During the years of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), Berlin became known for its cabarets, its nightlife, and its relatively open and accepting atmosphere. The city was home to dozens of bars and nightclubs frequented by gay men, lesbian women, and others whose sexuality or gender did not conform to social expectations.1 Berlin police monitored these establishments, but they did not systematically target them or force them to close.2 Similar clubs also existed in other large German cities, but small towns and rural areas typically remained intolerant of people whose gender or sexuality did not conform.3
Many of these clubs catered to a specific circle of people. Others had special nights reserved for different crowds, and some regularly encouraged clients of all kinds. These establishments included well-known spots like the Eldorado, tastefully decorated taverns, and dive bars with rough reputations.4 Several nightclubs regularly hosted elaborate drag balls, which became fashionable destinations where celebrities could often be spotted among the guests. The Prussian Ministry of the Interior ordered the Berlin police to close these establishments on February 23, 1933—only about a month after the Nazi party took power—but some of them continued to operate discreetly until 1935.5
The featured collage is made from photographs of some of these clubs. This image appeared in a March 1933 issue of Der Notschrei (The Cry for Help), a Nazi propaganda magazine published in Vienna. Der Notschrei typically featured many pictures and photographs, including similar collages with antisemitic or anticommunist texts written over the top of the images.
The creator of this collage is unknown, but Nazi propagandists regularly attacked Germany’s communities of gay, lesbian, and transgender people as immoral or “degenerate."6 Images like this signaled to readers that the new Nazi regime was actively targeting nontraditional expressions of gender and sexuality. In the collage, a photo of the Eldorado club—closed and covered with swastikas—appears alongside pictures of the bars' elegantly dressed patrons dancing and having a good time. By depicting these scenes, Nazi propaganda like Der Notschrei rejected the supposedly decadent and “degenerate” values of the Weimar era and cast Nazism as the defender of “traditional” German values.
In addition, the featured photo collage showed readers that the Nazis’ so-called "national community" ("Volksgemeinschaft") did not include gay men, lesbian women, and others whose sexuality or gender did not conform to the social norms and expectations of Nazi Germany. Propaganda that identified these groups as outsiders encouraged individual acts of discrimination, and it conditioned readers to expect further state-sponsored persecution of Germany’s communities of gay, lesbian, and transgender people.7