1931įollowing the seizure of power by the National Socialists and conservatives, a campaign is launched against alleged “public immorality” under a new policy of “national moral renewal”. Another icon of queer life in Berlin in the 1920s is the singer Claire Waldoff, who also lived in Berlin with her female partner. His Berlin Stories were written during his time in Berlin, and would later provide the inspiration for the musical Cabaret. Her portrait was even printed on the cover of the lesbian magazine Liebende Frauen (Loving Women).Īt the end of the 1920s, the British author Christopher Isherwood arrives in Berlin to sample the pleasures of its liberal gay nightlife. The highlight of the weekend is the variety shows and performances by famous stars of the scene, including the dancer Ilonka Stoyka.
Every evening, there is a stage programme or live music to dance to, along with carnival costume balls and literary readings.
The Dorian Gray opened at Bülowstrasse 57 in 1921. This includes the popular café and bar for dancing and entertainment, Dorian Gray. The author Ruth-Margarete Roellig describes 12 venues in it, all of which are located in the lesbian hotspot of Schöneberg. Girlfriends drinking coffee © GettyImages, Foto: Leonardo PatriziĪ travel guide for lesbians is published in 1928: Berlin's Lesbian Women. Numerous hotels and guest houses, beauty and hairdressing salons, tailors and photo studios, doctors and lawyers in private practice, libraries, cigarette and shoe shops, and even a car rental company, a travel agency and a distributor for potency pills advertise in gay and lesbian magazines. She unites her association with the Monbijou Women's Club in 1928, which also includes transvestites and transsexuals, cooperating with the Association for Human Rights and constantly finding new venues for events. From 1925 on, large-scale events are held in the ballrooms in Alte Jacobstrasse and Kommandantenstrasse, or in the Nationalhof in Bülowstrasse.Īs the manager of the Violetta Ladies' Club, Lotte Halm, along with several hundred of her fellow female members, helps shape major sections of the lesbian movement and entertainment scene from 1926 on. There are now around 80 venues for gays and lesbians in Berlin: beer-soaked dives and distilleries, bourgeois restaurants, wine bars and clubhouses, dance halls and dance palaces, ballrooms and cosmopolitan night-time bars. This site is now occupied by the Alexa shopping centre, with its size and colour serving as a reminder of the former red behemoth. This means that the Berlin Police Headquarters at Alexanderplatz remains a credible threat of force despite its policy of tolerance towards the gay and lesbian scene. However, the hopes of newly-found freedom are soon dashed by a conservative government that is elected to power. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee drafts an alternative concept that gained much attention, and in 1928, the criminal justice commission responsible decides to reform Paragraph 175. In 1922, the gay and lesbian' associations briefly unite to form an action group to ensure their voices are heard during an upcoming criminal justice reform. More than six thousand prominent personalities from the German Empire and, later, the Weimar Republic have signed the petition. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee had been filing petitions since 1897 calling on the Reichstag to abolish the special law against homosexual men. The competing gay and lesbian associations are united in their fight against Paragraph 175 (which criminalises homosexual acts). © Getty Images, Foto: Classen Rafael / EyeEm