Mousie

Mousie is set in Berlin in 1936. The faded club at the heart of the film is based loosely on the celebrated “Eldorado”, in 1927 the toast of Schöneberg, Berlin. The music-hall in the film is depicted as the Eldorado might have been in 1936, had it survived…

After the German emperor had been sent into exile following the destructive misery of World War One, the Weimar Republic emerged as a different battleground: endless political parties fought endless elections against the backdrop of rising inflation and a flatlining economy. But in one corner of Berlin, Schöneberg promised relief from the maelstrom. Made famous by temporary resident Christopher Isherwood, (whose writing formed the basis for Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret), the area played host to performers such as Anita Berber and Claire Waldoff, and bands led by Barnabás von Géczy (whose music features in Mousie), Marek Weber and Adalbert Lutter, providing the most outrageous and liberated club scene in the world. Gay, straight, bi or transvestite - everyone was warmly embraced. But it wasn't to last.

In 1932, Hitler and the Nazis went into coalition government with Franz von Papen's extremely conservative Catholic Centre Party, riding on the back of a wave of populism and press propaganda. In July 1932, new Chief of Police Kurt Melcher initiated strict catholic policies and announced “an extensive campaign against Berlin’s depraved nightlife”. Many venues declared themselves private clubs in an attempt to avoid the crackdown. But gradually the dance-halls were subdued, the gay scene was outlawed completely and by 1936 - the year of the Berlin Olympiad - most clubs had perished. Our fictional club in Mousie remains, threadbare and hanging by a thread… Also hanging by a thread in Mousie is the life of a small, Roma refugee child hiding in a wardrobe inside the club. For while all had to wear a smile as the Nazis joyfully geared up for the forthcoming Berlin Olympics, a malignant tumour was growing across Germany, fuelled by populist nationalism and misleading, racist propaganda…

A year before the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Nazis had prohibited Jews from marrying with persons of "German or related blood." Two months later, the law was extended to include People of Colour and Roma or Sinti gypsies as "racially distinctive" minorities with "alien blood." Like Jews, Gypsies were also deprived of their civil rights.

Gradually, Jews and Gypsies were physically removed from German cities to ghettoes and camps and, in June 1936, the Ministry of Interior directives for "Combating the Gypsy Nuisance" authorized the Berlin police to cleanse the streets of the last Gypsies prior to the Olympic games. (In Mousie, Hauptführer Otto is one of many army conscripts co-opted to do this work.) The Gypsies were taken to an internment camp by a sewage dump in the Berlin suburb of Marzahn. The camp had only three water pumps and two toilets. In such overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, contagious diseases flourished, and the weakest died.

Similar “Zigeunerlager” (Gypsy camps) also appeared in Cologne, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg and as the new German empire expanded, Gypsy camps opened in Austria and Poland too. Children were snatched from their parents, and many died in these slave-labour camps, before the interned Romani followed the Jews, and were deported to Nazi extermination camps across Germany and Poland.

It is believed that by the end of the war in 1945, at least 500,000 Gypsies had been murdered by the Nazis – a genocide referred to by the Roma and Sinti as “porajmos”, meaning “the devouring”.