1. Public-houses with Women Attendants, the so-called “Animierkneipen.”—The waitress (barmaid) is the true exemplar of the secret prostitute, and further, in consequence of the perpetual association with alcoholism, is the most dangerous variety;[304] for the barmaid allures the guest even more to the excessive consumption of alcohol than to sexual indulgence. For this purpose barmaids receive a percentage of the receipts from the sale of liquor, and this sum, in addition to free board, is their only wage.
The “animierkneipen”[305] and the restaurants with women attendants can be plainly distinguished from a considerable distance by their curtained windows, and by the red, green, or blue glass panes over the doors of entry. These coloured panes are so characteristic of these places of lust and gluttony that at the last year’s District Synod of the Friedrichswerder section of the town of Berlin the attempt was made (cf. Vossische Zeitung, No. 248, May 30, 1906) to forbid the use of such illuminated panes for the advertisement of the houses of entertainment in Berlin with female attendants. To this proposal the reasonable objection was made that if this distinguishing mark were abolished, there would be no means of recognizing such places, and therefore no warning signal for blameless individuals.
Many “animierkneipen”—the French similarly term the girls in such places “les inviteuses”[306]—by their mysterious-looking interior; by the heavy curtains, which produce semi-obscurity; by small very discreet chambres séparées, lighted by little coloured lanterns and with erotic pictures on the walls; by their Spanish walls and their enormous couches—obtain the appearance of small lupanars. To these the richer customers and the initiates are brought, whilst the ordinary habitual guests commonly assemble in the larger bars, where also music—it must be admitted very bad music—in the form of a piano- or a zither-player, is not wanting.
The whole shameless activity of these “animierkneipen,” in which alcohol and indecency play the principal rôle, has recently been described by Hermann Seyffert in a manner no less perspicuous than true to life.[307] The clients of such places are, for the most part, immature lads, who squander here the money of their parents or their employers; but we find there also the habitual guests, usually elderly married men, who find in this atmosphere a welcome variety in comparison with the monotony of their homes. The quantities of alcohol which are consumed in the “animierkneipen,” both by the guests and by the attendants, are enormous. The barmaids must always drink at the cost of the guests, in order that the sales of liquor may be larger. O. Rosenthal[308] speaks of barmaids who consume twenty to thirty glasses of beer a day, and more, without mentioning brandy and liqueurs!
2. Ball-Rooms and Dancing-Saloons.[309]—Properly speaking, these are only a sub-variety of the places described in Section 1; they are enlarged “animierkneipen,” with the addition of (better) music and of dancing. But the beautiful days of the Bal Mabille and the Closerie des Lilas, or of Cremorne Gardens, the Portland Rooms, the Argyll Rooms, and the Orpheum have long passed away. The majority of the ball-rooms of Berlin and Paris (in London they disappeared long ago) have sunk to a lower level. Prostitution is now dominant. The “intimacy,” which in the earlier more idyllic ball-rooms felt so much at home, is now no longer to be found there. It is only necessary to visit the celebrated ball-rooms of Berlin—the Ballhaus in the Joachimstrasse, the “Blumensäle,” etc., not to speak of the seats of baser prostitution, as, for example, Lestmann’s Dancing-Saloon—in order to be aware of this fact. Here also the principal thing is drinking, and always more drinking! In Paris, in the dancing-rooms of Montmartre, we can see the “inviteuses” in full cry; some of the French dancing-rooms, however, appear more attractive from the æsthetic point of view than the haunts of Terpsichore in Berlin. A dancing-saloon that was not exclusively concerned with prostitution was that of Emberg in the Schumannstrasse, but in the year 1906 this was closed for ever. Now, similar great ball-rooms exist, properly speaking, only in the suburbs—in Halensee, Grünau, Nieder-Schönhausen, etc. Here also, however, the dance is not the principal thing—procurement and prostitution are widely diffused, as was pointed out fifty years ago by Thomas Bade in his essay, in this respect most convincing, “Ueber Gelegenheitsmacherei und Öffentliches Tanzvergnügen”—“Procurement in Relation to Public Ball-Rooms” (Berlin, 1858).
