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

The war years of 1914-1918 upended everything in Germany proper. Trainloads of young women from the 14 provinces were delivered to work destinations in Berlin’s war ministries and federal bureaus, filling minor positions once held by male secretaries and clerks. A kind of radical feminism and shared sisterhood, long dreaded by conservative elements in the German government, began to form in the epicenter of the Wilhelmian Empire. No longer wide-eyed innocents, these newly enfranchised women had also witnessed an implosion of moral values in their own native villages and cities.

As the national euphoria and jingoistic enthusiasm for modern warfare waned, even in the patriotic countryside, an insidious Chicago-style corruption spread. Butchers who honorably served families for generations were noticeably pressing their thumbs on the edges of regulated meat scales; formerly virtuous small-town mayors and church officials were implicated in preposterous scams and bizarre sexual improprieties. For the first time in a century, black-market survival and fears of illegitimate pregnancies became more than just neighborhood gossip for middle-class households. Worst of all, Germanic faith in the sacrosanct world of mustached, steely-eyed men—that is, the Kaiser and his General Staff—began to erode.

The pernicious hypocrisy and murderous bluster of the ruling patriarchs at every social level, the inescapable sights of disfigured and hollow-eyed soldiers wandering Berlin’s streets and parks, the long-delayed (if heavily censored) official postings of the millions dead, missing, or captured created a novel and creepy psychosexual vacuum. The realm of shared national purpose and manly virtue was challenged by more primitive philosophies of day-to-day survival.

For most German families, trade—either in heirlooms or stolen merchandise—earned subsistence to endure the month or week. But eventually these items became scarce or obsolete. Only foodstuffs mattered. The profiteering and theft of them were abetted by a distracted government, intent on victories in the field. Those poor souls without food sources or connections had just one other commodity to haul to the public market: sex.

At first, young war brides, branded “strawwidows,” offered their carnal services to the available males of Berlin, then it was the provincial youth of both sexes, and finally the children of bourgeois families. Prostitution lost its exact meaning when tens of thousands were involved in complex sex attachments, all of a commercial nature. The vaguely Wilhelmian underpinning of middle-class Berlin slowly cracked and, over time, collapsed.

Venereal disease, not flesh-peddling, threatened the immediate well-being of the capital. Syphilis and gonorrhea spread at an alarming rate. The city fathers, once proud watchdogs of the moral code, turned to Berlin’s public health officials and social workers for help. The war had spiritually corroded the old order at home.

In the conquered areas of Belgium and Polish Russia, German servicemen behaved strangely, too. Hundreds, then thousands, experienced a headlong release from all peace-time constraints. Homosexual affection and cross-dressing amusements became commonplace activities in the musty trenches and isolated campsites. Instead of pictures of their sweethearts to inspire them, pockets of combat-weary troops stared in frozen rapture at S&M and fetishistic photographs that they cradled in their palms. Public and habitual masturbation, manifestations of shell-shock, grew to epic proportions, shaking morale as well as becoming an embarrassing disciplinary problem. In the countryside, the brutal corralling and rape of foreign women, usually peasant girls, by German recruits was reported with some frequency in the early dispatches. Some nationalistic officers defended their underlings’ misbehavior as a healthy discharge from the tedium of building fortifications and other noncombatant duties.

The High Command, alarmed that the Imperial Army was aping the uncouth ways of their despised Serb and French brethren, responded with Prussian efficiency. They permitted local brothels to open under the strict supervision of military physicians. Every frontline soldier was issued a ration book of sex coupons; the frequency of contact, number of minutes, time of day, and class of whores allowed was determined mathematically by rank and combat unit. The booklets were as treasured as tobacco.

In the staging grounds behind the active theatres of war, or the Etappe , senior officers also engaged in nightly debaucheries. Local pretties were treated to luxurious outings, champagne dinners, risqué naked recitals, and crates of pilfered goods. Roman-style orgies became synonymous with Etappe life. Female spies, like the legendary Mata Hari, sometimes frequented these command centers, wrangling battlefield secrets from lust-smitten German administrators and military leaders.

Sex, the historical lubricant for rallying a nation to armed conflict, was destroying the Kaiser’s war.

Other unforeseen factors, like the American Expeditionary Forces and mutiny in the hinterlands, also undermined General von Hindenburg’s scheme for the occupation of eastern France and military triumph. By 1918, it was evident that the Central Power alliance had splintered irrevocably under the onslaught of Allied armies. Each nation was ready to sue for a separate peace.

On November 9th, 1918, a German republic was declared, replacing the Wilhelmian Second Reich. Within 24 hours, the Kaiser abdicated his monarchy and fled with his family to the Netherlands. Two days later an Armistice was signed with the Western powers. All fighting ceased. Germany had lost the Great War.

Now a stunned populace, reeling from new economic chaos and terror in the form of revolution and counter-revolution, watched in disbelief as top-hatted politicians attempted to transform their vanquished nation into a model constitutional republic. Germany in 1919 had no traditions of democratic consensus, only an embittered electorate in search of quick political fixes. Extremist parties of the left and right attained immense power in the first national election and ultimately dominated the workings of the Weimar Assembly.

Some radicals opted for a Soviet solution. But Lenin, the supreme revolutionary commander, already knew what the seditious leaders of Bavaria and Hamburg would soon discover to their regret: Germans were incapable of fomenting Socialist revolution; when ordered to storm a railroad station, they would stand in line first to buy tickets. By March 1919, the period of romantic left-wing insurrection had been checked. Private Nationalist militias, in league with the centralist authorities, had assassinated the Red leaders and overturned their “peasant-proletariat” communes. Berliners then returned to their business of pleasure.