Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine: Biographies and Geographies 9783839453322

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Andreas Kraß, Moshe Sluhovsky, Yuval Yonay (eds.) Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Historical Gender Studies | Volume 3

Andreas Kraß, born in 1963, is a professor of German literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He specializes on premodern literature and the cultural history of sexuality. Moshe Sluhovsky is a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He specializes in early modern religious history, history of sexuality, and modern German-Jewish history. Yuval Yonay is a professor of Sociology at the University of Haifa. He specializes in sociology of knowledge, Palestinian-Israeli relationships, queer theory, and the history of homosexuality and gays in Palestine/Israel from 1940 to 1975.

Andreas Kraß, Moshe Sluhovsky, Yuval Yonay (eds.)

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine Biographies and Geographies

This research was supported by a grant from the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF; grant number I-1335-111.4/2016).

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2022 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: (1) In the transvestite bar "Eldorado" in Berlin, Motzstraße. Photograph, 1926. © bpk. (2) Shimmon Korbman, On the Beach in Tel Aviv. Mid 1920s; by special permission of the Administrator General, The State of Israel, as the Executor of S. Korbman Estate & Mus, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5332-8 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5332-2 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839453322 ISSN of series: 2627-1907 eISSN of series: 2703-0512 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Contents

Introduction Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine Moshe Sluhovsky ................................................................................ 7

I. Geographies Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945 Movements, Professions, Places Andreas Pretzel & Andreas Krass .............................................................. 29

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin Belonging and Solidarity during the Weimar Era and the Third Reich Hilla Lavie .................................................................................... 77

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany? Thoughts on Lesbian Circumstances in the 1920s Janin Afken ................................................................................... 97

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences Susanne Korbel ............................................................................... 111

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine Yuval Yonay ................................................................................... 131

The Hebrew Lesbian Image and Reality in the Hebrew Press in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, 1930s-1960s Orit Yaal ...................................................................................... 157

II. Biographies Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine The Journey of a German Jewish Sexologist (February 14–March 13, 1932) Andreas Krass ............................................................................... 183

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman Yael Rozin..................................................................................... 221

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism? On Hugo/Hamid Marcus’s Writings during the First Three Decades of the 20th Century Benedikt Wolf ................................................................................ 239

Queer Messianism The Controversial Case of Mordechai Mendel in Interwar Warsaw Piotr Laskowski .............................................................................. 265

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet Dotan Brom ................................................................................... 291

Contributors ............................................................................... 311 Acknowledgments ........................................................................315 List of Images............................................................................. 317 Index of Places ...........................................................................319 Index of Names .......................................................................... 323

Introduction Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine Moshe Sluhovsky

During the Deutsches Kaiserreich, both the Jew and the sodomite were reconfigured as new subjecthoods, identities, categories, and social types.1 The emancipated Jew, the homosexual, and the lesbian comprised new categories of personhood, and a debate concerning their integration into the surrounding society followed soon. Furthermore, Germanness (Deutschtum) too was being reinvented at this time as a new political entity, embarking on a process of nation-building in a recently unified state. The postEmancipation Jew, who was increasingly present on the streets of German cities and towns (as s/he was elsewhere in Central and East-Central Europe), was no longer merely a member of a religious minority, identified by visual external markers, a language, and an adherence to a set of traditional rituals, nor was s/he confined to specific occupations. Emancipation and social and economic mobilities enabled these “New Jews” to integrate into society and benefit from the advantages of modernity, in the process shedding their traditional and visible marks of alterity. Similarly, the homosexual (whether male or female) was no longer defined only as a criminal or a pervert found on the margins of society, often in hiding. Like the Jew, s/he ceased to be an ‘other’ who could easily be physically identified. On the contrary, s/he could now be discovered to be a prominent officer in the German army, like General Kuno von Moltke; a member of the

1

The categories ‘Jew’ and ‘homosexual’ are obviously problematic in any period and context. In this collection, they are used to refer respectively to people who were, or were perceived to be, ethnically or religiously Jewish or of Jewish descent, and to men and women who exhibited same-sex erotic and sexual attachments or were suspected of having such attachments or inclinations. We use the term ‘homosexual’ to designate both gay men and lesbians; we refer to individuals as homosexuals even if they were also involved erotically or sexually with people, men or women, of the opposite sex but were or are nonetheless assumed to have had same-sex desires. We also use the term ‘gay,’ which is obviously anachronistic, because this term seems appropriate to describe people whose homosexual identity was a core component of their subjectivity. We similarly refer to a ‘gay scene’ or ‘gay culture’ when referring to social interactions that can already be identified as serving these individuals’ interactions in the public sphere.

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Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

emperor’s own entourage, like Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg; or a member of a leading Jewish commercial family, like Wilfrid Israel (Mancini 2010; Domeier 2010; Beachy 2014: 120-39). The New Jew and the New Homosexual now not only resembled the non-Jew and the heterosexual; they could act like, compete with, and even marry Gentiles and heterosexuals. They were everywhere, but visible nowhere. This potential integration and absorption into mainstream society was welcomed by members of these two social groups, as well as by large segments of liberal German society. But it was conceived as a threat by other elements in Germany, which saw this social blending as a danger to the nascent German nation. In the new antisemitic and homophobic discourses, both the New Jew and the New Homosexual were pathologized as degenerate and sick, and mechanisms had to be devised to identify them in order to reaffirm and maintain their inherent otherness (Gilman 1989). Writing about France of the 1890s, Hannah Arendt identified a paradox of the fin de siècle: certain elite circles in France, Great Britain, and Germany had “discovered the attractiveness of Jews and inverts” (Arendt 1951: 82). They no longer wanted to kill them, but maintained antipathy and even horror toward them. In a moment of fascination with the exotic, the strange, the dangerous and the monstrous, Arendt asks, who could better represent the infinite variety of nature than the Jew and the homosexual? In liberal, antisemitic, and homophobic imaginations and representations, the Jew and the homosexual have often overlapped in their perceived cliquishness, cosmopolitanism, and, above all, effeminacy (in the case of Jewish men and male homosexuals) or over-masculinity (in the case of Jewish women and lesbians). But to what degree was this phantasmic association of Jewishness and homosexuality also a historical reality? Were Jews more likely to be attracted to people of their own sex than non-Jews? Were Jews overrepresented among German or Central European homosexuals, or homosexuals overrepresented among Jews? Did Jews play a role in the emerging homosexual scene in Berlin and other German cities during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic above and beyond their numerical presence in society? If so, what accounts for this overrepresentation? And to what degree were Jews significant in the emerging gay scenes in other Central European cities, such as Budapest (Kurimay, 2020), Prague, and Warsaw? These questions shape the investigations that constitute one of the two components of this book. * As becomes clear from the articles that analyze the Jewish presence in the gay world of Berlin and other Central European cities and that document the lives of gay individuals, Jews did indeed participate in the new gay culture that was developing in these urban centres, with some Jews playing an important role in the invention of new gay and lesbian identities, forms of sociabilities, and activism. Importantly, though, just as the New Jew and the New Homosexual came into being in tandem, so did their exclusion, criminalization, and (in the Jewish case) annihilation. The German-Jewish presence in the gay and lesbian subcultures in Germany, including the not-insignificant and uniquely rich Jewish-lesbian subculture (Steakley/Wolff 1981; Boxhammer/ Halusa/Liu

Introduction

2015; and Lavie in this collection), came to a tragic end under Nazism, when the German nation reconfigured itself once more, this time as a Volksgemeinschaft of people seen as healthy in their racial, moral, and physiological bodies. And while the 1930s were marked by mass migrations of both Jews and prominent homosexuals, the 1940s were marked by arrests, deportations, and mass murder. Migration and escape, too, were a shared characteristic of gays and Jews (Weston 1995; Luibhéid 2008; Korbel in this collection). Among the numerous emigrants from Germany, many left to Mandatory Palestine, then under British rule. More than 57,000 Jews came legally from Central Europe to Palestine between 1933 and 1940, almost twothirds of them from Germany. Legal Jewish immigration, though, was restricted to 75,000 Jews over the following five years after the White Book of 1939, and many Jews entered the country illegally. If we include illegal immigrants, who broke through the blockade set by the British authorities to prevent Jewish immigration, the number of Central European immigrants, both German- and Czech-speaking, was at least 82,000, and may have been as many as 90,000 (Gelber 1990: 61, 63, 385). The second component of this collection investigates the migration of gay and lesbian German Jews to Mandatory Palestine, and the contribution they made to creating forms of gay sociability in their new Heimat. It is a main argument of this collection that these German Jewish immigrants imported with them – and thus helped to shape – new lifestyles, forms of sociability, and notions of identity and subjecthood in the small Yishuv (the Jewish segment of the population of Mandatory Palestine).2 Using prosopography, oral interviews, archival documents, and literary sources, this collection is a first attempt to map both the Jewish contribution to gay cultures and politics in Berlin (as well as other urban centers in Central Europe), and the significance of German-Jewish immigrants to gay life in the nascent Yishuv. Of course, living as Jews in Mandatory Palestine did not eradicate all forms of exclusion and otherness experienced by these German-Jewish immigrants. Not only did they remain members of a sexual minority in a puritan society; they had to readjust their identity, which was often urban, secular, and liberal, to a society that had been shaped by a fusion of small-town Eastern European provincialism, Russian socialism, and lower-middle-class aspirations to become modern. They also had to fit into an ethos of masculinity and physical prowess that was often (but far from always) attached to agricultural labor. It has become an established paradigm that early Zionism cultivated and promoted the Muscle Jew – rough and tough both inside and outside – as the sole model for the rejuvenation of land and nation (Boyarin 1997; Gluzman 2007; Dekel 2011. On the history of the term ‘Muscle Jews’, first coined by the Zionist intellectual Max Nordau, see Presner 2007). This simplistic view has finally been challenged (Wildmann 2009; Conforti 2011; Farges 2018; Hollander 2019). The second component of this collection deals therefore not only with the creation of the new gay sociality in Palestine, but also with the difficulties faced by the German Jewish homosexual immigrants. Thus, employing both biographical case studies and general surveys, the collection is a first attempt to document gay lives in Jewish Mandatory Palestine. More work needs 2

For purposes of brevity, I will refer to these gay and lesbian immigrants as homosexuals; the problematization of this usage will appear later in this introduction.

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to be done to discover additional players in both Central Europe and Palestine. Crucially, we have not been able to document sexual and emotional same-sex interactions between German-Jewish immigrants and Arab men in Mandatory Palestine, interactions that undoubtedly took place. And, regrettably (and as is usually the case), it has been easier (in both Germany and Mandatory Palestine) to document the lives of gay men than the lives of lesbians. Nevertheless, the collection offers the contours of the active engagement of gay and lesbian Jewish men and women in both gay cultures – the German and the pre-Israeli – between the late 19th century and the early years of the State of Israel.3 * As Robert Beachy, Jens Dobler, Florence Tamagne, Clayton J. Whisnant, and many others have demonstrated, new identities and new forms of sociability, entertainment, and politics came into being in major German urban centers – foremost among them Berlin – from the 1870s on (Beachy 2014; Bollé 1984; Dobler 2003; Tamagne 2006; Whisnant 2016). This was also the period in which Jews came to prominence in the urban culture of Germany. As industrialists, entrepreneurs, bankers, and merchants, but also as scholars and artists, Jews were ubiquitous in emerging fields and technologies. The assimilation of German Jews into German culture after 1870 was an assimilation into an urban, urbane, and modern culture (Mosse 1985; Elon 2002). Jews were especially prominent in the liberal professions, among them medicine (especially new fields such as dermatology and venereology), psychology, psychoanalysis, and sexology (Eppinger 2001; Haeberle 1982). They played an important role in the cultural life of the modern German city as owners, managers, and patrons of theatres and museums, as pioneers of the film industry, and as collectors and donors of modern art. It is worth mentioning that the history of the creation of modern gay identity and culture and the history of German-Jewish assimilation tend to be presented in a selfcongratulatory tone. Gay German history is usually told by gay and lesbian historians, who, following the revival of gay-affirmation politics and identities from the 1970s on, have claimed the Berlin of the fin de siècle and of the short-lived Weimar Republic as a golden age. Similarly, German Jewish history was developed by people who were themselves German Jewish refugees, among them George L. Mosse, Walter Laqueur, Fritz Stern, and Peter Gay (Mosse 1985; Laqueur 1974; Gay 1968; Stern 1987). Neither history can escape the teleological perspective that results from the historians’ awareness of the brevity of this experiment in modern cosmopolitanism and acceptance of the other. As previously mentioned, the growing visibility of Jews and gay people in the public urban sphere was, from its very start, accompanied by anxieties and resistance. In fact, Jews and homosexuals themselves were not necessarily promoters of tolerance or modernity. One should never forget that among assimilated Jews there was no lack of conservative, even reactionary Jews; that self-hate was not uncommon among gay people or among Jews; and that some individuals managed to be Jewish, gay, antisemitic, homophobic

3

This research project was sponsored by the German Israel Foundation (GIF), grant I-1335-111.4/2016.

Introduction

and misogynistic at the same time – Otto Weininger (1880-1903) comes to mind, but he was far from the only one (Weininger 1906, originally published 1903). This complexity and interplay of identities and anxieties can be documented in the case of one of the most prominent Jews of the period, Walter Rathenau. Rathenau (18671922) was the son of the founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (AEG), the German Electric Company, and played a leading role in the German economic effort during the First World War. As is well known, he was the target of vicious antisemitic attacks, and was murdered by right-wing radicals in 1922 while serving as foreign minister of the Weimar government (Volkov 2012: 28-33). Rathenau never married, and we have no idea whether he felt emotional attachments to other men (or women, for that matter). Shulamit Volkov, however, is not the first to have speculated that he might have been a homosexual: while cautioning us that the vocabulary of male camaraderie was highly romantic and melodramatic in his period, she also notes that he developed intimate friendships with more than one man (most of whom, parenthetically, were blond and aristocratic).4 Volkov also suggests the possibility that his extreme emotional detachment was a defence mechanism against his own homosexual drives. Such a ‘closet’ could also account for his discreet refusal to add his signature to the 1908 campaign, led by Magnus Hirschfeld, to decriminalize homosexuality (Botstein 2016: 137). Among the men Rathenau was especially close to was Harry Graf von Kessler (1868–1937), the Anglo-German count, diplomat, writer, and patron of modern art, who was, as Volkov aptly puts it, “as open a homosexual as was at all possible at the time” (Volkov 2012: 33). It was Kessler himself, who was later to become Rathenau’s first biographer, who draws our attention to the fact that some of Rathenau’s letters to men read like love letters (Kessler 1929: 65, in Volkov 2012: 33). In 1897, Rathenau published “Höre, O Israel,” a vicious attack on the assimilated Jewish milieu of Berlin, the same milieu to which he himself belonged (Rathenau 1897).5 In this blistering article, Rathenau, driven by the narcissism of small differences, finds his erstwhile brethren insufficiently assimilated for his taste. He accuses them of refusing to integrate into German society and culture and of behaving in a manner that necessarily prevents their acceptance by their gentile fellow Berliners. The Berliner Jewish elite, Rathenau claims, is a strange tribe (menschenstamm) that is conspicuously adorned, hotblooded, and animated in its gestures and behaviour. This is an Asian horde of soft-bodied, round-formed, and self-pitying arrivistes, who continue to speak in an identifiable manner and congregate within a voluntary, invisible ghetto, like a foreign organism within the social body. Their cliquishness, coarseness, and refusal to integrate are at least partly responsible for German society’s spitefulness toward them. Interestingly, this description recalls Otto Weininger’s 1903 remarks about the growing presence of the “dandified homosexuals” whose numbers had increased so dramatically in the recent past – and perhaps this is not a coincidence. The latter, too, stand apart due to their

4

5

And see his article “Von Schwachheit, Furcht und Zweck,” (Rathenau 1925), 26, where he sings the praises of the brave, “wondrous and mysterious primeval Northern race whose blond heads we are so glad to crown with all the splendor of humanity.” Quoted in Robertson 1999: 299. English translation in http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=717.

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cliquishness, bodily feebleness, femininity, loudness, and sing-song manner of speech (Weininger 1906: 73; Gilman 1989: 266). “You establish associations – for defence, rather than introspection,” Rathenau goes on to accuse the assimilated Berlin Jews. Historians have suggested that he was referring to the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger Jüdischen Glaubens, established in 1893, or perhaps to the First Zionist Congress, which was to meet a few months after the publication of Rathenau’s article in Basel. I wish to offer an additional possibility, one that is related to the mid-May 1897 inaugural meeting of the first organization for gay rights, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (WhK), which was convened in Charlottenburg, Berlin. Given the phantasmic morphological, behavioral, and physiological similarities between Jews and homosexuals, and considering Rathenau’s desire to disavow any affiliation with the latter, I propose that, in addition to other things, “Höre, Israel” was a kind of anxiety attack caused by Magnus Hirschfeld’s new initiative. While this idea may seem farfetched, let us recall a tantalizing line in Rathenau’s article. When discussing Berlin-Jewish elite families who had not (yet) converted, like the Rathenaus themselves, but who no longer felt part of the Jewish community, Rathenau states that all that remained “Jewish” in these families is “ein gewisser ironischer Atavismus des Aeusseren, einen Malice Abrahams,” a certain ironic and atavistic external sign. As Jay Geller has argued, this is very likely a reference to circumcision, presented here by Rathenau as a stunt bequeathed by Abraham to his descendants. Rathenau himself, I thus suggest, indicates that the very core of the Jew is his penis, just as the uses to which he puts his penis is what distinguishes the homosexual from the heterosexual male (Geller 2011: 16). Rathenau, then, was dealing not only with his ambivalence regarding his own Judaism, about which so many of his friends commented during his lifetime. In my view, he also sought to distance himself from a group that stood to proclaim the legitimacy of homosexual identities and behaviors, a group to which Rathenau was often rumored to belong. This, of course, is but one of many examples of the intricate and often ambivalent engagements of German Jews with homosexuality, and it should caution us against assuming a correlation between Jewish affiliation, sexual marginality, and liberal political or social attitudes. In addition to Rathenau and Weininger, one can add the homophobic Maximilian Harden, probably the most influential journalist in Germany at the end of the 19th century (and a friend of Rathenau), who played a major role in “outing” Moltke and Eulenburg; and Hans-Joachim Schoeps, the young Jewish theologian who, while being a Prussian royalist and a German nationalist, was also gay. After the Second World War, Schoeps’s claim to fame was his history of Prussia; before, he was known mostly for his intense patriotism. This patriotism even led Schoeps to support the Nazi movement in the 1920s, and to publish as late as 1934 a pamphlet in which he explained that German Jews do not seek their own happiness but only the happiness of the Fatherland. “We do not seek to be free, but to be bound,” he proclaimed (Schoeps 1970: 225). One name stands out among German Jewish homosexuals: the aforementioned Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935). In the past fifty years or so, he has come to symbolize not only gay rights in Germany, but also the significant role played by Jews in the flourishing of liberal notions of queer selfhoods and politics in Weimar Germany. Hirschfeld’s

Introduction

visit to Palestine in 1932 is discussed by Andreas Krass below as a moment in which one of his identities, namely, his Jewishness, was pushed farther to the fore than his advocacy of gay rights. It is worth mentioning, though, that he was not alone in promoting new notions of gay identity. While Hirschfeld was shaping one discourse of same-sex desire, using mostly medical and etiological language and scientifically explaining its existence as a phenomenon in nature, other Germans and German Jews promoted alternative notions of same-sex desire. Among them was the prolific Benedikt Friedlaender (1866-1908), whose glorification of same-sex male desire was based on the alleged Athenian model and echoed antisemitic German notions of race (Beachy 2014: 96-119; Keilson-Lauritz 2005; Ilany 2017b). More important were Hans Blüher, Adolf Brand, and others, who promoted a more metaphysical, even spiritually loaded, conceptualization of this desire. Focusing solely on male same-sex desire, and continuing a German tradition of fascination with homoerotic desire in Classical Athens, this alternative discourse on the meaning and even the spiritual goal of homoerotic desire was shaped, as Claudia Burns and Ofri Ilany have shown convincingly, not merely in opposition to Hirschfeld’s theories, but also to Judaism (see Benedikt Wolf’s article in this collection for a different case of the complex articulation of these entangled concepts). Thus, one should not assume that being a proponent of what we today call “gay rights” necessarily meant anti-antisemitism. In fact, one can argue that an entire metaphysics of gay male attraction to other men (or, to be precise, male youth), was based on the construction of positive, Germanic, and therefore spiritual and moral homoerotic and desexualized attraction, in a counter distinction to a negative, carnal, and Jewish (Hirschfeldian) defence of sexualized samesex desire (Bruns 2008; Ilany 2017b; Tobin 2000). One can, and should, view Blüher’s glorification of the spirituality of same-sex desire as a means of “saving” homosexuality from Jewish carnality. As such, we encounter here the two-thousand-year-old conflict between Carnal Israel and Spiritual Israel, or, in this case, a conflict between Carnal Sodom and Spiritual Sodom. It is only the Jews who mistake spiritual desire toward beautiful youth for carnality and who cannot achieve the high realm of mystical intercourse with beauty that the purely ethnic German can experience. Luisa C. Boeck and Andreas Pretzel’s meticulous account of the Jewish presence in gay Berlin takes us back from the lofty metaphysics of Blüher, Brand, and Friedlaender to the concrete lives of gay men and women of Jewish descent who participated in the gay and lesbian scene. In addition to recording the lives of famous queer Jews, theirs is an attempt to go beyond the elites, to identify Jewish men and women who did not belong to the cultural, artistic, or medical realms and who left only fleeting traces in the archives. We find among them bar owners, shopkeepers, salespersons, and even a prostitute. We hope this is a first step toward a very detailed reconstruction of the entire spectrum of Jewish occupations and forms of participation in the world that gay, biand trans men and women created in Berlin and other central European cities. Piotr Laskowski’s article in our collection, for example, analyzes the case of Mordechai Mendel Baltshuve, an Orthodox Jewish man who was busy fighting Zionists while pursuing young Yeshive students in Warsaw, and Shaun Jacob Halper’s wrote a detailed biography of Jiří Mordechai Langer of Prague and Tel Aviv, who combined homoeroticism

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with Hasidism (Halper 2011). Both suggest that some Orthodox Jewish men in Central and Eastern Europe who had an interest in homoerotic or homosexual relations with other men managed to combine religiosity with homosexuality. Much more needs to be known about similar subjectivities. It is also crucially important to learn more about the Jewish lesbian. The Jewish woman was one powerful symbol of urban modernity in Weimar; the lesbian, another. Among lesbians in Berlin there were a significant number of Jewish women, and Hilla Lavie’s and Janin Afkin’s articles in this collection offer preliminary discussions of their participation in the lesbian scene, as well as the different degrees to which these women were attached to their Jewish identity. As the articles make clear, there were many ways of being both lesbian and Jewish in early 20th -century Germany. We also need to know more about the lesbian-Jewish milieus in Germany and other European countries, and to ask in what ways (if any) the participants’ Jewishness shaped lesbian forms of sociability and might have configured their desires. One may assume that the experience of being triply marked – as a woman, a Jew, and a lesbian – impacted the self-fashioning and social interactions of these women. As the articles discussing Central Europe demonstrate so well, being both Jewish and homosexual in Central Europe was a multifaceted experience. The Warsaw criminal Mordechai Mendel, the intellectual Jewish-Muslim Hugo/Hamid Marcus, the industrialist Walter Rathenau, Magnus Hirschfeld, the wandering Jewish comedians who transgressed sexual and gender identities (Korbel), and the hundreds of Jewish men and women who frequented gay bars in Berlin shared little that marked them as either Jewish or homosexual. These articles, then, should serve as a warning against essentializing the experience of being Jewish or homosexual in the Kaiserreich or Weimar Republic. Yet one can argue that all of these individuals, each in his or her own way, partook in the tremulous process of the coming into being of new forms of urban modernity and urban identities. Whether they chose to remain in a closet – be it the Jewish one or the gay one – or to leave it; whether they chose to renounce Judaism altogether or connect it to their homosexuality (as was the case with the Jewish lesbians whose biographies are analyzed by Lavie), the double closet created a unique complexity that deserves further analytical attention. * On this note, we move from Berlin to Mandatory Palestine. A handful of elderly gay men, interviewed by Yuval Yonay and others since 2001, have indicated that GermanJewish immigrants to Palestine created the first recognizable gay scene, and that the language of gay men’s sociability was German. “Everybody spoke German” is how one interviewee described it, while another insisted that the language was not German and Yiddish but “German and German” (see Yonay’s article below). In 1942, an article in a Hebrew newspaper in Tel Aviv even referred to homosexuality as “The Berlin Infection” (Hamashkif , May 27, 1942).6 It has not been easy to recover fragments of the world these new immigrants created, mostly in Tel Aviv, and I will address the challenges shortly. But one must first put this social construction within its historical context.

6

I thank Ofri Ilany for this reference.

Introduction

The German-Jewish immigration to Palestine in the 1930s has acquired a mythical status in the story of Jewish migration waves (Aliyot) to Palestine since 1881, and rightly so. As has been the case in the history of German Jews worldwide, German Jewish immigrants themselves contributed to their own mythologization, writing a great deal about themselves and their experiences of exile, emigration, and integration (but at times also about the sense of being in exile in the Promised Land). Historians have also written about the contributions German-Jewish immigration made to what can be called a re-orientation or even re-configuration of the Yishuv, from a community and polity shaped by Eastern European and Russian traditions, standards, and norms, to a Westernized modern European society (Gelber 1990; Gelber 1993: 323329; Greif/McPherson/Weinbaum 2000; Schlör 2003; Meiron 2004; Zimmermann/Hotam 2005; Hoba/Schlör 2006; Bronner 2013; Sparr 2018). Even though half of the capital that entered Palestine between 1933 and 1939 was brought by Central European immigrants (Feilchenfeld/Michaelis/Pinner 1972), the major contribution of German Jews to the Yishuv was not wealth as much as professional expertise and the experience of participating in a modernized urban society. This was true even for those who came from small German towns, whose level of modernization was still far above that of the Eastern European shtetls from which the majority of previous Jewish immigrants to Palestine had embarked. And it was also true of numerous Eastern European Jews who came to Palestine after having been exposed to German culture in the major learning centers of Germany and Austria. German Jews contributed to the growth of small- and largescale industry, banking, and insurance (Gross 2005). They established hundreds of small hotels, pensions, and restaurants; cultivated cultures of urban leisure and lifestyle, including fashion, cosmetics, coffee houses, pastry shops and bookstores; and spurred the proliferation of orchestras, music events, cabaret culture, and modern dance and ballet. German Jews, also known as “Jeckes”, a quasi-derogative, quasi-admiring term whose origins and meaning are not clear, turned the Hebrew University (which was the only university in the country at the time) from a provincial establishment into a serious research institution, and they reshaped the fields of medicine and hygiene (Niderland 1985; Hirsch 2014), engineering (Gelber/Goldstein 1988; Schlör 1996; Mann 2006), law and economics (Yonay/Krampf 2014; Oz-Salzberger/Salzberger 1998; Sela-Sheffy 2006), music, the visual arts, and architecture (Hirschberg 1995; Bohlman 1986; Lewy 2005; Lewy 2016; Hoffman 2016: 13-123; Ofrat 2015), psychology and psychoanalysis (Rolnik 2018), sexology (Schlör 1998; Kozma 2010), psychiatry (Zalasnik 2008; 2012), and more. Gelber calls their contribution the ‘Europeanization’ of the Yishuv (2005: 385). Historians see this contribution as significant impetus for the process of nation-building (Lavsky 2005: 75-76). By 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, and due partially to the contribution of recent immigrants from Central Europe, Jewish society in Palestine had an entire set of bureaucratic, legal, economic, judicial, medical, leisure, and educational institutions that enabled it to function almost independently of the British authorities. Among the immigrants to Palestine were gay men and women, that is, men and women who had adopted a sexual identity based on their same-sex attraction. They came to a country in which same-sex contacts had already existed, but such sexual identities had not yet been recognized, although the more educated might have run across rumors of “homosexuals” and “lesbians.” It is beyond the scope of this collection

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and introduction to address same-sex relations between men in Palestine (and, alas, we know nothing about same-sex relations between women). However, to put the following articles in context, we present knowledge already published on homosexual sex in Mandatory Palestine. The legal historian Orna Alyagon-Darr documented cases of same-sex male rape, prostitution, and casual exchange of sex for money among Jews, Arabs, and the British and other soldiers who served in Palestine. Significantly, she also found a few cases of relations based on mutual love, but explains that such relationships were not considered normal, and defendants were therefore guided to present sexual acts as a consequence of the use of force or of an economic exchange. She further emphasizes that the term “homosexual” did not appear in the legal language of Mandatory Palestine, and there was no attempt to enforce the anti-sodomy law which was enacted in 1936 (Alyagon Darr 2019: 31-49). In her history of forsaken children in Tel Aviv, Tammy Razi mentions adolescent males who were engaged in male prostitution and others who had sex with other young men of their group of homeless youth (Razi 2009: 115-16). Ofri Ilany has documented numerous references to male same-sex sexual attacks in the Hebrew press, in which the common term was “ma’ase-sdom” (an act of Sodom), a modern Hebrew term for anal sex between two men. According to Ilany (2016; 2017a), in most of these news reports, the attackers were Arabs or Jews from Middle Eastern countries, and the assumption was that attacks reflected, in Ilany’s term, an “Oriental vice,” a tendency shared by all Oriental men. Others have written about the unique life and tragic assassination of Jakob Israël de Haan, who moved from Zionism to ultra-Orthodox Judaism, all the while pursuing sex with young Arab men (Berkowitz 2005). For the purpose of our investigation, however, it is important to separate this tradition of same-sex relations, based mainly (but not solely) on either casual anonymous stints, monetary exchange, or the use of violence, from the appearance of individuals who identify themselves according to their sexuality and create their own sites for socialization. This form of socialization offers participants more than just sexual encounters and sex for pay. Importantly, this new same-sex sociability included women who identified themselves based on their same-sex desires. Based on interviews with the oldest gay men he found, Yuval Yonay suggested that it was only with the immigration of the German Jews that new forms of same-sex sociability came into being. Their new networks, sites of socialization, reciprocal help in obtaining jobs, and shared (German!) language created what, I think, deserved to be called a gay culture. Gay German-Jewish men met in bars and cafes, might have had clubs, and established cruising sites (the most prominent, not accidentally, was called the Strich). Already at the time, their contemporaries were aware that a new form of male homosexuality was coming into being. In 1934, the sensationalist magazine Iton Meyuchad reported the existence of “clubs for homosexuals” in Tel Aviv, where effeminate men and masculine men allegedly met to engage in orgies. On the borders between new, Jewish Tel Aviv and old, Arab – and hence degenerate – Jaffa, they meet “in the depths of the shadows of a side room” in cafes. Others, though, the article goes on to warn its readers, might have established meeting clubs “right in the center of town” where men dance with other men. There is nothing here to characterize these sites and these men

Introduction

as German Jews, but the anonymous author of this article associates these gatherings with German bohemian “cocainists” and “morphinists” (Ilany 2017a: 114). Iton Meyuchad was highly atypical of the deeply ideological Jewish Yishuv, and the story might be completely bogus, but it may indicate that the author was aware of the presence of a new group of people, homosexuals, to whom he might have attributed stories he heard in Europe of “those people”. The mass migration from Europe to Mandatory Palestine brought with it knowledge about forms of male and female same-sex attraction, relationships, and identification; physicians, psychoanalysts, and sexologists wrote about homosexuality, sometimes mixing old stereotypes about sodomites with new scientific discourse. From various historical sources, including the interviews conducted by Yonay, personal recollections of people we interviewed during our research, and published information on public figures, we know about other men who already exhibited ‘gay sensibilities’, most of whom came from Germany. The only gay man to write about his selfidentity as gay in real time was Yedidia (Eduard) Havkin (1903-1948), whose diary is currently being analyzed by Ofri Ilany.7 Havkin was born in Munich into a family of Russian Jews who moved to Palestine in 1921. An eccentric man, Havkin did not hide his attraction to men and compulsively recorded information about the men he met, as well as about his astrological beliefs and calculations. He sent excerpts from these texts to the most famous figures of his time, including Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, and Klaus Mann, with the hope that they would help him publish the diaries. During the Israeli War of Independence in 1948, he was recruited to help the construction of fortified positions in a kibbutz near Jerusalem and was killed when the kibbutz was bombarded. Alfred Leschnitzer (aka Fred Lennè) is another example. He was born in Neisse (Silesia), and arrived in Palestine in 1944 after three years of Resistance activities in the South of France. He was a ballet and Flamenco dancer in German cabarets before the war. Under the name Fred Lennox, he taught Flamenco in Palestine and then Israel before moving back to Berlin in 1953, where, as Frieda Loch, he was to become famous in the 1970s as a drag performer in the celebrated Lützower Lampe bar in Charlottenburg. Another figure was Fritz Werdriner, born in 1898 in Siegen (Wesfalia), who was active in the gay scene in Berlin from the 1920s until 1935, when he was arrested by the Gestapo, deported to a concentration camp in Lichtenburg and then departed to Palestine (Hergemöller 2010: 1298). Other gay men of Central European background were Hans Hamburger, the Swiss manager of the most prestigious hotel in Mandatory Palestine (and later the State of Israel), the King David Hotel in Jerusalem; Hans Nathan and Walter Moses, industrialists and leaders of the German-Jewish youth movement before immigrating; Giora Yoseftal (in German: Georg Josephthal), another leader of the German Zionist youth movement, who became a Knesset member and a government minister in the State of Israel; and Hans Rozenkranz (Chai Ataron), a journalist for the Jüdische Rundschau and a book publisher in Berlin, whose small publishing house published homoerotic literature, and who later became a journalist, an art critic in the Palestine Post, and a member 7

We thank Ofri for his immense continuation to this project from its inception and for sharing with us his work-in-progress on Havkin.

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of a network of gay journalists of German-Jewish background. To this list, one could add some leading professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as at least one prominent intellectual whose bookstore served as a ‘clearing post’ for new gay men who arrived in Jerusalem and needed employment and a social (gay) network. Lesbian lives can also be documented as of the 1930s, and here, too, the GermanJewish presence dominates. In Rehavia, the German-Jewish neighbourhood of Jerusalem, which Thomas Sparr has dubbed Grunewald im Orient, Ms. I. R. was a member of a prominent Orthodox German-Jewish scholarly family and had a female partner. Frieda (Alfrieda?) Neumann and Eva Gutmann made up another couple. Together, they ran a luncheonette for bachelors. One, we are told by an interviewee, was very large and the other very thin; one was very masculine-looking and the other very feminine-looking. Unfortunately, our interviewees, who were all young children in the period they described, could not share more than these childhood recollections with us. It was clear, our interviewees nonetheless tell us, that they were a couple, but “no one talked about it.” Other interviewees recalled Ms. Schapsky, who was very masculine-looking and had a garçonne haircut, was an interior designer, and ran an upholstery store with her very feminine-looking partner, Frau Stein. Schapsky “always wore men’s three-part suits, black or grey, a white men’s shirt, and flat black shoes, a completely masculine attire and performance [. . .] Her partner was always dressed in pink and floral dresses, and her waist so extremely thin, probably held by a corset. Even though she was already an old woman, she was still blond. They were always walking arm in arm. There were lots of strange people in the neighbourhood, and we kids used to annoy them, because they were weird. But Ms. Schapsky and her partner were never bothered because they were simply there, part of the landscape”.8 A more famous couple were Batia Lichansky and her partner Annie Neumann, the topic of Yael Rozin’s article below. Lies Möller, a poet who worked for many years in a German bookstore in Haifa and then as a librarian at the University of Haifa, had a long relationship with another librarian, Gerda Fuchs. We do not know much about their lives, but we know that they share the same tomb on Kibbutz Ein HaHoresh (where Möller stayed during her first year in Palestine), after Fuchs donated her body to science. Another well-known couple were the American-born Jessie Ethel Sampter and her partner, the Russian-born, Berlin-educated Lea Berlin. The two women met in 1919 in Jerusalem and shared an apartment for several years. In 1933, after a few years of living apart, Berlin moved to Sampter’s house in Rehovot, and a year later they moved together to Kibbutz Givat Brenner, which in 1929 absorbed a large group of German Jews. In the kibbutz, the two established an exclusive vegetarian convalescent home in which they lived together. “Since our meeting in Jerusalem, we were never separated,” Berlin stated (Rotem 2019). Almost all the lesbians about whom we know lived as couples. It is likely that single women who happened to be lesbians did not register mentally or visually as such in the Jewish society of Mandatory Palestine (see Orit Yaal’s discussion below). Labour Zionist women often adopted masculine attire and other characteristics of the New Woman. 8

We thank Moshe Zimmermann, Shimon Zandbank, and Naomi Tamodr for their willingness to share recollections, and Aviel Astanovsky for conducting the interviews.

Introduction

This was not the case with bourgeois women, but it did enable the single lesbian to pass. The best example of this wilful ignorance is the case of Gertrud Kraus (1901-1977), one of the founding mothers of modern dance in Palestine and Israel. Kraus came to Tel Aviv in 1935 from Vienna, accompanied by Elsa Scharf, one of her students. The two lived together in Tel Aviv and later in Ein Hod on Mount Carmel. Scharf was the administrative director of Kraus’s dance school, but everybody knew that they were a couple. “She was gay, but it was not talked about” is how Linda Hodes, who was sent by Martha Graham to teach the dancers of the Batsheva dance troupe in the 1960s, put it. (Interestingly, Batsheva was founded by Bethsabee de Rothschild and her partner Jeannett Ordman.) Everybody knew that Kraus was gay, that she lived with a female partner, and that she had developed infatuations with some of her female dancers, but no one wanted to name the phenomenon.9 Another prominent single lesbian was Hilda Zadek (1917-2019), a Kammersängerin at the Vienna State Opera. Zadek was born in Bromberg, Posen, and moved to Palestine in 1934. In Palestine, she worked as a shoe saleswoman and a nurse while studying voice. In 1945, she moved to Europe and started an operatic career as an internationally renowned soprano. Zadek, we hear, was exceptionally beautiful. One German-Jewish gay man remembered seeing her in flagrante delicto with Mrs. Nathan, Hans Nathan’s wife, sometime in the 1940s. Whether or not they self-identified as homosexual, one important result of our research is the unique characteristic of the secret of being a homosexual or a lesbian. As others have pointed out before, the knowledge that a person is gay is a very special type of knowledge – one that chooses to remain somewhere between being acknowledged and being denied, wishing itself not to be acknowledged (Murray 1997). Often, it was a secret hidden in plain sight. The Yishuv was like the French provincial city of Reims, recently described in French sociologist Didier Eribon’s memoir of his gay childhood. Eribon recalls cruising in the one narrow street behind the train station, where he would always run into the same few men whom everybody knew to be looking for sex at this site. Yet this was a knowledge to which no one wanted to admit (Eribon 2009). In The Gold-rimmed Spectacles, the Italian author Giorgio Bassani tells a similar story about being a homosexual in the small town of Ferrara (Bassani 1958). In the Yishuv, anonymity and secrecy were not easy to maintain, and closets, as Dotan Brom tells us below, were often transparent. It was clear to young children in Mandatory Jerusalem that the women who lived together were couples, even if the exact nature of their bonding was not known (or was intentionally left unknown). In this context it is worth mentioning Jizchak Schwersenz (1915-2005), who, in 1943, was one of the leaders of Chug Chaluzi (Pionierkreis), the small Zionist underground movement in Berlin. In 1951, he moved to Haifa, where he worked as an educator and was a prominent member of the town’s German Jewish community. Though his presence in Israel postdates the Jecke immigration, the transparency of his closet was typical. “Everybody respected him, brought him food, invited him for the holidays. He was never in the closet. Everybody knew it, but no one talked about it; he always had a young lover,” said a woman who knew him when she was a young woman in Haifa.

9

I thank Dotan Brom for this information; Interview with Linda Hodes, New York, August 24, 2016.

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Question: It did not bother anyone that he was a homosexual? A: No one talked about it. There was silence. People thought that it was a matter of choice, not inborn inclination. . . He was very sensitive, and people thought that it was due to something that happened to him. Many of his friends were also homosexuals, but no one talked about it. Whenever he had a lover, he was euphoric and then everybody knew it. He knew that everybody knew, but no one talked about it.10 Schwersenz was active from the 1970s in rapprochements between German and Israeli youth (both Jews and Arabs), and in 1991 chose to return to Berlin. Interestingly, his itinerary, from Berlin to Haifa and back to Berlin, was not unique among gay and lesbian German Jews who immigrated to Palestine. Alfred Leschnitzer went back to Berlin, as did Gad (Gerhard) Beck, who came to Palestine in 1947 after being a member of the same underground Jewish group in Berlin that Schwesenz led (Beck/Heibert 1990). Zadek ended up in Vienna, and Edith Goldfaden, who came to Palestine in 1940, ended up in Germany in 1988 after living in five different countries, “never feeling at home in any of them” (Goldfaden 1993: 7). Their wanderings, I suggest, can stand as a symbol for the complex stories of identities, subjectivities, and identifications assembled in this collection, and which also shaped the itinerant comedians and performers analyzed by Korbel in her article. They stand, too, as a core component of modernity, a project in which both Jews and homosexuals played an important role during the previous century.

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10

Interview with Miriam Finkelman, Haifa, conducted by Ofri Ilany.

Introduction

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Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-19451 Movements, Professions, Places Andreas Pretzel & Andreas Krass

In summer 2013, the Schwules Museum (“Gay Museum”) in Berlin curated an exhibition titled Lesbisch, Jüdisch, Schwul (“Lesbian, Jewish, Gay”), documenting twenty-four biographies of queer Jewish women and men who contributed to political, social and cultural life in Germany, mostly in Berlin during the Weimar years (1919-1933). The exhibition, the first of its kind, was curated by Jens Dobler, together with Klaus Berndl, Christiane Leidinger, Andreas Pretzel, and Claudia Schoppmann. It presented, in alphabetical order, the physician Felix Abraham (1901-1938), the secretary Alice Ascher (1880-, deported 1941), the clerk Karl M. Baer (1885-1956), the merchant Walter Boldes (1898-1942), the student Herbert Budzislawski (1920-1943), the businesswoman Elsa Conrad (1887-1963), the nurse Annette Eick (1909-2010), the lawyers Fritz Flato (1895-1949), Kurt Fontheim (1882-1976) and Kurt Hiller (1885-1972), the physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), the teachers Vera Lachmann (1904-1985) and Käte Laserstein (1900-1965), the actress Erika Mann (1905-1969), the historian George L. Mosse (1918-1999), the lawyer Martha Mosse (1884-1977), the writer Richard Plant (1910-1998), the actor Harry Raymon (1926-), the artist Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), the salesperson Henny Schermann (1912-1942), the historian Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980), the editorial assistant Felice (Rachel) Schragenheim (1922-1945), the sociologist Alphons Silbermann (1909-2000), and the physician Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). The exhibition was a pioneering project in that it connected two formerly independent research areas: German-Jewish history on the one hand (cf. von Braun 2015; Gotzmann 2001; Grab/Schoeps 1998; Zimmermann 1997) and queer German history on the other (cf. Dobler 2020; Lybeck 2014; Bruns 2008; Schoppmann 1997; Fähnders 1995, Geuter 1994; Steakley 1993). One of the biographies presented in the exhibition at the Schwules Museum was that of George L. Mosse. His is a particularly prominent example of a queer Jewish life that 1

This article is based on a workshop paper written by Andreas Pretzel. It was revised, extended and edited for publication by Andreas Krass. Many thanks to Luisa C. Böck who contributed to the workshop paper and to Liesa Hellmann who helped to edit the article. Also, many thanks to KarlHeinz Steinle for generously making available to us a privately composed, annotated list of 101 “Jewish GLBT protagonists of the German homosexual scene”.

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began in the very last days of the German Empire, evolved during the Weimar Republic, and was totally transformed by the Nazi regime (Mosse 2000; Pretzel 2013b). Born towards the end of World War I into a wealthy Jewish family, grandson of the publisher Rudolf Mosse, he was educated at the Mommsen Gymnasium in Berlin-Charlottenburg and the Salem Castle boarding school close to Lake Constance. In 1933, when his family emigrated, Mosse enrolled at the Quaker Bootham School in York, England, where he first became aware of his homosexuality. He studied history in Cambridge from 1936 to 1939, at Haverford College (US) from 1939 to 1941, and at Harvard University from 1941 to 1946, where he earned his Ph.D. in History. Mosse first taught at the University of Iowa, and then, for thirty years, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 1969, he spent one semester each year teaching at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1996, he gave a lecture on “The Importance of Gay History,” organized by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual Alumni Council of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1997, he inaugurated the Mosse Lecture – a series of lectures that has since been hosted in his name at the Humboldt University of Berlin twice a year. Mosse lived together with his partner until his death in 1999. There are several reasons to highlight this particular queer Jewish life. First, Mosse was closely connected to both the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Humboldt University of Berlin – the two universities where, from 2016 to 2019, the research project that resulted in this article, and the collective volume of which it is a part, was conducted with the financial support of the German-Israeli-Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (grant I-1135-222.4/2016). Second, Mosse’s biography invites us to speculate on how his life might have unfolded if the Nazis had not risen to power in 1933. Would he, for example, have become an openly homosexual Jewish professor of history in Germany? And, if so, would he have written books on Jewishness, sexuality, masculinity, nationalism, racism, heroism, exile, and death akin to those that he wrote in the United States? Inspired by the exhibition at the Schwules Museum and other previous projects, this article aims at mapping queer Jewish lives in Berlin between the years 1897 (when the first homosexual emancipation movement emerged) and 1945 (when the brutally antisemitic and homophobic Nazi regime collapsed). The article is based on a database, composed by Andreas Pretzel and Luisa C. Böck from 2016 to 2019, that contains more than 250 relevant individual names and provides brief biographical information, an overview of the respective individual’s involvement in political and cultural life, and the sources on which this short description is based. This article will first elaborate the methodological approach we chose and then systematically present the results of our research project in three main categories: social movements and community involvement, professions, and places. The distinction is meant to structure the plentitude of acquired information and to give an impression of the variety and diversity of queer Jewish lives in Berlin before the Nazis seized power. The database can only be the first step in research that needs to be extended and improved in the future (not necessarily by us). We are aware that it may seem unsettling that a German research group is attempting to identify queer Jewish individuals and put their names on a list. Therefore, we are very grateful that we have had the chance to cooperate with colleagues from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the composi-

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

tion of this list, as the list helps us to investigate the extent to which immigrants from Germany contributed to the queer scene of Mandatory Palestine and, later on, Israel.

1.

Methodology

What do we mean when we talk about ‘Jewish’ and ‘queer’ people? And how did we specify the sources we examined in order to verify and extend the list of queer Jewish people in Germany between 1897 and 1945?

1.1

Definitions

The term ‘Jewish’ is highly problematic when applied to a historiographic database. As Ernst H. Gombrich (1997) points out, the very differentiation between ‘Jewish’ and ‘nonJewish’ runs the risk of reproducing antisemitic stereotypes and prejudices. Andreas Kilcher (2012: XXVI) argues that the best way to avoid the danger of generalization is the lexicon, as opposed to the encyclopedia, since it produces ambiguity by fragmenting the collected information rather than claiming, or at least suggesting, completeness. However, Franziska Mayer and Madleen Podewski (2009: 10) argue that, within a literary context, a lexicographic approach may fail to address significant criteria and categories such as genre norms, text types, and symbol systems, since it mainly refers to the author’s supposed identity. For these reasons we decided to implement a rather broad and pragmatic definition of Jewishness, following Sergio Della Pergola’s notion of a “core Jewish population” which takes into account “all persons who, when asked in a socio-demographic survey, identify themselves as Jews; or who are identified as Jews by a respondent in the same household, and do not have another monotheistic religion. […] The core Jewish population includes people who identify as Jews by religion, as well as others who are not interested in religion but see themselves as Jews by ethnicity or by other cultural criteria” (2016: 1088-1089). Accordingly, Della Pergola defines Jewishness “as being part of or connected to a Jewish people, whether by choice or not, and carrying the consequences of such circumstance” (ibid: 1080). Certainly, the socio-demographic definition of a ‘core Jewish population’ cannot straightforwardly be applied in a historiographic study. Nevertheless, it helps to address the precarious discrepancy between self-designation on the one hand, and being labelled from the outside on the other. Whereas self-designation is doubtlessly the preferable source, entirely ignoring attributions by a third party could mean overlooking what Della Pergola calls the “consequences of such circumstances”. Similar considerations are necessary when using the term ‘queer’. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick defined queer as “the open mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning when the constituent elements of anyone’s gender, of anyone’s sexuality aren’t made (or can’t be made) to signify monolithically” (1993: 8). Originally used derogatively in a homophobic context, the word ‘queer’ was turned into an affirmative self-designation by academic theorists and political activists, who criticized, deconstructed, and fought against heteronormativity. Today, it often collectively signifies non-heteronormative people and non-heteronor-

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mative ways of thinking and acting. Although ‘queer’ was not yet used in this sense, or for that matter used at all, in the period examined in this article, it may help to escape the limits of terms used then, such as ‘homosexual’, ‘third gender’, ‘transvestite’, or even ‘Urning’. In some cases, people who lived a “lesbian-like” or “gay-like” life are also included. People considered queer during the Nazi period were persecuted, incarcerated, tortured, and murdered. They also had to bear the “consequences of such circumstances”. When we composed the database of queer German Jews living between 1897 and 1945, we refrained from determining whether a person was actually living a queer Jewish life and self-identifying as queer or Jewish, or was merely assumed by others to be queer or Jewish. Both categories rather served as pragmatic working hypotheses. While relying strictly on the sources, we also always questioned and evaluated the source’s reliability.

1.2

Sources

In addition to the lists of queer German Jews from 1897 to 1933 composed by Karl-Heinz Steinle and the Schwules Museum, we first looked at what has so far been published on this specific topic in academic research. The only study to specifically address the intersection of Jewishness and homosexuality that we came across was Claudia Schoppmann’s essay on lesbian Jewish women who survived Nazi Germany (2011). It seems that what has been called “intersectional invisibility” (Purdie-Vaughns/Eibach 2008) with regard to black women – the fact that people belonging to two or more minority groups at the same time tend to be neglected in political and academic discourses – similarly applies to Jewish homosexuals, female even more than male. Theoretically, there are two possible starting points to investigate queer Jewish lives: first, looking for queer individuals in sources on Jewish people; second, looking for Jewish individuals in sources on queer people. Both approaches are problematic. With regard to the first option, there are contemporary compendia on German Jews, such as the Semi-Kürschner, a self-proclaimed “Literary Lexicon of Writers, Poets, Bankers, Money Jobbers, Physicians, Actors, Artists, Musicians, Officers, Lawyers, Revolutionaries, Feminists, Social Democrats, etc. of Jewish Race and Kinship Who Were Active or Known in Germany from 1813 to 1913”, published in 1913 by the racist journalist Philipp Stauff (18761923). The book, a product of antisemitic propaganda, and proudly presenting a swastika on the title page, contains many outright false statements. It includes, to give an example, a vilifying article on the German Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who was already well-known at that time for both his studies on homosexuality and transvestism and for his services as an expert in lawsuits such as the Harden-Eulenburg-trial (Stauff 1913: 174-176). The book was partially re-edited in 1931/1932 in four volumes (reaching from A to P), under the new title Sigilla Veri, by the equally antisemitic professor of literature Heinrich Kraeger, using the pseudonym of Erich Ekkehard. These lexica are more or less unusable for academic research, except for studying how antisemitic propaganda worked during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. With regard to the second option, the absence of a contemporary lexicon covering queer people of that time presents a problem. There are, however, recent publications on

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

homosexual men and women in Germany, such as Bernd Hergemöller’s lexicon Mann für Mann (“Man by Man”) (2010) or, with a focus on literary history, Claude J. Summers’s encyclopaedia The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage (2016), and Alexandra Busch’s and Dirck Linck’s Frauenliebe Männerliebe (“Love of Women, Love of Men”) (1999), which provide portraits of international – including German – gay and lesbian writers. In addition, there are internet platforms such as www.lesbengeschichte.org, which was launched in 2005 by Ingeborg Boxhammer and Christiane Leidinger and provides information in various languages on lesbian history, including a biographical section with a focus on Germany in the 20th century. Aside from evaluating what has already been published in academic and activist contexts, we decided to look at two types of potential primary sources: queer magazines on the one hand, and various public archives on the other. First, we sifted through the magazines of homosexual associations in order to identify Jewish people who actively participated in either homosexual emancipation movements or the queer cultural scene. Between 1896 and 1933, a large variety of journals addressing gay, lesbian, and trans* people was published (cf. Micheler 2008). Journals catering to gay people were: Der Eigene (“The Unique”) (1896-1932), Die Freundschaft (“The Friendship”) (1919-1933), Die Sonne (“The Sun”) (1920) and Uranos (1921-1923). The journals Die Freundin (“The Girlfriend”) (1924-1933), Frauenliebe (“Love of Women”) (1926-1933), and Garçonne (1930-1932) aimed at the lesbian audience but occasionally also covered trans*related topics. The short-lived journal Das 3. Geschlecht – Die Transvestiten (“The Third Sex – The Transvestites”) (1930-1932) was exclusively directed at a trans* readership. Also noteworthy are three periodicals of the first German homosexual rights organization, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitees (WhK) (“Scientific-Humanitarian Committee”): the Mitteilungen des WhK (“Newsletter of the WhK”) (1926-1933), the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (“Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries”) (1899 to 1923) and the Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft (“Journal of Sexology”) (1908-1915). Although these sources prove the vitality of queer life in Germany in the first three decades of the 20th century, they offer little information on the contribution of Jewish queer people to social, cultural, and political life, since the Jewish authors usually did not specify their Jewish background. It seems that being part of a Jewish community was not considered relevant in this context. Second, we consulted the relevant archives, of which three groups can be distinguished. The first group includes archives of Jewish institutions such as the Archiv Bibliographia Judaica (“Jewish Bibliographical Archive”), the archive of the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, and the Jewish Women’s Archive in Brookline, Massachusetts (USA). The Archiv Bibliographia Judaica publishes the Lexikon deutsch-jüdischer Autoren (“Lexicon of GermanJewish writers”) and will soon release a corresponding online database. The second category consists of federal and state archives such as the Bundesarchiv (German Federal Archives), the Landesarchiv Berlin (LAB) (State Archive of Berlin), and the archive of the Landgericht Berlin (LG Bln) (Regional Court of Berlin). In these archives we searched for legal records, court files, and similar data that could direct us to biographical information on queer Jewish lives. The third group of archival data we looked at are kept by compensation authorities such as the Entschädigungsbehörde des Landes Berlin (EA) (Reparation Authority of Berlin),

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where victims of the Holocaust and Nazi prosecution could apply for reparation, and the Wiedergutmachungsarchiv im Landesarchiv Berlin (WGA) (Reparation Archive of the State Archive of Berlin). In the second group of archives, namely, legal records from the period under discussion itself, we studied files containing police investigations and interrogations, accounts of witnesses, reports of so-called welfare institutions that were requested by the police or courts, written statements of lawyers, and sentences by judges. These documents occasionally provided information about certain aspects of the defendant’s life. In the course of police investigations and legal procedures, marital and extramarital relationships often became the subject of further questioning. This was the case if a house search revealed letters, photos, or homosexual literature; if the defendant was already listed in a particular police register (the so-called ‘homo-card index’); or if previous police investigations had revealed corresponding leads or evidence. From these sources we extracted information about the places the defendants frequented, the circles of friends or homosexual unions they belonged to, and the kind of queer amusement culture in which they participated. Alas, in comparing the names from the police register with individuals mentioned in homosexual magazines, we have not yet found overlaps/correspondences between the lists. In any case, the prosecution files are a questionable type of source. It is necessary to critically judge and question the statements with regard to their perspectives and intentions. The police or welfare authorities rarely mention whether or not they consider a person Jewish. Usually, ethnicity and religion were not addressed in police interrogations until the beginning of the 1930s; from 1933 onwards, however, the relevant data was regularly collected. From 1935 on, the Jewish descent of a defendant had a strong effect on their punishment. Prosecutors and judges significantly increased the penalty if a Jewish person was accused of homosexual activity. From 1939 onwards, authorities added the name “Israel” and “Sarah” respectively to the given names of Jewish suspects. In 1943, Jewish defendants lost their right to a fair trial and were deported to extermination camps. In contrast to the legal records, the files kept by the reparation authorities contain autobiographical statements rather than attributions from outside. For this reason, they are the preferable source, but people only rarely (if at all) mentioned their sexual identity in these files.

2.

Social Movements and Communal Affiliations

In general, we looked at two categories of movements and organizations: queer (or potentially queer) ones on the one hand, and Jewish ones on the other. With regard to the first category, various types of social and political movements – sometimes collaborating, sometimes opposing each other – can be distinguished. First, homosexual movements such as the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (“Scientific-Humanitarian Committee”), the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (“Community of the Unique”), and the friendship movement; second, (mostly) male-homosocial movements, such as the literary GeorgeCircle and the youth movement; and third, the women’s movement. Since these move-

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

ments operated in public, there is relatively rich information – especially so in cases where they were dominated by men.

2.1

Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee

The first homosexual emancipation movement in the world was formed in Berlin (Steakley 1975; Beachy 2015; Lybeck 2014). In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), a German Jewish physician and sexologist (Wolff 1986; Dose 2005; Herrn 2009c; Hergemöller 2010: 547-549; Berndl 2013e; Krass 2013; Dose 2014; Herzer 2017; Bauer 2017), founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (WhK), which fought for the abolition of the German “sodomy law”, the infamous Paragraph 175. Within ten years he became the most prominent protagonist of the homosexual emancipation movement. On November 26, 1907, the satirical weekly Lustige Blätter (Funny Gazette) ridiculed Hirschfeld as one of the “heroes of today,” playing a drum and carrying a banner reading “Fort mit § 175” (“Away with § 175”) (22/48: 3). The caption beneath the highly antisemitic cartoon addresses Hirschfeld as the “first campaigner of the third sex”. In 1908, the comedian Otto Reutter wrote the popular Hirschfeld Song, alluding to Hirschfeld’s involvement as an expert witness in the so-called Harden-Eulenburg affair, a lawsuit dealing with accusations of homosexuality against Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg, a high-ranking diplomat and close friend of the German emperor (Domeier 2010). In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the internationally renowned Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexology, or IfS) which was eventually looted and closed by the Nazis in 1933. The Institute comprised a medical center, a legal department, a library, a museum, and an archive. The institute was a place where homosexual women and men, as well as trans* people, found a place of consultation, treatment, asylum, and sociability. Hirschfeld wrote several essays and studies on the topic of male and female homosexuality. He shared his life with two partners: from 1919 with Karl Giese (1898-1938), who worked as an archivist at his institute, and from 1931 with Li Shiu-tong (1907-1993), a Chinese student he met in Shanghai during a world lecture tour. Many Jewish physicians and lawyers worked at the institute, and at least four homosexual Jewish men worked with Hirschfeld as members of the WhK, as colleagues at the institute, or both: the lawyers Fritz Flato, Kurt Fontheim, and Kurt Hiller, as well as the physician Felix Abraham. Kurt Hiller (1885-1972), a lawyer, essayist, and expressionist poet, played an important role in the WhK for 25 years (Grau 2009b; Hergemöller 2010: 357; Berndl 2013d; Münzner 2015). Born in Berlin, he studied philosophy and law. In 1908, he joined the WhK and was elected vice-chairman in 1929. In his dissertation on the legal implications of suicide, written in 1908, he argued against the criminalization of homosexuality and abortion. In 1922, he published a collection of essays titled § 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts (“§ 175: Outrage of the Century”). Politically, he was a firm socialist and pacifist. In March 1933, he was arrested and imprisoned in several concentration camps. In April 1934, he was released and immediately emigrated to Prague, where he met his fellow prisoner and soon-to-be-lifetime partner Walter D. Schulz. Four years later, he moved to London. When he returned to West Germany in 1955, he did not succeed in reviving the WhK. In the early 1960s, he prepared, but for unknown reasons did not submit, a petition against Paragraph 175, which had been tightened by the Nazis in 1935 and

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then remained valid and without change in West Germany. Hiller died in 1972 and was buried in his partner’s grave. Fritz Flato (1895-1949) was also an active member of the WhK (Pretzel 2013a; Dobler et al. 2015: 30-31), and served as its treasurer from 1929 on. In 1930, he became one of the group’s chairmen, responsible for its legal matters. He defended homosexual men who were facing a trial or a sentence and offered legal advice to homosexual magazines facing prohibition or censorship. After he lost his license in 1934 due to antisemitic legislation, he emigrated to the United States. There he struggled to earn a living, because his German university degree was not recognized. Poverty stricken and hopeless, he committed suicide in 1949 in New York. Kurt Fontheim (1882-1976) played an active part in the WhK in the early 1930s (Pretzel 2013e; Dobler et al. 2015: 32-33). He studied law in Munich and Berlin, received a doctorate in Leipzig, and started working very successfully as a defense lawyer in 1906. Like Hiller and Flato, he lived an openly gay life in Berlin and used to invite his friends to his apartment. At the end of 1935 he was detained by the Gestapo for being a “homosexual of Jewish descent” and incarcerated in different concentration camps. After several months he was discharged and emigrated first to Switzerland and then, in 1941, to the United States, where, in 1947, he was naturalized. In the 1950s, he successfully fought for reparations, and in 1975 established the Kurt-Fontheim Foundation in Switzerland in order to financially support pacifist projects. Felix Abraham (1901-1937) was the son of a Jewish physician in Frankfurt am Main (Herrn 2009a; Hergemöller 2010: 82; Berndl 2013b; Dose 2016). He studied medicine in Heidelberg and completed his practical training at both the Municipal and the Jewish Hospital (Krankenhaus der Israelitischen Gemeinde) in Frankfurt. In 1928, he received his doctorate with a thesis on infant mortality. He then moved to Berlin, where he lived from 1929 to 1937 and worked with Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexology as a forensic expert and a counsellor for trans*people. He co-founded the D’Eon union, which campaigned for improving the social and legal situation of trans* persons. Abraham participated in the first sex reassignment surgery ever performed and published on this topic in Hirschfeld’s Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft (“Journal for Sexology”) in 1931. He also wrote articles in the journals Die Aufklärung (“Enlightenment”) und Die Ehe (“Marriage”). Abraham participated in the congresses of the World League for Sexual Reform in London (1929) and Brno (1932). After the Nazis closed the institute, he stayed in Berlin, trying to continue practicing as a physician. In 1938, he sought, unsuccessfully, to get a job in Sweden; he then escaped to Italy, where he eventually committed suicide at the age of thirty-six.

2.2

Gemeinschaft der Eigenen

The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (“Community of the Unique”, GdE) was initiated in 1903 by Adolf Brand (1874-1945), a non-Jewish publisher and publicist, in order to support the literary magazine Der Eigene (“The Unique”) which he had already started in 1896 (Keilson-Lauritz 2009a; digital reprint available at the library of the Humboldt University of Berlin, open access). The magazine, which featured nude pictures and photographs of adolescent men, is considered the first gay journal in the world (Keilson-

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

Lauritz 1997). The GdE differed from the WhK in many ways. While the WhK focused on law and medicine, the GdE favored art and culture. While the WhK used the medical discourse of homosexuality to address same-sex desire, the GdE preferred the homoerotic discourse of male friendship. While the WhK was open to women, the all-male GdE formed a masculinist and in many cases misogynist branch of the early homosexual movement (Beachy 2015: 115-118). In its later years of activity, Der Eigene even published antisemitic statements, which could never have happened in the journals published by the WhK (Mitteilungen der WhK, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen). Before he turned antisemitic, Brand was backed by several Jewish supporters who also supported the WhK, including Benedict Friedlaender (1866-1908) (Keilson-Lauritz 2005: 311–331; Keilson-Lauritz 2009b; Hergemöller 2010: 351-353) and the physician Edwin Bab (18821912) (Hergemöller 2010: 116-117). Among the many associates and authors who collaborated with Adolf Brand and published in Der Eigene were the homosexual and bisexual Jewish publicist Johannes Holzmann, the writer Erich Mühsam, and the physician and playwright Friedrich Wolf. Johannes Holzmann (1882-1914) is also known under the pen name Senna Hoy, a palindrome of his first name (Fähnders, 1995: 117-153; Hergemöller 2010: 573-574). In 1903, he founded the pro-gay Bund für Menschenrechte (“Union for Human Rights”). In 1904, he started a short-lived magazine titled Kampf (“Fight”) which participated in the fight against Paragraph 175 and was financially supported by Benedict Friedlaender. Holzmann was persistently threatened by the police and the censorship authorities and at some point served a four-month sentence in prison. In 1906, he travelled to Russia, where he was arrested and incarcerated. The German Jewish poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler (1869-1945) – friends with Magnus Hirschfeld and often performing in drag as “Prince Yussuf” (Pretzel 2012: 16-20) – tried to intervene in Moscow on his behalf, but her attempt was unsuccessful. Holzmann died in a Russian asylum in 1914. He was defamed in the antisemitic Semi-Kürschner. Erich Mühsam (1878-1934) was friends with Holzmann but rejected his offer to edit the newly founded Bund für Menschenrechte (Hergemöller, 2010: 854-857). From 1903, he shared his life with Johannes Nohl, a young anarchist. He published several poems in Brand’s Der Eigene, among them the poems Widernatürlichkeiten (“Perversions”) in 1904 and Hubert in 1919. He also published a number of essays on homosexual topics. In 1910, he was accused of being a member of illegal secret societies, and was confronted with male prostitutes who testified against him. Mühsam denied being a homosexual and the charges were dropped, yet most journals refused to publish his writings from then on. In 1915, he married the daughter of a Bavarian innkeeper. From 1919 to 1924, he was jailed because of his collaboration with the Münchner Räterepublik (“Bavarian Soviet Republic”). In 1933, Mühsam was detained and tortured by the SS and murdered in the Oranienburg concentration camp in 1934. Friedrich Wolf (1888-1957), in his early years an active member of the Wandervogel youth movement, a fan of nudism, and a nude model, published homoerotic poetry in Der Eigene in 1905-1906 using the pen name Hans Unfried (Hergemöller 2010: 12911293; Keilson-Lauritz 1997: 68, 471). He fought in World War I and wrote a novel on his experiences as a soldier (Langemarck). Wolf was married twice. He became known as a playwright and communist in the 1920s. Starting in 1929, he campaigned against the

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criminalization of abortion. In 1933, he emigrated to the Soviet Union via France and Spain, where he fought in the Spanish Civil War.

2.3

George-Kreis

The literary circle around Stefan George (1868-1933) was an elitist phenomenon which has already been examined thoroughly (Karlauf 2007; Hergemöller 2010: 392-394). This circle had a certain affinity to the friendship movement, as well as the GdE, in that George and his disciples aimed at, as Marita Keilson-Lauritz put it, a “love that was called friendship” (Keilson-Lauritz 1987). Although the George-Kreis was a male-homosocial community with strong homoerotic undertones, it distanced itself from the homosexual emancipation movement (Hekma 2018: 26-29). The literary works written by the George-Kreis were nevertheless widely read as homoerotic literature and were reviewed in the journals of the homosexual movement. In his book on female and male homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld cites Stefan George as evidence for his assumption that, after two thousand years of Christian repression, same-sex desire could be openly thematized again in modern literature (Hirschfeld 1914: 1022). While George, the circle’s master, was raised as a Roman Catholic, many of his disciples were of Jewish descent, including Berthold Vallentin, Ernst Morwitz, and Ernst Kantorowicz. Werner Vortriede and William Hilsley were also close to the George Circle. Berthold Vallentin (1877-1933) was born into a Jewish merchant family (Hergemöller, 2010: 1195-1196; Schlüter 2012). After studying law, he received a doctorate and started his career at the Court of Justice in Berlin. He maintained a passionate friendship with Friedrich Wolters, whom he first met as a student. In 1902, Vallentin joined the George Circle. In 1903, he presented George with a collection of poems. Vallentin and Wolters founded a circle of male friends who lived and worked together in Berlin. In the 1920s, he married a Russian actress and named his son Stefan. He composed a poem titled Narcissus and wrote biographies on Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Stefan George. He also established a literary salon which George often visited during his stays in Berlin. Following a nervous disease and a stroke, Vallentin died in Berlin in March 1933. Ernst Morwitz (1887-1971), born to German Jewish parents, approached Stefan George in 1906 when he was eighteen years old and still a high school student in Berlin-Charlottenburg (Braungart 1997; Groppe 2001; Hergemöller 2010: 846-848). He studied law in Heidelberg, where he received a doctorate, and Berlin where he started his career as a lawyer. George called Morwitz his “beloved” disciple. They entertained a friendship according to the ancient model of erastes and eromenos. Morwitz wrote homoerotic poems celebrating adolescent beauty. He bonded with numerous young men and introduced them to the George Circle. In 1933, he was ordered by the Nazis to offer George the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Arts but George politely declined. In 1935, Morwitz lost his job due to the Berufsbeamtengesetz (BBG), a law forcing Jewish civil servants to retire. Three years later, he emigrated to the US, where he worked as a private tutor, joined a network of exiled George devotees (among them Ernst H. Kantorowicz) and translated George’s literary work into English. He frequently travelled to Amsterdam, where he co-edited the periodical Castrum Peregrini, a journal dedicated to the literary legacy of George.

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

Ernst H. Kantorowicz (1895-1963), born into a Jewish merchant family in Posen (today Poznań), joined the George Circle around 1922, shortly after he received a doctorate in economic history in Heidelberg (Schaller 1977; Hergemöller 2010: 624-626; Karlauf 2007: 547-553; Grünewald 2012; Lerner 2017). There, from 1921 to 1924, he lived in a homosexual relationship with Woldemar von Uexküll-Gyllenband (1898-1939), his “Tischgenoss und Bettgespiel” (“commensal and bedfellow”) (Lerner 2017: 68; Grünewald 2012: 1726). From 1930 until he lost his job due to the above-mentioned anti-Semitic law in 1934 Kantorowicz was a professor of history at the University of Frankfurt am Main. He moved to Berlin and eventually immigrated to the US in 1938, where he resumed his career first at the University of Berkeley and then, from 1951 on, at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he established a circle of disciples reminiscent of George’s example (Raulff 2009). Werner Vordtriede (1915-1989) was the son of a Christian manufacturer and a Jewish publicist who had been widowed when her husband was killed in an accident (Hergemöller 2010: 1211-1213; Raulff 2009: 177, 296, 306, 312, 503). They lived in Freiburg, where Vortriede received his university-entrance diploma in 1933. His mother was aware that her son, being a “half Jew”, was in danger, and sent him to Switzerland, where he worked as a private teacher. Feeling the urge to become a poet, he contacted the George Circle in 1934 and started writing poetry and novels. In the same year, he began studying German and English literature. In 1938, he immigrated to the US, where he wrote a PhD thesis on Stefan George. In 1961, he returned to West Germany, where he lived and worked as a professor of literature and an author. William Hilsley (1911-2003), born William Josef Hildesheimer, was the son of Jewish parents who separated shortly after his birth (Keilson-Lauritz 2013: 134-164). He lived with his mother in Berlin. When he was sixteen years old, he and his mother became close to Wolfgang Frommel (1902-1986) who introduced the ideals of the George Circle to them (Hergemöller 2010: 135, 368, 615; Keilson-Lauritz 2013: 134-164). Hilsley studied music in Berlin. In 1935, he immigrated to the Netherlands and worked as a music teacher in a Quaker boarding school for exiled children. In 1940, he was arrested and subsequently imprisoned in several detention camps, where he continued to compose (Hilsley 1999). In 1945, he returned to the Netherlands and continued teaching at the schools of Eerde and Beverweerd where his homosexuality was known. When he died in 2003, he was a respected teacher, musician, and composer. As has only recently become public, both Hilsley and Frommel, who often visited both schools, had a long history of sexually abusing the boys entrusted to their care (Ligtvoet 2017; Haverkorn 2018; Botje/Donkers 2018; Encke 2018). As their examples prove, ‘pedagogical Eros’ often served as a disguise for sexual assault on minors.

2.4

Friendship Movement

In 1920, a third homosexual movement emerged, the so-called friendship movement. It consisted of organizations such as the Deutscher Freundschaftsverband (“German Friendship Union”), founded in 1920, and the Vereinigung der Freunde und Freundinnen (“Union of Male and Female Friends”), founded in 1922. In 1923, these associations merged into the Bund für Menschenrecht (“Union for Human Right”, not to be confused with Holzmann’s

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Bund für Menschenrechte) (BfM), led by the merchant Friedrich Radszuweit (1876-1932) (Bollé 1984: 31-43; Leidinger 2003). While both the WhK and the GdE were based on the intellectual middle class, the BfM rather attracted the lower middle class. Radszuweit established a publishing company in order to promote gay and lesbian magazines such as Blätter für Menschenrecht (“Gazette for Human Right”), Freundschaftsblatt (“Gazette for Friendship”), Die Freundschaft (“Friendship”), Die Freundin (“The Girlfriend”), Frauenliebe (“Love between Women”) and Garçonne. The journals aiming at a female audience presented role models for women rebelling against conventional notions of ladylike conduct and attire (Lybeck, 2014: 156-168). By organizing events in numerous venues, the friendship movement helped to form a queer community. Many owners of the venues where these events took place joined the friendship movement and thus contributed to the emergence of a queer entertainment scene that at its peak included bars, dance halls, and other places of sociability, and which became a significant part of the homosexual emancipation movement. Thus, the magazines allow for an insight into the social and cultural everyday life of the queer milieu of the 1920s and early 1930s. The above-mentioned lawyer Fritz Flato, who joined the WhK in the late 1920s, supported the friendship movement. In 1922, when he was still an assessor, he participated in a conference of the Deutscher Freundschaftsverband. In 1927, he defended Radszuweit’s publishing house against an imminent ban and confiscation of the lesbian magazine Die Freundin (Dobler et al. 2015: 30-31). While the WhK was dominated by men and the GdE even tended to be misogynist, the friendship movement was supported by many women. As mentioned before, a variety of magazines, such as Die Freundin, Frauenliebe and Garçonne, were directed at female readers. Correspondingly, women were actively involved in the friendship movement. An outstanding example is the writer Annette Eick (1909-2010) (Schoppmann 1993: 98113; 1997: 179; 2013; Pretzel 2012: 35-42; Lybeck 2014: 171; and see Hilla Lavie’s article in this collection). She regularly recited her poems at events of the BfM, and became a well-known protagonist of the queer scene of Berlin.

2.5

Youth Movement

The friendship movement was preceded by the youth movement, which had already come into being in the early 20th century. In 1901, the youth movement Wandervogel (“Bird of Passage”) was established in Berlin, promising freedom, adventure, and comradeship (Bruns 2008: 267-330). A few years later, the Pfadfinder, the German branch of the British Scout movement, followed. Inspired by Wandervogel and Pfadfinder, a new youth movement emerged during the Weimar Republic, the so-called Bündische Jugend (“Unified Youth Movement”) which consisted of numerous associations. Although the youth movement kept its distance from the homosexual emancipation movement, it facilitated spaces and opportunities for same-sex intimacy and homosexual experiences, but also allowed for sexual assaults on minors (ibid: 284-288). The distinctive homoeroticism of the youth movement led to various police investigations (ibid: 236-245). There was a certain affinity between the youth movement (or at least its predominantly male factions) and the GdE because of the shared cult of youth, strength, and virility.

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

The GdE attracted leaders and members of youth groups seeking social acceptance of male homoeroticism within the setting of classical antiquity (ibid: 267-289). Two examples of Jewish members of the youth movement with strong homoerotic feelings were Hans-Joachim Schoeps, a well-known professor of history, and Joachim Boehm, an unknown export merchant. Both had to leave Germany in the 1930s to escape antisemitism and persecution. Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909-1980), a reactionary Prussian royalist who was already antisemitic in the 1930s, joined the all-male association Freideutsche Jugend (“Free German Youth”), an association belonging to the youth movement, in 1923 (Botsch et al. 2009; Hergemöller 2010: 1074-1075; Berndl 2013c; Brumlik 2019). Inspired by Blüher, he founded two youth associations: the Freideutsche Kameradschaft (“Free German Camaraderie”) in 1929 and the Jewish Deutscher Vortrupp – Gefolgschaft deutscher Juden (“German Vanguard – Fellowship of German Jews”) in 1933 (Bruns 2005: 100-117; 2008). In 1933, he met the leader of the German-Jewish youth association Schwarzes Fähnlein (“Black Bannerette”), Kurt Wongtschowski (1909-1986), called Arco (Hergemöller 2010: 1074). Between 1928 and 1938, he was friends with many prominent homosexual men. In 1938, Schoeps left Germany for Sweden, where he wrote books on the history of religion; he was married from 1941 to 1946. During his exile, he supported a resistance group called Deutsche Jugendfront (“German Youth Front”), which published the journal Kameradschaft (“Comradeship”) from 1938 to 1940 (Holler 2014: 189). The journal was financially supported by the Jewish feminist and resistance fighter Selma Meyer (1890-1942) (De Cort 2013). In 1946, Schoeps returned to Germany and became a professor at the University of Erlangen (Bavaria). In the 1960s, he strongly criticized the continued criminalization of homosexual men and even compared it to the persecution of the Jews. Like Schoeps, Joachim Boehm (1914-), an export merchant from Berlin, also tried to stay close to the German youth movement as long as possible (LAB A Rep. 358-02). He was a member of the Jewish Boy Scouts Association Kameraden (“Comrades”). In 1933, he joined the Jewish Boy Scouts Association Schwarzes Fähnlein. He led a subdivision until the association was forced to disband in 1934. Even then, many of the boys belonging to his group flocked to their charismatic leader, whom they called ‘Ringelnatz’ (referring to the popular poet Joachim Ringelnatz). In 1936, they even made a trip together to the Czechoslovakian Krkonoše Mountains. Boehm provided his young comrades with the magazine Eisbrecher (“Icebreaker”), edited by the illegal youth association Deutsche Jungenschaft vom 1.11.1929 (d.j.1.11.) (“German Youth of November 1st , 1929”). Eventually, Boehm was arrested and punished for homosexual relations. In 1939, he managed to leave Germany for Shanghai, like several other young people who had found refuge there with the support of the Amsterdam-based Deutsche Jugendfront. A list of passengers, kept by the Staatsarchiv Bremen, notes that he was born on April 18, 1914, worked as an exporter, and departed for Shanghai on January 24, 1939.

2.6

Women’s movements

The first German women’s movement emerged in the second half of the 19th century and lasted until the Nazis came to power in 1933. We identified two Jewish women who

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participated in the women’s movement and lived a lesbian-like life: Margarete Herz and Käte Laserstein. Margarete Herz (1872-1947) was born into a Jewish middle-class family in Halberstadt (Boxhammer 2019). She never married but had close relationships with other women. In the first decade of the 20th century, she worked as a dentist in the Ruhr area, where she moved with her friend Helene Wolff. In 1908, they co-founded the suffrage movement and became members of a local group of the Preußischer Landesverein für Frauenstimmrecht (“Prussian Union for Women’s Suffrage”). Together, they built a country house close to Bonn; after the sudden death of her partner, Herz moved to Blankenburg (Harz), where she established a health food store and a vegetarian restaurant. In 1938, she emigrated to Chicago. Käte Laserstein (1900-1965) was twelve years old when her widowed mother moved with her and her sister to Berlin (Schoppmann 2011: 153-154; 2013). She studied German and English language and literature as well as art history, received a doctorate in 1924, and became a teacher in 1932. She was a member of the Frauenliga für Frieden und Freiheit, the German branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. In 1933, she lost her job because she was Jewish. She continued teaching at a Jewish private school, where she met her future partner Rose Ollendorff. When the school was closed in 1939, she earned a living as a private teacher. In 1942, the two women had to go underground and lived in a shed in Berlin-Schmargendorf, where they were joined by Ollendorff’s former girlfriend Lucie Friedländer, who was also Jewish. In 1946, Laserstein moved to Sweden, where her sister lived, but returned to West Berlin after eight years. She then worked as a teacher until her death in 1965. Ollendorff and Friedländer also survived the Holocaust, but the latter committed suicide in 1945.

2.7

Jewish movements and organizations

Several homosexual men and women were members of Jewish movements and organizations. Joachim Böhm (who played an active role in Jewish scout unions) and HansJoachim Schoeps (who founded the assimilationist organization Deutscher Vortrupp) have already been mentioned. We identified seven additional women and men, listed in chronological order of their births: Martha Mosse, Karl M. Baer, Cora Berliner, Charlotte Herzfeld, Wilfrid Israel, Alfred Hirsch, Herbert Budzislawski, and Gad Beck. Martha Mosse (1884-1977), a cousin of the previously mentioned George L. Mosse, was born in Berlin (Dobler 2006; Leidinger 2013f). She studied law in Berlin and Heidelberg and received a doctorate in 1920. She worked for the Prussian government and became the first female superintendent for the Police Headquarters of Berlin in 1928. She lived with her non-Jewish partner Erna Sprenger in Berlin-Halensee. When the Nazis came into power, she lost her job and began working for the Jewish community. She was head of the department supporting Jewish people who had been expelled from their homes. From 1941, she had to help prepare the deportation of the Jewish residents of Berlin, and two years later she herself was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp. She survived the Holocaust, although weakened by hunger and illness. After the war, she participated as a witness in the Nuremberg trials and worked at the

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

criminal police department until her retirement in 1953. In the last decades of her life she worked for the Berliner Frauenbund (“Berlin Union of Women”). Karl M. Baer (1885-1956) wrote in his autobiography Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren (“Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years”), published in 1907 under the pseudonym N.O. Body, that “I was born as a boy and raised as a girl” (Baer 1993; Leidinger 2013e; Dobler et al. 2015: 10-11). After studying political economy, sociology, and pedagogy in Berlin and Hamburg, Baer became a social worker and suffragette. From 1904 to 1906, he went to Galicia on behalf of the Jewish service organization B’nai B’rith (“Children of the Covenant”) to campaign against the trafficking in women. In 1906, Baer, who was intersexual, underwent sex-reassignment surgery and received a new birth certificate reflecting his reassigned gender. Baer’s middle initial reflects his birth name, ‘Martha’. After the surgery, Baer married activist Beile Halpern, whom he had met in Galicia. He remarried in 1909 after Beile’s death. Baer was an insurance agent until he began working for the Jewish community of Berlin in 1911. In 1937, Baer and his wife immigrated to Palestine, where he worked as a bookkeeper. He died in 1956 and was buried as Karl Meir Baer at the Kiryat Shaul Cemetery of Tel Aviv. At the request of Magnus Hirschfeld, Baer documented his experiences as an intersexual person. A silent film based on his autobiography was released in 1919, but no copies have survived. Cora Berliner (1890-1942) was born into a Jewish family in Berlin, daughter of a school principal (Exler 1992: 86–90; Maierhof 2002: 81-85). She studied mathematics as well as political and social science in Berlin and Heidelberg. In 1916, she earned a doctorate with a thesis on the Jewish youth movement. She worked at the municipality of Berlin-Schönefeld and for the Verband jüdischer Jugendvereine (“Association of Jewish Youth Organizations”). From 1927 to 1930, she lived and worked in London. In 1930, she returned to Berlin and became a professor of economics at a college in Berlin. In 1933, she lost her job and began working for the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (“Reich Association of Jews in Germany”). In June 1942, she was deported to Minsk, where she was killed. Charlotte Herzfeld (1899-1981) was born in Berlin (Schoppmann 2011: 159). Her father was a professor of medicine; her mother was related to Walther Rathenau. In 1928, she began teaching at the Jewish girls’ school in Berlin. When Jewish schools were closed by Nazi order in 1942, she began privately tutoring the children of Jewish forced laborers. In the fall of the same year, the Herzfeld family received notification that they were to be deported. While her parents committed suicide, she went into hiding with the help of her friend Liesel Gansz. After the war, she taught at the College of Education in Berlin. Charlotte and Liesel, who was a designer, lived together until the latter’s death in 1981. They are buried together. Wilfrid Israel (1899-1943) was born into a wealthy Jewish family that owned the Israel’s Department Store in Berlin, one of the largest and oldest stores in Germany (Stent 1984). In 1921, he joined the family business, establishing an in-house business school. From 1928, he and his brother were responsible for commercial management of the business. After 1933, he funded several organizations supporting Jewish emigrants, including the Youth Aliyah. In 1937, he joined the board of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (“Relief Association for German Jews”). When the company was “Aryanized” – taken away from the family by the Nazi authorities and handed over to gentile Germans – in

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1939, Israel moved to London where he supported Jewish refugee agencies and counseled the Royal Institute of International Affairs. In 1938 and 1939, he played a major role in organizing the Kindertransport, an organized rescue mission that saved nearly 10,000 predominantly Jewish children from Nazi Germany. In 1943, he organized the immigration of Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal to Palestine. He was killed when his civilian passenger plane was shot down by the Luftwaffe on its way from Lisbon to Bristol. The character of Bernhard Landauer in Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin is based on Wilfrid Israel (Shepherd 1984). Alfred ‘Fredy’ Hirsch (1916-1944), son of a grocer and butcher, was born in Aachen (Stránský 2016). He joined the youth movement and co-founded a branch of the Jüdischer Pfadfinderbund Deutschland (JPD) (“Jewish Scouting Association of Germany”) in 1932. Later that year, he moved to Düsseldorf for a job with the JPD and was closely affiliated to the Maccabi Hatzair, a Zionist sporting association. In 1934, he moved to Dresden, where he worked as a sports instructor for Maccabi Hatzair. In 1935, he moved to Prague in order to escape the increasing persecution of Jews and homosexuals in Germany. Between 1936 and 1939, he lived in Brno with his lover, the medical student Jan Mautner. In 1937, he organized the local Maccabi sports games in Czechoslovakia. After Brno refused him a residence permit, Hirsch returned to Prague, where he worked at the Zionist Youth Aliyah School and organized agricultural training programs for young Jews seeking to immigrate to Palestine and live in a kibbutz. In December 1941, Hirsch and Mautner were deported to Theresienstadt. Hirsch took care of the children and organized sport activities, work in the vegetable garden, and a clandestine school, where children learned Hebrew, English, mathematics, and other subjects. In September 1943, he was deported to Auschwitz, where he was appointed a prisoner functionary; however, he was soon stripped of his position, since he refused to use violence against other prisoners. He tried to improve the situation of the children as much as possible, as he had done in Theresienstadt. In March 1943, when the family camp was about to be liquidated, he died from an overdose of barbiturates – it is unclear whether he was poisoned or committed suicide (Kämper 2017; Hájková 2018b). Herbert Budzislawski (1920-1943) was born in Berlin into a liberal Jewish merchant family (Pretzel 2013d; LAB A Rep. 358-02). In his early years, he was a member of the Jewish youth movement. When Hitler came into power, he joined the Gruppe Herbert Baum, a communist Jewish resistance group. In 1936, the openly gay Budzislawski was accused of homosexual conduct (§ 175) and interrogated by the police. In 1942, the group was uncovered after their attack against an anti-communist propaganda exhibition in the Lustgarten Park in front of the City Palace. Budzislawski was arrested, sentenced to death, and executed in Berlin-Plötzensee in 1943, aged twenty-two. Gad Beck (1923-2012) was born as Gerhard Beck in Berlin, son of a Jewish father and an originally Protestant mother who had converted to Judaism (Beck 2000; van Dijk/Grau 2003: 96-109). In 1941, he joined the HeHalutz, a Jewish youth movement which trained young people for agricultural settlement in Palestine. From 1943 to 1945, he led the Hug Halutzi, a Zionist resistance group supporting Jews in hiding. In early 1945, he was betrayed, interrogated, and interned in a Jewish transit camp in Berlin. After the war, he first moved to Munich and then immigrated to Palestine in 1947, where he lived for thirty years. From the early 1970s on, he lived with his Czech partner Julius Laufer.

