Flirting at the Resi Casino and Nightclub
Tinder in the 1930s. Yes, the Resi pioneered flirting from afar. Nightclub-goers in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s could communicate with strangers across the room using the astoundingly modern and convenient technology of telephones and pneumatic tubes. Two clubs set the trend – the Resi (also known as the Residenz-Casino) and the Femina.
At the Resi, a large club with a dancefloor that held 1,000 people and alive band, an elaborate system of table phones and pneumatic tubes allowed for anonymous, late-night flirtation. The swan-neck tube system delivered small gifts and notes to a basket by each table, and a colour-coded light system indicated your status and a map of table numbers distributed to every guest made you searchable. Who needs dating apps?
In 1931, during the heyday of this across-the-nightclub flirtation, The Berliner Herold described the process of receiving a call from an amorous stranger: “the tabletop telephones buzzed, and the acquaintance with the blonde, raven-haired or redheaded, monocle-wearing beauty was made, one was no longer alone, and had twice as much fun.”
These pics are from the Resi, which was at 10 Blumenstrasse in Berlin. Note the disco balls. Disco balls are now century-old tech, which is something I was surprised to learn.
The Resi was also famous for its “Waltzing Water” show, which began in 1928. A nightly spectacular of dancing water jets rising and falling to pre-recorded symphonic music and lit with coloured lights, it was almost as popular a lure as the phone system.
Jeder einmal in Berlin
This was the slogan of a 1920s tourism campaign that translates, very roughly, as ‘everyone should be in Berlin, at least once’ – or, “everyone, once in Berlin.” It was seen on posters throughout Germany in the 20s and 30s and was even appropriated by other Berlin establishments. The Resi Casino and Nightclub used the slogan on its brochures, altered to say “jeder einmal im Resi!”
Lise Meitner, Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman
My fascination with Lise Meitner is the reason this story exists in the first place. Professor Lise Meitner is the woman responsible for splitting the atom – she discovered nuclear fission and ran from the Nazis at the same time. Just as in my story, she worked with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin and fled to Sweden with just the clothes on her back in July of 1938. Otto Hahn really did give her his mother’s engagement ring to fund her journey.
In December of 1938, while walking in the snow in Sweden with her nephew, the truth of what had been happening in all those messy, confusing experiments hit Meitner in a rush of inspiration and she realised they had discovered nuclear fission. She mathed it out while sitting on a fallen tree trunk and scribbling on scraps of paper her companions had in their pockets. She continued working with Hahn and Strassman via letters, telegraph and telephone in the new year and they published their results in a series of papers in early 1939.
Meitner in her lab in Berlin in around 1930.
Her work laid the foundations for the atomic weapons that were used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, though she declined an offer to work at Los Alamos Laboratory on the Manhattan Project saying, “I will have nothing to do with a bomb!”
Meitner won many awards and honours during her lifetime but it was Otto Hahn who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for nuclear fission in 1944. Meitner was nominated 49 times for the Nobel Prize in physics and chemistry, but never won. In the 1990s, the sealed records of the Nobel Committee became public and they revealed that, in a thoroughly unimaginative, obtuse and politically expedient pile of nonsense, Meitner was not included with Hahn in the Prize for Chemistry for nuclear fission because she was … a physicist.
In 1997, the 109th element of the periodic table was named meitnerium, making Lise Meitner the only woman to be exclusively honoured so (the element curium is named for both Marie Curie and her hubby, Pierre.) Meitner is credited with the discovery of element 91, protactinium.
Meitner and Hahn remained close friends throughout their lives.
Wernher von Braun
Von Braun in Germany in the early days of the war.
Wernher von Braun is often called ‘the father of modern rocketry’ and his contributions to the science have been responsible for both countless deaths and horrors and the glory and splendour of taking humans to the stars.
Maths and physics were not von Braun’s strong points until, as a teen, he was given a telescope and a book about ‘interplanetary travel by rocket.’ After this, he honed his skills.
As the leader of Germany’s rocketry program, his work for the Nazis resulted in the V-2 missile that decimated Allied towns and cities in the war, and killed and exhausted the prisoners forced to labour on the project. The first rocket flew in 1942. By 1944, he recognised that Germany was not going to triumph in the war, and surrendered himself and his research to America.
The second half of his life saw him working on America’s rocket program, all based on his developments of the V-2 missile. In 1958, he successfully launched the first American artificial earth satellite, and in 1960, transferred to the newly created NASA. There he became the director of the Marshall Space Flight Centre, developing the Saturn V rocket that would take the Apollo 11 mission to the moon in 1969.
Hanna Reitsch
Hanna Reitsch was, in fact, the Nazi’s best test pilot. She became the first German woman to win a captain’s license, the first female helicopter pilot, and the first female test pilot in her country. In World War II she served as a test pilot for all types of German aircraft, including the jet-powered Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter and the prototype for the V-1 rocket. She did everything but fly combat missions during the war and was the first German woman to be awarded the Iron Cross in 1942.
Reitsch was also one of the last people to see Adolf Hitler alive in the underground bunker in Berlin, and she flew the last German warplane out of Berlin in late April 1945. She was then captured by the U.S. Army and interned for 15 months.
Reitsch went on to set more than 40 altitude and endurance records for powered and motorless flight, including gliding records in the U.S. in the 1970s.
Reitsch and von Braun were lovers in the heady days of the 1930s with rumours of a baby that was given up for adoption (as was encouraged in the Third Reich.) Reitsch remained committed to her support of National-Socialism for the rest of her life and died in 1979 in Germany.
