Gay Berlin

by Robert Beachy

  It was the Franco-Prussian War and German unification that guaranteed Berlin’s future growth and helped to elevate the city in the estimation of foreign observers. For one, Prussia’s victory had netted an indemnity of 5 billion francs, extracted from France, which spurred investment in Germany and especially in Berlin. The boom years of the Gründerzeit, the “era of foundation,” came to a standstill in 1873, however, following a stock market crash in Vienna and the onset of a worldwide depression. But Berlin remained the capital, with all that implied, housing Germany’s new federal administration, as well as the German Kaiser, his court, and the government, dominated by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. According to the new constitution, Berlin hosted Germany’s houses of parliament: each of the twenty-five federal states sent delegates to the upper house, the Bundesrat (Federal Council), and the members of the lower house, the Reichstag (National Assembly), were elected by universal male suffrage.21

  National unification was also the decisive fillip for the city’s many industries and their founders, which not even the crash of 1873 could undermine. The Borsig ironworks, established by Berlin blacksmith August Borsig in 1837, had supplied most of Germany’s railway stock since the 1840s, and emerged after 1871 as an industrial behemoth with its factory complex northwest of the city. Prussian army officer Werner Siemens, who studied in Berlin, invented a process to insulate overhead wires that could be used along railways. His innovation was first tested along the Berlin–Potsdam line in 1847. The firms that Siemens founded and controlled also helped to lay the first transcontinental and submarine telegraph cables, and in the 1880s he electrified Berlin—quite literally—with the world’s first electric streetcars and streetlights. Siemens’s great rival Emil Rathenau studied engineering and worked in the Borsig firm before founding the German Edison Company in 1883—later renamed AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft)—to manufacture Thomas Edison’s inventions in Berlin. Rathenau produced lightbulbs and also built Berlin’s first municipal electricity works. The rivalry of Siemens and Rathenau spurred innovation and industrial growth, and helped to create Berlin’s reputation—reinforced by Mark Twain—as the “city of light.”22

  As urban historian Peter Hall has claimed, Berlin in the late nineteenth century was “the Silicon Valley of its day.”23 Much of the basic research conducted in the physical and natural sciences at the University of Berlin had direct practical applications for the city’s burgeoning industries. The German chemical and pharmaceutical industries grew out of the collaboration of entrepreneurial “lay scientists” and their academic counterparts. Ernst Schering, the son of a Berlin pub owner, opened a small pharmacy in 1852, which expanded quickly by producing chloroform and eventually medicinal cocaine and by pioneering the manufacture of synthetic drugs, inspired and assisted by Berlin professors of medicine. Chemical production was another major industry: in 1867 the chemists Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy and Carl Alexander von Martius founded a firm for the production of aniline, used to create synthetic dyes. The German chemical giant AGFA emerged from this concern, and led German output in photographic materials, optical tools, and other precision instruments. AGFA also relied on academic chemists—many trained at the University of Berlin—to produce medical supplies and precision machine tools. Its manufacture of synthetic dyes supported the city’s fashion and garment industries—including ready-to-wear clothing for men, women, and children—which employed thousands of unskilled sweatshop laborers in the city’s southeastern neighborhoods.24

  Jobs created by Berlin’s burgeoning industries lured workers from throughout the German Reich, all the more so after 1873 as smaller manufacturing centers suffered from the economic downturn. Berlin had coped with a housing shortage since the 1860s, but the situation became acute after unification. Speculators invested fortunes to develop new suburbs, which would soon ring the city. East and west of the historic center, manorial estates were purchased for housing developments; potato farmers in Schöneberg retired on the windfall profits from the sale of their small plots. State and city officials attempted to regulate growth with a plan for rectilinear streets and uniform apartment buildings. But the drive to create housing units (and maximize profits) led to the construction of massive five-story complexes that could occupy an entire city block. This dynamic produced the infamous Berlin tenements or “rental barracks”—Mietskasernen, a Berlin architectural vernacular—pervasive in the poorer suburbs to the north and east of the city but found throughout the capital. External units had street access, but the cheaper, darker apartments inside could be reached only through a warren of cavernous courtyards. A single apartment complex might have a hundred or more units with a thousand occupants, including small retail stores, taverns, and artisan workshops. The internal courtyards within a Berlin rental barracks formed a small dark universe where children played, women hung laundry, grocers tended their produce, and independent craftsmen plied their trades. Needless to say, these quarters were squalid, poorly lit, and disease ridden.25

  Not only the poor, however, suffered from the effluences of cramped urban life. Indoor plumbing and running water were rare indeed, and most residents relied on public pumps for drinking water. August Bebel (1840–1913), leader of the German Social Democratic Party, described how Berlin’s streets “emitted a truly fearsome smell,” lined with open gutters for household waste and raw sewage.26 Not until the late 1870s was Berlin able to develop a modern sewage system. The impetus to address public hygiene came from Berlin medical professor Rudolf Virchow (the same man who chaired the Prussian Medical Affairs Board that recommended against maintaining the Prussian anti-sodomy statute in 1869). As a Berlin council member, Virchow presented research in 1872 that demonstrated a climbing mortality rate among Berlin residents. In response, city officials authorized a commission to study the sewage systems of London and Paris and then undertook a comprehensive project to build a vast web of underground soil lines, which channeled household waste to pumping stations and from there to farms far outside the city’s perimeters.

