Weimar Berlin (1920s) — Cocaine, Eldorado, the Kinks of Pre-Nazi Germany

It is a Tuesday night in November 1926, and the man checking you into the Eldorado has powder on his upper lip that is not face powder. He wears a cobalt-blue dress, silk stockings with a visible seam, and lipstick the color of a warning flare. His name, the placard on the counter says, is Lotte. His baritone has gone nowhere. He takes your three-mark cover charge without making eye contact — not from shyness, but because something far more interesting is happening behind you.

The Eldorado at Lutherstraße 31 is approximately the size of a generous living room, and it holds approximately two hundred people who have all agreed, without a single written contract, to set aside the civilization they walked in from. There are men in wigs and women in top hats.

There is a table where a Bavarian industrialist sits next to a young man in a sailor suit who has sold his body in three different currencies tonight.

On the tiny stage, a woman with bright red hair, glazed eyes, and a fur stole draped over a body that seems made of white wire is explaining to the room, in a voice that cuts through the noise like a scalpel, that she does not care what you think of her. Her name is Anita Berber.

By morning, she will have consumed enough cocaine and morphine to hospitalize a cavalry horse, and right now she looks like a saint who has been to hell and brought back souvenirs.

Outside on Lutherstraße, the November air smells of coal smoke and diesel. A woman in a Wilhelmine-era black-leather boot is leaning against a lamppost on the corner, her lace color advertising services that require a printed guide to decode.

Fifty meters toward Nollendorfplatz, a teenage girl — fifteen, maybe — is walking in small circles under a streetlamp, dressed like the film star Clara Bow. She is waiting for a man who will pay five marks for an hour of her company, and she told her mother she was at a friend's house.

Down the block, in a pension room that costs four marks a night, a pharmaceutical-grade vial of cocaine sits on a nightstand next to a copy of Die Dame magazine. The asking price on the street was thirty marks per gram, nearly three times what it cost to get in here. Somebody paid it.

This is Berlin. The year is 1926 and the Republic that produced this city has exactly seven more years to live. What happened in those seven years — in the bars, the cabarets, the pensions, the police files, the consulting rooms of Magnus Hirschfeld — is the subject of this episode. We are going to go inside. We are going to look at everything. And we are going to understand exactly why, almost a century later, we cannot stop looking.

To understand Weimar Berlin, you have to understand what it replaced, and what replaced it. The Germany that stumbled into 1919 was not a country that had merely lost a war — it was a country that had been told, in the most humiliating terms imaginable, that it deserved to lose.

The Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28, 1919, stripped Germany of roughly 13 percent of its territory, 10 percent of its population, all of its overseas colonies, and nearly all of its merchant fleet. It imposed reparations demands that would eventually total 132 billion gold marks — a figure so large that the German economy had no realistic mechanism to pay it.

And it included Article 231, the so-called "war guilt" clause, which assigned sole blame for the war to Germany and its allies. To ordinary Germans, this was not merely a peace treaty. It was a verdict.

The economic consequences were not abstract. They arrived in the form of inflation that began almost immediately after the armistice and accelerated into something that has no real peacetime parallel. By mid-1922, the exchange rate stood at 320 marks to the US dollar. By December 1922, it was 7,400 marks to the dollar. By November 1923, you needed 4.2 trillion marks to buy one American dollar.