Cabarets of Death: Death, Dance and Dining in Early Twentieth Century Paris

By Mel Gordon, Edited by Joanna Ebenstein
Strange Attractor Press. Paperback, 185 pages, 2024
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From 1892 until 1954, three cabaret-restaurants in the Montmartre district of Paris captivated tourists with their grotesque portrayals of death in the afterworlds of Hell, Heaven, and Nothingness. Each had specialized cuisines and morbid visual displays with flashes of nudity and shocking optical illusions. These cabarets were considered the most curious and widely featured amusements in the city. Entrepreneurs even hawked graphic postcards of their ironic spectacles and otherworldly interiors.

Cabarets of Death documents the dinner shows, the character interactions with guests, and the theatrical goings-on in these unique establishments. Presenting original images and drawings from contemporary journals, postcards, tourist brochures, and menus, Mel Gordon leads a tour of these idiosyncratically macabre institutions, and grants us unique access to a form of popular spectacle now gone.

Over 150 images, many never before published!

Mel Gordon (1947-2018) was a Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California Berkeley and New York University Tisch School of the Arts as well as a director and writer. He wrote and staged many productions spanning Russian Constructivism, Yiddish plays, Grand Guignol horror and comedy, experimental theater, and a notorious recreation of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlin Museum of Sex that featured a fully engaging cabaret show.

A prolific author, he penned fifteen books and over a hundred and fifty articles on popular culture and American, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Yiddish theater–and lectured extensively. His books include Voluptuous Panic: the Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946, Grand Guignol: Theatre of Fear and Terror, and Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant.