The late 1920s and early '30s were a period of wild optimism and stock speculation leading into the Great Depression in the United States.

In Germany, the economy went from post-World War I devastation to out-of-control inflation that led to the fall of the Weimar Republic and helped set the stage for the Nazi takeover, the Holocaust and World War II.

While both countries were heading to Armageddon, what were they singing?

Pretty much the same thing, it turns out: pop songs that were romantic, optimistic, silly, often witty and totally unrealistic.

When you see documentaries of America in those years, the soundtrack always has "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime," and the films about Germany feature march music and songs about the Vaterland.

But the big hits that people were hearing on the radio and buying in the record stores were more likely to be along the lines of "Happy Days Are Here Again" or the German version, "Wochenend und Sonnenschein," which translates to "Weekend and Sunshine."

Max Raabe believes the idea was "to heal the soul and give an idea of a better world. All the films with Fred Astaire showed a world that never existed. The music itself was innocent, but you have to know the time in which it was created."

Raabe, 45, is the leader and chief singer of the Palast Orchester (Palace Orchestra) from Germany, which plays Sunday night at the Orange Country Performing Arts Center and Tuesday at UCLA's Royce Hall in Westwood. He will be singing those songs, both from Germany and the United States, and the 12-piece "Orchester" will be playing the old arrangements.

There was a lot of pop cross-pollination at the time, but mostly in one direction. An occasional "Schoener Gigolo" ("Pretty Gigolo") became a hit ("Just a Gigolo") in English, but mostly the Germans created new words for British and American hits, as well as writing their own.

In the Orchester's concerts, the program will be about half English and half German, but Raabe points out that many of the English songs were also hits in their original language in Germany.

The Orchester was created to sound like the dance bands of the time, pre-big band. It has four saxophones, two trumpets, a trombone, a double bass, a tuba, drums, a piano, a guitar, a banjo and a violin.

"Some of the musicians sing with me," Raabe said, speaking by phone from his home in Berlin, and several of them double on various instruments "so we can change the color of the music."

Those attending the concerts will hear classic songs of requited and unrequited love and funny songs emphasizing lyrical gymnastics, such as "Mein Gorilla hat eine Villa im Zoo" ("My Gorilla Has a Villa at the Zoo"). The one thing they'll have in common will be catchy melodies.

The only shadow in the "Sonnenschein" will be when Raabe announces the composers. Sometimes he explains why he makes a point of doing this before each song, and sometimes he doesn't, but his reason remains the same. "The audiences loved the songs, but the (Nazi) regime wanted the names of the writers to be forgotten," he said. "Everybody knows Cole Porter in the United States, but we have a lot of names in our repertoire that they wanted to make forgotten. Most of the writers were Jewish."

Some of the writers died in concentration camps, but some escaped and continued to write their happy songs in America. For instance, Walter Jurmann, who wrote the gorilla ditty in Berlin, ended up in Hollywood, where he wrote such diverse hits as "San Francisco, Open Your Golden Gate" and "All God's Children Got Rhythm."

His co-writer on the gorilla song, Bronislaw Kaper, wrote the jazz favorite "On Green Dolphin Street" and the soundtrack for "Lili," including "Hi-Lili, Hi-Lo."

Raabe views the pop songs of the era he specializes in as "a modern kind of classical music. The music by Mozart was dance music - and entertaining music for the society of its day. But the quality is the same as a song by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter."

Raabe's fascination with this music began when he was about 14 and he found an old 78-RPM record among his parents' collection called "I'm Wild About Hilda." It was a foxtrot instrumental that was "wild and crazy," he said. "It was a happy song, but there was sadness in it, and that was curious to me. The music seemed so far away because of the arrangement and very bad mikes (used for the recording)."

He began to search out similar records in monthly local flea markets and gathered songs in German, English and French.

His other interest was opera, and he began studies in classical music. To finance his schooling at the University of Arts in Berlin, he performed. Starting with a piano, he put together 20- to 40-minute programs of the '20s-'30s pop songs that he sang for weddings, dinner parties and patrons in local pubs.

Other music students in Berlin began taking an interest in this music and joined him in founding the Palast Orchester. It's not a contract group of backup musicians, but more like a rock band. The only player who's changed in 20 years is the violinist because "the last one had a child and didn't want to travel around without the child, and so we respect this."

The fixed group is "absolutely necessary" for the kind of performance they put on, says Raabe. "Every musician knows exactly what the other is thinking and playing. When we change the tempo in a song, we don't need a conductor. We know how to listen to each other."

The group is constantly on the road in Europe, playing around 120 concerts a year, and is increasing its touring abroad. After Southern California, it will appear for the second time in Carnegie Hall and then Philadelphia before returning home, but next year it's planning a three-week tour across the entire United States.

When he performs, Raabe plays a character, in slicked-back hair and glitzy period tuxedo, but he bristles at comparisons with the Joel Grey character in the film of "Cabaret." "He's very diabolic, and I'm more sophisticated and sensitive - and much more humorous. He jumped around, but I'm just standing there and doing nothing but singing and talking. I don't like to move around too much in my private life and on stage, and so I found a way to present the music that makes the voice and the facial expressions much more important."

Judging from a previous performance, it would pay to bring some opera glasses if you attend one of the Palast Orchester concerts and don't have a seat close to the stage. That way you won't miss the droll self-irony that Raabe conveys with his expressions while singing such lines, in German, as "I break the hearts of the proudest ladies/Because I'm so stormy and passionate/I only need to look one in the eye/And she's already mine."

-Al Rudis