Lessons Americans Today Should Learn From This Classic Musical

The justly celebrated musical Cabaret, which won worldwide fame in Bob Fosse’s Academy Award-winning 1972 film version featuring Liza Minnelli, is now being presented in its fourth Broadway revival since the original production in 1966. More than just a work of entertainment, Cabaret has important lessons for America today that are perhaps more relevant than ever.

Its story originating from Christopher Isherwood’s semi-autobiographical novel Goodbye to Berlin, Cabaret is set in the hedonistic, gender-bending world of the German capital in the early 1930s, just prior to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. In that world, when it comes to sexual promiscuity, in the words of Cole Porter, literally “anything goes.”

The action is framed through the perspective of Clifford Bradshaw, a young, politically and morally “innocent” homosexual American from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who has come to Berlin in search of inspiration to write his first novel. Like Isherwood’s own protagonist (who, like Isherwood, was also gay), Bradshaw becomes involved with a dynamic young British woman who stars at a seedy nightclub, the Kit Kat Club, whose Master of Ceremonies (Emcee) celebrates its sexually amoral atmosphere.

Bradshaw’s involvement with the woman, Sally Bowles, not only brings out his underlying bisexuality, but also engenders in him a desire, when she becomes pregnant, for her to keep the child (rather than get an abortion, as is her custom) so that they can form a family and move back to Pennsylvania, where he’ll even settle down to a steady job.

Sadly, Bradshaw’s hopes are doomed, as Sally can’t resist the lure of returning to the Kit Kat, foregoing a life of boring respectability. Meanwhile, another romance is developing between two individuals of an older generation, the prosperous owner of a supermarket, a widower who happens to be Jewish, and the non-Jewish self-described “spinster” owner of the boarding house where Bradshaw and (for a while) Bowles reside.

That romance, too, is shattered, but for an entirely different reason: the specter of the Nazis, whose threatened rise to power and attacks on Jews cause the boarding house owner to back out of the marriage from fear of what would become of her under Hitler’s reign.

These romantic breakdowns coincide with Bradshaw’s political coming-of-age. Having been duped on one occasion into serving as an unknowing courier for a shipment of cash to the Nazis from supporters in Paris, he breaks off all relations with the German who had “befriended” him upon his arrival in Berlin.

In the meantime, the connection between sexual libertinism and other forms of amorality is made manifest in an infamous scene at the Kit Kat when the emcee performs a number in which Jews are represented (visually) as apes. By contrast to that scene (at the end of which, I was relieved to observe at the performance I attended, the audience refrained from applauding), Bradshaw takes umbrage at a Nazi whom he overhears making an anti-Semitic remark and punches him in the face. (Of course, he is then severely beaten by the Nazi and two of his fellow thugs.) As Isherwood did when Hitler took power, Bradshaw then departs for home.

We might think of Bradshaw’s departure as foreshadowing the loss of American innocence before the threat posed by Nazism. Just as Bradshaw’s awakening took time, years were required after Hitler’s seizure of power, persecution of the Jews, and growing aggressiveness before the American and British publics were brought to recognize the danger and support resistance to it under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, respectively.

Nonetheless, the entirety of Cabaret offers ominous parallels to problems developing in today’s America. A key scene is one in which a Nazi enthusiast (portrayed more effectively in the film, I believe, by a beautiful, blonde boy) sings what initially sounds like a moving religious hymn – until the spectator realizes that the uniformed boy is singing a National Socialist hymn, “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”

In the film, dining al fresco at a fashionable restaurant (according to my recollection), members of the public gradually rise to join the boy, whether out of agreement, or out of fear – with the exception of one horrified Jewish couple. We are meant to contrast the initial, aural attraction of the hymn with the ugliness we have repeatedly witnessed at the Kit Kat Club.

The dark allure of the hymn signifies, I believe, the deepest ground of the revulsion at “bourgeois” society and its meaningless pursuit of pleasure and profit that the great German-Jewish-American philosopher Leo Strauss identified, in a 1941 lecture on “German Nihilism,” as an underlying root of Nazism’s appeal.

Strauss did not mean for a moment, of course, to excuse the utterly contemptible, barbaric, and base conduct of Hitler and his henchmen – along with that of those millions of Germans who willingly cooperated with their evil conduct (as portrayed by historian Daniel Joseph Goldhagen under the title Hitler’s Willing Executioners). He sought only to explain how such a horrific evil could consume an entire population.

As Strauss explained, many of the more educated German youth who joined the Nazi movement were not merely rebelling against the legacy of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, including its postwar economic crisis. Under the influence of the great 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and lesser but still significant 20th-century thinkers like Carl Schmitt and Ernst Junger, they were repelled by their fellow citizens’ insatiable quest for comfort, fashion, and pleasure. They thought of themselves as idealists seeking a nobler goal – although they were tragically bewitched, thanks to the false promise of Junger and Schmitt, into believing that military conquest and ultimately genocide were the path to achieving that goal.

