Patrick Bade
Berlin 1920’s: Cultural Life and Performing Arts

Patrick Bade - Berlin: 1920’s Cultural Life and Performing Arts

- Now, if we ever get that time machine that I’ve been talking about, this would be an interesting book to have. It’s a guidebook of Berlin in the 1920s. You can see the title is So it’s a guide through “wicked, sinful Berlin.” Berlin at this time really had the reputation of being Sin City. It was the city where anything goes, any desire you could have, no matter how obscure or perverse could be satisfied. Stefan Zweig, in his great book, “The World of Yesterday,” he talks about this, there’s a chapter on Berlin, and he says that traditional bourgeois morality had completely collapsed in the wake of the First World War. And he says, for any young girl in secondary education to admit that you were a virgin or even that you were straight, was a badge of dishonour. He talks about how it was all out in the open, how high government respectable officials, judges, and so on could be seen openly courting drunken sailors in gay bars. And he says that the transvestite whores of Berlin in the 1920s outdid the orgies of Ancient Rome. These, of course, the two most iconic images of the Weimar years. Otto Dix’s portrait of Sylvia Von Harden, lesbian journalist on the right hand side, and the famous still of Marlene in “The Blue Angel.” I’ll be talking more about that next week. This is an illustration from the satirical magazine “Simplicissimus,” it was, I suppose, a German equivalent of “Punch.” And this shows a bourgeois mother or maybe even grandmother, I’m not sure, oh no it’s mother, she says . She says, “You’re of an age Paula, when men,” she’s about to warn her daughter against the dangers of men. And the rather languid-looking daughter smoking a cigarette says, “Oh, drop it mother, I’m a lesbian.” The woman who is considered to be the voice of Berlin in these years, rather like Yvette Guilbert, Guilbert was the voice of Paris in 1900, was Claire Waldoff, who you see on the left-hand side.

She was a very, very out, in your face lesbian. And she dressed as a man. You can see she wore a tie and she also wore trousers. And she celebrates her hometown of Berlin. You’ll hear her raucous Berlin accent, with the heavily rolled r’s. And this is her song “Es Gibt Nur Ein Berlin.” “There’s only one Berlin.” And in the song she says that it’s amazing when you meet a man in Berlin, you don’t know whether he’s a communist or Nazi. So as I said, everything goes morally, sexually, and politically. We see an image on the right hand side of a working class tenement in Berlin in the 1920s. I don’t think it would’ve been a very comfortable building to live in, ‘cause you’ve got communists on the first floor and you’ve got Nazis on the second floor. So I dunno what happened on the staircase when those two families met. But here is Claire Waldoff celebrating Berlin of the 1920s. So I wonder how many of the women listening to this talk tonight are wearing trousers or slacks. That would, of course, been absolutely impossible over a hundred years ago, at the beginning of the 20th century. And the fact that you have the freedom to wear comfortable slacks and trousers, you can actually thank Claire Waldoff for that. Claire Waldoff was the first woman in Berlin to, as I said, to go out wearing trousers and men’s clothes. It seemed she had a brief affair with Marlene Dietrich and Marlene Dietrich picked up the habit from her. And it was of course, Marlene Dietrich, who was the first woman to introduce the wearing of trousers for women in the United States when she arrived in the 1930s. So she was initially very, very much a product of Weimar Berlin.

