Budapest and New York: Studies in Metropolitan Transformation, 1870-1930, and: Berlin Cabaret

If state making and city making are closely linked processes, as editors Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske argue in the introduction to Budapest and New York, so too are both bound up with the making of modern culture. Whatever modern culture may be, it is distinctly the product of imaginations shaped by urban experience and nation-state politics, and its variant forms owe much to divergences in the same. In these complementary volumes, we are afforded a close-up view of the interworkings of modern culture, national politics, and urban sociability in three important modern metropoles: Berlin, Budapest, and New York. If the heavy emphasis on Central European examples strikes the reader as strange, that is not by chance; we are only just beginning to sketch out the borders of modern culture in what was the world beyond the Wall.

Unlike most cultural histories of modern Germany, Peter Jelavich’s Berlin Cabaret focuses attention neither on the “apolitical” products of the elite nor on the all-too-political activities of the masses. Cabaret, as he describes it, was neither great art nor primarily political in its aims; but instead an “ephemeral” form of entertainment, ambiguously poised between sleazy “Tingel-tangel” or vaudeville on the one hand and operetta and grand opera on the other. Its major preoccupations—fashion, consumption, and sex—were shared with its similarly ambiguously positioned audience, the Berlin Besitzbürgertum. The critical but comforting force of satire lay at cabaret’s heart, not the action-inspiring force of propaganda or the hope-shattering impact of irony. Thus Jelavich’s job as historian is to illuminate the general significance of the appearance of this satirical form of entertainment and to show how such ephemera as the regimented antics of the Tiller Girls give us an important new window onto the social world of the expanding Prussian cosmopolis. To anticipate, it seems to me that Jelavich is quite successful in the latter endeavor, less so in the former. His careful reconstruction of theater openings (and closings), performers and acts performed, and where possible, audience reactions offers a welcome relief from the dour and depressing political histories of the period.

The “Berlin-ness” of cabaret is, of course, an important theme of the book; though the form was originally borrowed from the Parisians, the Berliners added their own distinctive touches, infusing the form with a vitalist sensualism inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche and the subversive wit for which the city was famous (Berliner Witz). Life in the Prussian metropole provided not only the cabaret’s public but also the material for its skits and songs. Although Jelavich does not use this language, it is easy to see how Benedict Anderson’s discussion of imagined national communities could find a counterpart here in cabaret’s imaginary world of common Berlin types and experiences. Despite its satirical stance, the Wilhelmine cabarets exhibited an optimism and exuberance for the new; it celebrated consumption and fashion, industrial production and urban glamour. But it seems clear that by the 1920s, the Berlin theater world had lost much of its urban self-confidence; entertainers looked to America for new models or turned their satire on themselves. Unrestrained by censorship, eroticism flourished, and the racist primitivism that underlay the bourgeois fascination with black performers signalled the arrival of a new and unpalatable sort of Dionysian sensibility. In detailing the development of this urban form, Jelavich has given us a portrait of the intertwined world of Berlin bohemians and bourgeois comparable to Jerrold Seigel’s excellent Bohemian Paris.

Jelavich’s admirably researched discussions of the frustrations faced by cabaret owners (many of them women) will be of great interest to students of theater history, as well as to intellectual historians (though perhaps less so than his earlier book on theater in Munich). Other readers will find...