Unique, moving, and true - this radiant love story is set against the horrific backdrop of World War II Nazi Germany. When Lilly "Aimee" Wust, a gentile mother of four and wife of a Nazi officer, met Felice "Jaguar" Schragenheim, a Jew living underground in Berlin, neither could have guessed that their brief initial encounter would develop into a blazing, devoted love. As the Nazi stranglehold closed in on them, Lilly and Felice found themselves fighting insurmountable odds to stay together. Extraordinarily passionate and heartrending, this is a rare and personal look at the love and strength of two women whose commitment to each other defied the brutality of their time.
Nonfiction, biography, WWII, 1940s
Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy
An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.
Known already in the 1850s for the friendly company of its âwarm brothersâ (German slang for men who love other men), Berlin, before the turn of the twentieth century, became a place where scholars, activists, and medical professionals could explore and begin to educate both themselves and Europe about new and emerging sexual identities. From Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German activist described by some as the first openly gay man, to the world of Berlinâs vast homosexual subcultures, to a major sex scandal that enraptured the daily newspapers and shook the court of Emperor William IIâand on through some of the very first sex reassignment surgeriesâRobert Beachy uncovers the long-forgotten events and characters that continue to shape and influence the way we think of sexuality today.
Chapter by chapter Beachyâs scholarship illuminates forgotten firsts, including the life and work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, first to claim (in 1896) that same-sex desire is an immutable, biologically determined characteristic, and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science. Though raided and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the institute served as, among other things, âa veritable incubator for the science of tran-sexuality,â scene of one of the worldâs first sex reassignment surgeries. Fascinating, surprising, and informativeâ Gay Berlin is certain to be counted as a foundational cultural examination of human sexuality.
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In Gay Berlin, Robert Beachy describes the rise of a gay subculture in the 1920s and '30s, how it contributed to our understanding of gay identity and how it was eradicated by the Nazis.
Selection from Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, by Robert Beachy, 2014.
Prussia quickly consolidated the gains from its victory over Austria and established the North German Confederation in 1867. This truncated version of the former German Confederation excluded Austria, as well as the southwestern states of Bavaria, Baden, and WĂŒrttemberg. This outcome deviated widely from the groĂdeutsch solution hoped for by [Karl Heinrich] Ulrichs and many others, and forced a rapid reorientation by German nationalists of every perspective. But if some groĂdeutsch partisans despaired of Prussia's growing influence, others began to view Bismarck as a kind of savior who might succeed, where the bourgeois nationalists had failed, in creating a united Germany. The anticipation of unification also encouraged the activity of those cultural associations that intended to support the needs of an emergent Germany. The nationalist Association of Jurists had sponsored congresses since its inception in 1860, and its sixth congress was scheduled to be held in Munich in August 1867.
It was at this meeting that Ulrichs publicly demanded an open debate on the legal status of same-sex love and recommended a dramatic revision of the remaining German anti-sodomy statutes. The path leading to Ulrichs's historic appeal was a complicated one and required significant wrangling. Two years earlier he had submitted his first five volumes on Urning love to the planning commission of the German jurists along with the following resolution for discussion at the sixth congress:
"I. That inborn love for persons of the male sex is to be punished under the same conditions under which love of persons of the female sex are punished; that it is, therefore, to remain free of punishment, so long as: neither rights are violated (through application or threat of force, misuse of prepubescent person, the unconscious, etc.) nor public offense is given;
II. That, however, the present, often thoroughly unclear requirements for "giving public offense by sexual acts" be replaced by such as preserve legal guarantees."[56]
The committee attempted to suppress the petition, dismissing it as "unsuitable." Ulrichs was undaunted, and he wrote the congress chairman demanding an opportunity to protest "the exclusion of an agenda proposal" at the closing plenary session. The request was granted, and Ulrichs prepared for this unprecedented opportunity. Although silenced by jeering and tumult, Ulrichs managed to present the subject of Urning emancipation, which introduced his cause to the leading legal minds of the German world. The five hundred lawyers, officials, and legal scholars who attended the closing meeting would certainly remember Ulrichs and his impassioned appeal.[57]
[...] All the same, Ulrichs managed to place himself at the center of an unfolding legal and medical debate that gained increasing relevance with the march toward unification. The North German Confederation was governed by a new federal constitution and hoped to create a uniform penal code with jurisdiction over all member states. This marked an important departure from the much weaker constitution of the former German Confederation, which had left intact--from 1815 to 1866--the individual law codes of its thirty-nine members. Prussian officials wanted to "homogenize" the German penal codes, using their own legal system as a template. But the prospect that Prussia would replace the more liberal Hanoverian treatment of private sexual behavior with its own anti-sodomy statute was in Ulrichs's view an especially grave threat.
