Volume 53, Number 17 · November 2, 2006
Weimar Faces
By Ian Buruma
For those of us born after World War II there is one face that conjures up the spirit of Berlin around 1930 best, and that belongs to a man who was only born in 1932, in Cleveland of all places: Joel Grey, master of ceremonies in Cabaret, the androgynous host of the Kit Kat Club. Grey managed to personify everything we now associate with the end of that giddy, sinister, brilliant decade between the two world wars, when Berlin was the capital of sex, art, and violence. The sunken cheeks, the curled blood-red lips, the rouge and death-white powder, the lacquered black hair, the little dark eyes darting about like malevolent black insects, and all this combined with that unforgettable voice—whining, lisping, sneering. It is the sum of everything we find repellent yet deeply intriguing about Berlin at the dawn of the Third Reich.
Feature, 4496 words
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