And I’m going to play you a song sung by her of this period, . “Johnny, when you have a birthday,” . “I’ll be your guest for the whole night.” And, as you can see, her style of singing, raucous, rather like that of Claire Waldoff, based on the style of Claire Waldoff, really. And it’s amazing how, I mean, actually the words are innocent enough, but it’s amazing how naughty she can make them sound when she adds, I’m going to come and visit you at half past four in the afternoon. And she just makes that sound so erotic and so exciting and extraordinary. My last talk to you, I’m afraid, was cut short so often, I’m afraid, I try to put too much into these talks. So I didn’t get round to talking about Otto Dix, who’s one of the most important members of the movement known as Neue Sachlichkeit, new objectivity. And he, of course, painted the Sylvia van Harden I’ve shown you already. And another picture, which is in a way iconic of the period is his portrait of the exotic dancer, Anita Berber. I think anybody who let him paint them would have to be a very, very brave person. I’ve had a discussion about this with Charles Delheim when I was interviewing him for Jewish Book Week, about his wonderful book, “Belonging and Betrayal.” I know I’ve raved about it to you before. Such a interesting book about the importance of Jews in the art business in the early 20th century. And he felt very strongly that Dix’s portraits of the Jewish dealer, Alfred Flechtheim was anti-Semitic cause it’s so caricature. And I said, “Hey, look at all the other portraits.” he wasn’t singling out Alfred Flechtheim because he was Jewish. This was just the way that Otto Dix saw the world, in a very harsh way. He and his wife actually really liked Anita Berber and they were friendly with her. And this is what Mrs. Dix says about Anita Berber.

She says “She used to spend an hour doing her makeup and consuming a bottle of cognac in the process. And as far as the prostitution was concerned, that was obvious. We went for a walk in . And when someone approached her, she said "200 marks.” I didn’t think it was so awful, after all, she had to pay for her own stage costumes and dancers didn’t get paid that much in those days. She was so charming, so sweet, totally natural and lovely.“ Now, I know that William and Trudy will have given you a lot of political background in much more depth and detail than I can. But just to remind you, this is the 9th of November, 1918, two days before the official ending of the First World War. And this is the declaration from a balcony in the Royal Palace in Berlin of the end of the monarchy and the beginning of what we called the Weimar Republic. This was followed by a left wing revolution and a very violent and terrible right wing counter-revolution, in effect, a civil war. And the Jewish left wing leaders, Rosa Luxemberg and Karl Liebknecht were brutally murdered and their bodies thrown into the canal in Berlin. And of course, there’s huge unrest and unhappiness, you can imagine. This is a protest meeting against the Versailles Treaty. I think most historians now would recognise that the harshness of the Versailles Treaty towards the defeated countries was a terrible mistake and a recipe for future disaster. The Versailles Treaty, I mean when I lived in Germany, the old lady who adopted me, she never called it the Versailles treaty, she called it the , the "Shame Treaty”.

It’s a shame of another kind, of course, millions had died in the First World War, and millions more had been horribly mutilated, wounded mentally as well as as physically. So this would’ve been a very common sight in Berlin in the 1920s, people who’d lost limbs and had no source of income begging in the streets. This is a protest march of what the French called . And of course, these people, the nature of the First World War, it is industrial warfare, partly the nature of the war, but also the medical progress, if you call it that, meant that horribly, horribly mutilated people, these men would not have survived in any earlier war, but they did in the First World War. And so people were constantly reminded of the horrors of the war that had just passed. And this is another Otto Dix, of scat players, all seem to be mutilated veterans of the First World War. And this is again, George Gross’s comment, very bitter, savage, left-wing political critique of those bourgeois people who’d come through the war unscathed or even profited from it. And then again, as a direct result of the Versailles Treaty, of course, the inflation of 1923. I can never get into my head the figures, . billions, billions of marks, equivalent to a dollar. And money, it was worth less than toilet paper. And you needed to a van full of money to buy a loaf of bread at one point in 1923. Here are two ironic comments on this situation. Again, George Gross, noticing that there’s somebody in the background with a wheelbarrow full of money on the way to buy a loaf of bread. But there are fat cats who are profiting from the situation, as we see in the foreground. And on the left, a collage by Kurt Schwitters.

