Course:CSIS200/2025/The Eldorado Club

Unknown photographer. Berlin, Bar “Eldorado.” 1932. Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0121-500. Deutsches Bundesarchiv. Retrieved from Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1983-0121-500,_Berlin,_Bar_%22Eldorado%22.jpg. Used under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/)

During the Weimar Republic, cabaret clubs in Berlin became major sites through which queer performers and audiences carved out visibility in a period marked by both unprecedented sexual freedom and growing political volatility. By 1930, Berlin held nearly 900 dancing and cabaret licenses. Its dense network of nightclubs, drag stages, underground film circles, and pornographic industries formed a cultural infrastructure in which gender experimentation and same-sex desire could flourish. The city’s reputation was so widespread that Italians referred to homosexuals as “Berlinese”, while the English spoke of the “German custom". Homosexuality and gender variance entered public consciousness more visibly than ever before.

The Eldorado Club was one of Berlin’s most prominent cabarets within this landscape. Its shows frequently featured cross-dressing performances and songs that addressed sexuality and gender roles directly. But the Eldorado was more than a stage: it cultivated an atmosphere where all sexual expressions circulated both on and offstage. Its clientele ranged widely, though the audience skewed middle-class, and the performances increasingly catered to bourgeois tastes. This wiki examines how the club both catalyse and restrain queer liberation in Berlin during the Weimar Republic.

The Eldorado as a Space of Queer Visibility

Cabarets reflect the social construction of gender. As theatrical environments built on gender parody, inverted binaries, and exaggerated norms, they make visible what Judith Butler later theorizes as gender performativity: the idea that gender identity is created through the repeated acts that are taken to signify it—specifically repeated bodily gestures, movements, and styles that make it appear as though we have a stable, natural gender identity.

Situated in the Weimar Republic, the stability of heteronormativity bore significance in a rising authoritarian regime’s repression of sexuality. Building on Foucauldian theories, Steven Seidman’s Theoretical Perspectives defines sexuality as “a type of social control” , where sexuality emerges through struggles “between those who have power to define and regulate, and those who resist”. As a result, the Eldorado became a space of resistance where performances of sexuality contested state regulation and heteronormative norms.

Within this landscape of contestation, Weimar performers reimagined masculinity through female and queer embodiment. Halberstam argues that "female masculinity" exposes masculinity as a social construct rather than a natural attribute of male bodies. By showing that women—and especially masculine lesbians—can embody masculinity, she reveals that gender is not tied to genitals or biology but to performative expressions that anyone can put on.

However, despite this subversive potential, cabaret’s satire—such as the song "Maskulinum–Femininum" ("Masculine, Feminine")—often reaffirms the gender binary:

"Du bist Femininum, doch sehr maskulinum,
ich bin maskulinum doch sehr femininum…
und das Femininum kämpft’ fürs Maskulinum,
und das Maskulinum kocht’ fürs Femininum."

“You are feminine, but very masculine,
I am masculine but very feminine…
and the feminine fought for the masculine,
and the masculine cooked for the feminine.” (Translated by DeepL)

Thus, while the lyrics appear to blur gender categories, showing how masculinity and femininity function as fluid, they ultimately conform to patriarchal gender roles, revealing the limits of gender play in Berlin’s queer scenes. While female masculinity exposes how gender is constructed, as Butler notes, any gender performance also reveals the persistent cultural scripts that constrain gender expression.

Who Could Afford Queerness?

Dix, Otto. Eldorado. 1927. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2022. Berlinische Galerie.(https://berlinischegalerie.de/en/out-and-about/otto-dix/)

Capitalism simultaneously enabled urban queer autonomy and commodified sexuality for mass consumption. The Eldorado exemplified this tension—its queer freedoms were produced through the very market forces that constrained them.

The Eldorado’s glamour and gender play reveal its deep entanglement with broader social and economic structures. Otto Dix’s painting Eldorado offers a rare glimpse into the club’s interior and highlights its role as a site of gender performativity, especially given the limited photographic documentation. The performers’ glamorous dresses and stylized gestures visualize Newton’s observation that drag separates sex roles from biology. Yet the painting also hints at the voyeuristic gaze circulating within the club, where bourgeois, often heterosexual tourists consumed queer performance as spectacle. The club’s popularity among tourists furthered the commercialization of its cabarets. As a bourgeois venue, the Eldorado catered to an elite clientele whose purchasing power shaped what counted as “acceptable” performance. German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld noted that at least one lesbian cabaret saw a performer arrested when her act was deemed too risqué. Consequently, the Eldorado’s high prices and stylized environment distinguished itself from Berlin’s broader homosexual population, excluding many working-class queer people who instead frequented cheaper queer bars.

By turning queerness into a mainstream spectacle, the cabarets’ roots in authentic self-expression were often diluted. As Monro argues in Bisexuality: Identities, Politics, and Theories, modern sexual categories themselves emerged from capitalist and colonial modes of governance that sought to fix and freeze identities. Thus, queer liberation must confront not only heteronormativity but also the economic and racial structures that sustain it. Nevertheless, these queer entertainment scenes made contact between previously isolated social groups possible. Outside of queer entertainment spaces, artists, prostitutes, professional women, and single working-class women often lived in small, same-sex circles that occasionally permitted lesbian relationships to develop. A mixing of living spaces between these circles created new opportunities for articulating a sexual identity, one that “suggested linkage across class, gender, and culture”.

