The number that demonstrates this chilling reversal of the
Broadway convention is “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” Kander
and Ebb’s version of a Nazi anthem, first sung by the waiters
and the Emcee at the Kit Kat Klub. Its reprise at the end of act
1 is devastating. A good-hearted engagement party for Fräulein
Schneider and Herr Schultz is under way. (They are the middle-
aged couple who form the secondary love story.) Trouble arises
when the one Nazi at the party, Ernst, learns that Herr Schultz
is Jewish. Ernst is ready to stalk out when the prostitute Fräulein
Kost begins to sing the anthem.
The sun on the meadow is summery warm,
The stag in the forest runs free.
But gather together to greet the storm,
Tomorrow belongs to me.“Sing with me!” she calls to Ernst, and after their duet she
gives the standard call for singalongs to the other partygoers:
“And now—everyone!” Everyone joins in except for the prin-
cipal characters, the two sets of lovers, Fräulein Schneider and
Herr Shultz, Sally Bowles and Cliff. They are left “outside the
circle” while the ensemble sings,
Oh, Fatherland, Fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see.
The morning will come when the world is mine,
Tomorrow belongs to me.This is a choral number that excludes the lovers and drama-
tizes the way ordinary German citizens became swept up in the
Nazi ideology. (The concentration on “me” also shows the
core of self-isolation beneath the pretense of Nazi socialism.)
This is Cabaret’s reflection of the central moment in its
source, Christopher Isherwood’s long story, “Sally Bowles.”
To drift with the bohemian, cabaret-oriented life of young
people in Berlin in the 1930s is to be complicit with Nazism—
that is the realization on which the story turns. The moment
of the realization is the funeral of Hermann Müller, the last
Social Democrat chancellor before Hitler took power. Sally
Bowles and Chris (the narrator, an approximation of Isherwood