The other day I was at Telegraphenamt, this newly opened grand hotel at Monbijou Park. Very chic, clad in art deco design, it exudes an awful lot of roaring twenties flair, which never goes out of style in Berlin; we just really like that here. You know why? Because ever since the 1920s Berliners love to act as a Berliner. Every Berliner, aside from his normal job, is a part-time professional Berliner.
The Novice
I was there strictly for business, meeting someone in the suitable setting for the work at hand, in order to see whether she would fit into this elegant atmosphere. I was there in my night-time capacity for which I am well known: I am the head of the city’s most glamorous luxury escort service, something of a demimonde star, one might say. The team at the reception desk had greeted me respectfully as I strode into the lobby.
I was about to meet a prospective candidate. Ever since I’ve launched this high-class escort service platform with a feminist touch, three to five women on average apply for a job with me every week. Because of me, they all want to become prostitutes. I am talking women of all ages and from all backgrounds here, but predominantly young academics. These are women who have studied, who have one or more jobs and are trying to make ends meet in our increasingly expensive capital city all by themselves. They have given this a lot of thought. The survey they have to complete on my website is long. And asking them why they want to become prostitutes, every single one of them is baffled by the question: It’s their destiny, something they’ve always felt inside! I also ask them to what extent prostitution can be an emancipatory act. And all of their individual answers, regardless of the wording and level of education or eloquence, can be summarised in one term: self-determination.
She was sitting at the bar; dark hair, dressed like a college girl, with a chequered skirt and a red beret. One look at her intelligent face and I knew she was the right girl. She had a master’s degree in Political Science and had been running a start-up for feminist (i. e. non-commercial) porn films for the past year. So, of course she needed money.
She called herself Luca. Whether we would keep that name was still up for debate. Among the escorts in this city, there are already way too many Lucas.
City of Whores
“There are just too many of them,” I explained to Luca: “The market is so competitive. You have to be creative. Of course, nobody knows the exact number of occasional prostitutes, but as soon as you know how to spot them, you’ll see they’re everywhere. That’s just Berlin for you. It was already like this in the Twenties. 2023 – or 1923? Whores were the first thing foreign visitors to Berlin noticed when they roamed the city streets at night. Berlin never had a red-light district as such: In Berlin, the red light is rather scattered all over the city. Ever since Napoleon, Berliners all over the city have been engaged in what we call fisimatenten in Berlin vernacular – and now you understand where the expression comes from: Visite ma tente!”
“Why were there so many in the Twenties?”
“Because it was a mindset. Because old virtue no longer applied. Because the impossible had become possible.”
“Was it really like that here? My grandmother was still taught that a woman’s pride is her chastity,” Luca declaimed.
“Purity, as it was called.”
“This fairy tale about the hymen!”
“At least you know it’s a fairy tale.”
“Many people still believe it today.”
“We’ve been listening to this for ages. Patriarchal conventions according to which a woman is only deemed worthy as long as the paternity of her offspring is certain.”
“Men’s honour as the essence and purpose of state order…”
“… and the woman as the fruit husk of this state. A state that pays homage to the ideal of manliness because it needs soldiers for all its Teutonic-German glory. And now imagine this: the Great War had been lost: Prussia was ruined. The military drill had been all they had been capable of here in Berlin, a city with no ancient history, no religious depth, nor a long-established aristocracy. Berlin, a city of religious diversity, that had always been united and controlled by militarism and obedience only. All that was gone now. The soldiers had either died or they were human wrecks. There was an Inflation, a great devaluation of values: A grand reassessment of sorts. The question was: What is of value? Not money, not frills; Only natural resources. And your own flesh. Berliners are a pragmatic breed of people. They’ve always survived because they simply couldn’t think of anything more significant worth dying for, let alone morality. The German woman is not a whore? Well, then the whore doesn’t want to be a German woman any more. Bodice off, cigarette on, lipstick and pixie cut. Anita Berber instead of La Traviata. Morbid, but unsentimental! Everyone has to find a way to survive and some of them realise: there’s absolutely nothing to it; like you do.”
“I really believe there’s nothing to it!”
“Of course not. Prostitution loses its nefarious aura in this maelstrom of a city in which hundreds of thousands of people are involved in complex sexual relationships that are all commercial in some way.”
