Ruth Hay, 24, of Manchester, England, performs at the Kleine Nachtrevue. (Photos by Tracy Baker for USA TODAY )

BERLIN - Naughty little Tootsie glows in the spotlight, wearing little more than a pageboy wig. Pouting on the cabaret stage, she fumbles artfully with a flag draped around her -- the blue-and-white banner of Germany's arch-conservative Bavaria. She sings the mournfully nostalgic Lilli Marlene, made famous by Marlene Dietrich: "Time would come for roll call, time for us to part; darling, I'd caress you, and press you to my heart."

Then ever so slowly, Tootsie dips her colors.

Such is Berlin night life at the Kleine Nachtrevue cabaret: sex with a spritz of political satire. It's the kind of lusty farce captured in the Kit Kat Klub of the Oscar-winning Cabaret (now a brazen remake on Broadway). That story was set in Berlin of die goldenen swanziger jahre, the golden '20s, when despair and a sinful nonchalance briefly created an internationally known night life. That's gone forever. But the German capital of today, in the midst of new turmoil and change, has night life hotter than it's been in decades.

It brings a coy smile to the face of Berlin Mayor Eberhard Diepgen. On a recent swing through Washi ngton, D.C., glad-handing with U.S. politicians and speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, he pauses over Perrier at the Watergate Hotel to reflect on his city's night scene. "You can do what you like."

For Americans, it means treasures undiscovered in the former East Berlin borough of Mitte; the culturally electric Tacheles ruins of World War II; the bustling warren of cabarets, theaters, galleries, shops and restaurants at the Hackesche Hofe; the ghostly splendor of a midnight stroll through the ancient Gendarmenmarkt square. There is the gritty montage of Oranienburger Strasse with its open-air cafes, streetwalkers (legal here), graffiti, bunkerlike Stalinist decor and 132-year-old Neue Synagogue topped by a Moorish dome. (And, many feel, without the menace palpable in American streets at night.)

Berlin's bars never close. In the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, a cafe blaring Aretha Franklin holds an impromptu furniture sale in pre-dawn hours, and pharmacy student Karin Dreyer, 26, stretches out on a quilt-covered chaise longue. "That's the special thing about it," she says of her city's night life. "It's kind of dirty, and you behave like you want. Nobody really cares. And you can be yourself, whoever you are."

Hitler hated this town. According to Otto Friedrich, in his book Before the Deluge, the Fuhrer called it "that sinful Babel."

Berliners are brash, irreverent, liberal. And tolerant.

There is a large immigrant population here and a thriving gay community. Berliners have an expression, Berliner schnauze, which roughly translates as "Berlin big mouth." They thrive amid chaos.

From the end of World War I until Nazi ascendancy in 1933, there was revolution, inflation, joblessness, disease, fighting in the streets and chronic government crises. Fascists waited eagerly in the wings.

Yet Berlin flourished as never before, nor since, as a cultural and creative mecca, enlightening in architecture (Bauhaus), science (Einstein's Unified Field Theory) and theater (playwright Bertolt Brecht, producer Max Reinhardt). Dadaism, an art form defined by chaos and nonconformity, flowered and died here. A movie industry rivaling Hollywood's produced hit films that typified the era -- specifically, Dietrich as the pleasure-loving Lola-Lola in The Blue Angel, lounging on the cabaret stage in top hat, short skirt, bare thighs and black garters (Nazis later banned it).

Musicians Erik Stripp, right, from Italy and Vadim Pavluchenko, from Siberia, perform outside restaurants on the Kaethe-Kollwitz-Platz in East Berlin.(By Tracy Baker , Source: For USA TODAY)

And the night scene was a world-famous den of iniquity: Josephine Baker and her banana dance, half-naked prostitutes in the Cafe Nationale, Mata Hari performing at the Wintergarten and English writer Christopher Isherwood absorbing street color for his Berlin Stories, from which Cabaret would spring.

Today, there is new turmoil. The city is lurching into the 21st century with the largest construction project in Europe at Potsdamer Platz -- the Times Square of Europe in the 1920s -- raising gleaming corporate centers and cultural displays. A new glass dome is being built on the Reichstag parliament building (burned by the Nazis), preparing for the government's move here by 1999. Meanwhile, the economy is sluggish, unemployment high (nearly 18%) and a small but stubborn right-wing group of hatemongers persists.

Yet the night life glitters its brightest since the golden years. Cabarets are in a renaissance (though without the raw sexuality of the '20s -- exceptions are the Kleine Nachtrevue on Kurfurstenstrasse and the city's club scene, where sexual decadence in all forms is encouraged at places such as the latter-day Kit Kat Club in the Kreuz-berg borough).

More traditional cabaret in the age-old format of vaudeville and variety is alive at the Vegaslike Friedrichstadtpalast or the unpredictable Chamaleon Variete, both in the historic core of the city, Mitte. Best of all is the reinvented Wintergarten Variete on Potsdamer Strasse in Tiergarten. There, a calliope of jugglers, French Canadian trapeze artists, Russian clowns, Mongolian contortionists, Sri Lankan musicians and acrobats (two of whom snatched this reluctant writer from the audience and launched him into the air) orbit a master of ceremonies, who could easily be taken for a '90s version of Cabaret's expatriate American Sally Bowles.

 South Bronx native Bridget Fogle, raised on gospel music and a graduate of City College of New York, does seven costume changes per show at the Wintergarten, performs six days a week (twice on Saturday) and learned German from watching television. The audience goes nuts when she does her Tina Turner. "The thing with Germans," says Fogle, who has been an expatriate here for 10 years, "is when they see a big woman and a black woman, that's what they want: soul, blues and jazz."

But apart from cabarets, clubs, three opera houses, ballet companies and symphony orchestras, one of the most dynamic elements in Berlin night life is its rebirth in Mitte. It is, once again, Berlin creativity amid disorder. After the reunification in 1989, with Mitte still bearing war scars unhealed by underfunded East Germans, an avant-garde group of musicians and artists moved into ruins such as the Tacheles, a bombed-out department store on Oranienburger.

"The young people got into warehouses, started to make parties and build up their own group culture . . . in the yards and the cellars of Berlin Mitte,'' says Ralf Regitz, one of those early entrepreneurs. Today, he is general manager of the city's Love Parade, which draws a million young people to Berlin each July.

"The next process (is) to survive in the new city," he says. "But I think we've got a good chance."