“Weimar”
New Year’s Eve, Berlin 1932
The once-coveted annual New Year’s Eve party in the apartment of Annaliese Bergmann--- widow of the Great War; dogged upper class survivor of the seemingly endless traumas of the Weimar Republic; never-the-less determined to celebrate what has been still another harrowing year of life and near-ruin in the Deutsches Reich.
Hitler’s Nazis, trounced in the November elections, its Party membership shriveling, Der Fuhrer himself falling in popularity, with the democratically elected Weimar Reichstag barely maintaining national stability.
The once proud nation still reeling from the ravages of The Great Depression of 1929 which created massive debt, unemployment, and homelessness and left a restless German youth with little hope for their futures.
Frau Bergmann’s remaining friends warily gather to commiserate and to dare to dream that the Republic has at last prevailed over the withering threats of Stalinism to the East, the Ruhr Valley invasion by France to the West, and the National Socialists and Communists within.
Her guests include similarly widowed friends Greta, Frieda, Vera, accompanied by Herr Goldwasser, a Jew, all of whom share the same tastes in politics and the same resolve to survive whatever the New Year may bring;
Elisabeth Forster, the distinguished and much sought-after keeper of the Nietzsche Archives, who has recently found a benefactor, of a kind, in Adolf Hitler;
Heinrich Schumacher, a chummy but somewhat sinister fellow whom everyone knows, but whom no one seems to trust. Is he a National Socialist, or just a provocateur?
Herr Reimenschneider, hoping against all hope that Germany’s Criminal Code will finally repeal its persecution of homosexual men and remove the daily threat of arrest, or, worse, public assault at the hands of roving gangs of militant youth;
Retired Reichswehr Oberstleutnant Hasenjager, who has long abandoned his loyalty to the abdicated Kaiser and become more resigned to Germany’s collapse following the signing of the Treaty of Versailles;
Herr Kistenmacher, a politically uncommitted party animal who drinks as excessively as he expounds on what’s wrong with everything and everybody in Germany;
Thomas Edgecombe, an uninvited American party-crasher who admittedly come to Berlin for the unbridled debauchery of its Kabarett scene.
Cocktail pianist Frau Zieglar, who provides both light and chilling musical unscored to the affair.
Anna, a young serving woman who silently attends to the needs of the guests.