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.■
GIRL-CULTURE AND THE ALL-NIGHT BUMMEL
Berlin nightlife, my word, the world hasn’t seen anything like it! We use to have a first-class army; now we have first class perversions.
Everyone Once in Berlin!
Berlin glorified in its image as 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.
Fortunately there were books for the uninformed. Directories of nocturnal Berlin (in adventurous straight, S&M, gay, lesbian, or nudist versions) could be had at any train station, hotel lobby, or downtown kiosk. Foreigners and provincials alike could plot out, with a thumb-flip, where or where not they were wanted, calculate what to expect and spend, and fantasize how their dream Bummel or session might unfold. These lurid Baedekers of the night were indispensable pilots for lost souls.
“Girl-Culture”
Not every Berliner—or tourist—was swept away in the Weimar sex-rush. But the aggregate who participated in some commercial aspect of the Kietz, especially during the Inflation or the approaching depression, was extraordinarily high. Probably 20 to 25 percent of adult Berlin dabbled in the midnight amusements in the year before Hitler was anointed Reichschancellor. While newcomers thought the erotic madness was, more or less, a function of the uncertain economic times, Berliners themselves jokingly blamed it on their amphetamine-like air (that Berliner Luft), which many swore kept their hearts racing at night and then thoroughly revitalized them for the morning commute.
Poisonous fumes or no, the Sittengeschichten scholars of the time understood how the whore milieu permeated workaday Berlin. Advertising, music, mass-market periodicals, clothing styles, stage interpretations of Shakespeare and Schiller, high literature, dining arrangements in restaurants, and election propaganda were all indelibly stamped with this new image of female sexuality and the independent woman. In the mid-Twenties, it acquired a name: Girlkultur.
An abiding brainstorm of Flo Ziegfeld, the eponymous American producer, “Girl-Culture” redefined the psychology and bodily form of the desirable female. In heavily-promoted publicity campaigns and on the stage of his New York Follies, Ziegfeld advanced and constantly reshaped this modern fantasy creature. She was urbane, slim, not much interested in children, socially irreverent, leggy, charmingly vain, and a sexual predator. The Ziegfeld Girl had all the basic physical attractions of the Parisian Flirt, but her gold-digging motivations were refreshingly undisguised and externalized.