Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores, and political ideologies - all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstabe yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism.

Peter Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. Fads and fashions, sexual mores, and political ideologies - all were subject to satire and parody on the cabaret stage. This book follows the changing treatment of these themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of German history: the prosperous and optimistic Imperial age, the unstabe yet culturally inventive Weimar era, and the repressive years of National Socialism.