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

In 1979, they returned to West Germany, where Beck closely cooperated with the head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, Heinz Galinski, and became the director of the Jewish Adult Education Center. In 1995, he published his memoirs, depicting the life of a gay Jewish man living in Berlin. When the English translation was published in 2000, he toured the United States. In 2012, he died at age 88, survived by his partner.

3.

Professions

Another way to look at queer Jewish lives in Germany is to investigate the professions they pursued until they lost their jobs due to the Nazi legislation. Shortly after coming into power, the Nazis passed occupational bans against Jewish professionals. In April 1933, the Berufsbeamtengesetz (“Civil Service Law”) resulted in the dismissal of many tenured Jewish civil servants, and by September 1938, people of Jewish descent were prohibited from working as physicians, lawyers, and artists. Many such lawyers and physicians have already been mentioned, since they were members of homosexual, feminist, or Jewish movements and organizations. The following chapter focusses on creative professions such as literature and journalism, as well as the visual and performing arts. The vibrant cultural life of Weimar Germany, and particularly of Weimar Berlin, included numerous male and female Jewish writers and artists.

3.1

Literature and Journalism

Writing is a field in which queer Jewish women and men are highly represented. Members of the literary George Circle have already been mentioned. Further examples are, in chronological order of their birth dates, the writers Walther Rathenau, Alfred Lichtenstein, Leopold Heinemann, Moriz Seeler, Ann K. Hartwin, Vera Lachmann, Ruth Landshoff-York, Klaus Mann, Eva Siewert, Hans Mayer, Annette Eick, Richard Plant, and Oskar Seidlin. Walther Rathenau (1867-1922) was born in Berlin to a prominent Jewish businessman, founder of the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), an electrical engineering company (Schölzel 2006; Hergemöller 2010: 955-957). He studied physics, chemistry, and philosophy in Strasbourg and Berlin, where he received a doctorate in physics in 1889. His passions, though, were philosophy, literature, and art. In 1887, he anonymously published his first theatre play, titled Blanche Trocard. In 1895, he officially distanced himself from the Jewish community. Three years later, he published in Maximilian Harden’s journal Zukunft (“Future”) the polemical article Höre Israel (“Listen, Israel”), a vicious attack on the assimilated Jews of Berlin. Rathenau’s book Impressionen (“Impressions”), a collection of aphorisms published in 1902, was bought and destroyed by his father. His most popular book was a volume of essays titled Von kommenden Dingen (“Of Future Things”), printed in 1916. Rathenau wrote romantic letters to male friends, expressing his particular attraction to blond, athletic men. Harry Graf Kessler bluntly referred to Rathenau’s homoerotic desires (Easton 2002: 31). The foyer of Rathenau’s residence in Berlin-Grunewald was decorated with sculptures of naked figures, and the

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bedroom of his villa in Brandenburg was entirely pink. Rathenau had an illustrious career as an industrialist and a politician. In February 1922, he was appointed foreign minister, but four months later he was assassinated by right-wing terrorists. Rathenau is widely considered “Hitler’s first victim”. The character of Paul Arnheim in Robert Musil’s novel The Man without Qualities is a portrayal of Rathenau. Alfred Lichtenstein (1889-1914), born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf to a German-Jewish textile manufacturer, studied law in Berlin and Erlangen where he received a doctorate (Kanzog 1985; Heuer 2009: 32-36). In 1910, he began publishing poems in the literary magazines Der Sturm (“The Storm”) and Die Aktion (“The Action”). In 1913, he released his first anthology, titled Die Dämmerung (“Twilight”). In his literary work he repeatedly refers to the topic of male homosexuality. Lichtenstein, who never married, fell in battle in first year of World War I, aged twenty-five. Leopold Heinemann (1896-1954) was born in Kassel, son of Mendel and Rosalie Heinemann (Röder 1999: 480-481; LAB A Rep. 358-02). He studied philology, philosophy, and political science in Halle, Marburg, and Berlin. In 1924 and 1926, he received doctorates in Marburg (Dr. phil.) and Berlin (Dr. rer. pol.). Heinemann worked as a journalist for newspapers and periodicals including Hessenspiegel, Das Tagebuch, Weltbühne, Berliner Tageblatt, and Vossische Zeitung. He also worked as a translator and coeditor for the Knaur publishing house. In 1933, he was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer (“Reich Chamber of Literature”), interned in Lichtenburg concentration camp, and soon released after industrialist Emil Kirdorf intervened on his behalf. After he was rearrested in 1935, he managed to escape to London. Four years later, he emigrated to New York, where he worked on the reorganization of the American transportation system. Moriz Seeler (1896-1942) was born in Pomerania (Jacobsen 2015). He moved to Berlin at the age of fifteen. After finishing school, he served in World War I until 1916. Like many artists and writers, he patronized the Romanisches Café in Berlin-Charlottenburg and wrote poems. In 1920, Else Lasker-Schüler dedicated a prose text to him. In 1922, he founded the Junge Bühne (“Young Stage”), an avant-garde matinee-theatre, and produced several plays. In 1927, he co-authored the libretto to Friedrich Hollaender’s cabaret Bei uns um die Gedächtniskirche rum (“With Us around the Memorial Church”). Two years later, he co-founded Filmstudio 1929, a film production house. In 1933, he moved to Prague and Vienna but returned two years later because he could not find a job. In 1937, he published a collection of poems titled Die Flut (“The Flood”) in Vienna. In 1942, he was deported to the Riga Ghetto, where he was murdered. Ann K. Hartwin is the pen name of Anneliese Abels (1903-1990), a writer and former singer, who was friends with the painter Gertrude Sandmann (Schoppmann 1991: 81; 2011: 146). In 1939, Hartwin managed to flee from Berlin to England. In 1978, she published a German coming-out novel titled Sandra, which tells the story of a seventeenyear-old girl living in the 1920s. Vera Lachmann (1904-1985) was born in Berlin-Tiergarten (Pass Freidenreich 2002; Schoppmann 2005; 2013g; Wiesen Cook 2016). Her father was a renowned architect. She studied philology, literature, and language at the universities of Basel and Berlin. Lachmann, who was friends with poet Nelly Sachs and pianist Grete Sultan, wrote poems. In 1931, she earned a PhD, then continued her studies to become a schoolteacher.

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

In 1933, she founded a private school for Jewish children in Berlin-Grunewald, which was eventually closed by the Nazis in 1938. In 1939, she emigrated to the United States, where she founded a summer camp for boys in North Carolina (Camp Catawba). Her life partner was American composer Tui St. George Tucker, whom she met in 1946, when the latter began working as a music instructor at the camp. In 1949, she began teaching at Brooklyn College, and in 1972 she was appointed professor of Classical Philology. Collections of her poems were published in 1969, 1975, and 1982. Ruth Landshoff-York (1904-1966) was born as Ruth Levy in Berlin-Schöneberg to a Jewish middle-class family (Herrmanns n.d.). Her father was an engineer and her mother an opera singer. In the late 1920s, she was a prominent member of the bohemian milieu in Berlin. She frequented the gay bars of the city, often dressed as a man, and was one of the first female motorists. In 1922, she acted in Fritz Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu. From 1924 to 1930, she dated writer Karl Vollmöller, who wrote the screenplay for The Blue Angel. From 1927 to 1930, she wrote articles and columns for several journals, often thematizing the “New Woman”. In 1930, she published her first novel, titled Die Vielen und der Eine (“The Many and the One”), which was more or less autobiographical. Three years later, she wrote the novel Roman einer Tänzerin (“Novel of a Dancer”), which was published posthumously in 2002. From 1930 to 1934, she was married to David Graf Yorck von Wartenburg. In 1933, she emigrated to France, the UK, Switzerland and, finally, the US. She lived in New York, where she wrote novels, plays, poems, and magazine columns until her sudden death in 1966. One of her plays is about a homosexual man facing the death penalty (Lullaby for a Dying Man). Klaus Mann (1906-1949) was born in Munich to Thomas Mann and his wife Katia Pringsheim, who came from a family of converts from Judaism (Fischer 1999; Hergemöller 2010: 781-784; Spotts 2016). In his youth he admired Stefan George. In 1924, he got engaged to Pamela Wedekind, daughter of the dramatist Klaus Wedekind, and moved to Berlin, where he soon became a well-known dramatist, novelist, and essayist. In 1925, he published his play Anja und Esther, depicting a failing homoerotic friendship between two schoolgirls. In his autobiographical novel Der fromme Tanz (“The Pious Dance”), released in 1926, he came out as a gay man. Vehemently opposed to the Nazis, he left Germany for Paris in 1933. One year later, he was stripped of German citizenship by the Nazis. In 1936, he emigrated to the United States and lived in Princeton, New Jersey, and in New York. Mann’s most famous novel, titled Mephisto (1936), is a thinly disguised portrait of the homosexual actor Gustaf Gründgens. His novel Der Vulkan (“The Volcano”), published in 1939, is considered one of the most important examples of German exile literature. Mann committed suicide at the age of forty-two. Eva Siewert (1907-1994), whom Kurt Hiller called his “sister in spirit”, was born in Breslau, the daughter of two musicians (Wolfert 2015: 48-51). After the divorce of her parents, Siewert grew up with her Jewish mother in Berlin, where she studied music and became a coloratura soprano singer. For health reasons, she was forced to change her profession, and started a career as a journalist. In 1930, she travelled to Tehran, where she worked for a German export and import company. When she returned to Germany a year later, she gave radio lectures about her travel experiences. From 1932 to 1938, she worked as editor-in-chief and trilingual head spokeswoman (German, En-

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glish, French) for Radio Luxemburg. In 1938, she went to Berlin to get a visa in order to return to Tehran. She was denied the document and thus trapped in Germany. In 1941, she was arrested several times for spreading anti-fascist jokes; in 1942, she was sentenced to nine months in prison (LAB C Rep. 118-01, Nr. 8031; EA Nr. 20.406). She wrote about her girlfriend Alice Carlé (1902-1943) (Siewert 1946; n.d.). Carlé stayed in Siewert’s apartment, was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, and murdered in Auschwitz. Siewert’s health was damaged by her imprisonment but she survived the Nazi regime. After the war, she continued working as a journalist and playwright. Little is known about her life from the mid-1950s on. Hans Mayer (1907-2001) was born in Cologne to bourgeois Jewish parents (Hergemöller 2010: 802-803). He studied jurisprudence, political science, history, and philosophy in Cologne, Bonn, and Berlin. In 1930, he earned a doctorate at the University of Cologne, writing a thesis on the crisis of German political science. In the same year, he entered the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and worked for Der Rote Kämpfer (“The Red Fighter”), a magazine of the communist resistance group of the same name. Two years later, he worked briefly for the magazine Die Neue Welt (“The New World”). In 1933, he left Germany for France. His parents, who remained behind in Germany, were eventually murdered in Auschwitz. After the war, Mayer returned to Germany and became one of the most famous German intellectuals of his generation. He taught as a professor of literature in Leipzig, Hanover, and Tübingen. In 1975, he published Außenseiter (“Outsiders”), a study about the literary depiction of women, Jews, and homosexuals. Annette Eick (1909-2010) was born in Berlin. She went to a private school where a teacher encouraged her to write poems (Schoppmann 1993: 98-113; 1997: 179; 2013b; Pretzel 2012: 35-42). Later, she frequented the lesbian bar Dorian Gray and wrote poems, essays, and short stories for the lesbian magazine Frauenliebe. In the mid-1930s, she fell in love with Francis Trude, an American woman who lived in Berlin; during this period, Eick taught English and visited Hirschfeld’s institute. Eick was detained and jailed during the Kristallnacht of November 1938, but managed to escape after a couple of days. She moved to London, where she made a living as a nanny and a maid. In 1949, she met Gertrud Klingel, who became her companion until the latter’s death in 1989. Eick continued writing poems in English and, in 2005, a film documentary about her life was released under the title Immortal Muse. Richard Plant (born as Richard Plaut) (1910-1989), son of a Jewish physician and grandson of a reform rabbi in Frankfurt am Main, studied German literature (Grumbach 1988; Berndl 2013f). In 1930, he spent a semester in Berlin, where he wrote theatre reviews for various newspapers and was introduced to Klaus Mann. In 1931, he returned to Frankfurt, where he continued working as a journalist. From 1933 to 1938, he studied in Switzerland. Plant and his friend Oskar Seidlin co-wrote highly successful detective novels that were published in Germany. Plant also wrote children’s books. In 1937, he completed a PhD thesis on Arthur Schnitzler. In 1938, he moved to New York, where he worked for Klaus Mann and Siegfried Krakauer. Plant was naturalized as a US citizen in 1945 and became a teacher and a professor. After his retirement, he wrote a book on the persecution of gay men under the Nazi regime (The Pink Triangle) which was published in 1986.

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

Plant’s friend Oskar Seidlin (born as Oskar Koplowitz) (1911-1984) was raised by Jewish parents in Upper Silesia (Spalek et al. 2010: 307-309; Heuer 2012: 212-218). Like Plant, he studied in Frankfurt, moved to Switzerland and then immigrated to the United States. He also was a journalist and a novelist. Beginning in 1946, he was a professor of German literature and language at Indiana University in Bloomington.

3.2

Painting, Sculpture, Photography

With regard to the visual arts, it is worth mentioning painters like Gertude Sandmann, Elisabeth Dorothea Sternheim, Ludwig Meidner, and Rudolf Levy, sculptors like Renée Sintenis, and photographers like Gisèle Freund, Käthe von Bassenheim, and Willi Stark. Rudolf Levy (1875-1943), an Expressionist painter, was born into an Orthodox Jewish family (Thesing et al. 1990). He first studied at the Academies of Fine Arts in Karlsruhe and Munich, then went on to live, work, and study in Paris. During the First World War, he fought as a German soldier; after the war, he moved back to Germany and settled in Berlin in 1919. In 1928, he became a member of the Berlin Secession. In 1933, he left Germany and lived in Italy, Mallorca, New York, Dubrovnik, and Ischia. In 1937, the Nazis listed his works as “degenerate art”. In 1939 he had to leave the artists’ colony of Ischia and went to stay with friends in Florence. In 1943, when the Germans occupied Italy, he had to go underground. Eventually the Gestapo found him, imprisoned him, and deported him to Auschwitz. He died either in transit or after his arrival at the concentration camp. Levy had married in 1919, but the couple separated in the early 1930s. The Austrian-Jewish painter Walter Bondy (1880-1940) was a close friend of his. Elisabeth Dorothea Sternheim (1883-1971), better known by her nickname Mopsa Sternheim, was the daughter of playwright Carl Sternheim (whose father was Jewish) and writer Vera Sternheim (Ehrsam 2017; Herrmanns n.d.). She studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden and production design at the theatre of Cologne. She was friends with Klaus and Erika Mann. In the 1920s, she lived with the above-mentioned writer and actress Ruth Landshoff-Yorck. Sternheim joined the Resistance in 1942 and was caught by the Gestapo in 1943. She survived her internment in the concentration camp Ravensbrück. Sternheim wrote an autobiographical novel titled Vivian (the manuscript is lost) as well as diaries in which she refers to her bisexuality. Expressionist artist and writer Ludwig Meidner (1884-1966) was born in Silesia into a middle-class Jewish family (Leistner 1986; Breuer, Wagemann: 1991; Lang 1993: 23-24, 53; Hergemöller 2010: 809-811). In 1903, he attended the Royal Art and Crafts School in Breslau for two years, but left without a degree. In 1906 and 1907, he spent several months in Paris, where he became friends with Amedeo Modigliani. In the years before World War I, Meidner lived in Berlin and frequented the meeting places of the art and literature scene; he was friends with Kurt Hiller and Salomo Friedländer. Several of his drawings and a few texts were published in the expressionist journals Der Sturm and Die Aktion. Although his homosexuality was well known among his contemporaries – Magnus Hirschfeld claims to have met him in the homosexual bar Dalbelli – his relationship with the poet Ernst Wilhelm Lotz (1890-1914) has often been portrayed in academic publications as mere friendship. They lived together in Dresden for a couple of months before Lotz joined World War I as a military volunteer and was fatally shot soon after.

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After the war, Meidner turned towards Judaism and married. The Nazis listed him as a “degenerate artist”, and he and his wife had to emigrate to London in 1939 to escape persecution. In 1952, he returned to West Germany and spent the last years of his life with Jörg Kitta von Kittel. His most famous works are his Apokalyptische Landschaften (“Apocalyptic Landscapes”) and his portraits of Leo Baeck and Theodor Heuss. Renée Sintenis (born as Renate Alice Sintenis) (1888-1965) was an internationally acclaimed sculptor who lived in Berlin (Komander 2004; Kettelhake 2010; Wallner 2018). Her maternal grandmother had been Jewish until her conversion. In 1934, she was excluded from the Academy of Arts and her works were removed from public collections. One of her self-portraits was listed as “degenerate art”. Nevertheless, she was allowed to continue exhibiting her works. Three years after the death of her husband, the painter and typographer Emil Rudolf Weiß (1875-1942), she moved in together with her partner Magdalena Goldmann and lived with her for twenty years. Käthe, Countess of Waldbott Bassenheim (born as Käthe Hahn) (1892-1942), a trained art photographer, was the daughter of a Jewish dentist in Berlin (Gerlach n.d.). The multiple struggles of her life prevented her from having a career. She was unhappily married twice, suffered from syphilis, and was addicted to opium. In 1934, she moved in with her lover Wilhelmine Cruys (1887-1961). In 1938, she was arrested, charged with procuration and complicity in abortion, and sentenced to prison. After her release in 1941, she was deported to Riga, where she was killed. Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), daughter of a wealthy Jewish factory owner and art lover, studied at the art school of the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (“Union of Female Artists of Berlin”) (Schoppmann 1993: 75-86; 2011: 142-151; 2013d; Afken in this collection). In the 1920s, she participated in several art exhibitions in Berlin and spent time in Paris and Italy. In 1933, she immigrated to Switzerland, but soon had to return to Germany because her residence permit was not extended. Although Sandmann had already left the Jewish community in 1926, she was banned from her profession in 1934. Eight years later, she escaped deportation by feigning her suicide and going underground. While she was in hiding, her partner Hedwig Koslowski took care of her. After the war, she resumed working as an artist. In 1974, she co-founded L’/74, a group for aging lesbian women living in Berlin. Most of her oeuvre, mainly consisting of portraits of women, was shown for the first time after her death in 1981. Gisèle Freund (1908-2000), a photojournalist and portraitist, was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin-Schöneberg (De Cosnac 2008; Gianoulis 2015). Her father, an industrialist with a strong interest in the arts, took his daughter to museums and gave her a camera. Freund studied sociology in Freiburg and Frankfurt. In 1933, she left Germany and moved to Paris, where she finished her PhD. During the German occupation of Paris, she lived in Buenos Aires but returned to Paris after the war. Freund, who was seemingly bisexual, married a Frenchman in order to obtain citizenship in France but divorced him several years later. Willi Stark (1913-), a photographer and illustrator for print media, is mentioned in the case files regarding Richard Grune (1903-1984), a painter and graphic designer, who was arrested because of his homosexuality in 1934 and incarcerated in prisons and concentration camps until 1945, when he escaped from a death march to Dachau (LAB A Rep. 358-02 31986). In the summer of 1933, Stark, who was of Jewish origin, had posed

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

as a nude model for Grune, and he confessed to having had sex with a friend in Grune’s apartment. It is not known what happened to him after 1935, when the proceedings against him were dropped.

3.3

Music

Numerous queer Jews were active in the performing arts, particularly music, dance, theatre, and cinema. We know about so many of them because public entertainment has always been covered extensively by the press. Among them are musicians such as Vladimir Horowitz, Francesco (Franz) von Mendelssohn, and Hans Otto Schaefer; singers such as Max Hansen; dancers such as Erik Charell, Ellen Rathé, Margot Liu, Sascha Leontjew, Julius Hans Spiegel, Edgar Levin Frank, Alexander Sacharoff, and Alfred Leschnitzer; actors such as Therese Giehse, Elisabeth Bergner, Inge Meysel, Erika Mann, and Margarete Gahrmann; and comedians such as Harry “Hambo” Heymann. Francesco (Franz) von Mendelssohn’s (1901-1972) father was a wealthy banker with Jewish family background (Blubacher 2008). When he died in 1917, his wife left the villa in Berlin-Grunewald (and her husband’s valuable art collection) to her son Franz and her daughter Eleanora and moved back to Italy. Franz, who later Italianized his name, became a professional cellist. His close friends included the musician Vladimir Horowitz and the actor Gustaf Gründgens. He was a well-known dandy, socializing in the homosexual scene of Berlin, throwing parties, and occasionally changing clothes with his friend Ruth Landshoff-York (1904-1966). Although he was a baptized Christian, he was widely perceived as Jewish. In order to escape antisemitism, he left Germany in 1933 for Paris and New York, where he staged a short-lived production of Bertolt Brecht’s Threepenny Opera on Broadway. In 1935, he worked with director Max Reinhardt as a production assistant. Suffering from melancholia and alcoholism, he was treated in a psychiatric clinic. Mendelsohn’s friend Vladimir Horowitz (1903-1989), the son of assimilated Russian Jews, studied music at the Kiev Conservatory and soon became a famous concert pianist (Plaskin 1983). In 1925, he immigrated to Berlin and started an international career playing in Paris, London, and New York City. He spent most of his life in the US. Although he married the daughter of an Italian composer in 1933, rumors about his supposed homosexuality persisted. The Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein said of him that “[e]veryone knew and accepted him as a homosexual” (ibid: 162). From 1934 to 1938, Horowitz lived in Paris. In 1939, he moved to the United States, where he spent most of his life. In the 1940s, he began seeing a psychiatrist in order to alter his sexual orientation (ibid: 215). Horowitz, who died in 1989 in New York City, is regarded as one of the most brilliant pianists of the 20th century. In 2019, a biographical novel based on Horwitz’s letters to his student Nico Kaufmann was published, narrating their love story from 1937 to 1939 (Singer 2019). Hans Otto Schäfer was born on June 9, 1916, in Berlin-Charlottenburg (A Rep. 358-02 108134-108141). He lived in 158 Kantstraße and played the piano in the gay bar Schoppenstube (Grolmanstraße). He then moved to Düsseldorf, where he worked as a merchant with Peek & Cloppenburg, a retail clothing store. There, he was convicted of homosexual intercourse (§ 175) in 1937. The unmarried Schäfer confessed to being bisexual and

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was jailed for several weeks. As a young adult, he was a member of the Hitler Youth, and in the second half of 1939, did labor service (Reichsarbeitsdienst). Until the end of 1940, he was a soldier at the Western Front, but after leaving a military hospital, he was dismissed for being “half-Jewish”. It is unknown when and where he died. Operetta and cabaret singer Max Hansen (i.e. Max Josef Haller) (1897-1961) was born in Mannheim to a Danish actress and a Hungarian-Jewish actor (Arnbom 2006; Raber 2010: 50-53; Weniger 2011: 231-232), but was raised by foster parents in Munich. His career as a singer started early, and he was nicknamed “The Little Caruso” because of his beautiful voice. During World War I, he lived in Denmark, and after the war he moved to Vienna. From 1924 he lived in Berlin, where he became a famous singer and actor, working with directors such as Max Reinhardt and Eric Charell. As a cabaret singer, he wrote many satirical songs against Hitler (whom he satirized as homosexual in his song War’n Sie schon mal in mich verliebt? (“Have you already had a crush on me?”) and the emerging Nazi movement. He also performed successfully in numerous film comedies and musicals. Hansen, who was married twice and had four children, was in touch with the homosexual cultural milieu of Berlin. From 1933, he lived and worked in Vienna; in 1938, he emigrated to Copenhagen, where he started his own theater. In 1951, he returned to Germany and resumed his career as an operetta singer. In 1953, he moved back to Copenhagen.

3.4

Theatre and Film

Erika Mann (1905-1969), daughter of Thomas Mann, was, like her brother Klaus Mann, considered “half-Jewish” by the Nazis because of her Protestant mother’s Jewish background (von der Lühe 2009; Leidinger 2013c; Pettis 2015). In 1924, she moved to Berlin in order to study theatre and begin a career as an actress. Erika Mann had relationships with several women, including the Jewish actress Therese Giehse. From 1926 to 1929, she was married to Gustaf Gründgens. In 1933, Erika Mann, her brother Klaus, and Therese Giehse started a cabaret called the Pfeffermühle (“The Pepper Mill”). After two months, the cabaret was closed by the Nazis, and Erika Mann emigrated to Switzerland, where her parents already lived. In 1935, she married the gay British writer W. H. Auden in order to get British citizenship. Auden and Mann became good friends but never lived together. During the war, Erika Mann worked as a journalist in London, and in 1945, she returned to Germany, where she attended the Nuremberg trials. From 1946, she lived and worked in California. In 1952, she moved back to Switzerland together with her parents. Erika Mann’s lover, Therese Giehse (1898-1975), first appeared on stage in 1920 (Giehse 1973, Wendt 2018). In the late 1920s through 1933, she was a leading actress at the Munich Kammerspiele. When the Nazis came to power, she moved to Zurich, where she continued her career. In 1936, she married the gay British writer John Hampson to receive a British passport. After World War II, she returned to Germany and worked with Bertolt Brecht. She worked as a theatre and film actress until her death in 1975, including playing the part of the headmistress in the lesbian movie Mädchen in Uniform (“Girls in Uniform”) (1958).

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

Elisabeth Bergner (1897-1986) was an Austrian British theatre and film actress. She was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the now Ukrainian city of Drohobych (Bergner, 1978; Schock/Fessel, 2004: 36), and grew up in a secular Jewish family. In 1915 she started acting, and in 1922 she made her film debut. In 1923, she had her breakthrough with a Shakespeare production in Berlin. From 1924 on, she worked exclusively with the homosexual Jewish director Paul Czinner, whom she married in 1933. Bergner, who was bisexual, played many Hosenrollen (breeches parts), thus challenging heteronormative gender roles. In 1932, she left Berlin for London, where she continued her career. In 1935, she was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1940, she emigrated to the US. In April 1949, she visited Israel. In 1950, she returned to London, and in 1954 to West Germany. She died in London in 1986. Inge Meysel (1910-2004), born in Berlin-Neukölln, had a Danish mother and a German Jewish father (Meysel 1993; Schock/Fessel 2004: 191). After attending drama schools in Berlin from 1928 until 1930, she started her career as a theatre actress. During the Nazi regime, she was banned from performing because of her Jewish father (who survived hidden in a cellar). In 1945, she restarted her career in Hamburg. From the early 1960s, Meysel became one of the most famous and beloved German TV actresses, and was even called “Mother of the Nation”. She was married twice but had no children. In 1992, she came out as bisexual. Harry “Hambo” Heymann (1907-1995) was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg (Hájková 2018a: 96-99; EA Reg. 67.710). He performed as a queer clown and a female impersonator. In 1934, he emigrated to Denmark, but nine years later was deported to Theresienstadt. There, the painter Erich Lichtblau-Leskly created a caricature (now kept by the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust) showing Hambo as a queer comedian playing the accordion and singing a song. The caption reads: “Schlagersänger Hambo kam mit dem dänischen Transport ins Ghetto und sang ein Lied: Ich sterbe, ich sterbe, tralalala tralalalala” (“Pop singer Hambo came into the ghetto with the Danish transport and sang a song: I am dying, I am dying …”). He survived the concentration camp and died in 1994 in Farum, Denmark. Manasse Herbst (1913-1997), born in Galicia, began his career as a child actor in several silent movies (Schock/Fessel 2004: 71). From 1930 to 1933, he acted in Eric Charell’s popular Berlin production of the operetta Im Weißen Rößl (“White Horse Inn”). From 1931, he had an affair with the tennis player Gottfried von Cramm, whom he had met in the gay bar Eldorado. Von Cramm helped Herbst to escape Berlin in 1936. One year later, von Cramm was interrogated by the Gestapo about his affair with Herbst; he was jailed but released after seven months (EA Reg. Nr. 317.940). After the end of World War II, Herbst, who was by then married and living in the United States, visited von Cramm in Germany to thank him for saving his life.

3.5

Dance

Erik Charell (i.e. Erich Karl Löwenberg) (1894-1974), who is best known for directing operettas such as the above-mentioned Im weißen Rössl and Der Kongress tanzt (“The Congress Dances”), was born in Breslau (Hergemöller 2010: 233-234). He studied dance in Berlin and was professionally discovered in 1913 in a production of director Max Rein-

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hardt at the Deutsches Theater. After founding his own company, he toured Europe. In 1919 and 1920, he became a famous silent movie actor. In 1923, he worked for Reinhardt as an assistant stage manager for a tour production of Karl Vollmöller’s wordless play Das Mirakel (“The Miracle”) in New York. Back in Berlin, he managed Reinhardt’s Großes Schauspielhaus (“Great Theater”), where he produced revues and operettas. His great success led to an engagement in Hollywood. In 1933, when the Nazis cancelled his contract as an Ufa film director, he moved to the US and directed various shows on Broadway. After the war, he returned to Europe and resumed his career as a theatre and film director. In 2010, the Gay Museum Berlin dedicated an exhibition to Charell. Little is known about the early life of Erich Zacharias-Langhans (1900-1964), who was considered a “half-Jew” during the reign of the Nazis (Hergemöller 2010: 1304). He worked as a bookseller and a supernumerary until he met the theatre and film director Gustaf Gründgens and became his private secretary and lover. After Gründgens separated from his wife Erika Mann, he lived with Zacharias-Langhans for some time. Later, when Gründgens had become rich and famous as a general theatre manager of Berlin, he had Zacharias-Langhans come and join him. Since it was forbidden to employ “half-Jews”, Gründgens took care of him until he married actress Marianne Hoppe in 1936. In 1938, Zacharias-Langhans was arrested for being Jewish and homosexual and faced lifelong detention. Gründgens asked Hermann Göring to intervene, and Zacharias-Langhans was sent to Switzerland. From there, he managed to move to Italy, England, and Chile, where he ultimately took his own life in 1964. Ellen Rathé (1902-1994) was born in Berlin to well-off German Jewish parents (Schoppmann 2011: 154-156). In the 1920s, she was a professional dancer at the Berlin State Opera. Later, she founded her own dance company and toured in Germany and abroad. In 1934, she emigrated to Switzerland together with her partner, the non-Jewish actress Margarete “Deta” Gahrmann, whom she had met around 1927. They soon returned to Germany, since they were not allowed to work in Switzerland. In 1935, Rathé was excluded from the Reichstheaterkammer (“Reich Chamber of Theatre”), and thus banned from her profession. At this time, Rathé and Gahrmann lived together in Berlin-Schöneberg (Barbarossastraße). In 1937, their attempt to emigrate to Denmark was thwarted and their passports were confiscated. In 1940, she was forced to work in a chemical factory in Berlin-Schöneweide, where she contracted tuberculosis. After several orders of deportation, she went into hiding and hid in the suspended ceiling of her partner’s house. In 1943, the house was bombed, and they moved to Naumburg and Friedrichroda. The two women lived together until Gahrmann’s death in 1978. Margot Liu, née Holzmann (1912-1993), descended from a Jewish Silesian family (Boxhammer 2015; Fliegner n.d.; LAB A Rep.: 358-02). From 1925 to 1929, she lived in Neu-Isenburg in a children’s home of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (“League of Jewish Women”). In 1932, she met her future lover Marta Halusa in Hamburg. They became professional dancers, successfully performing together as the duo Pepita & Peter in Hamburg and touring in Germany and Prague. In 1937, they moved to Berlin and performed in the famous Haus Vaterland (“House Fatherland”) at Potsdamer Platz. Margot was accused of prostitution and frequently arrested. In 1940, she was forced to work for Siemens; from 1941 on, she had to wear the yellow star. When she received a deportation order in November 1941, she married the Chinese waiter Chi-Lan Liu. Frustrated

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

because Marta continued to be Margot’s partner, he denounced them as lesbians and prostitutes. Both women were arrested and tortured by the Gestapo until they managed to flee from the police prison in 1945. In 1949, they emigrated to England and lived with Margot’s sister. They are buried together in a cemetery close to London. Sascha Leontjew (aka Alexander Katz) (1897-1942), born in Riga, attended a ballet school in Moscow, and later studied modern dance in Vienna (Hergemöller 2010: 742744). In 1920, following the October Revolution, he moved to Berlin. He became famous for his interpretation of the main character in Richard Strauss’s ballet Josephslegende (“The Legend of Joseph”), which he performed in Berlin, Hamburg, and elsewhere. In 1925, he acted in the Austrian film Aufforderung zum Tanz (“Invitation to Dance”). In the same year, he published a book on modern dance, in which he elaborated on male dance. In 1928, the State Opera of Vienna hired him as ballet master, leading dancer, and director of the ballet school (he left after two seasons). In 1936, he was the ballet master of the State Opera of Warsaw. Throughout his career, Leontjew toured Germany, Europe, and Argentina. In Vienna, he had a relationship with the actor Alfred Gerasch (1877-1954). The antisemitic lexicon Sigilla Veri has an entry on Leontjew. In 1941, he was deported from Vienna to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he was murdered in August 1942. Julius Hans Spiegel (1891-1974) was born in Berlin to wealthy German-Jewish parents who died early in his life (Hergemöller 2010: 1128–1129). He was raised at the Israelitische Taubstummenanstalt (“Asylum for the Deaf”) of Berlin. From 1913 to 1917, he studied painting at the Königliche Akademische Hochschule für Bildende Künste (“Royal Academy for Visual Arts”) and continued his studies at the Academy of Arts in Munich. There, he met Thomas Mann. Allegedly, a Javanese prince introduced Spiegel to Javanese and Balinese dance, accompanied him during his travels, and bequeathed him his masks and garments. Spiegel studied dance and performed as a “grotesque dancer” in variety shows in Berlin and other German and European cities. In his dance Balinese Love, he performed with a male and a female mask at the same time, evoking the notions of androgyny and homosexuality. In 1925, he performed in Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin; in 1927, he danced in Lola Kreutzberg’s documentary film Bali, das Wunderland (“Bali Wonderland”). In 1934, he emigrated to Capri. During World War II, he was detained in concentration camps in Italy. In 1943, he was released and returned to Capri. In the 1960s, he became a tourist attraction in Capri and friends with many celebrities who visited the island. The dancer Edgar Frank (1904-1994) was born in Hamburg (Krohn/Kohlhaas 1998: 1105, 1107; Trapp et al. 1999: 265; Karina/Kant 2004; Hergemöller 2010: 614). He moved to Berlin and Munich, where he studied with Rudolf von Laban. From 1925 to 1927, he danced at the municipal theatre of Münster. From 1927 to 1933, he was a celebrated solo dancer at the Deutsche Oper (“German Opera”) in Berlin. In 1933, he toured with Kurt Jooss’ dance company, but shortly afterwards lost his job for being Jewish. He emigrated to Norway and, in 1937, to Sweden, where he briefly worked as a dance teacher in a studio in Stockholm run by the Russian dancer Lilian Karina (Sascha Leontjew’s former dance partner). His parents were murdered in Auschwitz. It seems that he had a second career as a supporting film actor in West Germany in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s (International Movie Data Base).

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Alexander Sakharoff (1886-1963) was the youngest child of a Russian Jewish banker (Hergemöller 2010: 1011-1013). In 1903, he went to Paris to study law and art. When he saw Sarah Bernhardt dancing, he decided to become a dancer, too. In 1905, he moved to Munich in order to complete his art studies and met the artists who later formed the group Blauer Reiter (“The Blue Rider”). He also took dance classes. In 1909, Alexej von Jawslensky painted a famous portrait of the androgynous-looking dancer. One year later, Sakharoff made his solo debut in Munich. In 1913, he met the dancer Clotilde von Derp (born Klotilde Edle von der Planitz) and formed a duo with her. They married in 1919. In the 1920s and early 1930s, they triumphantly toured the world. In German newspapers, Sakharoff was often criticized as “effeminate” and “emasculated”. In the 1936 version of the book Der künstlerische Tanz (“Artistic Dance”), all references to the homosexual Jewish dancer were eliminated. In 1956, the couple started a ballet school in Italy. Alfred Leschnitzer (1908-1980), also known as Fred Lenox and Fred Lenné, was born in Silesia to Jewish parents (Hergemöller 2010: 745-746). Instead of taking over the management of his father’s clothing store, he decided to become a dancer. In 1928, he was a solo dancer at the municipal theater of Liegnitz. He also had engagements in Słupsk and Regensburg. In 1933, he was accused of homosexuality, since he lived in the same house as the dancer Egon Wüst (1911-1995) in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, but the case was dismissed. In 1935, when the Nuremberg Laws were enacted, he emigrated to Brussels, where he danced at the State Opera for two years. In 1940, he was deported to the Gurs internment camp in France. In 1943, he managed to flee to Spain. In 1944, he emigrated to Palestine, where he continued his career as a solo dancer at the Opera of Tel Aviv. In 1958, he moved back to Berlin and started a new career as a grotesque dancer. In 1972, he had a comeback as a cross-dressing cabaret artist, performing as “Frieda Loch” in a little theatre in Berlin-Charlottenburg as well as in several gay bars. In 1982, Peter Schneider immortalized him in his Berlin story Der Mauerspringer (“The Wall Jumper”). Leschnitzer died in 1980 in Berlin, where he is buried.

4.

Places

Another way to look at queer Jewish lives in Germany is to focus on the places where they lived and gathered. Gay sites are crucial for the existence of a gay community, and we have already noted that many queer individuals met in gay bars and cabarets.

