Movie Review: Cabaret

Willkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome

It is ironic that the musical, an American art form, has as one of its finest examples a musical set not in Oklahoma or New York City, but in Weimar Germany as the country transitioned to Nazism. As somebody said about falling love, the descent into the Nazi regime for Germany happened slowly at first and then all at once. Cabaret tells the cultural side of the story.

First, a little history. Back in 1939, a young man named Christopher Isherwood traveled to Berlin both to be an American expat writer and to indulge in the city’s notorious gay scene. He went on to become one of those famous-but-little-known-writers of America and he penned a largely forgotten book about his amorous adventurous in Germany called The Berlin Stories. Isherwood’s adventures predated and overlapped the war, and The Berlin Stories was published in 1945. A section of this book called Goodbye to Berlin was adapted by John Van Druten into a Broadway play called I Am A Camera, which introduced America to the character of Sally Bowles (played by Julie Harris in I Am A Camera). Sally Bowles is the same character played by Liza Minelli in Cabaret. And as a character, Sally Bowles found great resonance; the role earned Harris a Tony award for the theatrical performance and in 1972, Liza Minnelli took home the Best Actress Academy Award. (Cabaret took home eight Oscars that year.)

The weird title of I Am A Camera comes from Isherwood’s writing: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.”

Bob Fosse took this body of work (a book and a play) about the collapse of Germany and crafted from it the most unlikely of end products: a musical. It was a shocking musical at the time, and it still is today. Although hard to believe by today’s standards, it was X-rated when it came out. It dispensed with the idea that musicals were supposed to be happy-slappy entertainment designed to make you feel better. And unlike the classic musicals where people seemed to randomly burst out in song, Fosse used a device where all singing occurred in a reasonable context. All but one number was performed in the cabaret. The exception was a spontaneous song in a beer garden by Nazi youth, a plausible occurrence.

If you want to talk cinema, Cabaret is a ground-breaking monument of a musical. But the reason it comes to mind for Richocet Cafe now is that it was set in Berlin as the Nazis were coming to power. It was quite literally the fall of the republic. As we experience what may well be the fall of the American Republic, Sally Bowles can guide us through the fall of another republic not that long ago and not that much different than our own.

The few Nazis who appear at the beginning of the film passing the hat in the cabaret (who get thrown out for their trouble) are replaced at the end of the musical with a fat-cat Nazi audience at the cabaret. The Nazis are the bookends of this movie, from a few earnest advocates at the beginning to a prospering dominant class at the end. The storyline of Cabaret is just a few months. That’s how fast things can change when you’re not looking.

Not that the Nazis are a focal point of the story. The barbarians at the gate are at first derided, then belittled, occasionally beaten up, only to one day take over. At Cabaret, the show goes on, but the patrons change. Part of me wishes to know what became of Sally Bowles after the Nazis took over and what happened to her friends, Jewish and Gentile, rich and poor, depraved and genteel? Then again, maybe it is better to not know and just remember her, frozen in the time right before the world went dark.

Cabaret strikes me as a dire prediction of where we are headed. This movie is a bit like the canary in the coal mine. The characters in Cabaret are all politically oblivious. They live and work and have relationships and barely notice the Nazis. They complain about the economy but manage to get by. They know that Jewish people have to be careful, but they are not alert to what is really going on. They mock the Nazis but do not take them seriously. They trivialize the persecution of the Jews as some sort of momentary issue. They never read newspapers or talk politics. They busy themselves with themselves.

Some of these people will soon be ashes tossed in mass graves at Dachau and Auschwitz. Hitler ran over 40,000 death camps and managed to exterminate 6 million Jews, 5 million Soviets and prisoners of war, 250,000 disabled people, and 50,000 political opponents. The most famous of these camps was Auschwitz with its famous gates (“Arbeit Macht Frei,” roughly translated as your work will set you free).

I rewatched Cabaret to get a reassessment of what willful political ignorance looks like. People are politically naïve at their own peril. If you visit the museum at Auschwitz, there is a room that is stacked with suitcases from the poor souls who arrived in boxcar after boxcar at the intake area for the death camp. It is easy to notice how many suitcases there are. It gives you pause to think of the scope of this atrocity. But think about it more. People were rounded up in cities like Berlin or Munich or Frankfurt and put on trains for what was euphemistically called “deportation,” but they brought luggage because they thought they were going to stay for a while. They may have believed the lie that they were just being deported or relocated. Many of them got off the train, were processed, and were sent to the gas chambers before they could ever open their suitcase. Or even get a drink of water.