Thankfully, America today faces no threat comparable in size or power to the abomination of the Nazi movement. But the takeover of many college campuses by militant anti-Semites following Hamas’s barbaric 2023 attack on Israeli civilians – with thousands of non-Muslims donning kaffiyahs and chanting slogans like “Intifada is the Solution” and “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Will All Be Free” (that is, the entire Jewish population of Israel will be exterminated) – along with the spineless response of so many academic administrators is still an ominous development.

That threat is rendered all the more ominous by the fact that so many academics (mimicking learned apologists for the Nazis) are inculcatingsuch doctrines in their pupils. Strauss himself traced the vulnerability of German youth to Nazi ideology to a lack of education in the great “Classical Books” that earlier generations of Germans had received.

Here, one cannot help but note the more general politicization of higher education in America today, at the expense of the study of great books – though that movement is now facing an encouraging counter-reaction at a growing number of schools such as the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, the new University of Austin, Arizona State University’s School of Social and Economic Thought, and elsewhere.

Beyond this academic problem, however, there is reason to fear a serious degree of moral decay in our country today, echoing what is portrayed in Cabaret. This decay threatens both the survival of the traditional family, including the ability of parents to rear their children with proper standards of behavior, understanding, civic order, patriotism, and respect for the rule of law more generally.

Consider such phenomena as the following: (1) schools across the country indoctrinating pupils, starting in kindergarten, with the notion that one’s gender is self-chosen, not grounded in nature, so that kids should be encouraged to believe they may have been born in the “wrong” body; (2) many school systems claiming the right to “socially transition” children while keeping such “treatment” secret from the kids’ parents; (3) the growing movement to legalize prostitution (now rebranded as “sex work”); (4) the far more advanced movement to legalize marijuana, despite growing evidence of its dangers, and some authorities advancing the legalization of stronger psychoactive and addictive drugs, or at least offering “safe” refuges where users of even the most dangerous substances can legally “shoot up” under medical supervision; (5) the “depolicing” and “decarceration” movements, signifying the liberal community’s doubt (as forecast by Nietzsche) that punishment itself has any proper moral justification; (6) public officials’ tendency to downplay the threat of anti-Semitism, for instance by balancing any condemnation of violent attacks against Jews with a warning against “Islamophobia”; and (7) as in the 1930s in the Western democracies, an unwillingness to realize the necessity of a serious buildup in our defenses, costly though it will be, in the face of growing threats to the freedom and survival of ourselves and our allies from aggressive foreign autocracies (and a failure of politicians to bring awareness of that need home to them).

I shall not develop the foregoing themes, which will be familiar to most readers. I seek only to emphasize here the broader politicalimplications of the foregoing developments, which Cabaret helps us to appreciate. America’s founders, including Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, along with its greatest subsequent statesmen, such as Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, and the French analyst Alexis de Tocqueville, rightly emphasized the dependence of civil liberty on a high degree of moral virtue among the public at large.

In other words, people accustomed to a life of hedonism and crude selfishness are unlikely to make the sacrifices that self-government requires. Instead, they will elect candidates who will inflate the currency thanks to irresponsible deficit spending, forgive student loans and home mortgages, pick and choose favored constituencies through tax subsidies and arbitrary exemptions, appoint judges who doubt the morality of the criminal law (or use it for purely partisan purposes), and neglect the need to maintain the country’s defenses. America’s leading statesmen, like most well brought-up and educated citizens, were formerly able to clearly distinguish liberty (for which they fought) from libertinism (which would have appalled them). They understood that preserving freedom requires a willingness to make sacrifices for the public good.

I close by citing two developments, one encouraging, one discouraging, exhibited by the latest Cabaret production (which I strongly recommend to theatergoers).

An encouraging sign of America’s moral progress in one area over the past 70 years is the fact that the actor who plays Clifford Bradshaw andrepresents America, Calvin Leon Smith, is black. Like the other stars, he performs excellently. Smith’s portrayal of a man who stands up in both speech and action against Jew hatred is a reminder of the prominent role that Jewish leaders like Jack Greenberg and Arthur Goldberg played in the movement for black civil rights. This is in contrast to the crude anti-Semitism expressed by demagogues like certain members of the Congressional “Squad” in recent years.

On the more discouraging front, however, in the playbill accompanying the latest version of Cabaret, all members of the cast and staff are identified with their “preferred pronouns.”

The most effective ad that the Trump campaign ran, it has widely been remarked, was his promise to be for “you,” not for “they/them.” Perhaps Broadway producers will find food for thought there.

David Lewis Schaefer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at College of the Holy Cross.