Berlin’s homosexual scene after 1918 was itself the critical context for the growth of sex tourism, and relied specifically on a popular, homosexual press with not only a reading public but also advertisers and business supporters. Although failing to eliminate all censorship, as noted before, the Weimar Republic eased laws, permitting far greater freedom for Berlin’s press and print media, film industry, arts institutions, and entertainment venues. From 1919 until February 1933, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty separate homosexual German-language journal titles appeared in Berlin, some weekly or monthly and others less frequently.3 These supplemented, of course, Berlin’s first homosexual periodicals: Adolf Brand’s Der Eigene and Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch. By contrast, there were practically no such journals published anywhere else in the world until after 1945. Only a few issues of one French-language periodical with significant homosexual content, Akademos, were published in Paris in 1909 by the French writer Andre Fersen, who corresponded with both Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand. The single English-language homosexual periodical appeared in Chicago in 1924, edited by the German-American Henry Gerber, who was stationed in the early 1920s as a soldier in the Rhineland, where he established contacts with homosexual rights activists in Berlin. One German-language Swiss monthly, Der Kreis (The circle), was published in Zurich from 1932 to 1967—inspired initially by Berlin’s homosexual press and especially the journals of publisher Friedrich Radszuweit.4
The homosexual press of Weimar Berlin was therefore truly singular. The first issue of Die Freundschaft was sold in the summer of 1919 and monthly thereafter—barring a short hiatus during the hyperinflation of 1923—until February 1933. Arguably the most successful of the Berlin titles, Die Freundschaft provided a broad range of features, including news coverage and political commentary. Catering to sexual minorities, a few, including Der Eigene, maintained a relatively highbrow literary profile. For a short period beginning in 1927 there was even a transvestite periodical, Transvestit, which catered specifically to male and female cross-dressers. The lesbian journals Die Freundin, Garçonne, and Frauen Liebe published serialized romance novels. Although owned and produced by men, the lesbian journals served their constituents effectively, not only as a mouthpiece for cultural interests but also with the political and social reportage of women journalists, including progressive heterosexual feminists such as Helene Stöcker, the prominent pacifist and advocate for birth control. For example, Die Freundin published lesbian opinion polls on a range of issues from abortion to regulated prostitution, and exhorted lesbian readers to vote for gay-friendly parties and candidates in local and national elections.
Certainly the large number of titles reflected the vicissitudes of market demand, and many journals were extremely short-lived. In some cases editors were compelled to change the names of titles to circumvent censors. Most often these ran afoul of the official minders because of nude photography or singles advertisements that were deemed too obvious and therefore culpable of “solicitation.” In 1927 a new censorship law was introduced. Although the law targeted primarily nudist and soft-porn publications, it also forced vendors to avoid the open display of homosexual titles. When officials investigated the public sale of potentially offensive periodicals in 1926, they produced photos—preserved now in a Berlin archive—of two of the busiest newspaper kiosks in the city, located at Potsdamer Platz and the Friedrichstraße train terminal, revealing just how openly nudist and homosexual titles were purveyed.5 Displayed in the photos of the kiosks are not only naked bodies from the covers of nudist periodicals but also several widely distributed homosexual magazines.
Almost all of the journals included advertising. Most common were announcements for same-sex bars, clubs, and cafés. The papers also advertised the goods and services of doctors, dentists, lawyers, private detectives, stationers, haberdashers, barbers, and interior designers. Most appealed directly to homosexual customers, often with an implicit argument—sometimes baldly formulated—that “friends patronize friends.” Certainly for a homosexual man with anal syphilis or a persistent throat rash a gay paper would be the best place to seek the name of an informed and discreet doctor. Those with secrets to keep—and facing blackmail—might find a private detective who investigated extortion threats. Cross-dressers naturally appreciated sympathetic milliners or dressmakers who could tailor for large or awkward sizes. Some business owners—gay, lesbian, or straight—viewed advertising in a gay or lesbian journal as a clever marketing ploy, though it also risked the perception of a self-outing and open membership in the broader homosexual community.
