The American Flapper persona fit snugly into the unsentimental machine-age Zeitgeist. It universalized femme-fatalism. Sex appeal was no longer a mysterious inborn construct but a purchasable commodity, available to the entire female-of-the-species. And seduction could be played out for better rewards than bourgeois marriage—and far longer—when its ultimate goals were money (or diamonds, gold jewelry, furs, penthouses) and emotional dominance.
Berliners, far more than Manhattanites, adapted Ziegfeld’s provocative concept to their mentality and lifestyle. It glamorized and extended the war between the sexes. Women and men each possessed something the other passionately desired in the big-city tango. In fact, Berlin’s professional Beinls were often looked upon as the heartfelt, unadorned subset of the New Woman. The dazzling sex cards they held were short-lived and not a danger to the gender status quo. The roles of good and bad women in Weimar had become reversed. Any Bubikopfed teen was a potential Lulu, or Nutte.
Girl-Culture also referred to the precision chorus line, which Ziegfeld’s choreographers contrived from a blend of French Can-Can and the American fascination with Taylorist motion economy. Stunning Girl-Groups from Anglo-Saxon countries demonstrated synchronized kick displays that beat the hell out of the prewar Tangel-Tingel leg shows. Each angelic dancer, the identical duplicate of the other, resembled an interchangeable machine part or a blank-faced soldier in a Prussian army drill. Here, the New Woman was automated, made trainable, streamlined, remolded into a robotic doll. Both aspects of Girl-Culture—the Demonic Sex Object and the Rationalized Sex Object—enthralled and animated Berlin.
The pairing or struggle between these modern archetypes largely replaced the old brunette/blonde conflict inside Berlin’s venerable theatre prosceniums. Male characters in sex farces and jazzy operettas no longer had to deal with the classic dilemma, the penis versus the heart. The ingenues-in-question were each beddable hellcats. Which succubi to wed or follow to Paris became the novel contentious denouement.
In Fritz Lang’s epic film, Metropolis (1927), where Berlin’s social and cultural conflicts were projected into a science-fantasy future, the theme of Girl-Culture was handled with recondite humor and a hokey melodramatic touch. One year later, Brecht and Weill bested the movie with their avant-garde musical, The Three-Penny Opera. By adding cynical dollops of Berliner Schnauze and restituating the Berliner erotic typology to Victorian London, the unlikely modernists perfected the titillating master narrative. Virtually the entire Berlin press corps hailed the brilliant rendering. The Marxist poet Brecht insisted, in his contrarian manner, that the play was a comic, left-wing indictment of capitalism, but the critics knew better. Three-Penny was Girl-Culture in song.
What Berlinerinnen felt about Girl-Culture is a contentious subject for feminist scholars. Interviews (that I conducted) with women who were teenagers and 20-year-olds in Weimar Berlin and a perusal of popular women’s magazines of the period indicate a high degree of personal satisfaction. Suddenly females from Wilhelmian families were accorded social and carnal opportunities that made them the envy of their older sisters. One woman called Girl-Culture sexual suffrage. Female novelists and Berlin’s feminists, as was their wont, were considerably more critical of the invented revolution.
Cabaret
Cabaret was, of course, the signature entertainment form of Weimar Berlin. Born in the backhalls and miniature variety-houses of fin-de-siècle Montmartre and Vienna, the cabaret melded lowly amusement genres to Bohemian sensibilities, in the service of a middleclass audience on the slum. In Berlin, the “tenth muse” unraveled, returning to its maverick roots: the brothel and concert-café.
Of the 150 Berlin commercial outlets that advertised cabaret revues, only a dozen or so were traditional cabarets in the Parisian mode: shows with alternating acts of musical comedy, poetry reading, topical monologues, torch songs, sleight-of-hand routines, dramatic sketches, and the like. In a sense, these were hip Music-Halls presented within an intimate restaurant setting. The evening’s mood in these houses shifted expeditiously, from laughter to tears to awe to artistic appreciation and finally back to laughter, with each succeeding act. In the standard Jägerstrasse Kabarett, however, there were only two moods: the bitterly sardonic and the heart-thumpingly erotic.
Harry Seveloh, the husband of the lead dancer, delivers a short introduction to the program. He enthuses that Berlin high society has now grown mature enough to enjoy the sights of naked female performers without lewd, sensual stimulation. The spectator’s appreciation of the girls’ exposed beauty should be of a purely intellectual or aesthetic nature.
Scattered applause from the mature audience. The curtain is drawn, exposing a tiny stage.
Oddly enough, Kander and Ebb got this part right. The literary and political cabarets, because of their high artistic content and celebrity casting, received substantial print coverage, which survived (in bits and drabs) to be analyzed and deconstructed by post-World War II historians. The more popular erotic cabarets hardly merited notice, except in the downtrodden Galante monthlies.
One sensational production mounted at the Black Cat Cabaret, “The Dance of Beauty,” achieved widespread notoriety due to its novelty during the Inflation and the legal problems that dogged its creators. Described in remarkable detail by Hirschfeld, Paul Markus (ʺPEMʺ), and several Berlin newspaper reporters, the performance revealed a relatively early attempt to stitch the naughty cabaret impulse to the protective frame of Ausdruckstanz (Expression Dance).
Celly De Rheidt’s brazen troupe was forced to disband shortly after this engagement. Her entrepreneurial husband, Seveloh, a former army lieutenant, was penalized 1500 Inflation marks, which he managed to delay paying until the following summer when the fine’s actual dollar value approached a near-zero decimal. Celly divorced him, remarried in Vienna, and settled down to be an upstanding Hausfrau, never to heard from again.
Gypsy violin music slowly ushers in a line of female artistes.
A waltz, danced by Celly de Rheidt and her ballet group, wearing short transparent dance-dresses, commences. A violet light illuminates them as they float across the dance floor, slowly in the beginning, then in a furious pace. Their bodies freeze, silhouetted against the background of the closing curtain.
A short violin interlude. Again the Girls appear and dance a wild bacchanal under a reddish-purple light. They wear transparent dance-dresses that expose one breast. The wild twirls are followed by a brightly illuminated dance scene: a spring serenade with the music of Lecombe, performed by Celly and a young attractive dancer. Each wears a short, fluttering chiffon skirt below a nude torso. The girl suddenly collapses. She is startled out of her dream state and begins to leap rapturously in a flower movement. Her body sways outward, as she lifts her breasts to the warm, life-giving sun.