JEWS QUEERS GERMANS, a “novel/history” by MARTIN DUBERMAN
Commentary by Lawrence D. Mass
Martin Duberman
Jews Queers Germans is an historical novel about a number of prominent figures of fin-de-siecle Europe whose lives intersect from the period preceding World War 1—”The Great War”—to World War 2. These protagonists are mostly German and mostly queer. Two are Jewish. The often subtle interplay of aspects of their lives is deftly captured by Duberman, who has never been more skilled, refined or economical in conveying situations of enormous complexity, especially the buildup to The Great War—an explosion of concurrences so labyrinthine as to defy even the best efforts, as here, at explanation and sequencing. But the bigger picture of the experience and fallout of that war is powerfully rendered. There is intimacy and timelessness in the details of how the war was conducted, of the terrible destruction and loss of life that resulted, of what it meant for Europe, the globe and humanity, and of how it set the stage for World War 2.
Beyond this estimable achievement, however, is the extent to which the book captures in termperament and ambience what we're going through now and where we're inevitably headed. The resulting atmosphere of the churning of great and dread forces of history behind the scenes of personal relationships is reminiscent of many war fictionalizations (War and Peace, Gone With the Wind), but especially Austrian novelist Robert Musil’s celebrated three-part, unfinished novel, The Man Without Qualities, a nerve-wracking chronicle of the confluence of people, places and things that eventuated in The Great War.
Duberman, a well-known figure of the left and an august figure of LGBT and historical communities and literatures, has said that when he wrote this novel he had little expectation that Trump would become president. Apparently, it was never his conscious intention for the book to be as disturbingly portentous as it turns out to be. How what turned out to be World Wars 1 and 2 went from being small partisan skirmishes to much greater and more violent confrontations with much greater consequences is rendered with such nonpartisan dispassion, insight and humanity that it's impossible for readers of any political stripe not to situate ourselves within it. It’s books like these that make it impossible for us to look at the past, at other societal breakdowns, and think that we are somehow different, that we will somehow prevail in ways that eluded these other times and places. That we are already repeating those storied “lessons of the past” we supposedly learned is inescapable. Even more than its treasures of LGBT, Jewish and European histories, it’s this tacit sense of the inexorability of the worst of history repeating itself now that makes this novelization so compelling.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia
Jews Queers Germans opens with introductions to its protagonists and a dazzling array of their contemporary luminaries in the arts and sciences--Maillol, von Hoffmanstahl, Stefan Zweig, Richard Strauss, Max Reinhardt, Nijinsky, Diaghalev, Stravinsky, Bonnard, Rodin, Rilke, Einstein, Shaw, Chamberlain, Cosima and Siegfried Wagner, Colette, Rouart, Foerster-Nietzsche. Most of these figures are just mentioned, but with freshness and in the context of their social connections. You learn new things about each. Duberman may not be an opera person but if he were to see the Met’s current production of Der Rosenkavlaier, updated to the time of it’s premiere on eve of World War 1, he’d probably understand and appreciate the opera more than many who think of themselves as aficionados.
Past its many and precious cameos, the drama of Jews Queers Germans unfolds through the private lives and interactions of its leading players—Kaiser Wilhelm II, Count Philipp von Eulenberg, Walther Rathenau, Harry Kessler, Magnus Hirschfeld and Ernst Roehm.
Count Philipp von Eulenberg, close friend and confidant of the Kaiser
Count Philipp von Eulenberg was the closest friend and confidant of Kaiser Wilhelm II. As portrayed by Duberman, Wilhelm is a vulgar, self-important anti-Semite who became the principal pot-stirrer of the caldron of conflicts that became World War 1. Eulenberg had become less and less circumspect about being gay in a time and place where homosexuality had begun to be debated publicly but was still illegal and a source, as in Wilde’s England, of extreme public opprobrium. When the taint of queerness threatens to smear the emperor and other leading figures, Eulenberg is summarily dropped and denounced by the Kaiser. The trial becomes a multi-phasic, protracted public scandal that tells us as much about calumny and “justice” today as then. The trial is also the counterpart to the book’s later and most arresting confrontation—between Hirschfeld and Nazi SA leader Ernst Roehm.
Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister during the Weimar Republic
Walther Rathenau, the Jewish industrialist who becomes armaments minister (not so unlike nouveau riche von Faninal in the Met’s updated Der Rosenkavalier) and a largely unwitting socialist, is someone we would recognize from the annals of the closet, someone who might have made different and better choices had he been more in touch with his real feelings of same-sex attraction. It’s not surprising that he’s likewise not as cognizant of the ferocity of the anti-Semitism metastasizing around him as he should be. He might be compared today to any number of Jewish or gay Trumpers who believe that their proximity to the President will ultimately protect them from the malignant anti-Semitism and homophobia that, here in Trump’s America, are once again ascendant.
Harry Kessler, diplomat, writer and art patron
Harry Kessler, who enters a long friendship-flirtship with Rathenau, is a leading cultural critic and raconteur who left extensive diaries, a gold mine for a scholar like Duberman. Kessler doesn’t have a precise counterpart today. Henry Geldzahler? Though not himself Jewish, he’s more self-aware as gay than Rathenau, and he can likewise be more attuned to issues of anti-Semitism. The ease with which Kessler, otherwise so humane an aesthete, becomes a practitioner of war atrocities is chilling.
Magnus Hirschfeld, pioneering sexologist
The novel’s star portrait is that of pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld. Though his story is told throughout, the big chapter on him is the heart and soul of the book. Duberman inventories his remarkable courage and character, his protean involvement in the social, legal and medical developments and debates of his time. It also uncovers many specifics of his court testimonies, his other accomplishments as lecturer, man of letters and scientist, and priceless details of the legendary Institute for Sexual Science he founded and sheparded, and which was destroyed by the Nazis in the most infamous book-burning bonfire of the vanities since Savonarola. Hopefully, this portrait will be the basis of a theater and/or film adaptation.
Ernst Roehm, head of Hitler’s SA, the Nazi militia
For those who keep wondering how it is that any self-aware, self-identified LGBT person could be supportive of highly reactionary elements—from the Republican fringes to the extremes of white supremacists—it’s cautionary to review the history of Nazism, especially this very readable version by Duberman. It’s well-known that Ernst Roehm, Hitler’s closest associate, was openly gay. Yet homonationalists today seem in denial about how resoundingly such LGBT persons in the Nazi ranks were betrayed. Much as conservative Jews today believe that Trump, Bannon and evangelicals can be relied on for acceptance and support, LGBT conservatives today believe they will likewise be valued and protected by forces whose volatility and unpredictability they have helped to bolster and which metastasizes with each street clash, each Nazi-like rally of Trump and his base.
As is well-known, Roehm was assassinated in the infamous “Night of the Long Knives.” Roehm and most of his army of SA troopers were killed on orders from Hitler. Duberman goes to lengths to show how for Hitler the issue was never homosexuality per se so much as the value that Trump likewise makes no bones about placing highest—loyalty. Roehm’s longstanding closeness to Hitler was such that he was the only one of Hitler’s henchmen to publicly address him by his first name. Such became Roehm’s status and power, however, that he posed a threat to Hitler’s hegemony.
The big confrontation that is in many ways the climax of the book takes place between Hirschfeld and Roehm. How much of this is fiction isn’t clear. But what happens is that Roehm seeks the counsel of Hirschfeld—whom he otherwise reviles for being Jewish—to help him with a blackmail case. Hirschfeld became widely known for giving expert testimony in court cases involving homosexuality, and Roehm, who is totally out as gay, even with Paragraph 175 (penalizing homosexuality) firmly in place, wants to find a way to turn the tables on his blackmailer, a street tough. Roehm knows this is something only Hirschfeld, with his track record of success in such cases, could help him with.
The paradoxes are dizzying. We think of the stereotypes of conservative gays tending to be closeted, in contrast to those who are out. Roehm is often described as a roustabout who on any given night could be found in various leading gay sex venues. We think correctly of all the ways Nazis, who otherwise despised and persecuted Jews (and soon enough, gays), had no qualms about exploiting their usefulness in myriad circumstances. The paradox of Jewish Hirschfeld defending one of Nazism’s most powerful figureheads is extraordinarily dramatic.
When all is said and done, what Duberman teases out is that regardless of knowledge or progress or tolerance, qualities that characterized the liberal Weimar republic that fell to the Nazis, just as they characterize our own era as it falls to the alt-right, forces of intolerance, of fascism, will always reconfigure themselves around vulnerabilities and scapegoats. What prevails in these situations is rarely about court law and justice or even politics. Rather, it’s about the laws of the jungle.