After WWI, movement and speed were the words of order that became the more striking characteristic of urban life, especially in the 1920s.

The countryside still remained largely untouched by this acceleration, but in the cities a quick pace became the rhythm imposed by the new factories and their machines. Factories demanded to the workers to adapt to the rhythms of an ever changing market, a market that was created by those same workers when they were using their free time to ran after their dreams and desires. That is: when they became consumers.
Sociologists have speculated about the irony of the ‘amusement’ market. Working times (and rhythms) were inhuman in the turn-of-the-century factories, where workers performed repetitive, monotonous movements and tasks for hours and hours on end. This created a nervous exhaustion and a craving for change and excitement that workers sought in their free time. This exhaustion, which would turn into anxiety, prompted a dramatic change in the commercialization and advertisement of goods as producers tried to atone to the consumers’ frantic need for variety and possibility to choose, which was answered – but also to a point induced – by the new department stores. Contrary to the traditional shop, department stores weren’t specialised. They offered products of an average quality. Because the ‘inner’ value of these products was very similar, producers had to find a different way to attract buyers and this was more easily achieved by operating on the ‘outer’ presentation of the product. Packages became ever more colourful and showy, advertisement became ever more aggressive.
Eventually, this created even more nervous exhaustion in the consumers, who became ever more difficult to satisfy and ever more frantic in their quest for satisfaction. So advertisement became more still aggressive, with the result that consumers ran from one product to the other, always changing, in the hopeless hope that something would satiate their craving.

The frantic life was certainly a mark of interwar Berlin. The insatiable fast life was fed by the consumerist society, by the anxiety of an insecure future, and by the actual possibility to try ever new, ever changing experiences and fashions. It has been speculated that it was this frantic rhythm characteristic of the new city, this ‘disloyalty’ that pushed people to try and soon look for something else in a continuous search for new stimulation, that found its manifestation in the variety show, which offered a bit of everything and didn’t demand too much involvement of any kind. The language of the consumer became the language of entertainment.

Cabaret once again adopted the language of its audience to come closer to them, to speak to them in a way they would understand… and maybe speak of realities the public wouldn’t listen to in any other way.

RESOURCES

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993