Commercialized sex in the Prussian capital was technically unlawful but allowed in practice. Only two strictures were consistent: unlike Paris, Buenos Aires, or Shanghai, Berlin had no established red-light district or legalized brothels, and prostitutes were prohibited from verbally soliciting customers or announcing their services in print.
Instead, they had to signal their vocation and specialized activities by other means: through frequenting specific locales, using the subterfuge of evocative pseudonyms, or adopting particular codes of dress. Altogether there were seventeen distinct varieties of female prostitutes in Weimar Berlin. Although relatively few in number to , Boot Girls, dominatrices near the Wittenberg Platz, provided Berlin nightlife with its most ubiquitous local color.
Naturally, only devoted aficionados could decipher such specific messages with confidence. One of them brandished a supple cane and leered at me as I passed by. Costs only six billion and a cigarette. A bargain. Come along, honey! There, a trio of six-foot-tall Boot Girls are garishly costumed in red and black attire like nineteenth-century horsewomen.
The following is an inventory of the services offered by the various types of prostitutes working indoors and outdoors in Weimar Berlin.
Demi-Castors Young women from good families who occasionally supplemented their allowances by working in high-class houses in west Berlin. Dominas Leather-clad women who specialized in whipping, humiliation, and other forms of punishment, and worked in lesbian nightclubs that admitted heterosexual couples and free-spending male clients. Fohses Independent prostitutes who advertised in newspapers and magazines as manicurists or masseuses.