It was what he called a . in German means to vomit. So it’s a vomit picture. And you can see he’s using bank notes just as scraps of paper on the surface of the picture. But what I want to concentrate on this evening is the performing arts in Berlin, from this period, I think 1919 to 1933, but Berlin is an incredible magnet to talent from all over the world. And it rivals or maybe even surpasses Paris as the cultural capital of the Western world, with very exciting things going on, particularly cabaret. So I thought I’d start with cabaret. Cabaret was a Parisian invention of the 19th century. And it spread from Paris to Vienna to Munich, and maybe its finest hour, its great period was in Berlin in the 1920s. And it’s a very Jewish thing, not so much originally in Paris, but by the time it gets to Vienna and Berlin, it’s an art form in which Jews have felt very comfortable. And I think it’s because Jews have so often been on the edge. And cabaret is really the ultimate edgy art form of the outsider criticising the establishment. Here are three leading cabaret figures of the twenties. Actually all three were Jewish. On the right hand side is Curt Bois. And he was only one of these three who survived the Holocaust. He fled to America. And, you know him, whether you think you do or not, because he appeared, he had cameo roles in lots of Hollywood movies. I know you, you all know “Casablanca” by heart. And Trudy has talked about it. And he plays the role of the pick pocket in “Casablanca”. So, of course, he missed Germany terribly. For all the ones who did escape and survive, they still had this terrible sense of loss. And after the war, he eventually went back to Germany and spent the rest of his life there, despite what had happened to him. But he was great friends with Kurt Gerron. He’s the large man here in the centre. God, there’s a whole talk to be given about him. Such a terrible, terrible, tragic fate. And he was superstar of Weimar Germany, brilliant man.

He was a brilliant actor, cabaret performer, filmmaker. Very successful, very wealthy, driven out of Germany in '33. And he went first to Paris, which was, I suppose the most friendly city towards German Jews at the time. And then Amsterdam. And Curt Bois was saying to him, “Look, you’ve got to get out, you’ve got to get out.” And he actually arranged a contract for him with, I think it was with MGM, but you know, he was so full of himself, he’d been such a big star. He felt it was beneath him to travel to America second class. And MGM would not provide first class travel for him and his family. He declined to go, and I won’t go into his fate now, I might get a chance to talk about it in another time, but it’s an incredibly poignant and terrible story, actually, what happened to him. Also, actually, the guy on the left, he’s called Paul O'Montis, big star of Berlin cabaret in the twenties. He had the double whammy, I suppose as far as the Nazis, when the Nazis came, of not only being Jewish, but being openly gay. And he was one who was very quickly arrested and he died in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen in 1940. But I’m going to play you a rather lighthearted song. Not a political one or a bitter one. Very charming. I love this record. And the title is, “My Brother Makes the Sound Effects in the Movies.” Remember sound just been introduced at the end of the twenties, beginning of the thirties into movies. So this- Two more very famous cabaret performers, Margo Lion, she’s actually French, but her big career was in Berlin at this time. And she is often said to be the model for Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.” And on the left, Villa Bendorf.

And you can see this, it’s a big theme, the gender bending, the breaking of gender roles in Berlin in the 1920s. And you can see he’s half dressed, half man, half woman in front of the- Rather topical, I think with all the extremely excited debate at the moment about transgender. Another favourite record of mine from this period is, it’s a song composed by one of the leading cabaret composers, Friedrich Hollaender. At least he wrote the words and he’s borrowed the tune. I don’t think I need to tell you where this tune, I’m not going to tell you 'cause you’ll recognise it. But I find this very funny and very ironical and the title is “An Allem Sind Die Juden Schuld”. “The Jews are to Blame for Everything.” This is a cabaret performer called Anna Maria Hauser. And she’s of course mocking the growing antisemitism in the 1920s. And you know, she starts off by saying, well, if it’s sunny, if it rains, if it’s pale, if it’s thunder or lightning, the Jews are always to blame for it. And then she goes through all sorts of other things in life and current events, some quite naughty lyrics in it. One, she says, if the Prince of Wales, that’s future Edward VIII, is gay, of course the Jews are to blame for it. And at the end of each verse, I love the way she ends each verse with the incredibly sort of naive reaction of people to antisemitism. “Oh really?” “Yes.” “Oh really?” The Jews to blame for the hail and the thunder and lighting. Some of these songs, I mean, could be very near the knuckle both socially and politically. This is Max Hansen. He was another person who was a real superstar of Weimar Germany. He was the original cheeky chappy. He was famous in cabaret.