Gay and lesbian publications also included singles ads placed by individuals seeking love relationships. The larger periodicals achieved readerships outside of Berlin and frequently carried notices from all corners of Germany and Austria, as well as German speakers in other parts of Europe. As Fritz H. admitted during a police interrogation in the mid-1930s, he was first drawn to Berlin from his Tyrolean village in 1924 to meet the man with whom he had entered into a correspondence through a singles ad in the Berlin homosexual paper Eros. The most popular journals, such as Die Freundschaft, boasted subscriptions exceeding ten thousand and an international readership; distribution was as far-flung as North and South America. Die Freundschaft also offered its readers, for postage and a small fee, up-to-date urban guides of homosexual and gay-friendly establishments in European and North American cities. In this manner the Berlin journals facilitated the growth of a worldwide, Germanophone community, established not only through personal, face-to-face contact in the urban setting of Berlin but also within the pages of weekly and monthly periodicals.
Many mainstream commercial travel guides, which became increasingly popular throughout the 1920s, alluded to Berlin’s sexual peculiarities. However, these references were oblique and likely mistaken for heterosexual prostitution or suggestive cabaret acts, at least by the uninitiated. The homosexual press was more forthcoming. Die Freundschaft sponsored the Internationale Reiseführer in 1920 (a kind of proto–Spartacus International Gay Guide, which is published today), listing not only fifty-four gay and lesbian venues in Berlin but also restaurants and cafés throughout Germany and Europe.6 Of course, the homosexual press advertised meetings, special social events, and transvestite balls, as well as bars, clubs, restaurants, and cafés.
This remarkable Berlin milieu attracted a large number of foreign visitors, including many homosexuals and some lesbians. Tourists began to trickle into the German capital almost as soon as the war ended in November 1918. The chaos of the early Weimar Republic made Berlin an exciting, if unusually dangerous, destination. The galloping inflation, which began during the last years of the war and only crested at the end of 1923—culminating in currency reform—was also an attraction, since visitors with hard currency could live like royalty. As the lesbian author Djuna Barnes (1892–1982) reported after visiting Berlin in 1921, “It was very nice, things so cheap for us that you felt almost ashamed to be there. Full of buggers from America who bought boys cheap.”7
The Americans who might have indulged their taste for bargain-basement sex included the modernist artist Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), the author Robert McAlmon (1895–1956), and the Broadway and television actor Harrison Dowd (1897–1964), with whom Barnes cavorted on her visit. Hartley, who had lived in Berlin before the war and had likely fallen in love with a Prussian officer (who seems to have inspired some of Hartley’s most exalted and militaristic work—and who, appropriately perhaps, died in combat), was a veritable habitué of 1920s Berlin. According to Hartley’s biographer, the artist attended large transvestite costume balls and patronized homosexual bars frequented by male hustlers.8 As Hartley later recalled, “Life in Berlin then was at the height of heights—that is to the highest pitch of sophistication and abandon. None of us had seen anything quite like the spectacle.”9
Robert McAlmon was no less inspired. Like so many Americans—including Barnes—McAlmon was based in Paris. A regular of Gertrude Stein
’s salon, McAlmon is remembered for his memoir Being Geniuses Together (1938), which documented the “lost generation” of American expats in interwar Paris. He also published an obscure volume in 1925, Distinguished Air: Grim Fairy Tales, describing Berlin’s raucous nightlife. In this thinly veiled autobiographical account of his 1923 visit during the Great Inflation, McAlmon depicted a debauched society of pleasure-seeking tourists, mostly western Europeans and Americans, whose hard currency could support all-night parties in bars and dance halls, fueled by cheap and plentiful cocaine, with a supporting cast of penurious Berliners, including cross-dressing drug dealers and prostitutes of both sexes. As one McAlmon character put it, “These boys are all right, but, my god, they must have difficulty in knowing which are their own bodies, and which limbs are their own, after all the gymnastics and promiscuity they’ve been through.”10