They brought their suitcases because they underestimated what was happening. They didn’t pay attention to the Nazis and their “final solution” agenda, but that didn’t mean the Nazis were not paying attention to them. And don’t believe the myth that the death camps executed only Jews; in actuality, more non-Jews than Jews died in these thousands of large and small camps— “antisocials” or criminals, homosexuals, Romani (sometimes called the Gypsies), Jehovah’s Witnesses, political enemies, prisoners of war, the elderly, the infirm.

If you never saw this movie (and it’s so worth the watch), be reassured that there are no concentration camp scenes in Cabaret. You won’t see anything grisly. The film is set in the last days of the Weimar Republic at a time when Sally Bowles revels in what she calls “divine decadence.” This is an era of sexual ambiguity, homosexual and polyamorous relationships, bawdy entertainment, men in makeup, women in drag, drunkenness, prostitution, abortion, street brawls, bullying. Against this randy background are some people who are living relatively normal lives. Sally is perhaps the most libertine, working at the KitKatClub and pursuing amorous relationships to soothe her boredom and occasionally supplement her meager income, but she also does normal things like take her laundry to the cleaners, walk around the city, and gossip about the people in her rooming house. You probably know the rest of the plot, but even if you don’t, it’s about work and love and relationships and money, but it is soaked in a weird sort of tawdriness. You can laugh it off—it’s just “decadent”—or you can see it for what it was. Aberrant. Abnormal. Wretched. Wicked.

The Apostle Paul once wrote in his letter to the Romans that before societies collapse, they go through a period of atheism, followed by sexual immorality, and culminating in moral wickedness that allows unspeakable evil to prevail. This movie is Chapter 1 of the Biblical book of Romans, Berlin version. You see, Paul also noted that even as the society is collapsing all around them—and there are a hundred warning lights and sirens—the people in greatest danger are not only blind to what’s going on, they perceive themselves as smart. Savvy. Clever. Intellectual, sophisticated, too smart to get caught up in the drama of politics. Sally Bowles thinks of herself as a woman of the world. Her boyfriend thinks of himself as an intellectual. A rich man in the film thinks he’s an international playboy. The guy who runs the Cabaret thinks he’s running a normal business. Everyone is blind.

But it’s not the blindness that occurs when things are hidden from us or deliberately obscured. It’s willful blindness, a commitment to simply not see the things that are in front of our faces.

It is important to understand that the Nazis did not just “happen” to this corrupt and morally deficient society. The Nazis were the corruption and the moral bankruptcy. They crept in, slowly and by inches at first. The normally upstanding, decent, hardworking Germans tolerated the stuff going on at the KitKatClub. They told themselves it was harmless or modern or just young people having a good time; they laughed Sally’s green nail polish and the song extolling the virtues of having a threesome. They minimized the corruption, when they acknowledged it at all, and some joined in. But even those who did not participate did not stand against it; they just ignored it and patted themselves on the back for being tolerant.

Early in the film, earnest-faced young Nazis entered the KitKatClub to pass the hat and drum up potential supporters. By the end of the movie, the Nazis are all at front row seats in the same club. The show is still the same. Sally Bowles will sing for them or any other paying customers. She still does that iconic dances-with-chairs routine. The only thing that has changed is that Nazis are no longer young and lean and earnest; they’re big fat slobs who smoke cigars and leave generous tips and leer at the club’s scantily clad performers.

Sally Bowles is an American living in Berlin who wants to be a real actress, but she takes what life throws at her. To make her way financially, she dances provocatively in a sketchy club in front of some pretty disgusting patrons. She lapses in and out of opportunistic prostitution, and she embraces the cabaret with what we today would call tolerance and acceptance and love. She never questions the men in makeup around her or the person in a dress using a urinal backstage. Everything is viewed as a “cabaret” and fun. She never evaluates what is going on around her. She falls easily into romantic relationships but she just as easily falls out of them. In one of the final scenes in the movie that involves a fur coat she got from a lover, we see the culmination of living life the way she lives it. And even in her most bitter moments, we realize that Sally is still blind.

The others are not much better. They play by the rules others hand down to them. Their mistake is that they think people are—as Anne Franke ironically wrote in her diary— “basically good at heart.” What the Cabaret characters don’t realize is that there are evil people in the world and evil people do evil things.

Cabaret has two Jewish characters in supporting roles but the film never gets into politics. It is only because we viewers already know history that we realize why one of the characters is hesitant to say that he is Jewish. There are hints that being Jewish is problematic. but nobody protests. In fact, the Jewish characters are rather tolerant of the blatant antisemitism around them, even minimizing it. This was fairly typical at that time. Many Jewish people in Germany had the means to leave the country before Hitler came fully into power, but did not do so… because they either thought things would get better or didn’t know things were as bad as they were. These were the people who packed a suitcase for their trip to Auschwitz.

