The behavior of Einstein’s new colleagues once war had broken out caused him to wonder if he had made the right decision to come to Berlin. He was horrified by all the war enthusiasm at the university, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As a response to the Manifesto of the Ninety-three (which Planck and Paul Ehrlich had also signed), Einstein coauthored a “Manifesto to Europeans,” which among other points chastised the German scientific and artistic communities for behaving, “almost to a man, as though they had relinquished any further desire for the continuance of international relations.” They had “spoken in a hostile spirit and failed to speak out for peace.” Alas, when this counter-manifesto was circulated among the faculty at the University of Berlin, only three professors, in addition to Einstein, signed it. Frustration over this state of affairs drove Einstein more actively into the political realm. In November 1914, along with Ernst Reuter, who would become mayor of West Berlin after World War II, he helped to establish the Bund Neues Vaterland, which agitated for an early peace. Later, he joined prominent socialists and pacifists from the Allied countries in calling for a cessation of hostilities. Planck, who remained committed to the German war effort, must have wondered if Einstein’s selection of a red-colored rose had meant more than just his yes-to-Berlin.
Like Berlin’s scientific establishment, the capital’s popular entertainment industry placed itself at the service of the nation; its goal was to help justify Germany’s cause and to provide diversion in a time of stress. The city’s theaters and cabarets had closed at the outbreak of hostilities to show respect for the gravity of the moment, but they soon reopened due to popular demand. As the author of a commentary on Berlin’s Wintergarten cabaret noted in November 1914:
Variety show treats in wartime are perhaps not to every person’s taste. God knows, there is much preaching about the seriousness of our times, that the carefree singsong of the dance troupes and the dizzying agility of the acrobats do not seem to fit in. On the other hand: many people believe that occasional diversion is needed precisely for nerves that have been stretched to their limits, that are hounded from one excitement to another.
The diversion was not without its patriotic message. Claire Waldoff, Berlin’s most popular cabaret singer, delighted audiences with her number “Immer feste druff!,” which contained the stirring refrain: “Der Soldate, der Soldate / ist der schönste Mann bei uns im Staate. / Darum schwärmen auch die Mädchen sehr / für das liebe, liebe, liebe Militär. (Soldier-man, Soldier-man / Prettiest fellow in the land / Thus all the girls go barmy / For the darling, darling army.)” Along with glorification of the home-side came a chorus of contempt for the enemy. An especially popular cabaret ditty, sung also in the schools, was the “Song of Hate against England.” It went: “We love as one, We hate as one, / We have one enemy alone: England!” Obviously England was not the only foe, but it was singled out as Enemy Number One because it was seen to be similar to Germany in ethnicity and culture but unwilling to accept the Reich as a peer. Decades of envy and unrequited admiration stood behind this song of hatred and the hundreds of “God Punish England” signs appearing all over Germany. As for France, Berlin’s cabaret artists dealt with the motherland of their art form by declaring their independence and wrapping themselves in exclusively national colors. Thus Berlin’s Chat noir rechristened itself Schwarzer Kater, and its announcer, previously a “Conférencier,” now called himself an “Ansager.” The Break-from-France theme was echoed in the fashion industry, which urged that French fashions be vanquished along with French troops, leaving “Berlin [to] take over from Paris the lead in fashion questions.”
Foreign influences were not the only taboo in popular theater: so were the traditional gibes at self-infatuated officials and dim-witted officers. Now cabaret skits and musicals, such as Rudolf Nelson’s The Kaiser Called and At the Outskirts of Paris, lavished sycophantic praise on the monarch and his generals. Performers exhorted audiences to subscribe to war loans, send socks to the troops, and to observe the rationing regulations. In play after play the home front was depicted as a stronghold of patriotic resolve where occasional shortages of food and fuel were shrugged off as temporary inconveniences. In a musical called Berlin in the War the chorus intoned the phrase “Laughter too is a civilian service obligation”—a variation on the old Prussian adage that “Quietude is the first duty of the citizen.” This suggested that making light of daily deprivations was now a duty almost as solemn as political quiescence. In addition to helping Berliners laugh their way to a stiff upper lip, cabaret and vaudeville performers offered some practical advice to the victims of war. For example, Carl Hermann Unthan, who played the violin with his feet because he had been born without arms, offered to teach soldiers whose hands had been blown off how to substitute the use of their feet for their arms, thereby helping them to regain “their self-confidence and prove to them that they will not be dependent upon the support of their fellow citizens.”
Claire Waldoff, Berlin’s favorite cabaret artist
Dutifully patriotic as most cabaret artists may have been, the authorities did not trust them to stay on the proper path without supervision, and subjected all their material to precensorship. This opened a new chapter in the old conflict between artists and bureaucrats in Berlin. The government’s strict controls provoked protests from some of the performers, who complained that their work, indeed their very ability to assist the war effort, was being compromised. Claire Waldoff was allowed to go ahead with only eight of the fifteen titles she planned to perform at the Metropol Cabaret in January 1915. Among the red-penciled titles was her Soldaten-Romanze, which featured a young woman climbing the military ranks, from corporal to general, only to dream upon becoming “Frau General” of starting all over again with the corporal. Herr von Glasenapp, wartime Berlin’s chief censor, considered this disrespectful toward the military. When Rudolf Nelson inserted some unauthorized material into one of his musicals, the police warned him that he would be subjected to more stringent controls in the future and might even be banned entirely if he committed any more “irregularities.” Conservative elements among the public also put pressure on artists to toe the patriotic line. A newspaper report in August 1916 about a Nelson cabaret program featuring bons vivants swilling champagne and ogling seminude young women while joking about food shortages elicited angry letters from readers, who complained that there was nothing funny about living high at home while German boys were dying for their Fatherland in the battles of the Somme. Furloughed soldiers joined the protest, echoing earlier complaints about idle youth. One group wrote: “We come from the battlefield, where we experience nothing but sorrow, pain, and death, and in the big cities they party into the night. . . . Our wives hardly know how to scrape by with their children, while the others dissipate their money with whores and champagne.” A Bavarian soldier, sounding like Private Hitler, declared that “that pack of sows deserves to be hanged, if they’re that well off, those unpatriotic bastards.” Another Bavarian, even more ominously, saw the Nelson play as evidence of Jewish war-profiteering, a plague that was allowed to ravage the land while “German” women starved and “German” men died in the trenches. The notion that the big cities, especially Berlin, harbored packs of Semitic profiteers persisted through the war and helped to further inflame hatreds during the revolution and Weimar era.