“At a time when the whole nation is burdened by sorrows”, said Goebbels, “good humour is not just important to the war effort, it can be a decisive factor”. And most of what ‘good humour‘ was to be found in the Third Reich came from the light-hearted, romantic films churned out by the studios of the state-run UFA company.

The musical which has been packing them in at the Theater des Westens is built around thirty-odd songs from such films. So, despite its ominous title (literally ‘Bombmood’; ‘I’m in the mood for bombs’, possibly) I went along expecting an evening of jolly wartime music, a sort of ‘Me and mein Mädchen’.  And this is what appeared to be on offer as the house-lights dimmed, and a chorus of starlets sauntered down the stairway singing ‘Es leuchten die Sterne’ (‘The stars are shining’), while a couple in full evening dress twirled centre stage.  But soon the stars went out and there, silhouetted against the UFA logo on the backdrop, stood a silent row of men in SS uniform, waiting to take over. ‘Springtime for Hitler’ indeed.

The point being made so early in the show was that UFA immediately buckled under to the Nazis. Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda came into existence on 13 March 1933; two weeks later Hitler personally briefed German film-makers on what he expected of them; the next day a memo was circulated within UFA stating that no Jew could be employed in any capacity. The lucky ones, from Peter Lorre to Max Reinhardt, found their way to Hollywood; few of those who stayed survived the war, Hans Otto beaten to death by SA thugs that November, others - men and women - ending up in the death camps.

The emigrants are represented in Bombenstimmung by the male character first seen as the tail-coated dancer in the opening number. After a series of blandly-titled songs  (‘It only happens once’, ‘A new spring’, ‘Dance and be young’) he reappears, suitcase in hand, singing (to the tune of the Habanera from ‘Carmen’) a song with the recurring line ‘An allem sind die Juden schuld!’

Is it raining or hailing, foggy or thundering?

Is your grandad a communist, or your grandson an exhibitionist?

Did Dietrich leave the country? Did the Reichstag burn down?

Blame it all on the Jews!

But there are few songs in which the point is made so overtly through the words The more usual approach of the writers Jurg Burth and Volker Kuhn is to recontextualise the lyrics, placing them in relationship to what was going on outside the cinema. Thus a group of songs praising married love and family life are preceded by a sketch in which UFA’s nordic Garbo substitute, Zarah Leander, is fervently wooed by a leading man brandishing a two-foot long racial purity certificate ‘going back to Attila the Hun’. On come the ladies again, dutifully pushing prams. while SS officers distribute bronze, silver or gold medals, depending on the number of children produced to serve the Fatherland.

Most striking of all is a scene where a butch male athlete is joined on stage by a shambling, adolescent figure in lederhosen and gingham shirt, but with toothbrush moustache and hair swept forward. The athlete grabs this unresisting Hitler figure and throws him around, even subjecting him to a brief bout of simulated sodomy. But, as the scene goes on, the lad grows stronger and stronger until, throwing off his aggressor, he mounts the stairway and takes his place on a throne, swiftly donning full Nazi uniform.  A gauze screen drops down onto which close-ups of adoring female UFA stars are projected, while the ladies themselves slink on singing ‘Ich will dein Schatten sein’ (I want to be your shadow), with the recurring line ‘Ich mache alles was du willst’ (I’ll do everything you want).

The consequences of doing everything the Fuhrer wanted are spelled out with wit, humour and pathos in this quite extraordinary show. “It’s a shame, though, that there aren’t more young people here”, said the man sitting next to me in the stalls. And I realised that almost everyone packing out the theatre was of that generation, now middle-aged, who have built up postwar de-Nazified Germany and who are bewildered by the resurgence of racial hatred and nostalgia for the swastika among their children.

The current run of the UFA-revue is over now, but you can see it when it returns in November and December 1993. Provided, as one of the cast announced after the interval, that they haven’t run out of money; since reunification, cash available for subsidising the theatre has to be spread very thinly. Blame it on the ossies, perhaps?

This was written in 1992, just two years after the reunification of Germany.  People in the former German Federal Republic (the ‘wessies’, short for ‘people from West Germany’) were starting to resent the money needed to raise the living standards of people from the former German Democratic Republic (the ‘ossies’).  And the same period was seeing an increase in the number of racially motivated attacks in Germany, especially in the east.

It was put on at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington DC, later in 1992, and pops up occasionally. But it has never been shown in Britain.

One more point. I hadn’t realise that the term ‘Bombenstimmung’ is actually used in the sense of ‘fantastic atmosphere’; so my referring to the title as ‘ominous’ could have been misleading, though I’d like to think that, given the context, it is ambiguous.