He was a very popular movie star. He was a great friend of Richard Tauber. He sang a song, . “If only I was Richard Tauber.” And Tauber replayed the compliment by actually writing an operetta specifically for him that was supposed to- I wonder what’s happened to that, if it still exists. It was supposed to be premiered in Vienna in 1939. Course political events got in the way and it never happened. Now Max Hansen was the illegitimate son of an actress, and the man who acknowledged him happened to be a Jew. So as far as the Nazis, he was concerned, he was that horrible term in inverted commas. Please, I don’t like to use these terms, but that’s what how it was. He was a . “A half Jew.” When the Nazis came to power, like a number- Of course if your mother was Jewish, it was tough luck. But if your father was Jewish, this is before of course DNA testing, if your mother could, if she prepared to put up with some public shame, she could say, “Well, actually I had an affair on the side and my child was not really my husband’s child or whatever. And that’s what happened in his case. And he was so popular that despite having outraged the Nazis with the song I’m about to play you next, Goebbels offered him honorary Aryan status, that would’ve been a terrible poisoned chalice. And he wisely declined that. And he hid out the war in Denmark and Sweden.

There was another reason why the Nazis were, many Nazis were not very keen on him. There was a song that he sang in 1932 and recorded, . "Were you once in love with me?” And the last verse of the song tells us that Hitler has gone to the halfway house in Munich with his old buddy Ziggy Cohen, obviously Jewish. And during the evening he gets drunk and sentimental and he puts his arms around Ziggy Cohen and makes homosexual advances to him. Well, you can imagine how that went down with the Nazis. Now, to move over to the theatre. This is Mr. Theatre, in Germany, between the early 1900s and 1933 and continuing, of course in Austria till '38. This is Max Reinhart, who started off as an actor but became one of the most influential theatre actor managers and directors. Very innovative director and a incredible discoverer of talent. In that respect, he was rather like Diaghilev, he sensed talent. He created the careers of enormous numbers of actors, film stars, and playwrights, and people in the theatre. At one point in the twenties, he was running five different theatres. The , which is sort of like the National theatre, the , which was a small theatre for intimate plays. He also ran a cabaret club and put on huge theatrical spectacles in the . This was an enormous building, huge theatre in Berlin, where he put on these performances with cast of hundreds. I probably mentioned in several lectures, if you’ve been following my lectures before, the amazing conversations that I had with the great art historian, Professor Ernst Gombrich That would’ve been about 1990. It was around the time I was starting to work for the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

And I had two days of conversations with him. But I’ve fed off those days ever since. He told me so many interesting things. He was actually living in Berlin for a while in the thirties. He was a little bit of a snob, I would say, he was a bit sniffy about Max Reinhardt. He thought he was a bit vulgar. A bit of a showman. Here is the , small intimate theatre where they were put on classical plays, Molière, and so on. I mentioned Alexander Moissi before, who was considered to be the greatest classical actor in Weimar Germany till '33. As far as I know, he was not Jewish, but nevertheless left Germany immediately as the Nazis took power. And he moved to Austria where he died at the height of his career in 1935. You can find snippets of film with him on YouTube. I did that recently. And it’s a style of acting, of course, which is very dated, I suppose. Nobody acts like that anymore. It’s very exaggerated, very expressionist. And I asked Gombrich about him, Gombrich said, yes, he knew him quite well. He was actually a family friend. And he told me this story, which I’m very pleased to be able to share with you. It’s rather extraordinary when you think about it. This is something that happened approximately a hundred years ago, in the mid 1920s. Gombrich was on holiday in Switzerland with the great pianist, Rudolf Serkin. And they went for a walk in the mountains and the weather was terrible weather, sort of stormy and raining. So they bumped into Moissi and he greeted them and they asked him how he was. And he said, “Oh, the weather is so awful.” He went into a great big sort of monologue about how awful the weather was, in a very dramatic way.

