by Philipp Blom
An Inflation of Values
FOR GENERATIONS OF STUDENTS, the real-world Professor Raats had been their teachers, their moral compass, and their tyrannical superego. They had been respected and hated in equal measure, as not only Heinrich Mann’s novella but a whole host of other works attested. The hyperinflation of 1923 had changed all this. Initially an attempt by the German government to offset crippling reparations payments, inflation had been encouraged, but it had disastrously spiraled out of hand. Fortunes vanished overnight, formerly comfortable existences were destroyed, workers needed wheelbarrows to collect their pay and had to rush to the shops to spend everything before it lost even more of its value, diners in restaurants ate quickly to avoid having to pay double the price for their dinner, and children used bundles of worthless banknotes as building material for their playhouses.
But not only the economic structure of Germany had suffered. Suddenly the principles and virtues on which the German middle class was built seemed redundant. People who had worked hard, lived modestly, and saved all their lives had lost everything literally overnight and were reduced to penury. The virtues of work, self-denial, duty, and frugality they had preached and enforced as teachers, parliamentarians, judges, and journalists looked worse than useless. At a time when the defeated country needed nothing more than reconstruction and stability, the moral core and authority of the middle classes had been ripped out. It is arguable that Hitler’s rise a decade later would be greatly facilitated by the catastrophic undermining of humanist values and work ethic that resulted from the hyperinflation.
This moral catastrophe that befell the young Weimar Republic was of the greatest importance for the cultural and political development of Germany at a time of instability; the worst consequence, a dictatorship, had been only narrowly avoided. Several years later, economic performance and general confidence had slowly recovered, and it began to look as if the unloved German democracy had had a narrow escape and could now finally really take root. But then two blows struck Germany in quick succession.
The first was the death on October 3, 1929, of Gustav Stresemann, the German foreign minister, whose farsighted policies had done much to begin a reconciliation with Germany’s former enemies, with the aim of renegotiating the harsh conditions of the Versailles Treaty. The Germans desperately wanted to see their economy regain traction, which would give the fragile new democracy a chance. They also wanted to secure foreign loans in order to keep up with the reparations payments and to maintain the social peace at home. Stresemann’s death robbed Germany of its most seasoned and internationally respected negotiator, a crucial figure for postwar reconstruction. But even his negotiating talent could not have prevented the consequences of the Wall Street crash, after which new American loans dried up and lenders demanded immediate repayment of the existing loans. This was the second and fatal blow for a democracy that still had not been fully accepted by the people and for an economic system that was only just beginning to recover. The consequences in Germany were disastrous. Millions lost their jobs; by 1932 official unemployment had risen to 42 percent. And the achievements of the previous seven years were called into question once again.
Two economic crises in less than a decade had cost Weimar Germany its sense of purpose and its sense of hope. The present seemed chaotic beyond repair, the past bitterly contested, the future already overshadowed by rival totalitarian visions that were often too frightening to contemplate.
Within this climate of total uncertainty, with its absence of traditional identities and moral principles, a new culture could flourish. And it was this culture, more than the charms of a single girl, that proved the undoing of the Prussian professor in Heinrich Mann’s novel and Sternberg’s film. The representative of imperial nineteenth-century virtues is both overwhelmed and undermined by the dangerous new sexual culture of Weimar Germany, a culture that respected no precedent, and indeed nothing at all.
Berlin-Babylon
THE CAPITAL OF THIS NEW, anarchist culture of the 1930s in Germany and beyond was Berlin, a city whose history reads like an allegory of the country’s fate. While other cities such as Cologne, Hamburg, Nuremberg, and Leipzig could look back on a proud and long history, Berlin had been a sleepy local town until Prussia’s rapid ascent to power had propelled it to new prominence. As the Prussian kings became German emperors, their capital had been transformed into a large and representative center of power—a little too large, perhaps, a little too ostentatious, never quite sure of itself, and dangerously hybrid in its mix of populations.
Beyond the great avenues conceived for parades and marching bands lay the poor Berlin of industrial workers and recent immigrants—Poles and Russians, Jews from Galicia, emigrants, exiles, refugees, and fugitives—crowded into dank tenement buildings. And between the tenements and the court was an increasingly large, increasingly wealthy, and increasingly self-confident professional middle class.
The capital was particularly hard hit by the uncertainty of the era and its various crises. With four million inhabitants, it was by far the largest city in the country, a metropolis too complex, too fluid in its composition, and too teeming with life and with ambition to be properly controlled.
Now, as the hard shell of official morality was cracked wide open, this life asserted itself—not in the boulevards and squares, the elegant shopping streets and government buildings, but in the private apartments and anonymous hotel rooms, the half-shade of the street corners, the cafés and bars where people could meet without attracting too much attention, the discreet recesses of public parks at dusk and the banks of the lakes around the city. Here there were a hundred thousand faces and many more masks. Its reach extended from the witty double entendres of the lyrics sung in large concert halls by the Comedian Harmonists and on hundreds of thousands of records to a semiofficial demimonde and finally to a totally clandestine underworld of prostitution that catered to any predilection, any fantasy, any perversion.
