"Life is a cabaret, old chum..."

"Come to the cabaret..."

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It was a time of gloom and doom in Berlin in 1931...

The Musical Cabaret...

Cabaret is a 1972 American musical period drama film directed by Bob Fosse and written for the screen by Jay Presson Allen. It stars Liza Minnelli, Michael York, Helmut Griem, Marisa Berenson, Fritz Wepper and Joel Grey. Set in Berlin during the Weimar Republic in 1931, under the presence of the growing Nazi Party, the film is an adaptation of the 1966 Broadway musical Cabaret by Kander and Ebb, which was based on Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical novel The Berlin Stories (1945) as well as John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera, which was itself adapted from Isherwood's novel. Multiple numbers from the stage score were used for the film, which also featured three other songs by Kander and Ebb, including two written for the adaptation.

The character of Sally Bowles was based upon Jean Ross, a British cabaret singer with whom Isherwood lived as a room-mate in Weimar-era Berlin.

The 1972 film was based upon Christopher Isherwood's semi-autobiographical stories about Weimar-era Berlin during the Jazz Age. In 1929, Isherwood moved to Berlin in order to pursue life as an openly gay man and to enjoy the city's libertine nightlife.^[ His expatriate social circle included W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Paul Bowles, and Jean Ross.^[While in Berlin, Isherwood shared lodgings with Ross, a British cabaret singer and aspiring film actress from a wealthy Anglo-Scottish family.

While rooming together at Nollendorfstrasse 17 in Schöneberg, Isherwood and Ross met John Blomshield, a wealthy playboy who inspired the film character of Baron Maximilian von Heune. Blomshield sexually pursued both Isherwood and Ross for a short while, and he invited them to accompany him on a trip abroad. He then abruptly disappeared without saying goodbye. Following Blomshield's disappearance, Ross became pregnant with the child of jazz pianist and later actor Peter van Eyck. After Eyck abandoned Ross, she underwent a near-fatal abortion facilitated by Isherwood who pretended to be her heterosexual impregnator.

While Ross recovered from the botched abortion procedure, the political situation rapidly deteriorated in Germany. As Berlin's daily scenes featured "poverty, unemployment, political demonstrations and street fighting between the forces of the extreme left and the extreme right," Isherwood, Spender, and other British nationals realized that they must flee the country. "There was a sensation of doom to be felt in the Berlin streets," Spender recalled.

By the time Adolf Hitler implemented the Enabling Act of 1933 which cemented his dictatorship, Isherwood, Ross, Spender, and others had fled Germany and returned to England. Many of the Berlin cabaret denizens befriended by Isherwood would later flee abroad or perish in concentrat These factual events served as the genesis for Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles which was later adapted into the 1955 film I Am a Camera and the 1966 Cabaret musical.

The Sally Bowles Character... 

Sally Bowles  (/boʊlz/) is a fictional character created by English-American novelist Christopher Isherwood and based upon 19-year-old cabaret singer Jean Ross. The character debuted in Isherwood's 1937 novella Sally Bowles published by Hogarth Press, and commentators have described the novella as "one of Isherwood's most accomplished pieces of writing." The work was republished in the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin and in the 1945 anthology The Berlin Stories.

In the 1937 novella, Sally is a British flapper who moonlights as a cabaret singer in Weimar-era Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age. She is depicted by Isherwood as a "self-indulgent upper-middle-class British tourist who could escape Berlin whenever she chose." By day, she is an aspiring film actress hoping to work for the UFA GmbH, the German film production company. By night, she is a mediocre chanteuse at an underground club called The Lady Windermere located near the Tauentzienstraße. She aspires to be a serious actress or, as an alternative, to ensnare a wealthy man to keep her as his mistress. Unsuccessful at both, Sally departs Berlin on the eve of Adolf Hitler's ascension as Chancellor of Germany and is last heard from in the form of a postcard sent from Rome, Italy, with no return address.

From the 1972 musical, "Cabaret"...