Berlin

Dutifully patriotic as most cabaret artists may have been, the authorities did not trust them to stay on the proper path without supervision, and subjected all their material to precensorship. This opened a new chapter in the old conflict between artists and bureaucrats in Berlin. The government’s strict controls provoked protests from some of the performers, who complained that their work, indeed their very ability to assist the war effort, was being compromised. Claire Waldoff was allowed to go ahead with only eight of the fifteen titles she planned to perform at the Metropol Cabaret in January 1915. Among the red-penciled titles was her Soldaten-Romanze

, which featured a young woman climbing the military ranks, from corporal to general, only to dream upon becoming “Frau General” of starting all over again with the corporal. Herr von Glasenapp, wartime Berlin’s chief censor, considered this disrespectful toward the military. When Rudolf Nelson inserted some unauthorized material into one of his musicals, the police warned him that he would be subjected to more stringent controls in the future and might even be banned entirely if he committed any more “irregularities.” Conservative elements among the public also put pressure on artists to toe the patriotic line. A newspaper report in August 1916 about a Nelson cabaret program featuring bons vivants swilling champagne and ogling seminude young women while joking about food shortages elicited angry letters from readers, who complained that there was nothing funny about living high at home while German boys were dying for their Fatherland in the battles of the Somme. Furloughed soldiers joined the protest, echoing earlier complaints about idle youth. One group wrote: “We come from the battlefield, where we experience nothing but sorrow, pain, and death, and in the big cities they party into the night. . . . Our wives hardly know how to scrape by with their children, while the others dissipate their money with whores and champagne.” A Bavarian soldier, sounding like Private Hitler, declared that “that pack of sows deserves to be hanged, if they’re that well off, those unpatriotic bastards.” Another Bavarian, even more ominously, saw the Nelson play as evidence of Jewish war-profiteering, a plague that was allowed to ravage the land while “German” women starved and “German” men died in the trenches. The notion that the big cities, especially Berlin, harbored packs of Semitic profiteers persisted through the war and helped to further inflame hatreds during the revolution and Weimar era.

Berlin’s nascent film industry, like cabaret, lined up behind the war effort, but instead of being diminished by the experience like vaudeville, it emerged as a much stronger force in popular culture. Before the war Germany’s film market was dominated by foreign competitors—French, British, Italian, and, increasingly, American. By 1916, however, all enemy European films were banned, as were American products after Washington’s entry into the war in 1917. To accommodate a public hungry for diversion, domestic producers leaped into the breach. The military and the Reich government fostered this development because they had come to understand—largely by watching enemy filmmakers blacken Germany’s image—that film could be an invaluable propaganda tool. With the support of Ludendorff, Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the Krupp arms firm, established the Deutsche Lichtbild Gesellschaft (DLG—German Film Corporation) in 1915, which produced short films to celebrate German industry and promote the nation’s war aims. A little later, another company, Universum Film A.G. (Universal Film Corporation, or UFA) joined in the cinematic campaign to combat Allied propaganda. Financed by the government, the Deutsche Bank, and heavy industry, UFA soon became the preeminent German film company, a status it retained through the Weimar period.

Like Berlin’s film crowd, the city’s sizable community of painters, including many members of the avant-garde, put their talents to work for the war, especially in the early stages. Kaiser Wilhelm himself could not have faulted these artists on their patriotism. However, much more than film, painting in Berlin came to reflect the escalating horror of the conflict as it dragged on and on. Moreover, some artists began to focus on the ways in which the war was debasing life on the home front, particularly in the capital.