One of the most famous and perhaps most frightening portraits by Otto Dix shows a woman in a red dress, her face little more than a chalk-white mask of cynical disdain with a small, cherry-colored mouth painted onto the pallor, large green eyes surrounded by charcoal-colored eye shadow, thin black arches for eyebrows, and a fringe of dull red hair. The woman portrayed here, the dancer Anita Berber, looks as if she had lived too much and seen too many things, despite the fact that she was only twenty-six years old. But by that time she was already famous, a living legend and a perfect embodiment of the reckless time. Like Marlene Dietrich a girl from a secure bourgeois family, Berber was a gifted dancer who started a solo career early on. Classical dance, however, did not interest her, and she specialized in custom-made expressionist performances of choreographies with titles such as “Cocaine,” “Morphine,” and “Opium Trance” (all of which she knew from firsthand experience, and washed down with at least one bottle of cognac a day). During her performances she wore very little, and sometimes nothing at all; audiences gasped with delight or outrage as her lascivious movements left nothing to the imagination.
The eighteen-year-old Klaus Mann, son of the writer Thomas Mann, met the dancer around the time her portrait was painted:
Anita Berber was already a legend. . . . Post-war eroticism, cocaine, Salomé, the last word in perversion: words such as these made her fame radiant. . . . She had a cavalier with her and sekt was served. At 2 o’clock in the morning she took her cavalier and me to her hotel room. . . . When you’re eighteen, you’re shocked by such a painted face. Her face was a dark and wicked mask. . . . She spoke without interruption and lied terribly. It was clear that she had taken a lot of cocaine. She offered me some. . . . In a hoarse voice, she related the most incredible adventures; animals she had hypnotized; murderers she had skillfully escaped from.1
Berber was a trailblazer of the new and self-destructive way of living beyond convention. Her appearances in nightclubs or larger theaters were certain to scandalize her audiences and resulted in a
stream of outraged letters to the police—and in ever-rising ticket sales. Naked, boyish, beautiful, and shamelessly exhibitionistic, she came, danced, and conquered. Photographs of her appeared in Vanity Fair; famous artists and prospective lovers queued up at her doorstep. But her drug consumption became overwhelming. Her character changed and she frequently became violent, hitting, scratching, and spitting her way through disagreements. Once, when a woman pointed her out on the street, Berber almost bit the woman’s finger off. She got in trouble with the police and thought it was wiser to leave Berlin.
In Vienna, Berber performed at the prestigious Konzerthaus together with her husband. The evening was called “Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy” and predictably caused a public outcry. She traveled on, always one step ahead of the lawsuits, to the Middle East, where she performed until one day she collapsed onstage in Damascus. The doctors diagnosed a rapidly advancing case of tuberculosis, possibly exacerbated by an overconsumption of cocaine and alcohol, but the real diagnosis was simply total excess. She died in Berlin on November 10, 1928. She was twenty-nine years old.
Berlin Means Boys
MARLENE DIETRICH AS THE LASCIVIOUS LOLA in The Blue Angel famously sang that men were clustering around her like “moths around a flame,” and in real-life Berlin there were countless places for moths of all descriptions. An estimated six hundred nightclubs in the city offered sexual services, from very explicit erotic revues to lap dancing and more.
Eighty-five of these clubs catered exclusively to lesbians, who could live openly due to a legal loophole. The infamous Paragraph 175 of the penal code criminalized only homosexual acts between men, very possibly because the nineteenth-century lawmakers had been unable to conceive of the female variety of homosexuality.
In addition to these official establishments, there were also hundreds of gay bars, saunas, massage parlors, and clubs. In 1928, the English poet Wystan Auden had come to the German capital from Paris, which bored him because he had found nothing but “bedroom mirrors and bidets, lingerie and adultery, the sniggers of schoolboys and grubby old men.” Now he was almost ecstatic at the culture unfolding itself in front of his unbelieving eyes: “Berlin is a bugger’s daydream. There are 170 male brothels under police control.”2
Like other homosexual Englishmen traveling abroad to live as they could not at home, Auden became a regular at the Cozy Corner in the working-class Hallesches Tor district, which, according to another English visitor, was “filled with attractive boys of any age between sixteen and twenty-one . . . all dressed in extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage.” At one point the visitor had to go to the toilet, where he “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.”3
Auden enjoyed rough play and for a while he lived with a young man he described as “a cross between a rugger hearty and Josephine Baker,” and who regularly left him badly bruised but happy.4 Auden’s school friend Christopher Isherwood, who joined him in the German capital, found an exquisitely beautiful young man who went by the nickname of Bubi. “By embracing Bubi,” the writer later recalled, “Christopher could hold in his arms the entire mystery-magic of foreignness, Germanness. By means of Bubi, he could fall in love with and possess the entire nation.”5
But the entire nation was not so easily possessed, or easily understood. Berlin boasted an erotic demimonde consisting of an estimated one hundred thousand women and thirty-five thousand men who regularly prostituted themselves. If its relative tolerance for sexual minorities made it a haven for refugees from bourgeois morality from the provinces and from abroad, it also became the world’s premier tourist destination for sexual predilections of all kinds. Twenty years earlier, French men, including writer André Gide, had traveled to Algeria in search of young boys willing to indulge their sexual fantasies; Germans such as homosexual industrialist Alfred Krupp or photographer and aesthete Wilhelm von Gloeden preferred the equally poor and equally pliant south of Italy. But even at home, there was now no desire so outlandish that it could not be satisfied in the German capital.
