In the Nollendorfkiez around Fuggerstraße, Motzstraße and Nollendorfplatz there are numerous pubs, bars and stores that cater mainly to a homosexual audience. Every year on the third weekend in July, the homosexual "Motzstraßenfest" takes place in this part of Berlin. With a mixture of information booths of same-sex groups, show stages as well as snack and sales booths, it now attracts thousands of visitors and has become a tourist attraction.
The area was already considered a so-called gay district in the Golden Twenties, a neighborhood with a dense infrastructure and cultural offerings for homosexual and transgender people and thus intended to provide a space for queer people free of discrimination. One of the first eyewitness accounts of this is the autobiographical novel “Leb wohl, Berlin” by British author Christopher Isherwood, who lived for two and a half years at Nollendorfstraße 17, where much of the book's action takes place. The novel was, among other things, the basis for the musical Cabaret.
The area is characterized by partially completely preserved streets of the time of its founding and imperial-era ornamental squares, such as Winterfeldtplatz or Viktoria-Luise-Platz. After ever-burgeoning periods of relative cultural queer-friendliness in the district, general shifts have also been reflected in Schöneberg. Both the association of heroin and other hard drugs with sex work since the 1970s, as well as the subsequent HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the gentrification process in the neighborhood that has been going on for decades, and the intensification of xenophobic and racist narratives in German general discourse (e.g., Germany as the "brothel of Europe"), have greatly changed the circumstances and possibilities of Schöneberg’s sex work.
The loss of countless hotels, guesthouses, and brothels has forced sex workers to work in public and see clients
in public. People in the neighborhood wanted a solution for the sex workers and drug users, who were using their
yards, hallways, and stairwells for work and drug use. Sex workers wanted safe work spaces like
"Verrichtungsboxen" (boxes in which sex work can take place) - a concept that serves as a solution in other cities
like Cologne. In response, the SPD installed two public eco-toilets in 2018 and two more a few years later.
These toilets were built with two doors (one on each side) to prevent sex workers from being locked in; an indication that these toilets were undeniably built as work sites for sex workers. Today, these toilets are primarily used for work and drug use, as well as a toilet. They represent unsanitary working conditions provided by the state. The local sex workers are against these toilets, but are forced and work here - in portable toilets without running water.
According to the Schöneberg City Hall, the toilets are used 300 times a week for defecation. Supposedly they are cleaned twice a day, but neither the sex workers who use them nor the volunteers of Trans*Sexworks can attest to this. There is a dispute between the district and the toilet cleaners because they are usually extremely dirty - you can smell them from meters away. In the middle of new buildings, condominiums and expensive cars, sex workers are supposed to be driven out of this new neighborhood. The eviction of Rummelsburger Bucht is a prime example of how marginalized people, especially migrants, drug users, homeless people and street-based sex workers are victimized by economic interests of entrepreneurs and local governments.
The Covid pandemic has made its own contribution to plunging sex workers in Schöneberg into increased precarity. When the first lockdown began, local counseling centers were also closed. No one went out to tell the women, who were still working on the streets what was going on. One day, seemingly out of the blue, everything was closed. No one had thought to educate the sex workers, drug users, and homeless people in the Kurfürstenkiez about Corona. Instead, there were more and more acts of violence in Frobenstraße, mostly against the transwomen. There were attacks again and again, but the police did not come or came very late. Many sex workers were afraid to call the police. Sex work was forbidden and the police had been very aggressive and disrespectful towards the women in the previous months.
Thus Schöneberg has developed from a neighborhood in which sex work was safely embedded, into an environment that wants to fight and displace visible sex work. However, sex work is unequivocally a part of Schöneberg's history, present and future. For more information on Schöneberg*s queer and sex work history, consider the informative zine Trans*Sexworks has made