Precarious Freedom: Queer Visibility at the Edge of Fascism

Before its demise, the Eldorado was home to many famous homosexuals before the Nazi regime. Their relation to the club demonstrated how queer identities, in their knowledge and perceptions, were inseparable from the political climate:

Magnus Hirschfeld

Unknown photographer.Costume party at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft with Magnus Hirschfeld (second from right). Early 1930s. © Archiv der Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft.The Berliner. (https://www.the-berliner.com/berlin/magnus-hirschfeld-day-celebrating-queer-history/)

Hirschfeld’s presence reveals that the Eldorado was a space of queer knowledge-making. His participation in queer entertainment events, such at the Eldorado and other Berlin nightclubs, informed his sexological research at the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and shaped his mission to use science to advocate for the queer community.

Ernst Röhm

Röhm was the only openly homosexual Nazi leader and a frequent guest at the club. He provides a paradoxical case in which homosexuality was mobilized to support nationalism. Röhm constructed a hyper-masculinist homosexuality that rejected effeminacy, reframing same-sex desire as the emotional foundation of male community and state power. For him, feminine values symbolized weakness and bourgeois hypocrisy, while the masculine represented revolutionary strength. His reconstruction of queer identity thus represented a peculiar case in which homosexuality could coexist with mainstream power in a repressive political regime.

Unknown photographer. Photo of the Eldorado Club. Mar.1933. © Landesarchiv Berlin. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. (https://perspectives.ushmm.org/item/photo-of-the-eldorado-club)

Yet this tolerance for queer space existed only within the narrow window of Weimar liberalism. Criminalized under Paragraph 175, queerness directly conflicted with Nazi ideology, which framed homosexuality as a threat to heterosexual reproduction and racial purity. Röhm was executed during the Night of the Long Knives, a purge Hitler justified by portraying Röhm’s homosexual “inclination” as corrupting the SA and endangering party loyalty. Hirschfeld’s institute was also stormed by Nazi forces, and its documents and research papers were burned. The Eldorado was seized shortly after the Nazi Party’s rise to power in 1933. Covered with swastikas and guarded by the Nazi force, the very space that once hosted drag performances and sexual experimentation now symbolized fascist authority.

The club’s rapid demise underscores the fragility of queer visibility under political change. Building on Seidman’s understanding of heterosexuality as a mechanism of control, British sociologist Jeffrey Weeks similarly argues that sexuality emerges through “continual negotiation” rather than being something “given” or “inherent”. Authoritarian consolidation interrupts these negotiations, revealing how easily queer expression can be suppressed and reabsorbed into dominant social and political structures.

Parallel Constraints: Queer Nightlife in Weimar Berlin and 1970s Vancouver

Screenshot from Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance. Directed by Noam Gonick, National Film Board of Canada, 2025. NFB, https://www.nfb.ca/film/parade/.

A comparative lens with the nightlife in 1970s Vancouver shows how capitalist gentrification similarly constrained queer liberation in North America. Ross demonstrates that the West End—initially a vibrant queer and sex-work district—was systematically “sanitised” and “whitened” to make the neighbourhood safe for bourgeois capitalism, with devastating consequences for those rendered “out of place”. This conditional visibility parallels nightlife in Weimar Berlin, where queer culture was celebrated only when profitable, as was divided by class.

The documentary Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance reinforces this comparative analysis. In one scene, Fontaine, a drag performer, was photographed after being attacked outside Toronto’s St. Charles Tavern following a Halloween drag ball in the 1970s. Fontaine was pelted with eggs, spat on, and inked, while a hostile crowd jeers and police officers look on mockingly. The image captures the fragility of queer visibility: Fontaine’s public presence as a drag queen made her a target, just as Weimar drag artists faced hostility despite their cultural prominence. The humiliation towards Fontaine echoes the vulnerability of Eldorado performers, underscoring that public recognition—even celebration—does not necessarily translate into safety. The comparative lens reveals continuing restraints of queer performances: queer spaces can reproduce exclusion even as they challenge dominant norms, and visibility does not guarantee acceptance or respectability.

Conclusion

The Eldorado Club exemplifies the paradox of queer modernity: it enabled unprecedented forms of gender and sexual expression while simultaneously limiting the radical potential of queer liberation through embedded gender norms, commercialization, and class exclusivity. The club both catalyse and restrain queer liberation in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. As a cabaret stage, the Eldorado expanded gender and sexual possibilities, dramatizing what queer theorists later describe as gender performativity. Its performances challenged heteronormative expectations and offered a rare space in which nonconforming identities could be enacted and briefly affirmed. Yet the same forces that enabled this flourishing also constrained it. Dependent on bourgeois tourism and the commercialization of drag, the Eldorado transformed queer expression into a marketable spectacle shaped by class hierarchies. Working-class queer people were often excluded, and the club’s radical edge was tempered by the economic structures sustaining it. When the political climate shifted, these freedoms collapsed: the Eldorado was seized, Hirschfeld’s institute destroyed, and queer life violently recontained under Nazi rule. The comparison with North American drag cultures reinforces this pattern. As Parade: Queer Acts of Love & Resistance shows, performers like Fontaine faced the same tension between visibility and vulnerability. Whether in Weimar Berlin or 1970s Canada, queer spaces survived only within narrow political and economic conditions—and visibility, while empowering, offered no guarantee of safety.

About the Author

Lucy Huang is a third-year student in the GRSJ Department at the University of British Columbia. Before joining UBC this August, she completed the first half of her dual bachelor’s degree at Sciences Po Paris. She is currently a trainee member at the Vancouver Women’s Health Institute and is exploring new research directions informed by her interdisciplinary studies in GRSJ and her Economics minor. Lucy’s approach to gender studies—both in topic selection and research methodology—is shaped by her time studying in France, where she completed coursework and earned a certificate in gender studies. She also draws insight from her everyday interactions and her work as a model, which continually complicates gender theory through embodied experience and representation.