Weimar horror

Der Orchideengarten ('The Orchids-garden') was a German magazine published from 1919 to 1921. It is considered to be the first fantasy magazine. Also described as 'supernatural horror', it was edited by the writer Karl Hans Strobl and by artist and writer Alfons von Czibulka, both Austrian-born.  

Neither Strobl nor Czibulka had much connection to Weimar Berlin, and I must confess knowing nothing about the Fantasy or Horror genres, and still I choose to write about Der Orchideengarten in this blog because of its daunting images, something between Surrealism and Expressionist, with a whiff of Jugendstil. It may not be completely uninteresting that Strobl converted later to antisemitism and became a high official in the Nazi writers organization. 

The magazine included a selection of new and reprinted stories by both German-language and foreign writers. The main source of the translated material Der Orchideengarteen published was French literature : Charles Nodier, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Guillaume Apollinaire. Other known writers were Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Amelia Edwards, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Karel Čapek.

Illustrations included pictures by Gustave Dore and Tony Johannot, as well as contemporary artists such as Rolf von Hoerschelmann, Otto Linnekogel, Karl Ritter, Heinrich Kley, Alfred Kubin, Eric Godal, Carl Rabus, Otto Nückel and Max Schenke.

Resi, an interactive nightclub

“Resi” was short for a vast, luxurious dance-hall called Residenz-Casino, just by Alexanderplatz. It was built and opened in 1908, but it was in the Weimar Period that the venue really came into its own.

 "Resi bleibt Resi" (Resi will always be Resi). Behind those four letters there was a Berlin institution famous all across Europe

In the 1920s

The dance-floor could accomodate 1000 people and its ceiling was made from reflective glass. There were several bars and private rooms, but its most talked about feature were 200 private telephones fixed to tables and various stations around the venue, where customers could flirt anonymously with other patrons. A lamp on the table gave an indication of the availabilty of each guest: if the light was red, that meant "Go ahead", while blue meant "Don't disturb". Guests could also choose from a menu of 135 gift items and have them sent to other patrons via pneumatic delivery tubes (Rohrpoststation) suspended above the tables. Supposedly, little packets of cocaine were also sent through those tubes...

Resi in 1952

At Resi in 1936

In the 20s

A rain of confetti all over the place, over you, over me. That’s the famous Confetti Dance of Resi, which the whole world has tried to imitate. To run the light and water marvels of Resi, a whole power station is needed ; it is lodged in the cellar of the building, together with the soul of Resi’s telephone system. Because Resi was the first dance hall to introduce the table Ttlephones. At every table, a device to speak and to listen with. A red lamp lights up : someone wants to talk with you. You take the handset to your ear and you hear a friendly lady voice asking if you would care for a dance. There are another three signals : "Gentleman dancer wanted", "Lady dancer wanted" and "Don’t disturb please". 

Here, a colourful description of Resi by Mel Gordon:

"The Resi offered another kind of diversion. It was an interactive pickup bar-cum-wired nightclub. Designed in another monstrous Baroque style, Montmartre Music Hall crossed with UFA spaceship, the Resi sported several tiers of dining, dancing, and infantile play. One of its many ceilings was a motorized glass dome, painted with images of squawking birds and exotic flora. Mechanical geysers erupted with three-foot streams of sparkling, dyed water and 100 mirrored-balls continuously revolved and then split open, like welcoming orchids, when the overhead lights went down. There was a downstairs private rendezvous wine-room, competing bands and bar counters, a parquet dance floor for one thousand box-steppers, even a gigantic “Carousel and Shooting Gallery” for drunken revelers, attempting to relive adolescent Luna Park memories.

Mostly patrons came to the Resi for its promiscuous atmosphere and helpful technology. On 150 tables and 50 balcony stations, numbered telephones allowed celebrants to dial up complete strangers from across the palace and converse in naughty word-play or whisper instructions which bar to meet at. Additionally, an ingenious pneumatic system, built into the Resi handrailings, allowed guests to send small goodies to potential comrades-of-the-evening. On request, waiters brought gift-menus. Lovestruck customers selected from a list of 135 pocket-sized presents, like a bottle of perfume, cigar-cutter, or travel plan for a secret weekend (encased in leather). The luxury item was then placed in a sealed container, rocketed through hidden pneumatic tubes, and finally landed with a dramatic whoosh in a basket at the edge of the intended’s table.