3. Variety Theatres, Low Music-Halls, and Cabarets.—The principal object of these places, so characteristic of our time, is “to kill time” in as amusing a manner as possible, “amusement” being what the “average sensual man” of to-day, dull and empty-headed, demands. What he wants is the satisfaction of his desire for sensations by the appearance of more or less décolleté singers, dancers, acrobats, male and female, by the representation of tableaux vivants in which the parts are played by beautiful women, by the kinematograph, or by pantomime, by spicy songs, by the performance of clever jugglers, by wrestling and boxing matches between men and women, by juggling, and all kinds of spectacles, etc. In short, the most diverse “varieties”—hence the name—of amusement are offered here, and it is significant that these places of pleasure first appeared in the great seaports of Liverpool, London, Hamburg, and Marseilles, where the sailors, after the weary monotony of long sea voyages, found satisfaction in the variegated display of enjoyment offered to them in such places. Now the monotony, the emptiness of their life, drives innumerable crowds of townsmen to the variety theatres, which, even though as little as the drinking-saloons can they be called true “places” of prostitution, still serve as localities in which prostitutes meet their clients; and in this way evening after evening a large number use them as the field of their activities.
The lowest class of variety theatre, the “Tingel-Tangel” (low music-hall), also euphemistically called “Academy of Music,” is, in fact, nothing more than a brothel, the only difference being that the actual sexual intercourse does not take place in the house itself, as so often occurs in the similar “animierkneipen.” The singers appearing in these “tingel-tangel” are all low-class prostitutes. In most cases, whilst one of their number is practising the “art of song” (sit venia verbo), the others, sitting about the hall in shameless décolleté, display their charms, and incite (“animieren”) the visitors to drink. Clerks and students form the indulgent audience; in seaport towns the audience consists generally of sailors. Who is not familiar with the most celebrated tingel-tangel streets in the world, the Spielbudenplatz and the Reeperbahn, in St. Pauli, near the docks of Hamburg? In these streets we see one variety theatre after another, and all are crowded by a smoking, drinking audience, taking part in the choruses of the songs. A peculiar kind of these places of pleasure is constituted by the so-called “Rummel,” a speciality of Berlin. Wherever, within or without the town limits, by the demolition of old houses or in any other way, a large area remains free from building for a considerable time, these tingel-tangel proprietors invade the place, erect merry-go-rounds and cake-stalls, and there develops in the place a manifold activity, in which the lower classes of the population exclusively share. Here the very lowest types of prostitute seek their prey, and find it.
4. “Boarding-Houses” (“Pensionate”) and Maisons de Passe (Houses of Accommodation).—Anyone walking through the streets of Berlin will not fail to notice boards at the doors of certain houses, bearing the inscription, “Here rooms can be hired by the month, week, or day.” I do not assert that this announcement always represents an invitation to fornication, or the provision of an opportunity therefor; but in many cases these announcements serve as indications of the “intercourse” obtainable in such dwellings. Often several stories, or even the entire house, is devoted to this purpose. It professes to be a “Private Hotel” or Furnished Lodgings; but in reality it is a masked brothel, a “house of accommodation” for prostitutes and their clients, a place in which the landlord—in most cases the landlord is of the female sex—has for principal occupation the practice of procurement. Other dwellings, without these sufficiently well-known and suspicious boards attached to the door-posts, passing under the less striking name of a “pension,” are adapted rather for the exquisite and artificial enjoyment of the richer classes, and are employed for sexual orgies of a more extensive character, for the procurement and seduction of young girls, and for the assignations of the higher classes of the demi-monde and their clientèle.
5. “Massage Institutes.”—To these distinctly modern establishments, which mainly subserve the purposes of masochistic prostitution, we shall return in the chapter on masochism. Many prostitutes have some knowledge of massage, and masquerade as “masseuses”; their supplementary profession is ordinary prostitution, and for this reason we are justified in alluding to them in this section.
6. The Weibercafés.—These are found in all the large towns, especially in London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, and Buda-Pesth, and they serve as the principal places in which prostitution is carried on by day. Prostitutes sit here in great numbers hour after hour, and wait for their clients, who, of course, must pay for drinks which are consumed. Certain cafés in Berlin—as, for example, the “Café National,” the Café Keck in the Leipziger Strasse, etc.—are typical nocturnal cafes, in which from the onset of darkness until early in the morning prostitutes await their clients.