And then he turned around and he strode off and Serkin turned to Gombrich. And he said, quietly, . “He’s rehearsing.” So yes, experimental theatre in Berlin in the twenties, I mean, everything that’s considered sort of avant-garde or experimental in theatre today was really tried out already in Berlin in the 1930s. This is Erwin Piscator, who was using all sorts of innovations of theatre in the round and projections onto the stage and so on and, and so on. This is a design for a theatre for Erwin Piscator. And of course, the most famous name of Berlin theatre in the twenties is Bertolt Brecht. And this is a theatre, which of course is politically engaged theatre. The idea that theatre is not just entertainment, it’s there to change the world, you hope, for the better. His biggest success that really led to world fame was the , the Threatening Opera, in 1928. I’m going to talk about that on Sunday, next Sunday, in greater detail. So I’m not going to say much about it tonight. Kurt Gerron, I will play you Kurt Gerron singing “Mack the Knife.” So instead, I thought I’d play you this. It’s a song, words of Brecht. Music by Hanns Eisler. And it’s from a play called, “Die Mutter”, “The Mother” of 1931. And the title of this song is , “In Praise of Communism”. And it’s a kind of hymn, almost like a Bach aria with a flute obligato. And I find it curiously touching and moving. Remember this is 1931, when it, I think, it was still possible for many people to think that communism was going to be the answer to the world’s problems. Although we know now, of course with hindsight, that Stalin already had his grip on Russia, but the worst crimes of Stalin were not yet apparent to the world. I think it was possible to really believe in the ideal of communism. And that’s what this song expresses. So it’s sung here by Helene Weigel, who was Bertolt Brecht’s wife. My translation, by the way, of the German.

That final line, of course, is really the key, isn’t it? “It’s the simple thing that is difficult to do.” I quoted that to Anita Laskagalvich recently. She said, “Well, you can certainly say that again.” So for classical music, Berlin was the most exciting city in the world in the 1930s. And it was, as I said, it was a magnet that attracted talent from elsewhere. So here are the three leading avant-garde composers in Berlin. Actually all were Austrian, but at this time, Berlin was more interesting for them. So it’s Zemlinsky on the left, Schoenberg in the middle, and Schreker on the right hand side. All Jews, although Zemlinsky was again what the Nazis would’ve called . He was only half Jewish. And if you were in Berlin in the twenties, one thing you could be sure of was there was going to be a great concert every night of the week. This is a photograph from 1931 and we have the world’s most celebrated conductor, that’s Arturo Toscanini, who’s of course Italian. He’s second from the left, but he is being fêted by the four leading conductors in Berlin. You just think, “My god.” Every night you had a choice. You had Bruno Walter on the left hand side, who’s the director of the Berlin Philharmonic. You had Erich Kleiber, who was at the Staats-Oper. You had Klemperer, he’s the tall one. And of course you had Furtwängler, not looking very happy, on the right hand side. And my guess is probably it wasn’t a very happy atmosphere on that occasion. It’s often said that a conductor, a male conductor, anyway, is only as great as his ego. And the testosterone level when that photograph was taken must have been off the scale. The most important opera to be premiered in Weimar Berlin was Berg’s “Wozzack”. It was presented at the Staats-Oper in 1925 with Erich Kleiber conducting.

