Berlin

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.