Aleister Crowley lived in Berlin for a brief two years at the end of
the Weimar Era. Despite homosexuality having been illegal in Germany since 1871 (under Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code), “Babylon on the Spree” was home to thriving and diverse sexual subcultures.

Crowley, no stranger to “alternative” sexualities, took the opportunity to explore all that Berlin had to offer, even memorializing the city’s unique subcultures in some of the paintings for his exhibition at Galerie Nierendorf. Crowley left for London in 1932, and barely a year later, after seizing the reins of government, the National Socialists laid waste to Berlin’s brief experiment in sexual
freedom.

This paper examines Crowley’s activities in Berlin’s queer underworld and what became of the individuals and institutions with whom he spent his “Lila Nächte.”