In a filmed interview with Richard Leacock in the 1970s, Louise Brooks spoke of the rather wild nightlife she witnessed in Berlin while she was there filming
Pandora's Box in late 1928. Brooks' experience in Berlin - she was there twice, once while filming
Pandora's Box and a few months later while filming
Diary of a Lost Girl, are detailed as well in Barry Paris' outstanding biography of the actress -- so is her experience in Paris while filming
Prix de beaute (1930).
Two books, one a new release, focus on the wild nightlife and sexual underground of Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. I have both books, as well as a couple of others by the author, Mel Gordon. (Especially fascinating is his
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber.) Each are recommended for those interested.
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, by Mel Gordon
From the publisher: When
Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin first appeared in the fall of 2000, it inspired wide acclaim and multiple printings.
This sourcebook of hundreds of rare visual delights from the
pre-Nazi, Cabaret-period “Babylon on the Spree” has the distinction of
being praised both by scholars and avatars of contemporary culture,
inspiring performers, filmmakers, historians straight and gay,
designers, and musicians like the Dresden Dolls and Marilyn Manson.
Voluptuous Panic’s expanded edition includes the new
illustrated chapter “Sex Magic and the Occult,” documenting German pagan
cults and their bizarre erotic rituals, including instructions for
entering into the “Sexual Fourth Dimension.” The deluxe hardcover
edition also includes sensational accounts of hypno-erotic cabaret acts,
Berlin fetish prostitution (“The Boot Girl Visit”), gay life (“A
Wild-Boy Initiation!”), descriptions and illustrations of Aleister
Crowley’s Berlin OTO secret society, and sex crime (“The Curious Career
and Untimely Death of Fritz Ulbrich”).
Horizontal Collaboration: The Erotic World of Paris, 1920-1946, by Mel Gordon
From the publisher: Mel Gordon presents a companion volume to his highly praised pictorial history Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin.
Mel Gordon, author of Voluptuous Panic, the
celebrated history about the sex culture of Weimar Berlin, returns with a
stunningly illustrated look at Paris, The City of Pleasure, prior to
and during German occupation during World War II.
Horizontal Collaboration encompasses the Jazz Age,
Depression, World War and Occupation, and Liberation. It concludes with
the shuttering of the licensed brothels in 1946, which some Parisian
intellectuals thought was the final “destruction of French
civilization”.
The term “Horizontal Collaboration” refers to the sexual
liaisons between French civilians and German occupiers from 1940 to
1944. These were extremely widespread and included both individual
wartime relationships in addition to prostitution. As Allied armies
swept across the French countryside, thousands of young women—and some
men—were savagely punished by the authorities or by vigilante crowds,
becoming a source of deep national shame.
Author Gordon redefines the pejorative term to mean
something much broader: French men and women “horizontally collaborated”
to overcome all social obstacles, divisions, and regulations. These
obstacles include married and unmarried couples, straights and
homosexuals, foreigners and locals, gun-toting soldiers and their
vanquished subjects. The natural yearning for sexual pleasure equally
corrupted all co-habitating partners.
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber: Weimar Berlin's Priestess of Depravity, by Mel Gordon
From the publisher:
The Seven Addictions and Five Professions of Anita Berber is
the first contemporary biography of the notorious
actor/dancer/poet/playwright who scandalized sex-obsessed Weimar Berlin
during the 1920s.
In an era where everything was permitted, Anita Berber’s celebrations
of “Depravity, Horror and Ecstasy” were condemned and censored. She
often haunted Weimar Berlin’s hotel lobbies, nightclubs, and casinos,
radiantly naked except for an elegant sable wrap, a pet monkey hanging
from her neck, and a silver brooch packed with cocaine.
Multi-talented Anita saw no boundaries between her personal life and
her taboo-shattering performances. As such, she was Europe’s first
postmodern woman. After sated Berliners finally tired of Anita Berber’s
libidinous antics, she became a “carrion soul that even the hyenas
ignored,” dying in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine.
• Includes nearly two hundred photographs and illustrations,
including some that recreate Berber’s salacious and enduring “Repertoire
of the Damned.”
• Berber was a lover of Marlene Dietrich and influenced and
associated with Leni Riefenstahl, Lawrence Durrell, Klaus Mann, and the
founder of modern sexology, Magnus Hirschfeld.
• An early movie star, Berber acted in Fritz Lang’s
Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler and the silent epic
Lucifer. [ Berber also starred in
Dida Ibsens Geschichte, the 1918 sequel to the the originial filmed adaption of
Diary of a Lost Girl. ]
Mel Gordon is Professor of Theater Arts at the University of California,
Berkeley. He is the author of twelve books, including
The Grand
Guignol,
Dada Performance,
The Stanislavsky Technique, and the
Feral House title
Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant. 
Lost Creatures, by Melissa McCarl, centers on the meeting of Brooks and the British drama critic Ken Tynan. The play "follows the evening in May of 1978 when British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan met his long time cinematic idol Louise Brooks. He travels to her dingy little apartment in Rochester, NY where she has sequestered herself for many years. He is there ostensibly to write a profile on Brooks for the New Yorker, but he discovers that they are kindred spirits, and in spite of an age gap of twenty years, theirs becomes an unlikely love story discovered through a marathon dialogue about sex, philosophy, art, and criticism. There is also a silent third character, Lulu, (based on Louise’s role in her most famous silent film Pandora’s Box) who drives the action of the play."
