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After the armistice, the guns went silent across Europe, but not in Berlin, where Germans

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were fighting Germans. News of the loss by the Fatherland had come as a shock to Berliners,

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and now the old order was gone. In its place came chaos. The streets of what was once a quiet

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conservative town became free fire zones, the nationalists of the extreme right battling it

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out with the communists of the extreme left, and out of this struggle emerged a new democratic state,

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the Weimar Republic. In the 20th century, after the First World War, the world's great

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metropolis of Weiss was Berlin. Berlin in the 1920s was the sixth capital of Europe.

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If you knew what to look for, you could find anything, anything known to man in the sexual

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world was available on the streets of Berlin. On any given night, as many as a hundred thousand

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prostitutes walked the streets or worked the sex clubs across the city. There were all different

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with different kinds of makeup on the street. For instance, one was called Muzi. Muzis who were

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prostitutes who hung out on just one street, Muzstrasse, and these were pregnant prostitutes.

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They were prostitutes who looked horrible, who had acid scarred faces or hunchbacks,

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or were lame or crippled. These were called drasshoppers. He had mother and daughter

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teams on one street that dressed exactly alike. Here in Berlin, sex for sale offered every sort

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of perversion or fetishism imaginable. There was not a sexual appetite that could not be satisfied

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in this city. There were clubs where lesbians liked to whip schoolboys, and you'd find military

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officers sitting there with children sitting on their laps. So a lot of it was play acting,

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but there were quite a lot of people who also indulged in it. Berlin in the 1920s was the

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sex capital of Europe. Its very name became synonymous with perversion, debauchery, and

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creativity. Places that you hadn't noticed would turn into outrageous strip clubs. The basements

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of the restaurants would be homosexual or lesbian romper rooms and sex clubs. Every

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intellectual was leftish. The whole political right wing, which basically came from Munich,

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did not play any role in the beginning. The whole town was in the hands of leftish ideas.

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But outside Berlin, the right-wing nationalist movement was attracting scores of disillusioned

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Germans, including one obscure Austrian corporal by the name of Adolf Hitler. Hitler, like many

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of the right-wingers, hated this new Berlin, a city bursting with Bolsheviks, socialists,

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revolutionaries, and Jews. But in the early 1920s, Berliners had more immediate concerns. By 1922,

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inflation was spiraling wildly out of control. People would be paid in the morning and have

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suitcase fulls of banknotes, and they would have to then run to the shops because in the time

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between being paid, the time when they bought their goods, their food, the prices would have

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risen. Berlin was in a state of total, total chaos. Hundreds of thousands of dispossessed,

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starving in the streets. And at the same time, you had very rich people. You got on the one

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hand the poor eating turnip soup, the butchers selling crows, squirrels, even rats. And on the

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other side, people who could afford it, eating the most sumptuous meals like they never paused for

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thought. With virtually every currency in the world more valuable than the German mark, foreign

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tourists flocked into the city to take advantage of the cheapest sex on the continent. $10 in

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American money could buy you anything you wanted. Every possible sexual taste was catered for.

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Housefrauds became harlots, teenagers turned tricks, and papa became a tent. When you have

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unemployed, you also have an increase in sex workers. But it wasn't just Berliners. It was

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tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of young boys and young girls who were coming to Berlin

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to participate in this hard currency sex traffic. It was a city that was filled with lesbian life.

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There was the idea that everywhere you went, you didn't have to hide what you were.

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When it came to sex, Marlena Dietrich could be omnivorous. As long as she found them attractive,

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she couldn't care less if her lover was a man or a woman. Dietrich was an omnipotent sexual

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figure. She was an icon for gay women around the world at a time when there was no one else.

