In the end, Berlin’s famous sex clubs were probably not much raunchier than similar places in other cities around the world. What distinguished them from their counterparts in America and in other European cities was their openness, their brazenness. The accessibility of vice was perhaps the main reason behind Weimar Berlin’s reputation for singular decadence. Another reason was the desire on the part of visiting foreigners to see the city as super-naughty, since this made them feel more daring. At the same time, however, it also made them feel morally superior to the natives. As Stephen Spender observed, “One of the contributions of Germany to the rest of civilization ever since the time of Tacitus has been to make it feel virtuous in comparison with the Germans.”
Among the foreigners attracted to “Babylon on the Spree” in the early twenties was the American writer and publisher Robert McAlmon. As a bisexual and occasional drug-user, McAlmon was in his element. In an autobiographical piece called Distinguished Air (Grim Fairy Tales) he recounted his experience during a night of excess in 1921. At a seedy club he met “an American fairy” named Foster, all camped up with waved hair and plucked eyebrows. “I wouldn’t look like this in Paris,” confided Foster, “but it goes down all right here.” Then McAlmon encountered an English homosexual, Carrol, who admitted to being one of the “awful rats who have come to Berlin because of the low exchange.” Carrol and his friends could not resist the “lovely window displays” and the smashing shopping, even though they knew the “natives can’t buy.” McAlmon and his crowd moved on to the Adlon, where they gorged on “cocktails, pat’ de foie gras, three bottles of wine, pheasant, Russian eggs, pastry, coffee, and several fines to round out the meal.” Then it was on to the Germania Palast and drinks with a gentleman from San Francisco who had “three automobiles and all the bitches in Berlin trying to keep up with him.” For a break they went outside and snorted cocaine. After a stop at a nightclub on the Kurfürs-tendamm filled with coke addicts, they ended their tour at the Oh la la!, a lesbian bar that did not open until 6:00 A.M. There they watched nude dancers, drank champagne, took some more drugs, and finally vomited it all up on the floor.
McAlmon did not mean for this report to be inspirational; like many visitors, he eventually tired of Berlin’s strenuous sleaze and moved on. The sad reality, these foreigners soon saw, was that the German capital could be quite depressing and tawdry under its veneer of glitter. Of course, the foreigners had the luxury of abandoning Berlin when they had had enough of the place; the natives had to stay on and try to survive.
Living in Berlin during the inflation years meant putting up with increasing social disorder. Because farmers refused to sell their produce for depreciated marks, there was a growing shortage of food. Shops in the poorer quarters of town were frequently looted. Strikes in crucial sectors of the economy became endemic as even the better paid workers saw their purchasing power evaporate. In summer 1923 streetcar, elevated train, and gas works employees all walked off the job. In August 1923 workers at the Reich Printing Plant struck, shutting down the production of paper money just as the nation was due to get a much-needed fix of 50 million mark bills.
The strikers, for all their grievances, were better off than the growing legion of unemployed. In mid-September 1923 Berlin had 126,393 registered unemployed. On October 9 the figure had climbed to 159,526, and by late November it was over 360,000. The city was able to provide limited unemployment relief for only 145,000 people. The combination of escalating joblessness, astronomical prices, and the old human need to find a scapegoat for one’s misery was too combustible a mix not to blow up, and in early November 1923 the inevitable explosion occurred in the form of deadly rioting with ugly anti-Semitic undertones.
The focus of the action was Berlin’s Scheunenviertel—or “barn district”—a poor quarter north of Alexanderplatz that had become a haven for Eastern European Jews fleeing persecution in their homelands. The immediate postwar era had brought a new wave of refugees from Poland and Russia. The majority of Berliners, including assimilated Jews living in the wealthier western and southern districts, tended to shun the Scheunenviertel as alien and possibly dangerous. Venturing into the district in 1920, Joseph Roth found a “strange sad ghetto world” devoid of the racing autos and bright lights of western Berlin. The streets were filled with “grotesque eastern figures” holding “a thousand years of pain in their eyes.” While the men shuffled along in black caftans, the women carried their children on their backs “like sacks of dirty laundry.” Altogether, the Scheunenviertel Jews seemed like “an avalanche of disaster and dirt, growing in volume and rolling irresistibly from the East over Germany.”
Right-wing papers in Berlin had been claiming for some time that the Ostjuden in the Scheunenviertel were feeding off the misery of “decent Germans,” and the charges were finding a receptive audience among the unemployed. On November 5 a rumor circulated among the jobless that they would get no payments that day because Jews from the Scheunenviertel had bought up all the funds to lend at usurious interest rates. Indignant, a mob descended on the Scheunenviertel and began to loot shops. Proprietors who tried to defend their property were pulled into the street and beaten. The owner of a kosher butcher shop was pummeled so badly that he died from his injuries. Jews caught in the streets were often stripped of their clothes, which were thought to contain precious foreign currency sewed inside.
Jews in Berlins Scheunenviertel, 1929
The police did not arrive on the scene until much of the damage had already been done. They closed off parts of the quarter but did not immediately expel the rioters. In fact, the first to be arrested were Jews, who were taken to the police barracks in the Alexanderplatz and made to stand for hours with their hands over their heads. By midnight the district was calm, though full of signs that it had just been a war zone: discarded booty littered the streets, shards of glass from shop windows covered the sidewalks, bonfires smoldered here and there, and some stores sported signs saying “Christian-owned.”