(2) CABARET takes place eight years later just before the very end of Weimar Germany. What's happened in between is that in November,1923, just after the period covered by "The Serpent's Egg", a new government took over in Germany, (the Stresemann government) and with the financial  help of the U.S. Government was able to put Germany somewhat on its feet. A new currency was issued and times became tolerable for Germans until the 1929 worldwide financial collapse.  The new currency, the Rentenmark was issued at one for one billion (or trillion?) old Papiermarks on November 15,1923, just one week after the" beer hall putch." The German economy never became really strong again, just stable on its surface, but when foreign loans were called after the Great Depression hit, the German economy collapsed again and its democracy was put in a near death situation with death finally arriving in January, 1933.
Again I'm going to borrow a few paragraphs from an amazon.com reviewer from his good description of CABARET.

This is a very good movie, although deeply disturbing. Set in the great city of Berlin in 1931, a time of economic depression and political crisis, this movie constructs an image of the decadence and delusion of the late Weimar period as German society is plunging through a kind of moral and social decay into the nightmare of Nazism.
The film is based on "The Berlin Stories" by Christopher Isherwood (written between 1935 and 1939), who lived in the city in the early 1930s. He had seen both the decadence and the dangerous hunger for a kind of national "purification" among many "respectable" and "moral" middle class Germans, who already had been traumatized by military defeat, hyperinflation, and mass unemployment. The film, following Isherwood, weaves together the stories of the marginal characters who live in this troubled city at the very edge of the great moral catastrophe of the 20th centtury
Liza Minnelli is ... "Sally Bowles", an Americanized version of the British Sally who appears in Isherwood's book, and her energy (and visible angst)drive the film as other characters wander aimlessly through a narrative heading all the time towards disaster. Michael York is ... "Brian", the fictional stand-in for Isherwood himself, and the other characters present believable and even moving representations of people wandering through the impending nightmare as through a fog.
The nightmare itself is suggested by the increasing visibility of the Brownshirts and the sinister swastika, the authentic posters and grafitti from the period, and the passing visual allusion to the street fights and storm troopers. These allusions effectively evoke the sense of uneasiness and danger in the air, an effect reinforced by Sally's deep desire to scream her heart out. The smug and complacent self-assurance of the conservative aristocrat Maximilien, played by Helmut Griem, provides a clue to the almost wilfull blindness of even (perhaps especially) educated Germans to the moral danger posed by the Nazi movement. The anti-Semitism of the movement is also effectively displayed from several angles, most movingly through the love story between Fritz and Natalia.
... the strangest character is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, played brilliantly by Joel Grey. His character has a sinister ambiguity; is he mocking the Nazis by his farcical musical satires, or rather is he reinforcing the anti-Semitic prejudices of his audience through such pieces as, "If you could see her as I do . . ."? Is his decadence ignoring the danger and plunging his head like an ostrich into the sand, or is it a critical commentary on the pseudo-morality that worries about cabarets while ignoring Nazis?

By Scott Grau "avid reader" link

CABARET was released in 1972 ; THE SERPENT'S EGG in 1977. CABARET was a great critical and commercial success, won several Academy Awards losing out to THE GODFATHER for Best Picture. It is considered by many to be one of the greatest musicals ever made,
THE SERPENT'S EGG was a commercial failure as well as a critical failure on its release, ( I believe it was more successful in Europe than the U.S.) although as it ages its worth is being reconsidered by many and I feel it has aged well.
I first saw CABARET around 1973 and I liked it well enough; classy Bob Fosse presentation, great songs, Lisa Minnelli, Joel Grey, traces of seriousness- what's not to like. However, it soon went into storage in the archives of my brain.
I first saw the SERPENT'S EGG  pre-release, about 1977, and I was bowled over by it. The fact that I liked it was a curse for the film! But over the years, 2 or 3 times, my ex-wife and I would rent a 16mm version of the film, I'd bring a projector home from my cinema, (no home video in those days) and we would have several friends over to watch and discuss the film. If it told you that I remembered those discussions in detail I'd be lying; thirty years is a long time.
Recently I was discussing Bergman with my current wife and I mentioned THE SERPENT'S EGG which she didn't know. I ordered a copy of the film and it lay around our house for 6 months or so until one Saturday evening she decided to play it. I was busy with my computer, but I was kind of watching out of the corner of my eye and became fascinated again. I  mentioned that on ET and later on suggested that we do a film blog and here we are at the first.
We can have a lazy two day discussion of these films so I won't go into too much detail at this point. I will just give my general impression of these films and explain why I feel THE SERPENT'S EGG is a very important film and why CABARET does not seem so important now.

