Gay Berlin

by Robert Beachy

  The contrast between the fashionable West End, or “Berliner Broadway,” and the neighborhood dive bars of central and east Berlin was especially well analyzed by the Berlin journalist and homosexual rights activist Hans Siemsen (1891–1969). In a short essay published in 1927, Siemsen described Berlin as a sexual laboratory and playground for voyeuristic tourists:

  Especially in literary and pseudo-literary circles, it has become a fashion to “take a stroll through the gay locales.” The visitor expects to see shocking dens of vice and highly perverse things. What does he see? Absolutely nothing! In west Berlin some small bars and cafes decorated with red and pink silk lanterns, with names such as “Lounge,” “Casino,” or “Club.”…. The male prostitutes are out quite early, often by noon, awaiting their johns. They all appear as though they were once pretty…. A boy with a steady relationship rarely comes to these locales unless with his friend. Most of them have already had a lengthy career and are in decline. The cavaliers and other johns know almost every boy, and are likewise known to them. But that does not prevent a john from taking up with a prostitute “once again.” In North and East Berlin, the locales are simpler, sometimes no more than a Bouillonkeller [soup basement]. Among the great misery and wretchedness one also sees some very pretty boys. There are fewer “Tanten” [“aunts,” or effeminate boys] than in the West. At least a third are “normal,” a type that many homosexuals prefer. Much “occasional prostitution”: unemployed young workers, idle swastika soldiers, burnt-out reform-school youth, ship’s boys, sailors, boys from the provinces, and those who wanted or had to run away from home. The friendship here is more honest, and less costly than in West Berlin. Less fuss, less waffling about the clearly understood business aspect of the matter at hand. What the curious onlooker expects, the public vice, the sensation—that is missing entirely. There is some cocaine consumption, a few are drunk, with the occasional squabble, a pair of lovebirds cuddling—but in general conduct is uncommonly proper and honorable. Responsible for such decorum is the bartender, who is on good terms with the police and ultimately responsible that everything remains within respectable limits. There is no such thing in all of Berlin as a gay locale that is not known to the police and not under police supervision.45

  Siemsen’s depiction anticipated the preliminary findings of Linsert’s study and broadly confirmed other literary and journalistic accounts of male prostitution. While the West End hustlers were better turned out, earned higher fees, and exhibited greater “professionalism,” the poorer youth who worked the humble bars and outdoor spaces of central and east Berlin engaged more often in “occasional” prostitution—due primarily to unemployment—and were themselves frequently heterosexual.

  An evocative account of the most vulgar prostitution is provided by John Lehmann, a friend of Christopher Isherwood, whose autobiographical novel In the Purely Pagan Sense (1976) was inspired in part by his 1932 visit to Berlin. The protagonist was given a tour by his host, William:

  One of the first things William did to further my education was to take me on a tour of the homosexual bars and night-clubs. We started with one of the most popular non-smart Lokals, the “Cosy Corner.” This Lokal was a sensational experience for me, a kind of emotional earthquake…. The place was filled with attractive boys of any age between sixteen and twenty-one, some fair and curly-haired, some dark and often blue-eyed, and nearly all dressed in extremely short Lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs. Hardly had we found a place, when William told me, in a tone of command rather than of advice: “if you want to pee, it’s over there.” I went. The lavatory had no cubicles. I was followed in by several boys, who, as if by chance, ranged themselves on either side of me and pulled out their cocks rather to show them off than to relieve nature as I was doing. I don’t think a drop fell into the gutter from any of them; I returned to our bench, shaken by this exhibition…. William said to me. “Any you fancy?” I shook my head though I knew that any single one of the boys who had followed me would make me happy—if only I knew how to handle him. “Well, there are a couple of boys here I know, who are thoroughly reliable.” William said, “I’ll call them over.” The two were summoned, and ordered to sit on either side of me. I felt rather like a recruit being put through his first bayonet drill. “Don’t be shy, but put your hands in their pockets,” William commanded, now rather mischievously. I put one hand into the outer Lederhosen pocket of the one on my left, and my other into the outer pocket of the one on my right; they were both now snuggling up to me. I had shock of more than surprise when I found that the pockets had been cut off and my hands went straight through to their sex…. I did not take either of them home…but gave them a few Marks and we continued our pub crawl.46

  We might question Lehmann’s account here—memories embellished with the passage of time—though we know that he was taken to the Cosy Corner by Isherwood in 1932, when he first came to the city from Vienna.