“Yes, I can imagine in Berlin.”
“It has shaped the image of the city in the world. It had pervaded all parts of society back then: not just the exploited workers who prostituted themselves on the side, on the Alexanderplatz and in the Scheunenviertel; it was the huge crowd of white-collar workers! Shorthand typists and department stores’ saleswomen who, as semi-silkies, wanted to attract the attention of men in Wilmersdorf’s squares after work: flappers, hookers, minettes, dominas and boot girls. Even Grunewald’s upper middle-class daughters and their mothers went out on Tauentzienstrasse in search of prey. Some for fun, others because they didn’t know how else to survive. Widows of renowned Wehrmacht generals opened their bedrooms to tourists for a few dollars or Swedish crowns!”
My impressive half-knowledge was based on the book Voluptuous Panic –The Erotic World Of Weimar Berlin, a work by the American art historian Mel Gordon. A gift from a client.
Virtues
“People were no longer blindly obeying orders, which had kept the anarchist urban swamp in check during the Kaiserreich! The government had lost the First World War. What did the former imperial subjects do? They danced!”
“This infamous dance on the volcano…”
“This metaphor… The difference between back then and now is that we know there was a second world war.”
“What would have been our part in the 1920s you think?”
“Most likely dinner ladies. Noble whores, geishas, who spent the evening engaged in cosmopolitan conversations over champagne and fine canapés, after which finally granting capitalists, film moguls or politicians a rendezvous in the séparée.
“We live in the Golden 2020s!”
“Except that we’re almost cheap compared to back then: an evening with a dinner lady often cost several hundred dollars. While the services of a brothel whore cost around six dollars in Paris between the wars, you could buy a whole month’s worth of sex for five dollars in hyperinflationary Berlin. Sex was the capital’s commodity when Greater Germany had to atone with reparations. Friedrichstadt and Ku’Damm variety theatres and cabarets outbid each other in naked flesh: bourgeois married couples who had once led a quiet life with a fixed income and pension in their Wilhelminian-style rooms had now lost everything, and those who were too much of a coward to commit suicide offered foreign customers live marital porn on request. Whole families, from apathetic grandmothers to underage girls and doll-like made-up boys, clung to lemonades at vaudeville tables, hoping to catch the eye of one of the perverse dollar millionaires attracted to this cosmopolitan city of vice and its ferocious inhabitants. It is said that until Hitler was appointed Chancellor of the Reich, a full 25% of the population were dabbling in the nocturnal amusement business. 25% of all adult Berliners! A quarter of the population!”
“But wasn’t that forbidden back then?” asked Luca, who is a political scientist.
“Forbidden? As in Criminalised? As I said, state authority was in crisis. That’s what people thought: Let them come, the policemen in uniform. Let them overstretch their crippled authority even more. Anything else? Everyone does it. If not, nothing gets done. And when many do it – too many to arrest and lock them all up in a German prison – then authority simply yields to reality. Five years later, in 1927, the time had finally come: The first legalisation of prostitution, disguised as a law to combat venereal disease was passed. New objectivity, in other words.”
Persuasive Female Perpetrators
From across the dimly lit space, with a fair-haired boy’s head, came Mika. She had just had a date with a client here in this hotel. Now she was grateful for a gin and an audience to honour her heroic deeds.
Mika smiled at the unknown young woman, whom I introduced to her as the new girl. She realised immediately what had changed. Until today, Mika had been the new girl; now she was a veteran scrutinising new girl Luca with a watchful eye. Did she have what it takes? The inner prerequisites? She wants to become a whore, one of us. To become a whore, you have to be a whore already. Mika was one, with all the haughty audacity of her 26 years. After all, she had already been doing this line of work for a quarter of a year.
Mika’s reasons to become an escort were similar to those of most people: The sheer impossibility of making ends meet without depending on a partner or family ties. In their young adult lives, they had never experienced anything other than times of crisis. Oil crisis; financial crisis; Trump and Corona; energy crisis and of course the climate crisis: the end of the world permanently looming over us. But also, the awareness that there are people who are actually benefiting from these crises. You want to get the money where it is, right? Woman is an independent creature: no rich parents, no rich boyfriend. “That’s the best,” said Mika. “Just no dependency.”
