VOLUPTUOUS PANIC:
The Erotic World
Of Weimar Berlin
Mel Gordon
Feral House

www.feralhouse.com

All Photos Property of Feral House

"I saw pimps offering anything to anybody, little boys, little girls, robust young men, libidinous women, or (I suppose) animals. The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and time-saving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy too, as one could eat the goose afterward."

Luigi Barzini, "The Europeans"

In 1994, Mel Gordon, professor of theater arts of the University of California at Berkeley, was asked by German punk expressionist Nina Hagen to write and direct a stage show dedicated to the career of 1920s cabaret personality Anita Berber. Described by Gordon as "...the most glamorous decadent (of) Berlin's Golden Twenties," Berber had died, abandoned by her public, of various addictions in 1928.

Gordon had little idea that his desire to immortalize Anita Berber would take him to a time and place that would eventually define decadence in the twentieth century.

Hagen and Gordon believed that Berber represented "...the first postmodern woman," something considerably more than a doomed German flapper. They undertook to celebrate her brief but remarkable life in a stage production which would feature all the trappings of 1920s Berlin...erotic sketches, Weill/Hollander music, dance routines, dildoes, and an evil master of ceremonies. Hagen would perform the lead role, Gordon would write and direct the piece.

The problem: Gordon's research turned up very little authentic visual Berlin material from the period in question. "I figured two or three days, tops, in the public library would suffice," Gordon stated. "The researchers for Bob Fosse's Cabaret (which was shot on location in Berlin in 1971) also reported a remarkable lack of erotic documentation...my mind reeled...did the Nazis or frightened Berliners destroy every suggestive publication during the politically sobering Thirties and Forties? Maybe such print or photographic material from the orgiastic Weimar era never really existed as I imagined them."

During the fourteen years between the first and second World War (1919 - 1933), "Weimar" Berlin entered into a period of sexual and psychological experimentation that was to know no previous or subsequent parallel. Although the Nazis did their infamous best to eradicate the Weimar depravities that "...misrepresented the honor and purity of the Reich", they were ultimately unsuccessful.

History has had the last laugh. Nina Hagen's stage show, although only moderately successful in itself, set Mel Gordon upon the trail of the Berlin the Nazis tried so hard to extinguish - Berlin remembered by such luminaries as Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weill ("The Three Penny Opera" and "Mahagonny"), and Christopher Isherwood ("I Am A Camera".)

"Relying on private European contacts and antiquarian bookstores, I launched a feverish search for all bits of data and representations from pre-Hitler Germany," recalls Gordon. Within months, he had accumulated an enormous collection of magazines, postcards, playbills, tabloids, guidebooks, street maps, police reports, price lists for a wide variety of sexual offerings...vastly more material than was needed for his Berber requiem.

With the support of Feral House Publications, Mel Gordon has assembled Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, a collection that goes considerably beyond a mere coffee-table history social and sexual excesses. This handsome book functions as a highly effective time-traveling device.

Readers should be warned, however, that such travel might be hazardous, as the imagery of Voluptuous Panic far surpasses any carnival sideshow. The book serves as a tour guide, a tour-de-force in human excess. "Berlin means depravity," remarks Gordon. "Even the alkaline air around the Prussian capital (Berliner Luft) was said to contain a toxic ether that attacked the central nervous system, stimulating long-suppressed passions as it animated all the external tics of sexual perversity."

With this kind of philosophy kicking off the first chapters, Gordon initiates our tour of Weimar Berlin with historical and political background. His description of Berlin's economic collapse, which resulted from the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, is telling: "On October 12, 1923, the once vaulted German note plummeted to the staggering equation of 4.2 billion marks to the dollar." Photographs are provided of children playing with stacks of marks taller than they, along with cartoons of German notes employed as toilet paper.

Most Germans -- especially those on fixed incomes and pensions -- lost everything. Desperate to put food on the table mothers, daughters, and sons provided the ultimate object in trade: themselves. Since its primary work force had been virtually decimated by the war, Berlin's primary industry became sex. In time, the city became the European playground where everything (sex included) could be had for practically nothing. Years later, even after the Reichsmark became a stable currency, Berlin maintained this reputation until the Nazis took it over in 1933.

Homosexual offerings, lesbian and gay alike, are celebrated with a spectacular array of paintings, photographs and drawings. Photographs include portraits and sexual rites of tribal "Wild Boys" upon whom American novelist William Burroughs later modeled the gay street radicals of Naked Lunch and Nova Express.