Resi flyers assured the nocturnal public that this was “Berlin at its most beautiful.” The institution outlasted Weimar and became a favorite attraction during the 1936 Nazi Olympics. Allied bombers smothered its randy charms in a devastating nighttime raid in 1944. The last Pleasure-Palace of Berlin finally imploded."

(From "Voluptuous panic. The erotic world of Weimar Berlin", by Mel Gordon)

And here, a description in John Chancellor's tourist guide "How to be happy in Berlin", 1929:

 

 

The Potsdamer Bridge seen by Willy Pragher in 1928

Potsdamer Brücke 1928

This beautiful photo, taken by Willy Pragher, shows the bridge at the junction of the Potsdamer Strasse and the Landwehrkanal, in December 1928.

The red circle shows the position of the bridge, south of the Tiergarten

The German photographer and photo journalist Willy Pragher (1908-1992) was the son of a chemical engineer from Bucharest and a German mother. He attended schools in Berlin and Stuttgart.

In 1924 he started taking photographs, in 1928 he began an apprenticeship at the Ullstein publishing house in Berlin. From 1930 to 1932 he completed training in commercial graphics and decoration at Berlin’s Reimann School, the largest private art and craft school in Germany. There he was even trained in photography from 1931.

From 1932 he worked as a freelance press photographer for, among others, the Ullstein publishing house, the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung and the Badische Zeitung, built up his own picture service and undertook numerous trips. From 1939 to 1945 he worked as an advertising photographer for an oil company in Romania, in 1944 he was drafted into the Volkssturm in Bucharest. From 1945 to 1949 he was a prisoner of war in Siberia. Then he returned to Germany where he resumed his work and where he lived until his death.

 

Georg Schrimpf, another neo-objectivist

  

Georg Schrimpf (1889-1938) was a German painter and graphic artist. He is considered as an important representant of the New Objectivity movement, along with Otto Dix and others. His works were exposed in the famous Mannheim exhibition of 1925, which was something of a consecration of that school. 

Already In 1916 the art expert and gallery owner Herwarth Walden had successfully exhibited Schrimpf's first oil paintings in his famous Berlin gallery Der Sturm.

From 1905 to 1914 Schrimpf wandered through Europe, working as a waiter, baker, and coal shuffler. In 1913 he lived in Monte Veritá, an anarchist colony in Switzerland.

Unlike other artists of the avant-garde, Schrimpf was initially not persecuted by the Nazis. Eventuallyt though, his "red" past attracted their attention and he was finally labeled "degenerate artist" and expelled from his professor post in Berlin-Schöneberg. The year before his death, he was defamed again in the Nazi exhibition “Degenerate Art”.

Hanns Katz, expressionist painter in exile

Der Eiserne Steg in Frankfurt am Main, 1930

Hanns Ludwig Katz (1892–1940) was a German expressionist painter and graphic artist. He was born in Karlsruhe, and moved to Frankfurt on Main in 1920, after having studied painting, architecture, and art history. Despite initial success and renown as an expressionist painter, Katz had to work in a whitewashing company with his partner in order to support himself and his wife.
                         

During Nazi rule, Katz’ paintings were denounced by the Nazis as "degenerate art. He was active in the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a cultural federation of German Jews that hired thousands of artists, musicians, and actors fired from German institutions.                                                                                   

      
In 1935 he started preparations for the foundation of a semi-autonomous Jewish settlement in Yugoslavia. The plans fell through, so in 1936 he emigrated to South Africa. After he left Germany, an expressionist portrait of the philosopher and anarchist Gustav Landauer, painted in 1919-1920, was denounced as degenerate art by the Nazis. Landauer, who believed in a kind of spiritual socialism and was a friend of Martin Buber, fell victim to a political murder in 1919.

Portrait of Gustav Landauer, 1919-1920

In South Africa, Katz's works never found the recognition they’d had in Germany, and he was forced to revert to house painting to support himself and his wife. Katz developed cancer and died in 1940 in abject poverty. 

Willy Römer and the children of Berlin

Berlin children in the 1920s, by Willy Römer.

Willy Römer, 1887-1979, was a Berlin-based photographer. He documented the Spartakist revolution of 1919. In 1920 he founded a photo-agency together with Walter Bernstein. This enterprise was very successful, but with the Nazis accession to power, it was labeled "Jewish business" (Bernstein was of Jewish origin) and had to close down. 

As luck would have it, his large photographic archive was not damaged by the fighting in World War II.

 

Another child photograph, not by Römer this one, but by Marianne Breslauer:

By Evgeny Henkin, 1930

1929 - Ullsteinbild, unknown photographer