Berlin - City of Whores

[Lord Mayerling]

If you would like to play, please click here.

Rules and guidelines can be found here. 

The OOC thread is here.

The characters and character template can be found here.

Berlin – City of Whores

The legend of wicked Berlin, the international sex-tourist Mecca of the 1920s and early 30s, endures into the 21st century. Two full generations after its demise in March 1933 with the rise of Hitler and his Nazi party, American and British filmmakers, pop novelists, fashion photographers, playwrights, academics, and now erotic writer/roleplayers still play out the enchanting tales of a debauched, 20th century El Dorado that disappeared in flames. With Babylon and Nero’s Rome, Weimar Berlin has entered into our cultural thesaurus as a synonym for moral degeneracy.

Berlin – City of Whores indirectly follows the life of Maxwell Langdon, an American journalist and travel writer working as a foreign correspondent for the Detroit Free Press newspaper in 1920s Berlin. His stories and writings form the backdrop to Weimar Berlin’s most lurid trade and most sought after entertainment, sexual gratification. The game can have any number of characters from any number of backgrounds. Players are allowed to have as many characters as they want; they can treat the setting as a sandbox, or weave plots among themselves as they choose. I will be playing the character of Max, and co-GMing with the lovely Niferbelle. We’ll be working together to keep everything moving along, and help character concepts fit into the world as a whole. Generally, female characters will be some kind of prostitute, and male characters will be foreigners traveling to or working in Berlin.

The game is essentially a historic roleplay in an open freeform setting. The players and characters are intended to gain enjoyment from writing stories or vignettes, and or weaving plots with other characters or NPCs within the world’s setting. A historic background will be offered and continuously expanded upon as Langdon navigates the sex trade in Berlin. Players are encouraged to be creative within the world, creating essentially whatever they want to embellish and elaborate on the world around them. We’ll need plenty of whores and plenty of Johns. Smut is encouraged, but plotting between characters will also be welcomed and accommodated.

The game will be hosted on the Bondage Board (only negotiated scenes will be allowed). Any sexual preference for characters is welcome, as well as most historically appropriate mainstream fetishes. Just about anything you desire can be bought and paid for in Berlin.

If you have interest in playing in such a game, please let us know in this thread. We will then provide further historic background for the setting, as well as a list of the plethora of prostitutes that worked the most sexual city of the 20th century.

[Niferbelle]

As LM said, I'll be co-GMing the game. There is a very rich history and setting to work off of so I'm very excited about getting this off the ground. So if you're peeking in and you're a little unsure, please jump in!

[Bruja]

I would care to throw my hat in on this game. Historical fiction (that always sounds like an oxymoron to me) is something I am interested in, plus this is an era that piques my interest.

[summoner2183]

I ight be interested in this.

[Niferbelle]

Excellent! We'll be watching to see who else might be interested and perhaps put up some more information.

[Jezabelle]

Color me interested; I could be either one, but iUnderstand this was something of a renaissance for BDSM as well so if anyone's going to be playing ye olde 1920's Dominatrix I'd be your biggest customer  XD


Though I have a question about the line about deriving enjoyment for both the player and character from writing vignettes. Would we make posts in the form of diary (or perhaps newspaper) stories/entries? Or is that just saying "it will mostly be between two people at a time but they exist in this world we're building"?

[Seranova]

The idea is rather intriguing. I could very well be interested in something like this. I haven't played a historical piece in a long time, and I don't think I've ever run anything from that era, specifically.

[KatieSparks]

Certainly sounds like an interesting idea. <3 Honestly I'm not too, too familiar with the area during that period aside from general knowledge but I'd be willing to learn a bit if you'd have me!

[Lord Mayerling]

Though I have a question about the line about deriving enjoyment for both the player and character from writing vignettes. Would we make posts in the form of diary (or perhaps newspaper) stories/entries? Or is that just saying "it will mostly be between two people at a time but they exist in this world we're building"?

I would say more like the second. I think the game will have a "purchased encounter" aspect to it. Where the John (or Joanne) and the whore have a negotiated encounter. This may be two player characters, or a player and an NPC. You may end up wanting more than just purchased encounters for your character, such as plots of various kinds. We'll be able to accommodate that as well. The vignettes are more for Langdon, used as a world-building and history delivery device. The other players can world-build too with their own vignettes or diaries or whatever. You could even use such a tool as an ad for another player, "I would really like to experience X, maybe another player would like to try that, too?" Or it can be used for a character to simply reflect on the world they live in and or their situation within it.

