The Weimer Republic was the period after World War I until the rise of Nazi Germany, and was the first time Germany was a constitutional republic. It was a time of political turmoil, economic hardship, and artistic movements that set the stage for Hitler's rise to power. Berlin was a hub for sex tourism and had a strong homosexual emancipation movement that was divided into camps, with physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld advocating for the repeal of paragraph 175 that criminalised sexual relations between men.

Berlin's transvestite community included trans sex workers and transvestite bars with the city becoming a global hub for sex tourism throughout the 1920s. The rise of the Nazi Party led to the closure of transvestite bars and the persecution of trans people. More information can be found via Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014) by Robert Beachy.