An incredibly powerful piece. I know it’s coming up, for those of you in the UK, it’s coming up very shortly 'cause I’m going to see it when I get back to UK in May. Overwhelmingly moving, gripping piece and I’m going to play you a very rare unpublished recording. It comes from a German radio archive of Erich Kleiber, the first conductor, conducting the orchestral interlude before the final scene. Here we’ve got Berg, he’s the tall one in the middle, on the left hand side. And Kleiber, you can see. So this, to tell you what you’re going to hear, that it starts off rather strange effect, which is actually bubbles rising to the surface of the water as the anti-hero of the opera, he’s just drowned himself. He’s walked into a pool and he’s drowned. And then the orchestra, it is just the most achingly poignant, incredibly gut-wrenching music before the final scene when his orphaned child is surrounded by cruel children in the playground, taunting the child that the mother and the father are dead. So this herein performance, conducted by the original conductor, Erich Kleiber. I can’t hear that very well myself, I don’t know whether you can, so I think I might move on. So the lighter muse, operetta. Operetta, again, originally a Parisian invention, although it was a German Jew who invented it in Paris that was Offenbach, exported to Vienna. Vienna then becomes the operetta capital of the world in the early 1900s. And the king of the silver age of operetta is of course Franz Lehár. So he’s getting on in life by the 1920s, but he, like so many, he’s attracted to Berlin. And it’s the Metropol Theatre you see on the left, which is the leading operetta theatre of the world in the 1920s.

And this is down, I would say, to the talents of a small number of people, Lehár himself and his genius was reignited in the 1920s by his encounter with Richard Tauber. You see Tauber standing behind Lehár on the right hand side. 1923, Lehár had an operetta called “Frasquita.” It was on in Vienna and it wasn’t actually doing very well, but Tauber went to a performance and he thought, “Oh, I could do something with this.” So he went to Lehár and the management, he said, “Will you let me take over a few performances?” And so he did. And suddenly, of course the house was filled and it became a huge runaway success. And it contained the first, what became known as the “Tauber Lieder,” the serenade from “Frasquita”. ♪ Dun-da-da-dun-dun-da ♪ ♪ Da-da-da-da-da-da ♪ I can’t. I haven’t got the top notes of Tauber. But thereafter, Lehár wrote a succession of highly successful operettas, always with the “Tauber Lieder” that had to be encored two or or three times. So, and these were mainly in Berlin, “Der Zarewitch” on the left hand side. And the most successful of all, in 1929, was “Land of Smiles.” And I’m going to play you an excerpt of that in my talk on films in the Weimar Republic on Wednesday, 'cause it was actually the very first sound film to be made in Germany, in 1930. So instead I’m going to play you the queen, the undisputed queen of operetta in Berlin, that’s Fritzi Massary. I talked about her arriving in Berlin in the early 1900s. She’d really been driven out of Vienna because she’d had an affair with an Austrian prince. And of course that was a big scandal.

She had an illegitimate child with this prince and she was a, you know, working class Jewish girl from the Vienna suburbs, so, you know, their marriage was thwarted and it was good for her, really, 'cause as I said, she was absolutely adored in Berlin from the early 1900s, I think it’s 1904 up 'til the advent of the Nazis in '33. And her last great success was written for her by Oscar Straus, no relation to Johann, spelled differently. And it was an operetta called, “Eine Frau, die weiß was sie will,” “A woman who knows what she wants.” And it was, of course, tailor made for her talents. And that was premiered 1st of September, 1932. And sold out, massive, the biggest hit in town at the end of 1932, 1933. But shut down almost immediately, the Nazis took power. So here is the incomparable, marvellous Fritzi Massary singing a very, very naughty song. It’s a song about gossip. And the last time I actually heard this song was Felicity Lott. She sang it at Wigmore Hall. But she didn’t sing it with the original words. The words were, I think, it’s funny, it’s funny, you could get away with the words. I’m not going to translate it for you either. There’ll be some German speakers who will know what’s going on in this song, but it’s a gossip about a beautiful woman and all the things she’s supposed to have got up to from an amorous point of view. So she’s saying, you know, if a beautiful woman, everybody’s saying she has affairs and she might, as they’re saying it, she might as well have them, she says. Why shouldn’t she have these affairs? And I didn’t get that far into this song, oops.

