It’s often said that if we fail to learn from history, we’re likely to repeat it.
And Cabaret is not simply a memorable night out at the theatre, it’s also a history lesson which might just offer some pertinent parallels with the here and now.
Set in Berlin at the dawn of the 1930s, Kander and Ebb’s dark classic pits tolerance against intolerance, liberalism against a particular brand of conservatism, and offers a stark warning of the dangers of mass indifference and denial.
The 1966 musical was based on John Van Druten’s 1951 play I Am a Camera – which in turn was inspired by Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, a cautionary contemporary memoir set against the rise of fascism in the twilight days of a decadent Weimer Republic.
At its heart is a love story, between carefree British cabaret artist Sally Bowles and penniless American writer Cliff Bradshaw, both caught up in a vibrant, hedonistic and culturally liberal – and liberated – night-time world. Meanwhile a second romance, less turbulent but ultimately as doomed, blossoms between boarding house landlady Fraulein Schneider and Jewish greengrocer Herr Schultz.
These personal stories unfold against the backdrop of the rise of Nazism, which over the course of 12 months’ plot goes from a distasteful fringe philosophy to be ignored or laughed at to an enveloping political populist force driven by propaganda promising a glorious future for the ‘volk’ (people) – exemplified by the ominous lyrics of Kander and Ebb’s Tomorrow Belongs to Me.
The national populism – the völkisch ideology – expounded by the Nazis (the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or National Socialist German Workers’ Party) gained traction by playing on the fears of ordinary people who felt they’d been abandoned in the disastrous economic aftermath of the First World War, and were looking for someone to blame.
In 1930s Germany’s case the NSDAP invoked the moral decay of the Weimar regime – and the existence of a perfidious Jewish population, which was incrementally dehumanised through the Nazi playbook’s ‘big lie’.
However, the economic and social circumstances of the 1930s are not historically unique.
And here in 2019, a decade on from the latest global financial crisis, significant portions of the world are in the grip of another mass flirtation with populism, whether that be in the United States or Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, through the rise of populist political parties in central and eastern Europe or in the divisions wrought by the Brexit debate here at home.
Another theme explored in Cabaret is the idea of inclusiveness verses divisiveness.
In the Kit Kat Klub, anything and anybody goes, whatever their race, religion or sexuality. Outside the confines of the club however, the wider world has a more culturally
conservative view which helps provide a receptive audience for the Nazis’ chilling and pernicious propaganda which gains momentum as the musical progresses.
We watch this unfold both from our theatre seats and from the vantage point of history and hindsight. But 80 years on, racism, extremism, LGBT+ issues and political propaganda remain hot topics, which is why the themes that run through Cabaret continue to resonate.
So perhaps it’s also worth posing the question – how inclusive are we as a modern society? And how can we guard against sleepwalking into a similarly dangerous situation in this increasingly neo-nationalistic world?
The news can often make depressing reading, from Donald Trump’s divisive rhetoric and discrediting attacks on the media (with its echoes of Hitler’s lugenpresse, literally ‘lying press’) to China’s ‘re-education’ camps for its Uighur Muslim minority, the treatment of LGBT communities in regions like the Middle East, Africa and Asia, to a general rise in reported anti-Semitic, Islamophobic or other hate crimes across the Western world.
At the same time, it’s worth noting the majority’s rejection of the kind of far-right views expounded by organisations like the English Defence League and BNP.
Ignorance, indifference and self-involvement helped allow the skewed ideology of the Nazi party to take hold in Cabaret’s 1930s Germany, where silence ultimately became complicity.
So along with the idea that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’, it’s also worth remembering another popular (although often misquoted) sentiment – that all it takes for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing