by Whitney Otto
Every patron in the room was also masked, and because they were nearly all dressed alike in evening clothes—the women sparkled, the men in tuxes—it was nearly impossible to discern who was who. Between the hidden identities and the drinking and smoking, the audience was fairly inclined toward uninhibited behavior. That the audience was largely well-off and sexually straight made the evening twice as amusing for the girls in Charlotte’s group, if only because the Monkey Bar had a reputation as a lesbian bar that tolerated men and occasional adventurous tourists. A female hostess, in a beautiful blue velvet frock coat, trousers, and no shirt, her breasts exposed, wandered the floor, a rhinestone choker around her neck and a delicate jeweled riding crop in her hand. In one corner sat butch bubis, little gamines on their laps, near another table of women in tuxedos and horned-rimmed eyeglasses, their faces powdered white.
The girls had considered going to one of the occult clubs, with their potent mix of drugs, sex, and magic, which served, among other intoxicants, white roses that had been dipped in a mixture of chloroform and ether, from which one bit off the frozen petals, but chose their old haunt instead.
“I can’t remember the last time that we were here,” said Maria.
“It’s been two or three years,” said Ines.
“The last time I was here, they did this thing where they reenacted Greek myths, except with goddesses pursuing and deceiving and violating mortal women,” said Maria, who added, “I once dated Io and Persephone.”
“At least it wasn’t Ceres and Persephone,” said Neile of the mother and daughter goddesses. She smelled of hash and was well into her second drink.
“Yeah,” said Maria. “That’s another bar.”
As a single blue spotlight lit a man and a woman lying on a bare mattress on the stage, Charlotte rose to go to the ladies’ room, but Grete Grun, again, her eyes scanning the room, placed a hand on her arm, holding her back.
“What?” whispered Charlotte.
Grete’s eyes, peering through the holes in her mask, were almost pleading.
“What is it, Grete? You haven’t been you all night,” said Charlotte.
“Shhh!” whispered Grete Grun.
“I’m coming back,” said Charlotte, “though who wouldn’t prefer spending an evening in a ladies’ room?”
Grete Grun shook her head. “Stay.”
The naked couple onstage caressed each other as a scratchy record gave a clinical play-by-play of the sex act.
. . . The man stimulates the woman’s nipples and clitoris in an attempt to arouse the woman as well as himself. This is known as foreplay . . .
Ines leaned in to the two women. “Didn’t this used to be a girls’ bar?”
“Maybe they’re in the ladies’ room,” said Charlotte.
“What are we talking about?” asked Maria, noticing Grete’s hand on Charlotte’s wrist.
“Nothing,” said Grete Grun.
. . . When the woman is sufficiently lubricated the man will insert his penis as they lie, face-to-face, in the missionary position . . .
“Grete, I really have to—” said Charlotte. She could see Grete trying to relax, which, paradoxically, had the effect of making her seem more agitated.
. . . They reach a climax simultaneously . . .
Neile laughed. “Mädchen, I haven’t been with a man in a long time, but I know it can’t have changed that much.”
“Seriously,” said Ines, “who is this show for?”
It was then the group at the table realized that, with the exception of the hostess, one or two couples, and themselves, the usual girls were in rather short supply.
Giselle announced that she and her boyfriend were going to leave, that it was late, and that the news about kitten + kohl’s award was fantastic, and that one would think they, as the token straight couple, should enjoy this show, but what the hell? “I don’t even think my parents do it like that,” she remarked, causing Maria to say, “Please don’t use the word parents.” Ines said, “Speaking of straight sex,” indicating the makeup of the audience, and Charlotte said, “Maybe they should post a sign,” and Maria said, pointing to the postcoital stage couple, “I think they did.” Grete Grun was too distracted to comment, and Neile too loaded.
As Giselle went to kiss everyone good-bye, Grete Grun stood, saying, a little too loudly, “Of course we’ll go with you. I hope you have a friend for me,” to Giselle’s boyfriend.
