A snapshot of Berlin between the world wars includes nudist magazines devoted entirely to children; glittering cabaret shows parading acres of sweaty, perfumed female flesh; and an endless supply of cafes, bars and private clubs catering to gay men, transvestites, lesbians and sadomasochists.
Inflation is so rampant that the local paper currency is good only for toilet paper. Cocaine, morphine and opium are peddled on every street corner. And more than , desperate women and girls of every age and stripe sell their bodies for a pittance, including mother-daughter prostitution teams and brazen streetwalkers well into the third trimester of pregnancy.
Such was the glory that was Weimar Berlin, a burg American writer Ben Hecht called the "prime breeding ground of evil. And most of it has been filtered through the arid prose of academia. Now with Mel Gordon's new tome, "Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin," connoisseurs of carnal excess have the next best thing to a time machine with which to visit that era of blissfully morbid hedonism.
Drawing from his vast collection of pre-Nazi Berlin memorabilia, Gordon, a professor of theater at UC-Berkeley, has assembled an Encyclopedia Britannica of Weimar smut. This page omnibus of Babylon-on-the-Spree's demimonde is full of antique pornography, guidebooks, magazine illustrations, board games, photos of Rube Goldberg-like masturbation devices and priceless ephemera from bygone restaurants and pubs.
Gordon says his massive, wallet-busting collection began as part of a job assignment from the Goethe Institute, a program supported by the German government to promote German language and culture. We had a lot to go on, research-wise, except the visuals.
