Berlin’s cabaret scene presented the Nazis with a particular challenge because it was central to the city’s world-image as a vibrant metropolis and also full of leftist and Jewish entertainers. Although the local cabaret’s satirical teeth had grown dull in the Weimar period, it could still bite off its pound of political flesh. The regime moved quickly to shut down Berlin’s left-wing agitprop cabaret and to eliminate its chief practitioners. Hans Otto, of the German Workers’ Theater League, was murdered at Golumbia-Haus; Erich Mühsam, who acted in leftist cabaret in addition to writing for Die Weltbühne, was killed at Sachsenhausen. For a brief period Aryan performers were allowed to produce political cabaret as long as they made fun of the right targets. But when Werner Finck of the Catacombs Cabaret began tossing out barbs that were a little too irreverent toward the leadership, his enterprise was shut down. In the same year, 1935, the Tingel-Tangel Cabaret was closed for defaming the National Socialist order with skits celebrating the resilience of “weeds” (dissident thoughts) in a field covered with “manure” (the Nazi state). Unable to cultivate a “positive cabaret” that was economically viable, the regime fell back on pure vaudeville and girlie shows.
Important as live drama was to the Nazis, film was even more so, inasmuch as it had a broader audience and was, along with radio, the perfect propaganda tool. Goebbels, who considered himself a “passionate fan of the cinematic art,” insisted that film was an instrument of popular education “at least as influential as the primary school.” He was fully aware that Berlin was a major player in the world of film, and he intended to keep it that way. His problem, however, was that Jews were especially prominent in the German cinema. A Nazi tabulation in 1932 claimed that Germany’s motion picture distribution companies were 81 percent Jewish-run, and that Jews constituted 41 percent of the screenwriters and 47 percent of the directors.
Although he was determined to end “Jewish domination” of the cinema, Goebbels was willing to tolerate a few renowned Jewish directors and actors in the interest of maintaining Berlin’s prominence. He hoped in particular to induce the half-Jewish director Fritz Lang, whose Siegfried and Die Nibelungen were among his favorite films, to remain in the German capital. Lang later claimed that Goebbels offered to put him in charge of UFA and to make him the “Nazis’ Führer of film.” This is probably fanciful, but Lang could undoubtedly have stayed and worked in Nazi Berlin had he wanted to. He left the city in 1933 because, like Brecht, he thought he could do better for himself abroad. Unlike Brecht he turned out to be right, for after a few years of exile in France he became a great success in Hollywood, and he was never inclined to return to Berlin.
Another refugee from the Berlin film world who made it big in Hollywood was Billy Wilder. He had moved to Berlin from his native Vienna in 1926, landing jobs as a reporter with the Nachtausgabe and Berliner Zeitung am Mittag. Chronically broke, he had also picked up a few marks working as a gigolo at the Hotel Adlon, escorting lonely old ladies around the dance floor. “I dance,” he wrote, “painstakingly but desireless, joyless, without thoughts, without opinion, without heart, without brain.” When he wasn’t covering stories or dancing he frequented the Romanisches Café, mingling with the movie people. There he learned about another way to make money: as a “Neger” (ghostwriter) on movie scripts. This turned out to be his unglamorous entree into the film industry. During the late 1920s he worked on almost fifty scripts, always without credit. His first major writing credit came with a low-budget film called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a portrait of ordinary Berliners enjoying a Sunday excursion to the Nikolassee. The movie proved a surprising success, both with Berlin audiences and the local critics. Der Abend’wrote: “Once, Paris was shown to us in an impressive, simple manner; now, we see Berlin without the shine of advertisements in lights and the crazy nightlife of the bars.”
