Abstract
This chapter focuses on the long decade between the Stonewall uprising in 1969 and the upcoming AIDS crisis in the early 1980s. Two musical films representing Berlin as a temporal and spatial signifier of sexual dissidence serve as a case study: Cabaret (1972) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). While the first film shows Berlin as the permissive capital of Weimar Germany, the second one refers to the divided city in the 1970s. Both films—as well as the respective plays they are based on—contribute to a queer historiography by entangling the various waves of gay liberation from the homosexual movement of the first third of the twentieth century to the queer movement since the 1990s. As they mirror the present by looking into the past, the films construct what Carolyn Dinshaw calls a queer ‘community across time’.
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Notes
- 1.
For queer literary fictions of Berlin, see Kraß and Wolf (2017).
- 2.
The title of the adaptation refers to the narrator’s self-description as ‘a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking’ (Isherwood, 1992, p. 243).
- 3.
The scene is borrowed from Goodbye to Berlin (Isherwood, 1992, p. 283).
- 4.
The meaning of the German title is, ‘I still have a suitcase in Berlin’; the word café sounds similar to Koffer (suitcase).
- 5.
On the monocle as a requisite of cross-dressing, see Garber (1997, pp. 152–155).
- 6.
See Russo (1987, p. 190): ‘Brian represses his homosexual feelings throughout the film, and when he does sleep with the baron […], the act is seen by everyone in the film as a fall from grace. Before Brian and Sally Bowles […] can get married, she calls it off – largely because she fears he might “slip” again and wind up in a gay bar, returned to his old bad habits’.
- 7.
The text was reprinted along with the Broadway run in 2014 (Mitchell & Trask, 2014).
- 8.
The musical Rent is explicitly referred to in the film version of Hedwig when at one point Yitzhak participates in a casting for the part of Angel, a gay drag queen.
- 9.
The documentary Whether You Like It or Not: The Story of Hedwig (directed by Laura Nix, USA 2001) is included in the DVD (Mitchell, 2001).
- 10.
See the documentary Whether You Like It or Not.
- 11.
As Peter Doggett points out, Bowie’s manager Kenneth Pitt ‘encouraged him to read Christopher Isherwood’s stories of life in pre-war Berlin’ (Doggett, 2012, pp. 39–40, 272). As Rüther points out, Bowie watched I am a Camera in the mid-1960s and, most probably, Cabaret in the 1970s (Rüther, 2016, p. 39).
- 12.
Bowie lived at Hauptstraße 155, Isherwood at Nollendorfstraße 17.
- 13.
Quoted after https://genius.com/David-bowie-heroes-lyrics.
- 14.
See the appendix to the libretto (Mitchell & Trask, 2003, pp. 39–41).
- 15.
The London Gazette published her full name and profession on 12 May 1970 due to hearings at the employment tribunal: ‘Renner, Jack Gilbert, otherwise known as Ricky Renee, […] FEMALE IMPERSONATOR’. Retrieved from https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/45098/page/5391/data.pdf.
- 16.
See matches for ‘Ricky Renee’ on. Retrieved from https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net.
- 17.
Vol. 1, no. 6 (August 1965), 8 (summer 1966), 10 (summer 1967).
- 18.
- 19.
Vol. 1, no. 1 (January 1973).
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Krass, A. (2019). Queer Fictions of Berlin: Gender Trouble in Cabaret (1971) and Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001). In: Afken, J., Wolf, B. (eds) Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970s. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27427-6_4
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