The American architect Philip Johnson (1906–2005) arrived in Berlin in 1928 to study the Bauhaus and the emerging International Style. As Johnson’s biographer Franz Schulze ascertained, Johnson also availed himself of Berlin’s male prostitution. “The Americans were the conquerors of old Germany and the young Germans were eager to accommodate them,” Johnson reported. “Paris was never that gastfreundlich” (hospitable). Unlike most non-German tourists, however, Johnson was a fluent German speaker, claiming later, “I learned it the best way, using ‘the horizontal method.’ ”11 American artist Grant Wood (1891–1942) also found Berlin revelatory, although his visit served rather to inhibit than to liberate him. After the war, Wood traveled repeatedly to Paris, where he sampled or at least witnessed the sexual hedonism of the 1920s. His 1928 travels in Germany transformed his life, however: the Flemish and German Old Masters of the Pinakothek in Munich were an “aesthetic epiphany,” shaping Wood’s subsequent style; in contrast, Berlin’s openly homosexual culture was an unpleasant, jarring sensory epiphany. The jolt was so great, his biographer suggests, that unlike Isherwood or Auden, Wood retreated not only from Europe but also from the libertinism of urban life, returning to the American Midwest and his native Iowa.12
Berlin was a revelation even for other Germans. In his autobiography, The Turning Point, Klaus Mann (1906–1949), the homosexual son of writer Thomas Mann, described his first Berlin foray from his native Munich as a seventeen-year-old: “I first came to Berlin in 1923…the inflation was approaching its staggering climax.” About the prostitutes on Tauentzienstraße, a famous strip for male and female prostitutes just east of the Kurfürstendamm, Mann wrote,
One of them brandished a supple cane and leered at me as I passed by. “Good evening Madam,” I said. She whispered in my ear: “Want to be my slave? Costs only six billions and a cigarette. A bargain.” There were girls who couldn’t have been older than 16 or 17. I was told that some of the most handsome and elegant were actually boys in drag…. Must look kind of funny, I thought—a boy’s body with a pink, lace-trimmed shirt…. I was magnetized by the scum. Berlin—the Berlin I perceived or imagined—was gorgeously corrupt. I wanted to stay much longer.13
As Mann documents here, the Great Inflation, which wiped out the life savings of the German middle classes, drove many to prostitution and crime. Its cultural implications became a popular preoccupation, and an inspiration for works such as Hans Ostwald’s Moral History of the Inflation. Not only the salacious but also the practical consequences of the inflation attracted pleasure-seeking tourists, whom Ostwald claimed were popularly described as “guests from Dollarika and from the Dutch Guldenland.”14
The currency reform that helped to stabilize the republic after 1923 did little to alter Berlin’s appeal, such as it was, or its reputation. When young Oxford poet Brian Howard (1905–1958)—the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s flamboyant homosexual character “Anthony Blanche” in Brideshead Revisited—came to Berlin in 1927, he was astonished (disingenuously?) by Berlin’s homosexual hedonism. On one of his first nights out alone in Berlin, Howard was compelled to sit at the same table with a German who looked exactly like the family doctor back home: “Fifty, silvery, rather rich-looking, with a dark blue bow tie.” The young Howard was pleased to discover that the man spoke English and readily engaged him in discussion. After a short conversation, the German suggested that they move to another locale, a so-called dance palace. Not understanding the character of this second establishment, Howard was jolted to encounter his first homosexual ball. “Presently, the cabaret finished,” Howard explained, “and we secured a table by the dancing floor. I remember distinctly the precise moment at which I became sensible of the true nature of my companion and surroundings…. [W]hen the band commenced, instantly this enormous floor was convulsed with movement, and I hiccoughed with astonishment to see only men dancing together.” Howard soon took his leave—but without the older German gentleman.15
The most famous, or perhaps most notorious, Oxbridge graduates (or onetime students) who indulged Berlin’s unusual libidinal offerings were members of the literary circle that counted W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood as its constitutive members. Both men became apostles for the city’s open homosexuality. Although they invited, hosted, and capered with a large group of English visitors, their closest associates remained Stephen Spender (1909–1995), Gabriel Carritt (1908–1999), Alan Bush (1900–1995), John Lehmann (1907–1987), John Layard (1891–1974), and Arthur Calder-Marshall (1908–1992), as well as the artist Rupert Doone (1903–1966). Of course, it was Auden who first moved to Berlin, in October 1928, enticing Isherwood to visit in March 1929. Isherwood was the one who settled in Berlin, however, and ultimately made his name as the chronicler of Weimar.
