Weimar & Cabaret
The roaring, decadent, dangerous 1920s — cabaret, expressionism, sexual liberation and political street-fighting in the most modern city in Europe.
Part of Berlin
16 moments in this segment.
- — Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute. The Institute for Sexual Science (1919) — pioneering research into sexuality, its library burned by the Nazis in 1933.
- — The Spartacist Uprising. January 1919 — armed revolution in Berlin, crushed by the Freikorps; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht murdered.
- — The Kapp Putsch. Right-wing Freikorps seize Berlin in 1920; a general strike by workers brings the coup down within days.
- — George Grosz. The savage caricaturist of Weimar Berlin — fat profiteers, crippled veterans, a society he drew with acid.
- — The Einstein Tower. Erich Mendelsohn's expressionist observatory at Potsdam (1921), built to test Einstein's theory of relativity.
- — Hyperinflation. By 1923 a loaf of bread costs billions of marks; Berliners burn banknotes for warmth and shop with wheelbarrows of cash.
- — Anita Berber. The scandalous nude dancer of Weimar nightlife, immortalized in Otto Dix's flame-red portrait.
- — The Berlin cabaret. Smoke, satire and song in the Kabaretts of the 1920s — political wit and sexual freedom in a city without limits.
- — Josephine Baker in Berlin. The American star electrifies Weimar Berlin's stages; the city embraces her where others would not.
- — Café life of the intelligentsia. The Romanisches Café and the Kurfürstendamm — where writers, painters and exiles argued over coffee.
- — The Eldorado. The famous queer cabaret of Weimar Berlin — a symbol of the city's short-lived sexual freedom.
- — Marlene Dietrich — Der blaue Engel. Marlene Dietrich becomes a global star as Lola Lola in von Sternberg's 1930 film shot at Babelsberg.
- — Fritz Lang — M. Lang's 1931 masterpiece of a child-murderer hunted through Berlin's underworld — Peter Lorre's breakthrough.
- — The Bauhaus. The revolutionary design school — its final Berlin home before the Nazis forced it to close in 1933.
- — The Threepenny Opera. Brecht and Weill's 1928 premiere at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm — "Mack the Knife" conquers Berlin.
- — Otto Dix — Metropolis. The New Objectivity painter's savage, dazzling triptych of Weimar Berlin nightlife and its war-crippled outsiders.