4.1

Public Venues

Since the end of the 19th century and even more so during the Weimar Republic, Berlin was internationally renowned, and even notorious, for its vibrant queer subculture, with numerous cafés, pubs, restaurants, and ballrooms (Bollé 1984: 48-73; Leidinger 2008; Pretzel 2012; Lybeck 2014: 151-187; Beachy 2015; Koblitz 2018; Schoppmann 2018). These venues were more or less tolerated by the police despite the official criminalization of male homosexuality (Dobler 2020). Curt Moreck (i.e. Konrad Haemmerling, 1888-1957), writer of a tourist guide on “vicious Berlin” in 1931, dedicates a chapter to a detailed

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

account of the many gay, lesbian and trans* locales in Berlin at that time (2018: 115-152). He notes that there were at least eighty pubs, bars, and clubs for homosexual men (ibid: 117) and that the number of lesbian places was “not smaller” (ibid: 133). Many activists and artists who were contemporary witnesses of the first half of the 20th century remember the numerous queer cafés, bars, clubs, and ballrooms frequented by people of all ages and social classes. One example has already been mentioned: the Dorian Gray, an elegant, popular bar in the West End of Berlin, where Annette Eick read from her poems and short stories. This venue, a gathering place for a mainly young crowd of homosexual men and women, including homosexual activists of the Bund für Menschenrecht and the lesbian lady’s club Monbijou, was founded in 1921 (Pretzel 2012: 35-42; Moreck 2018: 138-139). The Dorian Gray was closed by the Nazis, who, upon seizing power in early 1933, immediately began closing queer venues and persecuting queer people, thus erasing the gay, lesbian, and trans* subculture of Berlin (Grau 2013). Another example is the famous trans* bar Eldorado, where celebrities like Rudolph Valentino, Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, and Marlene Dietrich often stopped by. Anticipating its imminent closing, the owners handed the premises over in 1932 to the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party, who redecorated the building with swastikas and posters canvassing for Hitler (Pretzel 2012: 111-127). Court files of the Nazi regime document the existence of various public places in Berlin where queer people continued to meet secretly after their bars and clubs had been closed (Meinhard n.d.: Mitte; Gerlach n.d.: Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Tempelhof, Schöneberg, Spandau). Many of the owners and clients of the queer venues of Berlin were of Jewish descent. The well-known lesbian club Mali und Igel, located in Berlin-Schöneberg, was run by Amalie Rothaug (“Mali”) and Elsa Conrad (“Igel”: hedgehog, because of her signature haircut) (Moreck 2018: 145; Lavie in this collection). Conrad (1887-1963), née Rosenberg, was born in Berlin as an illegitimate child to a Jewish mother, who worked as a needlewoman, and a non-Jewish father (Schoppmann 2013c; 2019). A trained clerk, she married the waiter and future innkeeper Wilhelm Conrad in 1910; they had no children and separated in 1931. From the 1920s, Conrad managed the Verona-Tanzpalast, a lesbian ballroom in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Around 1927, she opened together with Amalie Rothaug (1890-1984) the elegant Mali und Igel, where singers, actresses, and film stars socialized. The bar was closed in March 1933 by the Nazis. In 1935, Conrad, who was very outspoken about her aversion to the Nazis, was arrested and sentenced to a fifteen-month prison term. While she was incarcerated, her non-Jewish partner Rothaug moved to New York (Schoppmann 2007: 10-26). Right after her release, Conrad was deported to a women’s concentration camp. Her former girlfriend Bertha Stenzel tried to help her leave the country by organizing a passport and a ship passage for her. In 1938, Conrad was able to emigrate to Africa. She first lived in Tanzania and then, from 1943, in Kenya, where she worked as a nanny and a shop assistant. In 1961, she returned to Germany, where she died two years later, sick and poor. We also know of a Jewish owner of a venue for homosexual men. In 1930, the actor Eugen Borel (1906-1982) opened the gay bar Chez Eugen in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He entertained his customers as a musician and singer. In 1931 and 1932, he also appeared in three movies (filmportal.de). When his bar was shut down by the Nazis in 1933, he left Germany for Prague. Two years later, he emigrated via Switzerland to New York,

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where he lived until 1942. He then moved to Miami where he worked as a manager in a liquor store. Two types of sources document Jewish customers who frequented the gay and lesbian bars of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s: autobiographical reports and police and trial records. In addition to the above-mentioned activists and artists, we know of several Jewish women and men who socialized in queer bars and clubs. Helene Apitz (1886-1943), born in Silesia, married a non-Jewish musician in 1915. Six years later, they got divorced, with the court finding her at fault (LAB A Rep. 355; 1 Sond KLs. 7. 41 [313.41]). In 1927, she met Elfriede Ebert in the Nationalhof, an elegant ballroom in Berlin Schöneberg (Pretzel 2012: 83-97). In 1925, the Nationalhof was opened to the queer scene. Lectures organized by the Bund für Menschenrecht took place there, as well as dance events such as the “Bad Boys Balls”. From June 1926 on, balls “for ladies only” were also hosted on the premises. Starting in September of the same year, a lesbian club called Damen-BIF-Klub, consisting of readers of the sophisticated lesbian magazine Blätter idealer Frauenfreundschaft (“Gazette for Ideal Female Friendship”), regularly met there. Another lesbian club called Violetta, with its four hundred members, also met at Nationalhof. From 1928, trans* people were also able to meet there separately. In 1932, however, the lesbian era was over. We do not know the exact occasion of the first encounter of Helene Apitz and her future girlfriend. In any case, they soon moved together. In 1937, Apitz was accused of a sexual offence. In 1941, she was deported; she died in Auschwitz three years later. Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) was born in Riesenburg (now Prabuty, Poland) into a liberal middle-class Jewish family (Wolff 1981; Leidinger 2013b; Grossmann 2015: 265-268; Lavie in this collection). She first studied literature and philosophy in Freiburg but soon changed to medicine. She continued her studies in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), Tübingen, and Berlin, where she completed a degree as a physician in 1926. She completed her practical training in Berlin at the Rudolf Virchow Hospital (now Charité), and worked as the associate director of a clinic for birth control and family planning and at an institute for electro-physical therapy in Berlin-Neukölln. She practiced as a physician, psychotherapist, and, from 1932, as a palmist. She also immersed herself in the lesbian subculture of Berlin and unapologetically wrote in her autobiography Hindsight (1981) about her “escapades into lesbian locales and night clubs” such as the elegant Verona Diele (Moreck 2018: 141) and the tawdry Toppkeller (ibid: 139-141; Pretzel 2012: 6877). She had a non-Jewish partner who left her for fear of the Nazis. In 1933, she was arrested by the Gestapo for wearing men’s clothes and was suspected of being a spy. When her apartment was searched, she emigrated to France, where she was forbidden to practice medicine. In 1936, she emigrated to England, where she continued working as a physician and psychotherapist, taking British citizenship in 1947. She called herself an “international Jew with a British passport”. From the 1960s, she published several sexological studies, including the study Love between Women (1971). In 1976, she published the novel An Older Love. In 1978, she was invited to speak in West Germany by the Women’s and Lesbian movement. Shortly before her death, she published the first biography of Magnus Hirschfeld, whom she regretted never having met. Gerda Fürst, née Sulke (1905-1942), the daughter of a Jewish merchant, was married to the Jewish sales representative Georg Fürst and had a daughter with him (Dobler

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

2009; Gerlach n.d.). After their divorce in 1930, she joined the lesbian scene of Berlin. Her favorite ballroom was the Zauberflöte (“The Magic Flute”) in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where the lesbian club Violetta was located (Moreck 2018: 123, 143). Many of her female friends were metalworkers. In 1941, she was working as a prostitute. She was forced to go underground, travelled to Vienna with forged documents, and continued working as a prostitute. In January 1942, she was arrested but soon released due to her forged “Aryan” passport. She returned to Berlin and made money on the black market. In March, she was arrested by the police and was forced to reveal details of her life, including names of her female friends. A short while later, she was deported to the Warsaw Ghetto, where she died. Margot Leonie Hanel (1912-1941) was born in Berlin to a Christian father and a Jewish mother. She was a baptized and confirmed Protestant. In 1932, the nineteen-year-old girl met the love of her life, the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900-1941) at the queer bar Silhouette (Moreck 2018: 130-133; Wolfert 2017). Boye was part of a lesbian circle of friends in Berlin that included Gertrude Sandmann. In 1933, Hanel immigrated to Stockholm, where she trained as a pediatric nurse and a bookbinder. From 1934 on, the two women lived together until Boye, who called Hanel ‘her wife’, took her life in 1941. Shortly after, Hanel also committed suicide. Henny Schermann (1912-1942) was the first of three daughters of a Russian-Jewish immigrant living in Frankfurt am Main (Louis 2007; Schoppmann 2013e). When her parents separated in 1931, her mother took over the family business, a shoe store, until it was closed by the Nazi authorities. Schermann worked as a shop assistant. In January 1940, she was arrested; shortly after, she was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where she was categorized as a “political” inmate. After her release, a court in Frankfurt convicted her of not using the compulsory middle name “Sarah”, and she was imprisoned in Prenzlau and then sent back to Ravensbrück. At the end of the year, she was selected for extermination by the physician and psychiatrist Friedrich Mennecke who, based on the court files, characterized her as an “unmarried shop-girl”, a “stateless Jew”, and a “licentious lesbian,” who “only visited such [lesbian] bars” and “avoided the name ‘Sarah’”. Schermann was gassed at the Bernburg killing facility in 1942. Luise Goldmann (1913-) was born in Berlin to a devout Jewish family that had recently arrived from Lodz (Gerlach n.d.). When she was fourteen, her mother died and her father, a bookkeeper and merchant, remarried. He and his new wife established a prosperous ladies’ fashion store. Abandoned by her father and her stepmother, Luise spent much time in the lesbian milieu of Berlin, wearing men’s clothes and her hair short. In 1931, she was picked up by the police, examined for sexually transmitted infections, and placed in a school for maladjusted adolescents. Two years later, at the age of nineteen, she was released. Her family moved to Palestine, leaving her behind. Having no permanent residence, she was charged with theft in 1936 and, as a Polish Jew, expelled from Germany. She found shelter in Warsaw with an aunt of hers. In 1942, she was sent to a death camp. The date of her death is unknown. Hanna Gronemann (1914-1992) was born in Berlin (Gerlach n.d.) and worked in her Jewish father’s textile company. She was briefly engaged, but when she was twenty, she cancelled her engagement and began to have affairs with women she met in the lesbian scene of Berlin. In 1933, her father disavowed her due to her unconventional lifestyle.

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In 1934, Gronemann took her father to court, since he had stopped supporting her, and won the case. In 1937, she left her father’s company and moved to West Berlin, where she continued to meet women, often in the Regina cinema. In the same year, she started preparing her emigration. In 1939, she left Germany for London where she remained single, becoming known as Hanna Dorothy Gee. Felice Rachel Schragenheim (1922-1945) grew up in Berlin in an assimilated Jewish family (Schoppmann 2011: 151-153; Leidinger 2013d; Dobler et al. 2015: 66-67). While her parents had a dental practice, she aspired to become a journalist or a writer like her uncle Lion Feuchtwanger. However, her plans were thwarted by the Nazis. In 1941, she was forced to work in a factory that produced bottle caps. Her attempt to leave Germany failed. When she received a deportation order in 1942, she feigned suicide and went underground. She moved in with her non-Jewish girlfriend Elisabeth “Lilly” Wust (19132006) and the latter’s four sons in Berlin-Schmargendorf. She had first met Wust in the elegant Café Berlin, which was located in the West End, close to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and often served as a meeting place for gays and lesbians (Moreck 2018: 55, 63). Wust divorced her husband, a banking accountant and soldier with the Wehrmacht. From the summer of 1944, Schragenheim worked undercover for a Nazi newspaper and provided the resistance movement with information about the military situation at the front. She was arrested in the same year and incarcerated in various concentration camps, where Wust tried to visit her (and by doing so possibly put her in additional danger). She was murdered in March 1945 in Bergen-Belsen. In 1994, the Austrian journalist Erica Fischer wrote a book on the love affair of Aimée (Wust) and Jaguar (Schragenheim) based on the latter’s poetry and the couple’s letters. Little is known about the lawyer Karl Amberg (1884-1937). He was born in Arnsberg and lived and worked in Berlin. In 1937, he was convicted of committing homosexual acts with two other men, including a certain Kurt Kraft (1914-), in the elegant Café Uhlandeck (Strafakte Uhlandeck: LAB A Rep 358-02 No. 52 902-916). The café, which also served as a ballroom and a cabaret, was located in West Berlin (Kurfürstendamm). It was established in 1929 and “Aryanized” in 1935. Amberg committed suicide while being detained pre-trial in Berlin-Moabit. The lawyer Werner Senff (1892-1943), an acquaintance of Fritz Flato, was born in Berlin and lived in Berlin-Charlottenburg. From 1927, he was repeatedly accused of having sex with male sex workers. One of the public venues he frequented was the KleistKasino, a gay bar in Berlin-Schöneberg that existed from 1921 to 1933. The history of this inconspicuous bar, where mostly middle-class clients went in order to pick up young prostitutes, is very well documented (Pretzel 2012: 21-29). Businessmen, bankers, and lawyers (like Senff) made up the main clientele, but sometimes upper-class men also showed up. In 1939, Senff was reported to the authorities by a sex worker, but the judge found him not guilty (LAB A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 62842-62849). Senff’s attempt to emigrate to Buenos Aires failed, and he was deported to Auschwitz in April 1943, where he was killed three months later. The case of Max Salomon Meyer (1892-1941), an unmarried lawyer living in BerlinPrenzlauer Berg, is also known because he got into trouble with the authorities due to section 175 of the criminal code. Meyer, a decorated soldier during World War I, received a doctorate from the University of Würzburg and worked as a lawyer and notary. In

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

1938, he was convicted of a homosexual offense and imprisoned for several months. He was removed from public service and lost his doctorate. His plans to leave the country failed in 1941, when he was deported to the labor camp in Szymanowo (Friedrichsweiler) and the Lodz Ghetto, where he died. The court files note that Meyer frequented the restaurant Groß-Berlin located at Alexanderplatz in the building of the former Grand Hotel (LAB A Rep. 358-02 Nr. 033164, 033166, 03318; Landgericht Berlin, 2 Ju Kls 37/38). Walter Boldes (1898-1942) lived in Breslau until he moved to Berlin in 1937, where he worked in a bottle factory (Pretzel 2013f; LAB A Rep. 358-02, No. 1604). He met his non-Jewish partner Paul Küster in a bar called Bierschwemme, located at Alexanderplatz. The couple hung out in the notorious gay bar Weinmeister-Klause, located in the center of Berlin (Weinmeisterstraße). In 1941, they planned to flee to Switzerland in order to escape deportation (Boldes) and military service (Küster). At the end of the year, Küster went underground. After a couple of months, he was detected, and both men were arrested. Küster was convicted of desertion and executed. Boldes was sentenced to death for facilitating desertion and committing homosexual acts. He was murdered in December 1942 in the prison of Berlin-Plötzensee. Male homosexual Jews also participated in the public scene of cruising in parks, streets, baths, fairgrounds, and public toilets. Isidor Schnapper (1885-), born in Stanisławów (then Poland, now Ukraine), moved to Berlin when he was twenty-three. In 1911, he married and had two children, and from 1933 to 1939, he lived in BerlinPrenzlauer Berg. In 1935, he was accused of having sex with Otto Schmidt, a married worker, in a public toilet at Teutenburger Platz, and put in custody. While Schmidt claimed he had received money for his services, Schnapper denied any misconduct. The still-extant files contain an antisemitic statement of an officer involved in the case, calling Schnapper a “dishonest foreign Jew” who should be incarcerated in a concentration camp (LAB A Rep 358-02 62 830; LAB A Rep 358-02 131454). In 1940, Schnapper was not registered in Berlin anymore; it is unknown what happened to him after the trial. The same files document a similar case involving the same Otto Schmidt, now with the married dentist Paul Wallach (1896-1961). Wallach was born in Berlin, served in World War I, studied dental medicine in Berlin and Leipzig, and received a doctorate in 1923. From 1930 to 1933, he practiced in Berlin-Friedenau. From 1933 on, he was repeatedly blackmailed by male prostitutes and eventually denounced and interrogated in 1935. Otto Schmidt claimed that he had sex with Wallach in 1933. In 1938, Wallach immigrated to Brazil, lived in Tel Aviv from 1950 to 1952, and then returned to Berlin. He sought to be recognized as a victim of racial persecution and applied for reparations at the Entschädigungsamt Berlin. Hans Meyersohn (1909-) was an unmarried merchant at the department store Kaufhaus des Westens until 1933. In December 1934, he was arrested by the Gestapo and incarcerated in the Lichtenburg concentration camp until July 1935. A year later, he was arrested again and jailed for violating § 175. He admitted to having had homosexual intercourse and procuring a rent boy to several customers in public places such as baths and fairgrounds. When he was released in 1938, he presumably emigrated. The police files additionally contain the names of two men who may also have been Jewish and gay (Peter Aron, Benno Färber) (LAB A Pr. Br. Rep. 030 Tit. 198 A 5. Alg., No. 781).

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Richard Walter Louis (1897-1942) was born in Pomerania and lived in Berlin. He was a disabled veteran of World War I, running a clothing store for men in BerlinCharlottenburg. In 1936, he was interrogated by the Gestapo and admitted to having picked up a rent boy at Nürnberger Straße, a street that used to be a nightlife hotspot. He was sentenced to prison for three months (LAB A Rep. 352-02 No. 130065, No. 130067). After his release, he emigrated to Shanghai, where he died in 1942 (https:/ /www.ushmm.org/online/hsv/person_view.php?PersonId=1328926).

4.2

Private Homes

Another location where queer Jewish people met were private homes, where people lived together, gathered as friends, secretly met for an erotic rendezvous, or, later, hid from the Nazis. As already noted, several homosexual couples lived in the same building or even shared an apartment. As it seems, this was easier for women than for men, probably for two reasons: first, because section 175 of the criminal code was restricted to men; and secondly, because the domestic lives of women tended to be overlooked anyway in the patriarchal society of Germany. Magnus Hirschfeld and Karl Giese were able to live together in the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft because both worked there, as a physician and an archivist respectively. The examples of women living together in regular homes include the above-mentioned cases of Margarete Herz and Helene Wolff, Renée Sintenis and Magdalena Goldmann, and Ellen Rathé and Margarete Gahrmann. We found two more such couples, one in Hamburg and one in Vienna: Alice Ascher and Margot Doctor, and Anna Freud and Dorothy Burlingham. Alice Ascher (1880-), who was born in Silesia, lived and worked in Hamburg as a private secretary of the Jewish banker Max Warburg (1867-1946) until the latter immigrated to the United States in 1938 (Leidinger 2013a; Sparr n.d.). During the 1930s, she shared a flat with her younger partner Margot Doctor (1897-) in the northern part of Hamburg. Both women left the Jewish community in the 1920s, but Ascher returned in 1939 and became an active member. She declined the opportunity to immigrate to the United States, since her partner failed to receive the required affidavit. In December 1941, both women were deported to the Riga Ghetto, where they died. Anna Freud (1895-1982), born in Vienna as the youngest daughter of Sigmund Freud, grew up in comfortable bourgeois circumstances (Young-Bruehl 1989; Schock/Fessel 2004: 104-105). From 1915, she worked as a teacher, but resigned five years later for health reasons. From 1922, she was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, and a year later started her own psychoanalytical practice. From 1925 to 1934, she was the secretary of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and in 1935, she became the director of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Training Institute. From 1929, she lived together with her partner Dorothy Burlingham, who had moved to Vienna with her four children in 1925. In 1938, both women immigrated to London, where Freud successfully resumed her psychoanalytic practice and became a pioneer of child psychology. Private homes also offered a safe space for circles of friends to meet. Two examples have already been mentioned: the siblings Francesco and Elenore von Mendelsohn, who were friends with Ruth Landshoff-York, Vladimir Horowitz and others; as well as the

Queer Jewish Lives in Germany, 1897-1945

siblings Erika and Klaus Mann, who were friends with Oskar Seidlin and, among others, the writers Hans Feist and Wolfgang Hellmert (Strohmeyr 2020). Hans Feist (1887-1952) was born in Frankfurt am Main. A physician, art collector, and multilingual translator, he was twenty years older than the Mann siblings. He was “rich, gay and adored Klaus, an adoration that was not greatly reciprocated” (Spotts 2016: 32). Nevertheless, Klaus Mann did not decline Feist’s offer to finance a joint trip around the Mediterranean in 1925. Feist translated René Crevel’s novel La Mort difficile (1926) (“Difficult Death”), a tragic homosexual love story. Crevel (1900-1935), who was bisexual (though mostly gay, as it seems), also belonged to this circle of friends. In 1939, Feist emigrated to Switzerland but returned to Germany after the war. When he died in 1952, Erika Mann wrote an obituary praising him not only as a writer and translator but also as a friend. Wolfgang Hellmert (1906-1934), born in Berlin as Adolf Kohn, was the son of a German Jewish merchant (Täubert 2001: 14–23; Spotts 2016: 91-92). After finishing school, he worked as a bank apprentice before becoming an acting student and finally working for a radio station in Hamburg. In 1926-1927, he belonged to the friendship circle of the Mann siblings. Hellmert wrote novels, poems, and literary prose. He dedicated his novel Fall Vehme Holzdorf (“The Case of the Holzdorf Vehme”) (1927) to Klaus Mann. The story deals with an alleged homosexual “honor killing” in the milieu of volunteer corps soldiers. Some of his smaller pieces were published in Mann’s monthly literary magazine Die Sammlung (“The Collection”). In 1933, Hellmert left Germany for Paris, where he committed suicide one year later. His relationship to Klaus Mann was so intimate that, according to Erika Mann, his death left Klaus paralyzed with grief. There is also a testimonial of a private circle of lesbian friends that included women of Jewish descent. Margarete Knittel (1906-1991), a stenographer and clerk from Berlin, reports that she used to visit queer bars (Dorian Gray, Geisha-Bar, Mali and Igel, Monokelbar, Zauberflöte) and read queer magazines (Die Freundin, Die Freundschaft, Garçonne) in the 1920s and early 1930s until most of them were shut down when the Nazis took power (Schoppmann 1993: 87-97). After 1933, many lesbian women let their hair grow longer, chose more feminine clothes, and engaged in sham marriages in order to escape public shaming and legal persecution. Knittel’s circle of friends withdrew from the public but frequently met in their private homes. Knittel mentions two Jewish friends whose lives still await a thorough investigation: Margot Schwersenz and Elli Palm (Schoppmann 1997: 24, 240). While Elli Palm survived in Berlin, her cousin Margot Schwersenz was deported to Auschwitz. Private homes also served as a hiding place for queer Jewish people who had to go underground during the Nazi regime in order to escape deportation. Two examples have already been mentioned. Since 1942, Rose Ollendorff, Käte Laserstein, and Lucie Friedländer took cover in various private hiding places until they finally found shelter in Lilly Wust’s home in 1945. The second example is Walter Boldes, who hid his partner Paul Küster after the latter deserted from the Wehrmacht in 1941. In this case, it was the Jew who hid his non-Jewish companion, not, as was more typical, the other way around. Additional cases are described in Lavie’s article in this collection. Finally, private homes also provided opportunities for sex. Many cases are documented in court files, because blackmailing was very frequent at a time when sex be-

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tween men was legally prosecuted. One example is Otto Behmack (1893-1969), a lawyer and high-ranking civil servant in Berlin (EA Reg. No. 07248). In 1934, he was arrested in a raid on homosexuals and was put in detention in the Columbia concentration camp in Berlin-Kreuzberg. He was accused of participating in “homosexual orgies” in private apartments. In 1937 or 1938, he managed to immigrate to Shanghai (cf. Eber 2012: 71-77), and in 1947, he returned to Berlin.

5.

Conclusion

The ninety brief biographies presented in this article shed light on the diversity of queer Jewish lives in Germany between 1897 and 1945. The biographies have been structured according to the criteria of social movements and communal participation, professions, and places. Equally instructive is an intersectional point of view. While this article has mainly focused on the categories of nationality, religion, and sexuality, the categories of class and gender have proved to be important as well. With respect to the category of class, male homosocial organizations and communities such as the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, the Society of the Unique, and the literary George Circle were mainly bourgeois, whereas the friendship and youth movements also reached members of the middle and the working class, who would join their activities and read their magazines. Queer Jewish lawyers and physicians participated in the homosexual emancipation movement, and queer Jewish writers and artists contributed to the sphere of culture and entertainment, including literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, photography, music, theatre, film, and dance. Due to their visibility in the public sphere, we know more about them than about queer Jewish members of the working class, whose names and fates often only show up in the context of legal prosecution. Class division also shaped the topography of meeting spaces. As Christopher Isherwood points out with respect to Berlin, there was a stark contrast between the queer venues catering to well-off and well-known people (as well as tourists) in the West and the rather simple and hidden queer bars for the working-class (and their lovers) in the East. The villas and apartments of the rich provided more space, security, and comfort for sociability than the densely populated tenements where the workingclass lived. Bourgeois men went to working-class sites to pick up working-class men, and working-class male sex workers came to the West to find clients. The category of gender also had a meaningful impact. Only a third of the biographies covered in this article refer to women, and this gender imbalance reflects the patriarchal structure of German society during the Reich, the Weimar Republic, and the Nazi regime. While the Society of the Unique and the George Circle were restricted to men only, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was dominated by men but also included a few women (Micheler 2008: 21). Although there was a vibrant women’s movement, a fullfledged lesbian emancipation movement never formed for reasons that are still being debated (cf. Afken, this volume). Another finding regarding gender imbalance is that the police files and court records we looked at mostly refer to men, since the relevant section of the German criminal code criminalized sexual acts between men only (§ 175). The fact that there was no corresponding law for women does not mean that lesbians

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led untroubled lives (Hacker 2015; Treusch-Dieter 1993: 55-59). Apart from being affected by the gender hierarchy of the patriarchal society in which they lived, they were controlled and disciplined by other sections of the criminal code. Investigating the archives, we found ten Jewish lesbians whose sexual orientation was recorded even though lesbianism per se was not a criminal offense. In addition to the above-mentioned cases of Helene Apitz, Wilhelmine Cruys, Luise Goldmann, Hanna Gronemann, Margot Liu, and Henny Schermann, we identified three more women whose lives deserve to be investigated: Maria Berkelmann (1888-1942) from Berlin-Charlottenburg, who died in the Warsaw Ghetto; Erna Pünjer (1904-1942) from Hamburg, who was killed in the Bernburg Euthanasia Center; and Hertha Sobietzky, who was deported to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1941. Trans* people played a significant, albeit limited, role during the Weimar Republic. The common terms applied to and used by trans* people at that time were Transvestit (male to female) and Transvestitin (female to male). Unlike today, the notion of trans* was often conceptualized in terms of outward (appearance, behavior) rather than inward (gender identity) characteristics. However, various definitions of trans* were discussed in journals and magazines, and were thus in flux (Herrn 2016: 267-272). A selfreliance association advocating the rights of trans* persons, called Vereinigung D’Eon, was closely connected to the WhK (Herrn 2016: 254-260). There was a specific trans* magazine titled Das 3. Geschlecht, but gay and lesbian magazines also occasionally covered trans*-related topics. Additionally, there were trans* bars, such as the Eldorado, and trans* events that took place in venues such as the Nationalhof. Magnus Hirschfeld successfully advocated for specific identification papers issued for trans* people, giving them the right to legally dress according to their gender. The majority of the people identified in this article did not survive the Holocaust. They were prosecuted for being Jewish and queer. Only those who had the necessary resources, such as money, prestige, and connections, were able to escape Nazi Germany. Those who were less privileged could only survive if they went underground and found shelter with gentile German citizens who risked their lives when protecting them. Homosexual women who ended up in concentration camps were often marked with a black triangle, categorizing them as “asocial elements”. Germany will never recover from the loss of its pre-war queer Jewish figures. As we have seen, Jews played an important role in Berlin queer life, as well as in the artistic and cultural scene of the city. The present article is an effort to reconstruct this life, as well as a call to continue researching, remembering, and honoring the men and women who configured it.

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— (2009b): “Benedict Friedlaender.” In: Volkmar Sigusch/Günter Grau (eds.), Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, pp. 198-203. — (2013): Kentaurenliebe. Seitenwege der Männerliebe im 20. Jahrhundert, Hamburg: Männerschwarm. Kennedy, Hubert (2001): Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. Leben und Werk, Hamburg: Männerschwarm. Kettelhake, Silke (2010): Renée Sintenis: Berlin, Boheme und Ringelnatz. Berlin: Osburg. Kilcher, Andreas (ed.) (2012): Metzler Lexikon der deutsch-jüdischen Literatur: Jüdische Autorinnen und Autoren deutscher Sprache von der Aufklärung bis zur Gegenwart, Stuttgart: Metzler. Kittel, Ingo-Wolf (1989): “Zur historischen Rolle des Psychiaters und Psychotherapeuten Arthur Kronfeld in der frühen Sexualwissenschaft.” In: Rolf Gindorf/Erwin J. Haeberle (eds.): Sexualitäten in unserer Gesellschaft, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, pp. 33-44. Koblitz, Katja (2018): “Lesbische Subkultur im Regenbogenkiez.” In: Katja Koblitz/KarlHeinz Steinle/Claudia Schoppmann/Martin Reichert: Spurensuche im RegenbogenKiez. Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten; Berlin: Maneo, pp. 12-39. Komander, Gerhild H. M. (2004): “Renée Sintenis.” In: http://www.diegeschichteberlin s.de/geschichteberlins/persoenlichkeiten/persoenlichkeitenot/390-sintenis.html. Krass, Andreas (2013): “Meine erste Geliebte.” Magnus Hirschfeld und sein Verhältnis zur schönen Literatur, Göttingen: Wallstein. Kreuter, Alma (1996): Deutschsprachige Neurologen und Psychiater. Ein biographischbibliographisches Lexikon von den Vorläufern bis zur Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts. 3 Volumes, München: Saur. Krohn, Claus-Dieter/Kohlhaas, Elisabeth (eds.) (1998): Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration 193-1945, Darmstadt: Primus. Kühl, Richard (2009): “Georg Merzbach.” In: Volkmar Sigusch/Günter Grau (eds.): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, pp. 494–497. Kühn, Dieter (2009): Gertrud Kolmar. Leben und Werk, Zeit und Tod, Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer. Lang, Lothar (1993): Expressionismus und Buchkunst in Deutschland. 1907-1927, Bern: Lang. Leidinger, Christiane (2003): “Der anarchistische Bund für Menschenrechte 19031906 – eine fragmentarische Spurensuche.” In: Mitteilungen der Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft 35/36, pp. 43-50. — (2008): “Eine ‘Illusion von Freiheit’. Subkultur und Organisierung von Lesben, Transvestiten und Schwulen in den Zwanziger Jahren.” In: http://www.lesbenges chichte.de/politik-subkultur_d.html. — (2013a): “Alice Ascher und Margot Doctor.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013b): “Charlotte Wolff.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished).

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— (2013c): “Erika Mann.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013d): “Felice Schragenheim.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013e): “Karl M. Baer.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013f): “Martha Mosse.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). Leistner, Gerhard (1986): Idee und Wirklichkeit. Gehalt und Bedeutung des urbanen Expressionismus in Deutschland, dargestellt am Werk Ludwig Meidners, Frankfurt am Main u.a.: Lang. Lerner, Robert E. (2017): Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ligtvoet, Frank (2017): “In de schaduw van de meester: seksueel misbruik in de kring van Wolfgang Frommel.” In: Vrij Nederland, 10 July 2017. Louis, Chantal (2008): “Lesben unterm Hakenkreuz.” In: www.gelsenzentrum.de/lesben_unterm_hakenkreuz.htm. Lybeck, Marti M. (2014): Desiring Emancipation. New Women and Homosexuality in Germany 1890–1993, Albany: State University of New York Press. Maierhof, Gudrun (2002): Selbstbehauptung im Chaos. Frauen in der jüdischen Selbsthilfe. 1933-1943, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Marcus, Paul (2013): Zwischen zwei Kriegen. Aus Berlins glanzvollsten Tagen und Nächten. Mit einem Nachwort von Inka Bach, Berlin: Transit. Mayer, Franziska/Podewski, Madleen (2009): “Einleitung.” In: Christine Haug/Franziska Mayer/Madleen Podewski (eds.): Populäres Judentum: Medien, Debatten, Lesestoffe, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, pp. 1–17. Mayer, Hans (1975): Außenseiter, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Meinhard, Ursula (n.d.): “Treffpunkte und Schwulen-Lokale in Berlin-Mitte 1933-1945.” In: https://www.rosawinkel.kulturring.berlin/?treffpunkt=mitte. Meysel, Inge (1993): Frei heraus, mein Leben, München: Heyne. Micheler, Stefan (2008): “Zeitschriften, Verbände und Lokale gleichgeschlechtlich begehrender Menschen in der Weimarer Republik.” In: http://www.stefanmicheler .de/wissenschaft/stm_zvlggbm.pdf. Moreck, Curt (2018): Ein Führer durch das lasterhafte Berlin. Das deutsche Babylon 1931, ed. by Marijke Topp, Berlin: Bebra. Mosse, George L. (2000): Confronting History: A Memoir, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Münzner, Daniel (2015): Kurt Hiller. Der Intellektuelle als Außenseiter, Göttingen: Wallstein. Pass Freidenreich, Harriet (2002): Female, Jewish, and Educated. The Lives of Central European University Women, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Pettis, Ruth M. (2015): “Erika Mann (1905-1969).” In: http://www.glbtqarchive.com/arts /mann_e_A.pdf. Plaskin, Glenn (1983): Horowitz. A Biography, New York: William Morrow & Co.

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Pretzel, Andreas (2004): NS-Opfer unter Vorbehalt. Homosexuelle Männer in Berlin nach 1945, Münster: Lit. — (2012): Vom Dorian Gray zum Eldorado. Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten im Schöneberger Regenbogenkiez. Berlin: Maneo. — (2013a): “Fritz Flato.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013b): “George Mosse.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013c): “Harry Raymon.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013d): “Herbert Budzislawski.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013e): “Kurt Fontheim.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013f): “Walter Boldes.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). Purdie-Vaughns, Valerie/Eibach, Richard P. (2008): “Intersectional Invisibility: The Distinctive Advantages and Disadvantages of Multiple Subordinate-Group Identities.” In: Sex Roles 59, pp. 377–391. Raber, Ralf Jörg (2010): Wir sind wie wir sind. Ein Jahrhundert homosexuelle Liebe auf Schallplatte und CD. Eine Dokumentation, Hamburg: Männerschwarm. Raulff, Ulrich (2009): Kreis ohne Meister. Stefan Georges Nachleben, München: Beck. Reichmayr, Johannes (2009): “Friedrich Salomo Krauss.” In: Volkmar Sigusch/Günter Grau (eds.): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, pp. 384-392. Röder, Werner/Strauss, Herbert A. (eds.) (1999): Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933-1945. Bd. I: Politik, Wirtschaft, Öffentliches Leben, München: K. G. Saur. Sandmann, Gertrude (1976): “Anfang des lesbischen Zusammenschlusses. Die Clubs der zwanziger Jahre.” In: Unsere kleine Zeitung 2, No. 7/8, pp. 4–8. Schaller, Hans Martin (1977): “Ernst Kantorowicz.” In: Neue Deutsche Biographie (NDB) 11, pp. 126-127. Schlüter, Bastian (2012): “Friedrich Wolters.” In: Achim Aurnhammer/Wolfgang Braungart/Stefan Breuer/Ute Oelmann/Birgit Wägenbaur/Kai Kauffmann (eds.): Stefan George und sein Kreis. Ein Handbuch, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, pp. 1774–1779. Schock, Axel/Fessel, Karen-Susan (eds.) (2004): Out! 800 berühmte Lesben, Schwule und Bisexuelle, Berlin: Querverlag. Schoeps, Julius H.: “Der ungeliebte Außenseiter. Zum Leben und Werk des Philosophen und Schriftstellers Theodor Lessing.” In: Walter Grab/Julius H. Schoeps (eds.): Juden in der Weimarer Republik, Darmstadt: Primus, pp. 200–217. Schölzel, Christian (2006): Walther Rathenau. Eine Biographie, Paderborn: Schöningh. Schoppman, Claudia (1993): Zeit der Maskierung. Lebensgeschichten lesbischer Frauen im “Dritten Reich,” Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag. — (1997): Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität, Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus.

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— (2005): “Vera Lachmann (1904-1985).” In: https://www.lesbengeschichte.org/bio_lach mann_d.html. — (2007): “Vom Kaiserreich bis zum Ende des Zweiten Weltkrieges. Eine Einführung.” In: Gabriele Dennert /Christiane Leidinger/Franziska Rauchut: In Bewegung bleiben. 100 Jahre Politik, Kultur und Geschichte von Lesben, Berlin: Querverlag, pp. 10-26. — (2011): “Sprung ins Nichts. Überlebensstrategien lesbischer Jüdinnen in NSDeutschland.” In: Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 13, pp. 142-160. — (2013a): “‘Finden sie mich oder finden sie mich nicht’. Gertrude Sandmann (18931981).” In: www.lesbengeschichte.de/bio_sandmann_d.html. — (2013b): “Annette Eick.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013c): “Elsa Conrad.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013d): “Gertrude Sandmann.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013e): “Henny Schermann.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013f): “Käte Laserstein.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2013g): “Vera Lachmann.” In: Lesbisch, jüdisch, schwul, Berlin: Schwules Museum (unpublished). — (2018): “‘Die weitaus interessanteste Vereinigung lesbischer Frauen Berlins’. Die Clubwirtin Elsa Conrad (1887-1961).”. In: Katja Koblitz/Karl-Heinz Steinle/Claudia Schoppmann/ Reichert, Martin : Spurensuche im Regenbogen-Kiez. Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten, Berlin: Maneo, pp. 12-39. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1993): Tendencies, Durham: Duke University Press. Seeck, Andreas (2009): “Arthur Kronfeld.” In: Volkmar Sigusch/Günter Grau (eds.): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York 2009: Campus, pp. 397-402. Shepherd, Naomi (1984): A Refuge from Darkness: Wilfrid Israel and the Rescue of The Jews, New York: Pantheon.  Siewert, Eva (1946): “Das Orakel.” In: Der Weg. Zeitschrift für Fragen des Judentums 1/37, p. 5. — (1948): “Das Boot Pan. Ein Blatt.” In: Die Erzählung. Zeitschrift für Freunde guter Literatur 2/6, pp. 21–22. Sigusch, Volkmar (2008): Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus. Sigusch, Volkmar/Grau, Günter (eds.) (2009): Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus. Silbermann, Alphons (1989): Verwandlungen. Eine Autobiographie, Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe. Singer, Lea (2019): Der Klavierschüler, Zürich: Kampa.

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Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin1 Belonging and Solidarity during the Weimar Era and the Third Reich Hilla Lavie

1.

Introduction

The scholarship on queer history in Germany has grown significantly in recent decades. Much of this research examines lesbian communities and cultures during the Weimar Republic and the fate of lesbians under the Nazi regime. The 1920s are often considered as the “Golden Age” of the German lesbian community. The center of this community was Berlin, and it encompassed dozens of meeting places, the publication of lesbian magazines and literature, and political feminist activities. Among the women involved in those circles were many Jewish lesbians, some of whom played a key role in shaping the lesbian nightlife and culture of the time. The Nazi rise to power in 1933 marked the beginning of a tragic process towards the end of this flourishing lesbian community (and the queer community as a whole), when bars and other meeting places were forced to close down, and the publishing of lesbian magazines was prohibited. Though there was no corresponding section of the criminal code for lesbians that paralleled the infamous Paragraph 175 dealing with male homosexuals, lesbians were nonetheless discriminated against and prosecuted by the Nazis according to different categories, among them the elusive category ‘anti-social,’ (asozial), leading in some cases to incarceration in concentration camps (Schoppmann 1991, 2012). Thus, Jewish lesbians faced Nazi persecution on account of their ethnic origin as well as their lesbian identity and lifestyle. In this article, I offer a thematic focus on the experiences of German Jewish lesbians in Berlin during those years of upheaval. At the core of my discussion are two topics. The first addresses the fluctuations that occurred during this period in their sense of

1

The author would like to thank the following people: Prof. Moshe Sluhovsky, Prof. Andreas Krass, Prof. Christiane Leidinger, Ingeborg Boxhammer, Dr. Heike Schader, Katja Koblitz (Spinnboden e.V.), Tatjana Volpert, Dr. Claudia Schoppmann, and Dr. Nathan Lavie.

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belonging to both the lesbian community and to the Jewish community. The other addresses the fragile state of solidarity between non-Jewish and Jewish lesbians. Unfortunately, we can reconstruct only small fragments of the lives of Berliner Jewish lesbians. As is well known, lesbian lives have received significantly less documentation than the lives of gay men. Women who participated in the lesbian culture in the city generally left behind sparse written records, and this is also the case for the Jews among them. In what follows, I refer to the biographies of five Jewish lesbians: the bar owners Elsa Conrad and Käthe Fleischmann, the writer Annette Eick, the physician Charlotte Wolff, and the artist Gertrude Sandmann. These biographical studies, conducted by Claudia Schoppmann, Christiane Leidinger, and Ingeborg Boxhammer, among others, manage, despite the lack of historical documents and testimonies, to recover lesbian history in general and the unique stories of Jewish lesbians in particular (Schoppmann 1993, 2011, 2018; Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018; Havemann 2013). The stories of these five women reveal a variety of life experiences of Jewish lesbians during those years, as well as different processes of forming an intersectional identity. The multiplied “othernesses” of these women – ethnic, gendered, and sexual – allow us to determine that for many of them, the 1920s lesbian community served as a safe space for a social and political integration and as a platform for self-development. However, the Nazi rise to power challenged this integration and emphasized the Jewishness of the women over their other identities. This, in some cases, weakened the shared solidarity based on lesbian “otherness”. Still, some of the documented rescue stories of Jewish lesbians by non-Jewish partners and lesbian friends indicate that the integrated lesbian circles that had developed during the Weimar years now became crucial to the survival of the Jewish women.

2.

Weimar Lives

Berlin in the 1920s was a “homosexual paradise,” as the physician Charlotte Wolff (18971986) declares (Wolff 1982: 90). Wolff was one of the many Jewish lesbians to regularly visit the lesbian bars in town, and in her memoir, written many years later in London, she vividly reconstructs the look and atmosphere of the various meeting places designated for women who love women. The lesbian subculture was flourishing during these years, with dozens of meeting places throughout Berlin. There were many lesbian bars, and several lesbian clubs held women’s dance parties each week; other lesbian cultural gatherings, including lectures and book readings, took place in various venues. The fame of this subculture spread throughout Europe, and a guidebook covering lesbian bars and clubs in Berlin was even published in 1928 by author Ruth Margarete Roellig (1878-1969), aimed at potential tourists (Roellig 1928). This infrastructure enabled women to meet, create romantic and friendly relationships, and empower the developing lesbian culture. The artist Gertrude Sandmann (1893-1981), another Jewish lesbian active in this subculture, wrote in a postwar German lesbian newspaper that the club scene was a great liberating experience from the social isolation many lesbians experienced, and a first step toward creating a community. In the clubs, she said, one could

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

find herself surrounded with women “like herself”, and walking into a club was as if one was “coming home” to the place to which one belonged (Sandmann 1976: 6). Only a few references document the existence of German Jewish lesbian circles in Berlin even before this period. Magnus Hirschfeld, for example, mentions in his 1904 report a group of Jewish homosexual women (“urnischen Israelitinnen”), who met regularly in a north Berlin café, where they chatted, read newspapers, and played chess (Hirschfeld 1990 [1904]: 31; Leidinger 2008: 15).2 The lesbian venues of the Weimar era created, therefore, a space of belonging for women of different social and ethnic backgrounds, as both Wolff and Sandmann write. The bar Toppkeller (Schwerin Str. 13, Schöneberg), for example, was described as a meeting place where women of all classes could dance with each other – the academic woman with the salesgirl, the lady from the street with the lady of society, the known artist with the worker (Sandmann 1976: 7; Wolff 1982: 97; Roellig 1928: 20). Other lesbian meeting places, as the Jewish lesbian Annette Eick (1909-2010) recalls, aimed more at a proletarian clientele, while still others targeted more intellectual women. Eick found herself the most comfortable at a friendly lady’s club called Monbijou, where writers like her were hanging out (Schoppmann 1993: 102-103). Many of the women attending these venues manifested in their appearance and attitude the “New Woman” figure, with her short-bobbed haircut (Bubikopf ) and a cigarette in hand, holding progressive views on sexuality and femininity. The lesbian meeting places reflected in this sense the German urban public sphere, where, according to Ingrid Sharp, the dominant presence of the New Woman in the streets led to a difficulty in distinguishing “between women of different classes, and even between prostitutes and respectable women” (Sharp 2004: 118). The New Woman phenomenon, which was very common in major cities during the Weimar era, is mostly associated with the 1890s United States and England, though in the 1920s it could be found – with certain variations – around the world (Sharp 2004: 118-119; Sutton 2011: 3). In the German case, the 1920s women’s emancipation was rooted in the earlier feminist movement of the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. This process was intensified during World War I, when new labor opportunities were opened to women, leading many to experience emancipated lifestyles which continued into the Weimar years (Lybeck 2015: 189). While challenging accepted views on gender roles, the New Woman – mostly seen as a “working woman” – strove for her financial independence and demanded equal rights within the political, social, and private (familial) spheres (Sharp 2004: 118; Heilmann/Beetham 2004: 1-2).3 Modern women with a strong positive Jewish identity – or the “New Jewish Woman” – were also common during the Weimar era. Either secular or religious, and even critical of certain aspects of Judaism, the New Jewish Women were full of self-

2

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Ingeborg Boxhammer’s important study also follows the tales of a circle of friends and lovers surrounding the Jewish lesbian Margarete Herz (1872–1947) and her Jewish lesbian partner (and cousin), Helene Wolff (1871–1917), of whom some were Jews or had Jewish roots (Herz fled Nazi Germany to the US). Though most of the time Herz and her friends were not situated in Berlin, but around Bonn and the Ruhr area (Boxhammer 2019). After a long struggle of the German women’s movement for equal rights, German women obtained the right to vote in 1919.

