10. It wasn’t all about the Kit Kat Club. In fact, Berlin alone had 900 nightclubs, many of them were hotspots of jazz, drugs and sex
For many, the Kit Kat Club was the epicenter of Weimar-era Berlin. The club is arguably the city’s leading entertainment venue and was made famous by Liza Minnelli in the hit musical Cabaret. But the Kit Kat Club was far from the only place Berliners could let their hair down. In fact, the records show that, by 1930, some 899 venues with a dancing license were registered in the German capital. Many of these were just as decadent as the world-famous Kit Kat Club, if not more so.
The Moka Efti nightclub, for example, was one of the crazier places in town. Now made famous again thanks to the massively popular Babylon Berlin books, as well as the TV series of the same name, the venue was completely over-the-top: it had its own barbershop, pastry shop and billiard hall, while there was also a room full of typists ready to take dictation for businessmen or journalists needing to take a break from their party to do some work. While there was no members-only brothel on-site, it’s believed that the Moka Efti was still a hotbed of prostitution, with many of the beautiful dancing girls – and boys – happy to go home with a client for the right price.
Other infamous Berlin venues of the time included the Haus Vaterland, a known hangout of gangsters as well as prostitutes, drug addicts and bohemians. Haus Vaterland was known as a “palace of pleasure”, with the interiors modeled on everything from ancient Egypt to Moorish Spain via the Orient Express. Clients would spend whole days there, sometimes even two or three days. Of course, there were plenty of ways they could keep awake – as well as the cocaine and other drugs, legend has it that the Haus Vaterland was selling up to 25,000 cups of coffee on a single day!