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With this new anything goes attitude, Berlin overnight replaced Paris as the center of

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hedonism. That's why people say Berlin is the Babylon of the 20s. Things that have been

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considered to be immoral, amoral, whatever, became irrelevant and anything went. Drugs were readily

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available in Berlin. Every variety of drug, morphine, cocaine, opium. The morphine and the

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cocaine you could probably get prescribed by your local doctor or pharmacist. Opium was wildly

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available and also drugs were used in sexual science. Sexual scientists were very interested

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in the effects of, for instance, morphine would have on the orgasmic rate of a lesbian. So there

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was a complete scientific culture. Berlin had become the center of sexual experimentation. It

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also became the center of scientific research into sex led by a pioneering doctor. And this

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was a very funny character called Papa or the Einstein of sex in Berlin. It was Magnus

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Hershfeld. Hershfeld was queer, Jewish, social democrat who really defined the liberal spirit

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of Berlin. The crusading doctor for sexual freedom was also the founder of the world's

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first Institute devoted to the scientific study of sex. You could go and look at various fetish

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items. For example, he had these trousers that if you wore a trench coat, you could walk around

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Berlin. It looked like you had pants on because the lower parts of the trousers were there,

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but then you had nothing on above them and you could flash this way. This was thought to be very

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titillating, very amusing. So it was this sort of thing you could see in the Institute for Sexual

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Research. Unlike his fellow doctor in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, Hershfeld advocated the radical

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notion that human sexuality could be studied without imposing moral judgments. Hershfeld's

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also credited with operations and surgeries of sex change and sexual rejuvenation. He had a

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clinic for people to be consults about sexual problems. But Berlin's reputation as a hotbed

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for the new and risqué was not just limited to its bars and bedrooms. They also streamed into the

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city streets and clubs of Berlin. From all across Europe, artists, writers and intellectuals with

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homosexual leanings were drawn to this metropolis. Berlin was unquestionably the most open gay city

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in the world. It attracted first W.H. Auden, the great British poet, and then his friend Christopher

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Isherwood. Auden came first, was interested in the gay scene there and talked about Berlin being a

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bugger's paradise. Christopher Isherwood, fed up with Cambridge and in England openly hostile to

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homosexuals, chose to move to Berlin. His novels about the wild side of life in the city and its

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cabarets were eventually turned into a hugely successful stage play and movie. There were about

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160 completely different lesbian and gay male nightclubs and lounges. Unlike most cities, with

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their one red light district, Berlin's erotic clubs were scattered throughout the vast metropolis.

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Bizarre sexual fantasies of domination were turned into works of art, while they would indulge in a

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wide variety of strange sexual experiments involving violence and death, all in the name of art. In

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1928, a Nazi propaganda sheet denounced Berlin as a melting pot of everything that is evil. When Goebbels

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got off the train in 1926 to take over the city, he found the Nazis could scrape together maybe 200

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members and the communists at that point had about 250,000 and they didn't particularly take to a group

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of people who came in from outside and said that everything that the city had stood for was all of

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a sudden to be abandoned or to be considered decadent or to be pushed aside. Hitler had personally

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appointed him to go to Berlin. It looked at the time like an impossible mission. He was a good

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choice for the Nazis because he understood the city. It was he who was designated to turn the city

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from a bastion of communism, a red city, into a brown one, that is bastion of the Nazis. This was a

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difficult proposition. Berlin to them was foreign territory. They shared the typical provincial

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conservative Germans notion about Berlin as a decadent place. It was too avant-garde. They hated

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the place. Berlin was in an upheaval. Street fights were common. Unemployment was worsening. And then

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on January 30th, 1933, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. He made it clear what

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his plans for the city were. What is ugly in Berlin, we shall remove. What happened in 33,

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especially, was that the gay Berlin dive bars started to be raided. Those things had allowed,

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were allowed to kind of exist under the radar for up until 1933, really. The Nazi police started

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paying attention to the dive bars. They were harassing the customers. They were closing them

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down. You might get arrested. The El Dorado, home to some of the most famous transvestites in the

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city, was taken over and turned into Nazi headquarters. Goebbels sang up the name of

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every book as it was consigned to the flames. Legend has it.

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The exodus was almost immediate. Bertolt Bracht and Kurt Weill,

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George Gross, Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, just a small number of the thousands were driven

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into exile. Berlin, for a short 14 years, had been a crucible of history, brimming with a

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volatile mix of sex, arts, and politics, laced with disillusionment and spiked with decadence.

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The Babylon on the river Spree was no more.