Lust/Berlin is Becoming a Whore
Thomas Wehrling was a Weimar cultural critic. His essay ‘Berlin is Becoming a Whore’ was first published in 1920 in Das Tage-Buch, an independent, center-left weekly magazine. In this essay, Wehrling marvels at the openness and commonplace nature of brothels, remarking that once such institutions were particular to Budapest, but now they are common to Berlin, as well as the provinces. He then proceeds to describe how the promiscuity of today’s young bourgeois women is leading to ultimate social decay, making no explicit distinction between the woman who has sex for money and the woman who has sex for pleasure.
Notable in this article is the fact that Wehrling, a Leftist, focusses his essay primarily on bourgeois women driven to prostitution by a need to pay for luxury goods. As a result, rather than aiming to move his audience to sympathy or engage in a deep analysis of the material conditions of the women that he’s discussing, Wehrling can instead appeal to the audience’s concern about the “Prussian-Kantian social order,” and the state of German family and motherhood. This article is rather representative of the trend within social-democratic politics of having the conflicting political needs to both represent the interests of proletarians while maintaining the bourgeois norms of the Republic.