Most modern Americans only see German history as the rise and fall of Hitler and National Socialism. This whole game, and especially the vignettes, are to help cut right through that to the previous history. 1920s Berlin experienced a level of sexual and personal freedom that hadn't and hasn't ever been matched anywhere else on Earth. Homosexuals especially found themselves having rights and forming their own flourishing culture in Berlin where they were not discriminated against by the rest of society. This is the world we're going to play in. 1920s Berlin literally became a tourist destination for people who wanted a sexual gratification they simply couldn't have anywhere else, and it was affordable.

Niferbelle might have some ideas on this that she'll share as well.

[AlexStone]

While no one would be crazy enough to call me an expert on Wiemar Berlin- or much about the Wiemar Republic- I'm always in for something historical, since I'm a sucker for that kind of stuff.

I'm not sure I quite understand the format, but I don't know that I have any well formed questions about it yet, either- I'll watch this space for a bit to see how it comes along. 

Actually, I have one question- do you two have the ideas pretty well settled, or are you looking for input and ideas?  I don't mind either way, just curious.

[Wargtass]

Holy shit I just had an idea for playing a historical figure in this setting. I just need to think this over extra hard before I commit to the idea.

[Lord Mayerling]

Actually, I have one question- do you two have the ideas pretty well settled, or are you looking for input and ideas?  I don't mind either way, just curious.

I think input would be welcomed.

[Lord Mayerling]

Some Contextual/Informational Background

Berlin was a pretty strange place at the end of the Great War. It had been the seat of power and government for a military juggernaut that had ground its way through five years of the bloodiest war the world had ever seen. When the war was over, Germany took on a schizophrenic personality; unsure of its friends or enemies, unsure of the motives of its own people. Germany ended the war without losing any territory, and in the East, Germany had beaten the old Russian regime at war and had won the peace against the newly emerged Soviet Union as well.

Yet in 1918 and 1919, Germany found itself in the midst of a social revolution. Its cities were filled with socialist strikers, unemployment was rampant, goods that were readily available before the war were now hard to find, or had been replaced by lesser products of the quintessentially German type: ersatz. Things were so bad politically that it was decided that Berlin, heretofore always the center of Germany in terms of its culture, Government, and prosperity was deemed an impossible place from which to rule. The nascent democratic government, without precedent and culturally unknown in Germany, vacated itself to the small city of Weimar near the new geographic center of Germany.

Geographic changes also played a role in Berlin’s future from 1919. Even though it had lost no territory during the war, and had soundly beaten its enemy to the east, the victorious Western Powers robbed Germany of its peace with the Soviets, the major result of which was the recreation of Poland as a nation. The Versailles Treaty, which memorialized if not its defeat, Germany’s blame for the Great War, moved the newly created Poland several hundred miles to the west, and claimed a major port city, Danzig, now renamed Gdansk. Many former German citizens, most of them ethnic Germans and Jews, now found themselves living in Poland. As a result, they immigrated back into Germany, swelling the population of Berlin to 4 million in 1930, by then the world’s third largest city, and the largest in Europe. Berlin also hosted Germany’s largest Jewish population at nearly 400,000, just under 10%.

The war had served to change other demographics as well. Due to the draw from the army of men, women came to Berlin from the outer provinces by the trainload, filling minor positions in Berlin’s war ministries and federal bureaus once held by male clerks and secretaries. A kind of radical feminism and shared sisterhood began to form all over Germany. No longer wide-eyed innocents, these newly enfranchised women also witnessed an implosion of moral values in their own native villages and cities. As the war went on, moral decay evolved into outright corruption. For the first time in a century, black-market survival and fears of illegitimate pregnancies became more than just gossip for middle-class households. 

For most German families trade, either in heirlooms or stolen goods, earned subsistence to endure the week or month, but eventually these items became obsolete. Only foodstuffs mattered. The profiteering and theft of them were abetted by a distracted government intent upon victories in the field. Those poor souls without food sources or connections had just one other commodity to haul to the public market: sex. At first, young war widows, branded “strawwives,” offered their carnal services to the available males in Berlin, then it was the provincial youth of both sexes, and finally the children of bourgeois families. Prostitution lost its exact meaning when tens of thousands were involved in complex sex attachments, all of a commercial nature. 

