From George Orwell at the Café Royal :

The coming of the Hitler regime in 1933 had a chilling effect on all the arts. Many writers and artists left, if they could, fleeing for their lives. Those who remained – and who were not Jewish – had to fit into the enforced Nazi orthodoxy if they wished to be published or shown.

Those that stayed, and lived, had to find ways to adapt and survive.

All part of a systematic and brutal eradication of “non-Aryan” elements in all art forms. –  About Isms He was Never Wrong: George Orwell at the Café Royal

The chill turned to deep freeze as the Nazis consolidated their power. And I wondered about what happened to the artists who were such a vibrant element of the ‘Bohemian life in a Wicked City.’  How did the systematic cultural cleansing and nazification affect them?

We know that many who could, fled. Others were persecuted, silenced, driven underground, rounded-up, sent to the camps, murdered. 

Here’s the story of one of them – Jeanne Mammen – the artist and illustrator whose best known work provides a glimpse into the cabaret decadence, night life, and street scene of post WW1 Weimar Berlin.

For convenience I have divided her story into four parts;

1. Before WW1
2. Until the coming of the Nazis.
3. 1933 -1945
4. The post WW2 years.

This post has parts 1 and 2 –  the story up until Hitler came to power in 1933.

To set the scene here are a few of her watercolors from the 1920s.

The Early Years: Before WW1

Gertrud Johanna Louise Mammen was born in Berlin in 1890 but her family moved to Paris when she was five. Her father – Gustav Oskar Mammen – was a wealthy businessman. Jeanne, as she was called, was raised and educated in Paris. 

After the completion of her secondary education at the Lycée Molière, Mammen studied art in Paris. Along with her sister Mimi she attended the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1908 she and Mimi moved to Brussels where they continued their formal art training at the Académie des Beaux-Arts. Three years later they moved to Rome where they attended the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma and the Scuola Libera del Nudo dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma.

They returned to Paris in 1912 and set up a studio together, and then in Brussels. Her sketchbooks show that she was a keen observer of the social scene. Her more formal work shows the influence of symbolism and her interest in French literature.  

Her first major work –  twelve illustrations of Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony, circa 1910 – introduces elements of the fantastical into a frequently painted religious scene.  By contrast, her sketchbooks from that time are filled with observations of everyday life on the boulevards of Paris and Brussels.

Observations of urban life (ca. 1910–1914).

Café Boul’ Mich c.1910
Watercolour and pencil .Boul’Mich – nickname given to the Boulevard St. Michel in the Latin Quarter of Paris

Enemy Alien

When the war came in 1914 Gustav Mammen was declared an enemy alien. The French government seized his assets and the Mammen family fled, first to Holland and then in 1915 back to Berlin. The war years were times of deprivation, financial hardship and struggle.

Berlin After the War

Mammen needed to support herself financially and she drew upon the artistic education to earn a living. In 1920 she and her sister moved into a studio apartment at Kurfürstendamm 29, in the rear building on the fourth floor, where she lived and worked until her death in 1976.

Germany in the 1920s was fighting its way back after defeat, enduring both the psychic and physical  trauma of devastating loses, the crippling costs of punitive reparations and a disrupted economy. Berlin was the epicenter of a ferment of social change and political upheaval. 

Mammen  was finally able to support herself as a commercial artist.  She drew illustrations for  periodicals – Jugend, Ulk, Der Junggeselle, Querschnitt and Simplicissimus and  fashion magazines such as Styl, Die Dame, Die Schöne Frau  She chronicled the gauzy, glitzy glamor of Berlin’s “Golden Twenties” as well as the darker side.

Mammen was one of a number of artists whose work captured that spirit of ribald resilience and reckless revelry. She showed the hungover ennui of bourgeois decadence. She drew the dancers, the revelers, the prostitutes, all the jaded denizens of sidewalk cafes and cabaret bars.  Her characters are blasé, disillusioned and sophisticated. They are cosmopolitan, knowing. worldly and defiant. We look at them. And they stare back with a bored and supercilious disdain.

It wasn’t all glamor. A group of women stand in the doorway of a brothel.

Tired, bored, listless and lascivious.

And in the summer she took her sketchbook to the beach.

Her illustrations told the story of the “New Woman” – the modern, sophisticated, independent woman who lived and worked in Berlin and frequented the bars, cafes and night clubs of the big city.  She took her sketchbook everywhere and her drawings reveal a kind of intimacy and sympathy between the artist and the subject. 

Her work is usually more gauzy than grotesque grim. Many of her portraits have an almost cartoonish cast to them.  This reveler wakes up on the couch after Mardi Gras, hungover, but not unhappy. No regrets. Mamman had the capacity to be the critical and sympathetic observer. 

The Kurfürstendamm where Mammen lived was a busy entertainment district in the 1920’s.  Mammen’s apartment was just a few blocks from the hub of it. She lived at number 29 and under number 127 was the Sanssouci Winery and Dance Lounge. The Nelson Theater, where Josephine Baker regularly performed was next door.

A bit further along, under No. 205, Marlene Dietrich and Margo Lion sang homoerotic songs. Their famous duet “Wenn die beste Freundin mit der besten Freundin” was a popular hit.