In June 1868 Bismarck ordered the preparation of a revised code by the Prussian minister of justice, who commissioned the Prussian Medical Affairs Board to study the anti-sodomy statute. The board chairman was Berlin pathologist Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902), one of the most famous doctors of his age, who also served--as cofounder and member of the German Liberal Party (Deutsche Fortschrittspartei)--in the Berlin City Council, the Prussian Diet, and later the German Reichstag.[56] The other board members were prominent physicians and psychiatrists with academic posts in the medical faculty at the University of Berlin. Under Virchow's leadership, the board submitted a formal report in March 1869 recommending against the anti-sodomy statute. The group argued that male-male sexual relations were "no more injurious than other forms [of illicit sexuality]," like fornication or adultery. They claimed further that they were unable "to offer reasons why sex between men should be punished by law when other forms of illicit relations are not."[60] Surprisingly, perhaps, the board's recommendation reflected the liberalism of its members, who largely supported free trade, minimal government interference in the lives of private citizens, and, not least of all, the determinations of modern science. No doubt the French decriminalization of sodomy also influenced their thinking.
While considering the anti-sodomy statute, the Justice Ministry received nearly one hundred petitions--from jurists, medical doctors, and private individuals--most arguing against the anti-sodomy statute. Ulrichs initiated this chorus for legal reform by submitting his first of five petitions in September 1868, along with two of his published pamphlets. "The hermaphrodite [Urning] is not only a human being," Ulrichs pleaded; "he is also a competent citizen of the constitutional state and as such he may demand, so long as he neither harms the rights of others nor gives public offense, that he too not be punished for the expression of his sexual love."[61] The Medical Affairs Board announced its conclusions in March, and newspapers reported that officials had determined to exclude the anti-sodomy statute from the new penal code. Ulrichs took this satisfying victory as an opportunity to send one last petition, this time requesting pardons for those convicted or incarcerated for sexual crimes related to their Urning identity.
One significant result of this legal review was the invention of the word HomosexualitĂ€t, homosexuality. The man who coined this influential neologism was the enigmatic author and journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824-1882), who introduced his terminology in two short publications protesting the anti-sodomy statue. Submitted anonymously to Prussian minister of justice Leonhardt in 1869, Kertbenyâs self-published pamphlets were also circulated by booksellers in Leipzig and Berlin. As the anonymous author, Kertbeny maintained in the two pamphlets that he was sexually ânormalâ but argued passionately--based on the conclusions of Virchowâs board, as well as the findings of other psychiatric authorities, including Casper--that âhomosexualityâ was an inborn condition and that the anti-sodomy statute violated the fundamental civic and constitutional rights of âhomosexuals.â Kertbeny rejected Ulrichs's Urning theory of psychological hermaphroditism, but he clearly took inspiration from Ulrichs's public campaign, and the two had corresponded since 1865. Kertbeny never made public his support for homosexual emancipation, however, and so guarded was he that even Ulrichs was unaware--until much later--of his identity as the anonymous author.[62]
Ulrichs's campaign to end the punishment of same-sex love appeared poised to succeed. Like Kertbeny, many of those sympathetic to Ulrichs and his cause took inspiration from his public stance while remaining skeptical of this theories. Stimulating open debate among legal and medical professionals--and perhaps influencing their views--was a critical achievement. But what Ulrichs could not easily control was entrenched prejudice, nor the brutal, unsolved sex crimes that enraged popular sentiment in Berlin in the late 1860s. [...]
