Wilkomen to the Weimar Republic: 'Cabaret'

On this episode of the Fascism on Film Podcast, we focus on the 1972 film, "Cabaret," James and Teal introduce the guiding ideas behind Fascism on Film: that cinema is not simply a record of political events but one of the primary arenas where fascism is imagined, stylized, reproduced, and resisted. For the series, we will explore how fascism expresses itself through regimes and ideologies, images, gestures, narratives, tones, and aesthetic forms that live on in the cultural unconscious.

This episode explores the collapse of democratic culture in the Weimar Republic through the lens of Bob Fosse’s "Cabaret"(1972). Set in Berlin during the early 1930s, the film depicts the slow-motion unraveling of liberal society, where decadence and denial mask the encroachment of fascist power. 

Rather than portraying Nazis as an external threat, "Cabaret" shows them as emerging from the very heart of a fractured society—at once ignored, tolerated, and eventually embraced.

The episode investigates how art, performance, sexuality, and political evasion interweave with rising authoritarianism. "Cabaret" becomes a parable for the death of democracy by distraction: it asks whether culture can resist collapse—or whether it dances on as the world burns.