This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Leaders of the burgeoning socialist movement such as August Bebel used prostitution as a polemic device, arguing that it was an integral part of the bourgeois capitalist economy. Portraying prostitutes as victims of a corrupt socioeconomic order on the one hand and as markers of bourgeois perversion and degeneration on the other, socialist and leftist-progressive writers attempted to show that the bourgeoisie had compromised its own doctrine of respectability and should therefore be denied a position of moral, social, and economic power.
Manliness and virility went hand in hand, and active sexual desire was a defining characteristic of the male citizen who could create and sustain a strong and healthy nation. Prostitutes, although outwardly shunned as immoral by most members of bourgeois society, were, by means of the regulatory system, made available to male citizens for discreet and allegedly disease-free sexual encounters. Defenders of regulated prostitution argued vehemently that the existence of prostitution prevented men from seducing and thereby sullying the reputations of their would-be wives.
The sexual behavior of the male citizen was private; the sexual behavior of women was not, especially if it transgressed the boundaries of marital, procreative sex. Their sexual actions were therefore open to public scrutiny, strict moral judgment, and legal penalties. Their behavior was studied, classified, and publicized by the fledgling discipline of sexual science, and in the case of prostitutes and male homosexuals, it was subject to legal discipline.
By the early s, the public outcry over prostitution in Berlin reached a fever pitch. The widespread willingness to speak so openly about prostitution was sparked by the murder trial involving the pimp Hermann Heinze and his prostitute wife Anna, who were charged with murdering a night watchman while attempting to rob a Berlin church of its silver.
Both the lex Heinze and the renewed political activity of socialists also significantly affected the dissemination of print and visual media. The censorship laws passed as a result of the Heinze trial represented a tightening of state control within the cultural realm, and yet, as I will show in the case of Otto Erich Hartleben, Berlin theaters devised creative strategies to get around restrictive measures.
