quite fits.”

In the subsequent decades Isherwood’s already fictionalised love letter to Berlin has passed through several more distortion mirrors: a play and film called I Am a Camera and then the musical Cabaret on stage and, 40 years ago, on screen with Liza Minnelli. In later life, Isherwood implied he found the Cabaret craze slightly ludicrous: the clubs he visited but mentioned only in passing were now front and centre, re-imagined by an American creative team that had never set foot in one. His fellow Berlin boarder Jean Ross, a mousy performer with a little voice, was now the brassy American singer Sally Bowles. “You have this little girl saying ‘Oh, I’ll never make it. I haven’t any real talent.’ Then she comes on the stage and you realise that she’s every inch Judy Garland’s daughter,” said Christopher Isherwood of Minnelli’s 1972 performance. “The truth is that this cabaret would have attracted half of Europe. You wouldn’t have been able to get in for months on end.”

For Berliners, too, the fuss over Cabaret has been a source of amusement and bafflement for decades. For them, the film has as much to do with 1930s Berlin as The Quiet Man had to do with 1950s Connemara. But, like the green nail varnish on Liza Minnelli’s fingernails, the fiction has adhered stubbornly to fact, and stage productions of Cabaret are now commonplace in the German capital, its most famous fictional export – “divine decadence” – a successful reimport.

But how much Cabaret existed in Berlin to begin with? The kaiser’s abdication after the first World War defeat triggered a unique series of events. Chief agents of change were the 1919 abolition of censorship and liberalisation of dance licences, shattering the remaining veneer of rigid Prussian morality.

Hyperinflation of 1922 added a fin de siècle panic, not to mention prostitution, to daily life, where human necessity now trumped moral virtue. “For the jolly foreigner, it must have seemed as if Berlin was holding a clearance sale of human flesh: sex was to be had everywhere for cash,” writes Mel Gordon in Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin. Things settled down again but Berlin had joined Babylon and Nero’s Rome as a sin bin, where Anita Berber performed her infamous erotic dances in an ether-chloroform daze.

As Bruno Werner, a Berlin journalist of the era, later recalled in his book The 1920s, it was “the last era of commonality, a virtual Charleston on the volcano” of fascism and war.

Of 900 licensed establishments in 1930, Berlin police records show 150 cabaret clubs, most offering lowbrow music-hall fare or risqué “naked ballets”. Fewer than a dozen had any Cabaret-style aspirations and the best-known, the Tingel-Tangel, operated for just two years until creative director Friedrich Holländer fled the Nazis in February 1933. Hollywood’s Cabaret was, it seems, improved reality.

And today? Flick through the Berlin nightlife listings and you’ll find a remarkable range of Kleinkunst, small-scale cabaret acts in unlikely places. Five flights above Kreuzberg lies the BKA, an attic club with black walls, clusters of tables and yellow light bulbs around the stage. The similarity to Cabaret’s Kit Kat Klub is striking but unintentional. It’s a Monday afternoon and a drag troupe is rehearsing its latest satirical revue, Linie 8, skewering the phenomenon of gentrification in Berlin. “We’re deliberately topical and definitely political,” says Bob Schneider, better known as the middle-aged, henna-haired, bigoted bar owner Jutta Hartmann.

The shows of Schneider and fellow drag performer Ades Zabel mix songs, scenes and sly humour and are a hilarious reworking of tradition.

“So much was cut off by the Third Reich: the cabaret tradition was gone; the artists either fled or were murdered,” Schneider says. “The 1950s and 1960s were amnesia decades of idealised, sugar-coated entertainment.” Schneider and his friends emerged from the 1980s West Berlin underground scene, to which they added a glamorised drag queen edge. As in Weimar days, improvised backstreet venues popped up to give them a place to perform.

One such venue is the pocket-sized, open stage Scheinbar Varieté where, for nearly three decades, its amateur performers have created an entertainment niche of their own. On a recent Thursday night the tiny, sold-out audience of 50 is ready for anything. Almost anything.

“One man wanted to juggle chainsaws while they were running, but we decided the space is too cramped,” says owner Werner Krejny.

