Bilder aus dem Verbrecherleben (“Children of the Night. The section “Night Figures of the City” ( Nachtgestalten der Großstadt) from Engelbrecht and Heller’s 1926 book Kinder der Nacht. The two men wrote books about the Berlin underworld and Engelbrecht wrote scripts for crime films. Leo Heller was a journalist who collaborated with Engelbrecht, a Kriminalkommisar (police superintendent) in the Berlin police. Ernst Engelbrecht and Leo Heller are prime examples of this connection. Film was intimately connected with the popular perception of the modern metropolis as a locus of crime and vice. Mabuse contribute to our stereotypical image of Berlin as a permissive incubator of crime, song, and dance in this era. The historian Benjamin Ziemann offers a corrective to this urban-centric view of Weimar culture: “Weimar was Weimar: it is best represented by the small town in Thuringia.” This entry provides a sketch of how the city in Weimar Germany was portrayed as a den of sin and how this portrayal continues to influence popular perceptions of Weimar Culture today.įilms like Marlene Dietrich’s The Blue Angel and Fritz Lang’s M and The Testament of Dr. While drugs like cocaine continued to enjoy a following among artistic and intellectual circles (especially surrounding German Expressionism), our current view of Weimar as a free-for-all zone of liberation is in part due to the skewed image offered by these urban figures. Newspaper stories, novels, and films like Laster der Menschheit portrayed the “new Sodom” of Berlin and other cities as dangerous for the average German. Although cities like Berlin were notorious for their nightlife and its associated drug culture, this image is in part due to the influence of mass media during this period. However, taking either of these judgments at face value is too simplistic. Poster for the silent film “Laster der Menschheit” (Vice of Humanity), 1927. Jazz, cocaine, prostitution, and other forms of vice form one half of the Weimar stereotype: the other of course being runaway inflation, civil unrest, and the rise of Hitler.

Often portrayed as a society dancing on a volcano, both the political right and left have used Weimar Germany’s permissive urban nightlife and debauchery as examples of either societal degeneration or as an open, “anything-goes” paradise. The Weimar Period has captured the popular imagination through musicals like Cabaret and films like Marlene Dietrich’s The Blue Angel.

Today, as in all revolutionary times, when the existence of the individual trembles to the roots, when life and death are separated by a hair, the ecstasy of delirium and dance sprouts up as if in search of mass narcosis.

Berlin metropolis ark 1