February 18, 1933, the date of Der Silbersee's premiere, fell at a turbulent time in Germany. Hitler, whom most artists and intellectuals had seen as too preposterous to take seriously, had been appointed Chancellor about two weeks earlier. Weill had already ruffled a few political feathers with Die Dreigroschenoper in 1928 and Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny in the following year, and Die Bürgschaft (1932) had been quickly escorted from the stage for its dissident overtones; the news over the grapevine was that the premiere of the politically charged Silbersee would be met with opposition as well. As one audience member in Leipzig wrote, "Everyone who counted in the German Theater met together for the last time. And everyone knew this. The atmosphere can hardly be described. It was the last day of the greatest decade of German culture in the twentieth century." On February 27, the Reichstag in Berlin had gone up in flames; the first week of March saw Der Silbersee pulled from all three theaters in which it had been playing. Having been made a symbol of "Jewish cultural bolshevism" and the "degenerate art of the mechanical age," Weill fled the country on March 23. Der Silbersee would not be performed again for twenty years.

So what was it about Der Silbersee (The Silver Lake) that so angered the followers of the Führer? Besides premiering at such an unstable time, several elements in the work were clearly topical: police brutality, an oppressed lower class, a soulless aristocracy, and commercial greed. The Silver Lake was no doubt a defiant reminder of the nearly six million homeless living in similar hovels around the lakes near Berlin. The most pointed political reference occurs when Fennimore, the housekeeper's niece, is asked to provide some after-dinner entertainment for Olim, the newly rich owner of the mansion, and Severin, his house guest. She sings a number entitled "The Ballad of Caesar's Death." This defiant warning—that he who lives by the sword will die by it—is anything but subtle in its reference to Hitler. What's more, it is followed by an absurd dance number of sorts: to the accompaniment of a foxtrot, Fennimore replicates Charlie Chaplin's famous dinner-roll dance from Gold Rush. While earlier works like Der Zar lässt sich photographieren (1927) and Mahagonny (1929) had pointedly eschewed nineteenth-century fantastical themes by portraying life in the present-day, Der Silbersee mixed the modern with the mythical. This is suggested in the subtitle of the work, "Ein Wintermärchen," translated "a winter's tale"—undoubtedly a reference to Shakespeare's fantasy of the same name. In Der Silbersee, the now penniless protagonists finally set out for Silver Lake—to drown themselves in order to escape the oppression that plagued them in the city. Magically, the surface of the lake hardens, inviting them to walk across to freedom. Undoubtedly, on that night in February of 1933, those watching Der Silbersee could only hope for a similarly miraculous deliverance.

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