The evening passes in a hilarious haze of amateur talent. A white-coated magician, Dr Bitter, wields a string and scissors, announcing: “I want to show you how to treat a colonic tumour . . .” Swiss man Freddie’s efforts at comedy fall flat but he has better luck in the second act, inserting teaspoons up his nasal passage, to gasps from the audience.

The evening’s biggest hand goes to Benjamin and his sleepy tortoise puppet Henriette, who performs a rousing rendition of Dream a Little Dream of Me. “I have the feeling that people are just fed up with lowbrow television and want to experience something real again,” says Benjamin, who discovered only recently, by accident, that he could throw his voice.

“I bought a dummy on Ebay, left my job as a second-hand car salesman and here I am.” After two hours, the delighted audience spills out into the night.

It’s Friday night in the Theater im Keller, located in the increasingly hip neighbourhood of Neukölln. Owner Michael Brenncke, in business for 25 years, sees his club less in the 1920s tradition and more as sole survivor from West Berlin days, when dozens of drag clubs attracted personalities such as the transsexual Romy Haag and her erstwhile lover, David Bowie.

“The old tradition is vanishing, I’m afraid, but we’ll carry on,” he says. “My philosophy is that people should come, laugh and go home. We just dress in frocks, nothing more: we’ll leave the pretension to the Deutsche Oper.”

In the theatre’s tiny dressing room dozens of wigs sit on polystyrene heads and three drag queens in underwear hurry to finish their make-up. “I think we’re all a bit exhibitionist, we get something on stage we wouldn’t get otherwise in life: attention,” says Dietmar, stage name Linda Ratzinger, while applying silver eyeshadow.

He started as a drag performer 22 years ago after replying to a newspaper advertisement from the Dreamboys Laughter Stage, run by Harry Tose – better known to Berliners as Suspender Harry. “He had long green hair and wore red suspenders and stockings, never trousers,” says Dietmar. “The ad promised a free drag training. I never got the training; Harry said I was a natural.” Out front in the all-red, 50-seater theatre, a disembodied voice promises a “perfect illusion where masculinity and femininity merge”.

The show starts on the tiny stage, mixing lip-sync versions of pop hits such as Lady Marmalade, live-singing to show tunes such as Big Spender and lots of dirty jokes. Every song means a change of wig and frock: black sequins, gold sequins, blue sequins, red sequins. Midway through the second act the illusion begins to work, as men in the front row throw lascivious looks at the drag performers. Mission accomplished.

Last stop: Sunday evening in the Kleine Philharmonie bar near the Kurfürstendamm. Two dozen patrons – middle-aged gay men and glamorous grannies drinking pink champagne – are squeezed into a small backroom cluttered with decor that matches the clientele.

Gilt-edged mirrors hang on the flowery wallpapered walls; battered Chippendale sofas and dining-room chairs; lace tablecloths and yellow fringed lampshades. A chandelier surrounded by cherubs dangles from the ceiling.

This evening’s act is Schwarzblond, a Berlin duo offering comedy songs, nonsense rhymes and ballads. Benny Hiller plays his self-penned songs on keyboard, didgeridoo and electric zither. His most striking instrument, though, is his piercing, four-octave voice. His blonde partner, Monella Caspar (above in top hat), has a girlish voice and gallons of gamine charm. She designs the playful costumes too: tailored corset jackets, slinky black dresses and dozens of miniature hats, each more inventive than the last. It’s unbeatable, intimate, real-life entertainment: not a kitsch recreation of a fictional Hollywood cabaret but a modern take on an old form.

“Berlin has always had a very strong tradition of small-stage entertainment, so it’s probably not surprising that it has survived in some form here,” says Benny. “There is a bit of the old tradition in there, but contemporary too.” Some edge was lost forever with the vanished Jewish talent. The cabaret’s sexual element, too, has shifted to dedicated clubs, including one named after the movie’s Kit Kat Klub.

But after a life on the endangered list, nothing – not the Nazis, a world war, division, television nor the internet – has managed to kill this fabulous invalid. “Berlin varieté is already as good as dead,” said critic Eberhard Bucher in his book Tingeltangel. “It’s a shadow of what it once was.” That was 1905.