The Lavender Song is a cabaret

Cabaret

Cabaret is a form, or place, of entertainment featuring comedy, song, dance, and theatre, distinguished mainly by the performance venue: a restaurant or nightclub with a stage for performances and the audience sitting at tables watching the performance, as introduced by a master of ceremonies or...

 song

Song

In music, a song is a composition for voice or voices, performed by singing.A song may be accompanied by musical instruments, or it may be unaccompanied, as in the case of a cappella songs...

 written in 1920 with lyrics by Kurt Schwabach and music by Mischa Spoliansky

Mischa Spoliansky

Mischa Spoliansky was a Russian-born composer and a long-term resident in Britain.- Life :Spoliansky was born into a musical family in Białystok; his father was an opera singer and his sister would later become a pianist and his brother a cellist. After the birth of Mischa the family moved to...

 in Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 and is considered one of the first gay anthem

Gay anthem

A gay anthem is a song that has become widely popular among, or has become identified with, the LGBT community; usually with gay men. The lyrics of gay anthems are often marked with hope against the odds, pride, unity, or defiance...

s.

History

The song is a product of Germany's Weimar Republic

Weimar Republic

The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...

, during which time lesbian

Lesbian

Lesbian is a term most widely used in the English language to describe sexual and romantic desire between females. The word may be used as a noun, to refer to women who identify themselves or who are characterized by others as having the primary attribute of female homosexuality, or as an...

s and gay men enjoyed a short period of improvement in quality of life when the government established basic democratic rights that covered the LGBT

LGBT

LGBT is an initialism that collectively refers to "lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender" people. In use since the 1990s, the term "LGBT" is an adaptation of the initialism "LGB", which itself started replacing the phrase "gay community" beginning in the mid-to-late 1980s, which many within the...

 community and abolished censorship.

The song was written after the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute of Sex Research, Institute for Sexology or Institute for the Science of Sexuality...

 (Institute for Sexual Science) under Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld was a German physician and sexologist. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, which Dustin Goltz called "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights."-Early life:Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in a...

made worldwide news with its "First International Conference for Sexual Reform" which called for regulations on sexual behavior to be based on science instead of religion or other unscientific tradition.

External Links

• "The Lavender Song (Das Lila Lied)" - Take the Facing History and Ourselves (Lyrics in English and German; audio clip)