Toppkeller (1924-1930)

(this text can also be heard in the audio clip)

A special highlight of the Toppkeller was the “Award for the most beautiful ladies’ calves”. Five women stretched their legs through holes in a curtain so that the audience could give their assessment.

The famous chansonnette Claire Waldoff and her partner Olga von Roeder often partied with the “Pyramide” ladies’ club in the Toppkeller. Waldoff remembers the exuberant nights: “Admission 30 pfennigs, four musicians with wind instruments played the forbidden club songs. A hall decorated with garlands, populated by painters and models. From the side you could see famous painters; beautiful, elegant women who wanted to get to know the other side of Berlin, the wicked Berlin; and little employees in love. There were jealousies and tears galore, and couples kept disappearing to settle their marital quarrels outside. Several times a night, the famous ‘cognac polonaise’ would be heard, danced on one knee with a full glass of cognac in front of you. […] Every Monday evening at nine o’clock, the ‘Pyramide’ took place in Schwerinstraße – the typical Berlin nightlife with all its sin and colorfulness.”

Among the guests was Marlene Dietrich, with whom Waldoff was rumored to have had an affair. The nude dancers Celly de Rheydt and Anita Berber were also regular guests. Anita Berber was one of Berlin’s most famous dancers, an actress and an icon of nude dancing. She was part of the queer bohemian scene of the Weimar Republic and was interested in both men and women. In the 1920s, she was considered the wildest woman in Berlin.

Barely clothed, Berber’s excessive performances embodied the irrepressible hunger for life of a generation characterized by war, inflation and social upheaval. Her shows were scandalous, her lack of restraint legendary. She took morphine and cocaine, drank a bottle of cognac a day and repeatedly caused a stir with her eccentric behavior.

But from the fall of 1923, times changed: The introduction of the Rentenmark brought economic stabilization, the old order slowly returned and the debauched nightlife returned to normal. The New Objectivity art movement replaced the intoxicating Expressionism, and the ideal of beauty shifted towards sporty girls with bobbed heads.

Berber’s star began to sink. In her final years, she spent a lot of time drinking and doing coke in bars such as the Eldorado or the Toppkeller. Her health deteriorated rapidly.

In 1928, during an engagement in Beirut, she collapsed on stage. After an agonizing journey back to Berlin, she died of tuberculosis a few days later on November 10, 1928, aged just 29. On her deathbed, she is said to have painted  her lips and said: “The guy should have me beautiful.”

The lesbian activist and communist resistance fighter Hilde Radusch also remembers her nights in the Toppkeller – especially the “underwear dance”: “The skirts back then were quite long and you wore petticoats with lace underneath. So there was dancing, you were allowed to lift your skirt a little – that was terribly sexy. Then came the polonaise, where you had to climb over chairs standing against the cellar wall to finally get that longed-for kiss. It was so exciting that women from all walks of life came here, including actresses. It was always full, and on Fridays you could hardly get in.”

The writer Kurt Moreck visited the Toppkeller at the end of the 1920s and described it as a place where women were looking for a partner for the night: “You see famous dancers, painters too, women from high society circles who otherwise only frequent clubs as guests and only see a brief passage here, from which they soon slip away again. They come with their fickle desires, their moods, their restless hearts and their changing desires. They are looking for a girlfriend, a partner, a toy for their capricious senses, an erotic sensation. They come because this place is a stock exchange where you can find what you’re looking for – without much effort.”

The Toppkeller was closed in 1930, the exact reasons are not known. The building in which it was located was destroyed during the Second World War.