Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Other child dens of iniquity sidestepped the Bulls through a ruse of codewords and cheesy disguises. On Bülowbogen in Berlin West, a pederast could enter a storefront “Pharmacy,” where he would be asked to enumerate the exact years he suffered from some malady—although the nature of the illness was always left unnamed. The answer had to be in the 12-to-16 range since it signified the age of the child-prostitute he was requesting. The attending “physician” (who had a diploma in hairdressing on the wall) then responded by searching the back cubicles for the properly aged Medicine , which was dispensed in hourly “tablets” of “blonde, brown, brunette, or Gypsy-black.”

More popular (and far more profitable) was the trade in Telephone-Girls . Attractive 12-year-old girls and young teens were made up and dressed to resemble adult female celebrities—typically Lya da Putti, Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Haas, or Lilian Harvey. Lonely Cavaliers telephoned one of six or seven agencies to purchase the services of the “child-star,” who was whisked in a waiting motor vehicle to his domicile. What would appear to be a rather singular perversion among the Berlin’s high society was in fact a favored divertissement. Theatricality, pederasty, star-fucking, and technology all meshed in ways that would have likely startled the wizened flesh-peddlers of Nineveh and Shanghai.

The Kietz , or underworld life of the Berlin prostitute, was presented in countless ways during the Weimar era. Songs, revues, film melodramas, faits divers all doted on the loony spectacle. Police reports and tabloids emphasized the Kietz’ ugly and dangerous nature. Religious leaders and health officials warned of its spiritual and physical repercussions. And graphic artists naturally recorded the Kietz’ ironic juxtapositions as a telling panorama on human mendacity and deceit.

Like other workers in debased professions, the people who inhabited the Kietz saw it differently. They felt nothing but contempt for outsiders (except for the Bulls , who normally treated them with good-natured respect). Most prostitutes claimed their lives were infi-nitely more liberated and interesting than those of their lumpenprol sisters. The Kietz had its own system of justice, language, familial relationships, annual customs, sources of satisfaction, entertainments, taboos, and codes of honor. For four years, it even produced its own weekly newspaper, Der Pranger (“The Pillory”).

And while public servants ranted about infectious venereal disease, for instance, the average Kupplerin could cite statistics from League of Nations studies that found Berlin to have rather low rates of syphilis and gonorrhea, compared to, say, London and Paris. “Big and Little Jelly” were occupational hazards but so was mangling a hand in a stamp-press or daydreaming while brushing down a wheat-thresher.

Life in Weimar Berlin could be unpredictable and very unpleasant, but real street violence—a sure catalyst for inner-city anxiety and dread—was exceedingly rare, at least until the political situation outside the Kietz began to sour.■

Berlin glorified in its imageas Europe’s showcase of sin. Its own police commissioners often boasted that vice and debauchery were the city’s prime industries. (Actually manufacturing, finance, and publishing produced more revenue.) But over 150,000 Berliners made their living in the Kietz or were employed in related businesses, notably Nachtlokals , seedy hotels, pornographic studios and cinemas, unlicensed casinos and bars, naked boxing and wrestling arenas, private torture dungeons, and like-minded flimflam operations.

On any given weekend in Berlin, six to seven hundred emporiums promised nonpareil sexual pleasures and sights—indulgences unknown even to the orgy-seeking miscreants of ancient Rome and Asia. In each nighttime establishment there was a conspicuous effort to appeal to a specific and novel perversion or erotic taste. Lesbians alone in 1930 could select from 85 same-sex Dielen , risqué nightclubs, and dancehalls. Some of these private concerns barred straights and gay men outright, others welcomed them, and still others restricted their female clientele to circumscribed types or tribadic couplings.

The carnal advantages of class and wealth intensified in Sodom, although they appeared at times to be replaced by more fluid categories of dress, bodily appearance, age, and sexual disposition. Even the standard categories of desire—male/female; gay/straight; normal/abnormal; latent/public—were shaken in such fundamental ways that they astonish even now.

Hidden away in Berlin East, for instance, was a tiny honky-tonk, the “Monte Casino,” where working-class husbands partook in boy sex. While their understanding, prole wives sipped beer and applauded the transvestite revue, the otherwise straight men quietly excused themselves and tramped back to the greenroom cubicles. There they negotiated oral sex with the sweaty, bewigged kid performers. A few Reichsmarks lighter, the lusty stevedores eventually retired to the dining tables of their ever-patient mates. Life was truly a cabaret then.

French journalists, in particular, were impressed by the diverse throngs of harlots and exotic Strich trade that the German Gotham featured. But their Descartesian minds boggled at the sporting menu of bizarre classifications and typologies that substituted for natural local color. In the thinking of these fun-loving Frenchmen, wicked Berlin was overly determined and taxonomical, devoid of romantic camouflage, leeringly ironic, intentionally perverse, and far too Germanic. The ancient human exchange between money, sex, and psychic fulfillment had never been so complicated, they claimed; it required a new calculus.