As a cultural construct, Weimar Berlin is Atlantis. It's become a fabulous tale so freighted with hype, misconception and myth that it has sunken to a point where one questions if it ever existed at all except in its renderings? Isherwood, Cabaret, Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Some of Weimar Berlin has come down to us more or less intact, most notably Threepenny Opera and scattered songs of its cabaret scene marvelously interpreted a few years ago by Ute Lemper and the Matrix Ensemble on their collection, Berlin Cabaret Songs.
For the visuals, there's Otto Dix and George Grosz. Seven decades later, much of it remains brilliant. There's a vividness and acidity to the latter, for instance, which continue to make them useful antidotes to the Weimar fable. The sleek leer of many of the songs that Lemper covered on Berlin Cabaret Songs replaces the Broadway turn that Weimar's taken in the public consciousness with something smarter and more salacious.
In many ways, this eye-popping treasure trove of kinks and sex-killers, porn and perversion is a catalog of exactly the things to which Brecht, Weill, Dix and Grosz were reacting. The Weimar Berlin that Gordon describes is one suffused with sex in all varieties and forms, an uncommonly commonplace Sodom where perversion was the rule and not the exception. There's a sort of overall scholarly premise imposed on this fascinating stuff. In fact, it's Voluptuous Panic's one maddening weakness.
There's no doubt that economic depression and postwar politics played a vital role in creating the "panic" that Gordon so lovingly catalogs. Yet there are moments especially in the first few chapters when Gordon feels that he must do more than dynamite the Atlantis of Weimar Berlin. To say that his text paints history with a broad brush is charitable.