The stage couple finished copulating with sighs of satisfaction. The narration stopped for a second, with only the sound of the scratching record, before the final words: Heil, Hitler! as the girls followed Grete Grun, who was hurrying after Giselle and her boyfriend. Neile swallowed the rest of her drink and the remains of the other drinks on the table. As she trailed behind the group now crossing to the door, she bumped into the table of two couples who seemed like well-to-do young marrieds. As Neile went to apologize, she held the edge of their table and she put her face close to one of the wives, but instead of saying anything, she kissed the young wife full on the mouth.
“What’s wrong with you?” demanded Grete Grun, who had turned around in time to see the kiss. The girls, sans Giselle and her beau, were crowded into a cab, heading back to Charlotte’s studio. Everyone had left her mask on the table except for Grete.
“Me?” asked Neile. “Nothing. Nothing at all.” She stared out the window.
No one said anything. It had been nearly a month since Neile had been banned from racing cars. At the time she said she didn’t know if it was because she was Jewish, female, or gay, with everyone half hoping it was because she was female—female being the preferable prejudice—though no one believed it.
As the cab moved down nighttime Friedrichstrasse, Charlotte thought about how much she loved Berlin. All the parties, and the nights when she and her friends would migrate from cafés and bars to the apartments of other friends, to country places and the lake, and how beautiful it was to go boating in the moonlight. These days it often seemed that everything in postrevolution Germany was up for grabs. It was riding out the good in post-Kaiser Germany—progressive policies like the eight-hour workday, trade unions, health insurance, the Bauhaus, the New Woman—with the bad—the dance of various political groups like the Communists, the Catholic Center Party, the Socialist Democratic Party, the German Democratic Party, the capitalists, the nobles; a slight increase in street violence; the Nazi speeches that were becoming more common. And the sexual variety, which was both good and bad, depending.
Charlotte knew that she should be afraid, but she wasn’t; politics was politics, and, in truth, this flux inspired her. She was in the thick of a life she never could’ve had before the war, no matter how progressive her parents.
Then there were times when she thought maybe it was love that made everything burn so bright.
And then Maria reached over to untie Grete’s mask.
When the streetlights illuminated Grete’s face, no one was sure at first that the terrible bruise surrounding one eye, a smaller one on the inside of the other eye, along with the swelling at the bridge of her nose, weren’t a series of shadows. But all the girls responding at once (a sharp intake of breath, a soft “Jesus Christ”) confirmed that what they were seeing was what they were seeing.
• • •
“I had just walked into the hangar when I saw Michael and Hans doing something around my plane,” Grete Grun told the girls when they arrived at the studio, ignoring the glass of water Ines had given her.
“Michael and Hans?” asked Maria.
“Sons of the caretaker of the airfield, who is also the mechanic. I didn’t think much of it—I’ve know those boys since they were little, when I used to let them sit in the cockpit, sometimes take them up for rides. They’re maybe fifteen or sixteen now. And I didn’t think much of anything.”
“You said that,” said Maria gently.
“I did. But there was something different. It was the way they reacted to my coming into the shed. Like the
y had been caught.
“So I told them that they weren’t to touch my plane when I wasn’t around, and Michael, the older boy, came up to me and said, Who was I to tell him what he could and could not do? It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I hadn’t seen them around very much lately . . . You know, I didn’t realize how much taller he was than I. He came very close to me and said quietly that I was a Jewish swine and a man—he knew I wasn’t a ‘natural woman’—and so he thought it was time that I took it like a man.”
“You’re not even Jewish,” said Charlotte.
“What was the other kid doing?” asked Neile.
“Watching.”
It was almost as unnerving to imagine Grete intimidated as it was to hear the menace of these boys, the way they thought they could bully her and the fact that the bullying came to them so easily, so naturally. Charlotte could not imagine Grete without her swagger.
“So I said, ‘If I’m a man, then “giving it to me,” as you say, makes you a poof.’
“Then the next thing I knew I was on the ground, my face almost numb from the blow.” Grete Grun started sobbing. “I refuse to be scared,” she said, then quietly added, “There was no warning.”
