James J Conway on pioneering Weimar cabaret performers Anita Berber and Valeska Gert…
In the Tiergarten district of Berlin we find ourselves on Lützowstrasse under a grey, frigid sky. As we walk westward the streets are all but empty. We pass Magdeburger Platz where once stood a covered market, a playground for the young Walter Benjamin whose family home overlooked the square. The actual playground which now stands in its place is deserted, desolate, like an establishing shot in a made-for-TV divorce drama.
At Genthiner Strasse we wait, with Teutonic obedience, at the lights, although there is no traffic to breach the stillness. We look right—there is the Defence Ministry staring down the street, built in 1914 as the headquarters of the navy with which the Kaiser hoped to win the imminent war; we look left—the Twelve Apostles Church directly facing it at the other end of the street, its reproach muted once its bells were melted down in 1917 for the now-doomed war effort.
But not all was quiet on the home front during the Great War. With Genthiner Strasse behind us we pass a four-storey building presenting an incongruously Aegean face to the winter morning, and next to it we note a wall set back from the street announcing “You’ve reached your destination”. And it’s true, we have reached our destination. But we are not here to see “Berlin’s finest bathroom display” as the wall further infers—rather the lifeless void before it.
Here, in a single performance on 24 February 1916, the two most notorious, revolutionary women of the Weimar Berlin stage made their respective debuts: Anita Berber and Valeska Gert. This was not, of course, the car park of a sanitary ware showroom at the time. In 1916 this spot was occupied by the largest of three halls in a com…