ABSTRACT
After the end of the First World War Berlin became the entertainment capital of Europe. Specifically German was Claire Waldorf in Berlin, Karl Valentin and Liesl Karstadt in Munich – great characters, great actors, reciting and singing in dialect, untranslatable, inimitable. There were some excellent comic artists such as Claire Waldorf in Berlin and Karl Valentin in Munich, but they too were facing an uphill task, for the climate of a dictatorship was inclement to satire, however good-humoured. Berlin had the edge on Paris so far as the leichtgeschurzte Musen of popular entertainment were concerned; the cabarets, the farces, the hit songs, the cinema. Of the great cinema directors, Fritz Lang and G. W. Pabst were of Austrian origin, so were Joe May and Josef von Sternberg. German jazz would have been unthinkable without the talent lately imported from Poland, Hungary and Rumania.
