The playboy, the sex worker and the ‘mother’ of night owls: Berlin says goodbye to three of its wilder characters

Like an exotic zoo, Berlin has never been short of colourful characters. As its unique history of division retreats into history, though, many of those who thrived in the West Berlin enclosure have in recent years been taking their final bow. Three were particularly memorable, starting with the perma-tanned Rolf Eden. Until his death last week aged 92, Rolf was the oldest swinger in town.

As a nightclub owner he delighted Berlin’s tabloids with carefully curated sleaze: Hugh Hefner, of Playboy notoriety, meets London strip club impresario Peter Stringfellow.

Eden outlasted them both. He started in 1957, aged just 27. For nearly 40 years his Big Eden nightclub, a wonderland of mirrored walls, offered West Berliners topless waitresses, beauty pageants and the promise of western glamour.

Born Rolf Sigmund Sostheim in 1930 in Berlin to Jewish parents, his family survived the Holocaust after fleeing to Israel months after the Nazis took power in 1933.

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At 18 he joined the Israeli army and served in an elite unit alongside future president Yitzhak Rabin before moving to Paris in the mid-1950s. He returned to Berlin with dreams of replicating Hefner’s Playboy empire with the start capital of 6,000 Deutsche marks on offer for all returnees to the decimated city.

“There was a gap in the market for playboys,” the 82-year-old Eden said in 2012, “and I was the only Jew in Berlin who didn’t feel like a victim.”

He died at home quietly last week in the company of his wife but, right to the end, he sparked delight and horror with his lewd pronouncements — such as his newspaper advertisement a few years back offering a €250,000 reward for any woman “upon whom” he died during sex.

“But it has to be during sex,” he insisted. “Word has got around now. The women are showing a greater interest.”

Another Berlin original I met who made a great interest on this front was Molly Luft, a brothel owner who happily referred to herself as “Berlin’s fattest whore”.

She was born Edda Blank in 1944 in Pomerania, now Poland, and her earliest memories were of her mother feeding her “lots of meringues and whipped cream”.

It was the start of an eating disorder and deep anxieties, exploited in postwar West Berlin by her American soldier husband to get her earning for him in the sex trade.

Molly, a tabloid and chatshow favourite, was a memorable sight: 5ft tall, weighing 170kg (26 stone), her heavily painted faced crowned with a spiky pink wig.

When we spoke in 2005 she had just announced her retirement: after an estimated 90,000 clients she felt too old for the oldest profession. “Everything’s more difficult today,” she said. “You have to work with all sorts of tricks to get by.”

Five years later, unrecognisable without her wig, Molly died of colon cancer in a Berlin hospital. Around that time I was already on friendly terms with Inge Schulz. Known to Berlin night owls as the Schrippen Mutti, or Breadroll Mother, the Berlin native toured night spots — from bars to sex clubs — with trays of filled rolls and meaty snacks for hungry revellers.

In 2019, realising I had not seen her out in a while, I visited her at home, hoping for a fun story.

I was confronted with a squalid apartment and a lonely woman battling mobility issues and demons, descending into dementia. She made her favourite drink: filter coffee, cognac and spray cream. Only after I finished mine did I notice she liked to feed her many cats cream, direct from the spray tube.

What united Rolf, Molly and Inge is how they saw the worst of life but chose to focus on the best: seizing each day with a live-and-let-live spirit

Nearly 80 at the time and estranged from her children, Inge recalled wartime Berlin as a confusion of bunkers, air-raid sirens, ruins and hunger.

In a quiet and cautious voice she confided how she shared in the fate of many Berlin women after the war ended in May 1945: a Red army soldier raped her — then was shot dead by another soldier before her eyes. Anxious not to linger on that memory, she then related, in a girlish giggle, about how her life as a West Berlin butcher’s assistant led to her night-time rounds.

After Inge’s carer showed up and explained her desperate health situation, it felt exploitative to run an interview, so I never did. Inge never got out again on her night-time rounds and died last December.

As provincial West Berlin sophisticates, what united Rolf, Molly and Inge is how they saw the worst of life but chose to focus on the best: seizing each day with a live-and-let-live spirit.

“It was such a rich life here in Berlin, particularly with my boys and girls on my night rounds,” said Inge that afternoon, slurping happily on her third cognac-laced coffee. “I couldn’t care less how they are, who they love, a person is a person.”