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confidence about their role in society, interested in sex education and family planning, and often active in promoting gender equality within the Jewish community and outside of it (Prestel 1998: 135, 152, 155). Charlotte Wolff, for example, who integrated a strong feminist consciousness with a Jewish identity, is considered by Claudia Prestel as a good example of a New Jewish Woman (Prestel 1998: 149). Wolff, however, was an outsider in Jewish society because she fought for homosexual rights, a matter that was not tolerated by the conservative middle-class Jewish society as a whole. She was lucky enough, though, as Wolff herself recalls, to be accepted as she was by her parents and her circle of Jewish relatives who held progressive views (Wolff 1982: 91). Unlike the heterosexual Jewish New Women, who desired to acquire a young and slim look, and were enthusiastic about new beauty-care techniques such as the removal of facial hair (Prestel 1998: 151), Wolff manifested in her appearance a different yet equally dominant female representation in 1920s German society and media, namely the masculinized woman. Standing at the center of popular discourses on gender roles and social change, the masculine woman blurred gender boundaries with her short hair, wearing a suit and a tie or an elegant tuxedo. She elicited both fascination and rejection, igniting both heterosexual eroticism and the threat of sexual perversion. Though sometimes perceived as a response to the emasculation of men after the war – especially following the German defeat in World War I – female cross-dressing was linked more, I believe, to empowerment and emancipation and as a refusal of women to undertake their ‘cultural missions’, including maternity (Sutton 2011: 8, 138; Sharp 2004: 124). Homosexual women understood themselves mostly via the categories of “feminine” or “masculine”; the masculine category included several possible types, such as the sophisticated, boyish Garçonne (considered also in the public media as a modern, fashionable type, i.e. Marlene Dietrich in the US film Morocco, 1930) or the muscular female athlete Virile. Though many lesbians’ socializing was shaped by the Bubi (masculine/virile) and Madi (feminine) gender polarity, masculinity, according to Marty Lybeck, was still claimed by women who had ambitions to fashion themselves as emancipated subjects, and therefore both lesbian partners sometimes fashioned themselves according to a normative performance of masculinity (Lybeck 2015: 195). Other than the prominent masculine/feminine self-representation, lesbians used a variety of signs for recognizing each other, thus opening a variety of options for gender and sexual play. Colors such as lilac-purple and magenta-purple were commonly used for manifesting one’s homosexuality, as well as “flower-language”, with references to the lilac flower, for example. The wearing of accessories such as the monocle, as well as smoking a cigar or cigarette, were also common among lesbians. These and other codes were also used for communicating different desires and erotic fantasies (Leidinger 2008: 28; Schader 2014: 165-176). This inner system of symbols and signs strengthened the sense of solidarity among women who felt otherwise alienated from the general culture. As Roellig explains in her 1928 guidebook to lesbian venues, Berlin’s lesbian subculture created a space where Freundinnen (girlfriends, the word lesbians used when referring to themselves) could feel “among themselves”, free from any social or professional considerations (Roellig 1928: 15-16). The feeling of belonging to the lesbian community, as articulated by Jewish lesbians such as Gertrude Sandmann, Annette Eick, and Charlotte Wolff, had indeed to do with

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

this diversity of backgrounds and classes among the participants. But it might also have had to do with the fact that they themselves – the Jewish lesbians – played a central role in shaping and maintaining this infrastructure. Elsa Conrad (1887-1963), for example, was a key figure in the lesbian community, since she owned several lesbian meeting places as early as the beginning of the 1920s and ran a successful lesbian club with her partner. Born in Berlin out of wedlock as Elsa Rosenberg to a non-Jewish father, she was brought up by her Jewish mother, Berta Rosenberg, who worked as a tailor. At the age of twenty-three, Elsa Rosenberg married Wilhelm Conrad, a waiter who went on to become a pub owner (it is unknown if he was also a homosexual). Though their marriage ended in 1931, she continued to carry his last name. Conrad lived in Charlottenburg – the bourgeois and heavily Jewish center of Berlin – and operated a number of lesbian-designated spots in this borough. One of the first bars she ran, the Verona-Diele (Wilmersdorfer Str. 77), became a very popular dance bar, known even among tourists (Pretzel 2012: 101; Schoppmann 2018: 104-105). After meeting her non-Jewish partner, Amalie Rothaug (1890-1984),4 around 1927 they opened together a lesbian bar in the Schöneberg district (Berlin’s best-known center of homosexual nightlife), which they called Mali und Igel (Lutherstraße 16), after their own nicknames. Conrad and Rothaug also soon started running an exclusive women’s club in their small venue, which consisted of two rooms, a bar, and a dance floor. While the handwritten sign Mali und Igel was hung at the entrance of the bar, the club Monbijou des Westens operated inside (Leidinger 2008: 7). Roellig described the club in her 1928 guidebook as the most interesting place for lesbians in the city. According to her, it was a restricted club, expensive, and often required a recommendation to enter. She notes that Mali and Igel stood at the entrance to the club and greeted comers personally. Curtains covering the large windows hid the small rooms, which were full of elegant women – the elite of the intellectual lesbian world, including artists, academics, and actresses. Among the known actresses, one can mention the American film star Louise Brooks and the German film star Marlene Dietrich (Roellig 1994 [1928]: 49; Schoppmann 2018: 110; Sandmann 1976: 7).5 Each year, Conrad and Rothaug organized large balls and costume parties which attracted some 600 women and were reported even in the Berlin daily press (Roellig 1928: 116; Schoppmann 2018: 113). Elsa Conrad, however, was not the only Jewish lesbian who ran a lesbian meeting place in Berlin. One should mention here the restaurateur Käthe Fleischmann (18991967), who, along with her non-Jewish partner Lotte Hahm (1890-1967), ran some of the best-known lesbian bars of the late 1920s. Fleischmann was married with two children when she met Hahm, already then a prominent figure in the lesbian community’s nightlife. They opened together two popular lesbian venues in Charlottenburg, the Monokel-Diele (Budapester Str. 14) and Manuela-Bar (Joachimstaler Str. 26). While

4

5

According to Claudia Schoppmann, some Weimar era lesbian subculture eyewitnesses considered Rothaug a Jew, since she emigrated from Germany already in 1935. However, Schoppmann found out that Rothaug was in fact born in Hamburg into a Protestant family (Schoppmann 2018: 108, 118). Louise Brooks participated in the German film production Pandora Box (1929), where she played a character with whom several men and women fall in love.

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Fleischman chose to stay behind the scenes and take care of the business, Hahm was the one whose pictures decorated the advertisements for their third enterprise, the wellknown lesbian club Violetta. At some point Hahm was organizing three women’s parties a week, sometimes including special theme events, like “Bad Boys Ball” and “Carnival in Cologne” (Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018: 44-45; Lybeck 2015: 163, 195). The main lesbian magazine that published Violetta’s advertisements was Die Freundin (The Girlfriend). This magazine, whose title changed later to Garçonne, was one of several lesbian magazines published during the 1920s and early 1930s (see also Janin Afken’s article in this book). As with the lesbian venues, where Jewish women such as Elsa Conrad and Käthe Fleischmann were very active, there were also Jewish lesbians active in the community’s media. One of them was the writer Annette Eick, who was born in Berlin into an assimilated and wealthy Jewish family. Eick wrote for the magazine Frauenliebe (Love of Women), the competitor of Die Freundin. Behind the scenes of this rivalry was the competition between the two major homosexual organizations that sponsored each of the two women’s magazines: Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM) (League of Human Rights), headed by Friedrich Radszuweit, and the Deutsche Freundschaftsverband (DFV) (German Friendship League), which was established by members who split from the BfM.6 Each of the organizations, run mostly by gay men, had a women’s division, and sponsored local women’s clubs in big cities, as well as a women’s magazine. The women’s clubs also held intellectual and political events, sponsored and conducted by these women’s divisions, among them lectures and reading nights (Lybeck 2015: 159, 161; Schader 2016: 12-44). Käthe Fleischmann and Hahm’s club, Violetta, was then affiliated with the BfM, as was the magazine Die Freundin. This magazine was published starting in 1924 and was initially edited by Aenne Weber and other women, until in 1928 the editing position was taken by men affiliated with BfM, who wrote – together with Radszuweit himself – most of the articles (Lybeck 2015: 161; Beachy 2014: 190). Frauenliebe, on the other hand, which was affiliated with the DFV, was published starting in 1926 by the publisher Karl Bergmann (who in 1928 became the chair of DFV) and was edited by a woman known as Karen. Among the lesbian clubs affiliated with the DFV was the Monbijou (operated separately from Elsa Conrad and Rothaugh’s Monbijou des Westens), which was also the main competitor of the club Violetta. The members of the editorial board of the DFV’s Frauenliebe frequented another affiliated bar, the Dorian Gray (Bülowstraße 57, Schöneberg),

6

The organisation Berliner Freundschaftsbund (Friendship Organization of Berlin), was established in 1919 and soon became a nationwide organization (including Austria and Switzerland) with branches in many cities. With the invitation of Magnus Hirschfeld to join forces with the Berlinbased homosexual organization he had established as early as 1897,the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (WhK) (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), they created in 1920 the umbrella organisation Deutscher Freundschaftsverband (DFV). Together with Adolf Brand’s Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (The Society of the Uniques) they campaigned against Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexual activity (Leidinger 2008: 17-18; Beachy 2014: 220-240). Radszuweit was first the president of the Berlin DFV group, before becoming the national leader, renaming it Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM). The new DFV was re-formed, as noted, by former members of the BfM who were dissatisfied with Radszuweit’s leadership.

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

one of the first designated homosexual venues in Berlin, which was a mixed place, with certain nights for gay men and other nights for lesbians. The young Jewish writer Annette Eick, who at age nineteen had already started to visit lesbian clubs in Berlin, very early on discovered the Dorian Gray and the women’s club Monbijou, which had been operating at the back of the bar since 1928. As Eick recalls, after some time seeking for a place within the lesbian subculture where she felt good, it was there, at the Monbijou, that she felt comfortable and could make new friends (Schoppmann 1993: 102-103). There she met several writers and became acquainted with Karen and the Frauenliebe magazine’s staff. Soon after, she started to publish her own poems and stories in the Frauenliebe, while writing also for other newspapers such as the Berliner Zeitung (Schoppmann 1993: 103). The lesbian magazines served as central hubs for acquaintances, exchanges, and the expansion of community activities. Nevertheless, they also covered various serious themes related to medical issues, politics, and the place of woman in society.7 Annette Eick participated in these ongoing discussions, writing about lesbian identity, female desire, and bisexuality. She also took an active part in the ongoing heated debate within the lesbian press about the masculinization of women. She was one of the writers whose articles explicitly rejected the claim that masculinity is the essence of female homosexuality and therefore of female emancipation, which dominated the sexological discourse of the time, following Otto Weininger’s book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) of 1903. Weininger, himself a Jew who converted to Christianity and presumably a closeted gay man, suggested a certain ratio, a psycho-physical construct of masculinity and femininity, which each individual allegedly contains, and explained homosexuality as an effect of an imbalanced ratio between these two components in an individual’s constitution. While emphasizing the absolute superiority of masculinity, he argued that a “real woman,” namely a woman with a balanced gender ratio (which, according to him, the masculinized homosexual woman does not have), rejects the emancipation of women. Eick offered to look at female homosexuality as neutralized from any consideration of the masculinity factor, writing: “Is an opposition required before being

7

Another interesting aspect of the history of the lesbian magazines has to do with the fascinating story of the Jewish lesbian Martha Mosse (1884-1977), who in 1926 became the first female criminal legal advisor of the Berlin police department. As part of her job, she was in charge of censorship of magazines and literature, including homosexual magazines (and especially those published by Radszuweit, such as Die Freundin). According to Jens Dobler, though Mosse had a female lover at the time, the police files show that she actively categorized some of the materials published in those magazines as “dirty”, passing them over to the relevant committees. Still, he argues, this attitude toward these magazines was common within parts of the homosexual community (Dobler 2006). To that I will add that Mosse’s intersectional identity, as both a Jew and a lesbian, made her position more vulnerable to different accusations. This vulnerability had another manifestation also during the Nazi era when she worked for the Reich Association for the Jews in Germany, and was later on – after the war – accused by a German woman of collaborating with the Nazis. See Javier Samper Vendrell’s argument regarding these accusations against Mosse as stemming from a homophobic attitude towards her (Vendrell 2018: 335-353).

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attracted to something beautiful? Everything feminine […] attracts; why shouldn’t it attract a woman with a sense for art and beauty in the same way?” (Eick 1930: 103; Lybeck 2015: 173; Schader 2004: 99). Charlotte Wolff, whom I have already mentioned above, was another Jewish lesbian who was engaged with the theme of sexuality and women’s emancipation in her professional activity. She worked during the 1920s as a physician within the health insurance fund system (Berliner Krankenkasse) and developed an interest in the social aspect of medicine. This led her to be integrated into a family planning and pregnancy counselling clinic, a centre she also headed later on. In this framework, she became a leading German sexual reformer, a field that drew many Jewish physicians and female activists during the Weimar era. The most prominent and influential among them was the pioneer sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) in 1919. As Atina Grossmann puts it, Wolff led a double life, as did other Jewish sexual reformers during this time. Her identity as a sexual reformer coexisted side by side with her Jewish identity (Grossmann 2015: 269). To this one can add the third identity as a lesbian. In her writings, Wolff refers to Berlin of the 1920s as a tolerant city, which attracted people from all over the world, and especially from Britain, to come and enjoy the freedom that was not possible in their own countries (Wolff 1982: 90) Her favorite lesbian place was the Verona-Diele (Kleiststraße 36, Schöneberg, not to be confused with the place of the same name run by Elsa Conrad in the early 1920s), and she describes it as a Paris-style venue, where men, too, were sitting at small tables, invisible as shadows, watching women dancing with each other. Many of the lesbians there were prostitutes, who made a living selling their bodies to men on the streets, but went back home to their beloved female partners. Despite the freedom the lesbians felt – or the illusion of freedom, as Wolff formulates it – the police raided this bar and other lesbian bars, and it is unknown whether the reason was the presence there of prostitutes or the lesbian clientele in general (Wolff 1982: 94-95). Wolff often went to the Verona-Diele accompanied by her good friend Dora Benjamin, the wife of the German Jewish philosopher and Marxist critic Walter Benjamin (Wolff 1982: 94). The three met in Berlin through a mutual Jewish friend, and thus the couple joined Wolff’s Jewish network in Berlin. Another Jewish friend of hers was the poet Elsa Lasker-Schüler. They had met years before at the bohemian Café des Westens, when Wolff was still a Gymnasium student in Danzig, visiting Berlin for the first time because her lover, a Russian Jew named Lisa, was living there at the time. Café des Westens was known for the many Jewish intellectuals and artists who met there regularly, turning it into what can be defined as a place of “Jewish belonging” (Wobick-Segev 2010: 50). Wolff, who was born in Riesenburg, a small town in West Prussia, into a bourgeois liberal Jewish family, saw in the Jewish family a model for a close social network, a community, held together by affection and mutual assistance. She also claimed that friendship with other Jews was the same as family ties (Wolff 1982: 15). That might have been the reason that her first love affairs were with Jewish women, with whom she kept contact also later on in her life. It is also not surprising, therefore, that she visited Café des Westens when staying alone in Berlin, finding there a place of belonging among Jews.

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

It was also an antisemitic incident that Wolff experienced – for the first time in her life, as she writes – when she was already a medicine student that made her decide to go back to Berlin and make a home for herself there. It happened during her studies in Tübingen, when she visited a restaurant with her student friends, and the waitress refused to serve her. Her strong reaction to this incident was connected to the fact that she grew up in a place where, according to her recollections, all inhabitants accepted each other without considering each other’s class, race, or religion (Wolff 1982: 15). Later on, when Wolff discovered Berlin’s lesbian subculture, she understood that she had found the community in which she felt most comfortable. In a lecture she gave in Berlin in 1978 (during her first visit to her homeland since she had fled Nazi Germany) she connected this feeling of belonging she had to the lesbian community to her upbringing within a warm and open Jewish family, who were very supportive of her and accepted who she was and what she did (Grossmann 2015: 266). At one of the lesbian events during the 1920s, Wolff met her non-Jewish lover, Katharina, who was an artist and a therapist, and they lived together for many years in Berlin.8 Wolff, as we see, felt strongly about her Jewishness, spent time in places that were identified as Jewish or “Jewish-friendly,” and had a Jewish circle of friends. In contrast, the artist Gertrud Sandmann’s relationship with her Jewish identity during the 1920s was more complicated. She was born into a wealthy assimilated Jewish family in Berlin, to a father who was a businessman and art collector. Their home was full of art books, and Asian and African artworks and antiques, and her interest in art began at an early age. In the early years of the 20th century, there were only a few places open at the Academy of Art for female students, and Sandmann took courses at the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen (Association of Female Artists in Berlin). She then studied in Munich, where she also became active in the left-wing party USPD (Independent Social Democratic Party), and learned at the ateliers of various artists, including Käthe Kollwitz. While holding her own workshop and starting to exhibit her art in 1923, Sandmann was also engaging in initiatives that aimed to strengthen the visibility of women artists. She was active in the Verein der Berliner Künstlerinnen, and, in 1926, was one of the founding members of the association GEDOK – Gemeinschaft Deutscher und Österreichischer Künstlerinnenvereine aller Kunstgattungen (Joint German and Austrian Association for Female Artists from All Artistic Fields). She also participated in joint exhibitions of women artists, and was known for her paintings that focused mainly on female figures. Questions regarding sexual identity and the place of women in society occupied Sandmann very much, and she addressed them in the personal diary that she kept for decades. Relating to her own identity and sexual orientation, she wrote that she considered it fortunate for an artist to be a homosexual (Schoppmann 1993: 78). Though Sandmann married a Jewish physician, Hans Rosenberg, when she was young (their marriage lasted only a few years, 1917-1921), she always knew that she was a lesbian. In discovering the lesbian subculture in Berlin, she felt that she found her “home”. At the same time, her feminist consciousness was developing, and as a lesbian artist she could not accept patriarchy and homophobia. She decided, therefore, to leave the USPD 8

Wolff doesn’t mention Katharina’s last name in her memoirs.

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because of its patriarchal structure and attitude towards female members. Moreover, she could not accept the intolerance expressed by the Jewish community toward “nonorthodox” sexual relations, as she described it, and in 1926 she decided to leave the community. In the next few years, the political situation began to change around Elsa Conrad, Käthe Fleischmann, Annette Eick, Charlotte Wolff, and Gertrude Sandmann, and the whole lesbian community. The severe financial crisis of 1929 led many lesbians to poverty and even hunger. Furthermore, despite the intense homosexual activity in Berlin, violence by Nazi activists in the streets began targeting community gatherings. Antisemitism also became more apparent. As Boxhammer and Leidinger write, already in 1932, men from the National Socialist paramilitary organization SA bullied patrons at Käthe Fleischmann’s famous lesbian bars (Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018: 45). This incident exemplifies the unique situation of the Jewish lesbians during these years of upheaval, since their intersectional identity became more apparent to their surroundings than it had been before. Jewish lesbians, like those mentioned above, played an integral role in establishing a flourishing lesbian subculture during the Weimar era. They were among those who owned prominent meeting places, who shaped the lesbian culture through writing in the community’s magazines, and who, as sexual reformers and activist artists, fought for women’s – and lesbians’ – visibility and equal rights for homosexuals in Germany. They were those who, together with their fellow non-Jewish friends, made the lesbian subcultural into a multi-ethnic space. Unlike the Jewish community, which had not tolerated their sexuality, the lesbian community accepted the Jewish lesbians as they were, both ethnically and sexually. The lesbian subculture served as an important platform for the development of their social, political and sexual consciousness, making their sense of belonging to this community stronger. However, in the last years before the rise of the Nazi regime, cracks appeared on the surface of this “solidarity of others”, challenging both Jewish and non-Jewish lesbians. They were all forced to take a stance in the face of the changing political reality.

3.

Under the Nazis

The Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 was a turning point for the entire homosexual community of Germany, starting with the forced closure of most venues connected to the homosexual subculture and the prohibition against publishing homosexual magazines.9 Since the National-Socialist ideology saw the German “Aryan” woman as one who should marry and bring forth babies as a “present to the Führer”, lesbian women were considered “morally degenerated”. It was, therefore, almost impossible for them to live their

9

Anneliese W. (Johnny), an eyewitness interviewed by Claudia Schoppmann, recalls, for example, a gay venue called Kleist-Kasino in Schöneberg, which was still operating during 1933 and served a mixed crowd of men and women. After the police raided the place several times on different pretexts (drugs, health control for prostitutions) it was finally closed down in 1935 (Schoppmann 1993: 46-47).

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

lesbian lives openly. There were a few attempts to run lesbian meeting places – sometimes together with gay men – camouflaged as bars open for the wider public. In those places, a guard used to stand at the entrance to warn the guests if a stranger arrived.10 Other than that, lesbians used to meet in small cliques, each time in an apartment of one of the women, and the connections they had created within the lesbian subculture of the Weimar era were for them a source of comfort (Kokula 1989: 33; Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018: 45; Schoppmann 1999). The fear of being denounced, discriminated against, and persecuted drove many lesbians to marry gay men (in order to protect them both). Some also emigrated from Germany, while others tried to live their life quietly somewhere in the provinces. There are a few reported cases of lesbians who suffered at the brutal hands of the Nazi authorities, since, despite the lack of a formal paragraph criminalizing “lesbian activity” comparable to the penal code against male homosexual activity (§ 175), the police still harassed and arrested lesbians under other Nazi penal categories, among them fraud, theft, prostitution, fornication, and procuration (Schoppmann 2012: 43; Dobler 2012: 53-62). Lesbians, or women denounced by neighbors or colleagues as such, were often interrogated by the police. In some cases, their homosexuality was tolerated by the authorities (Huneke 2017),11 while in other cases women were deported to concentration camps. There was an unknown number of lesbians who were arrested under the Nazi category of ‘antisocial’ and had to wear the black triangle. Many of them were presumably lesbians who worked in prostitution. There are also known cases of lesbians imprisoned in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp who were registered officially as “lesbians” on the lists of prisoners (Schoppmann 2012: 46-48; Eschebach 2012: 65-78).12 With all the hardship lesbians went through during those years, Ilse Kokula still argues that one should differentiate between the first years of the Nazi regime and its last third (1941-1945). During the last stage, she claims, Germany was in a state of chaos, and with the absence of many men who were fighting the war, the social control over women weakened. Therefore, the danger of living openly as a lesbian also diminished (Kokula 1989: 29-30). However, in our case – Jewish lesbians – the situation was dra-

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Anneliese W. (Johnny) recalls a place on Nettelbeckplatz (on Pank Street) in Berlin – Wedding which was run by a straight couple, and hosted a regular heterosexual male crowd in the entrance hall, but had another room designated for lesbians in the back. Another place operated in 1941 on Hoch Street around Berlin-Gesundbrunnen, and was closed later on. She also mentions a place that Lotte Hamm, the girlfriend of Käthe Fleischmann, ran before the war around Alexanderplatz (Schoppmann 1993: 53-54). Huneke argues that during the Nazi era, the police kept tabs on Germany’s lesbian population, but that as a general rule they did not intervene in such cases. According to him, this moderate tolerance showed by the police parallel to acts of persecution against lesbians indicates the ambivalent attitude of the society and the police toward lesbian desire (Huneke 2017: 54, 58). Two of the women registered in Ravensbrück as lesbians, Henny Schermann and Mary Punjer, were also categorized as Jews. Both were murdered as part of the Nazi Euthanasia Program (Schoppmann 1993: 24-25). On the current ongoing fight for commemoration of the lesbian victims of the Nazi regime, especially at the Ravensbrück memorial site, see: Tomberger 2005: 100-109.

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matically different than the picture Kokula depicts, since exactly the last third of the Third Reich was for them the most dangerous period. Jewish lesbians faced extreme challenges and threats to their lives under the Nazi regime due to their intersectional identity. Moreover, relationships they had made over the years with non-Jewish women and the sense of solidarity with the “others” within the lesbian community were now put in doubt, especially since many of the non-Jewish lesbians passively accepted the Nazi regime, and some actively supported it (Kokula 1989: 32-33). Best known among the lesbians who supported the regime was Ruth Margarete Roellig, who published in 1928 the guidebook for lesbian venues in Berlin. Roellig applied to become a member of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature), expressing in her application letter German patriotism and sympathy to the Führer. In her 1938 book Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin (Soldiers, Death, Dancer) she integrated antisemitic and racist motives (Roellig 1938; Schoppmann 1996).13 However, a number of stories of Jewish lesbians being rescued by their non-Jewish partners and friends attest to the strength of the lesbian circles, solidarity that began in many cases within the framework of Berlin’s nightlife. This picture, thus, is far from clear-cut. Elsa Conrad and Käthe Fleischmann, the two Jewish bar owners, lost their property under the Nazi antisemitic regulations which dispossessed Jewish business owners. Both had non-Jewish girlfriends, who were also their business partners, and in both cases these relationships proved to be unstable in times of distress. Fighting for her financial survival, Conrad lost Mali und Igel, and made a living by renting a room in her apartment, while her partner, Amalie Rothaug, worked as a housemaid. In 1936, Rothaug emigrated to the United States. In 1935, Conrad’s subtenant reported her to the police as making statements against the regime. She was arrested and sentenced to fifteen months in a Berlin women’s prison for “insulting the Reich’s government.” After she was released from prison in 1937, Conrad was immediately taken again into police custody, since the authorities determined that she was masquerading as an “Aryan” and hiding her homosexual tendencies (Conrad had been baptized as a child, and was considered as a “half-Jew”). She was accused of having relationships with women during her marriage to a man, and running two venues that exhibited a “homosexual” spirit. She was sent soon after to the Moringen women’s concentration camp in Lower Saxony, and was told she would only be released if she pledged to emigrate. Since her ex-partner, Rothaug, was already in the United States, the one who came to her rescue was a non-Jewish former lover of hers, Bertha Stenzel (1891-1979), who arranged a passport and a ship ticket for her. Conrad was released from the camp in February 1938 in a very bad physical state, and a few months later, after Kristallnacht, was able to board a ship leaving for Tanzania, Africa. From 1943 on, she lived in Nairobi

13

Other known lesbians who supported the Nazi regime include Selli Engler, who was a central activist in the community and wrote in the Frauenliebe magazine as a colleague of the Jewish writer Annette Eick, and after disappearing from the public eye in 1930, returned in 1933 with a play entitled Heil Hitler, which she sent directly to Adolf Hitler; and the lesbian feminist activist Elsbeth Killmer (1890-1957), who was involved as a writer and editor in BfM magazines, such as Die Freundin and Freundschaftsblatt, and joined the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Writers) during the Nazi era, probably hiding her homosexuality (Schoppmann 1998).

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

(Kenya). She remained in exile through 1961, when she returned to Berlin, and died shortly after at a local nursing home (Schoppmann 2018: 114-117). The bar owner Käthe Fleischmann, along with her non-Jewish partner Lotte Hahm, attempted at great risk to organize secret lesbian parties in Berlin, after changing the name of their known club Violetta to Sportklub Sonne. Their place was closed in 1935 after being denounced as a lesbian bar. Hahm then tried to operate a lesbian pension in northern Germany (Hiddensee). But upon returning to Berlin, she was interrogated by the police for presumably committing a fraud, though the allegations also stated that she was a “pervert”, since she was recognized neither as a woman nor as a man. She was fined and apparently sent to the Moringen concentration camp (though no official documents about her imprisonment were found), where Elsa Conrad was also detained for a while (Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018: 45). At the end of the 1930s, Käthe Fleischmann was sent, as a Jew, to forced labor in Berlin-Osthafen. In 1941, after being wounded and sent to a hospital, she managed to escape and survived in hiding in Berlin until the end of the war, partly with the help of Lotte Hahm. However, when asked after the war about Lotte Hahm in order to honor her for her rescue efforts, Fleischmann noted that she felt abandoned by Hahm during this difficult time, a matter that still awaits a thorough historical investigation (Boxhammer/Leidinger 2018: 45). After closing the lesbian magazines, Annette Eick, who, as we remember, had been writing for the Frauenliebe, worked for her living as a nanny. After ending a relationship with an American woman she met, and aware of the escalating dangers for Jews – the business owned by her parents was “Aryanized” and they went bankrupt – she decided to leave Germany. Though she was not a Zionist, and grew up with parents that were considered “Yom Kippur-Jews”, meaning assimilated Jews who celebrated only the Jewish High Holidays, she decided to immigrate to Palestine (Schoppmann 1993: 102, 106). Eick first joined a Jewish youth movement and attended cultural events arranged by the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), the only framework that still allowed Jews to enjoy cultural events under the Nazi regime. Within the Jewish surroundings, she found a new space of belonging, since the lesbian subculture had ceased to exist. Later on, she joined the Hachshara course, which offered training in agriculture and horticulture for young Jewish people in farms around Germany. This course prepared them for integration into agricultural work in Palestine, most often as part of kibbutzim. Eick was in training in Havelberg/Brandenburg until late 1938 when, during the November Pogrom, Nazis raided the premises, demolished and burned the houses, and forced the Jewish youngsters to stand outside in lines. They were all taken to the local police station, where they had to wait while lying on the ground of the detention hall. Eick recalls that a police officer’s wife assisted them with food and blankets, and left the door open on purpose so that they could escape. Fleeing from there on her bicycle to her parents’ house in Berlin, she met a postman who brought her a letter with travel papers to Great Britain. This had been arranged for her by a lesbian girlfriend who was living in England at the time. Eick left for England soon after, parting from her parents on the train platform. They were sent to Auschwitz a few years later and were murdered there. In a documentary film made in England about Eick when she was 95 years old, Immortal Muse (Giovanni 2005), she recalls that before she left for England, she encountered

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a German police officer who helped her extend the validity of her passport, against the rules, so that she could escape from Germany. Following this, she adds that we should remember that “not all Germans were Nazis.” This sentence indicates her continued complex relationship with her German homeland. On one hand, Germany was haunting her entire life, and she tells of the time she spent in a British mental health hospital for rehabilitation after her long period of suffering during the Nazi era and following the loss of her family. On the other hand, in the last years of her life, as documented in the film, after decades of writing in English, she returned to write poetry in German, as if making peace with her past. Like Annette Eick, Charlotte Wolff also decided to emigrate from Germany. She made this decision after she had been dismissed from her position at the clinic in 1933, concluding that she had no future in Germany anymore. Another trigger for the decision to emigrate was a traumatic experience on the day she went to the Neukölln district of Berlin to say goodbye to her colleagues. A Gestapo man wearing civilian clothes stopped her on the way and took her to the police station for questioning. He allegedly suspected her of being a foreign spy and accused her of wearing men’s trousers. She laughed at him in the face, as she writes in her memoir, and argued that her Jewish ancestors had been living in Germany for 300 years, and that many of them fought as soldiers in the German army. Fortunately, the station guard identified her as the physician who took care of his wife, and she was released unharmed. The incident shook her, and from that point on she was afraid to walk through the streets. Another incident also prompted her decision to leave. The son of her building’s caretaker, an NSDAP party member, falsely accused her of hiding a bombshell in the building, which led to a search of her apartment by the Gestapo (Wolff 1982: 247-250). Soon after, she took the train to Paris and later on traveled from there to London, where she stayed for the rest of her life. In Charlotte Wolff’s autobiographical writing, it is possible to identify the way she retroactively conceived the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in Germany. When she states that Jews do not abandon their relatives in times of trouble, even though jealousy or rivalry exist, or that friendships among Jewish people are as strong as family ties, she is probably also reflecting on the sad end of the relationship with her last German non-Jewish partner, Katharina. Wolff writes that Katharina had left her already in 1932, before the Nazi rise to power, following her father’s claim that her relationship with a Jewish woman could endanger her life (Wolff 1982: 126). Contemplating the essence of Jewish existence in Germany, Wolff writes that Jews remained primarily Jews, whether or not they were considered to be equal citizens in their “host country” (Gastland), as she formulates it. Thus, Jews who assumed they were Germans like all those around them refused, she says, to see the truth before their eyes. According to her, only the Zionists, who argued for Jewish national and territorial separate identity and refused to integrate into a foreign society, recognized these facts and prepared themselves for exodus to Palestine (Wolff 1982: 15-16). Reflecting on her private painful experience, Wolff’s words about Katharina could serve as a metaphor for Gershom Scholem’s rejection of the ‘myth’ of German-Jewish symbiosis (Scholem 1964: 229–232). Pointing out the imbalanced relationship between the two people, it is as though she agrees with Scholem’s argument when she states: “Despite her leaving me in the hour of need, I yearned for her as never before” (Wolff 1982: 126).

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

Gertrude Sandmann’s story turned out differently than Wolff’s, since the non-Jewish woman she met in Berlin in 1941, and who became her partner, was the one who eventually saved her life. A few years after she left the Jewish community (1926) due to its conservative view of homosexuality, the escalating hostility towards Jews in the streets – even before the Nazis came to power – led her to reconsider her Jewish identity, as well as the political meaning of considering oneself part of Jewish society. In her 1932 diary she wrote: “Nazi – the enemy of culture! Anti-liberalism, anti-spirit, setback! […] Anti Jews! I have never been, unfortunately, and I am ashamed of myself, Jewish friendly, rejection! I did not want to be like that, who is similar to oneself is the most hated. Now, it is cowardice not to admit our Judaism! Jews must now boldly be Jews” (Sandmann 1932; Havemann 2013: I).14 The reality in Germany drove her to try and leave the place, and she traveled around Europe in hopes of obtaining a working visa elsewhere. When she was not able to extend her work permit in Switzerland, she had to return to Berlin. Since she was considered as “non-Aryan,” Sandman was expelled from the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Fine Arts) in 1934. The practice of art by “non-Aryans” was officially prohibited in 1935, and she was forbidden to participate in exhibitions or sell her works, nor could she buy painting supplies. With time and the escalation of the antisemitic regulations, her living conditions in Berlin were reduced to a bare minimum. Sandmann managed to obtain a visa to Britain in 1939, but decided to stay in Berlin and nurse her ill mother. Her mother died one month after the war began, but by then the visa to Britain was no longer valid. Shortly after, Sandmann met her new lover, Hedwig Koslowski, who was an art dealer. Sandmann describes in her diary that the new relationship filled her with joy and confidence during a time of constant anxiety and distress (Havemann 2013: 54). Due to her poor physical condition, she was released from forced labor. After her uncles were expelled to Theresienstadt, Sandmann realized that she would have to hide in order to survive. She wrote a fictitious suicide note, which she left in the apartment. Once this letter was found by the Gestapo, she was registered as a dead person. Help came from her close acquaintances, Charlotte and Reinhold Grossmann, who had belonged to the Communist Party throughout the Weimar years. They took her in to their two-room apartment, hiding her for one and a half years. In the summer of 1944, when it became too dangerous to stay with the Grossmann family, her girlfriend, Hedwig Koslowski, and her friend Susy Hermans hid her under an abandoned pergola in a Berlin suburb, and in the winter, they brought her to Koslowski’s studio in Schöneberg, where they took care of her. Thanks to them, she survived (Schoppmann 1993: 81-83; Schoppmann 2011: 146-151; Havemann 2013: 50-71; Grossmann 1990: 15-16). At the end of the war, on May 8, 1945, Sandmann left her hiding place in Berlin, along with about 1,700 other Jews who were hiding in the city. Among them were also Käthe Fleischman and other

14

“Nazi – Kulturfeindlich! Antiliberal! Anti-Gesi! Rückschritt! [...] Gegen die Juden! Ich war, leider, ich schäme mich, nie judenfreundlich. (Abwehr!) [... will nicht so sein, das Ähnliche ist am verhasstesten. Aber jetzt, es wäre feige, sich jetzt nicht als Jude zu bekennen! Die Juden müssen jetzt betont Juden sein […] (Sandmann 1932; Havemann 2013: I).

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Jewish lesbians, who were rescued thanks to their non-Jewish partners or the support of non-Jewish friends from the lesbian community.15

4.

Conclusions

The variety of stories depicted in these pages highlight some of the unique challenges faced by Jewish lesbians during the Weimar era and under the Nazi regime. Following the important biographical studies conducted by several prominent researchers, to whom I referred throughout the article, I would argue that the subject of Jewish lesbian existence in Germany calls for more systematic research. This research has the potential to showcase in more detail the centrality of Jewish lesbians in the creating and maintaining of the lesbian subculture, and to reveal more stories of solidarity or abandonment within lesbian Jewish and non-Jewish circles and partnerships during the Third Reich. Beyond its significance to the documentation and writing of (German) lesbian history, such research may contribute to the scholarship dedicated to the history of German Jewish women and to the history of Jews during the Holocaust in Germany. This article, therefore, serves as another step toward a more thorough and comprehensive investigation of the German Jewish lesbian experience in the first half of the 20th century.

Bibliography Beachy, Robert (2014): Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity. New York: Knopf. Boxhammer, Ingeborg (2015): Marta Halusa und Margot Liu: Die lebenslange Liebe zweier Tänzerinnen. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. Boxhammer, Ingeborg (2019): “Herrin ihrer selbst”: Zahnkunst, Wahlrecht und Vegetarismus Margarete Herz und ihr Freundinnen-Netzwerk. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. Boxhammer, Ingeborg/Christiane Leidinger (2019): “It-Girls der 20er Jahre.“ In: L-Mag, März/April no. 2, pp. 44-45 Dobler, Jens (2006): Martha Mosse (1884-1977). In: https://www.lesbengeschichte.org/b io_mosse_d.html Dobler, Jens (2008): Zwischen Duldungspolitik und Verbrechensbekämpfung – Homosexuellenverfolgung durch die Berliner Polizei von 1848 bis 1933. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag für Polizeiwissenschaft, pp. 524-526.

15

See more stories of solidarity between non-Jewish lesbians and their Jewish partners and friends (though not all the Jewish women in the stories ultimately survived the Nazi extermination policy), including Felice Schragenheim and Lilly Wust (Aimée und Jaguar) (Fischer 2005); Ellen Rathé and Margarete Gahrmann (Schoppmann 2011: 154-156); Marta Halusa and Margot Liu (Boxhammer 2015); a lesbian couple from Hamburg: Erna Kisch and Martha Zacher (Meyer 2007: 916-936).

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

Dobler, Jens (2012): “Unzucht und Kuppelei: Lesbenverfolgung im Nationalsozialismus.” In: Insa Eschebach (ed.): Homophobie und Devianz: Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Metropol, pp. 53-62. Eschebach, Insa (2012): “Homophobie, Devianz und weibliche Homosexualität im Konzentrationslager Ravensbrück.” In: Insa Eschebach (ed.), Homophobie und Devianz: Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus, Berlin: Metropol, pp. 65-78. Eick, Annette (1930): “Was Frauen den Weg zum eignen Geschlecht finden läßt.” In: Frauenliebe 5, no. 19, pp. 1–3. Fischer, Erica (1998): Aimée und Jaguar. Eine Liebesgeschichte, Berlin 1943. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. Grossmann, Atina (2015): “Die Sexualreform und die ,Neue Frau‘: Wie jüdisch waren sie?“ In: Christina von Braun (ed.): Was war deutsches Judentum? 1870–1933, Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, pp. 262–274. Havemann, Anna (2013): Gertrude Sandmann: Künstlerin und Frauenrechtlerin. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. Hirschfeld, Magnus (2015 [1904]): Berlins drittes Geschlecht: Homosexualität um 1900. Berlin: Zenodot. Heilmann, Ann, Margaret Beetham (2004): “Introduction.” In: Ann Heilmann et al. (eds.): New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 1-14. Huneke, Samuel Clowes (2017): “The Duplicity of Tolerance: Lesbian Experiences in Nazi Berlin”. In: Journal of Contemporary History 54(1), pp. 1-30. Kokula, Ilse (1989): “Zur Situation lesbischer Frauen während der NS-Zeit.” In: Beiträge zur feministischen Theorie und Praxis 25/26, pp. 29-36. Leidinger, Christiane (2008): “Eine “Illusion von Freiheit”: Subkultur und Organisierung von Lesben, Transvestiten und Schwulen in den zwanziger Jahren.“ In: https://ww w.lesbengeschichte.org Lybeck, Marti M. (2015): Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933, New York: State University of New York Press. Meyer, Beate (2007): “Grenzüberschreitungen: Eine Liebe zu Zeiten des Rassenwahns.” In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 11, pp. 916-936. Prestel, Claudia T. (1998): “The ‘New Jewish Woman’ in Weimar Germany.” In: Wolfgang Benz et al. (eds.): Jews in the Weimar Republic. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, pp. 135-158. Pretzel, Andreas (2012): Vom Dorian Gray zum Eldorado: Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten im Schöneberger Regenbogenkiez, Berlin: Maneo. Roellig, Ruth Margarette (1928): Berlins lesbische Frauen, Leipzig: Bruno Gebauer. Roellig, Ruth Margarette (1994): “Einleitung.“ In: Adele Meyer (ed.): Lila Nächte: Die Damenklubs im Berlin der 20er Jahre. Münster: Lit. Sandmann, Gertrude (1976): “Anfang des lesbischen Zusammenschlusses: Die Clubs der zwanziger Jahre”. In: UKZ [Unsere Kleine Zeitung] August 7, pp. 4-8. Schader, Heike (2014): Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen: Sexualität, Begehren und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahre. Königstein im Taunus: Helmer.