Fritz and Natalia are a young Jewish couple in the film. The Nazis—who called Jewish people subhuman—would have considered these two Jewish characters worthy of the gas chambers. Yet this young Jewish man and woman are the only ones in the movie who are doing normal honorable things. They fall in love and want to marry. It’s an interesting juxtaposition—the most upstanding people in this film are the ones that the Nazis would seek to destroy as subhuman. And, by the way, the Jewish woman never steps foot in the KitKatClub and the Jewish man does, but finds it distasteful. While they are the most upstanding characters in the film, they are most reviled by the Nazis.

And that is how decadence works. It seeks to win the weak-minded by promising them fun and a rousing good time, and it seeks to punish those who would live by another standard. Ironically, this other standard may be things that were considered normal up to about 15 minutes ago.

Once a film expert whose name escapes me wrote that every film has a secret “owner” even if the owner is not the main character. The film is owned by the background forces that are shaping the events. And using that paradigm, the Nazis are the secret owners of Cabaret. It isn’t the emcee or the triangle of mismatched lovers or the Jewish couple… the Nazis own this film. They permeate the whole film even though we don’t see them much. We don’t know their names, we have no clue about their individual stories. But they are the invisible, driving force that will collapse of the Weimar Republic as the people in the KitKatClub serve them drinks and dance for them.

That is where we are right now. We are steeped in a crazy-town culture, sometimes called “clown world,” where up is down and wrong is right. At the moment I write this, there is a family in the United States who lost custody of their teenage child because the parents did not wish the child to undergo a radical sex reassignment. That’s wrong. There are people facing a double-digit prison term for praying and singing hymns outside an abortion clinic. That’s wrong. A woman who smoked some marijuana stabbed her boyfriend over 100 times in a rage; he died and she did not get even one day of prison time. That’s wrong. We allow shoplifting and carjacking and looting without penalty, but lock up people who entered the Capitol on January 6 through doors opened to them by the Capitol police. Homeless people can encamp in our cities with virtually no restrictions. In some places, squatters can claim vacant property by simply inhabiting it. Hard-working taxpayers who must buy their own health insurance are expected to pay for free insurance for illegal immigrants, and sometimes we are not even allowed to say the word illegal. Objecting to pornographic books in school libraries is called “book banning.” Refusing to call an obvious man a woman is an act of hatred. Families are fragmented, if they even exist at all; people are encouraged to develop idiosyncratic marriages based on polyamorous relationships. Carjacking is no longer an act of hatred, but a reasonable response to the pressures of modern life. Hiring based on skin color and denigrating people based on race is wrong but it has become so acceptable in our culture that it has been enshrined in regulations and laws. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 620,000 babies were aborted in 2020. So much wrong, and yet we normalize it. We normalize an open border,  gender transition surgeries for kids not only enough to get a tattoo, high taxes and cities where open defecation is protected by law.

We normalize the aberrant. We trivialize wrong. We pretend that we are not in a speeding car heading over a cliff, Thelma and Louise style. We try to enjoy our lives. We ignore politics. We grab a few laughs when we can.

That’s what they did in Cabaret, and then they sang about it like they were happy.

Come taste the wine

Come hear the band

Come blow your horn, start celebrating

Right this way, your table’s waiting…

That’s what Sally Bowles sang as Hitler built the gas chambers that may or may not have taken her life or the lives of her friends. Sally was an American girl working in 1930s Berlin, but she did not want to leave Berlin. It was too much fun.

When I first saw Cabaret, I loved the movie for the most shallow reasons. The music was wonderful, the cabaret scenes were mesmerizing, and the movie had a nice plot and interesting characters. I liked Bob Fosse’s choreography and his signature knock-knee dance moves. I thought Liza Minelli’s make-up was amazing. Joel Grey as the Master of Ceremonies was creepy and endearing at the same time.

The last time I saw Cabaret, it was poignant. Sad. This is where we are. Uncritically accepting the dark cultural forces that are collapsing our culture. There is an old saying that Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Well, Sally Bowles sang as the Holocaust burned … only they were burning people.

If there is anything to learn from Cabaret, it is that politics matter. The late Andrew Breitbart once wrote that politics is downstream from culture, meaning that culture is where you get the signals of what politics is going to make happen. Politics is where you get the gas chambers and culture is where you get the politics. There are forces at work, sometimes very dark forces, that foist things on us and tell us to like them or at least tolerate them, usually in the name of love or decency. These sinister powers want us busy and entertained, maybe even drunk or high, so that they can move in and choke us out. We have to be alert. We have to stand up for truth. We have to speak out.

It seems we are here, standing at the junction of Weimar 2.0 and the Fall of the American Republic, and we need to close down the KitKatClub.