Berlin was Mein Kampfing to a goose step beat and was nothing more than one large breathless bordello laden with lacy boys in fag drag with tight waists, while macho manly women donned fedora's looking for some same gender vaginal gratification and satisfaction. Someone had opened Pandora's box of jazz and jive, and Berlin was hell bent for leather and in leather to get it on with a fleshy dose of topless and bottomless displays of wet and wild genitalia with a delightful dash of BDSM as the Third Reich was growing in strength faster than a hard-on at at a fetish ball.
Yes, boys will be girls and girls will be boys according to the song "Lola" by the Kinks, and the Berlin cabaret scene was locked and loaded on kink. Transvestites in tights, Marlene Dietrich in top hat and tails, while in an earlier era, across the border in France, the topless black beauty Josephine Baker was ramping up the libido factor with her famous banana skirt dance with her bare breasts bouncing and flouncing like two bronze baby moons with nipples extended like 50,000 watt New York City radio towers emitting a signal of pure sexuality. By the dawn of Nazi power in Germany in the 1930's the Berlin cabaret scene was in full swing with unrepressed sexual freedom and expression. Fraulien’s frolicked playfully baring all while boys in full drag regalia were traversing the transvestite trail to the land of libidinous Oz, following the Yellow Brick Road of good old fashioned degeneracy where midgets camped it up with the best of them, and Dorothy was making it on stage with Glinda the good witch in a lesbian frenzy free for all! Cue the Flying Monkeys!
Cabaret itself as an art form evolved from an earlier era of bar and brothels in North Africa, Italy and Spain. It was Ricks Cafe in Casablanca with exotic dancers who danced, singers who sang and exotics who exotic’d. There was plenty of booze and clientele to add to the highly charged adult sexual nature of the show. From it’s flood lit stage it has spawned the famous and the infamous including Mata Hari who while dancing the cabaret circuit during the war, managed to extract classified information from seduced military officers who fell under her cabaret spell of flesh and promiscuity. In the end...her curtain came down as she was captured and shot by the Germans as a spy.
The first acknowledged cabaret opened in 1881 when the clitoris culture was born kicking and screaming at a venue known as the Le Chat Noir in gay Paree. At first it was just a Bohemian drinking hole for artists, poets, writers, and other drunks to visit, sit and try to out wit each other in verbal fencing matches with as much caustic wit as a flock of bitchy self absorbed drag queens. Soon, the cabaret culture experienced urban renewal as the old ghetto mentality of sit and drink was replaced by flamboyance and panache with the opening of the Moulin Rouge in G-spot middle of the vaginal vortex of the red light district. It came complete with a bright whore red windmill on the roof that would keep Don Quixote busy for hours dreaming his impossible dream. It was the launching pad for the luminaries of the intelligentsia of the day such as Edith Piaf and Toulouse Latrec. Contrary to popular belief there was no one named Rice Pilaf, and Pia Zadora was yet to be born or surely she would have been worth a few fucking pfennigs to watch strip down dressed as a high school cheerleader. Rah, Rah, Rah, Sun Ra.
While most cabarets had “rules and regs” for the regulars, the “irregulars” wore their berets at a jaunty slant at the world famous Folies Bergere where the literati illuminated the neon nights with convivial convo, fine food and the Horn of Plenty Horny filled with plenty of jazz age juice and sexual jism. Rules were non-existent while flesh and fantasy merged into a Picasso dreamscape.
France may have been in the vanguard of letting their fancy French pants down, but, after years of devastation and ruin brought on by WWI, a defeated German Weimar Republic decided to unleash inhibitions to a magnitude unheard up to this point that would have made an emperor of the old Roman Empire or even a Viking blush. Expressive sexuality in Thirties Germany was alive and well in cinema, arts and on the stage. Cabarets were on overdrive in that arena, and all forms of censorship were eliminated faster than Jimmy Hoffa disappeared. Berlin, Munich and other German cities exploded with cabarets where the main themes after years of authoritarian regimes were now given over to sex and politics after a small revolution and the overthrow of the doddering old Kaiser.