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Schader, Heike (2018): “Die Zeitschrift Frauenliebe.” In: Digitales Deutsches Frauenarchiv, https://www.digitales-deutsches-frauenarchiv.de/themen/die-zeitschriftfrauenliebe. Scholem, Gerschom (1964): “Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-jüdischen Gespräch.” In: Manfred Schlösser (ed.): Auf gespaltenem Pfad: Zum neunzigsten Geburtstag von Margarete Susman. Darmstadt: Erato, pp. 229–232. Schoppmann, Claudia (1993): Zeit der Maskierung: Lebensgeschichten lesbischer Frauen im “Dritten Reich”. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag. Schoppmann, Claudia (1996): “Die innigsten Sympathien für den Führer: Ruth Margarete Roellig im ‘Dritten Reich.’” In: Christiane Caemmerer et al. (eds.): Dichtung im Dritten Reich? Zur Literatur in Deutschland 1933-1945, Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, pp. 169–176. Schoppmann, Claudia (1998): “Elsbeth Killmer: Ein Leben mit Kompromissen.” In: Das sind Volksfeinde: die Verfolgung von Homosexuellen an Rhein und Ruhr 1933-1945, Centrum Schwule Geschichte (ed). Köln: Emons, pp. 205-213. Schoppmann, Claudia (1999): Verbotene Verhältnisse: Frauenliebe 1938–1945. Berlin: Querverlag. Schoppmann, Claudia (2011): “Sprung ins Nichts: Überlebensstrategien lesbischer Jüdinnen in NS-Deutschland.” In: Invertito 13, pp. 142-160. Schoppmann, Claudia (2012): “Elsa Conrad – Margarete Rosenberg – Mary Pünjer – Henny Schermann: Vier Porträts.” In: Insa Eschebach (ed.): Homophobie und Devianz. Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Metropol, pp. 97-111. Schoppmann, Claudia (2012): “Zwischen strafrechtlicher Verfolgung und gesellschaftlicher Ächtung: Lesbische Frauen im ,Dritten Reich’.” Insa Eschebach (ed), Homophobie und Devianz: Weibliche und männliche Homosexualität im Nationalsozialismus. Berlin: Metropol, pp. 35-52 Schoppmann, Claudia (2018): “Die weitaus interessanteste Vereinigung lesbischer Frauen Berlins: Die Clubwirtin Elsa Conrad (1887-1963).” In: Katja Koblitz/KarlHeinz Steinle/Claudia Schoppmann/Martin Reichert (eds.): Spurensuche im Regenbogen-Kiez. Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten. Berlin: Maneo, pp. 102-119 Sharp, Ingrid (2004): “Riding the tiger: Ambivalent images of the New Woman in the popular press of the Weimar Republic.” In: Ann Heilmann/Margaret Beetham (eds.): New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930, London/New York: Routledge, pp. 118-141. Sutton, Katie (2011): The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghan. Tomberger, Corinna (2015): “Symbolpolitische Orte und geschichtspolitische Akteurinnen: Die Doppelrolle der Gedenkstätten im Streit um das Gedenken an verfolgte Homosexuelle.” In: Gedenkstätten und Geschichtspolitik. Beiträge zur Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Verfolgung in Norddeutschland 16, pp. 100-109. Vendrell, Javier Samper (2018): “The Case of a German-Jewish Lesbian Woman: Martha Mosse and the Danger of Standing Out.” In: German Studies Review 41/2, pp. 335-353.

Being a Jewish Lesbian in Berlin

Weininger, Otto (1903): Geschlecht und Charakter: Eine prinzipielle Untersuchung. Wien/Leipzig: Wilhelm Braumüller. Wolff, Charlotte (1982): Augenblicke verändern uns mehr als die Zeit. Translated from English by Michaela Huber, Weinheim: Beltz. Wolff, Charlotte (1986): Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. London: Quartet. Wobick-Segev, Sarah E. (2010): “German-Jewish Spatial Cultures: Consuming and Refashioning Jewish Belonging in Berlin, 1890-1910.” In: Gideon Reuveni/Nils Roem (eds.) Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture. Leiden: Brill, pp. 39–60.

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Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?1 Thoughts on Lesbian Circumstances in the 1920s Janin Afken

Weimar-era images and ideas have experienced a revival in the collective conscious, having recently been spotlighted in the television series Babylon Berlin (2017-present) and Transparent (2014-2019). In the 1920s, Berlin, the world’s third-largest city at the time, was considered a global hub of homosexuality (cf. Asmuss 1987: 63). In this era of emancipatory change, Weimar Germany was emblematized by the phenomenon of the Neue Frau (New Woman) (Pass-Freidenreich 2006: 123-132). The ban on gay and lesbian bars was lifted and freedom of the press was affirmed, a development which contributed to the founding of several homosexual magazines. The New Woman was recognizable not only by her short bob hairstyle, but by other outward expressions of liberation: smoking and drinking in cafés and bars, driving a car, pursuing a career. Prior to the First World War, these freedoms had been denied women, or at least considered taboo for those in the middle class. The path for the New Woman had been paved by the first women’s movement, which had secured access to university education (1909 in Prussia) and the right to vote (1918) for women. The relaxation of attitudes towards sexual morals, as well as changes in the normative concepts of marriage and family, produced a liberal climate during the 1920s. Berlin became a magnet for gay, lesbian, and trans* individuals, as well as for the cultural and artistic avant-garde. How are we to understand this myth of Gay Berlin when viewed from the angle of the diverse lesbian subculture of the Weimar Republic? What was the significance of the lesbian subculture in relation to the New Women on the one hand, and to the German Lesbian movements of the 1970s on the other? Was the movement of the 1920s a lesbian emancipation movement of its own accord that was then taken up in the 1970s, or was it rather the first step towards a lesbian alliance which only became possible in the 1970s? In the following, I address these questions by investigating a discussion between a contemporary witness who experienced the 1920s in Berlin, and a scholar and activist in the New Women’s Movement. The discussion was published in the summer of 1976 in the lesbian magazine Unsere kleine Zeitung (UkZ; Our Little Newspaper). In

1

This article was mainly translated from German into English by Evelyn Barrett.

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conversation are the Jewish painter and illustrator Gertrude Sandmann, who survived the Shoah by hiding in Berlin, and the sociologist and pedagogue Ilse Kokula, who was involved in the New Women’s and Lesbian Movement (Neue Frauen- und Lesbenbewegung) in the 1970s. Both women were members of L 74, the collective of older lesbian women that published UkZ. First, I will briefly introduce Kokula and Sandmann, as well as the UkZ. Next, I will analyze Kokula and Sandmann’s discussion of what I call “the Weimar myth of lesbian subculture”. I focus on the question of why there was no organized lesbian movement in Weimar Germany. Then I will look into the significance of Jewishness in the lesbian subculture of the Weimar Republic. Finally, I will analyze how the women’s and lesbian movements of the 1970s addressed Jewish lesbian history.

1.

In Conversation: Gertrude Sandmann, Ilse Kokula and Unsere kleine Zeitung

Gertrude Sandmann was born in Berlin on October 16, 1893 and grew up in a wealthy Jewish merchant family. Her father, David Sandmann, was an art collector, specializing in East African and Asian art (Havemann 2013: 13). According to Anna Havemann, he also had an extensive library which included numerous art books. Gertrude Sandmann studied art in Berlin and received private lessons from the painter Käthe Kollwitz, who later accepted a professorship at the Berlin Art Academy in 1928 (ibid: 20). Although women had been accepted to universities in Berlin and Prussia since 1909, they were still not permitted to attend art academies (ibid: 14f). Therefore, many women opted to take private lessons with artists. Sandmann was in Munich from 1917 until 1921, and then spent a few months in Paris. Until her German citizenship was revoked in 1936 on account of her Jewishness, she traveled to Paris, Florence, Ascona, London, Denmark, and to the North and Baltic Seas, as well as to the Krkonoše Mountains, in order to pursue her studies (ibid: 23f). At this stage, Sandmann did not wish to abandon her mother, who was old and unwell; for this reason, she chose to remain in Germany rather than flee from the Nazis. After Sandmann’s mother died in October of 1939, it was no longer possible for her to leave (Schoppmann 2011: 146). On November 21, 1942, she faked her own suicide through a letter of farewell and went into hiding. With the help of friends, Sandmann survived the Shoah, but the years of hardship took an emotional and physical toll (Havemann: 2013).2 In the 1970s, at the age of 80, Sandmann encouraged her friend Kitty Kuse to form a group for older lesbians, which led to the founding of L 74 (“L” indicating Lesbos, “[19]74” indicating the year the group was founded). Although Sandmann attended the group meetings only occasionally, she wrote articles for the UkZ and drew artwork for it, including a cover page that remained in use for three years. In an interview that was conducted a few years later, a member of the group recalled Sandmann: 2

All references to Sandmann’s biography are taken from Anna Havemann’s volume on Gertrude Sandmann in the series Jüdischen Miniaturen.

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

Graceful Gertrude Sandmann looked like an aristocrat. Lilo, a committed group member, spoke of her as a Grande Dame de Lesbianisme. By contrast, everyone called Röschen Streck Tamara. Both have had an influence on the group L`74 and promoted its development in their own way. The fact that the social situation for lesbian women has improved over the past three decades is partly due to their courage (Kokula 2013). Unlike Sandmann, Ilse Kokula did not experience the lesbian subculture of the 1920s, nor the Second World War. Born in 1944, Kokula studied educational theory in Berlin; she wrote her thesis on the Lesbisches Aktionszentrum (LAZ; Lesbian Action Centre) in West Berlin, of which she was a member. In 1975, she published this work under the title Der Kampf gegen Unterdrückung (The Fight Against Oppression) and the pseudonym Ina Kuckuc. In 1982, Kokula received a doctorate in sociology from the University of Bremen, and in 1985, she was appointed to a guest professorship at the University of Utrecht, the first female professor of the ‘social history and socialization of lesbian women.’ From 1989 to 1996, she headed the Department for Same-Sex Lifestyles (Referat für Gleichgeschlechtliche Lebensweisen) in Berlin, regarded throughout Germany as a model for political involvement in matters concerning homosexuality. Kokula’s numerous books, articles, and lectures fall somewhere between the poles of academia and activism. The contributions I analyze below were published in Unsere Kleine Zeitung, which first appeared in West Berlin in February 1975. UkZ was published by the lesbian group L 74. The then-70-year-old Kitty Kuse founded the group, seeking out members who were older and still employed. Kuse had not felt at home at the LAZ; young women and students formed the main cohort there. Some members of the L 74, including Gertrude Sandmann, her friend Tamara Streck, and Hilde Radusch, had experienced the lesbian subculture of the Weimar Republic, and personal reference to this subculture can be seen in different ways in the group – for example, in the name they gave the magazine. This name was a direct reference to the well-known magazine Die Freundin, which had been published during the Weimar Republic. It is said that people often asked not for Die Freundin but for ‘Unsere Kleine Zeitung’ at the kiosks (Bornemann et al. 2007: 78).

2.

The contention between witness and academic in UkZ

In August 1976, an article by Gertrude Sandmann was published in the UkZ, titled Anfang des lesbischen Zusammenschlusses: die Clubs der Zwanziger Jahren (‘The beginning of the Lesbian Alliance: The Clubs of the Twenties’). In this article she aimed to “depict what the situation was like for lesbians in the Twenties: to challenge errors and misconceptions that would otherwise be carried over from one author to another” (4).3 In this article, she refers specifically to Ilse Kokula’s portrayal of the Weimar Republic in Der Kampf gegen Unterdrückung (1975), which she considers as “very informative and worth reading”. Kokula posits the following in her book:

3

In the following pages, references to quotations from the discussion will be found in brackets after each quotation.

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All in all, it can be said that the lesbian woman of the Weimar Republic was not organised. The sparse nature of information from this time leads to the assumption that being a homosexual was not really a problem for members of the bourgeoisie. There was a certain sophistication about it, and it was conceived as an enrichment of personal life (Kokula 1990, 59-60).4 Sandmann responds to these concluding remarks at the beginning of her article, claiming a privileged position of insight due to her having been a witness to 1920s Germany. She stresses that correcting the myth of Weimar Germany “is only possible for someone who experienced those years” (4). Sandmann not only lived through the 1920s, but was also able to make a direct comparison between the New Women’s Movement of the 1970s and the emancipation efforts in the 1920s and early 1930s, and was further able to identify essential differences between all three time periods. In her view, lesbians’ freedom at the time of the article’s writing (1970s) was much greater than in the Weimar Republic. This freedom, she says, was, however, thanks to the ‘beginnings of a lesbian alliance’ in the 1920s (28). Sandmann also states that during the Weimar Republic there were no “groups or larger alliances of people of the same nature […,]” and that they could not have existed (5): This was not because back then lesbians conscious of their nature thought only about their own problems, their own liberation. Just like today, they wished for an alliance and thus the possibility of liberation for everyone. However, 50 years ago the time was not yet ripe for that (5). From Sandmann’s perspective, a true alliance was not possible because the political parties, especially the socialist ones, were not interested in “lesbian problems” (5). Rather, they were as patriarchal in their reaction to feminism and lesbianism as they are at present in the 1970s. On the other hand, solidarity among women – and Sandmann here is alluding to solidarity between women from the Women’s Movement and lesbians – hardly existed, and “even today, some feminists are only understanding gradually that, apart from our own goals, we also share some with you” (5). I want to examine this assertion by looking at specific sites of lesbian life, namely the magazines and the clubs.

Significance of the Lesbian Magazines Sandmann goes on to negate or at least minimize the level of the assumed importance of lesbian magazines in the 1920s, although she does acknowledge their “courage” (5). She points out that Die Freundin was “sold under the table, [it was] inferior and cheesy, but welcomed, because there was nothing else of its kind”. She concludes that the magazines could not serve as “a meeting place for the people who are isolated and discriminated against” (5-6).

4

All quotes are based on my own translation, with one exception: the quotes from the autobiography Hindsight by Charlotte Wolff.

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986), a physician, sexologist, and author, is one of the better-known protagonists of the Weimar subculture. In the 1920s, she was friends with Walter Benjamin and his wife Dora, as well as with the couple Helen and Franz Hessel. As a Jewish lesbian, she feared repression and persecution by the Nazis and therefore emigrated in 1933, first to France and then to London, where she was granted British citizenship. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, she published several books in which she famously referred to Weimar Germany, for example in her autobiography Hindsight (Wolff 1980). She also wrote a biography of Magnus Hirschfeld (Wolff 1986), another autobiography (Wolff 1969) and one of the first studies about lesbianism (Wolff 1971) and bisexuality (Wolff 1977). Like Sandmann, Charlotte Wolff diminished the importance of the magazine Die Freundin in Hindsight 5 (1980), stating: Short stories, poems, and drawing were kitsch at its most mannered and ridiculous. The lesbian world which it depicts had little in common with the homosexual women I knew and the places I frequented. Its readers must have been of a different class who loved, wined, and danced in a different world (Wolff: 256). It bears mentioning that both Sandmann and Wolff came from wealthy and well-educated Jewish backgrounds, had studied, and were able to travel extensively. They also had the financial means to participate in the lesbian subculture in Berlin. Of course, this was not the case for all women, especially since the economic climate was unstable, particularly towards the end of the 1920s. For women who lived in the countryside, but also for women from less liberal backgrounds or from the lower classes, Die Freundin enabled them to share information about events and about what bars and clubs to visit. The magazine informed readers of current political issues concerning homosexuality. The personals section provided a way to get to know other women, and the poems, short stories, and serial stories created a space for self-recognition and identification. Notably, no other positive representations of lesbians and their love existed at the time (cf. Leidinger 1995: 64). It is assumed that the magazines, especially Die Freundin, were in relatively broad circulation and that the magazine was also mailed to rural locations. However, this does not mean that the circulation of these magazines was in fact particularly broad. More often than not, women came across the magazines haphazardly, whilst in bars or at parties. One woman interviewed by Kokula reported that she had found the magazine in a bar in the bathroom and read it there (Kokula 1981: 74). Lesbian women lived in fear of being identified as a lesbian, and this trepidation comes through clearly in the accounts of the women who bought Die Freundin. An interviewee describes the nerve-wracking experience of buying Die Freundin: Yes. I bought it [Die Freundin] for the first time where I had read it. Then I bought it where I was anonymous. Well, at a kiosk where no one knew me. Kokula: At the railway station? Just wherever you saw it. And then you felt like you had a bomb in your pocket. And

5

Charlotte Wolff's autobiography Hindsight. An Autobiography (London 1980) was first published in English and then translated into German. The German edition is titled Augenblicke verändern uns mehr als die Zeit (Weinheim 1982).

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then I read it elsewhere. On the toilet! Where no one bothered you, that’s where I read them. I stuffed it down my blouse, so no one could see (Kokula 1990: 95). Another interviewee, the dancer Marte X., bought the magazine despite fearing for her livelihood if discovered as a lesbian. Had she been exposed, her contract with the Deutsche Staatsoper would have been terminated (ibid: 74-75). Her girlfriend, whom she had met through an advertisement in Die Freundin, shared this dread of being “found out.” In addition to the Die Freundin, there were other lesbian magazines, among them the Frauenliebe, later renamed Garçonne, in which the writer and poet Annette Eick published her poems. Sandmann does not mention Frauenliebe/Garçonne in her article. In Desiring Emancipation (2014), Marti M. Lybeck discusses the magazines’ target markets and aspirations. Frauenliebe/Garçonne aimed for an intellectual readership, while Die Freundin appealed to a much wider audience. Christine Leidinger, in her diplom thesis Formen politischer Identität. Soziale Bewegungen um Lebenszusammenhänge von Lesben in den zwanziger und siebziger Jahren (1995; Forms of Political Identity. Social Movements surrounding Lesbian Work and Life Contexts in the 1920s and 1970s), examines the magazine culture and the forms of lesbian alliance that formed place in clubs and bars. She concludes that lesbian magazines “cannot be considered a self-organised medium” of lesbian activism, given the fact that both the editorial staff and publishing houses were exclusively managed by men (Leidinger 1995: 64). She also notes that a discourse about lack of solidarity among homosexual women was repeatedly raised, if not condemned, in Die Freundin. Accordingly, it is possible to speak of a ‘Forum lesbischer Öffentlichkeit’ (a platform for a lesbian public sphere), that served “self-identification”. So “we cannot talk of any politicized lesbian public in the sense of a place for collective discussion” (ibid: 51-52). Such lack of political mobilization is also evident in the rarely used LeserinnenbriefEcke (Readers’ Letter Corner) of the magazine Die Freundin, where readers could initiate discussions by sending in letters. These letters were mainly concerned with questions about the ‘right’ ways to form relationships between two people (ibid: 64). The magazines created an arena for communication with its own codes, such as ‘Dame, Freundin, Veilchen’ (lady, girlfriend, violet) (cf. Hacker 2015; Schader 2004). These exchanges tended to eschew politics, even though the women were involved in the creation of new identities. Only a handful of individuals, such as Johanna Elberskirchen, Anna Rühling, Leonore Kühn and Evelyn Killmer, tried to initiate a joint political emancipatory movement (Leidinger 1995: 60). Thus, I agree with Leidinger that, on a fundamental level, there was no politicization of lesbians in the Weimar Republic. Although Charlotte Wolff and Gertrude Sandmann both downplayed the importance of lesbian magazines in Weimar Germany, their existence, I argue, was crucial for lesbian women of the middle and working classes. As noted above, these publications provided such women not only with information about events and gathering venues, but also with stories, poems, and articles from and about lesbians with whom they could identify. In this way, the magazines served to strengthen the first awakening of lesbian self-understanding and self-formation. The magazines were not only an indication of the beginning of a lesbian self-conception, then, but also played an important role in its formation.

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

Significance of the Clubs For Sandmann, the clubs, which served as a safe space for lesbian women, were crucial to the formation of a lesbian alliance in the 1920s. She names six clubs of particular importance, each of which had its own particularities. In an article in the August 1976 edition of the UkZ, she elaborates on the three best-known of them. At Mali und Igel, also known as Klub Monbijou, one could only gain entry with a recommendation from a current member. At the Zauberflöte, the “bourgeois, stuffy people, with taste for soppy music and good and proper dancing in the great hall” (7), took center stage. Finally, she talks about the Toppkeller – a club that was ‘unique’ due to the intersectionality of its clientele: academics, saleswomen, prominent artists, and “ladies of the street” (7). In Ruth Margarethe Roellig’s Lesbische Frauen (Lesbian Women, 1928; cf. Meyer 1981, and Lavie’s article in this collection), Mali und Igel /Klub Monbijou is given a full presentation.6 The book paints a picture of the erotic and extraordinary atmosphere of 1920s Berlin, an image which has persisted to the present day. The club, “a strictly private society that could be joined by invitation only”, counted about 600 members (Meyer 1981: 71). The large windows are affixed to the outside, and behind their dark walls one can hardly imagine the gentle, intimate secrecy of those small rooms, which are filled with elegant women evening after evening. Deep club armchairs create cosy corners. Delicate floral tablecloths lie atop round tables, illuminated by the soft glow of matte, colourful lamps. On the walls there are some perky drawings here and there, suited to the type of visitors: Two beautiful, naked girls lying dreamily in each other’s laps – women smoking in armchairs or dancing couples and the like – and portraits of some of the great artists who ‘belong’ here. Here, the elite of the intellectual world of lesbian women, film stars, singers, actresses, the artistically creative, and the academic woman in general keep each other’s company (ibid). As the description makes clear, the visitors to this club formed an elite. Nonetheless, club attendance, and its sheer existence, were not meant to be visible to the public eye. This double-edged sense of secrecy and exuberance contributed to the 1920s subculture’s ecstatic image. Sandmann also remarks on the poverty of the period: “The time between World War I and Hitler, the 20s, [...] is called ‘Golden’ in misguided nostalgia”. Inflation and unemployment are not what the 1920s brings to mind, as Sandmann makes clear: [one thinks] not of inflation and unemployment [...], by which women, too, were severely affected, but only of the great artistic achievements of the time, of the bubbling joie de vivre, the reaction to years of emotional pressure from the War, of the relaxation towards sexual taboos, – at last Victorian morality was sloughed off (4).

6

In 1981, Adele Meyer re-edited a book titled Lila Nächte. Die Damenclubs der Zwanziger Jahre, in which she republished Roellig’s book and integrated other contributions on the subject of female homosexuality and the club culture of the 1920s.

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The bars and clubs provided women with the opportunity to meet other women, to have fun, and to be among themselves. This was the case, even if, as Kirsten Plötz notes, visiting bars and clubs was not a “significant [] part of women’s everyday life”, because fighting for survival took precedence (Plötz 1999: 54). Marte X, for example, spent her days working to support herself and her girlfriend. No time remained for clubs and bars (Kokula 1990: 69). According to Sandmann, though, the clubs were not only attended by privileged people. Rather, one found a “‘classless society’ there, namely that of the homosexuals”. (6) Being homosexual, she assumed, was a unifying identity despite different social classes and backgrounds. It was precisely this feeling of having something in common, the tight-knit community spirit, that made the clubs special: People knew and supported each other both professionally and financially. However, other women report that they did not like the atmosphere in the clubs, or that the entrance fee was simply too expensive for them, meaning that they could only rarely afford to go to the parties and clubs – or indeed not at all (ibid: 82).7 For some women, even buying Die Freundin regularly was too much of a financial strain (ibid: 95).8 Kokula responded to Sandmann’s piece in her own article in a later issue of the UkZ (October 1976). In the same issue, Sandmann follows with her own rebuttal, countering Kokula’s. Kokula begins her response with an idea she formulated in Der Kampf gegen die Unterdrückung (The Fight Against Oppression; Kokula 1975: 59), according to which “it was no big deal for members of the bourgeoisie to be homosexual” and “this identity rather enriched a person’s life”. Kokula then pursues the question as to why there was no major lesbian movement in the 1920s, and maintains “that the women could have joined [a movement], even if it were still limited” (26). Thus, Kokula contradicts Sandmann’s statement that there could not have been an alliance of lesbian women, and invokes the emancipation movement initiated by Magnus Hirschfeld. Kokula asks why so many women went to the clubs and bars but did not join the Hirschfeld movement or start their own political group or movement. She suggests that Hirschfeld may have been rejected by lesbians because he was a socialist, and, moreover, seemed to some lesbians to be more concerned with questions of male homosexuality. From this she deduces that the women may have had “limited political insight”, because they were mostly “women or artists, who were well provided for and who had some freedom” (26). In response, Sandmann states that Hirschfeld and his institute were well-known and that his books were read by her and others. “He was important because he collected material about homosexuality and defended homosexuality at every opportunity” (27). Sandmann confirms Kokula’s suggestion that lesbians had little to do with Hirschfeld on account of the impression that he was mainly interested in male homosexuality.9 According to Sandmann, the fact that he was a socialist was not important; rather, the

7 8 9

Gerda Madsen mentions that she could not afford regular visits to clubs. This is mentioned by Branda. Although he wrote books like Male and Female Homosexuality (1914) and Sappho and Socrates (1896) and supported trans* persons, including trans* women, his main focus was on the abolishment of paragraph 175, which did not concern women. This is why some lesbian women did not feel a significant connection to the movement Hirschfeld had initiated.

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

more pertinent fact was that she “did not want to make herself available as a study subject (also because he was male, even if he was homosexual)” (27). In concluding her reply to Kokula’s article, Sandmann states that the absence of an alliance of lesbians in the 1920s does not indicate that women were apolitical and only interested in their own personal pursuits, but rather that the times were not ready for a movement of this kind. The reason for this, according to Sandmann, was that “it was still hard for individuals to stand by their nature and to live with it”; Sandmann calls this “the first phase of the liberation”. “The second phase, the alliance of homosexuals, had to be built on that foundation” (28). The work of Christine Leidinger, which found no evidence of a collective politicization of homosexual women during the Weimar Republic, confirms Sandmann’s claims. And, as an eye-witness, Sandmann provides an insider’s view of the plausible reasons for this lack of a political alliance of homosexual women in Weimar Germany.

3.

Jewish Presence in Lesbian Culture in Weimar Germany?

Below, I use the term ‘Jewish’ to refer to an individual’s affiliation with Judaism, which encompasses not only religious, but also cultural and ethnic aspects. Lesbian Jewish women are often seen as having been widely present in the phenomenon of the ‘New Women.’10 Those lesbian Jewish women who were considered ‘New Women’ were neither married nor actively involved in the Jewish community. They were independent, well-educated, often working women who broke with gender roles that they believed to be outdated (cf. Pass Freidenreich 2006: 132). From a twenty-first-century perspective, the aforementioned discussion between Kokula and Sandmann is evidently lacking in terms of its engagement with the topic of Jewish women. It not only fails to address the widespread antisemitism of the 1920s; it also fails to engage with the subject of Jewishness. This can be explained in two ways. Firstly, according to Havemann, it was only when the Nazis came to power that Sandmann began to consider Judaism important to her. Like many other Jews from the middle and upper classes in the Weimar Republic, religion was not a formative factor in her sense of identity. In fact, Sandmann had distanced herself from the Jewish community in Berlin in the 1920s because of its conservative views on homosexuality (Havemann 2013: 26).11 Nevertheless, she did not abandon her faith; rather, she did not tie it to any institution or specific religious community. Evidence for this can be found in her diary: “I don’t go to church [sic!], I go to the forest. And it is there that I think of Dear God. Or by the sea, or when it’s quiet in my room […]” (ibid: 6). Jewish identity was imposed on Sandmann by external forces, as can be seen in a diary entry from May 1932: Nazi - Anti-cultural! Anti-liberal! Anti-spirit! Regression! They create antagonisms between humans instead of humanity, borders between 10

11

The assignment of lesbian/homosexual and the New Woman made here is not to be understood in an essentialist sense, but serves at best as an attempt to trace a possible existing lesbian-Jewish self-image. Anna Havemann has pointed out this circumstance in the Jewish literature on Gertrude Sandmann.

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countries instead of community on earth. Against women! Brawn over brains! Fists over spirit! Against Jews! I was, unfortunately, I’m ashamed, never pro-Jewish (Resistance!) I don’t want to be like that, the similar is the most hated. But now, it would be cowardly not to admit to being Jewish. The Jews must now emphatically be Jews […]. Sandmann’s own description as “judenunfreundlich” (unfriendly against Jews) reveals her ambivalent attitude towards religion and Jewish traditions. As it turns out, however, her rejection of religion and Jewish tradition could also generate a feeling of belonging to a different aspect of Judaism. This is precisely the phenomenon that is described as the Jüdische Neue Frau or the Neue Jüdische Frau (Jewish New Woman or New Jewish Woman, respectively) (Prestel 1998, 135-156; Kaplan 1997; Grossmann 2006: 133156). While the category ‘Jewish New Woman’ deals with the Jewish aspect of the New Woman phenomenon, the ‘New Jewish Woman’ investigates the ways in which modern Jewish women continued to adhere to Jewish traditions. The latter stood for a modernization of Jewish family life and Jewish traditions without fundamentally questioning the concepts of family and marriage. Marion A. Kaplan, Claudia T. Prestel, and Atina Grossmann have examined these phenomena. In her essay The ‘New Jewish Woman’ in Weimar Germany, Prestel points out that the ‘New Woman’ was no longer limited to heterosexual partnerships, but that there is only “little evidence of its extent among ‘new Jewish women’” (Prestel 1998: 149). Her sole example is Charlotte Wolff, who had “a strong Jewish identity”, but this “was based not on religious or national, but ethnic grounds” (ibid). For this reason, Prestel includes Charlotte Wolff among the ‘New Jewish Women’, although she remained an outsider to Jewish organized society. Prestel refers to Charlotte Wolff’s self-referential statement, included in her book Hindsight, where she stated: “Although I identified myself as a Jew, I had not a Jewish collective to turn to. And thus I remained an isolated outsider” (Wolff: 173). Sandmann is, I believe, an additional example of such a New Jewish Woman. A second explanation as to why Jewishness is not addressed in Kokula and Sandmann’s exchange can be seen in the failure to come to terms with the Shoah in the women’s and lesbian movement of the 1970s and early 1980s (Eifler 2019).12 The role of women as perpetrators in Nazi Germany, but also the antisemitism that had flared up in the 1920s, were initially ignored in the women’s movement of the 1970s. Instead, both Nazism and the Shoah were seen as a patriarchal phenomenon to which ‘all’ women were equally subjugated. Within the German-speaking women’s and lesbian movement, when Jewish issues and a lack of sensitization had been addressed, these issues were met with defensiveness and a repressive attitude (Heschel, 1994). Anita Grossmann’s account of a visit by Charlotte Wolff to the Lesbisches Aktionszentrum Westberlin (LAZ) in April 1978 demonstrates the persistence of residual antisemitic thought patterns and prejudices within the movement. Wolff, who had been living in London since 1936, was

12

The information in this section on antisemitism in the German-speaking women's and lesbian movement is taken from Naemi Eifler's groundbreaking MA dissertation (unpublished master’s thesis; available in the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv Berlin).

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

persuaded by the women of the centre and the L 74 group to come to Berlin and talk about her life in the Weimar Republic. Grossmann describes this event as follows: That evening she was, however, confronted with a sense of resentment, irritation and mistrust. How could she so frivolously claim that she had never - never! – faced a conflict in her sexual identity; [this is what] the women in the room wanted to know. Wolff responded to this that, naturally, she had always felt at home in the Berlin subculture of the Weimar years, and added (as Gad Beck did years later) that, after all, she came from a warm, open Jewish family that considered everything she was and wanted to do as wonderful, and supported it. Dissatisfied murmuring filled the room. The ‘German’ young women couldn’t cope with Wolff's sparkling, sharp self-assurance; in some sense they felt personally misunderstood, threatened and even attacked. [...] One young woman stood up and berated the almost 80-year-old woman: “How can you say that about the Jewish family? Everyone knows that Judaism is particularly patriarchal and ‘Old Testament’” (Grossmann 2015: 266-67). The encounter between Charlotte Wolff and the women of the LAZ, as described above, shows that antisemitic thought patterns had not been addressed, nor had there been any recognition of the women’s own antisemitic biases. In the 1980s, however, this ‘Opferthese’ (Victim Theory) became increasingly untenable. The lesbian-feminist group Shabbeskreis in Berlin, which was founded in 1984, provided the initiative to examine the Shoah, one’s own contribution to it, and the persisting antisemitism in the women’s and lesbian movements (Antmann 2015: 101).13 A systematic review of the antisemitic thought pattern in the New Women’s and Lesbian Movement has yet not been published, although Naemi Eifler’s thesis is an excellent start (Eifler 2019). This is probably why the questions of Jewishness and homosexuality in particular, and antisemitism in general, do not occur in Kokula’s research, or at least in the interviews she conducted, which appear in Jahre des Glücks, Jahre des Leids (Years of Happiness, Years of Sorrow). In this collection, the word ‘Juden’ is only mentioned once. In the interview with Marte X, Kokula asks about the Bund für Menschenrechte (BfM; Union for Human Rights), a Berlin gay, lesbian, and trans organization that was established in 1920. Marte X. then tries to remember who she knew belonged to the BfM: Yes, and at that square, Dönhoff-Platz, there was also a restaurant, it was only closed on the days when the lesbians went there. And of course they were from an upscale neighbourhood. All from Winterfeldplatz and from our street and Viktoria-Luise-Platz, there were still a lot of Jews there then. They always met there. Actually, they didn’t get together with us very much. I only know of them that they were there, too (Kokula 1990: 71-72). Unfortunately, Kokula did not follow up on the remark “there were still a lot of Jews there then”. It is nevertheless interesting to note her distinction of “the Jews” and “us”, 13

This was a group founded by Jewish and non-Jewish women, which for the first time after the Shoah, focused on lesbian and feminist issues and addressed anti-Semitism in the women's and lesbian movement.

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which points to group formations within the BfM. I am uncertain as to whether a Jewish women’s group, as mentioned by Marte X., belonged to the Bund für Menschenrechte, but this would certainly be an interesting topic for further research. It is also notable that even in issues of Die Freundin and Frauenliebe/Garçonne from the 1920s and early 1930s, Jewish issues are hardly mentioned. Rather, the magazines are marked by antisemitic tendencies, albeit to a limited extent. By the same token, no reference to lesbianism can be found in Jewish magazines such as in Blatt des Jüdischen Frauenbundes (Journal of the Jewish Women’s Association) (Weissberg: 374). This can be explained in part by the fact that the Jewish Women’s Association saw itself first and foremost as an authority on women’s issues within the context of the family, women as mothers and wives. Furthermore, the group was rather conservative, even though it was committed to modernising concepts of family. I have not yet been able to determine whether there were specifically Jewish-lesbian groups who met in the lesbian clubs. The lack of attention to Jewish issues in homosexual magazines, as well as the corresponding lack of attention in Jewish women’s magazines to the topic of homosexuality, leave these questions unanswered. Fiction depicting the Weimar Republic offers some interesting directions. In her monograph Masculine Women in Weimar Germany, and especially in the fifth chapter, “Beyond Berlin: Female Masculinities in Weimar Fiction”, Katie Sutton has contributed a starting point for such an investigation (Sutton 2011).

Conclusion I have demonstrated that homosexual women in the Weimar Republic had greater freedoms than those in the Kaiserreich. Nonetheless, homosexuality remained a social taboo which was only acknowledged publicly in exceptional cases. I agree with Sandmann that the lesbian clubs and their membership systems can be considered a first step toward an organized lesbian movement. In the clubs, women from different backgrounds and classes came together and had the opportunity to experience solidarity. Yet the club scene was not the answer for all middle and working class lesbians; for some, the fees may have been prohibitive, while for others, the more liberal approach toward gender roles and sexuality that was displayed in the clubs may not have been appealing. A collective politicization, which led to an emancipative lesbian alliance, only existed in a rudimentary stage during the Weimar Republic in the form of exclusive clubs and magazines. It is also difficult to investigate the participation of Jewish women in the lesbian subculture at the time. It seems that one promising approach would be to look at overlapping lesbian, feminist, and Jewish discourses and the omissions within these discourses. The figurations, themes, and topoi that evoke these discourses can be found in the literature of female authors from the time of the Weimar Republic. These include not only Else Lasker-Schüler, but also, as Katie Sutton has shown, Vicki Baum and Anna Weihrauch’s Der Skorpion. The search for further literary representations in works that have mostly been forgotten, because they were assigned to the Nazi category of ‘degenerate literature’, is part of my current work on the project Jewish Homosexual Modernism in the German-Speaking World and in Mandatory Palestine/Israel. It is my hope that this

Myth of the Homosexual Subculture in Weimar Germany?

search will reveal new insights on the connection between homosexuality and Judaism in Weimar Germany.

Bibliopgraphy Antmann, Debora (2015): “Vom Vergessen und Erinnern. Ein Portrait der AG ‘Frauen gegen Antisemitismus’.” In: Iman Attiaet/Swantje Köbsell/Nivedita Prasad (eds.), Dominanzkultur reloaded. Neue Texte zu gesellschaftlichen Machtverhältnissen und ihren Wechselwirkungen, Bielefeld: Transkript. pp. 101-111. Asmuss, Burkhard (1987): Berlin, Berlin. Materialien zur Geschichte der Stadt. Eine Publikation im Rahmen der Ausstellung im Martin-Gropius-Bau 1987. Ed. b. Gottfried Korff a. Reinhard Rürup, Berlin: Berliner Festspiele. Bornemann, Eva and Helga Trachsel (2007): “Gruppe L 74 und die Zeitschrift UkZ (Unsere kleine Zeitung).” In: Gabriele Dennert/Christiane Leidinger/Franziska Rauchut (eds.). In Bewegung bleiben. 100 Jahre Politik, Kultur und Geschichte von Lesben, Berlin: Queer Verlag. pp. 77-79. Eifler, Naemi (2019): Ausradierung, Verdinglichung, Identifizierung. Antisemitische Denkmuster in der deutschen Lesbenbewegung der 1970er und 1980er Jahre. Eine Analyse von Äußerungen und symbolischen Gesten in Zeitschriftenbeiträgen. Berlin 2019. (Unpublished Master’s Thesis; available in the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv Berlin). Grossmann, Atina (2006): “‘Neue Frauen im Exil’. Deutsche Ärztinnen und die Emigration*.” In: Kirsten Heimsohn/Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte. Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein. pp. 133-156. Grossmann, Atina (2015): “Die Sexualreform und die Neue Frau: Wie jüdisch waren sie?” In: Christina von Braun (eds.); Was war deutsches Judentum? 1870-1933. Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 262-274. Hacker, Hanna (2015): Frauen* und Freund_innen: Lesarten ‘weiblicher Homosexualität’. Österreich 1870-1938. Wien: Zaglossus. Havemann, Anna (2013): Gertrude Sandmann. Künstlerin und Frauenrechtlerin. Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. Heschel, Susannah (1994): “Konfigurationen des Patriarchats, des Judentums und des Nazismus im Deutschen Feministischen Denken.” In: Charlotte Kohn-Ley/Ilse Korotin (eds.), Der Feministische ‘Sündenfall’? Antisemitische Vorurteile in der Frauenbewegung. Wien: Picus. pp. 160-184. Kaplan, Marion A. (1997): Jüdisches Bürgertum. Frau, Familie und Identität im Kaiserreich. Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz. “Ilse Kokula speech for a commemoration to Gertrude Sandmann”, October 16, 2013 (https://www.lesbengeschichte.org/erinnern_feiern_berlin_sandmann_kokul a_d.html). Kuckuc, Ina (Pseudonym for Ilse Kokula) (1975): Der Kampf gegen Unterdrückung. Materialien aus der deutschen Lesbierinnenbewegung. München: Frauenoffensive.

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Kokula, Ilse (1990): Jahre des Glücks, Jahre des Leids. Gespräche mit älteren lesbischen Frauen. Dokumente. Kiel: Frühlings Erwachen. Leidinger, Christiane (1995): Formen politischer Identität. Soziale Bewegungen um Lebenszusammenhänge von Lesben in den zwanziger und siebziger Jahren. Berlin. Unpublished Diplom Thesis. Pass Freidenreich, Harriet (2006): “Die jüdische ‘Neue Frau’ des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts.” In: Kirsten Heinsohn/Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), Deutsch-Jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte. Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Wallstein, pp. 123-132. Plötz, Kristen (1999): Einsame Freundinnen? Lesbisches Leben während der zwanziger Jahre in der Provinz. Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript. Prestel, Claudia T. (1998): “The ‘New Jewish Woman’ in Weimar Germany.” In: Wolfgang Benz, Arnold Paucker, Peter Pulzer (eds.), Jüdisches Leben in der Weimarer Republik. Jews in the Weimar Republic. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, pp. 135-156. Roellig, Ruth Margarethe (1928/1981): “Berlins lesbische Frauen.” In: Adele Meyer (eds.), Lila Nächte. Die Damenclubs der Zwanziger Jahre. Köln: Zitronenpresse. Schader, Heike (2004): Virile, Vamps und wilde Veilchen. Sexualität, Begehren und Erotik in den Zeitschriften homosexueller Frauen im Berlin der 1920er Jahre. Königsstein im Taunus: Helmer. Schoppmann, Claudia (2011): “Sprung ins Nichts. Überlebensstrategien lesbischer Jüdinnen in NS-Deutschland.” In: Invertitio – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 13, pp. 1421-60. Sutton, Katie (2011): The Masculine Women in Weimar Germany. New York: Berghahn Books. Wolff, Charlotte (1969): On the Way to Myself. Communications to a Friend, London: Methuen. Wolff, Charlotte (1971): Love between Women. London: Duckworth. Wolff, Charlotte (1977): Bisexuality. A Study. London: Quartet Books. Wolff, Charlotte (1980): Hindsight. London: Quartet Books. Wolff, Charlotte (1986): Magnus Hirschfeld. A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. London: Quartet Books. Weissberg, Yvonne (2016): Der Jüdische Frauenbund in Deutschland 1904-1939: Zur Konstruktion einer weiblichen jüdischen Kollektiv-Identität. University of Zürich. (htt ps://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/150729/1/150729.pdf).

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences Susanne Korbel This article provides a case study on how traveling artists in popular entertainment in Central Europe from the last decades of the 19th century to the 1930s expressed sexuality and gender in their performances. Venues under consideration include music halls, cabarets, and vaudevilles and, according to the intertwining of the development of the genres, also film productions in the 1930s. I argue that these sites of popular entertainment not only became a space to negotiate the boundaries of sex, but also offered identifications that were at the core of denunciations by antisemites, homophobes, and antimodernists alike.

