During this part of his career he worked as a writer and illustrator, also producing poetry..[1] In the early 1920s Schiffer got to know Marguerite "Margo" Lion, the Constantinople-born French cabaret singer who had come to Berlin in order to study at the city's Russian ballet school.
He developed in Berlin a genre of his own that combined literary revue with cabaret, working between 1922 and 1925 on the shows "Wilde Bühne", "Rampe", "Tütü", "Größenwahn" and "Katakombe".
In November 1923 MargoLion made her own performance debut with the song created by Schiffer "The Line of Fashion" ("Die Linie der Mode").
[2] Another defining collaboration involved the Russian-born composer Mischa Spoliansky who at this time as living in Berlin, and whom Schiffer first met in 1925.
Together with the collaborations highlighted above, Marcellus Schiffer also wrote libretti for Friedrich Hollaender, Rudolf Nelson, Werner Richard Heymann and Allan Gray.