While post-war life in Berlin bizarrely continued to take on a more eroticized nature, the government in Weimar continued to struggle with the impositions of the Versailles treaty. Reparations, harshly drawn new borders, and forced demilitarization all dealt the new republic political issues it couldn’t solve. The angered allies imposed new terms for this delay tripling reparations payments to six billion gold marks in raw materials and industrial goods to be paid over a 42-year period. Known as the 1921 Reparation Act, the move ensured the end to any stable commercial life in Germany, although the true ramifications of the act were yet to be seen, and hadn’t been predicted. In January 1921, 7 marks bought 1 American dollar. In August, the exchange rate had tumbled to 550 marks to the dollar. A year later, in the summer of 1922, one dollar bought 7,500 German marks. By January 1923, the official exchange rate was 22,400/1; in May it slipped to 54,300/1. The all time low was reached on October 12, 1923, when the mark plummeted to 4.2 billion to the dollar.

Germans on a fixed income and pensions lost everything during this period. A wartime barter economy again took hold. The Great Inflation complicated Berlin’s sexual folkways, but didn’t really alter them. The so-called moral collapse had already occurred. Erotic amusements, prostitution, and narcotics were all readily available before the inflationary madness, but now entrepreneurs and purveyors of the sex trade had a more acute economic incentive. Berlin was suddenly inundated with hard-currency tourists looking for Jazz-Age bargains. Swedes, Dutch, French, and detested hordes of Turks and Japanese flocked to the open city. Their assets being in kronen, guilders, francs, lira and yen made them instant multimillionaires the moment they arrived.

In postwar Paris, a traveler could engage the services of a streetwalker for five or six dollars; during the Inflation in Berlin, five dollars could buy a month’s worth of carnal delights. The most exquisite blowjob or kinky dalliance never cost more than 30 cents, or 65 million 1923 marks. Nachtlokals, essentially proto-stripclubs where other sexual services were also offered, in particular teemed with non-German speaking thrill-seekers. For the newest clientele, humiliation and sexual degradation served as an equal attractant as the old Naked Dance revue itself. Outside the tourist hotels and downtown pensions, knowing gigolos and pretty boys, dolled up in rouge and mascara like wax mannequins, displayed their androgynous wares. To the merry-making tourist, Berlin was conducting a clearance sale in human flesh. Sex was everywhere and available on the cheap. The Kaiser’s Germany, in the minds of many, was finally paying its war reparations.

In November 1923, the Weimar government released a new currency, the Rentenmark. Worth about 20 cents, or 1 trillion marks, it stabilized the internal economy and Germany’s international standing overnight. The Rentenmark was itself replaced a year later by the Reichsmark, but confidence in the Weimar government’s ability to govern was restored, at least until 1929. Many thought this would tone down the sex trade in Berlin, itself thought to be the upshot of first the war and then the Great Inflation, but this didn’t happen. Instead, the glorious period known as Germany’s “Golden Twenties” catapulted into history with champagne toasts and an intoxicating roar.

The end of the Great Inflation didn’t stanch the perv invasion of Berlin. In fact, fascination with the city intensified when the Reichsmark proved itself a stable currency. Weimar Berlin had shed its reputation for menace and civil disorder, yet retained its reputation as Europe’s newest illicit playground. Along with cruises down the Rhine and Munich’s Oktoberfest, guidebooks added Berlin’s Friedrichstadt at midnight as a must-see tourist adventure. The very first thing foreigners noticed in Berlin were whores; thousands of tarted-up women on the streets, in hotel lobbies, and seated at cafes and clubs. It’s estimated that 120,000 prostitutes (not including 35,000 male prostitutes) plied the sex trade in Berlin at this time. Berlin was like no other city when it came to the sheer magnitude of sexual possibility.

Prostitutes in Berlin can be broadly broken into two types: those that attracted clients outdoors, and those that attracted clients indoors.

Outdoor Types

Boot Girls
Identified by their furs and calf-length, patent leather boots. Lacquered gold, cobalt blue, brick, "poisonous" green, or maroon, the iridescent footwear indicated the girl’s specialty. Freelance Dominatrixes (Dominas), they attracted frugal German provincials (Suitors) who were led to nearby pensions.

