were both fast asleep.”^14 That is what Cliff is writing on the
train. Christopher Isherwood wrote better prose than this, but
the idea is that Cliff is becoming the author of the story we
have just seen, a narrator after the fact. The pretended source
is beginning to appear as a result of the musical.
Then Cliff begins to sing “Willkommen.” This is odd, for he
is reprising the Welcoming Song that the Emcee sang at the
Kit Kat Klub near the beginning of the show. Cliff is leaving,
and by now we know that the Kit Kat Klub is a place for Nazis.
This is what he wants to leave behind. Perhaps he is just being
sardonic with his “Willkommen.” Or perhaps we are being wel-
comed to the pretended “Berlin Stories” that Cliff is beginning
to write. But what happens next is even stranger. The Emcee
from the Kit Kat Klub enters, comes downstage, and joins Cliff
in the song. What are these two doing, singing the same song?
The answer lies in the real source. Isherwood’s Berlin Stories
insists that a neutral observer in Berlin cannot stay free from
complicity with Nazism. “I am a camera,” Isherwood writes
near the beginning, as though he could be pure and objective.
In moments of political crisis, however, there is no purity. In
the “Sally Bowles” story that is the main source for Cabaret, he
recognizes the danger of being a mere observer of Nazism in
its rise. We glanced at this passage earlier: “In a few days, I
thought, we shall have forfeited all kinship with ninety-nine
percent of the population of the world.”^15 He may be telling a
story critical of Nazism, but in belonging to the story himself,
he has been complicit with the thing he is criticizing. That has
been Cliff ’s realization toward the end of Cabaret. It is why he
is leaving, perhaps why he is writing. And in the ambiguity of
his position, he is like the ambiguous Emcee, who always seems
to know what is going on inside and outside the cabaret even as
he seems to remain detached from it.
That is why they belong together for “Willkommen” at the
end. The drama makes it clear that one cannot enter into the
WHAT KIND OF DRAMA IS THIS? 201
(^14) Cabaretlibretto, pp. 112–13.
(^15) Isherwood, “Goodbye to Berlin,” p. 49 in The Berlin Stories.