  Once underground sewers were in place, extensive indoor plumbing and outdoor public toilets became practical. Although the city had opened its first crude outdoor public facility just south of Unter den Linden in 1841, public accommodations became common only much later. The first ladies’ toilets were built in 1879—after significant council debate on the propriety of public restrooms for women—and by 1901 more than a hundred enclosed water closets and pissoirs, including fourteen for women and children only, had been opened, primarily within the old city center.27

  City fathers also introduced measures to improve hygiene and living conditions for the working poor: municipal utilities outfitted tenements with indoor plumbing and eventually gas and electric power sources. New city regulations eliminated basement apartments and set strict limits on the number of residents permitted to occupy a single flat. By 1892 the city had built a dozen public bathhouses, mainly for the poor, with many more projected for the future.28 Berlin’s emergence by 1900 as one of the most hygienic cities in Europe—after decades of frenzied construction and a population explosion—is truly astonishing. French illustrator and travel writer Charles Huard praised the cleanliness of not only wealthy residential districts but also Berlin’s working-class neighborhoods and slums: in comparison to Berlin, Huard wrote in 1907, “Paris is a stable, London a sewer, and New York a pigsty.”29

  Berlin’s fearsome expansion was accompanied by the development of one of the world’s best urban transportation networks. The city’s first long-distance terminals were built well before 1850—at Potsdamer Platz and Schlesisches Tor—but only in the 1870s did they begin to offer more amenities for travelers, including enclosed waiting areas, kiosks, and public toilets. By 1900 twelve railway lines transported visitors from all points in Germany and Europe to the ten long-distance stations that now ringed the city. In 1867 city planners demolished the city’s old fortifications (nearly a decade after Vienna’s had been torn down), creating the path
for an elevated circular or “beltway” train connecting the long-distance railway stations. Initially horse-drawn, the circle line or Ringbahn was powered soon after by steam engines. Berlin also maintained public horse-drawn carriages, and provided thirty-six separate tramlines in 1871. These were increased throughout the 1870s and finally replaced by the world’s first electric streetcars in the early 1880s. By 1882 the elevated Stadtbahn connected the inner city with the expanding suburbs. In 1902 Berlin opened the first leg of what would become an extensive underground subway, two years ahead of New York City.30

  If Berlin emerged as a model of urban modernity within just a few decades, one of the institutions responsible for this reputation was the police force. To explain the position and role of Berlin’s constabulary we must consider the German concept of Polizei, a term with broader connotations than its English counterpart. During and after the Protestant Reformation—beginning in the sixteenth century—secular rulers increasingly assumed authorities that had once rested with the Catholic Church; the princes of the disparate German states, including Berlin’s Hohenzollern rulers, bolstered their territorial control through the meticulous regulation of their subjects’ lives. This meant in practice that state officials, or Polizei—in addition to general law enforcement—regulated most everyday, urban activities: commerce and exchange; rights of residency; morals violations including adultery; censorship; and even street cleaning. German notions of “policing” preserved elements of this premodern understanding, conferring greater authority, and responsibility, on modern municipal officials. In short, a German police unit did much more than simply apprehend criminals. Shoring up public order demanded constant vigilance and creative innovation, especially in the face of exponential urban growth and the emergence of a new industrial order.

  Berlin was also the Residenz, or court city, of the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty, heightening the autocratic legacy of the early modern Polizei. As such, the city served as an urban military base: some 20 percent of the 100,000 residents in 1780 had been soldiers; in 1900 greater Berlin was still dotted with more than one hundred military institutions and barracks. And Berlin’s royal police force, the Königliches Polizeipräsidium, was a seamless extension of Prussia’s military establishment. Most police officers and all higher-ranking commissioners were both Prussian aristocrats and military officers who began their careers in the elite Prussian officer corps. At the pinnacle of the city’s law enforcement pyramid stood Berlin’s police president, who received his appointment from the interior minister and served as a member of that department. Drawn from the military elite of Prussia’s aristocracy, the Berlin police president and his commissioners represented the Kaiser and his government, not the municipal government or Berlin’s citizenry.31

  Into the twentieth century, Berlin’s police presidents exercised office with expansive powers, conferred by the grace of the German Kaiser. As the American lawyer Raymond Fosdick explained in a 1915 study of European constabularies (commissioned by John D. Rockefeller), “[T]he German citizen is always confronted by newly adopted police regulations. Thus in Berlin, the police president has recently issued ordinances regulating the color of automobiles, the length of hatpins and the methods of purchasing fish and fowl. He has decreed that a prospective purchaser shall not touch a shad in order to determine whether there is any roe and shall not handle a fowl to verify the market woman’s praise of its tenderness. Each such ordinance provides a penalty for violation.”32 These officious and petty regulations illustrate well the tremendous authority, for better or ill, that the police president and his underlings maintained over all aspects of the everyday conduct of Berlin’s residents.

