In a mirrored tent decked out to look like the notorious Kit Kat Club, Anna Loos-Liefers has been playing the role of Sally Bowles. Cabaret was such a hit onstage in Berlin last year that it's being rerun.

Like many Germans, Loos-Liefers had to wait a long time before she saw the Hollywood film. "I came from the East and it was never shown on state television," she says. Since the play she is starring in was modelled on the film it would have been reasonable to catch up with the Liza Minnelli performance before appearing on stage. “I chose not to — I wanted to be my own Sally — but eventually I had to watch it on DVD. And I was stunned; it was extraordinary."

She now ranks Cabaret among her ten favourite films, joining a growing legion of German fans of a work which is largely seen as being more about expatriate life than the gritty reality of Weimar Germany. As a consequence it never quite took root in the German consciousness. Yes, there is an acceptance that Berlin in the inter-war years was a decadent and creative place. But the reality — the collective memory of the time — is of turnip soup and of money so worthless that it was cheaper to plaster your room with banknotes than to buy paint.

The Berlin portrayed in Cabaret existed, but only on the remote fringes of everyday life. “It was the least glamorous time of our lives," says Elsie Von Carnap, now 93, who was a young aristocratic girl about town in the Cabaret period. “These people were dancing on the edge of the volcano.”

Even for a newly converted fan like Loos-Liefers the film concentrates too heavily on the love affair between Bowles and Brian Roberts (Michael York). “I find it a bit of a pity, the politics slips a bit too much in the background,” she says.

The Broadway stage version of the drama, I am a Camera, contained a subplot in which the hero’s landlady falls in love with a Jewish greengrocer. The tension in this relationships shows a great deal about the treatment of the Jews in Berlin at a time when the Nazis were edging towards power — and the current Berlin staging retains the subplot. “You have to do that in Germany, especially in Berlin,” Loos-Liefers says. “It’s an unbelievably important subject — the Nazis, the Jews and how the German people adapted to the political changes.”

For Germans the film glosses over these problems a little too smoothly. For them it remains an outsider’s view of their own story.

In Berlin little tribute is paid to Christopher Isherwood, whose stories inspired the plays and film. Isherwood lived briefly in the German capital during the early 1930s, observed, wrote — and left. The Germans stayed and had to wrestle with the many moral compromises that arise from living under tyranny.

Liza Minnelli will always have her fans in Germany: she has become a gay icon. But a recent evening spent with a group of German friends watching Minnelli strut her stuff in the movie ended on a discordant note. Nobody was happy about seeing German history kidnapped in this way, even though all agreed that they had just watched one of the strongest performances in musical cinema.

ROGER BOYES

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