“My God,” said Ines.
“I said his name. ‘Michael,’ I said, ‘you know me.’ It affected him enough that he hesitated. In the stillness, the door opened and in walked a pair of Nazis. ‘What’s this?’ they said, maybe not knowing I was a woman at first but helping me up anyway.
“I said it was nothing, a misunderstanding. Nobody moved. Then they walked to just outside the door, where they were waiting for a pilot friend of theirs.”
Looking at the girls, Charlotte could see the anger and fear in their faces and bodies. A tension had so tightened up every muscle that Charlotte felt as if she might go faint with the stress of it, the enveloping rage of it, the breathtaking terror of it.
“Those boys,” said Grete Grun, now composed, with a voice kissed by wonder, “acted as though nothing had happened. As if time had rewound.”
When Grete left that night, she forgot her leather gloves, her lucky flying gloves, as she called them. When Charlotte and Ines called to tell her, she said, “Keep them.”
They had never known her to fly without them, they said. To which she replied that all the gloves in the world couldn’t keep her safe as long as her plane was housed at that airfield, and wasn’t that precisely the point?
Charlotte and Ines didn’t feel it too much at first, aside from the directive to deal only with Jewish businesses, which they mostly had done anyway. Then Giselle Weiss was fired from her job at the film lab, where she was informed that she would no longer be “taking” employment from “good” German men. She said, “When people start identifying some people as ‘good,’ you just know that ‘bad’ as a designation is coming right up.” There was the burning of the Reichstag, with the Nazis blaming the Communists, then using the incident as a way to justify book burning and other demonstrations and repressions. As Bruno Blum said of the Reichstag destruction, “Communists? No, you must look at who profits from the incident.”
A brick through the window of kitten + kohl; someone calling Maria a Jewish whore as she boarded a train to Berlin from Dessau, almost daring her to try to sit in an empty seat. There were the gay men Charlotte and Ines knew from the Bauhaus and the neighborhood and the advertising companies, who quickly butched up, taking seriously for the first time the antihomosexual laws that had seldom been enforced before January 1933.
Some Jews remained in civil servant positions, along with some in the private sector, even though wives were begging husbands to consider leaving Germany. The husbands said, No, we’re German. Our love for the poetry and music and beauty of Germany is inside us. And the wives said, I have to find a store that will sell groceries to me. Sometimes I spend all morning searching. And the husbands said, We’re war veterans. We all fought, side by side, for the same country. And the wives said, The teachers make our children sit apart from the other children. And the husbands said, After the war, no one had any money and we all suffered, side by side. (One internationally known Jewish shipping magnate opened his own personally financed soup kitchen to feed impoverished Berliners, crushed under the demand for war reparations.) And the wives said, They humiliate your children. And the husbands said, You make it sound as if we are hated.
And the wives said nothing.
• • •
Charlotte’s father and mother were still in the Netherlands when, on a day in July, she ran into her former classmate Ignacio Martín. They had first met when Charlotte was commuting to Dessau to study with Rainier Ermler. Like Charlotte and Ines’s friend Maria, Ignacio was interested in architecture as well as glass work, though he lacked the religious zeal of Bruno Blum.
Through glass Ignacio Martín and Charlotte Blum became friends. They were close enough to enjoy animated, unguarded conversations when they would run into each other at the Bauhaus, or have coffee or lunch or take in a film. On occasion, Ignacio had supper at the Blums’ when Charlotte’s parents were in town and Bruno invited him.
Charlotte liked talking to Ignacio because conversation with him was so much less one-sided than it was with some of the men at the Bauhaus, even the ones who wanted to impress her enough to get close to her father. She thought maybe it was because Ignacio was from Argentina, and not Germany, making her think that she would like one day to see the country that had produced someone like him.
On that July day in 1933, Ignacio ran into Charlotte near the train station in Potsdamer Platz and said, “It’s awful.”
