by Whitney Otto
“No Moka Efti today?” asked the pilot.
“Wednesdays,” said Ines.
“What’s Moka Efti?” asked Charlotte.
With her arm still around Ines’s shoulders, the pilot pulled off one leather glove with her teeth, stuffing it in a pocket before reaching out a hand to Charlotte. “Grete Grun.”
“I thought your name was . . .” said Charlotte, confused but offering her hand. Grete’s grip was firm and warm.
“This is Charlotte,” said Ines.
“Charlotte,” Grete said. She was no longer half-embracing Ines. Instead she was leaning against the fuselage.
“Café Moka Efti,” said Ines to Charlotte. “On Friedrichstrasse. I work there on Wednesday afternoons.”
“Oh,” said Charlotte.
Grete Grun laughed. “Your friend thinks you’re a barmaid.”
“I work in the back,” said Ines. “With the businessmen.”
Grete said, “I think you explained that beautifully, dispelling the barmaid aspect and implying a career that pays by the hour.”
“Moka Efti has a room where businessmen can work and drink their coffee. They hire people like me—stenographers—to take dictation so they can claim to be working and not hanging around a café. They even have telephones on the desks in case someone calls. It’s a stupid job, but the pay isn’t bad.”
“So are you in or out for Wannsee this weekend?” asked Grete.
“In.”
“And you, Charlotte, will you be coming too?”
“Yes, Charlotte, will you be coming too?” asked Ines.
“I don’t know,” said Charlotte, looking to Ines.
Grete shrugged her shoulders. “If I see you I see you.” To Ines she said, “Gotta get this put away before dark.” Grete turned her back as she pivoted the plane in the direction of the simple structures. Airplane hangars, thought Charlotte, not houses. “Saturday, Marlene,” called Grete.
“Why did she say that?” asked Charlotte as they walked to the car.
“A group of us are meeting at Wannsee on Saturday, to swim and eat and spend the night on the beach. You really should come.”
“Not that—Marlene.”
Ines said nothing, then, “I’ll be at your house at noon on Saturday.”
Giselle Weiss worked in a film lab. Neile raced cars. Maria was interested in architecture and was a student at the Bauhaus; she was very excited to meet Charlotte, being an ardent admirer of Bruno Blum’s public housing projects and his work with glass. She, too, wanted to construct great monolithic buildings of glass, the passing reflections of the clouds giving the illusion of walls of sky.
And then there was Grete Grun, who was a kind of informal organizer of their modest encampment by the lake. There were two small canvas tents, folded wooden stools with canvas seats. A large hamper of food and another of drinks.
But it was Ines who brought the record player.
The girls were all about the same age as Charlotte and Ines, mid-twenties, and all from families in business (with cultural affections) or education (with cultural affections), and they all typified the media image of the New Woman, with their bobbed hair—except for blond Giselle Weiss, who wore her curly hair in two short pigtails behind her ears—and their androgynous clothing—the tailored jackets and girlish, flat-heeled shoes. They wore trousers or long shorts, much as Grete Grun had worn that day at the airfield. One of the daily papers had taken to running weekly a feature that asked “Bub oder Mädel?” with half a dozen head shots of Berliners the readers were to identify as boy or girl. The girls laughed about it (there was something intoxicating about thinking you could be that close to having social power), but inside they could never fully decide who was insulted more.
As permissive and decadent as those days were—exhilaratingly so—being a homosexual man was illegal. It was dangerous and made more so by the fact that there were so few arrests, making gay men less guarded and thus more at risk. There was nothing worse than thinking yourself safe when you weren’t.
But the girls who liked girls were never considered criminal. Grete Grun said it was because “if you don’t count, then whomever you choose to sleep with doesn’t count either. By association, if you will.”
In truth, it was sometimes difficult to tell all the Berlin girls—the lesbian, the androgyne, the gamine, the New Woman—apart.
