Performance Anxiety: The Cabaret as 'Living Pornography' in Interwar Poland

• In Event: Sin, Skin, and Scandal: Pornography in 20th and 21st Century Poland and Russia

Abstract

This paper examines raging debates about the role of cabaret in interwar Poland, focusing on moral reformers’ claims that the cabaret was a form of “living pornography.” Using activists’ writings, letters of complaint, police records, and cabaret publications, this paper argues that such discussions about cabaret performances tell us much more about anxieties surrounding modernity, urbanization, and Polish-Jewish ethnic tensions in interwar Poland than they do about the performances themselves.

Author

• Michał J Wilczewski, Northwestern U