By Bridie Pearson-jones For Mailonline. Women buying cocaine, open homosexuality and raucous revellers dancing into the early hours of the morning are featured in these remarkable photos which reveal what Berlin looked like in the roaring twenties. Before Hitler completed his march to power in , the German capital was a liberal hotbed where people indulged their sexual and hedonistic appetites in Berlin's nightlife and party culture.
The century-old photos, from Germany 's Federal Archive bundesarchiv , show Berlin's relaxed social attitudes. It meant that same-sex bars, nightclubs and cabarets catered to gay men, lesbians and trans people flourished in the exciting city. Fritz Lang with his wife, the writer Thea von Harbou in their apartment in Berlin, Fritz Lang directed Metropolis, one of the most famous films of the early 20th century.
Before Hitler completed his march to power in , the German capital was a liberal hotbed where people indulge their sexual and hedonistic appetites in Berlin's nightlife and party culture. Experimental art such as this would have likely been banned by the Nazis. Berlin's relaxed social attitudes also meant that same-sex bars, nightclubs and cabarets catered to gay men, lesbians and trans people flourished in the exciting and sometimes precarious city.
As Berlin was left ravaged by World War I, prostitution rose in the capital city as a means of survival for both men and women. It became normalised to a degree and a part of the city's underground culture and economy by the s. Crime developed in parallel with prostitution and Berlin acquired a reputation as a hub for drug dealing in substances such as cocaine, heroin and tranquilliser. The German capital's unusually liberal law enforcement and its pleasure-seeking reputation turned the capital city into a hedonistic and open-minded mecca which was unmatched across Europe.
Berlin's tolerance for behaviour that was technically still illegal saw writers, poets, artists from across the world to indulge in the uninhibited nightlife and a thriving gay subculture.
