Kleist Casino

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The Kleist Casino around the time it was first closed, around 1933
Advertisement by the Kleist casino from “ The Friendship Gazette”, No. 10, 1928

The Kleist Casino or Kleist Casino , often just called KC for short , was a gay bar in Berlin's Kleiststrasse . It was founded in 1921 and existed until October 2002, interrupted only from 1936 to 1950 as a result of the closure by the National Socialists . During its existence, the KC offered space to live out gay sexuality and was also a meeting place for prominent guests, at times it was also a prostitute.

The first Kleist casino (1921–1936)

When it opened in 1921, the Kleist Casino was at Kleiststrasse 15, roughly where the Urania building is today. The founder and owner was Robert Dozy, born in 1870. He managed to make the Kleist casino a permanent fixture in Berlin's gay scene. In 1924 he met Gerhard Voigt, born in 1907, who remained his partner until Dozy's death. When Dozy died in 1930 after a long illness, he bequeathed all of his property to Voigt, including the Kleist casino. Voigt only continued to run it until the end of 1931, after which he opened a new restaurant and passed the Kleist casino on to the businessman Herbert Schreiber.

In his appearance, it was indistinguishable from a normal restaurant, a large sign with the name in Gothic lettering hung over the entrance, beer signs for Engelhardt Brau and simple sign "Bar" flanked the entrance. The interior was a tubular room, which was divided into three niches by wooden beams, each with space for a round leather sofa. The subdued pink light and umbrellas at the entrance to the niches offered the couple a discreet retreat to exchange tenderness. In the center of the room was the bar, there were seats on bar stools. The audience consisted of employees from banks and offices as well as shopkeepers, mainly representatives of the middle class as well as some visitors from the upper class, celebrities and artists. Well-known visitors of the time were Gottfried von Cramm , Adolf Wohlbrück and Willy Trenk-Trebitsch . The bar was a meeting point for prominent National Socialist homosexuals such as Ernst Röhm , Philipp Prinz von Hessen and Paul Röhrbein .

Although there were events in the Kleist Casino, such as transvestite reviews, and homosexual pornography was also available, the majority of the guests were there primarily to get in touch with rascals. On request one received a booklet with a title page “Je t'aime.” , In it there was a list of names and all kinds of characteristics assigned to them, so that the suitors could choose from the prostitutes as in a menu . The rent boys earned around 10 to 15 marks a night.

This aggressively sexualized business principle led to conflicts within the contemporary gay movement. The homosexuals organized in associations such as the Federation for Human Rights sought to paint a “virtuous” image of homosexuality based on bourgeois values ​​in order to achieve socio-political goals such as the abolition of § 175. Locations like the Kleist casino with their mixture of prostitution, promiscuity , permissiveness, pornography and large age differences between prostitutes and suitors undermined this strategy and ultimately led to the distancing of the “organized” from places like the Kleist casino. In 1949, when this strategy was resumed as part of timid efforts to revitalize the homosexual movement, Kurt Hiller used the Kleist casino as a synonym for “amusement”: “I'm anything but the Kleist casino thing with humanitarian lifestyle, dance and bar delighted [...] Movement and amusement must, in the interest of movement, be kept strictly apart. "

On March 3, 1933, just a few weeks after the National Socialist seizure of power , the city's fourteen best-known homosexual meeting places were closed, including the Kleist Casino. At the insistence of Ernst Röhm, who complained to Hitler about the closings, some were able to reopen, including the Kleist casino. The murder of Ernst Röhm in July 1934 did nothing to change that, but raids were now frequent. At least at this time, lesbian women also visited the Kleist Casino, it is unclear whether this was due to the previous closure of other meeting places or whether it was a previously common practice. The Kleist casino was finally closed in 1935/1936.

The second Kleist casino (1950–2002)

On February 4, 1950, the KC reopened at Kleiststrasse 35. In the late 1950s, when the Berlin gay scene again suffered from repression, the Kleist casino was also affected; in the spring of 1958 a raid took place here.

In the 1960s Hubert Fichte was a regular guest here, as was Andreas Baader , who in the mid-1960s was a model for photographer Herbert Tobias for a gay newspaper. Klaus Nomi took his first unsuccessful steps as a singer of operas and arias here in the late sixties. In 1971 the bar appeared in the Rosa von Praunheim film “It is not the homosexual who is perverse, but the situation in which he lives ” and it represented the promiscuous lifestyle of many gays. Manfred Salzgeber stands in front of the bar in the film and the comment can be heard off-screen: "2000 changing sexual partners in the life of a gay person are often the substitute for one."

The Bulls, successor at the site of the Kleist Casino

The critical reception of traditional gay meeting places from the ranks of more politicized gays did no harm to the Kleist casino, despite its character as a “very ordinary gay bar”. Even in the 1980s it was an integral part of Berlin's gay subculture, at that time as a bar and discotheque. In 1986 it changed its legal form to "Kleist-Casino Kommanditgesellschaft Spezi-Gastronomie GmbH & Co." and remained so until its closure in 2002. On its website, it claimed to be “Europe's oldest gay bar”. Despite the closure of the “Kleist Casino”, the place is still a place of gay life - with the “Bull”, which is open around the clock, there is now a gay fetish bar here.

The Kleist Casino in Westerland is named after the Berlin Kleist Casino. Opened in 1964, it had been under the same management since 1972 and was not only open to gays. In addition to guests from the demi-world, there were also prominent guests such as Arndt von Bohlen and Halbach , Evelyn Künneke , Zarah Leander , Ivan Rebroff , Harald Juhnke and Thomas Fritsch .

proof

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Kleist-Kasino (1921–1933) - Men for sale In: Andreas Pretzel: Historic places and dazzling personalities in the Schöneberger Regenbogenkiez - From Dorian Gray to Eldorado , undated (2012?) , Pp. 21-29
  2. ^ Joseph Howard Tyson: The Surreal Reich , 2010, ISBN 1450240194 , p. 251
  3. ^ A b Florence Tamagne: History of Homosexuality in Europe, 1919–1939 . 2005, ISBN 978-0-87586-356-6 , pp. 38 & 357
  4. ^ Kurt Hiller in a letter to Hermann Weber, August 12, 1949, cited above. in: Raimund Wolfert: "We who are still alive want to finally achieve something tangible ..." Josef Wagner and his correspondence with Kurt Hiller in the years 1947-1960 In: Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft 63: 2019, p. 46
  5. ^ Claudia Schoppmann: "National Socialist Sexual Policy and Female Homosexuality", 2nd edition, 1997, ISBN 9783862268535 , pp. 167–168
  6. ^ Association of Friends of a Gay Museum in Berlin eV: The homosexual group Gesellschaft für Reform des Sexualrechts (Association for the Reform of Sexual Laws) and the 1950ies Berlin , accessed on April 4, 2013
  7. ↑ laut.de: Klaus Nomi - laut.de - Band , accessed on April 4, 2013
  8. ↑ Last archived edition of the active website of the Kleist Casino from November 27, 2002, KLEIST-CASINO-BERLIN-INTERNATIONAL ( Memento from November 27, 2002 in the Internet Archive ) , accessed on April 4, 2013
  9. ↑ kcsylt.de: Eine Sylter Legende - das Kleist Casino , reprint of an article in Sylter Spiegel from May 23, 2007, accessed on April 4, 2013

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