Berlin

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.

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.”