Did Sex Bring Down the Weimar Republic?

I recently learned that the well-known Berlin nightclub KitKat is closing:

"The KitKat, where guests often wear revealing outfits, is known for pushing boundaries with its debauched fetish parties.Launched in 1994, the KitKat's name is inspired by the Berliner nightclub featured in the musical Cabaret. It was set in Berlin in the early 1930s, against the backdrop of the uprising of the Nazis, at a burlesque venue called the "Kit Kat Club"."

Bob Fosse's 1972 film Cabaret dealt with the collapse of the Weimar Republic.  The centerpiece of the movie is the Kit Kat Club - emblematic of the free-ranging sexuality of Berlin in final years of the Republic.  Laurie Marhoefer, a professor at the University of Washington, has studied sexuality in the Weimar Republic.  In the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute she writes: 

"The cabaret in the film, the Kit Kat Club, is home to gender-bending and sexual transgression — heterosexual transgression, often. Joel Grey’s character, the Master of Ceremonies, presides over the Kit Kat Club. He cross-dresses and sings about the pleasures of three-way relationships. To American critics in 1972 the Master of Ceremonies was, as Terri Gordon writes, an embodiment of “the decadence and decline of an increasingly corrupt society” or, perhaps, a Hitler-figure, “luring the audience into blind complacency.” That is, critics linked his sexual and gender rule-breaking to fascism, which makes sense — the film’s plot makes the same link."

This is the "Kit Kat Club theory" of the Weimar Republic's collapse:  the "moral nihilism" of the liberal democracy led inexorably to immoral fascism.  In the final scene of Cabaret the Kit Kat Club clientele is comprised of swastika-bearing SA men.  This theory was advanced by several postwar historians, including Gerhard Ritter:

"Ritter’s idea was that the Weimar Republic’s relative toleration of sexual diversity amounted to moral nihilism, a revolt against moral authority that opened the door for even more immorality, namely, fas-cism. In his view, fascism represented a rejection of Christian moral values, such as the condemnation of murder. Moreover, fascism’s rejection of the Christian injunction against taking human life and its rejection of Christian sexual morals were of a piece."

In Erich Kästner's Weimar Zeitroman - Fabian (1931) - the moralist protagonist Fabian complains about the immorality that surrounds him:

"Dort drüben, an dem Platz, ist ein Cafe, in dem Chinesen mit Berliner Huren zusammensitzen, nur Chinesen.  Da vorn ist ein Lokal, wo parfümierte homosexuelle Burschen mit eleganten Schauspielern und smarten Engländern tanzen und ihre Fertigkeiten und den Preis bekannt geben, und zum Schluss bezahlt das Ganze eine Blondgefärbte Greisin, die dafür mitkommen darf. [...] Im Osten residiert das Verbrechen, im Zentrum die Gaunerei, im Norden das Elend, im Westen die Unzucht, und in allen Himmelsrichtungen wohnt der Untergang."

The moralist Fabian cannot survive long in this sea of depravity. 

Of course Erich Kästner was no Nazi; Goebbels had Fabian tossed into the bonfire as "smut".  And there were many factors other than sex that brought down the Weimar Republic.  Still, the backlash against the "loose morals" of the young democracy undoubtedly played a role, and deserves more historical analysis.

Comments

[johan]

You’d think that maybe World War One did more to degrade the fabric of society than people fucking, but oh well