This is not Weimar level of degeneracy yet. It's getting there, and the club and every who attends it needs to be eradicated, but it's not Weimar level of degeneracy yet.
In 1931, Berlin surely was the artistic capital of Europe, full of brilliant theaters, cabarets, avant-garde art shows, trail-blazing films, experiments of all kinds. The
Kurfiirstendamm, the famous tree-lined boulevard, a pretentious imitation of the Avenue des Champs Elysees, was filled with characters dreamed up by de Sade, Havelock Ellis, Sacher-Masoch, Krafft-Ebing, and Sigmund Freud. There were men dressed as women, women dressed as men or little schoolgirls, women in boots with whips (boots and whips in different colors, shapes, and sizes, promising different passive or active divertissements). I saw legless veterans on crutches, culs-de-jatte, armless or blind veterans wearing iron crosses, and the hungry unshaven unemployed, all of them begging. I saw pimps offering anything to
anybody, little boys, little girls, robust young men, libidinous women, or (I suppose) animals. (The story went around that a male goose of which one cut the neck at the ecstatic moment would give you the most delicious, economical, and timesaving frisson of all, as it allowed you to enjoy sodomy, bestiality, homosexuality, necrophilia, and sadism at one stroke. Gastronomy, too, as one could eat the goose afterward.)
This is not Weimar level of degeneracy yet. It's getting there, and the club and every who attends it needs to be eradicated, but it's not Weimar level of degeneracy yet.
This is Weimar Germany, from The Europeans pg. 75 by Luigi Barzini Jr.:
Add in the collapsed economy and we're still a far ways off of Weimar (though we are doing a good job of digging our way there).
I wonder if we are printing more money today than weimar?
(I guess we would have to compare amount of money (measured in gold) printed)