As the phonograph played that day by the lake, the girls danced, arms around each other’s waists, no one resting a languid hand on someone’s shoulder; everyone was the Girl, and no one the Fellow, the other hands clasped. Though they laughed and clowned and sometimes exaggerated their movements (a tango, a waltz, a fox trot), there were moments of quiet, a touch, a lingering kiss.
Charlotte lay on the grass next to the beautiful Giselle Weiss, her blond pigtails undone.
Later, the girls waded into the water near the shore where a flat-bottom boat with a striped cabana and gathered curtains, with the word Eis in white paint on its side, sold ice cream.
“Marlene,” said Grete Grun as they sat in the soft summer evening, roasting sausages over the fire, “what were the Katz twins doing with Alice last week?”
“Marlene?” asked Charlotte.
“The Katz twins,” said Neile, shaking her head. “They’ll sleep with anyone as long as they have a trust fund.”
“The Katz twins?” asked Charlotte.
Grete Grun, the pilot with her boots and rolled shorts, placed each cooked sausage in a roll with mustard and sauerkraut before handing it round. “Vivienne and Veronika Katz,” said Grete, “frequent horse, car, and air races. They dress identically in men’s suits with neckties and knee boots and hats, and always seem to be in the company of a woman with money who can’t decide if she likes girls or not.” She licked some mustard off her fingers before handing a roll to Maria. “In this case, it’s one Miss Alice Ring, who, if I’m not mistaken, seemed more than a little uncomfortable sitting between the twins.”
Maria said, laughing, “It was as if she just found herself flanked by those two.”
“And her pearls,” said Neile, “seriously.”
“Opportunists,” said Ines to Charlotte. “You wouldn’t like them. No girl does.”
“What about Alice Ring? She likes them?”
Ines tore off a piece of the sausage roll, popped it into her mouth. “That’s another kind of girl.”
It was then that Charlotte finally caught on to the utterance of Marlene. It made sense: the unabashedly bisexual Marlene Dietrich. It was a gay endearment. It also made Charlotte feel just a little jealous when Ines said it or, more so, when Grete Grun said it while looking at Ines, her voice not unlike the sexy rasp of Dietrich herself.
“If only they’d stop coming to my races,” said Neile.
“Neile won twice last year,” said Ines.
“And crashed four times,” said Maria.
“Or stop acting like a pair of party boys,” continued Neile.
“Yeah, or they’ll find themselves in ‘Bub oder Mädel?’ in the paper.”
Everyone laughed.
“I dislike his work,” said Ines.
The girls were lying around the campfire, long after dinner, smoking cigarettes, Neile and Grete Grun smoking a little hash.
“I don’t understand how you can’t like it,” said Giselle Weiss. “There isn’t another novelist today taking on the complexities of modern Berlin. Okay, just the description of the 1918 demonstration of the war veterans? That image of a group of young men, marching down the boulevard with their missing arms and legs and eyes, as if it was a human collage of body parts? I remember that parade and I don’t remember anyone saying anything half as true about it.”
“Perhaps dislike is the wrong word, since it indicates a reaction, when, in fact, his books leave me indifferent.”
The girls were talking about a recent literary reading given by an internationally known Berlin writer at one of the big department stores. Giselle Weiss, with her aspirat
ions to be a film editor, loved books. Her parents, like Ines’s, lived in Heidelberg, where her mother was a poet and professor, and her father a psychiatrist, which, claimed Giselle, doesn’t exactly make for the most involved parents. “It was like growing up with housemates,” said Giselle. “Very loving housemates.”
Talk then turned to movies and the recent protest against the showing of All Quiet on the Western Front, which Carl von Ossietzky, pacifist and editor in chief of the cultural magazine Die Weltbühne, called Fascism’s “first victory. Today it was a film, tomorrow it will be something else.” This brought the conversation back to the Great War and its casualties, which had Hanna talking again about the internationally known writer.
