These regulations were ineffectual because only a small percentage of the prostitutes paid any attention to them, and the police, many of whom were on the take from pimps, made little effort to enforce them. In 1900 only 1,689 women registered as prostitutes, but the police estimated that over 20,000 were active in the trade. At night they patrolled Unter den Linden as if it were Lovers’ Lane, and some of the girls made a specialty of turning tricks in open carriages as they rolled through the Tiergarten. The most heavily infested area was the Friedrichstrasse and the side streets running off it near the Linden. By day this was a busy commercial district, though it was beginning to look a little shabby because some of the better shops were moving to fancier addresses in the “New West.” The coffee houses were filled during the afternoons with portly bourgeois ladies stuffing themselves with kuchen, but during the night they catered to parchment-faced men who brought along private supplies of morphine and cocaine. At the corner of Friedrich-strasse and Behrenstrasse stood the Panopticum, a kind of amusement gallery featuring the “fattest and thinnest persons in the world,” the “lion-men Lionel and Lentini,” and (after 1908) the Captain of Köpenick in person, sitting on a stool in his uniform. By night Wilhelm Voigt and company gave way to hookers so numerous that, as one observer complained, “no decent woman can enter the area without being considered fair game.”
The Friedrichstadt also harbored a number of venerable ballrooms that enjoyed a boom at the turn of the century due to the patronage of tourists and naive provincials looking for a hot night on the town. According to a student of the scene, men in frock coats stood inside the doors of these establishments and relieved any innocent-looking visitor of a five-mark cover charge. The rube would then be obliged to order champagne to impress the young woman who instantly materialized at his side. Though he might have preferred an inexpensive domestic brand of drink, the poor provincial would invariably end up with “something French” at eighteen marks the bottle. “Were it not for the tourists and the rustics,” noted the observer, “these places could not have survived.”
The impresarios of Berlin’s raucous nightlife often belonged to underworld societies called Ringuereine (sporting associations). These had their origins in an officially sanctioned organization—the Reichsverein ehemaliger Strafgefangener (Reich Association of Former Prisoners)—which was designed to rehabilitate ex-convicts. Almost immediately, the former convicts took over the association and broke it up into smaller groups responsible for drug dealing, smuggling, prostitution, and murder-for-hire. Prospective members of the clubs were required to have served at least two years in prison and to swear an oath to abide by all the group’s rules. Dues were stiff, as were the penalties for transgressing any of the codes of conduct. Errant members faced beatings, expulsion, or death, depending on the seriousness of their infraction. In exchange for absolute loyalty, club-brothers enjoyed the right to ply the various criminal trades favored by their group. Should they be arrested, they could count on their club’s providing first-rate legal assistance and the funds to bribe witnesses and officials. As masters of their criminal universe, the Ringvereine were enshrouded in a romantic mythos much like that which later surrounded the Mafia in America.
Berlin Is Not Sodom!
Noting a proliferation in the German capital of Lustknaben (young boys catering to male homosexuals) and “women with lesbian tendencies,” the author of a pamphlet entitled “Fast-living Nights in the Friedrichstadt” insisted that Berlin had become the “El Dorado of an international rabble spewed out by the other great cities of Europe.” As if the city on the Spree did not have enough of its own corruption, this critic fumed, it was “welcoming with open arms the vice-ridden scum from the rest of the world.” The rhetoric was a bit hyperbolic, but turn-of-the-century Berlin did harbor an especially sizable homosexual community, many of whose members hailed from other parts of Germany and Europe. In this respect, Wilhelmian Berlin anticipated the “Spree-Babylon” of the Weimar era.
Magnus Hirschfeld, a contemporary authority on this subject and a homosexual himself, argued in a book entitled Berlins drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex) that the German capital attracted many “persons with other-than-normal sexual inclinations” because they could live there relatively free of interference. Such freedom derived not from official tolerance (male homosexuality was explicitly proscribed by Paragraph 175 of the Prussian Penal Code) but from the opportunity to live unnoticed in the “teeming sea of houses and humanity” that constituted modern Berlin. In the city’s labyrinthine apartment complexes, wrote Hirschfeld, “the residents in front rarely know the residents in back, much less care how they live.” The capital’s internal geography, its varied districts separated by vast distances, allowed people to lead double lives. A Berliner living in the east could meet regularly with a friend in the south without his or her neighbors having a clue. Hirschfeld knew of a but-toned-down gay lawyer with offices in Potsdam who spent his nights at a seedy Kneipe in the Friedrichstadt with the likes of “Revolver-Heini, Butcher-Hermann, and Amerika-Franzl.” There was a regular round of private dinners and artistic evenings in the gay community, especially among the wealthy. Hirschfeld was invited to an all-male dinner attended exclusively by nobles. While dining on exquisite food, the guests chatted about the latest Wagner performances, “for which practically all educated Berlin homosexuals have a particularly strong sympathy.” 96 He also attended a private party at one of Berlin’s grandest hotels, which included a performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor with an all-male cast. After the performance there was a dance, and “although the wine flowed freely, nothing indecent occurred.” Such was probably not the case in an opulent suite at the Hotel Bristol, where Friedrich Krupp, Germany’s wealthiest industrialist, regularly entertained young Italian waiters employed at the hotel at his expense. Berlin gays willing to risk attention from the police could frequent well-known “cruising points,” such as the exotic postcard shop at the Panopticum or the chestnut grove at the Sing-akademie. Drinking establishments catering to a homosexual clientele also abounded in the city, especially in the Friedrichstadt. On the eve of World War I, Berlin had about forty homosexual bars, and the police estimated that there were between 1,000 and 2,000 male prostitutes.
Although Berlin increasingly took homosexuality in stride as another dimension of life in the modern megalopolis, the city could still be scandalized when gay behavior intersected with high politics. This happened with a vengeance in 1907/8 when a group of friends of Kaiser Wilhelm II, known as the Liebenberger Circle, were exposed as homosexuals by the muckraking journalist Maximilian Harden. At the center of the storm was Prince Philipp (“Phili”) zu Eulenburg, a close confidant of the kaiser, who had served as Berlin’s ambassador to Vienna. Eulenburg often entertained His Majesty and other illustrious friends at Liebenberg, his country estate outside the capital. In return, Wilhelm sometimes took Phili along on his ocean cruises. Some of the others caught up in the scandal were Count Kuno von Moltke, commandant of the Berlin garrison; Count Wilhelm von Hohenau, one of the kaiser’s aides-de-camp; and Baron Axel von Varnbüler, Württemburg’s diplomatic representative in Berlin. None of these men was openly homosexual, for they all understood that they could not acknowledge their predilection without social disgrace and possible legal prosecution. They might have continued to pursue their double lives without interference had not Harden, editor of the Berlin journal Die Zukunft, decided that they encouraged the kaiser’s illusions of grandeur. Using inside information about the men’s intimate affairs supplied by Chancellor Bernard von Bülow, who also considered the Liebenbergers a menace, Harden published two articles calling attention to the group’s activities. He did not use the word “homosexual,” but everyone knew what he meant.