The Goldene Zwanziger or Golden Twenties describe a time in Weimar Germany when the economy was improving, arts and sciences were flourishing, and people were partying like they had just emerged from a World War. A convergence of circumstances also came together to make Berlin a haven for queer people from around the world. All of this in spite of Paragraph 175, which was a law that criminalized sexual relationships between men in Germany.
The First World War was undeniably horrific for anyone fighting in it. Men died brutal deaths in brutal circumstances. Those who came home, including the queer soldiers, felt that their country owed them something. They didn’t sacrifice to come home and live a secret life of fear because their relationships were illegal. And they were illegal in much of Europe, including Germany, due to the infamous Paragraph 175.
Then a failing economy drove young people to the cities, creating vibrant youth cultures that were more liberal and more hedonistic. Finally, the police in Berlin under Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem chose to focus their resources on other crimes. They largely tolerated the growing queer scene and allowed it to exist publicly.
In Gay Berlin (2015), Robert Beachy points to another factor that caused a flourishing queer culture in Berlin. Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem was an innovative police commissioner in Berlin who was surprisingly tolerant of the queer community emerging in his city. He saw Paragraph 175 as virtually impossible to prosecute, and a waste of police resources, so his police force largely tolerated the burgeoning queer community. This allowed a network of public LGBT bars, clubs, balls, and cabarets to emerge.
At the same time, German thinkers were starting to try to gain a deeper understanding of human sexuality and gender expression, and the two were often conflated at the time. Starting in the late 19th century, many men (and it was almost all men getting published) began to ask questions about how diverse human sexuality is and why that diversity exists. Freud’s theories of psychosexual development posited that we are all potentially bisexual, and it was environment, society, and upbringing that determined our ultimate sexual orientation.
Freud took the psychological approach, claiming that we are all born bi. By universal bisexuality, he meant that all people are born with feminine and masculine traits. As we grow, our psychosexual development represses some traits and nourishes others, leading to a happy heterosexual individual with no kinks or fetishes. When something goes wrong in their development, we see other expressions of human sexuality. He wrote extensively about psychosexual development and all the ways it could go wrong, but basically if a man has strong feminine traits or a woman has strong masculine traits after puberty, they will experience same-sex attraction.
Magnus Hirschfeld, who fought tirelessly for the overturning of Paragraph 175 and founded the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, also believed that sexual orientation was not a choice, but that it was biologically determined. That does not, however, mean that he was a huge fan of bi people.
In most bisexual people, Hirschfeld believed, the strength of same-sex desire was relatively low, and therefore its development could and should be restrained. He recommended that young people in general be allowed in the company of the opposite sex and not be kept in a single-sex environment, which might nurture the germ of homo-sexuality. In this way, he believed, same-sex feelings would develop only in exclusively homosexual individuals, in which the strength of the same-sex drive lay beyond what could be modified by experience.
Pushing back against the idea of men who are attracted to men being inherently more feminine was Adolf Brand, who was very openly bi. He advocated for young men pairing off with each other before marrying a woman and living model heterosexual lives. Brand found the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen or Community of Free Spirits, and in What We Want (1925), he wrote,
[The Community of Free Spirits] shows every young man that he, through a close union with a friend, can calm the dark pressure of his blood, extend his youth, and keep body and spirit fresh and pure. It teaches him about the fact that the natural and moderate satisfaction of boys and lads among themselves is no sin, but rather a sensible expedient of nature, which is the transition to sexual intercourse, and which one should not stupidly hinder and suppress, as the madness of medical charlatans and sanctimoniousness of today’s schools does.
And Brand did, in fact, eventually marry a woman and retreated from activism, seemingly living out what he preached.
What did this all look like on the streets of Berlin? Curt Moreck’s A Guide Through Licentious Berlin 1931 makes it sound like a very good time. His guidebook to Berlin gave addresses and descriptions of the more than one hundred queer venues in the city. These spaces welcomed a broad crowd of gay, lesbian, bisexual, gender-bending, and trans folks as well as artists, free thinkers, and even tourists attracted by the spectacle. Moreck describes one performance that plays with the audience’s expectations of gender:
“A very girl-like revue star dances under the spotlight, gracefully pirouetting. He is naked except for a chest shield and a loincloth, and even this nudity is deceptive — it confuses the viewer, leaves doubts whether they are a man or a woman.”
Marlene Dietrich emerged from the cabaret scene of Berlin in the 20s. Throughout her career, her act was often split into two acts. In the first, she would perform in a clinging gown; in the second, a tuxedo. She showed off her tuxedo performance in the film Morocco (1930), where she strolls through the audience singing and seducing everyone before kissing one of the women in the audience. Dietrich’s bisexuality was perhaps one of the worst-kept secrets in Hollywood. With the knowledge of her husband, Rudolf Sieber, she had many lovers, including Gary Cooper, James Stewart, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Yul Brynner, Tallulah Bankhead, Mercedes de Acosta, and Dolores del Rio.
Anita Berber was another performer of the time who was very openly bi. She was famous for her androgynous looks and performances that often included dancing in the nude. Her nudity, her bisexuality, her many affairs, and her well-known drug habits all made her the topic of constant scandal and gossip, even in the permissive society of Weimar Berlin.
Outside of Berlin, Germany was also liberalizing, and this is especially clear in the cinema. GW Pabst managed to sneak a bi-coded heroine past the censors in his classic film Pandora’s Box (1929). In it, Louise Brooks plays Lulu, a beautiful young woman who seduces everyone around her, including Countess Geschwitz. Different From the Others (1919) was co-written and features Magnus Hirschfeld and directly addresses the harm caused by Paragraph 175. In it, Hirschfeld routinely appears to directly explain his theories of human sexuality and why same-sex attraction should not be criminalized. Mädchen in Uniform (1931) takes place in a repressive girls’ school where sexual undertones (and overtones) were flying between students and sometimes teachers. Some of these films faced censorship, but the mere idea of them getting made would have been impossible in pre-Weimar Germany.
This era lives on in the popular imagination as one of decadence and uninhibited sexuality. Both the stage and film versions of Cabaret dramatize its glamour and eventual collapse. Bisexual icon Alan Cumming famously portrayed the Emcee in three major productions, earning a Tony Award in 1998. More recently, the series Babylon Berlin (2017–2024) delves into the era’s seedy yet dazzling underbelly, while the 2023 Netflix documentary Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate examines the most iconic LGBT nightclub of Weimar Berlin.
Perhaps one of the reasons this era remains so vibrant in our imaginations is that, with hindsight, we all know what’s coming next. Those freewheeling times were uncomfortably coexisting with a rising Nazi party that was actively trying to eradicate queer community. The brief Golden Twenties seem all the more dazzling with the knowledge of what horrors were looming on the horizon.