The stage darkens as a circle of barefoot girls in peasant dresses rush forward to execute a vibrant Hungarian folk dance.
An erotic pantomime, the “Opium Slumber,” ensues in quick succession. It begins with the shadow of a Chinaman smoking wanly on an opium pipe. After a few minutes, an evil femme fatale appears and seductively enslaves him to be a victim for her mélange of sadistically lewd games. The club spectators watch this with a special intensity.
This is followed by a carnal “Bullfight,” performed to the clicking of castanets. Celly, the female matador, disrobes with exquisite deliberation and uses her diaphanous garb to sexually torment and subjugate the hapless beast. The dance concludes with the defeated bull lying supine next to the high heels of the triumphant—and now naked—matador.
After the Black Cat affair, naturally, no Berlin cabaret was stupid enough to flaunt its fleshy wares as high art in the face of the authorities or, if it did, forget to compensate the local Polenta for their impeccable critical faculties.
Foreign tourist guides, true to their calling, championed the Kabarettwelt’s indecent rep. Jägerstrasse, the home to 14 or 15 Nachtlokals, was publicized as Berlin’s hothouse citadel of forbidden sights. Yet, around 1927, a natural downturn occurred. The dark hedonism of the erotic cabaret could be explored in other, more comfortable and accessible surroundings: in ritzy dinner clubs, private Dielen, a few showy restaurants, the “Pleasure-Palaces,” even on an evening’s Bummel of the Kudamm.
Most “Golden Age” Berliners patronized the non-literary cabarets for their ineffable atmospheres, the cynical mood (Berliner Stimmung) that enveloped the stale, smoky air, and only occasionally for the overpriced intoxicants and nude tableaux. Usually, the cabaret conférenciers, or Masters of Ceremonies, were the chief draw. These tuxedoed wits did not exist anywhere else.
While Friedrichstadt Lokal producers experimented with endless sexual and thematic innovations, one out-landish idea succeeded. A malicious conférencier, Erwin Lowinsky, known in the trade as “Elow,” rented the for-mer Weisse Maus cabaret on Jägerstrasse from its new lesbian owners. Running only on Café Monbijou’s dark night, Monday, Elow called his enterprise the “Cabaret of the Nameless.” Instead of hiring professional entertainers, Elow did just the opposite; his stage was open only to amateur performers, 15 per evening.
Elow chose for his off-night cabaret the most thoroughly talentless types he could possibly find, including—for the greater delight of his demented public—utterly delusional and rapturous sickies. Berlin intellectuals compared the milieu of the Nameless to the Roman Coliseum where Christians were savagely martyred, to neighborhood bullfighting rings in Mexico City, and to the execution of criminals by guillotine on Paris’ sidestreets.
The menacing cadence of an Inca sacrificial ceremony is pounded out by the orchestra. On a mountain plateau, a bevy of pearl-necklaced, naked virgins are forced to participate in the ritual murder of their sisters and then given drugs by a High Priest so they may delight in erotic worship with the nubile corpses.
Finally, a fully orchestrated Spanish mystery play, based on Calderon’s The Nun, is enacted. A cello solo establishes the somber mood. Then a procession of nuns and monks, led by a bishop, moves through the audience to the stage, which is arranged like the interior of a church and lit in dark purple columns. The procession is accompanied by the sound of harpsichord, violins, and the cello. A trembling young Sister, played by the histrionic Celly, is brought before the altar of the inquisitorial court. The Father declares her unchaste, worthless. Despite her mad pleas, the errant “Daughter of Christ” is mercilessly expelled from her Order. Before a statute of Mary, the distraught teenager rips off her habit and begs for divine intervention. The Holy Virgin magically steps forth, passionately kisses the Nun, fondles each of her breasts with a slow, icy touch, and then presents the Sister with a silver crucifix—all before the eyes of a stunned clergy. Lights out!
The majority of Elow’s nonprofessionals were cajoled into believing that their appearance would hurl them into cabaret stardom. Generally, they were Berlin’s losers: Gogol-like office clerks who believed that their true calling was comic recitation or juggling; frustrated housewives who once trained in Bayreuth; incompetent teenage magicians; tin-eared composer-and-lyricist teams; hypnotists who were banned from the variety circuit because of their chronic inability to bring their volunteer subjects out of deep trance; mad Napoleonic-posturing poets; and psychologically impaired dilettantes who assumed their renditions and imitations of Wintergarten headliners were superior to the originals.
At the low point in each act—and Berlin’s journalists reported many such moments—Elow jumped on the stage and mockingly polled the audience whether or not to allow the “artiste” to continue. Only the most pathetic and hopeless creatures were encouraged to complete their number. (A few really schizophrenic or severely incapacitated performers were told by an effusive Elow that their painfully conceived routine was so absolutely smashing that they should restart the whole thing.)
The toxic Stimmung at the Nameless was further enhanced by Elow’s abusive taunts directed at the hard-drinking spectators, who often responded with hearty anti-Semitic invective. The Cabaret of the Nameless played to full houses almost into the Nazi period. Elow, the peripatetic imp, ended up in Hollywood, where he vanished into American show-biz obscurity, leaving behind just an archive of his Berlin press clippings.
The Erotic Revue
In the mid-Twenties, erotic revue, another Ziegfeld invention, supplanted cabaret as Berlin’s stylish Jazz Age destination. It combined the lavish features of operetta and Music Hall in the old cabaret format. Like the variety show, its principal competitor, the program of the revue unfolded in episodic set pieces. Olio acts followed spectacle numbers; comic interludes punctuated the space between extravagant choreographic and musical displays. In the revue, however, an underlying aesthetic and dramatic thesis held the evening together. A single team of creators assembled and molded the production. Foreign dance troupes or renowned starlets could be dropped into the show at any time, but their independent routines had to further the revue’s “plot.”
Although conceived in Paris and New York, the erotic revue blossomed in sensation-hungry Berlin. It was mammoth, hectically paced, thoroughly cosmopolitan, and oozed Girl-Culture sex. Berliners flocked to the revue-palaces, bought the Tin Pan Alleyish recordings, marveled at the chorus girls’ legs (which became iconic images in the pictorial monthlies). Revues were a testament to Berlin sophistication—what other city had its own Gesamtkunstwerk erotica? But the revue structure also spoke, in a subterranean way, to the Germanic need to control desire through objectification and derision.