Like Isherwood, Auden experienced a “coming out” of sorts after his first emotionally satisfying love affairs, prompting him finally to break off his engagement with a young woman in England. Early on, Auden discovered the most popular public cruising areas. In his unpublished “Berlin Journal,” he recorded his first, failed attempt to take home a male prostitute from the Passage arcade, whose one entrance extended south from Unter den Linden. Alone one evening, Auden ventured out: “I tried to pick up a boy out in the Passage. He retired to a side passage where there were views to look at through a glass. I looked at the smokes and didn’t dare to sneak a look at him. He went away and stood in the middle of the passage, like a faun. I went home. ‘You can’t be such a coward’ I said and set off back again buying cigarettes to make an excuse for a conversation, but he was gone.”16
In his journal Auden kept a careful tally of relationships—exclusively younger men or boys—the venues where they met, and the precise nature of their sexual encounters.17 Isherwood followed Auden’s example, and his experiences were similar. In a letter to John Layard from January 1930, sent from his rented room at the Institute for Sexual Science, Isherwood mentioned no fewer than eight past and present love interests—Berthold, Otto, Heinz, Pieps, Frantz, the brothers Nowak, and Gunther—all of whom were at least “occasional” prostitutes. “Have also been seeing Frantz, who is much improved,” Isherwood reported to Layard. “But we had a row the other day, because I refused to give tischgeld [money for food for the table] to his girl, whom I’d very good naturedly given about ten drinks to at Frantz’s suggestion.” Prostitution or financial largesse provided Isherwood with his sexual liaisons: “I’m still known as a millionaire, but considered extremely stingy, because I simply cannot afford to give boys more than ten marks, a meal and drinks. I don’t know how Wystan [Auden] managed.”18
Isherwood and Auden were hardly unique. In 1930, Berlin—with a population that by then had increased to 4 million—hosted 280,000 tourists. That same year nearly 40,000 Americans were registered as guests in Berlin hotels. The relaxation of closing hours in 1926 permitted most establishments to remain open around the clock, except from 3 to 6 a.m.; even this restriction was nominal, and the after-hours clubs were always open.19 The number of gay and lesbian locales in Berlin by this point has been estimated at somewhere between eighty and one hundred. In his 1956 memoir, Gerald Ha
milton (1888–1970), the real-life inspiration for Christopher Isherwood’s “Mr. Norris,” claimed that there were no fewer than “132 homosexual cafes registered as such with the tolerant police.”20 The number that patronized these establishments is impossible to determine, though Magnus Hirschfeld suggested a homosexual population for the city at this time ranging from 50,000 to 100,000.
Certainly this reputation influenced Oxford-educated Maurice Bowra (1898–1971), who visited Berlin on numerous occasions, often with friends. Bowra’s contemporary, Cambridge Provost Baron Noel Annan (1916–2000), claimed bluntly, “[Bowra] was the centre of the great homosexual Mafia if you like to call it, of the twenties and thirties.”21 Bowra himself conceded leadership of “The Immoral Front,” “the 69th International,” or “The Homintern,” and anchored a circle of friends—some but not all “like-minded” or homosexual—including John Sparrow, Bob Boothby, Duff Cooper, Christopher Sykes, and Adrian Bishop, who capered with him in Berlin. Bowra had visited Berlin before the war and again in 1922, but he embarked on his first sexual foray in 1928. While negotiating sleeping arrangements with travel companion Sparrow, Bowra asked, “Do we have a room with two beds or two rooms. For the first, it is cheaper…. For the second, it might be better if we were to introduce guests late at night. But perhaps one takes them elsewhere?”22 According to Bowra’s biographer, Leslie Mitchell, “Germany was not the only country to offer sexual opportunity, but in Bowra’s mind, there seems to have been the clear idea that each country has its own menu fixe. It was Germany for the homosexual and France for the heterosexual.”23 Unlike Auden and Isherwood, Bowra never sustained an erotic relationship and restricted his homosexual dalliances to the German capital, too timid or conservative to risk exposure at home in England.
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