They talked about photography, the New Objectivism and Expressionism and how its time was now officially over, as far as Charlotte was concerned. They talked about Surrealism and collage and Hannah Höch with her photomontages of women and politics, and someone said something about John Heartfield’s photomontages as well. They talked about various magazines, politics; Grete and Giselle were Communists, while Charlotte and Ines demurred and said they chose art instead, prompting Maria and Neile to say that you can’t parse one from the other.
Then it was time for bed and all the girls piled into the tents, where everyone fell immediately and blissfully asleep.
Rainier Ermler had moved his class to the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Charlotte and Ines would travel twice a week. He taught them how to judge a picture from a negative and how important it was to “be the eye of the camera,” a statement so simple that it was radical.
Ines made a picture of Charlotte that prompted Rainier to grunt and say, “Who knows what you’ll do with your life, but you should never give up photography.”
“I was actually terrified when he said that,” Ines told Charlotte, “because it suddenly seemed something too enormous in my life. What if I’m good only with this one picture?”
“Then you’ll be one of those people who does one thing really well,” said Charlotte, tucking a curl behind Ines’s ear.
“We could open a studio where I sell only that one portrait of you.”
“I could take one of you. You know, just to show our range,” said Charlotte.
“Is that like ‘less is more’?”
“It’s more like ‘less is less.’ ”
“I love you,” said Ines.
“You’re a great photographer. And I’m not just saying that because I love you too.” Charlotte said, “Or because I’m copying Rainier.”
In 1930, when Charlotte and Ines were twenty-six and twenty-seven, respectively, Rainier Ermler made a permanent move to Dessau, and Charlotte came into a small inheritance, giving her the means to move out of her parents’ house, now solely occupied by Trilby, since their parents were in the Netherlands while her father collaborated on a Dutch project with another architect.
She purchased a large studio with living quarters upstairs, close off of Friedrichstrasse, with its array of city lights. Downstairs was outfitted with the photographic equipment she purchased from Rainier Ermler.
“I want us to be partners,” said Charlotte to Ines one morning over coffee.
“Is this about the minimalist, less-is-less studio?”
For the past year, the girls had been studying with Rainier Ermler, and refining their ideas about photography, not to mention falling in love in a way that made Charlotte question the difference between having a best friend and having a girlfriend, only to tell herself that all love is mutable, only the love itself the stable element. They both believed that there was no more thrilling place to be than Berlin if you were young and eager for a world that made no distinction between art and commerce.
Advertising was their passion.
“We can open a photography studio specializing in advertising and, when we need to, portraits. Functional art,” said Charlotte. “We can do this.”
kitten + kohl was the name of their studio because it was young (they were young), the profession of advertising photography was young (nearly unheard of), because kitten was playful (they were playful) and kohl sexually suggestive (in the first flush of first love it was nearly impossible not to see the world in erotic terms).
In the window, and on their business cards, they used a double self-portrait: Charlotte—dressed in a sleeveless striped shirt, wide-legged white trousers, tucked into black leather boots—reclined nearly horizontal on a very small, wooden folding stool, her hair hidden under a scarf, with a long, fake black beard, and wearing black gloves that ended above her wrists. Ines, her curls held back by a gauzy bow, wore capris and an identical striped shirt, only with a pair of pale net angel wings affixed to her shoulders; she balanced on the stool, her foot planted between Charlotte’s thighs, with her other leg angled behind her in an arabesque. Charlotte’s gloved hands held Ines’s bare fingers while both girls looked at the lens of the camera.
All of this was set before a white wall with a small rectangular black backdrop, so there was no mistaking the location as a photography studio.
The Strongman and the Flying Something was the title of the whimsical picture that said nearly everything there was to say about the girls and their work.
The Monkey Bar was Neile’s suggestion.
