Sally Bowles (1905-) was an American cabaret singer who lived in Berlin, Weimar Germany during the Interwar period.
Biography[]
Bowles in 1931
Sally Bowles was born in the United States in 1905, the daughter of a traveling businessman whose frequent travels to Europe and elsewhere led to Bowles comparing him to an "ambassador". Bowles, who was raised in luxury, came to live a bohemian and "flapper" lifestyle during the Roaring Twenties, and she had hopes of becoming a film star. In 1931, she moved into a boarding house in Berlin and was hired as a cabaret singer at the Kit Kat Klub, and she lived an openly promiscuous and hedonistic lifestyle full of random sexual encounters, drinking, and smoking. She attempted to seduce a producer from UFA GmbH in order to acquire a film acting job in Germany, and, as an alternative to her dream of acting, she harbored desires of seducing a wealthy man and becoming his mistress.
Three months into her stay in Berlin, she befriended her new neighbor at the boarding house, the British English-language teacher Brian Roberts, with whom she soon entered into a sexual relationship. She introduced Roberts to her friend Fritz Wendel to help him launch his English-language instruction career in Berlin, and, after meeting Baron Maximilian von Heune at a laundromat, she immediately took an interest in Von Heune and introduced him to Roberts as well. Von Heune invited them to his countryside estate and spoiled and courted the two of them, and both Bowles and Roberts privately began sexual relationships with Von Heune. Ultimately, Von Heune left them for an adventure in Argentina and left each of them 150 marks, while Roberts and Bowles - during an argument over Bowles' infantile delusions of becoming a filmstar - revealed that each of them had trysted with Von Heune, and they made peace with each other. After Bowles became pregnant, Roberts invited Bowles to marry him, return with him to Cambridge, and raise the child together. However, Bowles had a change of heart due to her and Roberts' conflicting lifestyles and her unwillingness to become a housewife, and she had an abortion, causing a heated argument between her and Roberts. Ultimately, they came to an understanding, and Roberts decided to return to Cambridge, while Bowles remained at the Kit Kat Klub. She left Germany on Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party's rise to power in 1933, moving to Rome.