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Phot1: Otto Dix, Three Wenches. These prostitutes were willing to work individually or in a team.
Outdoor prostitutes: (1) Kontroll Girls: legal prostitutes checked for venereal disease. (2) Half-Silks: part-time amateurs with day jobs as office workers, secretaries and shopgirls; evening and weekend workers. (3) Grasshoppers: lowly streetwalkers who gave handjobs and standup sex in dark alleys. (4) Nuttes: Boyish teenage girls who worked for “pocket money” after school without their parents’ knowledge. (5) Boot-girls: dominas (or dominatrices) in shiny patent leather boots who offered to stamp all over their clients. (6) Tauentzien girls: Chic mother-and-daughter teams, fashionably dressed, who offered their services to men who wanted threesomes. (7) Münzis: Heavily pregnant women who waited under lampposts (very expensive, since they offered an erotic speciality). (8) Gravelstones: hideous hags with missing limbs, hunchbacks, midgets, and women with various deformities. “The most common German word for them was Kies. In other accounts, they were referred to as Steinhuren.”
Indoor prostitutes: (1) Chontes: Low-grade Jewish prostitutes, mostly Polish, who picked up their clients in railway stations. (2) Fohses (French argot for “vaginas”): Elegant females who discreetly advertised in magazines and newspapers as private masseuses and manicurists. (3) Demi-castors (or “half-beavers”): Young women from good families who worked in high-class houses in the late afternoons and early evenings. (4) Table-ladies: Ravishingly beautiful escorts of exotic appearance who came with the reserved table in an exclusive nightclub. Clients had to be fabulously rich in order to afford the cultured conversation of these high-class call girls who accompanied the caviar and champagne and who later unveiled their charms in a sumptuously furnished chamber of delights. (5) Dominas: Leather-clad women, athletic and Amazonian, who specialized in whipping and erotic humiliation. They were often found in lesbian nightclubs which also catered for kinky males. (6) Minettes (French for “female cats”): Exclusive call girls who offered S&M fantasy scenes, foot worship, bondage, and enforced transvestism. They worked in top class hotels. (7) Race-horses: Masochistic prostitutes who let themselves be whipped in “schoolrooms” or “dungeons” liberally supplied with instruments of torture.
Clients were carefully screened to make sure they didn’t go too far. (8) ‘Medicine’: Child prostitutes (age 12-16), so called because they were prescribed as “medicine” in pharmacies. All the client needed to do was tell the pharmacist how many years he had suffered from his ailment , without mentioning what ailment it was, and request the color of the pill he preferred (e.g., red). He was then escorted to a cubicle where his “medicine” awaited him: a 12-year-old redhead. (9) Telephone-girls (often billed as “virgins”): expensive child prostitutes (ages 12-17) ordered by telephone like a takeaway meal; the nymphettes were delivered by limousine or taxi.
Luigi Barzini, in his social memoir The Europeans, describes the saturnalian scene in the Tingel-Tangels or sleazy bordellos of sex-crazed Berlin in the 1920s, the Golden Age of the Jews:
I saw pimps offering anything to anybody: little boys, little girls, robust young men, libidinous women, animals. The story went the rounds that a male goose whose neck you cut at just the right ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious 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 afterwards. [18]
In October 1923, when one US dollar could buy 4.2 billion marks and six wheelbarrows of banknotes could barely buy a loaf of bread, it was said that “the most exquisite blow job to be had in Berlin never cost an American tourist more than 30 cents.”
Berlin nightlife, my word, the world hasn’t seen anything like it!” Klaus Mann, son of the great German author Thomas Mann, enthused sardonically. “We used to have a first-class army. Now we have first class perversions.”
German author Erich Kästner, writing of Weimar Berlin, was to reflect on the topography of the soul sickness that had now taken possession of the once proud city: “In the east there is crime; in the center the con men hold sway; in the north resides misery, in the west lechery; and everywhere—the decline.”