  Lehmann, Siemsen, Mackay, Cordan, and Got—as well as Auden and Isherwood—drew sharp distinctions between West End and “non-smart” locales. These observers also recognized that the Berlin police subjected these bars to different rules. Certainly city officials were aware of the nature of all of these establishments—as Siemsen explained—which were left largely unmolested as long as they maintained the prescribed decorum. Indeed, the implicit compact established by Berlin police commissioner Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem in the late nineteenth century remained the order of the day. But social class and urban geography—which was ultimately also a reflection of class—played significant roles. As the character Gunther in Der Puppenjunge discovered, the west Berlin bars did not admit underage boys—nor those shabbily dressed—unless accompanied by a trustworthy “guardian” or “chaperone.” Because they screened both the prostitutes and their clientele, these establishments appear to have been allowed to flaunt the nominal restrictions placed on pimping and procurement.

  By contrast, the east Berlin bars were accessible to all, regardless of age, but also more vulnerable to raids by police or other officials. In Der Puppenjunge, Gunther had no trouble entering the working-class dives alone. But he was also arrested in one of these, the Adonis-Diele, during a police raid.47 Not only the police but also other officials conducted periodic raids on the boy bars of central and east Berlin. Sometimes city social workers trolled the bars for “juvenile delinquents” who had escaped from local orphanages and detention centers. John Layard describes how together with Auden and Isherwood he helped three young hustlers who had escaped from a detention facility. One evening at the Cosy Corner, probably early winter 1929, the landlord warned that “the Gruener [the “greens,” or police] are coming,” searching for “three escaped borstal boys in the café.” Layard, Auden, and Isherwood were asked to surrender their overcoats, which the three boys donned. They then strolled out of the bar and right past the police, who were deceived by their relatively elegant outerwear. Inside the locale, the police “searched every nook and cranny and couldn’t find them.” Later the Englishmen rendezvoused with the youth at Alexanderplatz to retrieve their topcoats. The six then spent the remainder of the evening together in Auden’s quarters.48

  As the historian Martin Lücke notes, as many as thirty-seven of Linsert’s one hundred boys and men who made up his case studies might have spent time in adolescent homes and orphanages.49 For many, such an experience was a formative introduction to criminal activity and prostitution.50 From this same group, fifty-nine had never fallen afoul of the law, while fourteen had been convicted and punished for a crime. With the remaining twenty-seven, it was either unclear or unstated. The most common offense was theft.51 Strikingly, practically none of Linsert’s interview partners admitted to engaging in blackmail, which was addressed explicitly in question number 26 of the survey. A single hustler from the group of one hundred had served a two-year jail sentence for blackmail. The vast majority averred that they would never attempt such a thing. Although anti–Paragraph 175
activists still invoked blackmail as a central argument for eliminating the statute, it was clearly no longer the scourge it had been before the Great War. As one male prostitute in Der Puppenjunge explained, the “Berlin johns [Stubben] were too shrewd to be extorted.”52

  One sensational case that was widely reported in the press offers the rule-proving exception. In December 1926 the twenty-two-year-old street hustler Alois Dämon was sentenced to two years imprisonment after one of his extortion victims committed suicide in October. Dämon, a native of Austria, had left home at the age of sixteen and worked on a ship before coming to Berlin, where he established a significant record of arrests for petty crimes, including solicitation, theft, and assault and battery. Dämon’s victim was a thirty-eight-year-old state bureaucrat named Otto Zöhn, who lived with his wife and small child in a small apartment and led “a well-ordered marital life, and did not drink or gamble.” Zöhn managed to poison himself by inhaling the gas piped into his apartment for lighting. In his short suicide note he attempted to console his wife—“Dear Ella! Do not be shocked”—explaining that he had “fallen into the hands of extortionists,” and that death was his only option. Using the threatening letters found in Zöhn’s apartment, the police were able to identify Dämon, who had been known in Berlin since 1924 as a prostitute and investigated once before after another man had accused him of blackmail. Zöhn and Dämon had met in March at the Anhalter train station. Over the course of six months, Zöhn—apparently uncharacteristically—had begun to borrow money from his wife and work colleagues. Although his wife had considered him completely heterosexual, the police suspected that he had had a sexual relationship with the boy.53

