"Life is a cabaret, old chum," sang Sally Bowles in the musical based on Christopher Isherwood's novel Berlin Stories. I suspect the movie version, Cabaret, which won Liza Minnelli the Oscar for best actress, is the nearest older Americans ever got to the Weimar Republic.
Still, it's not a bad place to start, if you want to talk Weimar and its relevance to US President Donald Trump's America. From the camp decadence of the Kit Kat Klub to the chilling rendition of Tomorrow Belongs To Me by the blond Hitler Youth in the beer garden, Cabaret (1972) provides the essentials: a diseased democracy, swept away by the irresistible temptations of ethnic nationalism, political violence and demagogy.
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