(Almost the whole of page 29 of today’s Times is devoted to a long article about prostitution in Germany. Some UKP-ers may find it of interest.)
Germans grapple with sex work as museum becomes giant ‘brothel’
Bonn’s exhibition hall converted into red-light facsimile after Bundestag speaker says country estimated to have up to 400,000 prostitutes is ‘knocking shop of Europe’
While Germany’s national exhibition centre was being built in the Eighties, the conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl was promising to lead a revival of traditional “bourgeois virtues” and selling sex was still legally classified as an activity that “violates good public morals”.
One wonders what Kohl would say if he were alive today to see the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn, the old West German capital, being converted into a giant facsimile of a brothel.
Its blockbuster show on the history of sex work, which opens in April, is timely. Two months ago Julia Klöckner, the speaker of the Bundestag and a former Kohl protégée, claimed that Germany’s relatively light-touch laws on prostitution had turned it into the “knocking shop of Europe” and produced a “slave market in the middle of our society”.
In response to an uproar the family affairs ministry convened a panel of experts to look into the possibility of making it a crime to buy sex, following the so-called Nordic model pioneered by Sweden at the turn of the millennium.
Tempers are hot on all sides. Johanna Adam, the exhibition’s curator, said: “The topic is almost impossible to broach without immediately triggering a strong emotional reaction. The debate is almost always highly moralising.”
Officially, there are just over 32,000 sex workers in Germany who have put themselves through the bureaucratic rigmarole of obtaining a mandatory certificate nicknamed the Hurenpass (whore’s licence).
This requires two biometric photos, a specific municipal district where the applicant will ply their trade and proof that they are attending regular sexual health counselling sessions.
Unofficially, there are many more who remain unlicensed. Estimates for the total range from 90,000 up to 400,000, which would be larger than the population of Bonn. Nearly half of them are thought to be Romanian or Bulgarian.
While some of them treat it as something like a regular job, with trade unions and pension contributions, surveys suggest that about two thirds of sex workers are doing it unwillingly, either because they are being coerced or because they are desperately poor.
Just about the only thing virtually all of them have in common is that they are women: it is one of the very few occupations where men typically earn less.
As far back as the 14th century, German towns and cities established municipal brothels on their outskirts, run by “woman-keepers” and bound by rigorous dress codes, in the hope of channelling male residents’ sexual appetites away from rape, adultery or masturbation. The prostitutes outside these houses, known as “secret women”, were often persecuted and publicly shamed.
While the brothels were largely driven underground in a fit of puritanical mores that swept through the German states with the Reformation in the 16th century, sex work flourished during even the most moralising periods.
As the German empire expanded overseas in the late 19th century, colonial administrators set up harems of both German and local women in outposts such as Togo and Cameroon, despite the mixing of races being strictly frowned upon.
Adam said: “It was seen as highly problematic that white colonisers and black women, and vice versa, were having sexual interactions. This racial ideology already completely permeated everything.”
The real revolution came after the First World War, when Berlin and other pockets of free-wheeling decadence such as the St Pauli district of Hamburg pioneered not only gender experimentation but also something like a gig economy of sex.
Adam said that since the 1920s sex work had often been practised as a kind of “hybrid” model, for example by a young woman working in a department store who might periodically lease her body for a “little bit of extra money to buy that new dress”.
During periods of hyperinflation, other women who struggled to make ends meet were compelled to trade sex for food or other essentials simply to get by.
“We don’t want to promote or romanticise it, but simply to point out that for some people, especially where it’s hard to find time or work regular hours, such as single mothers or people caring for relatives, there is often a need to generate sufficient income quite quickly within a relatively flexible timeframe,” Adam said.
One striking example was the notoriously provocative dancer and hellraiser Anita Berber, the subject of an arresting painting by Otto Dix.
After the pair met in 1925, Dix’s wife Martha recalled the businesslike frankness with which Berber had sold her body: “Someone approached [Berber], and she said: ‘Two hundred marks.’ I really didn’t think it was that terrible. She had to earn money somehow.”
When the Nazis took power in 1933 they officially banned prostitution. “Fallen women”, or simply those reported by their neighbours for allegedly loose morals, were frequently rounded up and interned.
Among them was Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, another famous avant-garde painter, who had documented the sex workers of Weimar-era Hamburg but developed schizophrenia. She was sterilised against her will and then murdered at the Pirna-Sonnenstein “sanatorium” near Dresden, as part of the regime’s Aktion-T4 campaign to exterminate people with disabilities.
At the same time, the Nazis set up about 500 brothels for Wehrmacht soldiers on the front, and another ten in concentration camps, which were staffed by more than 200 women.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is a long-lost oil painting of the Berlin madam Kitty Schmidt, whose Salon Kitty brothel was frequented by foreign diplomats and senior Nazis such as the SS chief Reinhard Heydrich; the foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop; and Sepp Dietrich, the head of Hitler’s Leibstandarte praetorian guard. The picture was rediscovered by two of Schmitt’s biographers last year.
The hypocrisy and the censoriousness lingered long after the fall of the Third Reich. Women who did not abide by strict social codes of modesty risked being labelled “HWG” (a German acronym referring to people with frequently changing sexual partners). This could get them picked up by the Sittenpolizei (moral police) vice squads or subjected to invasive medical examinations.
Some were shut up in prison-like workhouses such as the former Benedictine abbey in Brauweiler, whose inmates were put through a 13-hour working day and could be locked away in solitary confinement for up to three months if they broke the rules.
Brauweiler’s alumnae included Rosemarie Nitribitt, the legendary “noble whore” who served clients including MPs, ministers and captains of industry before she was strangled to death in 1957, at the age of 24.
The last of the workhouses was only closed in 1969 and the term HWG was still used in police reports well into the 1970s. In communist East Germany, it survived until reunification in 1990.
