The schlager would reach its peak in the first half of the 20th century. By the end of WWI, the schlager was seen as a specific (German) genre, although individual schlager were quite diverse musically. The variety, cabaret and revue shows popular at the time became the "home" of the schlager during the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. This coincided with the advent of film and radio, in which media the club shows were routinely featured. Indeed, schlager would be caught up in the rubric of "mass production."
After the German defeat in WWII, schlager survived, in part because of the genre's mutability. As Sunka Simon points out in "Der Vord're Orient: Colonial Imagery in Popular Postwar German Schlager", schlager offered a nostalgic escape to Der Vordere Orient (the "near east"), which often didn't go much farther than vacation spots in Italy or Spain (sometimes Mexico); at the same time, schlager re-purposings of Native American imagery allowed younger Germans to, as Simon asserts, invest such portrayals "of the noble Indian with the hope for an ecologically based humanism of tolerance, [and] singlehandedly root for the underdog in a world order ruled by US economic and military power and reinvigorate one's sense of teutonic superiority via Old Shatterhand's [Karl May] exploits" (92).