Three Women Walk into a Berlin Ball

the shutter click that immortalized Anna, Marlene & Leni

Berlin in the late 1920s was a surreal place. For the Weimar Republic’s greatest artists and bohemian visionaries, the city offered safe harbor and a space in which to experiment freely. At the same time, Berlin symbolized all the stuff that hedonistic dreams are made of, or depending on how you look at it, the death spiral of a decadent, self-destructive society.

After years of penury, of scraping by to do one’s part to support the German struggle…