Painter [George Grosz](https://www.christies.com/features/10-things-to-know-about-george-grosz-7883-1.aspx) lived it. See [here] (https://www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5945007) and [here](https://apollo.imgix.net/content/uploads/2018/11/LEAD_Jeanne-Mammen-Bruderstrasse-Free-Room-1930.jpg?auto=compress,format&w=900&h=600) >Between the collapse of Germany's monarchy in 1918 and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Berlin gained a reputation for being the bawdiest, most licentious city in Europe. Its cabaret acts were outrageously explicit, and its brothels were infamous. It is said that cocaine could be bought in the city's nightclubs for half the price of a decent dinner. >‘Barbarism prevailed... the times were mad,’ wrote Grosz in his autobiography, A Little Yes and a Big No. His best-known works are visions of the seamy side of German metropolitan life at this time, which, along with Christopher Isherwood's ‘Berlin’ stories about Mr Norris and Sally Bowles, have indelibly shaped our picture of what the German capital was like in the Weimar years. They give off a heavy whiff of social decadence and political corruption. Take, for instance, Grosz’s 1922 watercolour Orgie, depicting a dingy bar in which a grotesque, cigar-chomping drunk spews wine through his teeth, while other patrons defecate and copulate around him.