The same ignorance and popular prejudice that condemned [Carl von] Zastrow also derailed Ulrichs's campaign to end the legal persecution of Urning sexuality. On November 7, little more than a week after the conclusion of the Zastrow trial, Prussian official announced their decision to include the anti-sodomy statute in the revised law code. Prussian cultural minister Heinrich von MĂŒhler, citing "the people's sense of right and wrong" (Rechtsbewusstsein des Volkes) that held homosexual conduct to be a crime and not just a vice, rejected the counsel of his own leading medical advisers.[64] A draft of the North German penal code was published in December, and the section addressing same-sex eroticism reproduced the language of the Prussian penal code from 1851. Sodomy was defined as the sexual penetration of one man by another, as well as "sexual contact between man and beast." The draft code was debated in the Reichstag of the North German Confederation from February to May 1870, and during this period Ulrichs petitioned again, requesting that lawmakers, if the sodomy paragraph were preserved, also insert the following qualification: "the preceding does not pertain to a person who commits sexual acts that correspond to his innate sexual drive."[65] The only significant change, however, was the assignment of a new paragraph number, which provided the nickname--Paragraph 175--for the statute criminalizing sex between men. The North German penal code was finally promulgated as law on May 31, 1870.
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Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy
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Book summaries below:
Time Is a Mother by Ocean Vuong
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of his mother's death, embodying the paradox of sitting within grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong contends with personal loss, the meaning of family, and the cost of being the product of an American war in America. At once vivid, brave, and propulsive, Vuong's poems circle fragmented lives to find both restoration as well as the epicenter of the break.
The author of the critically acclaimed poetry collection Night Sky With Exit Wounds, winner of the 2016 Whiting Award, the 2017 T.S. Eliot Prize, and a 2019 MacArthur fellow, Vuong writes directly to our humanity without losing sight of the current moment. These poems represent a more innovative and daring experimentation with language and form, illuminating how the themes we perennially live in and question are truly inexhaustible. Bold and prescient, and a testament to tenderness in the face of violence, Time Is a Mother is a return and a forging forth all at once.
Poetry
Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy
An unprecedented examination of the ways in which the uninhibited urban sexuality, sexual experimentation, and medical advances of pre-Weimar Berlin created and molded our modern understanding of sexual orientation and gay identity.
Known already in the 1850s for the friendly company of its âwarm brothersâ (German slang for men who love other men), Berlin, before the turn of the twentieth century, became a place where scholars, activists, and medical professionals could explore and begin to educate both themselves and Europe about new and emerging sexual identities. From Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a German activist described by some as the first openly gay man, to the world of Berlinâs vast homosexual subcultures, to a major sex scandal that enraptured the daily newspapers and shook the court of Emperor William IIâand on through some of the very first sex reassignment surgeriesâRobert Beachy uncovers the long-forgotten events and characters that continue to shape and influence the way we think of sexuality today.
Chapter by chapter Beachyâs scholarship illuminates forgotten firsts, including the life and work of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, first to claim (in 1896) that same-sex desire is an immutable, biologically determined characteristic, and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science. Though raided and closed down by the Nazis in 1933, the institute served as, among other things, âa veritable incubator for the science of tran-sexuality,â scene of one of the worldâs first sex reassignment surgeries. Fascinating, surprising, and informativeâ Gay Berlin is certain to be counted as a foundational cultural examination of human sexuality.