  Other male prostitutes whose “careers” are documented by surviving archival records were most often arrested for loitering or solicitation. The fourteen-year-old Fritz Thomas was arrested in March 1929 for “loitering” in the Passage. Because his own mother was suspected of running a brothel from her apartment, Thomas was eventually sent to an asylum.54 Kurt Doering had his first sexual encounter as a twenty-year-old when approached by a man in a public restroom in 1930. After this he learned to trade sexual favors for food.55 Willi Schulz, aged sixteen, was arrested for solicitation in the spring of 1932. It turned out that Schulz had disappeared in January, though his parents had failed to report him missing. Earlier the boy had been banned from school outings because of his sexual escapades. Fearing for the welfare of a younger daughter, Schulz’s parents would not allow him to return home and he was sent instead to a juvenile home.56

  Some youth were reported directly to social service authorities by their own parents. One widowed mother, Frau Steinke, appealed to the guardianship court for help with her nineteen-year-old son, Hans: “I ask that you place my son Hans in a welfare community home. Hans has been making much trouble. He stays out late into the night and then sleeps into the afternoon, only to go out again. Oddly he always has money and somehow ekes out his own living, since I can ill afford to support him. I tell him to look for work, but he threatens me, or at best ignores my advice.” Following his investigation, which included a series of home visits, an official of the guardianship court reported,

  Hans claims to work as a valet in front of the Charlottenburg opera, but, in fact, he allows men to pick him up there when the theater is closing and only returns in the early morning hours. Opera performances never run past 11:30. He regularly earns as much as 10 Marks in an evening. Ultimately Hans admitted that he not only opens and closes doors for opera patrons, but also leaves with strange men. Hans also explained that he had been seduced by other boys last year, and followed their example. It is clear from his clothing and bearing that he has fostered homosexual contacts. He always irons his shirt and ties and shaves his eyebrows.

  Although the court official recommended that Hans be committed to a group home, his fate is unclear.57

  In 1931, the guardianship court reported on sixteen-year-old Fritz Viert:

  The irregularity of his life and his unreliability reflect the influence of homosexual persons. He was approached by strange men in the street who enticed him to engage in homosexual practices. He has regular relations with a special group of men, who can be found in the bars of west Berlin, and he is completely under the influence of those ruined persons. In the bars, he is provided with alcoholic drinks and he smokes a great deal. He also puts on make-up and he powders himself, he dances with the men he knows, and often spends the night in the apartments of the homosexual persons who visit bars.58

  The court record ends here, and we know even less about Fritz Viert than about Hans Steinke.

  One feature of Berlin’s nightlife—mentioned in many sources, including Linsert’s study of male prostitution—was the widespread use of illicit drugs and especially of cocaine. Not unlike the words “homosexual” or “transvestite,” “cocaine” was also a German innovation, first isolated from Peruvian coca leaves and so named by the German PhD student Albert Niemann in the lab of his chemistry professor, Dr. Friedrich Wöhler, at the University of Göttingen in 1859. In the 1870s the German pharmaceutical firm Merck first produced the drug commercially. Cocaine was given initially to morphine addicts, ironically, to counter addiction. Recognized for its numbing qualities, it was also used as a local anesthetic, especially in eye surgeries. Freud became acquainted with the drug in the 1880s, and, somewhat infamously, recommended cocaine to patients while using it himself.59

