To Louise the city's erotic smorgasbord was the most pervasive and intriguing attribute of 1928 Berlin (4th November 1997)

"To Louise, the city's erotic smorgasbord was the most pervasive and intriguing attribute of 1928 Berlin, 'where the ruling class publicly flaunted its pleasures as a symbol of wealth and power.' No account of the city's sexuality at that time is better than her own: Sex was the business of the town. At the Eden Hotel, where I lived, the cafe bar was lined with the higher-priced trollops. The economy girls walked the street outside...Collective lust roared unashamed at the theatre. In the revue Chocolate Kiddies, when Josephine Baker appeared naked except for a girdle of bananas, it was precisely as Lulu's stage entrance was described by Wedekind: 'They raged there as in a menagerie when the meat appears at the cage.'" 

"Wedekind's controversial writing embraced Freud's thesis that civilisation is based on the suppression of the most basic human instinct: the erotic. He preached a 'revival of spiritual sensuality and bodily pleasure'--an unattainable freedom of the flesh that outraged late Victorian morality...Wedekind also practiced what he preached. He delighted in scandalising the fin-de-siecle bourgeoisie with his capes and extravagant Mephistophelian garb, and he kept company with avant garde artists and con-artists, prostitutes and petty criminials. He loved bordellos, opium dens, and particularly the circus."