But there are later suggestions that she has Black lovers and that she is bisexual. So those bits were cut when Felicity Lott sang the song. This is the man who they called the Offenbach of Berlin. This is Mischa Spoliansky, originally from Belarus and brilliant composer of cabaret songs and revues, and a close friend of Tauber, he accompanied Tauber on many occasions. And then you can see Tauber fooling around with him, there’s Spoliansky at the piano. Marlene is showing off her legs on top of the piano. In fact, Spoliansky was the person who discovered Marlene’s talent, gave her her first break, and she became a star in Berlin in his revue , where it’s all about a ménage à trois between two women and a man, with everybody having it off with everybody else. This was a kind of topical theme. And everybody at the time knew about the very complicated relationship between the son of Thomas Mann, oh God, I’ve forgotten his first name again. Somebody asked me that recently. And oh, I’ll tell you more about that actually in a coming lecture. The complicated relationship with those four people. And then, and so another big hit right at the very, very end, the end of 1932 into 1933, was a cabaret opera by Mischa Spoliansky. So there were all sorts of very interesting, experimental, theatrical and musical forms going on in Berlin. And you sort of, “Oh, if it hadn’t all been shut down early in 1933, how would these these new theatrical forms have developed?” Spoliansky, always a gifted composer. And I suppose in a way he was very lucky because he left very quickly indeed.

And he’d just written a huge hit song for a movie and that got him a contract to work for Alexander Korda. And he came to Britain and he spent the rest of his life in Britain, writing film music for British movies. But, you know, there’s an inevitable sense of regret of what he might have produced actually, if he’d stayed in Berlin. This is a very fascinating document. It’s a transcript of a radio broadcast of an early performance of this cabaret opera, which is called . is the manager of a department store. So it’s set in a department store and it’s got kind of nice bluesy, jazzy rhythms and flavours, and it’s very up to date. It’s about modern life. This is a private recording, transcript of the radio broadcast, which Spoliansky brought with him when he came to England. And it was inherited by his daughter, Spoli Spoliansky who I came to know very well. Wonderful, delightful woman. And she allowed it to be published. And what is so fascinating, I think about this, and there are quite extensive excerpts of this performance, you can hear the audience and you’re thinking, yes, this is a Berlin audience on the eve of the Nazi takeover really enjoying themselves and really loving the music and loving the performance. I’m going to finish with the very famous Comedian Harmonists. I’m sure many of you are familiar with them, but they get get played quite a lot on the radio these days. There’s a film about them, there are various books about them.

There’s been documentaries. They were a boy band that was put together in 1927 and between 1928 and 1934, they were amongst the most popular singers in Europe And they sold huge numbers of records, not just in German, but in French and English. And they toured Europe and they were widely adored. But, now the problem, when 1933 came, half of them were Jewish and half of them were, in inverted commas, “Aryan,” whatever that means. And so they were given an ultimatum, told that they had to break up. And they broke into two groups. The Jewish group left and came to England, performed in England and France, and the Aryan members reformed and stayed in Germany. But once they’d split apart, that was it really, it was the end of their great success. Their last tour of German cities was in 1934, and the very last performance they gave was in Munich. And at the beginning of the performance, a brown shirt, a Nazi, came in front of the curtain and he addressed the sellout audience.

He said, “I want you to know that half the group who are going to sing to you tonight are Jews. And anybody who wants to leave can claim their money back at the box office.” And apparently a couple of people did, but the vast majority of the audience stayed and listened to the end. And the very last thing they sang together as a group is a song called, “Auf Wiedersehen,” “I’ll see you again. Somewhere in the world, somewhere, I know that we’ll meet again. It’s been wonderful, but we have to move on.” It was a quite a, it was a song that Spoliansky had written for a revue. And there are recordings made at the time with the original cast where it’s throwaway, it’s not a tragic song, but of course it became that. It’s interesting how songs, I’ve talked about this often, songs can change their meaning or take on a new meaning as a result of political situations. And my guess is there was not a dry eye in the house when they ended their concert with this song. I don’t have a recording of them doing it, but I have a recording of the excellent modern group Cantabile singing “Auf Wiedersehen”. So that’s what I’m going to end with this evening. Right, I think I should end and see what you have to say.