THE SERPENT'S EGG reeks of  devastation, darkness, misery and collapse; the collapse of possibly the most civilized county in the world at that time.  The country of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Nietzschie, and Einstein to name a few of its illustrious citizens.  A Germany turned on its head.  The line in the film, which to me best describes this  is when the police inspector is telling Abel Rosenberg about his visit to his old mother in the country.  He went to the railroad station and discovered that there were no timetables; there were trains but no timetables. He says to Rosenberg: "Rosenberg, can you imagine a Germany without timetables?" But that's just a cruel joke, Imagine taking a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a carton of milk if you can find one. I can't remember seeing one ray of sunshine in this film.
I am not talking about an intellectual appreciation of this devastation which would lead, in a short eight or nine years, to the German people's acceptance of a  Nazi government led by Adolph Hitler. I am talking about Bergman  punching us in the gut so hard that after seeing the film you feel that you've spent a week in Weimar Germany and can understand in your bones how Germany was able to turn to Hitler.
The arrival of violent anti semitism is evident throughout the film, fifteen years before Kristallnacht.. One of the most chilling scenes is the violent and sadistic attack upon the Jewish owner of the cabaret where Manuela worked and then the burning of the cabaret. This was done by one of the right wing Nazi street gangs that were patrolling Germany at the time. ( I'm not sure if this gang was one of the precursors to the "brownshirts"- someone help me on this.)

The total madness was further illustrated when a drunk Abel, himself a Jew, throws a cobblestone through the window of a Jewish shopkeeper and his wife and then beats them. He seems to be very angry at "the stupid Jews" for bringing all this trouble upon him. (See his conversation with the circus owner at the fancy Berlin restaurant which surprisingly, still existed in the midst of all this economic misery. I guess such opulence surrounded by poverty is not so surprising after all-I refer to the current U.S.A.)
There's plenty more here, eg., The mad scientist Hans with his experiments on people that invariably led to their violent deaths; the wonderful cinematography of Sven Nyqvist, etc.,etc. But I will leave them for the group discussion.

A prominent question of the post war generation referring to Nazism and the Holocaust was "how could that have happened in Germany?"  When I first saw this film I thought that  it gave us  important clues as to why Germany "went crazy" starting eight years later in 1933; a craziness which was to continue until its almost total destruction in 1944. (As an aside, I submit that America was not that far from a national insanity five or six years ago; one more terrorist attack could have triggered it given the leaders who were in power at the time  who would have been willing to exploit it.)

I'll speak a bit about CABARET. When I saw it the first time it was several years prior to the release of THE SERPENTS EGG. And it was special. Lisa Minnelli and Joel Grey are great performers. Bob Fosse is a great director of musicals.  There's always a Nazi or two in the background. And when the young man gets up a the country festival and starts to sing "TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME" and the all festival attendees rise and join in I have to admit it made me squeamish. Well, we all know what was coming not too long after; this is 1931 after all.
But after all is said and done, CABARET is still "Hollywood." Although THE SERPENTS EGG  was financed and produced by DeLorentis, and was made with the biggest budget Bergman ever had,  one cannot  say that the film is "Hollywood."

So I'll close my portion here. While  I've only touched on a fraction of the things that we can discuss  I hope that I have provided a good springboard from which to enter into a lively discussion.