“And why not, why not! What the hell was the reason?”
And Mika was mimicking the mewling voice of some female politician: “A human body is not a commodity…”
“This nonsense,” I lectured, “has always been postulated precisely when the straps of the capitalist harness were pulled particularly tight in bourgeois society. The commodification of everything and everyone is supposed to be banished by a hypocritical commandment in the very place where the alienation between labour and capital is – by exception – indeed eliminated. It is okay to sell your labour for a minimum wage, but not to be your own instrument of production? August Bebel said it back then in the Reichstag: “That’s just the way things are!”
“Isn’t that Brecht?”
There were dressed-up women all over the place. However, they were not prostitutes. Why not? The tiny handbags: You can always recognise a whore by her large handbag. Even in the twenties everyday clothes disappeared into large cloth bags when it was time for nightlife after work. And in the morning, the flapper dress would disappear into the bag again when the young lady had to rush straight back to the office right out of a stranger’s bed.
Us girls, the only three real prostitutes, were the most demure-looking women in the entire room. I was wearing black tweed, looking business-like. Mika, the gender student, wore a white men’s shirt and pepper-and-salt coat. Yet, tonight she had turned a man into an animal and literally put him on a leash. She triumphantly pulled the leather leash and collar out of her large handbag, Luca watching her attentively, like a pupil at an elite boarding school, a docile novice. So well-behaved, so sly. There was nothing more for me to educate. I don’t have to teach my applicants to be what we already are.
I pointed at a group of heavily made-up women in mini dresses who strolled past us.
“They are sexually enlightened; they have expectations of men, want good sex, they want to decide what happens in bed. Moreover, they want their own money. They are basically just as much whores as we are, but they are afraid of the stigma. They still can’t eradicate the patriarchy within them. That’s why they hate us.”
The Test
He’d been watching us all evening, seeking eye contact. This young man with his pompous Rolex. He had long noticed us. Now, he had joined us at our table. He was from somewhere near Frankfurt. So, how did he like it here in Berlin?
“Oh, Berlin is not my city.”
“Why not, is it too dirty for you?”
“I don’t like the people here! They’re so straightforward.”
Is that so? Needless to say, he was rich. Newly rich, a tech millionaire. I gave him my escort service business card. I asked him where he was staying. But instead of ordering us champagne, he insulted us with a solemn declaration telling us that he didn’t pay for sex and he only cared for genuine feelings. That’s why he’d been living in chastity for years… he’d been hurt too much, he said, giving Mika a pity-inducing look. Paradoxically, during the conversation that followed, he also told us, inspired by our chat, that he had a fully equipped torture chamber in his villa in the Taunus region. “How does that work, I asked him, if you’ve been living in chastity for years, do you actually torture yourself?”
“Of course he does,” Mika cheekily said.
He had to acknowledge that he had no chance of getting what he wanted from Mika and me – free sex, what else? – so he turned his attention to Luca. He listened with great interest to me promoting this Little Red Riding Hood who was a novice and had just successfully completed her job interview on the verge of being turned into a whore – perhaps even with his help?
Luca did not oppose.
“But paid, of course, otherwise it wouldn’t be real prostitution!”
He was disgruntled. He didn’t realise that we were just playing with him. He followed Luca into the smoking area and the two of them stayed away for a while. When Luca finally came back alone, she burst out laughing.
“Imagine: He wanted to rescue me!”
“Was he trying to lead you astray, Little Red Riding Hood?”
“He said… You’re marriage material!”
Marriage material! This was the llast thing they wished to be.
The poor young man left in defeat. Berlin really wasn’t his city. Our unreligious and immoral Berlin, our Berlin-by-night, wicked Berlin, fetish-obsessed Berlin, ungovernable, failed-state Berlin, nightmare of people from the countryside, Babylon-Berlin, this Berlin that is mentioned in the popular quote “you are crazy, my child; you must go to Berlin”. Berlin, the occasional capital of casual prostitution. Berlin, the whore maker.
This text was first published in B.History issue no. 7 of Berliner Verlag, published on 7 June 2023, Berlin.