Die Katakombe

The catacomb was a political- literary cabaret in Berlin, which existed from 1929 to 1935.

The catacomb was founded by Werner Finck, Hans Deppe, RA Stemmle and other Berlin in the basement of the club artists in the Bellevue Road 3. Among the artists to whom the catacomb offered a platform that included Rudolf Platte, Theo Lingen, Ursula Herking, Isa Increase, Ernst Busch, Hanns Eisler, Erich Kästner, Veit Ivo and Erik Ode.

Finck led as master of ceremonies through the program, the skits and parodies united. However, after one year, there were differences of opinion, which resulted in the politically motivated artists like bush and Eisler retired. Also, the venue was changed.

Since the seizure of power by the Nazis on 30 January 1933 representatives of the Gestapo were part of the core audience of the catacomb. Although the cabaret was now completely apolitical, the suspicions of the watchers could not be scattered:

"B. - Nr.41551/35 II 2 C 8057/35, April 16, 1935: The audience in the Catacomb ' continues in the vast majority of Jews together that the nastiness and vitriolic, subversive critique of the emcees Werner Fink [ sic] fanatical applaud. Fink is the typical former cultural Bolshevik who has not clearly understood the new time, or at least does not want to understand and tried in the type of earlier Jewish writers, the ideas of National Socialism and all that is a Nazi holy, in the dirt pull ' "

On 10 May 1935, the catacomb at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels ' by the Gestapo was closed. Finck was briefly detained in Esterwegen.

The Berlin " catacomb " should not be confused with the eponymous former cabaret in Munich- Schwabing, which had been founded by Karl Theodor Langen and in 1975 received the Schwabing Art Prize.