Zeitgeist. It’s a German word. It means the ‘spirit of a time’, the inner energy of a particular place at a particular time. It’s the photography of that place at that time, the sound and the feeling. The essence.

There’s a reason why so many people think to the cabaret when they think about Weimar Berlin. The cabaret was the compendium of what good there was about the shockingly wild experiment of the Weimar Republic, but was also the expression of the many things that didn’t work, and of the few that went terribly wrong. Cabaret sniffed the wind and recognised the sent, even when it then didn’t surmise what that meant. All the history of the Weimar Republic passed through the cabaret songs and jokes, the satire and the poetry. The excess, the change, the shifting ideas and social mores, the messy politics. Everything speaks of that time, that particular place. Those people.

There’s a reason why if you google ‘Weimar cabaret’ today – as I did for this series – you’ll find a mix of old photos and new ones. Weimar cabaret is alive even today. Cabaretists still sing the same songs, still acts the same plays. They even dress and make themselves up in the same way. The Berliner Cabaret is still a living art, it still speaks of reality and life, one hundre years later.

Cabaret is truly a oral history of a nation. Its songs, its skits, his plays, his scripts tell us of what life was, looked and especially felt in the particular time of the Weimar Republic. It speaks a very peculiar language that come from that exact place and that exact time.
But at the same time, cabaret didn’t stop to the surface, it sought to sink into the very soul of people. And this is why, in spite of its very definite temporal and geographical characteristics, cabaret is a universal language.

RESOURCES

Peter Jelavich, Berlin Cabaret. Harvard University Press, Harvard, 1993
Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany. Promise and Tragedy. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 2007
Lisa Appicnanesi, The Cabaret. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1975/1984