Cabaret Songs
"In this day and age, you fall in love in the evening, are engaged at night,
and get married the next morning.
At noon you have a fight; by night you're divorced."
"Heut verliebt man sich abends, verlobt sich bei Nacht und vermaehlt in der Frueh sich zufriede und am Mittag da hat man bereits sich verkracht und am Abend ist man wieder geschieden."
~ No Time (Keine Zeit)
First of all, I can start off by noting how applicable the entire song is. They are relevant as much now as they were in the 1920s apparently. When I hear this line in particular I think of the stories of famous people who have courted for a few weeks or months and then decide to get married. Nearly a fortnight has passed and they're ready to get hitched. The words seem to say something about how hopefully and hopelessly foolish and vulnerable the human heart is or can be. The lyrics suggest how naive people can be.
In its entirety, the song is ironic. It suggests that people live their lives as if they believe their is "No time". People are so concerned about living their lives to the fullest that they make decisions in hastes. Yet those decisions can ultimately do more to prolong their pain their pleasure. So it's foolish to live life on a fast track plan. "No time" in this sense seems to suggest reckless endangerment rather than a sense of abandon and adventure.
"What makes them think they have the right to say what God considers vice
What makes them think they have the right to keep us out of Paradise"
"Was will man nur? Ist das Kultur,
da jeder Mensch verpönt ist,
der klug und gut, jedoch mit Blut
von eigner Art durchströmt ist,"
~ The Lavender Song (Das Lila Lied)
Again, it is very interesting how closely linked the past is to the present. This time we have a glimpse into the hardships faced by the LGBT community in the past. "If we resist, prison awaits so our love dares not speak its name" makes me recall that I have heard stories of homosexuals (Men) being jailed in the past. Someone commented on the video for this on Youtube that, if what they went through in the past is still being played out in the American courts today, how much have we really changed in nearly a century of world policy? It is a thought provoking question. There are some social norms that have changed from time to time, like the age of marriage and conception. But then there are others that we as a global culture have been dealing with for a much longer time... Such as LGBT equality.
Paragraph 175
"Penal servitude up to 10 years or, where there are mitigating circumstances, imprisonment of not less than three months shall apply to: (1) a male who, with violence or the threat of violence to body and soul or life, compels another male to commit a sex offense with him or to allow himself to be abused for a sex offense; (2) a male who, by abusing a relationship of dependence based upon service, employment or subordination, induces another male to commit a sex offense with him or to allow himself to be abused for a sex offense; (3) a male over 21 years of age who seduces a male person under twenty-one years to commit a sex offense with him or to allow himself to be abused for a sex offense; (4) a male who publicly commits a sex offense with males or allows himself to be abused by males for a sex offense or offers himself for the same."
Paragraph 175 seems to relate to the old German song, "Das Lila Lied", a.k.a. The Lavender Song. Whereas the former describes the laws that were enacted during Nazi Germany in order to prevent the spread of the so-called perversity of homosexuality, the latter is a protest song that was written in the same era. I imagine that during this time the cabaret was not only a place to which men would go in order to sate their sexual fantasies and desires, but also a place to which one might find the transexuals and homosexuals of the day. Since from a Nihilistic perspective, the Blue Angel was a nightclub symbolic of vice and a corrupting force of the intellectual, I wonder what stance Nihilism might have on homosexuality? That's an interesting question...
One of the finer points of Nihilism seems to be that society ordained what the individual thought of as morally right and wrong. Yet society, as we've seen through the paintings of Otto Dix's "Metropolis" is also feverishly hypocritical. I think the Nihilists would favor a version of homosexuality that fits in with the epic struggle of Siddhartha; One that is prevented from achieving its life goals towards Brahma by being constantly brought down by society's model man or Atman. Just like the Dadaists, who favored giving their own meaning to things, giving new concepts to old words and ideas, this passage seems to demonstrate how vacuous and nihilistic, indeed "Anti-life" were the laws and punishments against homosexuals and other transgressive
sexual "deviants" in Nazi Germany.
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