The Dada movement, which both anticipated and prepared the way for surrealism by a few years, saw the light of day in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Switzerland on February 2, 1916.1 The first program began, not surprisingly, with the Frenchman Alfred Jarry's irreverent, mocking farce Ubu Roi, a burlesque of Shakespeare's Macbeth written in the late 1880s as a puppet show, first staged in Paris in 1896, where it was the sensation of the season, and conceived very much to borrow the title of one of Mayakovsky's famous works as A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. The birth of Dada at the Voltaire in 1916 marked a summing up of the creative tendencies of the late nineteenthand early twentieth-century European cabaret and, at the same time, an end of the cabaret as a locus of artistic innovation. The great political, economic, and social changes which engulfed Europe from 1918 to the outbreak of World War II also had a profound effect on art and that includes the cabaret as well. To be sure, the cabaret did not disappear from the landscape of European entertainment far from it but after World War I it lost most of its earlier elitist character. It became predominantly commercial and, no longer an expression of the dynamism of the artistic community, it assumed the aspect of a combination music hall and intimate nightclub.2 Because of the conditions prevailing in Weimar Germany, the cabaret like other forms of art and entertainment and, in some ways, more so often functioned as a vehicle for trenchant-social and political satire. It is this image of the earlier twentieth-century European cabaret that enjoys the widest dissemination, an image enhanced greatly by the immensely popular film Cabaret.