Jews Queers Germans
A Novel
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style.
Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II's closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism, and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic and political events of the day and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Duberman is known for his biographies and accounts of the gay rights movement; he's written plays, as well, and now adds to his r sum this "novel/history" about the gay and Jewish men who were in and near German power circles from the first years of the 20th century up to the Nazi era. It's a rich topic, encompassing outsiders who were also sometimes insiders: the circle of gay men around Kaiser Wilhelm; friends Harry Kessler and Walther Rathenau, one a gay aesthete and so-called "Red Count," the other a Jewish industrialist who became a minister in the Weimar-era government; and Magnus Hirschfeld, the Jewish, openly gay pioneer of sexology. According to Duberman, his semi-fictionalized approach, which allows for subjectivity and "informed speculation," is needed because history-writing is stuck in the 19th century. Perhaps he's right, but this book does not succeed in making his case. Both historical novels and history require scenes, narrative, and characters who feel alive. Duberman describes genuinely compelling figures but then leaves them to bob on waves of German history while having awkwardly expository conversations. There are juicy stories, such as the one about the openly gay Nazi storm trooper, and tragic stories, as when Rathenau, who thinks that assimilated Jews have a real future in Germany, is killed by anti-Semites. But there is never a clear story line or a sense that these characters were living, breathing people.
