Weimar Germany had a population of over sixty million, so it is not impossible that such a prostitution team occurred. There were examples within the Weimar press that cited family-based prostitution. This was not exactly an unprecedented pattern for prostitution; there were examples of parents pimping out their children both before and after Weimar and such family-based sex work was not limited to Germany. But the idea of a mother-daughter prostitution team being a "thing" is a problematic approach to Weimar Germany. Much of the discourse on Weimar sex was a fusion of sensationalism and pointed propaganda that distorted the realities of German sex work

Although the Weimar Republic has since the 1930s become somewhat synonymous with decadence and sexual freedom, this experience was far from universal nor was it completely unchallenged. Although individuals advocating sexual freedom like Hirschfeld emerged as public intellectuals in the Republic, it does not necessarily follow that their advice seeped into everyday practice. Nor were all sex reformers as radical as Magnus Hirschfeld, most mainstream German sexologists emphasized healthy sexuality as a function of marriage, not sexuality for its own sake. Public celebrations of sexuality and other "decadent" pastimes generally tended to shrink once outside urban centers like Berlin. Even in Berlin, avenues of sexual escape and alternative experiences tended to be the exception rather than the rule to daily life in Germany's largest metropolis.

Berlin during the Weimar period certainly did have an outsized cultural weight compared to earlier periods, with emigres like Nabokov of Josephine Baker living in the city and a number of German intellectuals like Brecht. With regards to sex, there was a general loosening of morals in terms of semi-public entertainment. Cabarets and other venues did feature female nudity and other transgressive forms of entertainment. Some of this entertainment tried to fit into the forms of the neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) that sought to break with the stuffy norms of the Kaiserreich and the prewar avant garde. Dadaism, for instance tried to create art without real boundaries or conventions and some Dadaists thrived in Berlin's hustle and bustle. Yet, not all of these sensual entertainments were done in the name of neue Sachlichkeit and a number of them were peep shows or nude reviews with only a thin veneer of artistic pretensions.

One of the reasons why these shows became more prominent was the general loosening of the Kaiserreich's censorship laws under the Weimar Constitution allowed more freer expression in clubs or other venues. Yet this did not mean all forms of vice were now legal. Female prostitution remained in a nebulous position it had prewar where it was technically illegal, but loosely regulated by the Sittenpolizei (morals police) or other municipal authorities. Laws passed in 1927 further decriminalized female prostitution, but also kept a regulatory function. Some women abided by these rules, whereas others were free agents. The decriminalization actually made life harder for these women as it gave the police much greater powers to crack down on streetwalkers and other sex workers who were not registered. The overall system of female prostitution was highly exploitative sex work in most cases with a good deal of corruption among the regulators. Homosexuality remained illegal under Paragraph 175 of the legal code and there was no real regulation of male prostitution. Weimar Berlin certainly did develop a gay subculture in certain areas of the city, but this often built on precedents set during the Kaiserreich. There were gay clubs in the late Wilhelmine era that operated as open-secrets with municipal authorities and regions of Berlin like Friedrichstadt already had a reputation by 1914 for being the area to cruise for male prostitutes. Part of what fueled this development was the simple fact that Berlin was Germany's megalopolis. The explosive growth of the nineteenth century not only allowed for an anonymity that was not possible in smaller cities like Frankfurt am Main, but also provided a steady base of young men who were out of work and could turn to prostitution to make ends meet. The dislocations of war and its aftermath only added to these trends.

