Customer Reviews

Berlin Cabaret (Studies in Cultural History)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
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Sadly there are few books that give one a real sense of the Weimar years in Germany when the economy collapsed, near-anarchy reigned & bourgeois morality was evaporating along with the value of the mark. Berlin was the quintessential moderne city. Literature, painting & architecture all seemed to explode into new worlds in a kind of Big Bang. This book does a masterful job of documenting the evolution of cabaret theater from the innocent reviews of the early 1920s to the biting political commentary of the late 1920s & early 1930s when the last performances succumbed to the growing influence of the national socialists (nazis). Along the way you get the syncopated nude musical reviews & stage tableaux. There's a lot of careful considered analysis, but also a great feel for the time & place. Very well written & with many fascinating illustrations.

One caveat: this is an academic study, and you won't find the quantity or quality of photographs published in more coffee-table oriented books on the subject. That said, it is thoroughly excellent, and what you won't find in the coffee-table books is a discussion that is anywhere near as complete or insightful.

I bought this book because I needed research for a film script of that period. Without a doubt, for me, it contained more hard to find facts than I had ever uncovered before.
That special period of time when Adolf Hitler was about to take over Germany and The Cabarets were as avant garde as they could be, is well documented here. So are The Cabarets that opposed The Third Reich.
I'd reccomend this book to anyone who has an interest in that period.

Jelavich's goal in this historical book is to relate the culture of the berlin cabaret at the turn of the century with a political context. Each chapter focuses on a different cabaret, such as Sound and Smoke, and its satires on Berlin life. The book was extremely informative following a tradition that Carl Schorske started with his book "Fin de Siecle Vienna". Though mainly easy to read, I found their was too much information at times, and it became difficult to follow the different characters that Jelavich illuminated.

Peter Jelavich is a fantastic historian. This book shows much in-depth research, and Jelavich provides more than sufficient evidence to support his arguments. Sometimes the many names, titles, terms, and places can get a little confusing, but if you go after the main arguments he is trying to make you will find a very satisfying piece of German historical scholarship that gives a broad perspective on how political events and economic crises affected cultural elements like cabaret.