David Weir

Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt

The World of Yesterday (1942)

Pandora’s Box (1929)

cultural historian Mel Gordon

The Berlin Stories (1945)

These sex-workers are, after all, workers, so they make up part of the proletarian audience for Norris when he delivers an address at a meeting of the Communist Party. At first, Norris’s oratory makes him seem perversely progressive, but it turns out that the dandified decadent with a taste for sado-masochism is a political opportunist who sells Communist Party secrets to the government, which had already begun the drift to the far right well before the fascist triumph of January 1933.

Entartung (Degeneration; 1892)