Grasshoppers, aka Fresh-Air Women
Lowly streetwalkers without “room money” who serviced men in the corners of the Tiergarten and around Bulowplatz.   

Gravelstones
Unattractive sex workers on Oranienburgstrasse. Included women missing limbs, hunchbacks, and other deformities.

Half-Silks
Amateur, occasional prostitutes, the vast majority of the Friday night trade. Often secretaries, shopkeepers, and office clerks supplementing their income after work. During the Inflation era they were called Dodgers because of their unregistered status, and Five-o-Clock Ladies because of their preferred time of contact.

Munzis
Pregnant women who waited under the lampposts on Munzstrasse for “old money” clients in search of this erotic specialty. Very expensive sessions.

Nuttes
Boyish teenage girls. Coquettishly dressed and working in secret from their families, they treated prostitution as a form of dating. Often traveled in pairs, thought of primarily as gold diggers. Their standard pickup line was: “Don’t you think we should have a coffee first?”

Tauentziengirls
Bobbed hair streetwalkers in the latest fashions (sometimes mother/daughter teams) who silently solicited customers on Tauentzienstrasse south of the Memorial Church. T-Girls were celebrated for their down-to-earth, brash attitude. Beloved species to Berlin’s press corps, even those working for the Conservative and Nationalist dailies.

Kontroll-Girls
Berlin’s legal prostitutes, registered with the government, and checked by doctors called Pussy Pressers for venereal disease every month. They formed the nucleus of Berlin’s 30,000 round-the-clock itinerant whores. They were roughly divided into three classes by the locals.
Bone Shakers, the lowest class of Kontroll-Girl. Older and more experienced than others (40-60 years old, often looking much older), they looked down upon the undocumented Grasshoppers who plied a similar trade.
T-Girls, mentioned above, were the middle class
Boot Girls, mentioned above, were the top class, providing Berlin with its ubiquitous color.

Indoor Types

Chontes
Berlin’s large Jewish population dominated several industries within the city, but few were involved in common prostitution except two picturesque types: Kupplerinnen (procuresses) and Chontes (whores from southern Poland). In general, Chonte-Harbors (Jewish Brothels) were not well regarded in Berlin’s sex guides, but did good business with the working-class and indigenous population.

Fohses, aka Quality Women
Independent whores who advertised in newspapers and magazines as manicurists and masseuses. Sometimes seen behind Kudamm display cases.

Demi-Castors, aka Mannequins
Young women from good families who supplemented their allowances by working in secretive, high-class houses in Berlin West. Normal hours of operation were late afternoon/early evening.

Table-Ladies
Berlin’s version of a Geisha. Employed in private nightclubs on the Kudamm, Table-Ladies were reputed to be ravishing and multilingual. Each conformed to a specific national type: Demonic German, Exotic Eurasian, dark-eyed Gypsy-Girl, blonde Nordic, or Spanish Aristocrat. A favorite of politicians, movie moguls, bigtime capitalists, and Scandinavian tourists. Customers paid “table-money” to the club, often in excess of 100 marks, for an evening of champagne, fancy canapés, scintillating gossip, and a private backroom encounter.

Dominas
Leather-clad, mesomorphic women who specialized in whipping, humiliation, and other forms of erotic punishment. Active in lesbian nightclubs that permitted kinky heterosexual couples and free-spending male clients. Also found in phoney “Body Culture” clinics in Berlin West.

Minettes
Exclusive call girls who enacted S&M fantasy scenes, often involving foot worship, bondage, and forced transvestitism. Located in all the large Friedrichstadt hotels.

Race Horses
Masochistic prostitutes who enjoyed being beaten and whipped. Worked in “Institutes for Foreign Language Instruction” where the “schoolrooms” were equipped with instruments of torture and bondage furniture. Patrons were carefully screened before their first session.

[Aphe]

I would love to join in, if I may.

[Niferbelle]

You'd be welcome, Aphe, and anyone else who has recently chimed in. I will be getting something up to use a guideline for character creation soon.

