the NachtKabarett

Marlene Dietrich from the film Seven Sinners, dressed as she sung The Man's in the Navy, a very famous gender defying role	Marilyn Manson Leader of the "LOW ART GLOOMINATI" from The Golden Age Of Grotesque album artwork

All Writing & Content © Nick Kushner Unless Noted Otherwise

Marlene Dietrich is someone who needs little introduction. Aside from being one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood ever she came to personify glamour, beauty, elegance and decadence in the 1930's. She also later went on to represent and symbolize freedom and expressionism, as she was a German expatriate who became an anti- Nazi activist. Which for all of those reasons made her an influence on The Golden Age Of Grotesque.

In the video clip 'A Burnt Offering Can Be Considered Instant Choreography' from Manson's March 15th, 2002 Journal entry, which featured a statue of a lamb (of god) in flames while a Marlene Dietrich played in the background. The opening vignette to Manson's Journal is actually from memoirs of Marlene Dietrich as he revealed in his Journal entry bearing her name, whom The NACHTKABARETT is also a reference to. And as can be seen above from the movie Seven Sinners was from a very famous scene within this movie, championed and cited early the early 1990's by Madonna among other famous provocateurs, is one which Manson has used as influence in his new aesthetic where Marlene performs the song The Man's in the Navy in a cabaret-esque manner dressed in full Navy Officer's regalia, which Manson donned in his LOW ART GLOOMINATI Officer's outfit for The Golden Age Of Grotesque.

One of her most famous films was The Blue Angel which is about a traveling Cabaret show that Lola, Marlene, is the star of. It's a film noir in which a professor at a prominent German university falls in love with Lola, who eventually give up his profession to travel with her, being reduced to performing as a stage hand clown, ridiculed and left in ruins only to have Lola, Dietrich, fall in love and have an affair with another man.

But this type of decadent club cabaret performance was one which was hearkened back towards on The Golden Age Of Grotesque as it was an underground rebellion, very similar the the Swing and Jazz clubs of the same era, as well as the Moulin Rouge and the decadent club performances of the late Nineteenth Parisian nightlife, as portrayed by Toulouse-Lautrec (as seen below). It's an element which was used to recapture the excitement of rebellion, a live-for-now attitude with no thought for tomorrow because there's no future; so let's perform and witness everything obscene and decadent now because, and especially in Weimar Germany, we're not going to wake up tomorrow, and if we do it will be in naught but the same poverty and misery we woke up into today.

And while they may be tame compared to or at least their depiction of today, these clubs and performances were the rebellion and the forbidden at the time, which the youth flocked towards and the establishment was deathly afraid of, which during the Nazi rise to power was one of the first things to be crushed under its heel. So enjoy for today what may disappear or be destroyed tomorrow; "This is the Golden Age Of Grotesque"

 

 

Home

All writings, images and content © 2004-2024 Nick Kushner
Any unauthorized reproduction without prior written consent from the author, other than a brief excerpt for review or linking purposes, is a violation of copyright.
Technological innovations by Alex Deleyn