Bei uns um die Gedachtniskirche rum . . .
   Berlin Cabaret: Friedrich Hollaender and the Cabaret of the Twenties

* Original performers, including Ernst Busch, Marlene Dietrich, Blandine
Ebinger, Paul Graetz, Trude Hesterburg, Friedrich Hollaender, Oskar
Karlweis, Lotte Lenya, Willi Schaeffers, the Comedian Harmonists, the
Weintraub Syncopators, and others.

Edel 0014532TLR MONO TT: 156:09 (2 CDs)

Summary for the Busy Executive: Dancing into the Third Reich.

German cabaret (or Kabarett in German, with the final t's sounded)
began roughly around the turn of the century, inspired largely by the
French model.  However, it didn't get going until just after the First
World War, with the great director Max Reinhardt's groundbreaking
production Schall und Rauch ("sound and smoke").  It turned the world
of German popular entertainment, at that point dominated by operetta and
vaudeville-revue, just about upside-down.  The new cabaret was intellectually
sophisticated, sharply satirical, and socially critical, almost exclusively
from the left, occasionally from the extreme wing.  Mainly, it offered
a liberal critique.  Nazis or bourgeois conservatives, for example,
didn't create cabaret.

At its best, cabaret subverted the conventions of popular song.  Instead
of endless variations on boy meets girl, for instance, very often its
political content turned things on their head.  We all know the genre
of the femme fatale whom all the boys run after.  In Alfred Lichtenstein
and Friedrich Hollaender's "Lene Levi," Lene runs trying to escape from
a gang of rapists and finally commits suicide by jumping off a bridge.
Those sensitive to names will realize that Lene Levi is a Jewish girl
and her attackers are non-Jewish toughs, who at the end "run clear out
of the neighborhood." The issues that the newspapers won't talk about,
cabaret will.  In Julian Arendt and Otto Stransky's "Ich steh auf dem
Boden der Tatsachen," a man and his wife are accosted by a masher, who
gives the man's wife the eye.  The man asks the ruffian to move along,
to little avail.  "He was bigger and stronger than me." So the man himself
walks off.  He confides to the audience, "A heavyweight is hard to deal
with.  After all, it's my own private affair.  Right?  I ask you." It
turns out that the wife resents the masher's attentions and breaks his
nose.  The little man runs up to his wife and taunts the retreating
masher, "You coward, you!" Despite his protest that he's not at all
political and prefers peace and quiet, the little man then proudly tells
us how he was, in the days of the Kaiser, all for the Kaiser, at the
rise of the Communists, a man of the left.  With Il Duce, he turned
fascist, and now of course he's all for the Third Reich.  "After all,
it's my own private affair.  Right?  I ask you."

 From the beginning, actors, not singers, were its stars.  It never
produced a voice on a par with Sinatra or Clooney, although occasionally
you could find a good voice like Trude Hesterberg ("The Wild Trudy") or
Lea Seidl.  The stars not only knew their way around a stage, they could
also, like Groucho Marx or Maurice Chevalier, act with their singing
voices.

A lot of composers wrote for cabaret, but its Schubert and Mozart
all in one has to be Friedrich Hollaender, who enjoyed a run of popular
Schlaeger ("hits") unparalleled in German popular music.  People outside
Germany probably know him best as the screen composer of The Blue Angel
and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr.  T, but he has a far more complex history.
At any rate, cabaret songs were such the rage that they inspired hard-core
classical composers like Weill, Eisler, Grosz, and even Schoenberg to
try their hand at the genre.  This is where, among other works and down
to the present day, Threepenny Opera and Blitzstein's Cradle Will Rock
come from.  The artsy side of things took the vitality of cabaret and
also gave the genre a second wind, and you get here such stalwarts as
Ernst Busch, Lotte Lenya, and Marlene Dietrich.  The Nazis, of course,
closed all this down, since they often received and deserved the satirical
scorn of cabaret.  Some of the bright lights managed to escape.  Many
perished in concentration camps.

This wonderfully generous collection (44 tracks) nevertheless is aimed
at hard-core, German-capable fans.  Neither the terrific liner notes
(uncredited, but probably by producer Volker Kuehn) nor the lyrics come
in translation, and there's a lot of Berliner slang and dialect besides.
If you can get around that, you're in for a huge treat, including Paul
Graetz doing Hollaender's "Wenn der alte Motor wieder takt" and "Heimat
Berlin," Blandine Ebinger with Hollaender's "Oh Mond," Willi Prager in
Spoliansky's scathing "Ich weiss, das ist nicht so," Lenya with Weill
and Brecht's hair-raising "Seeraeuber Jenny," Dietrich with Hollaender's
"Jonny" and "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss," Trude Hesterberg in Heymann's
"Das Leibregiment," and Ernst Busch with Eisler's "Lied der Arbeitslosen
(Stempellied)." Most of these people have a large dramatic range. Even
Blandine Ebinger, known for her character of the naive shopgirl, can
also play much grittier in Hollaender's "Die Trommlerin als Schiessbudenfigur."
Those who know only Lenya's later nicotine croak might be surprised by
her youthful chirp, but not by the depth of her performance.  Nevertheless,
one also comes across the occasional "one-note," or pure pop artist.
Dietrich is probably the best-known, the naughty, knowing sex goddess,
but Dietrich, even at this early date, is obviously a star with a product
that doesn't outstay its welcome.  Her performances leap out at you.  At
the beginning of her career, she's nevertheless a classic.

For original shellac, this stuff is in amazing shape.  One does hear a
more or less constant crackle, but one also hears these voices very close
to what they might have been like in life.  And, of course, the performances
are generally stellar.

Steve Schwartz