Jelavich spotlights Berlin's cabarets from the day the curtain first went up, in 1901, until the Nazi regime brought it down. This book follows the changing treatment of topical themes, and the fate of cabaret itself, through the most turbulent decades of modern German history.

Neither highly politicized, like post-war German Kabarett, nor sleazy in the way that some American and European films suggest, Berlin cabaret occupied a middle ground that let it cast an ironic eye on the goings-on of Berliners and other Germans. However, it was just this satirical attitudes toward serious themes, such as politics and racism, that blinded cabaret to the strength of the radical right-wing forces that ultimately destroyed it. Jelavich concludes with the Berlin cabaret artists' final performances - as prisoners in the concentration camps at Westerbork and Theresienstadt. This book aims to convey a sense of what the world looked like within the cabarets of Berlin. At the same time, it reveals from a historical distance, these lost performers enacting the political, sexual and artistic issues that made their city one of the most dynamic in Europe.