Charlotte could feel a freeze in her chest. By now everyone knew someone who had been sent to a camp (the ones who came back barely “came back” at all), so naturally her mind went to the worst place possible even as she tried to tell herself whatever she hadn’t heard about couldn’t be that bad or she wouldn’t be hearing about it now, casually, on the street, from a sometime friend like Ignacio Martín.
“The Bauhaus,” he said.
In April the Nazis had raided the Bauhaus, arresting students, confiscating what they called “incriminating material.” Nearly everyone had been released in short order; it was harassment and nothing more, Ines said, though it was enough for Rainier Ermler to accept a permanent position at a Chicago university.
“They’re just looking for something to do,” said Charlotte to Ignacio, breathing a little easier.
“It’s over,” he said.
She slowly took him in her arms, there outside the train station in the busiest platz in the city, where five streets converge among the office buildings, department stores, cafés, restaurants, and news shops. There where the streets were mobbed with passersby, newspaper and flower vendors, strolling couples, nobles, capitalists, students, and working girls. There where the trams, buses, automobiles, horse carts, bicycles, trucks, and motor scooters raced in crazy disarray. Amid all this, Charlotte held Ignacio as he wept.
kitten + kohl shot an advertisement for face powder, the silver compact held in the empty fingers of Grete’s beat-up leather gloves. Charlotte made a series of still lifes with flowers and milkweed; then she made a picture with ivy branches lying on a table, along with a seashell, a scattering of blouse buttons, two camera filters, two protractors, and a woman’s hand mirror that held Ines’s reflection. My heart; your heart; my heart.
Charlotte and Ines produced a series of pictures, The Strongman and the Flying Something, the two girls in their striped, sleeveless T-shirts; Ines in her wings, Charlotte in her black boots. They posed side by side; they sat in a prop rowboat and pretended to be rowing; they drew fake tattoos on their upper arms; they pretended to sleep on the floor in the sun flooding in through the window.
Hannah Höch was scheduled to have a retrospective at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Charlotte and Ines looked forward to the show and to meeting Hannah with all the enthusiasm and elation of being in the same room with someone whom you can hardly believe ex
ists, you love her work so absolutely.
Only this was in July. Only this was in the New Germany, the one that had shut down the Bauhaus forever with all of Höch’s fabulous images still leaning against the walls, waiting for all the people who would never see them.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” said Maria, “even after the arrests in April, even when you still tell yourself that life will go on because life always goes on.”
Charlotte and Ines were eating a picnic dinner with Maria in the Tiergarten as brave squirrels edged ever closer for a handout. Maria absentmindedly threw them pieces of her sandwich.
Neile was drinking too much these days, with rumors of opium balls and morphine vials, holed up in her Grunewald house. When Grete Grun went to check on her plane two weeks after the incident with the caretaker’s sons, this time accompanied by Giselle’s boyfriend, she saw that it had been defaced with antilesbian graffiti and Stars of David, along with more epithets. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t Jewish; in the New Germany it was the company she kept and the girls she loved. The propeller was missing, and someone had used the fuselage for target practice. Without packing she went straight to the train station and bought a ticket for Switzerland, a place where she said they didn’t even speak “real German” but the people were nice, if a little dull, and she had met someone.
Giselle’s non-Jewish boyfriend wanted to marry her, but Giselle said that marrying a Jewish girl might not be the wisest decision just now, and he said she was being overly cautious, not all Germans felt as the Nazis did, and it was too late anyway because her fate was his fate. Maria didn’t have the money to leave, so she decided to hope for the best. She spent the better part of each day sketching houses she wanted to build and looking for work, even though she had recently had a job starring in a movie called A Sunday in Berlin, which followed two couples on what was meant to seem a usual Sunday, on which the couples have breakfast, go to the lake, sail on two tiny boats, fall asleep in the sun. Then, one of the girls wakes to find her boyfriend gone. She looks around their deserted beach area, until she hears a noise in the tall grass and stumbles upon the other girl, played by Maria, naked and engaged with the other girl’s boyfriend. The first girl can’t decide if she wants her presence known or if she should just return to the beach, prepare dinner, and act as if nothing has happened.