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

Decor:Standard restaurant dance-club with band stage and bar. In the back are outdoor “love porticos,” for extreme privacy. These are normally packed and available for two additional marks.

Entertainment:Dancing and interacting with the restaurant staff.

Unusual:All the restaurant employees (except the beautiful bar maid) are dead ringers for world leaders and film stars. The hooked-nose doorman wears a monocle and looks and behaves exactly like the British premier Lord Chamberlain. The waiters, scurrying by the jam-packed tables with plates of wurst and steins of beer, seem to be wax-museum figures of Harold Lloyd, Marshal von Hindenburg, Prime Minister Briand, and many others. Each brings a specialty dish from his country, like the Hirohito Pineapple Bowl or Reparation Brandy.

In addition, every band member wears a facial mask of an international celebrity and performs an appropriate musical solo/monologue from his “country.”

Area:FRIEDRICHSTADT. At the THEATER IN THE ADMIRALPALAST.

Atmosphere:Most extravagant of the Revues. True reflection of the topsy-turvy eroticism of contemporary Berlin. Everything in American rhythms.

Clientele:Elite Berlin crowds. Foreign tourists. Seating varies between two and three thousand.

Decor:Lush accommodations with VIP sections. Elegant dining and dancing available in the Admirals-Kasino and Admirals-Lounge. The venerable Admiral-Baths are also in the same building.

Entertainment:International variety revue with some 50 fast-paced acts. Emphasis is on outsized glamour, lewd pictorialism, and female beauty. Famous for its Empire Girls (also known as the Lawrence-Tiller-Girls). Trained in London and New York, these 24 precision dancers (“Often copied—never equaled!”), blend—in both real and parody forms—“Fordism,” gaudy French flesh-peddling, and the crystalline regimen of equestrian military drills.

Each production is led by an accomplished MC and includes juxtapositions of common cabaret numbers with naked dance and highbrow musical and dance pieces.

Area:The entire POTSDAMER PLATZ.

Atmosphere:Exciting, international. Ersatz. Fun tourist trap, expertly designed for around-the-clock party ambiance. The “Department Store of Restaurants” is open until 3 a.m. and can serve 6,000 diners. For non-German-speakers “the jolliest place in Berlin.”

Clientele:Mostly free-spending German provincials and foreign tourists, except during winter holidays when native Berliners dominate. A substantial coterie of Half-Silks make this their early-evening haunting grounds.

Decor/Entertainment:Overwhelming and grandiose architecture, combining Baroque and modernist styles. Entrance fee to the madhouse is 1 mark. The central lobby is broken up by an impressive series of color-light fountains and leads to the Palmtree Room, the Palace’s Variety show (admission is another 3M).

The upper four floors are connected by ugly marble staircases, which direct the crowds into twelve restaurant “environments”:

1) LÖWENBRÄU:A Bavarian Biergarten, seating one thousand celebrants. At one end is a man-made lake, replicating the mountainous Bernese Oberland. Buxom barmaids in traditional dress serve Bavarian beer while young men in green waistcoats and short knickers stroll through the restaurant, yodeling to one another. A Bavarian orchestra and revue of female chorines, an August clown, a family of jugglers, and a parody of some South German dance (like the Munich Cauliflower Feast) is staged every night.

2) GRINZING:A Viennese café (set outside the imagined city) with wooden trellises separating the tables. Diners look out on the fantastic diorama of Old Vienna and the Danube River. A trompe-l’oeil of the central railway station is activated with tiny electric trains crossing miniature bridges and mechanical boats sailing beneath. The three-man Biedermeier orchestra plays Strauss waltzes and other familiar Viennese fare. Comic washerwomen’s quartet is the chief attraction.

3) WILD-WEST-BAR:A saloon (specializing in pre-Prohibition American cocktails) is located on an alcove and surrounded by a striking vista of rolling prairies and cactus. Patrons enter through swinging doors. Folk-singing cowboys in oversized ten-gallon hats serve as waiters. They carry order-pads in their revolver hosters and alternate with an American jazz band as the musical accompaniment. Scantily-clad cowgirls perform Shimmys and sing American hit songs, which are available on 78 RPM disks. Blackface minstrel show rounds out evening.

4) SPANISH BODEGA:A huge Iberian inn jutting out from one wall. Bathed in a bordello-red spotlight is a Gypsy girl with a flower in her hair and dagger in her stocking hem. She sits provocatively on a wine casket and dances with customers on request. Other female Gypsy dancers join her when the mandolin orchestra starts up. Green-uniformed hussars serve as waiters.

5) RHINELAND WINE TERRACE:A cavernous room gives the three-dimensional illusion of the Rhine riverside. Quarter-sized paddle-boats float past a diminutive castle-ruins, where a singing troupe performs Rheinish folk songs. On the hour, a five-minute, artificial storm magically showers rain on the delighted customers.

In addition, there is a dimly lighted Turkish Café with cushions and short-legged divans; the Csarda, a “Hungarian” pastry restaurant set in Old Prague with zither music; an “open-air” Tuscan plaza; a student beer-cellar from Old Heidelberg; a Japanese tea garden; a sailors’ galley inside a rocking Bremen ship; and finally a smart Berlin café, which opens as an independent restaurant onto Königgrätzerstrasse.

Unusual:Advertised as “An Inexpensive Holiday Trip!” Kempinski’s Vaterland also provides, in its Palmtree Room, a nightly floor-show of big-name variety acts and the Vaterland-Girls. Altogether, there are 12 bands, 24 girls, and 50 separate cabaret numbers in this famous abode.

Area:BERLIN WEST. Across from the Memorial Church and the ROMANISCHES CAFÉ.

Atmosphere:Glamorous, expensive. Always an erotic buzz here. Risqué posters and illuminated signs promise a sophisticated evening.

Clientele:Old-family scions, up-and-coming politicians, playboys of every sort, the elite of Berlin’s nightlife. “The longest-legged women” of Berlin and highest-paid Minettes can be found in the powder-rooms here.