Berlinâs homosexual scene after 1918 was itself the critical context for the growth of sex tourism, and relied specifically on a popular, homosexual press with not only a reading public but also advertisers and business supporters. Although failing to eliminate all censorship, as noted before, the Weimar Republic eased laws, permitting far greater freedom for Berlinâs press and print media, film industry, arts institutions, and entertainment venues. From 1919 until February 1933, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty separate homosexual German-language journal titles appeared in Berlin, some weekly or monthly and others less frequently.[3] These supplemented, of course, Berlinâs first homosexual periodicals: Adolf Brandâs Der Eigene [The self-owned] and Hirschfeldâs Jahrbuch [fĂŒr sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for sexual intermediaries)]. By contrast, there were practically no such journals published anywhere else in the world until after 1945. Only a few issues of one French-language periodical with significant homosexual content, Akademos, were published in Paris in 1909 by the French writer Andre Fersen, who corresponded with both Magnus Hirschfeld and Adolf Brand. The single English-language homosexual periodical appeared in Chicago in 1924, edited by the German-American Henry Gerber, who was stationed in the early 1920s as a soldier in the Rhineland, where he established contacts with homosexual rights activists in Berlin. One German-language Swiss monthly, Der Kreis (The circle), was published in Zurich from 1932 to 1967--inspired initially by Berlinâs homosexual press and especially the journals of publisher Friedrich Radszuweit.[4]
The homosexual press of Weimar Berlin was therefore truly singular. The first issue of Die Freundschaft [Friendship] was sold in the summer of 1919 and monthly thereafter--barring a short hiatus during the hyperinflation of 1923--until February 1933. Arguably the most successful of the Berlin titles, Die Freundschaft provided a broad range of features, including news coverage and political commentary. Catering to sexual minorities, a few, including Der Eigene, maintained a relatively highbrow literary profile. For a short period beginning in 1927 there was even a transvestite periodical, Transvestit, which catered specifically to male and female cross-dressers. The lesbian journals Die Freundin [The girlfriend], Garçonne, and Frauen Liebe [Woman love] published serialized romance novels. Although owned and produced by men, the lesbian journals served their constituents effectively, not only as a mouthpiece for cultural interests but also with the political and social reportage of women journalists, including progressive heterosexual feminists such as Helen Stöcker, the prominent pacifist and advocate for birth control. For example, Die Freundin, published lesbian opinion polls on a range of issues from abortion to regulated prostitution, and exhorted lesbian readers to vote for gay-friendly parties and candidates in local and national elections.Â
Certainly the large number of titles reflected the vicissitudes of market demand, and many journals were extremely short-lived. In some cases editors were compelled to change the names of titles to circumvent censors. Most often these ran afoul of the official minders because of nude photography or singles advertisements that were deemed too obvious and therefore culpable of âsolicitation.â In 1927 a new censorship law was introduced. Although the law targeted primarily nudist and soft-porn publications, it also forced vendors to avoid the open display of homosexual titles. When officials investigated the public sale of potentially offensive periodicals in 1926, they produced photos--preserved now in a Berlin archive--of two of the busiest newspaper kiosks in the city, located at Potsdamer Platz and the FriedrichstraĂe train terminal, revealing just how openly nudist and homosexual titles were purveyed.[5] Displayed in the photos of the kiosks are not only naked bodies from the covers of nudist periodicals but also several widely distributed homosexual magazines.
Gay and lesbian publications also included singles ads placed by individuals seeking love relationships. The larger periodicals achieved readerships outside of Berlin and frequently carried notices from all corners of Germany and Austria, as well as German speakers in other parts of Europe. As Fritz H. admitted during a police interrogation in the mid-1930s, he was first drawn to Berlin from his Tyrolean village in 1924 to meet the man with whom he had entered into a correspondence through a singles ad in the Berlin homosexual paper Eros. The most popular journals, such as Die Freundschaft, boasted subscriptions exceeding ten thousand and an international readership; distribution was as far-flung as North and South America. Die Freundschaft also offered its readers, for postage and a small fee, up-to-date urban guides of homosexual and gay-friendly establishments in European and North American cities. In this manner the Berlin journals facilitated the growth of a worldwide, Germanophone community, established not only through personal, face-to-face contact in the urban setting of Berlin but also within the pages of weekly and monthly periodicals.
--Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, 2014