Q&A and Comments:

“Johnny” is your favourite song, Joan.

Q: Oh. “How does society go from anything goes that I want in the twenties to do what the Führer says?”

A: I know, it’s just, it’s so hard to grasp, isn’t it? The rapidity, I mean, it’s a warning it could happen again. And I think there are, we’re in a very, very dangerous situation around the world. And, you know, America, look at what’s happening in America. It’s terrifying and in various European countries as well. It could happen again.

Yes, that’s true, Shelly, that’s true that the treaty at the end of the Franco-Prussian war was punitive, but it doesn’t make it any more sensible that the Versailles Treaty was punitive as well. They were both a mistake. They both led to future wars. Of course there was a terrible sense of humiliation in Germany. And that fueled the rise of the Nazis.

The name of the book, it’s called “Belonging and Betrayal.” It’s by Charles Delheim. Strongly, strongly recommended book about the art trade in the early 20th century. Two symphony orchestras, yes.

And of course there were three opera houses. There was an incredible richness of musical life in Berlin at the time. So, I don’t think Moissi was born in Poland. I think he was born in one of the countries that became Yugoslavia. I think he was Croatian, but he was certainly probably quite a mixture of things.

And, well, I don’t know, who knows, whether he was Jewish or not. I’m not sure. The fact that he left Germany so promptly might suggest that he was. “I am a camera.” That’s right. It’s the basis of course, of cabaret.

Why not Ian? I’m not sure, Maria. Who painted the portrait of a woman that accompanied the song “A mother.” It’s by a minor Neue Sachlichkeit painter of the 1920s. It’s in that hard edge, no, I can’t remember the name of the artist. It’s that hard edge style of the Neue Sachlichkeit.

Again, “Belonging and Betrayal.” I know there’s a very good movie about the Comedian Harmonists. Klaus Mann and his sister Erika. It’s terrible how in the middle of these lectures you get these sudden blank moments and you can’t think of names. Sort of panic moments. But I will be talking about Klaus Mann and Erika and Gründgens, Gustaf Gründgens, who’s in, in this rather complicated love, not triangle really, it was a love quadrangle.

Q: “Is the Johnny whose birthday Dietrich sang early in your lecture, a connection of Wells?”

A: I don’t know what you are asking actually, but what is interesting is how “Johnny,” there are a lot of songs in the inter-war period about a man called Johnny and he’s usually a rather louche character. There’s a Piaf song and of course I’m going to be talking about “Jonny spielt auf” next week. Golo Mann was Klaus’s brother, Golo was the historian. Klaus was the novelist.

“Surabaya Johnny” is another Johnny, of course, with a decidedly louche character. “Harmony” was an off-Broadway show last year. Thank you.

About the Harmonists. Yes, the Comedian Harmonists. Thank you very much, Janet. And of course I love the museum behind me too. It’s very nice to be back in my Paris flat And the Die Weintraub Syncopators. Yes. They’re also a very popular band at the time. “"Turn off Prokofiev, Marla”. Her grandmother had taken her aged three and four to the Berlin Philharmonic rehearsals.“ Well, good. I wonder what date that was. Presumably that would’ve been after the war, though, wouldn’t it? Barry Manilow produced a play about the boy band. is the German word, is the verb , "I vomit” is the German word.

Thank you, Maxine. And right, and you’re a Mickey, your mother listened to that kind of music. I listened to it too. Of course, still.

Thank you all very much. I’ll see you on Wednesday where I’m going to be talking about the movies made during the Weimar Republic.