Acquired Tastes
Sophisticated het tourists came to Berlin for erotic “specialties.” Luigi Barzini’s social memoir, The Europeans, captured this Weimar excess best in his farcical recollection of the Alex:
I saw pimps offering anything to anybody, little boys, little girls, robust young men, libidinous women, or (I suppose) animals. (The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and timesaving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterward.)
Actually, in Berlin North, Alphonses and independent whores organized their perverse attractions in the manner of market-day vendors: like-with-like. Mehnerstrasse (site of the ice cream/masturbation shop) was known as “Old Mädchen Street.” For those with an itch for mature K-Girls (40- to 60-year-olds but looking considerably older) or a sympathetic motherly touch, there were three infamous Transient-Quarters and a few storefront chambers of the same. On Landwehrstrasse were only beautiful stout Beinls. Weighting an average of 220 pounds, these gorgeous street creatures in groups of three and four provided ideal subject matter for smirking painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit ilk.
Other corners near the Alex (like the faraway Tauentzienstrasse) were talking grounds for mother-and-daughter crews. In Berlin North, however, the age difference between the parent and child was striking and even exaggerated. The amusing twin-sister look of the T-Girls faded on Gollnowstrasse into a dark incestuous fantasy. One French journalist, Jean Galtier-Boissiere, described, in sickly pornographic detail, the creeping horror of feeling a nine-year-old’s tiny, but proficient, fingers stroking his upper thigh while her broken-toothed mother covered with his face with hot sucking kisses.
Two street types were deemed important enough to be granted a separate nomenclature: Gravelstones and Münzis. Like Berlin’s war-wounded, the Gravelstones had their own hideous allure. Outcast prostitutes with grim deformities—acid-scarred faces, hunchbacks, crippled or missing limbs, disfiguring skin conditions—they created their own informal society on Oranienburgstrasse in Berlin North. By the late Twenties, the Gravelstones came into their own; men in chauffeured limousines appeared with some frequency to chat with them and if their malformation proved compelling and unusual enough, an all-night arrangement was gamely struck.
Münzis were knocked-up streetwalkers who advertised their condition on Münzstrasse, about seven blocks from Gravelstone territory. Conscious of their temporal appeal, the Münzis charged triple rates for sessions and organized themselves on the “Münz” (“Coin”) according to their stage of pregnancy. Like the Boot-Whores, the Münzis became a much in-demand tourist sight.
S&M prostitutes publicized their presence in trade newspapers and hotel flyers. Dominas were to be found in “Body Culture” clinics and sometimes approached randy foreign couples in lesbian and transvestite nightclubs. More discreet were the Racehorses, young masochistic prostitutes, who were billed as “teachers” at “Institutes for Foreign Language Instruction” or “masseuses” in Berlin South “Beauty Salons.” Minettes, unlike their French namesakes, enacted standard domination and fetish scenarios (i.e., angry boarding-school mistress; new secretary; enraged customer; Madga Lupesco and King Carol; best friend’s mother; industrial spy; blackmailing student; boss’ sadistic daughter; old girlfriend) for hefty fees in fashionable hotel suites.
Child Prostitution
Child prostitution was a searing social issue long before and after the Inflation era. It involved both female and male children, sex-workers’ progeny, runaways, and troublesome adolescents. There seemed to be almost no bottom age for those seeking physical companionship with children. And virtually no end to willing girls and boys.
One unsettling example: In January 1932, a Berlin tabloid exposed a “prostitute ring” of ten-year-old girls who worked independently at the Alex U-Bahn Station. Each girl stood demurely inside a subway entrance foyer, hoping to catch the eye of an impulsive Cavalier (heterosexual pederast) on his way to work. Astonishingly, the prepubescent vixens had been whoring unimpeded for months before the story broke.
Of course, all major cities had to confront this pressing and psychologically debilitating civic problem, particularly during hard times. But in Berlin the quandary of kiddy-prostitution was partly resolved by a more cynical, free-market approach: the opening of child brothels.
How many children were actually pressed into sexual service/slavery is unknown. Magnus Hirschfeld reported on one such lucrative operation on Alexandrienstrasse, where a “rapacious harem” of 14-year-old Russian girls “lewdly beguiled” wealthy Cavaliers from Berlin’s industrial elite. The house was, remarkably, shut down by the municipal court after a sensational trial shrouded in political intrigue and late-night government machinations.
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.
Kietz
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.