Everything on the stage was ripe with sexual innuendo and it moved to a new neighborhood. One removed far away from modesty, as topless dancers and transvestites could now rub elbows and perhaps other body parts with patrons which included not only the straight community, but also Gay men, Lesbians and Transvestites...Strange bedfellows indeed, but interesting wouldn't you say?
Social critics cried out the alarm that the very social fabric of Germany was being ripped to shreds. Around the same time a young former WWI corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler was rising to power and would soon draw the world into a global battle for survival. The social fabric afterhis performance would never be the same again. As Berlin was in a close race with Sodom and Gomorrah as sex capital of the world, Socialists felt cabaret entertainment was capitalistic and wasteful. The right wing said it was a sign of weakness in a society as it broke itself down into a pile of social rubble and decay. You can’t win for loosing eh?
In the meantime, the pink swastika was being raised as porcelain boys with too much moulin rouge and highlighting eye-popping eyeliner were parading around the boulevards and holding well attended transvestite balls while cavorting at the cabarets. Women in mens clothing were becoming the norm and Lesbianism was now flaunting itself openly and deliciously. Fuck the Age of Aquarius...this was the dawn of an era some historians have referred to as that of the Pink Swastika. I can't see a pink swastika as a bumper sticker on anyones car today along side those for breast cancer or AIDS.
In private and in public, Nazi Germany was going pubic! Look over there in the corner in the alley, the softer side of the German Superman is dropping his drawers for some well deserved homoerotic discipline administered by a phallic phalanx of goose stepping Gestapo girls. Books were burning in the streets; yellow stars of David were a one one ticket to the ninth gate of Hitler hell, and all the while in smokey enclaves, lesbian tongues were tempting the taste buds of Teutonic virgins, while the pink punks strolled the Strasse mincing to the symphonic strains of Straus.
While the Sixties were Godspelling and Jesus Christ Superstarring, Joel Grey and Liza Minelli were fish netting and strutting with chorus boys on Broadway in the stage production of "Cabaret" based on a 1951 theatrical called "I Am A Camera" which in turn was adapted from a short novel "Goodbye to Berlin" published in 1939 just in time for Hitler’s panzer invasion of Poland.
The story is a looking glass glimpse of the Nazi goose step rise to power in 1931, and all taking place at the basillica of debauchery, the fictional Kit Kat Klub, the Vatican of sin and vice located on the sleazy side of the Twilight Zone of old Berlin. The main characters involved are a 19 year old old cabaret performer and a young American writer. Sub plot are as plentiful as the assassination attempts to eliminate Der Fuerher. The entire Casablanca gone wrong scenario is presided over by the Master of Ceremonies, brilliantly portrayed by Joel Grey as decadence is orchestrated to symphonic levels as overpowering as a moody Beethoven composition.
There are cabaret girls and cabaret boys prancing and dancing in a sequin sequence, but soon, the stage is ignited with a real Liza powerhouse number of sex and sensuality as she belts out "Don’t Tell Mama" Soon, Nazi drag queens line up on stage and do a high step goose step with the Master of Ceremonies him/herself resplendent in enough sparkles and spangles that would give Liberace's candelabra a hard-on! Weird? Oy Vay...wait there's more including a dance sequence with a female in a gorilla suit that is straight out of a scene in a Ed Wood, Jr film. The moment we have all been waiting for is not far down the line as Liza says, "I always hated Paris" contrary to Bogart to Bergmans "We will always have Paris" as a prelude to "Life is a Cabaret Old Chum!" Sing along everybody...grab your fishnets and tank tops and let loose boys..girls...boy girls, girl boys.
The production is locked and loaded with euphemisms for the rise and fall of Nazi power, anti-semitism and it's atrocities, concentration camps and debauchery of the power elite. In the 2012 London revival it gets even tastier as the cast members strip naked and fill the stage with Nordic Viking Brunehilde Breasts and Aryan Superman Gentile Genitalia for the Masturbating Master Race while the sound of hissing gas chamber gas is heard as all that bare flesh huddles together proving that death, not life, is a Nazi Cabaret Old Chum!