From the turn of the 20th century up to the National Socialists’ seizure of power, artists in emerging genres of popular entertainment culture presented alternative readings of gender and sexuality in Central Europe. The stages of Varietés (variety theaters) provided space for the performance of travesty numbers, for questioning stereotypical gender attributions, and for negotiating queer identifications. In this article, I will investigate how artists such as Curt Bois, Risa Basté, Molly Picon, and others expressed sexuality on stage, interrogating, dismantling, and expanding norms about this topic. I argue that these sites of popular entertainment not only became spaces in which to negotiate the boundaries of sex but also places in which to offer identifications that were at the core of antisemitic, homophobic, and anti-modernist denunciations. Tracing the development of this performative practice from the previous breeches roles, I will also demonstrate how such popular alternative readings were reflected in contemporary literature. In 1931, the Viennese revue Der Film published an interview with the magnificent Jewish actor Curt Bois (1901–1991) in which the journal focused on what it called his Wandlungsfähigkeit (transformation ability) (“Solche Späße sind oft kein Spaß” 1931: 5; on “Wandlungsfähigkeit” see also Breitner 1928: 9). The interview was about Bois’s talent to transform into female characters on the stage. Curt Bois became most popular for the cross-dressing and gender-bending characters he portrayed in the films Der Jüngling aus der Konfektion (1926), Der Fürst von Pappenheim (1927), and Charley’s Tante (1929). A critique of the 1929 film production of the 1892 transvestic classic by Brandon Thomas (“Charley’s Aunt”, fig. 1) commented on Bois’s performance: “One should have seen this actor as a total Woman, in a low-backed afternoon dress, exposed shoulders, a promising dé-

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Figure 5.1: Curt Bois in the 1929 Berlin re-production of Charleys Tante (image taken from Zolchow and Muschelknautz 2001, 27).

colleté, delightful legs; one should have heard him singing for hours—as it would not matter to him—in the highest frequencies” (Neue Züricher Zeitung 1934, 4). His staging of gender transformations also enabled him to perform as a Tanzkomödiant (dancing comedian) in Varietés and cabarets all around Europe (Mast/Zolchow 2001: 32-35). Bois was one of the (Jewish) performers who, in their performances, participated in a vivid discussion of gender and sexuality on stage.1 In 1941, the National Socialists presented the practice of gender bending staged by the Jewish performer as the element shaping the alleged inferiority of popular entertainment. In doing so, for example in the film Der Ewige Jude (1941), the National Socialists explicitly referred to Bois’s cross-dress-

1

For example, on the experiences he faced in Vienna, see Curt Bois 1929: 15-16.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

ing roles.2 The Nazis’ fierce opposition to performances of gender bending should not surprise us, given how such performances opposed all antisemitic and antimodernist attitudes. It is also not surprising given—despite antisemites’ attempts to pretend otherwise—how widely practiced and appreciated gender bending as a subversive element had become in popular entertainment prior to 1933. Gender bending in films, however, was a later stage in the development of performing and destabilizing gender and sexuality in popular entertainment. Although they took place elsewhere in time and space, Bois’s life and staging—performing crossdressing characters and experiencing different forms of migration—are representative of key developments in popular entertainment that occurred in Europe and the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Popular entertainment was being shaped by a high degree of mobility and migrational flows, and benefitted from this mobility to become a unique cosmopolitan space (Korbel 2020b: 226). In what follows, I investigate how Jewish performers, who were victims of a twofold marginalization—first, as Jewish, and second, as wandering artists—utilized the stage to play with gender identifications and to destabilize sexuality. I analyze how gender bending became a fashionable artistic form that allowed performers to demonstrate the overlapping of identifications3 and thus to question alleged dichotomies of categorizations, such as male and female, and queer them. I base my analysis on a close examination of newspapers, ego-documents of performers, text- and songbooks of performances staged at sites of popular entertainment, and black-and-white films.

1.

Mobility and Jewish performers in popular entertainment

On November 6, 1926, the renowned Jewish photographer Madame D’Ora4 invited a well-known vaudeville star of the time into her studio in Vienna for a shooting. In this shooting, she was about to take one of the rare pictures of an artist who performed as what was depicted as a Damenimitator (women imitator). In this visual source, Barbette, the Damenimitator, poses on a stool sideways to the camera and looks at the photographer. Wearing lipstick and a beaded dance dress, she grabs her knees and poses her legs such that her dress, wide open on the sides, allows a glimpse of her bra down to her 2

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4

Bois’s later career was determined by his emigration, which included an appearance as a pickpocket in Casablanca (1942). For the influence of emigration and displacement in the film Casablanca see Schlör 2015: 42. The concept of identifications builds on the assumptions of a critical reexamination of the concept of identity. Instead of talking about identity, speaking of “multiple identities”, or emphasizing that identities consist of several “layers,” which are presumed to be static, essentialist, and insufficient to describe complex situations, Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper suggested shifting the focus in research towards identifications. According to Brubaker and Cooper, that shift enables us to look at concrete situations instead of forcing historical subjects into categorizations (Brubaker/Cooper 2000: 14, 19-20). Madame D’Ora was born Dora Kallmus to a Jewish family in Vienna on March 20, 1881. Before the Second World War, she had a studio in Vienna and Paris. Many of her family members were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis. After 1945, she reported on the situation of DPs in the Austrian province Styria (Silverman, no date).

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Figure 5.2: “Marlene Dietrich”––portrait of the “Damenimitator Barbette in knapper Bekleidung” by D’Ora Benda, Vienna, November 6, 1926, Bildarchiv Austria, 204912-D.

chest (fig. 2). The photograph allows us to grasp at least an idea of the atmosphere that performers like Barbette must have generated in their performances, and it allows us to sense how artists like Barbette subverted gender in Varietés of Central Europe. Madame D’Ora entitled her picture “Marlene Dietrich,” who was herself known as a female actress interpreting sexuality, femininity, and masculinity on the stage. By choosing this title for the picture, the photographer also referred to Dietrich’s reputation as a woman with a smoky, erotic voice in trouser suits, wishing to indicate the opposite—a smokyvoiced male actor in tight dresses—for her picture of the Damenimitator.5

5

On Madame D’Ora’s life and work, see Meder/Firscher-Westhauser 2012.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

But what else is known about Barbette beside that he*she was captured by one of Europe’s best photographers of the time? The performer became famous in the Roncalli Varieté in Düsseldorf, also known as Barcelonas Varieté. Furthermore, the star traveled between vaudevilles in Western and Central Europe (Dietze 2020: 89-94) before dying in a horrible accident during a performance in the Barcelonas Varieté in January 1932 (Der Kuckuck 1932: 8). As his*her reputation in press clips and reviews indicate, the press at the time not only referred to Barbette as Damenimitator but also used additional feminizing and likewise sexualizing and eroticizing descriptions, such as Fräulein, which was the word for an unmarried—assumed “untouched”—woman (e.g., “Fräulein Damenimitator” 1927: 7). Since Barbette left only a short paper trail due to his*her short life, further biographical information remains vague. However, as a co-worker of Curt Bois and working together with artists such as Madame D’Ora, Barbette—though remaining mostly an invented character—is representative first of a dialogue between Jews and non-Jews in popular entertainment and art of the time; and, second, of a relative invisibility of Jews as Jews in popular entertainment. The question of whether a performer on the stages of the Varietés was Jewish or not only became important when the Nazis began to attack them. At the turn of the 20th century, mobile popular entertainment tended to open a space for Jewish performers. The historian Mary Gluck argued that in the case of the Hungarian capital Budapest, the spheres of Orpheums (music halls) and Varietés (vaudevilles) were unique spaces of the “invisible Jewish Budapest.” This was the case because Jews took up the opportunity to participate and became highly represented among the most popular performers (Gluck 2016). In the project of modernity, of which the growing popular entertainment was a part, Jewish protagonists were key players. The boundaries of German culture, the historian Peter Gay argued, were wider than the nationalists’ ideas imagined (Gay 1978: 12). In particular, emerging cultural fields and professions offered chances to engage in shared Jewish- and non-Jewish pursuits and further overcome the long-lasting exclusion of Jewish protagonists (Mosse 1985: 22-24). In the case of German Jewry, it thus became neither the nation nor the language that determined belonging. It was culture that Jewish Germans were affiliated with, articulated, and most of all coined. Conversely, it was culture—not religion or even race, as antisemites and National Socialists pretended—that allowed Jews to play such an important role (Ibid.; Elon 2002: 5, 261). Popular culture was one of the main aspects of the project of modernity. In Western societies, middle- and working-class people dealt for the first time with the phenomenon of leisure time and looked for things to do when not working. In addition, since living conditions in cities were dense and many people had to sublet their apartments or even beds, people searched for spaces outside their homes in which to spend time (Maase 2007: 16-23). In the decades around 1900, a flood of entertainment spaces opened in the urban centers of Europe and the United States (Korbel 2020b: 223-226). These emerging sites opened up spaces for Jewish protagonists to participate and for new practices such as gender bending to become popular. In the entertainment sites of the turn of the 20th century, Jews and non-Jews interacted regularly both as actors and spectators. Although antisemitism was becoming more radical at the time, newspaper critics, reports on Varietés, and other such publications made few statements

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about Jews, either as actors and actresses or as directors of establishments. The same was true for articulations concerning sex and gender that unfolded in the venues. It seems as if the spaces of popular entertainment—under the guise of mere theatrical performance and therefore not important—allowed for subversive elements and productive dialogues both between Jewish and non-Jewish and between homosexual and heterosexual performers. An important aspect that supported the relative openness of popular entertainment was its close link to migration. In the mass movement of people (Brinkmann 2012), an increasing number of artists began to travel between different cities to stage their repertoires. Mobility had a fundamental impact on the performers and their performances as well as on the entertainment business itself in terms of organization, exchange, and traveling activities. The impact of migration on the content of performances was due to the fact that vaudeville stars recognized traveling and migration as subjects that allow for mobility in the mind of their audience. Their popular plays and songs positioned them in the context of utopian texts that emerged at the same time and sought to offer alternative perspectives on class, ethnic, or gender barriers and conflicts. Literature, just like the plays in popular entertainment, used the metaphor of traveling in order to place contested gender relations or antisemitism in remote or imaginary spaces (Bach 2016: 2, 31). The performers were able to invite a large part of the population to such a mental mobility through the medium of mass culture. Secondly, the Varieté stars were themselves wandering performers (Korbel 2020a). A high number of them—in particular, the most popular—were Jewish, a fact that was invisible in the entertainment sites themselves, especially when compared to the prominence of Jews in other spheres of life, and only becomes visible when researching performers’ personal identifications using ego-documents.6 I argue that this high yet invisible presence of Jewish protagonists in popular entertainment was not a coincidence. The double marginality as a traveling performer and a Jew was the ultimate reason for their success in popular entertainment (on being doubly marginal, see Gay 1978: 13). However, the entanglement of Jewish performers in popular entertainment as key actors in challenging, subverting, and sometimes even queering sexuality and gender has remained obscured for two reasons. First, the mobility of Jewish performing musicians constituted a pattern of migration within the larger movement that is often termed “Jewish mass migration,” which itself remains understudied. Secondly, scholarship has strongly indicated that queer and Jewish identifications substantially intersected. Twenty years ago, the historian and literary scholar Sander L. Gilman pointed out that perceptions of Jewishness and gender subversion overlapped in many cultural products. Gilman related this finding to the fact that most of the “paradigmatic humorists” were Jewish (Gilman 2009: 135-149). However, little is known about how the gender-bender practices became popularized by Jewish performers at the turn of the 20th century and gained immense popularity until the Nazi seizure of power. In what follows, I will therefore delve into the development of gender bending performances 6

In my research, the most relevant sources for considering a Jewish affiliation were ego-documents such as handwritten residence registrations on which the protagonists could decide whether or not to write any such affiliation or leave it empty.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

and their popularization in a Jewish-non-Jewish dialogue starting with the turn of the 20th century.

2.

The making of gender bending in popular entertainment

The first performers who portrayed the ‘other sex’ in modern popular entertainment were known as Soubrettes. Yet these female singers and actors in vaudeville venues adapted a practice of gender bending that had already seen the light of the day some 200 years before. Until the mid-17th century, most prominently in Shakespeare’s plays, women were not allowed to perform on the stage. Therefore, men had to play female characters in plays (breeches roles) (Howe 1992: 1). By 1660, actresses in opera were novelties on the London stage and also became popular around the globe. In the United Kingdom, a window of opportunity was about to open for women performing “reverse” breeches roles, which meant that actresses who performed and mocked male characters were in demand. Between 1660 and 1700, in 89 out of 375 plays produced on public stages in London, there were roles for actresses in male clothing (Howe 1992: 57). Comparable to the development in Great Britain, there developed a tradition of breeches roles in late 17th -century France. In a famous article, Natalie Zemon Davis examined the rich gender bending performed by women. She argued that in a strict hierarchical society that lacked opportunities for participation, sexual inversion gave a voice to “unruly” women and thus potentially allowed them to make statements (Davis 1975: 132-137, 147). By the 19th century, then, gender bending as a performative practice had entered popular genres (Berlanstein 1996: 341). Female singers acted as Soubrettes in variety programs. They played self-assured characters and often wrote their own songs and plays, including their interpretation of the ‘other sex’ as Herrenimitatorinnen (male impersonators). Likewise, male performers staged as Damenimitatoren (female impersonators). The Damenimitatoren exaggerated femininity in many ways, sometimes even thrilling their audience with obscene acts, and were suddenly at the forefront of a new way of articulating gender critique. Among the first Jewish female stars who played breeches roles in popular entertainment was Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923). After becoming famous in Paris, she performed in London in 1879, and as of 1880 made a tour through 51 cities in the US within half a year before her career led her to Russia in 1881. In 1882 she gave a tour in Europe, and from 1886 to 1889 she traveled through the United States again before finally starting a world tour in 1891 (Gottlied 2010: 78-81).7 Contemporary sources ascribed the development of the soubrettes’ gender subversion to Bernhardt’s performance (Knepler 1968: 226). She is said to have ended up playing male characters on stages together with her close friend, the actress Louise Abbéma (1853–1927) (Williams 2004: 1-2). Abbéma was a widely-known member of the lesbian scene in Paris; the fact that she did not marry and the close, life-long lasting friendship with Bernhardt also invited speculations that she was Bernhardt’s lover (Ibid. 2; Gottlieb 2010: 88). 7

On Sarah Bernhardt in general, see Ockman, Silver 2005.

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Figure 5.3: Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, Louise Abbéma, 1879, Metropolitan Museum New York.

The visual studies scholar Marjorie Garber argues that the ongoing interest of Western civilizations in gender bending anticipated a “category crisis.” It crossed boggeddown boundaries by unveiling the absurdity of binaries (Garber 1992). Garber ascribes the first literary depiction of a cross-dressing scenario on a stage of popular entertainment to James Joyce (1882–1941). In Ulysses (1918/20, 1922), the writer included the character of the Soubrette Bella, who he then transforms into Bello in scene 15, second act (Joyce 1998 [1922]: 494-509). Even at this initial moment, so Garber’s argument goes, the soubrettes’ gender bending was charged with antisemitic stereotypes: “The domination sequence with Bella/Bello Cohen in which Bloom turns into a ‘soubrette’ who will be dressed in lace, frills, and corsets is likewise cross-cut with anti-Semitic stereotypes; Bella herself, ‘a massive whoremistress,’ has ‘a sprouting

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

moustache’ and a ‘olive face, heavy, slightly sweated, and fullnosed, with orangetainted nostrils’– all parodic traits of the ‘Jewess’” (Garber 2003: 36). Joyce’s novel sheds light on this connection between gender bending and mobility. By setting the plot of Ulysses on June 16, 1904, Joyce not only portrays authentic experiences of 1904 Dublin society with the inclusion of a soubrette practicing gender bending on the stage. He most likely also hinted to his autobiographic experience during his journeys to Trieste, where he first traveled in the very same year, 1904 (Ara and Magris 1987; Schlögl 2011: 262-271).8 Fin-de-siècle Trieste was then included in Austro-Hungarian Empire’s traveling vaudeville business. For example, Gérado Cöchelbergher’s café-concerto Al cervo d’oro was most likely among the sites of entertainment Joyce visited and then adapted into his writing.9 Joyce’s composition of the soubrette in Ulysses must be seen in relation to a performative tradition that emerged on Central Europe’s stages at least two decades earlier (Gay 1978: 26). One of the performative strategies that gained prominence then was the practice of gender bending. Female singers took the former breeches roles one step further. They staged opposite-sex characters not due to legal restrictions that forbid women to perform and made it thus necessary for men to stage female characters, as had been the case in the past. Rather, gender bending became a strategy for presenting, staging, and articulating contents they wished to mediate. The (female) soubrettes perfected this kind of gender bending together with their (male) partners. The vaudeville stars took the breeches roles out of the closet, so to speak. They developed the one-sided parodying of performances by same-sex actors further into a mutual negotiation of gender and sexuality. The urban sphere of popular entertainment in the second half of the 19th century allowed actors and actresses to spark a vivid and in-depth discussion about gender boundaries and to challenge norms of sexuality. In the Habsburg Empire, for example, the vaudeville stars of the fin-de-siècle popularized the breeches roles performed by women by displacing them outside the Empire’s sphere of interest. For example, they set the plots of their plays in the faraway continent of Africa. Applying the metaphor of mobility and traveling, and inspired by the mass movement of people that was frequently witnessed in Central Europe between 1880 and 1920, the performers realized that transferring the plot to neutral places that were insignificant for the censorship enabled the articulation and acting out of what was not possible in real life – namely, a crossing, a transforming of gender boundaries, and sometimes even a softening of sexual norms. In addition, they mocked heteronormative norms by adding a crucial element to the performance of breeches roles. Unlike in earlier performances, in which it was forbidden for women to act on stage, or later, when only women mimed men, it was no longer only one actor or actress who made up the scene, but a pair (a man and a woman), each of whom took on the role of the opposite sex. By having a female and a 8

9

James Joyce arrived in Trieste on October 20, 1904, together with his later wife Nora. Both had to leave at the end of 1904, came back in March 1905, and stayed until June 1915. Afterwards, they returned to Trieste for one year in 1919 before finally moving away, since Trieste's appearance after the end of the Habsburg Empire disappointed them. See advertisements and entry in the list of vaudevilles in the Internationale Artisten Revue.

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male performer playing the opposite sex, it became more acceptable to discuss issues of gender and sex in public, including the perspectives of both men and women. The Jewish Soubrette Risa Basté, together with her partner on the stage, Mr. Man de Wirth, perfected this kind of gender bending. Risa Basté was born Sali Friedmann in 1879 in Vienna.10 At that time, it was common practice among Jews and non-Jews to adopt stage names that added an international flavor to their shows. In many cases, often interpreted as a distinctly Jewish practice, the performers also decided to live under their stage names.11 Basté was one of the renowned stars of Habsburg’s stages and was actively involved with traveling vaudeville groups. “Mr. Man de Wirth and Ms. Risa Basté still exert the most powerful force to draw attention. They both contrast with each other in an interesting way—Mr. Man de Wirth as a lady, and Ms. Basté as a gentleman. Both successfully studied the strengths and weaknesses of the ‘other’ sex and provide imitations that cannot be distinguished from the originals” (Roithners Theater Variété 1899: 4). Basté’s partner, Mr. Man de Wirth, was claimed to be the best Damenimitator (woman imitator) or Chansonettenimitator (female singer imitator): “Not only in his appearance Mr. Man de Wirth is a woman, but also with his voice. To say nothing about his way of performing!” (Damenimitator Mr. Man de Wirth 1896: 7). Most of the critics assured their readers that “Man de Wirth is a caricature of nature, he is a perfect copy of the model of a snazzy soubrette, whose appearance and graceful motions make her look tenderly; and yet, she is a man” (“Varieté Schwan” 1902: 5). On one of his tours to Moravia, the performer appeared in Olomouc’s vaudevilles for a month. The reviews of Man de Wirt’s performances at Baum’s Orpheum, also known as Baum’s Hotel Goldene Birne, stressed that masses of spectators attended his performances. “The owner of the Hotel, Baum, had again provided a program that was not only diversified but also amusing and found thus the uninhibited cheering of the audience […]” (“Baum Orpheum” 1896: 5). Although the audience enjoyed the whole program, it was particularly enthused by the imitation scenes: “Mr. Man de Wirth was forced to perform countless encores at the stormy audience’s requests” (Ibid.). Advertising his last performance in Olomouc, on April 27, 1896, the newspaper again drew its readers’ attention to Mr. Man de Wirth’s “imitations”, promising that he will “surprise with the sucked-away nuances of the enigmatic female soul’s hidden wrinkles” (“Damenimitator Mr. Man de Wirth” 1896: 7). Performers such as Man de Wirth and Risa Basté created a specific attraction for the audience. They succeeded in creating a trenchant illustration of how individuals were socialized in terms of gender. The reviews in the newspapers depicted their ability to 10

11

Meldezettel Sali Sarah Friedmann, K2 – C-Antiquariat, Historische Meldeunterlagen [hereafter: HM], Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Austria [hereafter: WStLA]. Meldezettel Sali Sara Glinger Hargesheimer, geb. Friedmann, K4 – Meldekartei, HM, WStLA. Meldezettel Sali Risa Glinger, geb. Friedmann, K5 – E-Antiquariat, HM, WStLA. Todfallsaufnahme Sali Glinger, Verlassenschaftsabhandlungen: 46/68, Bezirksgericht Innere Stadt A4/3, WStLA. Having survived World War Two in a concentration camp, Risa Basté died in Vienna in 1968. To examine stereotypes concerning ‘Jewish names’, see Bering 1996: 153-166; for stage names and Jewish actors, see Hödl 2017: 6.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

Figure 5.4: Announcement: Last Performance of the “Damenimitator” Mr. Man de Wirth in Olomouc on April 27, 1896, published in the Mährische Tagblatt.

perform as a talent that was deeply inherent to these artists’ and actresses’ characters.12 While Mr. Man de Wirth performed in the rural Austrian city of Linz in 1894, the local newspapers, reporting on his great success, asked the performer “how he achieves the art to be both a complete man and a complete woman (ganze Frau).” The answer was articulated by the newspapers in biographical terms: “He was born a Dutchman and migrated with his parents to Germany early in his life. Their fondest wish, especially the mother’s, was to give birth to a girl, and, because this was not possible, he [Mr. Man de Wirt, SK] was raised as a girl until his 12th birthday, when his father vigorously protested, and he consequently became a boy again” (“Roithners Theater Varieté” 1894: 6). 12

Journalists said the same about the below-mentioned actress Molly Picon (Felder/Rosen 2005: 146).

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Equally famous was Molly Picon. Performances of gender bending by Picon in the play Yentele (1919)13 and later in the Yiddish film classic Yidl mitn Fidl (1936) are still among the most famous staging of this practice. Picon also performed her gender bending characters on the stages of music halls and vaudevilles. On December 13, 1921, most of Vienna’s dailies placed ads: “Maly [sic] Picon and Jacob Kalich, good luck on the 100th staging of Yankele [sic]”. In the Wiener Morgenzeitung, various performing societies placed six advertisements congratulating the “artistic couple Kalich” (Wiener Morgenzeitung 1921: 8). Molly Picon and Jacob Kalich arrived in Vienna in the early days of March 1921, and on March 5, they gave their first guest performance in the Austrian capital. The famous artistic capital of the former Habsburg Empire still attracted international performers. During their tour, which lasted until late December 1921 before taking them further to the Czechoslovak capital Prague, they performed at almost every venue in Vienna, including the Volkstheater, the Jüdische Bühne, and Varietés and orpheum stages such as Café Réklame. The Jewish couple introduced Jewish plots, which had already become widely known in the US, to non-Jewish audiences in Central Europe. Performing in German and Yiddish, Molly Picon became the audience’s favorite. The critics overwhelmingly extolled the couples’ artistic talent, their harmonic and thoroughly tested interplay, and, in particular, Picon’s voice and talent: “Special performance in the Kammerspiele. In an almost sold-out house, there were two beautiful afternoon hours to be witnessed in the Kammerspiele des Deutschen Volkstheaters. The gracious American artists, Mr. J. Kalich and the funny Mali [sic] Picon provided their best for Viennese children. There was a real ambiance. . . . songs from the ghetto, nursery rhymes, lovely duets . . . fine chansons exposed the Jewish mind to the listeners and taught them to love it. With an excellent temperament, Mali Picon danced a – to us, Viennese, quite alien transfiguration number – Broadway types –, and when the lovely artist sang toward the end songs written by herself, thrilling the audience with ever-changing, astonishing, and delightful impressions in facial expressions and movement, she made spectators instantly grateful after a few minutes only. The theatre became a saloon: as she sang, she chatted in amicable understanding with us Viennese, made us happy; indeed, she coaxed the parquet to join in for the chorus; if you wanted or not, you had to” (“Sondervorstellung in den Kammerspielen” 1921: 4). In the same year, Picon played the lead in Otto Kreisler’s Das Judenmädl (1921). Das Judenmädl is an additional interesting example of the portrayal of gender bending and Jewishness in interwar Vienna. Picon then continued to further develop her ability to play ambiguous gender representations. In Picon’s 1936 performance in Jidl mitn Fidl, she again applied gender bending. In this film, which explores the story of a traveling group of musicians who perform Yiddish songs and couplets at various locations, Molly Picon played the lead, the violinist or Fiddler Itke (a female). Jérôme Segal and Monika Kaczek illustrated that in the 1936 production, Molly Picon did express Jewishness only in staging in Yiddish, while in others, like the Judenmädl, the plot as well as Picon’s way of staging the character included expressions of Jewishness (Segal/Kaczek 2010: 9). 13

Re-staged with Barbara Streisand portraying Yentel/Anshel in 1983.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

Initially, Itke travels with her father. On her journey, she arrives in a small town. While giving her first performance there, she suddenly encounters another couple of musicians. They begin to compete against each other, and it comes to a duel between the performers that eventually ends in the four admitting that they sound better as a group. As the four continue their journey together, however, not Itke but Yidl (a male) joins them, because Itke’s father explains that he is afraid that traveling would be too dangerous for Itke as a woman. The two other musicians presume Yidl to be a man. In order not to jeopardize the new cooperation, Itke, now as Yidl, decides not to reveal that she is actually a woman dressed up as a man, until she falls in love with her male peer. By bending between a male and a female character, Picon was able to thematize the different layers of structural discrimination to which women were exposed. As a woman, Itke’s professional and personal freedom of movement were limited and only possible as long as she was escorted – first by her father and later by the other ensemble members. In doing so, the film referred to the widely discussed fear of trafficking in women (Wingfield 2016). The scene of Yidl’s ‘outing’ as a woman is portrayed in the movie as taking place on a theater stage. Yidl’s story becomes a gender performance itself—the audience in the film perceived her gender transgressions with humor and lightness (Gilman 1993: 196-200). While Itke as Yidl has to hide her identification as a woman in everyday life, she is able to speak freely on the fictional stage. The literary scholar Warren Hoffman states that Picon’s “gender bending cross-dressing work” was a huge success. For Warren, the moment of ambiguity, which he ascribes as inherent to Yiddish-American culture, unfolds Picon’s ability to be subversive. “The ambiguity in Picon’s performance is emblematic of the way in which cross-dressing circulated in the Yiddish community in the early 20th century, operating as a site of both ambiguity and pure entertainment” (Hoffman 2009: 67).

3.

Limits of Jewish (in)visibility and gender bending

When Franz Kafka (1883-1924) found himself irritated yet deeply impressed by a performance of a Damen- and Herrenimitator (male impersonator) in the Café Savoy Varieté in Prague on the evening of October 4, 1911, he described a close link between the ability to cross, convert, and transform boundaries of gender and boundaries of Jewishness: “Mrs. K[lug]—‘male impersonator [Herrenimitatorin].’ In a caftan, short black trousers, white stockings, from the black vest a thin white woolen shirt emerges that is held in front at the throat by a knot and then flares into a wide, loose, long, spreading collar. On her head, confining her woman’s hair but necessary anyhow and worn by her husband as well, a dark, brimless skull cap, over it a large, soft black hat with a turnedup brim. I really don’t know what sort of person it is that she and her husband represent. If I wanted to explain them to someone to whom I didn’t want to confess my ignorance, I should find that I consider them sextons, employees of the temple, notorious lazybones with whom the community has come to terms, privileged shnorrers

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for some religious reason, people who, precisely as a result of their being set apart, are very close to the centre of community life, know many songs as a result of their useless wandering about and spying, see clearly to the core the relationship of all the members of the community, but as a result of their lack of relatedness to the workaday world don’t know what to do with this knowledge, people who are Jews in an especially pure form [...]” (Kafka 1965: 79). Kafka continued the entry in his diary, emphasizing that the particular “Jewish” setting allowed the protagonists to cross the boundaries of gender better than a performance with an explicit Jewish affiliation would have done. Yet, he went on to explain, the Jewish affiliation evoked by the clothes they wore separated their performance from physicality. “‘Male Impersonator [Herrenimitatorin]’ is really a false title. By virtue of the fact that she is stuck into a caftan, her body is entirely forgotten” (ibid: 86). Nevertheless, as Kafka wrote, he would have to admit that he felt attracted to “Mrs. K.” staging a man. And, on a lesser note, he referred to a couple who had performed “a similar scene” a year before, but the two performers the previous year had been less attractive than “Miss K” (ibid). Kafka’s note on the Jewish setting of the scene and its stereotyping of gender and Jewishness alike brings us back to the questions of how Jewish protagonists influenced and shaped gender bending on popular stages and of how far Jewishness per se appeared to matter. Mary Gluck attests that Jews in the Budapest Varieté scene—where practices of gender bending were also highly common—were able to create an invisible Jewish sphere (Gluck 2016). Yet Kafka’s analysis of the composition of a gender bending setting in a performance in Prague suggests a Jewish visibility—at least concerning Jewish men. The alleged clash between a visibility of Jewish men and an invisibility of Jewish women points to an ambiguity that the cultural historian Sander Gilman investigated. Gilman states that “one of the most fascinating problems in tracing the stereotype of the ‘Jew’ in turn-of-the-century German culture is the evidence of difference which gender makes in the visibility of the Jew” (Gilman 1993: 195). In Kafka’s description of the gender bending scenario, the Herrenimitatorin wears garments affiliated with Jewishness. As Kafka noted, by doing so, the male impersonator “Miss K.” was immediately and unavoidably identifiable as Jewish. This observation supports Gilman’s argument that “the male Jew may try to hide or disguise his identity, but eventually, for good or for ill, he is revealed” (Gilman 1993: 195). On the one hand, the cultural position of marginality—first as Jewish, and second as wandering performers—enabled the performers to destabilize conventional gender interpretations. On the other hand, the widespread stereotypes about male Jews hinted at the limits of this openness. In the project of modernity, I would argue, Habsburg Central European society remained regressive in its thinking about women, Jewish men, and identifications beyond those categories, such as those represented in the practice of gender bending. There are numerous examples that reveal this paradoxical combination of modernity and backward assertions. Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) addressed this ironically when writing that new words ought to be invented so that women would not need to use “unspeakable” words such as “trousers”; women had to refer to trousers as the “unspeakable” (die

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

Unaussprechlichen) (Zweig 2014: 94). Furthermore, discourse on (Jewish) womanhood and femininity was much influenced by Otto Weininger’s (1880-1903) writings.14 Weininger, as is well known, argued that the essential Jew is feminine, and thus profoundly irreligious, without true individuality (soul) and without a sense of good and evil (Weininger 1903). One must also keep in mind that in the antisemitic atmosphere of the fin-desiècle, Viennese Jews were said to be inept at performing and producing art (Anderson 1992: 194-216). And last but not least, in the Viennese Jew Sigmund Freud’s description of the Oedipus Complex as the child’s unconscious desire for the opposite-sex parent, the clandestine phantasies and sexual pursuits of the society seemed to be uncovered (on the discourses that merged therein, see Spector 2016: 62)—as they had been uncovered on the stages of the Varietés.15 According to Daniel Boyarin, this caused a romanticizing of the image of the family as an escape from Jewish queerdom (Boyarin 1997: 215; cf. Bunzel 2000: 332). Because of the almost paradoxical mingling of modernity and stereotyping in central Europe around 1900, Boyarin even attests to a “Jewish gender crisis” (Boyarin 1997: 347). Similar to what Joyce did in Ulysses, Kafka recast his deep impression of gender bending performances and his astonishment at the tension between the possibilities of the stage and the limits of antisemitic discourse as the central plot of a novel. In Josefine, die Sängerin (Josephine the singer) (Kafka 1924: vi-vii), he offers an alternative and queer re-interpretation of the biblical Joseph trope against the background of finde-siècle culture in Central Europe and its negative stereotypes. Referring to the antisemitic stereotype of “Mauscheln,” Kafka depicts Josephine as a female Joseph allegory in becoming a beloved and honored female singer: The novella claims that Jewish people do not usually sing, but Josephine emancipates herself at night and reveals her voice to the audience in the Varieté. Kafka arranged the setting of the novella in such a way that the vaudeville singer rises from being an undistinguished part of the ‘mouse folk’ to a much-beloved star. Following Ziegler’s interpretation, the Mouse People symbolizes an indirect linguistic reference between the German words “Mauscheln” (the antisemitic assertion that Jews speak in an incomprehensible language) and “Maus” (the small animals with an almost inaudible voice). Despite their antisemitic prejudices, Josephine manages to win her audience. In her singing, she is able to show them “truth and future visions”—not only in favor of the emancipation of the Jewish population, but also of a more modern perspective on the construction of masculinity and femininity. For this conclusion in the novella, Kafka, in fact, incorporates what he witnessed in the Prague Café Savoy (Zierler 2013: 104-105). What seems to be shared among all these discourses and performative practices of modernity is that Jewish protagonists were key figures; they did not address their Jewish identifications, since other identifications such as gender were much more of interest. The making of modern entertainment could thus

14 15

On the influence of Otto Weininger’s writings on Jewish womanhood in Vienna around 1900, see Pellegrini 1997: 109. On the Oedipus Complex as an outcome of the increasing intriguing masculinization of Bildung (religious and secularized alike) and romanticism, see Litvak 2012: 25. On the exclusion of women from studying by the Haskalah, see Ibid. 42-44.

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be described as an open dialogue between Jews and non-Jews. However, gender identification reveals that the openness to stage gender bending, as Gilman aptly puts it, seems to have emerged through a Jewish sensibility (cf. Gelber 2014: 11-31).

4.

Conclusion

Jewish performers played a key role in the popularization of gender bending—emerging from the older tradition of breeches roles, which had its roots in restrictions on men and women being allowed to perform on stage—in sites of popular entertainment from the last decades of the 19th century onward, as well as on film in the interwar period. Modernity and the broad emancipation were entangled, however, with persistent biases. This made popular entertainment—as a newly shaped and rapidly growing field—particularly interesting and open. The double marginality of their identities as both Jewish and itinerant performers enabled them to become successful in the project of modernity, making them the most renowned stars in the entertainment scene in Varietés. In the Varietés, they mainly contributed to the development of gender bending. They destabilized the borders of gender, sometimes even queered them, and invited their audiences to an open dialogue on established sexual norms. Jewish protagonists like Sarah Bernhardt, Risa Basté, Molly Picon, and Curt Bois created this sphere of popular entertainment together with non-Jews. Some limits to this openness remained, however, in this window of opportunity. Influenced by the antisemitic mood of fin-desiècle culture, Kafka’s analysis of a gender bending scene illustrates that in particular, male gender identifications stretched the openness of popular entertainment to its limits, and revealed the Jewish sensibility that shaped the Jewish and non-Jewish exchange in the project of modernity.

Bibliopgraphy Ara, Angelo/Magris, Claudio (1987): Triest: Eine literarische Hauptstadt in Mitteleuropa, München, Vienna: Hanser. Ash, Sholem (1907): Got fun nekome/Der Gott der Rache, Berlin: Fischer. Bach, Ulrich E. (2016): Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire, New York: Berghahn. Berlanstein, Lenard R. (1996): “Breeches and Breaches: Cross-Dress Theatre and the Culture of Gender Ambiguity in Modern France.” In: Comparative Studies in Society and History 38/2, pp. 338-369. Bering, Dietz (1996): “Der jüdische Name.” In: Julius Schoeps Julius/Joachim Schlör (eds.), Antisemitismus: Mythen und Vorurteile, Munich, Zurich: Piper, pp. 153-166. Brubaker, Rogers/Cooper, Frederick (2000): “Beyond ‘Identity.’” In: Theory and Society 29, pp. 1-47. Korbel, Susanne (2020a): Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté – Habsburgermonarchie bis Amerika, Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau.

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Korbel, Susanne (2020b): “Jews, Mobility, and Sex: Popular Entertainment between Budapest, Vienna, and New York around 1900.” In: Austrian History Yearbook 51, pp. 220-242. Boyarin, Daniel (1997): Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Berkeley: University of California Press. Brinkmann, Tobias (2012): Migration und Transnationalität, Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. Bunzel, Matti (2000): “Jews, Queers, and other Symptoms: Recent Work in Jewish Cultural Studies.“ In: Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 6/2, pp. 321-341. Davis, Natalie Zemon (1975): Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dietze, Antje (2020): “Wie organisiert man die Vergnügungsindustrie? Internationale Verbände der deutschsprachigen Varietéwelt, 1880–1929,” In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 46/1, pp. 87-121. Elon, Amos (2002): The Pity of it All: A Portrait of Jews in Germany 1743–1933, London: Penguin Books. Faber, Monika/Ruelfs, Esther/Vuković Magdalena (eds. 2017): Machen Sie mich schön, Madame d’Ora! Dora Kallmus, Fotografin in Wien und Paris 1907–1957, Wien: Brandstätter. Felder, Deborah G./Rosen, Diana (2005): Fifty Jewish Women who Changed the World, New York: Citadel. Gay, Peter (1978): Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Garber, Marjorie (1992): Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, New York: Routledge. Garber, Marjorie (2003): “Category Crises: The Way of the Cross and the Jewish Star.“ In: Daniel Boyarin/Daniel Itzkovitz/Ann Pelligrini (eds.), Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 19-40. Gelber, Mark H. (2014): Stefan Zweig, Judentum und Zionismus, Innsbruck, Wien and Bozen: Studienverlag. Gilman, Sander L. (2009 [1991]): The Jew’s Body, 2nd edition, London, New York: Routledge. Gilman, Sander L. (1993): “Salome, Syphilis, Sarah Bernhardt and the ‘Modern Jewess’“. In: The German Quarterly 66/2, pp. 195-211. Gluck, Mary (2016): The Invisible Jewish Budapest: Metropolitan Culture at the Fin de Siècle, Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Gottlieb, Robert (2010): Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt, New Haven: Yale University Press. Hödl, Klaus (2014): “The Quest for Amusement: Jewish Leisure Activities in Vienna circa 1900.” In: Jewish History and Culture 14/1, pp. 1-17 Hödl, Klaus (2017): Zwischen Wiener Lied und Der kleine Kohn: Juden in der Wiener populären Kultur um 1900, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hoffman, Warren (2009): The Passing Game: Queering Jewish American Culture, New York: Syracuse University Press.

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Howe, Elizabeth (1992): The First English Actresses, Women and Drama 1660–1700, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knepler, Henry (1968): The gilded stage: The lives and careers of four great actresses – Rachel, Ristori, Bernhardt, Duse, London: Constable. Joyce, James (1998 [1922]): Ulysses, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeri Johnson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kafka, Franz (1965 [1948]): The diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910–1913, ed. by Max Brod, New York: Schocken. Litvak, Olga (2012): Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Maase, Kaspar (2007): Grenzenloses Vergnügen: Der Aufstieg der Massenkultur 1850–1970, Frankfurt a. Main: Fischer. Mast Rudolf/Sabine Zolchow (2001): “’Die anderen amüsieren sich königlich’. Curt Bois auf der Bühne der Weimarer Republik.” In: Sabine Zolchow/Johanna Muschelknautz (eds.), Ich mache alles mit den Beinen … Der Schauspieler Curt Bois, Berlin: Verlag Vorwerk 8, pp. 10-38. Meder, Iris/Firscher-Westhauser Ulla (2012): Vienna’s Shooting Girls. Jüdische Fotografinnen aus Wien, Wien: Metroverlag. Mosse, George L. (1985): German Jews beyond Judaism, Bloomington, Cincinnati: Indiana University Press/Hebrew College Press. Ockman, Carol/Silver, Kenneth E. (eds., 2005): Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama, New Haven: Yale University Press. Pellegrini, Ann (1997): “Whiteface Performances: ‘Race,‘ Gender, and the Jewish Bodies.“ In: Daniel Boyarin/Jonathan Boyarin (eds.), Jews and other Differences: The new Jewish Identity in Cultural Studies, Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 108-149. Schlögel, Karl (2011): Promenade in Jalta: und andere Stadtbilder, München, Vienna: Hanser. Schlör, Joachim (2015): Victor Laszlo – ein Wunsch-Bild aus der Emigration, Graz: Leykam. Segal, Jérome/Kaczek, Monika (2010): “Molly Picon and the Cinematique Archetype of a Jewish Women.” In: Cinemascope 6/14, pp. 1-16. Silverman, Lisa (no date): “Madame d’Ora.“ In: Jewish Women’s Archive, July 30, 2020 (https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/madame-dora). Sincluar, Eve (1995): “Gender Rebellion in Yiddish Film” In: Lillith 20/4, pp. 12-17. Spector, Scott (2016): Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860–1914, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Williams, Carla (2004): “Louise Abbéma.“ In: Claude Summers (ed.), The Queer Encyclopedia of the Visual Arts, San Francisco: Clei. Wingfield, Nancy M. (2017): The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zierler, Wendy (2013): “Joseph(ine), the Singer: The Queer Joseph and Modern Jewish Writers,” In: Nashim – A Journal of Women’s Studies & Gender Issues 24, pp. 97-119. Zolchow, Sabine/ Muschelknautz, Johanna (eds., 2001): Ich mache alles mit den Beinen … Der Schauspieler Curt Bois, Berlin: Vorwerk.

Popular Entertainment in Central Europe as a Space for Jewish and Queer Migration Experiences

Zweig, Stefan (2014 [1941]): Die Welt von Gestern, 41st edition, Frankfurt: Fischer.

Archival Sources Basté, Risa (1902): Liedertexte, Theater – Textbücher der Theaterzensur 117/24, Niederösterreichische Regierung Präsidium, Niederösterreichisches Landesarchiv, St. Pölten, Austria. “Baum Orpheum.“ In: Mährisches Tagblatt, April 7, 1896, p. 5. Boir, Curt (1929): “Das Leben ist schön.“ In: Neues Wiener Journal, June 29, 1929, pp. 15-16. Breitner, Erhard (1928): “Berliner Premieren.” In: Die Bühne, no. 174 [no date], p. 9. “Damenimitator Mr. Man de Wirth.“ In: Mährisches Tagblatt, April 27, 1896, p. 7. Der Kuckuck, January 10, 1932, p.8. “Fräulein Damenimitator.” In: Das kleine Blatt, September 21, 1927, p. 7. Kafka, Franz (1924): “Josefine, die Sängerin.” In: Prager Presse, April 20, 1924, pp. iv-vii. Neue Züricher Zeitung, October 1, 1934, p. 4. “Roithners Theater Varieté.“ In: Linzer Tages Post, December 8, 1894, pp. 5-6. “Roithners Theater Variété.“ In: Neue Linzer Tagespost, April 29, 1899, p. 4. “Solche Späße sind oft kein Spaß: Ein Gespräch mit Kurt Bois.“ In: Der Film, no. 303 (1931), p. 5. “Sondervorstellung in den Kammerspielen,“ Neues Wiener Tagblatt, August 8, 1921, p. 4. “Varieté Schwan.“ In: Terplitz-Schönauer Anzeiger, August 6, 1902, p. 5. Wiener Morgenzeitung, December 13, 1921, p. 8. Yidisher visnshaftlekher institute, Records Group 738: Molly Picon, YIVO Institute New York.