The city itself was far from a safe-haven for LGBTQ people. Weimar Berlin did witness periodic police raids against homosexual bars and sweeps of transvestite and homosexual prostitutes. German courts would also periodically declare some publications to be obscene, and the often right-leaning judges had little problem condemning publications like the lesbian-themed publication Frauenliebe. Hirschfeld was not only notable for his arguments that homosexuality was a normal form of sexual expression, but also because he was one of the few voices in Germany publicly arguing this position. Most mainstream Weimar sexologists still treated homosexuality as a disease or disorder that was unhealthy. Much the same fate befell the few researchers that examined transgender issues and transvestism ; the basic assumption was these behaviors and preferences was that they were a deviation from a heteronormative order and should be examine as such. Nor was all of Weimar's sex culture necessarily politically progressive in nature. Weimar's various discourses about the body and nudism often betray a profound concern over racial degeneration, strict militarization and regimentation of nudes, and an association of the health of an individual's body with that of the wider health of the nation. Many of Hans Suren's bestselling nudist books have völkisch overtones and celebrate an aesthetically pure Germanic body type.

Weimar Berlin also became one of the epicenters for what Germans at the time called the "New Woman" who wore cosmetics, bobbed her hair, and had a new can-do attitude to life and sexuality. Appearances of women's new independence though were often quite deceptive. Even though the New Woman was a reality for many Germans, beneath the glitz and glamour of Weimar fashion was a sexual dynamic that was often quite disadvantageous towards women. While the showgirls of Berlin's cabarets symbolized a the new objectivity and openness, at the end of the day they were still very much objectified cogs in an entertainment machine. Moreover, new fashions and a modern lifestyle were expensive habits. In a very perceptive 1931 article "Twilight for Women?, Hilde Walter noted that beneath the weight of advertisements for the modern woman was an actual mass of working women who were underpaid and had to now shoulder the extra expense of appearing "modern" to keep their jobs. In her estimation, liberation often entailed a new set of burdens as onerous as the pre-Weimar femininity.

German references to modern German womanhood in print could be quite condemnatory and these attacks often spilled over into condemning her sexual profligacy and un-German materialism. Especially in the Catholic south and Protestant countryside, the New Woman became a symbol for much of what was wrong with Germany's Republic. Walter's essay also noted that attacks on the new woman ran the gamut of the left and right, which underscores another aspect of sexuality and Weimar: its politicization. The most prominent advocates for sexual reform like Hirschfeld prominently connected sexuality with wider political reforms and they tended to be partisans of Germany's left. The Austro-German Wilhelm Reich, one of the most radical of the Republic's reformers, argued that sexual repression served the interests of capitalism and other social injustices. Yet the affinity of sexual reformers for the German political left was often quite one-sided. The Weimar KPD was somewhat stuffy and conservative. The KPD newspaper Rote Fahne decried Dadaism and other experimental art forms as mindless decadence and most mainstream KPD thinkers associated Berlin's sexual tourism and prostitution as a vices of a capitalism that commodified everything

NSDAP propaganda pretty much lied repeatedly about Berlin and its sex trade. None of these propagandists were really concerned with accuracy, as evidenced by the libel trials a number of Nazi journalists found themselves in during the Weimar period. Broadly speaking, there are two phases to this phenomenon. The first phase in the 1920s saw propagandists like Goebbels and Rosenberg spin tales of debauchery that were near pornographic in character. The tone of this material was so hyperbolic that it really twisted the image of Berlin beyond any recognition. For example, there were tales of Jews creating orgies at Christmastime to humiliate good Germans. None of this squares with the more nuanced and often quite quotidian picture of Berlin's sex industry historians have uncovered. As Julia Roos notes, there was no actual explosion in the number of prostitutes even though discourses across the German political spectrum stressed that there was such a phenomenon in Weimar.

The second phase of NSDAP sex propaganda was in the 1930s when the party was reaching for respectability. Much of the earlier line signalling specific debauchery was toned down. Marhoefer has shown in her research that appeals to a return to sexual morality were mostly absent in NSDAP materials directed at women. NSDAP propaganda instead used dogwhistle words like Kulturbolschewismus (cultural Bolshevism) to convey earlier notions of a Jewish plot to destroy German morals. More direct allusions to sex and depravity occasionally popped up in propaganda materials, but this was the exception rather than the rule in the 1930s. Most of Goebbels's line was to allude to Jewish-inspired vice and let his readers' imaginations fill in the gaps.