Prostitution in Berlin

Louise Brooks in "Diary of a lost girl", 1929

After World War I, prostitution became more common in Berlin. Soldiers at the front contracted venereal diseases from prostitutes, so the German army responded by letting brothels be inspected by their own doctors. Soldiers were then rationed coupon books for those establishments.

Soldiers returning to Berlin at the end of the War had a different attitude towards sex than they had previously had. Prostitution was still frowned upon by respectable people, but it ended up becoming firmly entrenched in the city's underground economy and culture. First women with no other means of support turned to the trade, then youths of both genders.

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There were other developments in Berlin culture that shocked many visitors. Thrill-seekers came to the city in search of adventure, and booksellers sold many editions of guide books to Berlin's erotic entertainment venues. There were an estimated five hundred such establishments, which included a large number of homosexual ones, for men and women.

Already in 1920, Thomas Wehrling wrote an article about prostitution in Berlin :

What we all perceive wide-eyed and everyday anew is the corruption of the bourgeois woman, the young girls from so-called good families who are turning into whores. Countless marriages have become a facade for the most wanton sexuall chaos. « Do any still exist », I recently heard a young woman from Berlin asked , « twenty-year-olds who are not having an affair ? » Twenty ? She could have said seventeen, perhaps even fifteen. A generation of females has grown up that has nothing but the merchandising os their physical charms in mind. They sit in the parlors, of which there are a dozen new ones every week ; they go to the cinema in the evenings, wear skirts that end above the knees, buy Elegant World and the film-magazines. They populate Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Saarow-Pieskow, the winter hotels in Thuringen, the Harz, and the seaside resorts. The display windows in the delicatessen are filled for these females ; they buy furs and shoes at the most extravagant prices and stream in herds down the Kurfürstendamm on Sunday mornings.

For a long time now there has been more than just one single caste of the demimondaine. The young bourgeois woman and the bourgeois daughter have joined the competition. Corrosive moral decay has eaten deeply into the middle-class family. Fathers and husbands close their eyes to it because they lack the force, the courage, or the sense of security to resist the wanton corrosion. Here the doctor's wife, five years ago still an upright lady, knows many bachelor apartments; there the merchant's daughter gets away with slipping into her own bed three times a week as morning nears.

What am I calling the overrunning of Berlin by whores? There are two aspects of the process. First, the financing of sexuality. Institutions such as previously flourished only in Budapest, houses with albums of photographs and prices for women waiting on call, have established themselves in Berlin, and, since the provincial cities do not want to miss out on progress, they will soon have branches in Leipzig, Hannover, and Breslau. Board a train traveling from Berlin to Frankfurt and you will find a quick connection in nearly every second-class compartment. But I have no desire to slander. Nevertheless, the corrosion has set in. Every woman who has lost her memory for the experiences of her lower body—and this is the second, deeper feature—has fallen victim to the sexual corruption. Once the internal unity between psychic and sexual experience was broken, once the isolation of sexual experience became the norm, Berlin arrived at a Hellenism of its own. It celebrates its festivals in the dark rooms adjoining every dance hall.

From The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, edited by Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg. University of California Press. 1995.