Berlin had its guidebooks advising tourists which establishments catered to which particular proclivities and at which street corner or café they could pick up a woman or man of their choice. Different streets and areas of the city were frequented by different kinds of prostitutes: girls with high boots, freelance dominatrixes, secretaries and shopgirls looking for a bit of extra cash in hard times, registered professionals with official health certificates, underage girls, older women, pregnant women, women made up to look like boys, transvestites and transsexuals and rent boys and rough trade, children for sale at a steep price, sadists and masochists, flagellators, and coprophiles.
There was something machinelike about all this fornication, a mechanical escapism that seemed determined to deny the political reality. But it would not have been Germany if this bewildering variety of sexual behavior had not aroused the interest of science, and the infinite plurality of Berlin’s nightlife and discreet daytime amusements was surveyed by the world’s first dedicated sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) not only conducted statistical and psychological research but also maintained a museum of utensils and implements that made even Christopher Isherwood giggle nervously.
Hirschfeld was a remarkable man. A qualified physician from an assimilated Jewish family, he had begun to understand his own homosexuality not as a social curse, as it was widely considered at the time, but as a subject for research as well as a political mission. Together with fellow activists he began to lobby for the decriminalization of homosexuality while at the same time conducting extensive research about sexual attitudes and orientations among university students—the easiest constituency for this kind of study—and publishing his findings in journals and books.
According to Hirschfeld’s findings, a fixed percentage of men and women in any population—around 2 percent, he believed—were bisexual, homosexual, or transsexual. In referring to the last group, he spoke of a “third sex,” a hitherto unrecognized and alternative sexual identity. In November 1930 a Danish patient came to visit him. Einar Wegener was a painter living in Paris, where he was married to another artist, Gerda Gottlieb, who had made a good career with her portrayals of elegant, delicate women.
There had been a minor scandal when it had become known that the model for these paintings had been her husband, who in addition to his masculine identity was living a parallel life as a woman, Lili Elbe. He came to Dr. Hirschfeld in order to take the last step and undergo sex reassignment surgery, the first such procedure ever to be carried out. Over the course of two years, Lili Elbe painfully came into being through a series of five operations. Initially the process appeared to be successful, but when the surgeon tried to complete the transformation by transplanting a uterus into his patient, Elbe died due to transplant rejection.
Murderers Among Us
BERLIN WAS A VIOLENT CITY, with physical danger always in the air. During the socialist May Day demonstrations of 1929, twenty-three people had been killed in street battles with fascist groups, with many more injured. The young Englishman Isherwood sensed a perilous possibility in the air: “Here was the seething brew of history in the making—a brew . . . seasoned with unemployment, malnutrition, stock market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty and other potent ingredients.”6
Fritz Lang and his wife, Thea von Harbou, who had shown only a few years earlier that they were awake to the utopian longings of the day as well as to their inherent terror, were now working on a psychological portrait of Berlin, which was to be released the following year, in 1931. The film M was inspired by the real-life Düsseldorf serial killer Peter Kürten, whose trial and eventual execution had been followed closely by the press. For the film, the plot had been transplanted to an unnamed city very like th
e German capital. Even the story’s main conceit was possible only in a society that had lost all faith in the state and in which upholding the law was a matter for vigilantes and criminals.
A sexual killer is on the prowl, preying on little girls and terrorizing the city. The level of public concern is so high that the increased police presence on the streets begins to interfere seriously with the activities of the underworld. Finally the boss of the city’s largest criminal organization decides to mobilize his own men in order to eliminate the murderer and return to his normal, workable arrangement with the police. A huge manhunt commences, and eventually the murderer (played by the young Peter Lorre at the peak of his creative powers) is cornered and brought to trial by the criminal underworld, whose boss (played by Gustav Gründgens, looking demonic in a bowler hat and a long leather coat) will be judge and executioner.
The trial is the psychological climax of this oppressively dense atmospheric tableau, which is lightened only by occasional moments of comedy between the incompetent police and the criminals. Lorre gives an impassioned speech describing his mental state, with inner voices and overpowering urges forcing him to commit murder after murder, and the assembled thieves, burglars, pimps, and thugs want him to die. In a fragment cut from the eventual release, Lorre’s character attributes his madness and depravity to his shattering experience as a soldier in the Great War, another in the long gallery of destroyed men coming out of the trenches and into fiction. It is a scene in which the violence and the nihilist sexuality of a rudderless society have become conflated and the only solution seems to be yet more violence. When the police finally raid the Piranesi-like catacombs in which the mock trial has taken place just in time to save the monstrous madman from certain death, their arrival is only a halfhearted gesture toward a restoration of order and authority.