  As undemocratic as they were, such extensive powers gave Berlin’s police great flexibility for dealing with intractable problems, including the enforcement of Paragraph 175. A perfect illustration of this was Berlin police commissioner Hüllessem’s initiative to create the “Department of Homosexuals” (Homosexuellen Dezernat) in 1885, just after the raid of Seeger’s Restaurant. There was little precedent for this new department, and its creation suggests the extensive character of Berlin’s homosexual subculture. Hüllessem was able to use it, moreover, to formalize older policing strategies and to introduce a general principle of tolerating homosexual bars and entertainments. We know that the police had monitored men considered to be habitual violators of the anti-sodomy statute since at least the 1860s. The alleged murderer Zastrow, who was convicted of sexual assault and sodomy in 1869, had been known to police long before his arrest; reportedly his name was entered on a special Päderastenlist (list of pederasts). The man whose denunciation led to Zastrow’s arrest had been a paid police informant. These tactics were applied more vigorously throughout the 1870s—as memories lingered of the sadistic murders ascribed to Zastrow—and the suspects of same-sex “perversion” were kept under close watch, often with the assistance of spies. By about 1880, the police introduced plainclothes investigators, who patrolled public parks and actively entrapped suspected homosexuals.33

  Hüllessem knew firsthand the difficulty of policing Berlin’s public spaces and recognized that the proliferation of homosexual locales might actually simplify his job. The introduction of the Department of Homosexuals was almost certainly intended to help pursue a policy of qualified toleration, following as it did the raid of Seeger’s Restaurant and corresponding likewise to Berlin’s rapid growth. As the city expanded geographically, a policy of monitoring every park and public space was no longer cost-effective or even realistic. So instead of aggressively interdicting potentially illegal sexual activity—which would drive it underground and out of view—the new approach was to tolerate homosexual fraternization within certain limits.34

  Hüllessem’s response to Paragraph 175—arguably quite progressive—reflected his creative approach to law enforcement more generally. An aristocratic, Prussian army lieutenant, he had joined the police in 1873 at the age of twenty-four. Throughout his career, his interests in science and in the application of new policing methods were important factors in his professional success. In 1876 Hüllessem organized Berlin’s first mug shot albums (Verbrecheralbum), organized by crime, to identify and apprehend repeat offenders.35 Before photography, detectives relied on crude physical descriptions; now mug shots allowed victims to identify their assailants, which assisted the investigation of crimes. Only in its infancy as a tool of law enforcement, photography had recently been adopted by police departments in London and Paris; New York would soon follow.36 Hüllessem trumpeted other novel investigative techniques, including anthropometry—the failed science of measuring a criminal’s physical features—which was pioneered by the famous French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914), whose tutelage Hüllessem sought in Paris in 1895. Although anthropometry was soon abandoned, in Berlin and elsewhere, Hüllessem also spearheaded the application of a more useful science, dactylography, or fingerprinting, which proved to be far more effective for investigating crimes and their perpetrators.37

  Even before he founded the Department of Homosexuals in 1885, Hüllessem had augmented the collection of mug shots with a special volume devoted to “pederasts.” This album was an extension of the special lists of suspected homosexuals kept since at least the 1860s.38 The pederast label was ambiguous, of course, and the police included male prostitutes, men who had sex with men, men who wore women’s clothing, and men who preyed sexually on children. At its inception, the photo volume included thirty-four images. This number grew sixfold by 1890, and by a factor of nearly ten by 1895, with more than three hundred images. The number of photos increased dramatically into the twentieth century, reaching nearly a thousand on the eve of the First World War. Police officials photographed most men detained under suspicion of violating Paragraph 175. A majority of those arrested were involved in prostitution or other criminal activity, and of course the number recorded in the Verbrecheralbum greatly exceeded those who were ever successfully prosecuted.39

  What the Verbr
echeralbum represented above all was a system of surveillance that helped Hüllessem and his subordinates to monitor individuals within Berlin’s homosexual community. If we consider Hüllessem’s approach more carefully, we can begin to appreciate how the Department of Homosexuals contributed to the creation of Berlin’s community of sexual minorities. Hüllessem knew and used the term “homosexual,” a neologism from 1869, as we have seen, that was just entering German psychiatric literature (although not the popular idiom). This suggests that he had some familiarity with the most recent medical literature and that he might have adopted the view that homosexuality was inborn or congenital. In this sense the Department of Homosexuals actually gave life to a theoretical construct—the theory of the inborn homosexual—by projecting it as a social and cultural identity and allowing it to develop within a network of bars and same-sex entertainments.

  Hüllessem helped further to create this milieu by making it an object of study. He literally gave tours of the city’s homosexual nightspots and escorted visitors to same-sex costume balls. Berlin came to serve as a kind of laboratory of sexuality, made available for investigation to a range of psychiatrists, sexologists, journalists, and popular writers. The experience of playwright August Strindberg (1849–1912) at the Café National in February 1893 illustrates this brilliantly. Accompanying other friends who had been invited by a Berlin “Police Inspector” (presumably Hüllessem), Strindberg described his astonishment (and disgust), always referring to himself in the third person as “the author”: