Fast-forward on a tape and whole worlds open up. For Jen Byrne, the creator of legendary Weimar cabaret singer Bernie Dieter, it came at the end of her own christening video: filmed in Germany where she was initially raised. Fast-forwarding past the usual scenes – moments in the church, family celebrating afterwards, drinking champagne and eating cake – she suddenly came across the remnants of a German prison porno, circa 1970. “Lots of men with moustaches and all these very large bushes,” Byrne says, laughing.
The discovery echoed an experience she had as an eight-year-old watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show with her parents, who “would stop it just before the orgy scene in the pool – one night I was on my own and I just kept watching. I was like: ‘Oh my God, there’s a whole new ending!’”
Somehow those abrupt shifts into adult spaces, from pious naivety to unmitigated raunch, stayed with her and maybe partly explain the deliciously febrile sexuality of her cabaret alter ego. Having only ever been interviewed in character as Bernie Dieter, Byrne is finally dropping the mask of the chanteuse and chats to the Guardian for the first time as herself. “It’s a little bit scary but in an exciting way,” she says over coffee as she prepares to open her new show, Club Kabarett, in Melbourne.
Dieter is an international fixture on the cabaret scene, having hosted the ribald circus antics of La Clique for a number of years, as well as touring her own shows Little Death Club and Berlin Underground throughout Europe and the UK. In her Louise Brooks wig, Dieter deliberately evokes the heady maximalism of interwar Weimar cabaret, with its sharp edges and politically subversive sensibility. If Byrne isn’t quite as sexually outrageous as Dieter – who often climbs over audience members in her predilection for hirsute men – she still suggests levels of allure and depravity under her gamine smile.
“Bernie’s obviously an extension of me,” Byrne says. “Everything that she represents is actually within me.” But Dieter also allows for a kind of debauched anarchy that Byrne would never get away with in ordinary life – “all those primal, dark, sexy, weird beautiful things that live deep inside you that you’re not always allowed to express”.
Byrne has been performing as Dieter since her early 20s but only recently discovered a familial link to the character stretching back to her German grandmother’s childhood. As she slid into dementia, her Oma began to relive her early life growing up in a travelling circus while wartime Germany divided in two. In a kind of reversal of those videotapes, Oma was stuck in a permanent rewind, and a fascinating story emerged.
“She was born in Dresden in 1932, and the family travelled under the Sarrasani umbrella, one of the big circuses at the time. But the hard border between east and west made it increasingly difficult to tour,” Byrne says.
Her Oma’s stepfather, Harry – a harsh, abusive man who had forbidden his stepdaughter to perform – decided they had to escape across the border to the west.
Oma was smuggled in under a bunch of costumes while her brothers hid in hay from the elephant enclosures. Once on the other side, Harry abandoned his family and left them with a single food truck.
“Somehow, they managed to survive,” Byrne says. “Whenever they got some money selling sausages, they would add on a room and the food truck became their kitchen.” This hodgepodge approach to architecture made for “a weird house, with rooms falling in random places. It was very bizarre.”
Oma never fulfilled her dream of performing as an adult, so her family never made the connection between her and Byrne’s Weimar-inspired alter ego. “All these stories and no one had told me,” Byrne says. “I don’t know why; they just never talked about it.”
Dieter may have come unbidden from Byrne’s consciousness but she clearly satisfied a need. It’s something Byrne recognises as she tours the world, especially when visiting countries with less permissive attitudes to sex and sexuality. Dieter’s shows, provocative at the best of times, take on a social and political urgency in a place such as Hungary, where LGBTQ+ rights are being erased, and even Japan, which is “still pretty traditional in their gender roles”.
Some of the reactions she receives from audiences after her shows astonishes her, for their fervour and sheer joy. “One immaculately dressed Japanese woman in her 70s took my hands and said, ‘Thank you for the most joy I have had in my life’.” Another woman in the UK told Byrne she was going to leave her husband after seeing the show. “She came back a year later and said, ‘I’ve left him. I’m having the best time of my life. I’m with a woman now.’”
Duality and the mirror, transfiguration and self-actualisation, have always sat at the heart of Byrne’s comically flirtatious creation but as she matures “the veil between Bernie and I is getting thinner and the differences are getting less”.
As rightwing nationalism and ultra-conservative attitudes to sex and gender re-emerge, the gin-soaked permissiveness of Weimar also begins to feel like a radical response to the times we live in – almost 100 years after it first did in Germany.
“Weimar cabaret has a kind of punk, dirty, gritty, raw, social commentary energy about it,” Byrne says. “It flares up in times when there’s a lot of scary shit happening in the world.”
