The Tiergarten, Berlin’s dimly-lighted park preserve at the city core, attracted young freelance Line-Boys and Grasshoppers (female specialists in BJs), who congregated in groups near the park’s edge after dark. South of the Tiergarten peered fashionable Berlin West and its elegant midway, the Kurfürstendamm (or the Kudamm). At this nexus of expensive nightclubs, pleasure palaces, lesbian cafés, transvestite cabarets, and American-style bars, high-end call girls, or Fohses, by the dozens, positioned themselves between the free-standing display cases set in front of glitzy Kudamm boutiques. (“Shiny merchandise by shiny merchandise” one guidebook ballyhooed.) Half-Silks (amateur prostitutes) and Boot-Whores respectfully staked out their claims slightly eastward, in the esplanades and street corners by the Kaiser-Wilhelm Memorial Church. Fancy whorehouses and sham fronts for underage sex were tucked away in the quiet neighborhoods abetting the Potsdamer Platz.
The Nolldendorfplatz, an out-of-the-way section in Berlin’s proletarian South, featured Erwin Piscator’s Communist theatre as its best-known nighttime draw. One could also find a surfeit of cocaine and S&M clubs just to the south of Walter Gropius’ temple of Red art. Another six blocks further south and east was the clandestine land of black-curtained homosexual lounges and Racehorse salons for the delectation of straight sadists.
On the Line
Kontroll-Girls crowded Berlin’s streetcorners in flush times and bad. They formed the nucleus of the 30,000 round-the-clock itinerant whores. By 1930, nearly 9,000 possessed Kontroll-Books that testified to their fine venereal health. (The others had allowed their medical papers to lapse or ignored the Pussy-Pressers altogether.) The Bulls categorized the K-Girls into three grades based on appearance, age, and number of clients per day.
The lowest (or Class Three) were known on the street as Bone Shakers. Older and most experienced than the others, they looked down upon the undocumented Grasshoppers (or Fresh-Air Girls), who performed similar duties under the inviting skies of the Tiergarten. Class Two included Tauentziengirls, a vivacious streetwalker type, found on the Tauentzienstrasse and characterized by their flapper-style wardrobe and bathing cap-like hats. Curt Moreck, a Sittengeschichte chronicler, compared them to swamp lilies and praised them as “an iridescent, demonic perversity.” Because of their fresh attitude (Berliner Schnauze) and frequent pairing with identically dressed daughters, journalists enjoyed quoting their droll responses to otherwise complex, current-event issues and national trends.
Boot-Whores, although relatively few in number (300 or 350), provided Berlin nightlife with its most ubiquitous local color. Arriving in Berlin during the Inflation, Klaus Mann remembered walking past a group of the outdoor dominatrices, “Some of them looked like fierce Amazons, strutting in high boots made of green, glossy leather. One of them brandished a supple cane and leered at me as I passed by. ‘Good evening, Madam,’ I said. She whispered into my ear, ‘Want to be my slave? Costs only six billions and a cigarette. A bargain. Come along, honey!’” Eight years after Mann’s encounter, Moreck reported on the same corner: “One favorite tourist site is located near the Passauer and Ansbacher streetcorners, west of Wittenberg Platz. There, a trio of six-foot tall Boot-Girls are garishly cos-tumed in red and black attire like nineteenth-century horsewomen. Snapping a riding crop, the tallest Amazon bellows menacingly, ‘Who will be my slave tonight?’”
First-Class Joy-Girls were generally the youngest and most desirable of the K-Girl bunch but they faced enormous competition from yet another unique Berlin erotic phenomenon, Half-Silks. Mostly fresh-faced secretaries, minor government clerks, department-store employees, and salesgirls by day, these amateur hookers roamed Berlin West by the tens of thousands in the early evening. They were easily recognized by their girlish makeup and unusual accoutrements, like large cloth handbags (where they secreted their daytime apparel) and, in summer months, teddy bears. It was said that the majority engaged in serious prostitution only during the last third of the month or in the difficult period just before payday.
Nuttes was a term used to describe very young, kittenish flappers. Sometimes it referred to teenaged Joy-Girls or coltish Half-Silks . Most Berlin sexologists viewed Nuttes as a separate prostitute type. Physically they resembled androgynous boys with short hair, flat chests, and long legs, accentuated by extremely short skirts, lustrous silk hosiery, and high heels. Usually rebellious teens from bourgeois families, the Nuttes, through their flirtatious demeanor and playful manners, inhabited an enticing middle ground between the brash Kontroll-Girls and often fickle Half-Silks . A successful Berlin Alphonse (pimp) liked to have a handful of Class 3s and one or two Nuttes in his intimate stable.
Indoor Varieties
From Renaissance times, Gypsies and Jews were closely identified with white slavery in Central Europe. By 1920, their participation was largely vestigial in Germany. Romany culture became submerged in gooey Viennese, Hungarian, Parisian, and Spanish renditions. Gypsies themselves disappeared from German urban life although they were the theme of a vast, mostly invented, erotic literature.
Weimar Berlin had a large Jewish population (around 9% if one includes Ostjuden [immigrants from Eastern countries] and thoroughly assimilated/converted /hidden Jews). While they dominated certain cultural fields in pre-Nazi Berlin, especially publishing, law, medicine, theatre, graphic art, cinema, music, architecture, and popular entertainment, relatively few Jews were still involved in common prostitution with the exception of two picturesque types: Kupplerinnen (procuresses) and Chontes—zaftig whores from southern Poland. In general, Chonte-Harbors (Jewish brothels) were not well regarded in Berlin’s sex guides but they appeared to attract a sizable working-class and indigenous clientele.
The other varieties of indoor Berlin prostitutes were substantially higher-brow. Fohses frequently made their initial contacts in public gatherings, negotiating prices and scenes, but were never considered streetwalkers since their work fell under the (even then) comic rubric of “Massage Therapists.” Upscale Demi-Castors were essentially the picky Half-Silks of the closed-door brothel set. And Table-Ladies (Berlin Geishas) applied their exclusive trade in snooty nightclub backrooms and at bachelor pads.