Gordon's collection also suggests the gradual incursion of sexualized behavior into Berlin's middle and upper classes. Page 74 of Panic features a painting by Manasse titled "The Unconscious in the Mirror," which provides the perfect metaphor for Weimar Berlin. A woman quietly dressed in a gray evening gown poses before a mirror in which her naked reflection stands, leering, a cigarette in one hand and a riding crop in the other. While Panic is notable for its historical perspectives and scholarship, what leaps out and grips the reader is its imagery.

Through further paintings, photographs, and reproductions of period playbills and erotic art, Gordon introduces concerns of high import during the Weimar period. In the chapter headed "Crossed Boundaries" he explores transvestitism; "Laughing Nudity" describes the multitudinous "nature movements", most of which are politically based. There is a militant cast to some of these nudist societies that seems laughable until we sense their inherent Nazi philosophy, mystical focus and intolerance of Jews and non-Aryans.

In "The New Calculus of Desire" Gordon introduces "sexual science", a bizarre predecessor to modern sexual theory led by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, referred to as "the Einstein of sex" during the Weimar period. Photographs of Hirschfeld's "Sexual Institute" feature several masturbation machines, one of which is composed of a bicycle wheel, two sewing spools, three pairs of used women's shoes, and two leather ties. Other devices such as spanking machines, paddles and sequences of "instruction pictures" are also included. It is clear, in most cases, that the "scientific" aspect of these images is dubious, at best. Yet Hirschfeld, for all his oddity, broke social and political ground in his defense of sexual minorities and homosexuals.

As "The New Calculus" moves on to "Algolagnia" (craving of pain), the paintings and drawings...fewer photos here...include detailed depictions of eroticized violence, Berliner style. Finally, we arrive at "Crime on the Spree," which reveals the worst of the Weimar period sex crimes. The concept of lustmord, or homicide associated with sexual frenzy, is introduced, complete with police reports and photographs. We make the acquaintance of several murderous personalities, including Fritz Haarmann, also known as the "Werewolf (or Butcher) of Hannover", and Peter Kurten, aka "The Dusseldorf Vampire", upon whom the murderer in "M" was based.

A brief, lurid collection of paintings portray Weimar drug culture (which, after the lustmord material, seem comfortingly familiar.) Gordon finally comes to the arrival of the Nazis in the early thirties, and the subsequent dissolution of Weimar Berlin as a cultural construct.. But Gordon's last shot has not been fired. He places the entire book in spectacular focus as he presents us with a street map of nighttime Berlin marked with the locations of fifty bars and cafes. It is exactly as though some modern decadent has provided us with notes for the satiation of every appetite conceivable.

As a result of some thorough research, Gordon has provided us with the name and the location of some fifty Weimar hangouts, accompanied by a plethora of detail concerning each. This includes a description of the neighborhood in which it is found, an indication of the clientele permitted on the premises, the food served (if any), the music presented (if any), the décor, the atmosphere, and whatever unusual tastes are pandered to. We are hereby introduced to The Stork's Nest (said to be the model for the film The Blue Angel), The Red Mill Cabaret (reputed to be the inspiration for Brecht's Three Penny Opera), The Aryan Café (a notorious Nazi hangout), and Pension Schmidt, AKA "Salon Kitty" (where the SS placed a number of prostitute-spies in an elaborate piece of espionage), and many others.

In the last pages of Panic, Gordon emphasizes his belief that despite much popular contention that Berlin's decadence ushered in Nazi rule, "...the facts of the time don't much support this tempting Puritanical thesis." Gordon argues that the nightclub owners, artists, and other progressives of the city fought Nazi encroachment with a greater ferocity than anyone else did, as they ultimately had the most to lose.

If any criticism can be made of Voluptuous Panic, it lies with the text, which is somewhat awkward in construction compared to the paintings, photographs, drawings, and other graphics that accompany it. The book might have been even more effective had Gordon collaborated with a historical researcher, or with anyone whose prose style could have lent the book a trifle more authority.

But what further authority is needed than this array of images -- this visual and psychological assault and battery to which the viewer submits in astonished willingness, page after page? It was with sheer fascination that I read Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin in one sitting. It took four and a half hours, and it left me shaken, aroused and thoroughly annoyed that I was unable to go back in time to experience Weimar Berlin for myself.

Erica Erdman