With a political backdrop of rising tension; an economic backdrop of uncertainty, recovery, depression and poverty; and a social backdrop of cultural disruption, experimentation and sexual freedom – Berlin became the capital of cabaret. Jazz clubs, gay bars, dance halls, cabaret theaters and night life across the income spectrum flourished. W.H.Auden counted 170 male brothels.

Berlin was a tourist attraction for those seeking liberation from the strait-laced conformity.

Unusual  guidebooks touted the city’s sub-cultures and underworld attractions. Ruth Margarete Roellig published a guide Berlins Lesbische Frauen for lesbians in 1928. Three years later Curt Moreck published his  Führer durch das ‘Lasterhafte’ Berlin (Guide to ‘Depraved’ Berlin) (1931) He had this say: 

“Kurfürstendamm is the most youthful street in Berlin, the fresh artery of the new west. Young people rule here and their motto rejuvenates what actually crosses the borders.”

Berlin: What’s Not in the Baedeker Guide, 1927Curt Moreck was the pseudonym of  well-known cultural critic Konrad Haemmerling. The guide’s red and gold embossed cover depicts a scantily clad woman dancing with a bear –  the symbol of Berlin.

The bear holds a bottle of champagne and she holds a glass. They are dancing on the city’s coat of arms. In a parody of a Baedecker  guide it lists the the city’s entertainment spots from seedy bars to elegant clubs and sidewalk cafés. It included art work by Mammen. 

The Blue Stocking at Linienstraße 140 was a late night bar in an area of north Berlin full of cellar bars, dives and clubs catering to tourists and a criminal underworld of drug dealers and prostitutes. 

The British tour operator Cooks, ran late-night buses to the these semi-criminal clubs catering to thrill seeking tourists not satisfied by the routine wild excesses of the more famous night spots. At midnight, buses picked up sightseers at the major Berlin hotels and delivered them to the Lesbian  “Toppkeller” and other night spots including The Blue Stocking.

And the streets where beggars, war wounded soldiers and prostitutes were ubiquitous

BOOT-GIRLS—Identified by their furs and calf-length, Wilhelmian-era, black-leather boots or (after 1926) in shiny, patent leather versions. Lacquered gold, cobalt blue, brick, “poisonous” green, or maroon, the iridescent footwear indicated the Girl’s specialty. Freelance Dominas , they attracted frugal provincial German Suitors , who were led to nearby pensions. Estimated numbers (in 1930): 300-350 – Mel Gordon VOLUPTUOUS PANIC The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

The best known of Mammen’s illustrations belong to the 1920s. She chronicled the wild excesses, the liberated times and erotic and queer sub-cultures of a sexually liberated city.  

In a magazine cover Mammen captured the cosmopolitan elegance and extravagance of night life in the glittering city.

In the autumn of 1930 Wolfgang Gurlitt organized Mammen’s first comprehensive solo exhibition at his father’s Galerie Gurlitt in Berlin.

The exhibition included “Chess Player” and her portrait of the groundbreaking performance artist and dancer and actor Valeska Gert.

The exhibition was so successful that Gurlitt commissioned Mammen to create a series of colored lithographs to illustrate a collector’s edition of Pierre Louÿs’s Les Chansons de Bilitis (1894).

The chansons – Lesbian love poems – are in the style of Sappho and in his introduction, Louÿs’ claimed they were found on the walls of a tomb in Cyprus. They were written by a woman in Ancient Greece, he said, and  he had merely translated them. 

And then the Nazis came to power. Mammen’s work was declared “Jewish” and degenerate. The book was never published.

Mammen did create the lithographs though and seven survived the wartime bombing of Berlin.

Below are two of them: Jealousy and Siesta. Given her choice of subjects and the intimacy of her portrayals it would be reasonable to conclude that Mammen was gay. But there is no evidence that she ever had a lesbian relationship. 

Mammen strongly opposed the National Socialist party.

When they came to power they took control of the publishing industry. Mammen refused to co-operate with Simplicissimus, when it bowed to Nazi pressure. It was a principled stance but one that ended the main source of her income. 

Her freelance career as a professional commercial artist was over.  

Moreck’s guide listed the Café Reimann on Kurfürstendamm with an illustration by Mammen. Here was a place to drink coffee and recover from the excesses of the night.  On the right of the painting you can see a coal-burning heater which together with blankets allowed guests  to sit in comfort on the terrace even in winter.  

The couple sit staring out and away from each other.  The woman – with a cigarette hanging from her fingers  – looks bored. The man seems to be dozing off. They have nothing to say to one another.

In September 1931 – the year of the painting –  the Café Reimann was the scene of a violent anti-Jewish riot. It was Rosh Hashanah and Nazi thugs attacked people leaving the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse. Up to a 1000 – many in SA Sturmabteilung brownshirts – gathered on Kurfürstendamm. They attacked those they perceived to be Jews and rioted in the bars and café terraces.

The Café Reimann was a specific target because it was considered a Jewish meeting point. The newspaper of the Social Democratic Party – Vorwärts – reported: “The tables and chairs in the front yard were demolished, as was the large window of the pastry shop.”

It was a foretaste of the lawless violence of Kristallnacht.

In Part Two: What happened after the Nazis came and her work during the war and post-war period,