Notes to myself & questions

[feuervogel]

- 1920s & 1930s, absinthe, sloe gin may have been popular. Absinthe was never banned in Germany.
(google: popular drinks 1930s germany (eng and ger, variations thereon); wikipedia (de & en) pages on alcohols)

? Would young women (age 19 or so) have drunk these things?

? Cabarets: would young women have gone to them? Would it have been weird? (google & wikipedia: cabaret/kabarett, who went to cabarets 1920s) Google says that by the 1920s, burlesques were just strip clubs basically. So I want cabarets, I'm pretty sure.

? How were families of war deceased notified? Bodies were buried at the front (I gather), so were personal effects sent home, and did they get posthumous medals? I mainly want to know about the German customs.
(google: world war 1 deceased notification families german/ erste weltkrieg toten familie notifiziert)

? What were mourning customs in 1930 Berlin? (google: funeral/mourning customs germany/berlin/lutheran 1930; trauergebräuche 1930)

? What did German soldiers carry for luck in WW1? (Google: luck charm world war 1; erster weltkrieg amulett/talisman/Glücksbringer) (The last one there got me a link to a lottery page. :P )

Comments

[david-f-smith.livejournal.com]

I know absinthe was still a popular drink with the bohemian set in middle Europe well after the turn of the century. Not sure if it was still fashionable into the roaring Twenties though.

There's a book you might dig in relation to those first few questions, The Brothel in Rosenstrasse, by Michael Moorcock. It's set more in the mid-teens, just before WWI, but it covers some related subjects. Good yarn generally speaking too.

[feuervogel]

Bohemian, huh? One of the girls wants to be/look sophisticated, though they're not a rich family, so maybe sophisticated is smoking from a cigarette holder (which has a cooler name in German, though I can't think of it) and drinking absinthe while declaiming on the virtues of communism.