I think the game will largely be organized around scenes you create for your character with others. In large part it will be sandbox in that respect though I am willing to play NPCs for people. Clearly with the subject matter there are going to be lots of sexual situations but the setting and history is intresting enough I think there is room for the characters to be fairly rich and complex if you're so inclined. Lord Mayering is excellent at creating settings and atmospheres so his posts will I think give us all a lot of flavor to work with.

Your characters will be either a sex trade worker of a client of a sex trade worker. Clients are probably going to be tourists if they have any kind of money to throw around at all. We do ask if you are going to write a scene with someone that the two of you negotiate the basics of what's going to happen to help make people more comfortable. We can probably create OOC areas where people express an interest in finding a writing partner to help that along. For those who might want to develop other facets of your characters beyond the sex scenes I'd be happy to help with that.

We are still in the formative stage and still open to suggestions as we move things along. Thank you everyone for your interest!

[AlexStone]

Might I toss a suggestion out?  This may prove a little too restrictive, so if it is, let me know, but it may help if there was a location or three where our characters could hang around when they're not engaged in their various sexual Olympics?  It would give them a chance to socialize if they wanted, and could focus the game.  Assuming we want something focused.

Also, would we have one character that runs through the various encounters and bits, or is it a sort of one vignette, one character?   (And if you need some help with NPCs, consider me a volunteer to help out.)

[Beguile's Mistress]

I've been following this thread and apropos of the above suggestion there is always the cabaret setting to consider as common ground.

[Seranova]

I've been following this thread and apropos of the above suggestion there is always the cabaret setting to consider as common ground.

I was kinda thinking the same thing. Some kind of centralized meeting place to help the story along when needed? Or can provide the setting for the majority of the initial transactions, before clients and hireds go off for their business in private.

[KatieSparks]

I'd be interested in playing a Nutte, or perhaps even a pair of them who work together. :)

Personally I think a vignette style would be interesting and probably make more sense... after all, it's not like Johns are going to be associating with each other at all unless they come to a brothel-type establishment - which seems to be out of favor if I'm reading right, since prostitution was technically "legal" but still on the hush.

Also, Lord Mayerling.. you've posted some cool historical info there which could be very useful as reference, so thank you! :) But out of curiosity, what time exactly would the game be taking place? I know that the era is obviously locked down but as your historical info shows the economical landscape of the country was constantly shifting so it would probably make a world of difference if we were playing in 1920 as opposed to say, 1922.

[Niferbelle]

Those are good ideas. The focus of the game will be the Friedrichstadt neighborhood of central Berlin. It was an area of the city where both indoor and outdoor whores worked, and could meet. The players themselves can help design the establishments that fill the area and allow for a wide variety of characters, have appropriate settings for them, and will reflect the sorts of characters that people create. A cabaret is not going to be used as a primary meeting place because of various historical connotations that will be revealed as we play, and also because they weren’t used to sell sex. Discussion is a good thing so keep the ideas coming!

[Lord Mayerling]

Also, Lord Mayerling.. you've posted some cool historical info there which could be very useful as reference, so thank you! :) But out of curiosity, what time exactly would the game be taking place? I know that the era is obviously locked down but as your historical info shows the economical landscape of the country was constantly shifting so it would probably make a world of difference if we were playing in 1920 as opposed to say, 1922.

I'm hesitant to nail down a year because I don't want to be saddled with a historical canon, or a fixed chronology. Basically it's anytime during the Golden Twenties, 1923 to 1933.

[Seranova]

I'm hesitant to nail down a year because I don't want to be saddled with a historical canon, or a fixed chronology. Basically it's anytime during the Golden Twenties, 1923 to 1933.

That seems pretty safe. Though, as KS pointed out, there can be a lot of major differences in social climate in that time period. Unless we're not focusing on those possibilities as much, we may want to at least establish something more specific there.

[Lord Mayerling]

That seems pretty safe. Though, as KS pointed out, there can be a lot of major differences in social climate in that time period. Unless we're not focusing on those possibilities as much, we may want to at least establish something more specific there.

Actually in Berlin there wasn't much social change over that period, and we aren't really focusing on politics in this game. It's something I specifically want to avoid to the extent possible. Too much about Germany is about National Socialism, and that's not what this game is about.

[AlexStone]

I mean, if we wanted politics, it would be Whores of Munich. :)

[Dashenka]

Interested! Ill think of a role :)