After reading this book, Maya Khankhoje finally got it: she had been reading in spoken-word events for years without realizing she was doing “cabaret”.

The Cabaret. By Lisa Appignanesi. Revised and expanded edition, 2004. Yale University Press.

The cabaret, as a “small room” where members of the counter-culture can congregate and freely express their dissatisfaction with the establishment, was born in France at the turn of the 19 th and beginning of the 20 th century. It then moved on to Berlin, Vienna, Prague and other European cities. Lisa Appignanesi, a dissident PEN International member and an establishmentarian Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France, provides a very thought-provoking and richly-illustrated history of this institution which is making a comeback in our very troubled police-state times. Irreverence, satire, humour, wit, a sense of the absurd, uninhibited eroticism and an internationalist perspective are some of the weapons pitched against an all pervasive state.

The spoken word preceded the written word throughout history. Then came the written word and with it, greater mind control. Moses read us the riot act from carved stones, the Egyptians lightened up our reading with papyrus and art-nouveau illustrations, Gutenberg created the precursor of the ubiquitous pocket-book and the audio-visual media and the internet have infiltrated our brains so thoroughly that we no longer remember how we could have ever lived without them. But some of us try, and for that, we frequent the cabaret. The cabaret is homo garrulus’ response to this pervasive attempt at homogenization.

The cabaret provided not only a vessel for the marginalized but also a potent culture broth where “Rauch und Sturm” – smoke and rage – with a pinch of imagination and a soupcon of the absurd nurtured artists like Picasso, Kokoschka and Klimt. Isadora Duncan danced nude on one of its tables. Doomed poets Anna Akhmatova and Mayakovsky sought solace in its warmth. Anton Chekhov observed its patrons to gain insights into the human soul. Konstantin Stanislavski made a repertoire of human gestures to develop his famous acting method. Prokofiev was inspired by Belaiev’s life-sized cabaret puppets to create his unforgettable Petroushka.

The success of the cabaret was in direct proportion to political repression. This is why it did not prosper in the British Isles, with its more liberal tradition and its friendly pubs for venting off. However, the Brits were not so forgiving with Oscar Wilde, perhaps because he struck too close to home.

The most interesting chapters in Appignanesi’s book are those referring to Germany. There was a repressive Wilhelmine Germany to contend with, a major world war and a Weimar Republic which promised more than it could deliver. The author attributes the rise of National Socialism to the inability of left-wing intellectuals to act. Perhaps, she posits, they were too busy frequenting cabarets to get out into the streets. Rosa Louxembourg and Karl Liebnecht were notable exceptions, but they paid dearly for their militancy. Their assassination led the Berlin Dadaists to take the theatre to the streets. By the way, Dadaism was born in Zurich in the aptly named Cabaret Voltaire and its credo was cultural nihilism as an expression of the bankruptcy of post-war culture.

Ironically enough, the German Cabaret thrived in the Weimar Republic because it gave intellectuals the freedom to express themselves. Its conscience was Walter Mehring who held greater stock in individual freedom than party allegiance. Eric Kästner put his money where his mouth was: he did not leave Germany during Nazi times because he wanted to document their atrocities. Moreover, he was also the only author to witness the burning of his own books, a feat which almost cost him his life when a fan spotted him and called out his name. Remember the movie The Baron Munchhausen? He was the unacknowledged author of the script.

Marlene Dietrich is another well-known stage child of the cabaret. Her performance in The Blue Angel has become iconic for cabaret culture. Unlike her compatriot Leni Riefenstahl, she refused to become Hitler’s propagandist and fled to the States.

And who has not heard of Bertold Brecht? The Nazi’s heard about him from the infiltrators they planted in cabarets. They did not like what he had to say: that German militarism and glorification of war stank. The following are the beginning lines of the poem that cost him his German citizenship:

“Legend of the Dead Soldier

 

And when the war reached its fifth spring

With no hint of a pause for breath

The soldier did the obvious thing

And died a hero’s death.”

Brecht had begun his career as a strolling balladeer and later on collaborated with Kurt Weil in Hollywood where he and other political émigrés ironically contributed to what is the largest media empire in the world – a far cry from the cabaret!

Other notable cabaret figures were Josephine Baker, Thomas Mann and his daughter Erika. Satirist Kurt Tucholsky, like Mayakovsky, ultimately killed himself because of political disillusionment. The tragedy of his life was that by the time people heeded his warnings against the rise of Nazism, it was too late.

The cabaret movement became more militant after the Second World War. It was recognized that laughing at your problems somewhat defuses the need to do something about them, so the aim of the new cabaretist movement was to raise consciousness about socialism. Small jazz clubs patronized by the beat generation sprang all over the United States. The locus of this wave was San Francisco and its main political satirist was Mort Sahl.

The sixties saw the emergence of the international student protest movement which used the cabaret to bring political dissent to the streets. The different elements of the cabaret broke up into separate institutions such as fringe theatre, stand-up comedy, song and dance routines, street theatre and so forth. A notable modern offshoot of the cabaret is Montreal’s comedy festival, where stand-up comedians kick-start their careers, some of them moving on to TV to reach large audiences. However, they have to pay the price of losing intimate contact with the public.

The importance of the cabaret movement is best expressed in the author’s own words:

“History has all too clearly shown that art and satire cannot stem the tides of terror or disaster. But if the artist’s metaphorical gun is no particularly potent weapon, it can still instigate shifts of awareness. It can indicate that other potential reality which is the home of hope and a vision of justice. Brecht’s wry smile hovers over the cabaret’s domain: ‘I could do but little, but the rulers would have sat safer had I not existed. I hope’.”

A leisurely reading of Appignanesi’s delightful book will certainly bring hope for those of us who want our “little room” where we can rail against the establishment before taking to the streets to subvert it.