Hotel Adlon, 1914
Lorenz Adlon had promised to build a tour de force of functional magnificence, and this is precisely what he achieved. When the Hotel Adlon opened on October 23, 1907, Berlin’s newspapers gushed over suites that were “half-museum, half-living room,” bathrooms outfitted with the latest plumbing, and a vast central hall featuring a bust of the kaiser in the style of a Roman emperor. Like no other building in Berlin, the Adlon evoked the pride and power of the new German empire. As one journalist commented, upon entering its stately conference rooms one could easily visualize diplomats redrawing the map of Europe and captains of industry shaping the economic destiny of the world.
The Adlon became a favorite stopover for the globetrotting plutocracy. It was especially popular with Americans, who appreciated its advanced plumbing. Soon other grand hotels sprang up to catch the travel-heavy crowd. The Esplanade, a worthy rival to the Adlon, opened in 1908 on Bellevue Strasse, close to the Pots-damer Platz. It too enjoyed the patronage of Kaiser Wilhelm, for whom one of its grandest reception rooms was named. Like the Adlon, the Esplanade imitated the English fashion of five o’clock tea, during which the jeunesse doree of Wilhelmian Berlin gathered to gossip and flirt. Slightly less opulent was the Excelsior, which went up across from the Anhalter Bahnhof in 1906-8. According to the snobbish Huret, the public rooms of these grand hotels displayed what passed for “elegance” in imperial Berlin. Here one found “officers with scarred faces, Jewish bankers and their wives, envoys on their way through town, young diplomats on the lookout for rich heiresses, Russian dowagers draped in costly raiment, American ladies wearing flowing veils and gloves running all the way up to their elbows, laughing and talking loudly to the clean-shaven, bespectacled men at their sides.”
The new hotels helped to make Berlin a major tourist destination for the first time in its history. In 1913 the number of overnight stays reached 1.4 million, double what it had been in 1896. Between 1909 and 1913 an average of 262,000 foreign guests visited the city annually, of whom 11 percent were Americans and 36 percent Russians. It is noteworthy that Berlin should already have been a favorite among the two nationalities that were to have such a lasting and fateful impact on the German capital.
Berlin Noir
The tourist hordes did not descend on Berlin simply because the hotel situation had improved. The erstwhile capital of Prussian rectitude was finally becoming an amusing place to spend some time, especially at night. Though Berlin was not yet famous around the world for its “decadence,” as it would be in the 1920s and early 1930s, Europe’s cognoscenti of dissolution were already smacking their lips over the wild things that went on there when the sun went down. After taking several nocturnal tours through Berlin in 1900, the ever-observant Huret could write: “The night life of Berlin is surprisingly lively. Will it surpass even Paris in this respect? Will we have to find a new location for the contemporary Babylon and Nineveh? The carousing continues all night long on Unter den Linden, on the Friedrich-strasse, and around Potsdamer and Leipziger Platz. Many nightspots don’t close at all. After the last guests have left, the clubs are quickly cleaned up and then it’s time to start all over again.” Hans Ostwald, who was an authority on Berlin’s seedier side, boasted (a bit prematurely): “If Paris was formerly regarded as the capital of vice and the birthplace of all forbidden pleasures, and if the super-decadent once spoke in hushed tones of the unbeatable delights of Budapest, Cairo, and Rome, today the whole world agrees that it is Berlin which has the most enticing nights.”
One of the reasons Berlin’s nights were so enticing was that the local authorities, in the interest of promoting tourism and cultivating a reputation for urban flair, did not enforce existing vice laws very strictly. According to a law on the books since 1866, establishments serving alcoholic beverages were supposed to remain closed between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a. m., but clubs and bars could apply for special exemption, and they were rarely turned down. Echoing the observation of Monsieur Huret, a police report of 1900 admitted that in the main streets of central Berlin the traditional Ruhepause (rest period) in the middle of the night had “almost completely disappeared.” Promoters of the “new Berlin” were quick to convey the message that this was a city that did not go to bed. Thus a Berlin Guide for Connoisseurs (1912) enthused: “Two o’clock at night. Couples emerge from the Palais de danse and the Moulin Rouge. The glowing red letters at Maxim are extinguished. That is the sign for the lights to go on and the champagne buckets to be set out in the casinos on Unter den Linden, at Toni Grtinfeld’s club, at Monbijou in the JagerstraBe, in the New Buffet in the Franzosische StraBe, and so forth... . This is also the hour of the coquettes, who now, all fresh and frisky, begin their ‘day’ and completely dominate the milieu.”
Dominate indeed. As a garrison town, Berlin had always had plenty of prostitutes, but in the late nineteenth century their numbers exploded as thousands of young women from the countryside gravitated to the big city in search of work. Well-paying jobs being exceedingly rare for women, many of the girls sold their bodies to make ends meet. Morality crusaders, of which Berlin had its fair share, complained that it was impossible for a gentleman to walk the streets without being constantly accosted by brazen hussies.
In 1891 a sensational murder case cast a lurid light on the prostitution scene in Berlin, bringing calls for an official crackdown. It seems that a pimp named Heinze and his prostitute wife broke into a local church to steal the silver, then killed a night watchman who interrupted their thievery. Arrested and brought to trial, Heinze showed his contempt for the proceedings by swigging from a bottle of champagne in the dock. Indignation over the scandal was so great that the kaiser himself intervened, demanding tougher laws to deal with prostitution and pimping. In response, the imperial government submitted to the Reichstag a law to quarantine prostitutes in brothels supervised by the police. This would, it was claimed, stamp out procurers (not to mention provide a new source of income for the police). Yet to many lawmakers this seemed more like abetting a crime than curtailing it, and the regulation was not instituted nationwide (only Hamburg maintained state-run brothels). In Berlin, street prostitutes and their pimps continued to be a highly visible feature of the nightly scene.
Unable or unwilling to keep prostitutes off the streets, officials in the imperial capital sought to regulate their behavior. All prostitutes were required to register with the police and to submit to regular medical examinations. If a woman was found to be infected with a venereal disease, she was barred from plying her trade until certified as cured. Whores were banned from Unter den Linden and could not solicit business from open carriages. In areas where they were allowed to operate, prostitutes were prohibited from “attracting attention to themselves by standing on curbs or walking up and down in the street”; nor were they allowed to appear in public in the company of their pimps.