  Published medical reports first warned of cocaine’s addictive properties in the 1880s, and by the early twentieth century, it was recognized as a powerful and potentially dangerous substance. A Hague Convention in 1911–12 attempted to regulate the distribution of morphine, opium, and cocaine; German drug companies feared limitations on their production, however, and the German government was able to effect a compromise that allowed individual national signatories to “use their best efforts” to control their own pharmaceutical firms. After 1918 the Weimar government became concerned with the diversion of military stockpiles, which created a surge in street-level trafficking. Responding in part to Article 295 of the Treaty of Versailles—which sought to toughen the prewar Hague Convention—the Weimar government issued a regulation in July 1920 that required a specific distribution license, limited to drug manufacturers, wholesalers, pharmacists, and scientific institutions. Popular demand increased illicit trafficking, however, and also the incidence of accidental poisoning. Cocaine sold on the streets was increasingly laced with boric acid or novocaine as well as innocuous fillers. Berlin’s university medical clinics claimed that 10 percent of all admissions in 1921 involved cocaine abuse.60 In 1925, the New York Times reported, “Drug Habit Alarms Berlin Police: Cocaine Circulates Like Cigarettes.” According to Berlin police, the Times claimed, “[d]ope peddlers in Berlin are rivaling American bootleggers for the artfulness with which they have been avoiding detection.” Cocaine abuse was especially common “among the prominent residents of Berlin’s fashionable West End,” the paper reported, and “is considered a fashionable fad.” Especially alarming was the “increasing number of drug fiend cases being treated in hospitals.”61

  As Robert McAlmon described in his roman á clef short stories, cocaine could be purchased in Berlin cafés and clubs, often from the barkeep, a bouncer, or a dealer, either behind closed doors or on the street. It was plentiful, and certainly cheap for tourists such as McAlmon, paying with hard currency during the Great Inflation. And, of course, cocaine was the perfect Berlin stimulant—perfect for pub crawls, perfect for all-night clubbing, perfect for sex. As one McAlmon character described,

  Feeling somewhat tired, and potentially sleepy, I was, however, ready to make a night of it, but suggested that if we were to go on we’d better take a sniff of the cocaine we had to liven us up. Getting under an archway entrance, away from the wind, and under the light of a near street lamp, we unfolded the paper containing the cocaine, and cautiously sniffed a little. Feeling no immediate sensation, to be aware whether we’d actually ta
ken any into our nostrils or not, or had blown it away, we sniffed a second time. My nose began soon to feel numbed, and in the back of my throat there was dryness that was mildly disagreeable, while a feeling of nausea was within my stomach. However I felt exhilarated, strong, leapingly light-bodied, and capable of going on without thought of tiredness.62

  Particularly disturbing for some was the pervasive, public abuse of cocaine not only within the demimonde but also among respectable burghers.63 In 1927 Brian Howard recorded his first impressions of a “drug fiend,” a man who looked like a “retired Prussian General,” out with his wife and two young sons in a café in the West End. Unable to grasp what was happening, Howard turned to the café owner: “ ‘What is he doing?’ I said…the proprietor said, not too quietly, ‘He smells hiss coke.’ ‘What?’ I said. ‘Hiss coke—he brithss it in.’…. Presuming that I must be hard of hearing, if not downright dense, the proprietor now bellowed at me, with some asperity, ‘CORK-HA-EEN!’ ”64 This openness reflected the common representations of cocaine in Weimar popular culture. Fritz Lang’s 1922 film Dr. Mabuse the Gambler depicts a criminal syndicate in Berlin (run by Mabuse) that—among other illegal operations—manufactures and peddles cocaine.65 Nicknamed the “Snow Queen” (Schneekönigin), Anita Berber (who also happened to play a small uncredited role in Dr. Mabuse) was the very face of cocaine consumption (and of many other illicit substances). She confessed openly to her addiction and explained that she had “enflamed nostrils” from the abuse. Her performance “Dances of Depravity, Horror, and Ecstasy” included an episode titled “Kokain,” with music by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns.66 Soon after his arrival in Berlin, Klaus Mann—who later developed his own addictions—met Berber for the first time, and he claimed “it was clear that she had already taken a great deal of cocaine, which she also offered to me.”67 The drug was also featured in popular literature: Otto Rung’s Kokain: Novellen appeared in 1923; Cocaina, the Italian-language novel by Dino Segre, or “Pitigrilli” (1893–1975), was published in 1921. Placed on the Catholic codex of banned books, Cocaina appeared in German translation in 1927, when it naturally became a best seller.