The same group from that first camping trip to the Wannsee (Grete and Giselle, Maria, Neile, Ines and Charlotte) had gathered to celebrate three years of kitten + kohl and the fact that the studio had just won its first prize at the Deuxième Exposition Internationale de la Photographie et du Cinéma in Brussels for one of their advertising posters. The partners had been mentioned in various graphic arts magazines for their style of clean lines and collage, along with their images of women that often conveyed what seemed at first a slightly exaggerated female depiction in the service of self-mockery, except that the astute observer couldn’t miss the political commentary beneath the joke. Sometimes their models were mannequins made to look like real women and, just as often, real women were made up to resemble mannequins. It was this duality, of the image seeming to be one thing when it was also another, that drew clients to their work.
The barrage of ads—on windows, walls, posts—thrilled Charlotte. Twenty-nine years old and she had her own studio, clients, a business partner and lover who shared her vision. Or maybe Charlotte shared Ines’s vision. Advertising was still so new that kitten + kohl had the opportunity not only to be a part of it but to influence it as well. The newness of the profession allowed for a lot of creative space, colliding with the embrace of the modern. kitten + kohl moved past the “monumentalizing” of the thing being sold and went quietly ironic.
They posed female mannequins tending real children, offering them cough syrup and comfort.
A model faced away from the camera, her beautiful face and figure out of view, wearing a white evening gown that pooled around the legs of the tiny table she sat upon. Her skin was white, her short hair black, matching the one arm, encased in a black opera-length glove, that held on to the seat of the chair, while she faced the wall, gazing at her own shadow. Her shadow, more compelling than facing the camera.
Long legs dominated the frame in an ad for floor tile, while miniaturized businessmen looked on in anxiety and wonder.
A white cardboard cutout of a woman (a reverse of the shadow woman) enjoyed an evening out with friends, her inanimate figure placed among the laughing, live couples as they all drank a popular wine.
kitten + kohl’s work appeared to exalt the dominant view of femininity while subtly undermining it with mannequins and collages.
New was the only way for Charlotte and Ines to get in; established would have locked them out. This was reason enough to believe in the possibilities offered by Berlin.
• • •
With her parents, Charlotte had spent months, sometimes years in other cities—primarily London—and each place had its own delights, but no place was like Berlin, with its slippery social groups, the enormity of its postwar problems, t
he consistently contentious politics, and a kind of sexual infinity. She loved the way the city turned on at night, a switch flipped that illuminated another Berlin entirely. A midnight place where nothing was fixed or forbidden, so everything was permitted. And the way the rain in the streets doubled the images of the city due to the effect of the lights illustrated the reality of two Berlins. No place she had ever been seemed to thrive so well on risk.
• • •
In Charlotte and Ines’s prize-winning ad, a full, red-lipsticked, disembodied mouth drew on a sleek German pipe, the smoke an ethereal cloud against a pale blue background. The lipstick clued the mouth as belonging to a woman; the pipe suggested a man. In the lower section of the picture what appeared to be a pane of glass rested at an angle, as if it were leaning against the blue background. And written on the glass, in the typography of a typewriter, were the words “This is not a pipe.”
On the way to the celebration at the Monkey Bar Charlotte and Ines couldn’t stop talking about how much this prize would do for their studio, how they could cut back on portraits and maybe lessen the impact of the recent economic depression. The Great Depression in Germany had actually accelerated the advertising business, along with the use of photography.
Grete Grun was already seated when Charlotte and Ines arrived, soon to be followed by Maria, Neile, Giselle Weiss, and her new boyfriend. Giselle was the only girl in their group who wasn’t lesbian or bisexual (“But we love you anyway,” Grete Grun said). Grete Grun jumped up from her chair when Giselle came in with her boyfriend, greeting him as if he were hers and not Giselle’s.
“Well,” said Giselle, laughing, “are you just happy to see us or are you trying to pass?”
Grete Grun glanced around the room before abruptly releasing Giselle’s beau, then dropping back into her chair.
Each of the guests at the table then put on a black mask, tied at the back of the head and coming across the eyes and the bridge of the nose. Grete Grun had already been masked when the other girls and Giselle’s boyfriend arrived.