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Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine Yuval Yonay

This article examines the contribution of gay immigrants who came to Mandatory Palestine from Germany to the emergence of the gay community in the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine prior to independence in 1948. The article is divided into seven sections. The first briefly reviews the new discourse about sexual orientation that emerged in Central and Western Europe at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th . The next section deals with references to male same-sex sex in religious, legal, newspaper, and literary texts in Mandatory Palestine, distinguishing between discourse on same-sex behavior and discourse on same-sex orientation, that is, homosexuality. Section 3 presents the oral history project from which I took the two main stories that serve as the basis for my analysis here. These two stories are narrated at length in the following two sections, leading to Section 6, in which I recap the significance of the gay immigrants from Germany for the development of a gay community in Mandatory Palestine. Based on my analysis of post-Independence newspapers, I propose that the attitudes toward sexual orientation that some German Jews brought with them to Palestine did not penetrate the Jewish mainstream until much later. Israeli society only became cognizant of, and more receptive to, these attitudes during the 1950s and 1960s, in the wake of post-war changes in Western societies.

1.

The Jeckes and the European Discourse on Sexuality

Many thousands of German Jews immigrated to Palestine after the rise of National Socialism (Nazism) to power in 1933, in response to measures taken against them as Jews, their political and social disenfranchisement, and the growing danger to their lives. Many of them did not share the Zionist aspiration for Jewish national revival, and Palestine was often a destination of last resort. Other immigrants immersed in German culture also came from Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia due to increasing instability and rising anti-Semitism in those countries as well. The influence of all these immigrants was immense. This was not only because of their numbers—60,000

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from Germany alone, in a society that numbered only 175,000 Jews according to the 1931 census—but also due to the (relative) wealth they brought with them and their human capital: the academic, professional, and technical knowledge that they had accumulated in some of the most scientifically, technologically, and economically advanced countries of that time (Gelber 1990). In the 1920s, a period known in Germany as “The Golden Twenties”, German culture underwent an explosion of philosophical, social, artistic and political creativity that quickly spread to major Central European metropoles like Vienna, Prague, and Budapest. Among such paradigm shifts was a new way of thinking about human sexuality in general and same-sex sexuality in particular. The work of Sigmund Freud naturally springs to mind, but he was only one among many. Although the thinking on same-sex sexuality started changing in the last decades of the 19th century—the word “homosexuality” was coined in 1869—the idea that people could be classified into groups according to the object of their sexual desire first took hold in major metropoles around the turn of the 20th century and reached its peak in Berlin of the Wilhelmine and Weimer eras (Beachy 2014; Cook 2003; Faderman 1991; Halperin 1990; Houlbrook 2005; Kinsman 1987; Lybeck 2015; Marhoefer 2015; Tamagne 2004; Weeks 1991). This idea incorporated the notions that (a) such classification implies different psychological structures; and (b) people who belonged to different sexualities lead different lifestyles. Scholars debate whether the psychological discourse on “homosexuality” (including lesbianism) was a revolutionary new conceptualization of sexuality defined by same-sex attraction or whether it was merely a new term to express much older notions (Boswell 1989; Halperin 1990, 2002; Stein 1990). This article adopts the former view, arguing that the introduction of the new terminology radically changed the ways people who engaged in same-sex sex thought about themselves, and the ways they were perceived and treated by others. In this article, I argue that the spread of the new approach in Mandatory Palestine was greatly facilitated by the arrival of German Jews, the Jeckes, of whom many had already been exposed to the new way of thinking. Unlike many of the cultural attitudes and ideas that the Jeckes brought with them to Palestine, which had a direct and immediate influence, German theories of sexuality were not readily adopted by medical and psychological institutions in Palestine. However, women and men who adopted homosexual (gay and lesbian) identities became models for others and exposed even those who had no sexual attraction to their own sex to the existence of “homosexuals” and “lesbians” as social categories.

2.

Discourses on sodomy and homosexuality in Mandatory Palestine

The shift from one discourse to another is a complex process involving various agencies and people, in different social and geographic locations, interacting continuously (Foucault 1970). Mandatory Palestine—in the heart of the Arab world, temporarily administrated by Great Britain on behalf of the League of Nations, and a destination for Jews from numerous countries, was an arena in which old and new ideas whirled fast and furious, probably more so than in many other places where modernization was said to be taking place (Pappe 2004).

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

According to Ben-Naeh (2005), in the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire, male same-sex sexual activity was common among unmarried men to such a degree that the religious authorities suspected that it could occur any time two single men were left unsupervised. Some men were known to be fonder of it than others, but they were not classified as a separate social class as gays are today. Same-sex male sex in the Ashkenazi communities of Eastern Europe, from where most Jewish immigrants arrived to Palestine during the Ottoman and Mandatory periods, is a topic that still awaits its scholarly due (but cf. Ben-Naeh 2016). We also know very little about same-sex male relationships among the non-Jewish populations of Eastern Europe, but according to Healey (2001) in Tsarist Russia male-to-male sex was quite common and drew no uproar as long as it was practiced in private. Eastern European Jews, located on the outskirts of two German-language empires and their attendant cultures, must have felt the reverberations of the new sexual discourse, especially in the larger and more secular Jewish communities of the cities. The responses to this discourse have hardly been treated in academic literature, and therefore it is impossible to even speculate about the ideas on same-sex sex that Jewish immigrants of the first immigration waves (aliyot) brought with them from Eastern Europe (but see Dotan Brom and Piotr Laskovski, this volume). The Ottoman Empire, following the Napoleonic Code, decriminalized voluntary anal sex between adult men in the 1860s, and thus it was not a violation of the law in Palestine when Britain conquered it in 1917 (Alyagon Darr 2019; Yonay 2016). Even prior to that, anti-sodomy prohibitions had not been enforced, as Islamic law required two eyewitnesses of the sexual act and the authorities had no interest in enforcing the law. Admiration of male beauty and close friendships among men were quite common in Middle Eastern societies and not regarded as indications of sexual desire (AbuKhalil 1993; Dunne 1990; El-Rouayheb 2005; cf. Massad 2007). In the 1920s, the new British rulers of Palestine contemplated re-criminalizing sodomy as one of the small number of changes they initially introduced into Ottoman law, which by and large continued to be valid. However, the British authorities at that time decided that the population in Palestine was not yet ready for such a “civilizing” intervention (Alyagon Darr 2019). In 1936, however, the Mandatory government enacted a new penal code that, among many other changes, re-criminalized sodomy. The rationale for this policy is not entirely clear. There was no attempt to enforce the anti-sodomy law, and according to the very few cases in which men were charged for violating it, the offenders were accidently caught “in the act” by police officers or snitched on by hostile neighbors, leaving the police no choice but to act according to the law. Hence it seems that the purpose of criminalization—which occurred also in other British colonies such as India, Uganda, and Cyprus—was declarative, namely, to educate native people on proper behavior (ibid.). The criminalization of sodomy went unnoticed in contemporary newspapers and seemed not to have changed common practices (Yonay 2016). The law itself made no reference to homosexuality and also banned “unnatural intercourse” between a man and a woman. It only became known as a law that “banned homosexuality” much later (Yonay and Spivak 1999; Yonay 1998). Unlike in many other British colonies (Human Rights Watch 2008), the British authorities in Palestine did not enact anything simi-

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lar to the Gross Indecency Act of 1885, which more broadly prohibited two men from engaging in sexual gratification together. According to Alyagon Darr’s (2019) study of the legal history of sexual offenses in Mandatory Palestine, cases of sexual attacks on male minors, including young children, were quite common in this period, and boys were the target as frequently as girls. In her corpus of 147 sexual violations cases, she found 101 cases that involved sexual attacks on minors, of whom boys numbered more than girls (56 percent). In 44 cases, the victim was a boy younger (in some cases much younger) than 16. Very few cases involving sexual attacks on adult men were reported, and the reason might be the shame men felt for not being able to prevent forced sodomy and their fear that they might be faulted for their failure to resist the attacker. Judges, Alyagon Darr argues, were suspicious even of male teenage victims of sexual attacks, often insinuating that they had engaged in sexual relations willfully and complained only to avoid shame. The Hebrew newspapers of the time covered police and court records and reported cases of same-sex sexual assaults quite frequently (Ilany 2017: 111-2), though the report would usually be no more than one or two short lines. For example, in a column full of diverse criminal reports, one story is titled “Sodomy [Maase Sdom] again.” The entire report reads: “An Arab man accused of sodomy was sentenced by the District Court to 12 months imprisonment” (Doar HaYom, July 18, 1930).1 Ilany found that in about half the reports, the attacker was an Arab man, and in the other half, the accused were Jews from Muslim societies or “neglected youth”, that is, young men without an appropriate institutional arrangement (2017, 111-2). The association between orientalism and male sodomy was very common in both newspapers and professional literature. The assumption was that sex between men was an “oriental vice” (the title Ilany 2007 chose for his article dealing with this phenomenon), but the exact nature of the “vice” was not elaborated. It was not referred to as “homosexuality” in the newspapers and it was not attributed to a deviant group of Oriental subjects. Rather it was assumed that a desire for young men and boys was common among Arab men (including Jews of Near-Eastern background). The people who participated in this vice were not supposed to have an exclusive “taste” for men, and their sexual contacts were assumed to be based on payment, use of force, and exploitation rather than love. The legal and journalistic evidence cited above demonstrates that people in Mandatory Palestine were aware of male-to-male sex and perceived it as illicit behavior in which some men occasionally engaged, or as a behavior violently forced upon minors. The term “homosexual,” however, assumes that there is a distinct category of people—women as well as men—who are attracted exclusively to their own sex, a desire that makes them inherently different from heterosexual people. This modern discourse regarding sexual orientation, as well as the homosexual and lesbian identities internalized by subjects who felt same-sex attraction, spread during the first half of the 20th century from the intellectual elites of the largest European metropoles to other social strata, as well as to smaller cities and to other countries and continents.

1

My claim here is based on materials collected but not yet published. The last example is taken from those materials.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

Given that the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine was closely tied to Europe, it is not surprising that the new discourse reached Palestine as well. Previous studies have analyzed explicit references to male and, much more rarely, female homosexuality during the Mandatory period. They show that the terms “homosexual” and “lesbian” were known among professionals and intellectuals, but the degree to which they were recognized by lay people remains an open question. “Homosexuality” and “lesbianism” were, no doubt, part of the developing psychological discourse in Palestine. Orit Yaal (this volume) documents a reference to lesbianism as an identity that might have been adopted, according to psychologist Alfred Adler, by women who refused to accept their conventionally inferior social status. Mosche Wulff (1878-1971) and Anna Smeliansky (1879-1961) were two founding members of the Palestine (later Israel) Psychoanalytic Society mentioned in Dotan Brom’s narrative, who also appear below in the story of one of my interviewees. Wulff published an article in 1942 in The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, the leading psychoanalytic journal in English, titled “A Case of Homosexuality in Palestine.”2 The article, which tells the story of a Third Aliyah Jewish pioneer who came to Wulff due to impotency in his conjugal relationship, demonstrates that homosexuality was part of the local psychoanalytical discourse. Wulff and Smeliansky were Russian-born, but they studied and practiced in Berlin. Although not Jeckes by origin, they were wellversed in German culture and scholarship. Sexology, a new scientific field that was taking its first steps at the beginning of the 20th century, reached Palestine as well. Although Avraham Matmon (1900-1974), a physician and pioneer of sexology in Palestine, attended Magnus Hirschfeld’s progressive sexology institute, he expressed quite conservative attitudes in his books and in the opinions that he provided to newspapers (Ilany 2017: 115-6). Max Marcuse (1877-1963), a close associate of Hirschfeld and an editor of the Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1919-1931), a non-Zionist who immigrated to Palestine only because of Nazism, did not manage to re-establish the scholarly authority he had wielded in Berlin (Kozma 2010). The work of Max Hodann, another supporter of Hirschfeld’s radical approach, which had already been translated into Hebrew in Poland in 1930 (Dotan, this volume), was banned as pornographic by the Mandatory authorities (Kozma 2010: 235). Thus, despite the exposure to radical views and the arrival of several renowned sexologists from Germany, there was, according to Kozma, a failure of “radical sexual reform in Tel Aviv.” The field of sexology was led by Eastern European Jews, whose mission was to support what they conceived as a national interest of maintaining healthy marriage and childbearing. Anything that deviated from this goal, including homosexuality, was portrayed as unhealthy and dangerous. When Magnus Hirschfeld died in 1935, Davar carried a long obituary. His sexual identity was not explicitly mentioned, but it was not covered up either. “He established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,” the obituary read, “and submitted a petition to the Reichstag against Paragraph 175 (which carried a severe punishment for a homosexual act).” Hirschfeld, as Andreas Krass (this volume) recounts, was a distinguished 2

The article was published in German a year earlier in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago, the merged journal of the two most prominent German-language psychoanalytic journals at the time.

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guest in the Yishuv in 1932, meeting with many dignitaries and lecturing in front of large audiences. His companion, Li Shiu-tong (Tao Li), came with him, and one may assume that the nature of their relationship was clear to his hosts. The term “homosexual” did appear occasionally in newspapers in Mandatory Palestine, and it was assumed that readers had some notion about it. The term appeared in reports from other countries, often in conjunction with criminal cases. In a report on the Civil War in Spain, for instance, an English volunteer who was arrested by a rival socialist faction complained that he had spent time in jail “among thieves, homosexuals, and fascists” (Davar, 28.9.1937). The newspaper HaYarden reported that in a famous murder case in Paris, the murderer was a homosexual sailor (24.10.1935). But these were the exceptions rather than the rule. A close reading of contemporary newspapers reveals that the term “homosexuality” appeared very rarely; perhaps once a year, and often not at all. An exception was the sensational tabloid Iton Meyuhad, which deviated from the established norms of journalism in the Yishuv. As Ilany describes, the weekly publicized a sensational story about a “ring of escort boys” who served important figures in the Jewish Yishuv. The newspaper was not known for its reliability, and it is hard to know how much of the story was true, but it was one of the few channels through which the public could learn that “homosexuals”—to be distinguished from men who occasionally experienced sexual contact with other men—existed in the Jewish Yishuv. Another channel was short stories and novels with lesbian and homosexual characters, but such works were also very rare. I found one short story in the literary magazine Ketuvim (“Writings”) by Shraga Kadri (1907-1982), that mentions a homosexual patient in a hospital (May 21, 1931), and Yaal found one by Yosef Aricha (Aricha 1967) about a lesbian woman who tries to seduce and corrupt a younger woman (this volume). Lubin (2003) wrote about another short story—“Nurse Naomi” by Penina Kaspi (1916-1993), which was published in Davar (15.7.1938) and which Lubin interpreted as involving lesbian attraction, although the term does not appear in the story, nor is there explicit description of same-sex love. In Kadri’s and Aricha’s stories, the homosexual and lesbian characters were presented as sickening and dangerous, and homosexual relationships were presented as abnormal. These images thus fit the modern homophobic discourse that developed together with the sexual identity discourse and became dominant in Israel only during the 1960s and 1970s. Although rare, these few literary works show that the writers were familiar with the terms “homosexuality” and “lesbianism,” and expected at least their more sophisticated readers to be familiar with them as well. At the same time, the texts might be viewed as conduits of the notion of homosexuality and lesbianism as abhorrent sexuality intrinsic in some abnormal men and women. In any case, as a scholarly method, counting the occurrence of a given term in printed material such as newspapers, scholarly articles and books might be misleading. In our inspection of documents that span thirty years of the Mandatory period, Ilany, Yaal and I found a few dozen references to homosexuality and a smaller number to lesbianism. But the question remains: how likely was it that typical sabras (Hebrewspeakers born in Israel) would encounter the words homosexual or lesbian in their reading, and how did they make sense of the terms when they did?

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

My interviews with elderly Israeli gays show that during their youth they were not familiar with the concept of “homosexual” and did not consider themselves to be inherently different from other men. They learned the concept and adopted a distinct gay identity only after meeting or reading about “homosexuals”—that is, men who had taken on a gay identity. In my study described below, I investigate the extent to which native-born Israelis encountered gay German Jews in the Mandatory period and the early days of the State of Israel.

3.

Oral History of Male-to-Male Sex in Palestine/Israel

In 2001, I initiated an oral history project with gay men who were born in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. I referred to this project as “my rescue excavation,” alluding to the Israel Antiquities Authority’s practice of expedited digging when, in the midst of constructing a new road or building, archeological relics are found. So, too, we raced to record the gay past stored in the memories of the community elders before it was lost to history.3 Due to the aforementioned circumstances, the research was conducted in a rather non-conventional manner. The interviews, which were two hours in length, had no set questions. I hurried to gather as much information as I possibly could in the allotted time, not knowing whether I would have an opportunity to do a follow-up interview. Hence, I often jumped from one topic to another, not always insisting on getting all the details. As in real rescue excavations, I did what I could, and I am proud that I managed to save many unique and valuable stories that would have otherwise been lost. Altogether, I conducted 40 interviews with gay men and 6 with lesbians. The latter number is very small because I and the research assistant recruited for this project found only four lesbians who agreed to be interviewed and who had lesbian experiences prior to the 1970s. In the following years I interviewed two lesbian pioneers who have since left Israel. Thus, the lesbian history in Palestine remains much more obscure than male gay history, although a few glimpses thereof will appear below. The oldest person I interviewed was born in 1924; the youngest was born in 1948. Most of the information gleaned from these interviews pertains to the 1960s and 1970s, when the gay Jeckes who were still alive were quite old. The information they had to share was limited in scope, but since there is almost no other source of information on this topic, the little we do have is priceless. The next chapter will be based on an interview with Roni Tal, for whom the gay Jeckes played a significant role. His testimony regarding this group was brief but it offers rare historical insight. The following chapter will be based on the memories of Theo Mainz, who was born in Germany but arrived in Mandatory Palestine as a child. Although he

3

Two other gay researchers, Yuval Noah Harari, then a new member of the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Amir Fink Sumaka’i, then a doctoral student of archeology at the University of Chicago, had similar thoughts and for a while we joined efforts, but after some time they had to leave the project. I thank them for their contribution during the time we worked together.

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joined the Jecke gay circle as an adult, after he had already developed a modern gay identity, I suggest that his exposure to German culture was crucial to the formation of his gay identity. Together, these two stories demonstrate the importance of German culture in bringing the modern sexual orientation discourse to Palestine/Israel. As I will explain in the concluding section, however, the impact of the Jeckes was confined mostly to the gay community because the general public was exposed to the new discourse only in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Sabra Who Learned German Johnny and Roni’s home served as one of the first gay institutions in Tel Aviv. Long before gay bars and clubs became part of Tel Aviv night life, gays knew that on Wednesday nights they could stop by Johnny and Roni’s place. It was an “open house” and according to Roni, the guests included tourists, who had heard about their home from previous visitors. Other than cruising public parks, gay tourists had nowhere else to go to find gay life in the 1950s and 1960s. The gatherings in Johnny and Roni’s apartment took place for many years, although Roni thought that they began in 1962, but was not sure of the start and end dates. Who were Johnny and Roni? How did their house become an institution, and—most relevant for our purposes—what is the connection between this institution and the gay and lesbian Jeckes who arrived in Palestine after 1933? To answer these questions, I will tell the story of Roni, with whom I met twice for my research.4 Roni (1932-2017) was the son of a Jewish police officer in the Mandatory police, and the family moved several times throughout his childhood because of work. He reported rich sexual experience, beginning at age fifteen with both girls and adult men, including policemen who were stationed with his father. “Until I entered high school,” he recalled, ”I thought everybody was doing it with boys and with girls. I had a girlfriend as well, and we fooled around, and I was convinced that all boys … did it with other boys as well. At that time, I thought that even adults had both this and that [women and men] but they did not talk about it.” He emphatically denied that the concept of “homosexuality” was known to him and to his peers. When I asked him whether children laughed at homoim (the pl. form of “homo,” the most common slur for homosexuals), he answered definitely: “There was no such term!” “Not even as a slur?” I asked him, and he categorically repeated: “No such thing! It did not exist!” I then inquired how effeminate boys were treated, and he answered: “At most, they would be called ‘yalda’ (yalda is “girl”, but when the first syllable is accented, the meaning is more like “girlish”). Roni insisted that people did not associate girlishness with sexual orientation. Although this association appears natural to us, it was not common at the time of Roni’s childhood and emerged many years later.

4

I promised anonymity to my interviewees or to consult with them if I mentioned their names. Roni’s story is so unique that I cannot conceal his identity, and I cannot ask his permission now that he has deceased. I was, however, very careful not to mention any confidential detail that Roni might not have wished to share with the public.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

Figure 6.1: Roni Tal, not dated; unknown photographer, a present of Roni’s sister to the author

When Roni was sixteen he had a girlfriend, but he also found out about gay cruising on the beach and in cinemas. And, of course, I knew about the beach. Where does one go? To the beach! I don’t know what led me there. And the cinemas. […] men would make a move; place their hands. I went to the cinemas and met many men there. […] Then, at the age of sixteen I went to the beach, and that’s where I met all the guys. Actually, I met someone who introduced me to someone else, who introduced me to another, who introduced me to still another man. It was like branches, and I met, and met, and met, and then at the age of seventeen, I met my partner.

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According to the story Roni told me, his partner, Johnny (Isidor Nebenzahl, 1909-1994), served in Mahal (“Volunteers from Abroad,” Jews from overseas who volunteered to serve in the Jewish army during the 1948 War) and, later, as an officer in the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces). In a story published in Yedioth Ahronoth based on an interview with Roni, it was said that Johnny “was a budding journalist in Ethiopia, a major in the British Army who served in Africa and the Far East during the Second World War, a volunteer in the IDF when the state was established, and the Commander of Military Prison 4 in Tzrifin” (Peretz 2010). After Roni’s death, his sister told me that Johnny, a Belgian Jew, had been a veteran of the French Foreign Legion and a guard during the Mandatory period in a camp for illegal immigrants in Atlit. Although the sister strongly insisted that Roni “had never been shy of anything” and expressed doubts about the accuracy of her own recollection, I suspect that the cause for the contradictory stories about Johnny was Roni’s discomfort in admitting his romantic ties with someone who served the British campaign against Jewish Aliya.5 But I was not concerned with issues of national loyalty. I was interested in Roni, the person, and how he conceptualized his relationship with another man. Roni insisted that it never occurred to him that he belonged to a separate category, a minority, of “homosexuals,” because he had neither heard the term nor thought about a group of people whose sexuality differed from that of the norm. Although he had had many sexual experiences with men, he had “known” that he should have girlfriends, that he would get married one day, as all men do. How did such a young man, a teenager, become involved in a long-term relationship with another man? This is a question I asked him directly: Q: Did you already know about couples? A: […] I told you, one Jecke introduced me to another Jecke; all of them were from Germany or from the Austro-Hungarian culture, and--Q: They lived as couples? Were there many couples among them? A: There were boyfriends etc., and girlfriends. This matter of relationships (zugiut) was not unfamiliar to me […] Q: Were there people who lived together in the same place? A: No, I did not know people [couples] who lived in the same house. Q: Were most of them married or single? A: All of them were single. As Roni described it, the idea of getting into a gay relationship dawned on him when he witnessed such relationships among the gay German Jews he met in Tel Aviv. While such couples did not live together, as far as he knew—he and Johnny only moved in 5

I thank Roni’s sister, Ora, for providing important details about Johnny, including his full name which was unknown within the gay community. Johnny’s biographical details are still vague, however. Until Ora provided me with the full name, I was sure that Johnny was not Jewish, as she also mentioned that he was a permanent resident rather than an Israeli citizen. Non-Jewish same-sex partners’ rights to live in Israel were not recognized, of course, at the time, and according to my memory, one of the other interviewees told me that Giora Yoseftal, then the Head of the Absorption Department of the Jewish Agency (see below, and also in Sluhovsky, this volume), was involved in letting Johnny stay in Israel as a permanent resident.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

together several years after they had become a couple—he learned that gay Jeckes had long-term partnerships, and not just occasional sexual encounters of the kind he had experienced.

Figure 6.2: Roni Tal and his partner, Isidor Nebenzahl, at their apartment, not dated; unknown photographer, a present of Roni’s sister to the author

Even more revolutionary, perhaps, than the idea of men in a long-term relationship, was the fact that those men did not marry. Prior to this realization, Roni had considered marriage as a natural and unavoidable aspect of adult life. As mentioned, as a teenager he had thought that all men “had both this and that,” women and men, but kept their sexual contacts with men under wraps. Roni became a regular in the gay scene of the Jeckes which had emerged in Tel Aviv during the thirties. He provided us with a glimpse of that world: It was a clique of men who … lived their lives as it was in Europe. … And most of the meetings were in private houses. Every Friday in someone else's [house]; they were meeting on Saturdays as well; there was the café of Saturday afternoon, kind of a tradition as it was in Germany. Roni was exceptionally young for this setting, which attracted mostly middle-aged men or older. “[I] was a child. […] But I felt okay with that, namely, I learned a great, great, great deal from them.” He admitted to having had sex with two of these men before he met Johnny, but “with the others it was friendship.” Unlike the cruising spaces he had already discovered, the gatherings of the gay Jeckes were not just about sex, they also served an important social function, enabling the men to establish friendships and support each other. The gay Jeckes created a community, and, apparently, they were open to other (non-German Jewish) people with same-sex interests, like Roni.

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Still, a sabra teenager fraternizing with older Jeckes would have been an unusual sight, and I wondered whether Roni had not feared being associated with the group. His answer was intriguing. “Among the Jeckes,” he explained, “one could not hide... [they] immediately knew [who was gay]; by a hand gesture, a movement, a look; they immediately comprehended, immediately.” The sabras, however, “understood nothing” about the unique behavior, clothing, and language of gay Jeckes and could not distinguish them from normative heterosexual Jeckes. Roni claimed that to the sabras, all Jeckes were a bit odd: “A Jecke is a Potz6 and that’s it! Anything looks strange? Ah, yes, he is a Jecke.” This quote alerts us to a crucial aspect of the cultural innovation brought by the Jeckes to Palestine. It was not only the gay culture which was imported; it was also the very division of people into “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals,” a word which became necessary only after the “invention” of homosexuals (Katz 1995). Familiarity with this new distinction was part of the German culture, and many Jeckes, not only homosexual men and women, recognized the slight signs that allowed one to know who belonged to which category. Roni claimed that associating with the group did not automatically label him gay to the general public but still, young sabras were not expected to befriend older Jeckes, so Roni was careful not to be seen with them in public. Even concerning his much older boyfriend, Johnny, he recounted, “we did not walk together in the street, side by side and talking; he walked in front and I behind him or the other way around. When we went to the cinema, Johnny or I went first … and when the lights went off, the other went in and sat next to the other; and before the movie was over, someone went out first.” With the discovery of a gay world, Roni also discovered the need to hide. His sexual exploits had always been conducted in secret, but now his social connections with certain people and his intimate relationship with Johnny also needed to be kept under wraps. In other words, he felt that he had to conceal his very identity, his membership in a class which, only a year or two earlier, he had not been aware of. Roni divided the gays he met in the late 1940s into two groups, “the Jeckes and the Varsovians,” those coming from Warsaw, or more generally from Poland. “The Varsovians,” Roni informed us, “were more hidden.” I asked Roni if this meant that Varsovian gays tended to be married, and Roni seemed to agree, but his answer was not definitive. It is difficult to know how much interaction took place between the two groups. Roni recalled constant exchange between the two groups but added that “the dominant language was German,” indicating the prominence of German Jews in the gay world. When I asked whether the two common languages of the gay community were “German and Yiddish,” he emphatically corrected me: “German and German! This is the language we spoke.” When he entered the Jecke society, he himself “had not known a word in German. […] I sat as if in a cocoon unless someone addressed me in English. … So slowly, slowly I got it and mastered German.”

6

A “potz” (from “putz”, “dick” in Yiddish) is, according to Hebrew slang dictionaries, slang for a stupid person, especially one who pretends to be very smart. Yet “Jecke Potz” had a special meaning. It was used by the much more cavalier sabras to mock what seemed to them the overly punctilious nature of German Jews.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

Roni’s story about his initiation into the Jecke group is a rare testimony about the gay community of the late 1940s. It is worth mentioning that there was one remark which I failed to give adequate attention to during the interview, a remark that came in answer to my question: “There were the Jeckes, and who else?” Roni’s answer was: “There were Jeckes, and there were Varsovians; edot ha-mizrakh were not gay [homoim] at all.” Since I was busy digesting the new information about a gay circle of Polish-born men in Tel Aviv, I overlooked this telling reference to edot ha-mizrakh, a general term for Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and North Africa. What does it mean that “edot ha-mizrakh were not gay at all”? I have no doubt that Roni met Sephardic Jews who had sex with men. As mentioned above, the view that sodomy was a commonplace in the East was widespread in the Jewish Ashkenazi Yishuv (Ilany 2017), and Roni himself referred to it in the interviews I conducted with him. Thus, I believe that we have to consider more judiciously the meaning of “homoim” in the sentence. I chose to translate it as gay, because in the LGBT vernacular that has become common in Israel since the 1990s, the Hebrew use of the word “homo” is parallel to the use of “gay” in contemporary English. The term “homo” did not exist in Israel in the 1940s and 1950s, and thus its use by Roni in the 2003 interview was anachronistic—a common phenomenon in oral history interviews. Assuming that Roni knew that there were Sephardic men who had sex with other men, a plausible interpretation is that he chose the term “homoim” to refer to social identity; Sephardic Jews were not homoim in the sense that they did not identify as gay men with a distinctly gay lifestyle, unlike the Ashkenazi Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, who developed the gay social scene that Roni discovered in Tel Aviv of the late 1940s. A terse allusion to sabras, those Jews born in Mandatory Palestine, might support this interpretation. Noticing that Roni did not mention any other native-born Israelis who had joined the Jecke circles during the 1930s and 1940s, I explicitly asked him, “What did the other gay sabras do?” His answer was that “There were very few; they would go, do their fucking and this, when there were parties, they were invited.” He later said that he met gay sabras mostly in the Strich (the cruising area along the beach in Tel Aviv) and emphasized again that “they did not come to the [Jecke] havura (social circle, group).” It is worth noting that Strich was a German term for the area in the capital of the AustroHungarian Empire where prostitution was tolerated, and Stricher was a German term for a male prostitute, two additional examples of the German influence on gay culture in the Yishuv. It seems to me that Roni made a distinction between those sabras who adopted a distinctly gay identity and those who did not. Men who identified as gay—including sabra homoim and homoim from the edot haMizrach—were invited to the parties of the gay German-Jewish emigres. Those who “merely” had sex with men were not invited. Such a distinction was not due to his familiarity with queer theories and the literature on sexual identities. Rather, it was a distinction he developed himself, based on his own experience and the understanding that these two groups were different; that his own life changed once he entered the gay circle and formed a more permanent relationship with another man.

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A Jecke Child’s Story Unlike Roni, Theo Mainz (1924-2007) did not have to learn German; he was German, a Jecke child who arrived in Palestine as a teenager. As such, he was not familiar with the gay culture of Weimar Germany. He developed a gay identity and discovered the gay world in Palestine, but as his story demonstrates, his Jecke heritage played a major role in this process. Theo, born in Frankfurt am Main, was an active member of the social gay circles of Tel Aviv. In 1975 he was a founding member of the first gay and lesbian association, HaAguda LeShmirat Zekhuiot HaPrat (the Association for the Protection of Individual Rights; today, The Aguda – The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel). In 1976, he and Avi Engle, the first Chair of the Aguda, were the first gay persons to talk live on Israeli TV about gay issues. Although Theo appeared incognito, he was identified at the studio by a colleague who happened to be there, and his sexuality became known in the hospital where he worked as a nutritionist. After Theo was “outed”, he was openly involved in the gay movement until his death in 2007. He shared his personal history in the first anthology on Israeli gay men (ed. Sumaka’i Fink and Press, Stanford University Press, 1999: 321-364). I interviewed him twice (the second time with Yuval Noah Harari). Theo’s father was a banker and his mother a lawyer, although she did not work in her profession. They were both from religious families, but according to Theo, not strictly observant ones. The family moved first to Amsterdam (in 1936), leaving for Palestine only at the very last moment before Nazi occupation, in March 1940. He recalled that his first exposure to sexual knowledge was due to his mother’s efforts to make up for the lack of Jewish education in Amsterdam, where he attended a public school. His mother taught him parashat hashavua (the weekly portion of the Torah), and as part of her lessons, she had to explain the meaning of such things as prostitution and menstruation. Although perhaps a trivial detail, this may indicate that the discourse of German Jews contained fewer taboos on sexual matters than that of Eastern European Jews. In his late teens, Theo developed a sense of being different. He engaged in sexual play with male classmates, and, like the adolescent Roni, was not aware that his attraction to male bodies was not shared by other boys. He had not heard of the concept of homosexuality, even in a humorous context or one of profanity. But then he read about it in the Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, a German-language encyclopedia which his parents had brought with them from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, and then to their home in Ramat Gan, near Tel Aviv. According to his memory of the encyclopedia entry, the term was first defined, and then the penalties homosexuals faced in various countries were specified. When he read it, he was still not completely aware that he was one of those homosexuals, but he had learned the term. He also looked for psychology books in bookstores, seeking to find out more about sex. What he remembered from those books was the claim that homosexuals met in public restrooms and beaches. Those books, he told us, were in German and in English. Hebrew books on sexuality were few and far between, and those that did exist said almost nothing about homosexuality. Theo read German, of course, and was also fluent in English, and thus could read things that were normally not accessible to most sabra children (cf. Giora Manor’s experience in Brom’s article, this volume).

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

Figure 6.3: Theo Mainz, not dated; unknown photographer; courtesy of the archive of The Aguda – The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel

Unlike Roni, who learned about homosexuals by meeting them, Theo’s knowledge was based on his reading. Even though he had not yet met anyone who was known to be a “homosexual,” his reading was enough to convince him that he belonged in that category. When he was 17 or 18, he decided that “he was attracted only to men, and had no interest in women, not knowing what to do with them.” This decision notwithstanding, it took him a long time to realize his sexual desires, and until he gathered the courage to do so, he was very attentive to hints of similar attraction among those around him. His attention to those memories was part of his identity development and is therefore relevant to this article.

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After school, Theo started training as a cook in the prestigious Kalia hotel on the coast of the Dead Sea,7 and there he heard the waiters and cooks gossiping about who was homosexual, and speaking derogatively about homosexuals. Many of the hotel workers came from Germany or from other Central European countries, and sexual orientation was apparently part of their quotidian talk. Such talk could not have taken place among sabras at that time, because, unlike the Europeans, they did not think of people in terms of sexual orientation. Theo believed, for example, that the Jecke gardener, a poet with long hair, was a homosexual, and after he had left the hotel, he learned—he did not explain how—that the tennis instructor was a homosexual as well. Theo was attracted to the Sudanese and Palestinian waiters, some of whom tried to seduce him, but he was too shy and fearful to respond to their advances and did not have sex with anyone. Theo did not describe the Palestinians and the Sudanese as homosexuals. I did not ask him about this, but I assume he did not consider them to be homosexuals because their desire to “use” him sexually did not mean they identified as homosexuals. At that time, Theo also felt embarrassed by not having a girlfriend, and pretended in front of his ex-high school classmates with whom he had remained in contact that he had a girlfriend but could not bring her with him to events because she was married to another man. The knowledge that some hotel workers and guests were homosexual and the awareness that male same-sex sex occurred in the hotel did not help Theo; he had already internalized the homophobia that came with the division of humankind into “normal heterosexuals” and “abnormal homosexuals.” Theo’s abstinence notwithstanding, his Jecke workmates apparently saw through him and realized he was a homosexual. Being part of a culture that distinguished people according to sexual orientation, they were familiar with the signals of homosexuality (and heterosexuality) and routinely used them to classify people. Thus, when Theo requested a reference from the chef with whom he worked, the latter gave him a letter to the owner of a famous bookshop saying, in German, that Theo was “one of us.” “Now I understand what he meant,” Theo told us, but, “at that time, I thought he meant that I was a Jecke like them. I couldn’t imagine that he would write something like this [that he was a homosexual].” Thus, even if Theo was too naïve at that time to understand it, his detailed memories and post-facto reflections allow us to see how the Jecke gay network functioned in those days. Theo said he knew the chef was homosexual because the chef once invited him home and showed him “very pornographic literature, very artistic, that he had in his house.” Theo was too shy to respond to the sexual overtures, and the chef gave up, but Theo was quite sure that the chef had intended to seduce him that evening. Two waiters in Kalia—named Helmut and Kurt, indicating their German origins—probably also recognized Theo’s homosexuality and told him about the manager of the King David Hotel, Mr. Hamburger, a Swiss man who “loved young men.” They

7

Kalia Hotel, a subsidiary of the Palestine Potash Company, opened in 1938, and was a famous luxury hotel that served the British, Palestinian, Jewish, and Transjordanian elites until the 1948 War. The manager of the hotel was also a Jecke who arrived soon after Hitler took power in Germany (Maariv, July 3, 1967).

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

advised him to approach Hamburger, because “you are a young man, and he’d like you.” They told him that sometimes “all the guys go to the [hotel] safe room and have an orgy.” I tried to inquire more about this conversation, hoping to clarify how serious the two waiters were and where they got their information. Theo, however, was not bothered by such concerns and accepted the information as valid, adding that he was quite certain that at least one of the two was homosexual. This hearsay information cannot stand as evidence that gay orgies occurred inside the safe room of the King David Hotel, but the very fact that such an event was imagined and discussed can give us a taste of the discourse among gays at that time. Regardless of what transpired in the hotel, it is through such verbal exchanges that Theo learned about the existence of “homosexuals” and the meaning of being homosexual. In Kalia, Theo also met gay guests. Once, he narrated, two couples arrived at the hotel, but to his astonishment, the two ladies took one room, and the two men a second. He remembered the identity of the guests. One of the men was a Jecke, Hans Nathan, and one of the women was his wife, Rosie.8 Hans Nathan was mentioned by several other interviewees in my project as a central figure in the gay scene of Tel Aviv in the 1950s and 1960s. He was a successful importer, and his name appeared occasionally in newspapers. According to an obituary published in the daily Maariv after his mysterious death in Capri, Rosie and Hans Nathan divorced in 1945. About that time, his non-Jewish partner, Bob, came from Germany and lived with him until Hans’ death. He might have known Bob before the war, because according to one interviewee, Nathan sent Bob food packages as soon as the war ended. Their lavish apartment in North Tel Aviv was another site of gay life. They used to hold extravagant parties but, unlike Roni and Johnny’s open house, Hans and Bob’s parties required an invitation. Theo mentioned Nathan’s divorcee, Rosie, once again in the interview. He saw her in Tel Aviv a few years after her visit to Kalia. She was walking with another woman, in such a way that “it was obvious that they were a lesbian couple.” He identified the other woman as Hilde Zadek. Zadek (1917-2019), a distinguished lesbian singer in the Vienna State Opera (New York Times, February 2, 2019), was born in Bromberg (today Bydgoszcz, Poland) and moved with her family to Stettin (today Czczecin, Poland). Escaping to Palestine in 1934, Zadek probably developed a lesbian identity in Palestine, but one may assume that her German background and her participation in the Jecke society of Mandatory Palestine facilitated the development of such an identity. For our purposes, the main point is that Theo witnessed glimpses of gay lives in Mandatory Palestine, and he understood their social meaning due to his exposure to German culture. After his training in Kalia and a few temporary jobs, Theo got a post in Armon Hotel, across the street from the London Park in Tel Aviv, which at the time was a known cruising area for gays. Most of the workers spoke German; they were from Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The barman was a Jecke named Richard Strauss, “who was

8

The other man was identified by Theo as “Arieli,” a Bulgarian Jew who had a souvenir shop on Ben-Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv and later left for France and became, according to Theo, a famous photographer. The other woman was the wife of a famous lawyer whose name Theo could not remember.

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gay ... German, … a bit feminine, and he knew how to make people talk. And all the homosexual soldiers went there; the information passed on through the grapevine.” Theo told us that the barman was important for attracting gay clientele to the bar. It happened once that the barman resigned following a dispute with the management, after which the soldiers disappeared. Shortly thereafter, the hotel brought him back in. After the 1948 War, he left for America. This testimony adds an additional piece to our portrayal of gay culture in Mandatory Palestine, and perhaps it is not accidental that the man in the center of the gay circle was a German Jew. According to Theo, there was a group of “regulars” at the bar of the Armon Hotel; gays who felt comfortable enough to hang around in a public space, where their sexuality was known to other insiders, gays or not. The bar at the Armon Hotel is where the stories of the two main protagonists of this article, Theo and Roni, come together. This is what Roni told us: There was a bar in the Armon Hotel […] and the barman was gay, and the gays went to that bar. It was not a gay bar, you know, but we knew the barman, and the barman knew us. […] One felt more comfortable there, although many straights went there too. […] the gays sat as gays, and when we were alone there, it was more... Roni did not finish the sentence, but it seems that he meant that at certain times the clientele was all gay and the atmosphere became looser. Theo was not part of this gathering but, as a waiter in the hotel, he saw it and understood what was going on. He was too afraid, however, to acknowledge his desire and join the gay gatherings. Another homosexual identified by Theo at that time was another Jecke: Dr. Walter Moses (1892-1955). Moses was a Berliner who got a PhD in political economy and later served as a chairman of the Jewish Work Commission, helping immigrants from Russia to find work, as well as the head of the Blau-Weiss youth movement branch in Berlin. He immigrated to Palestine in 1926, perhaps under threat of being charged with sexual harassment of teenagers (Ilany 2021). In Mandatory Palestine he established a cigarette factory that later became part of Dubek, the largest Israeli cigarette company.9 Theo recalled that a female workmate had told him when they saw Moses to be careful, because “he will make you miserable [ye’amlel]; he seduces young men.” Since this was the second time he had used this rare expression in Hebrew, I asked him whether it was a common idiom, and it turned out that he was translating the German phrase “macht unglücklich.” He clarified that “all the conversations” had been in German. Moses, Theo, and Theo’s workmate were all part of the Jecke social world, and in this world, some people such as Moses were known to be “homosexuals.” Others gossiped about people’s sexuality and warned each other of those homosexuals; homophobia, as I said above, came together with the sexual orientation discourse. Theo’s own struggle with his sexuality continued for a long period. He heard about homosexuals in Kalia and he was courted by some workers who identified his samesex desires, but he missed their cues; he observed homosexual guests in the hotel. In the Armon Hotel, he witnessed the gay scene; he knew about Moses, Hans and Rosie 9

Moses was also an avid collector of glass works and antiques, and his collection became the basis of the Haaretz Museum in Tel Aviv.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

Nathan, and others, and he was also aware of the lively cruising scene in London Park. Theo even took part in the cruising scene and in a very few cases allowed himself limited contact with other men. He did not elaborate on it, but from what he said in other parts of the interviews, it seems that those few contacts did not get to the level of “sex”. As he confessed to me, his avoidance of male sex made him similar to the wicked son in the Passover Haggadah who distanced himself from others: he told himself that he was not like those homosexuals whom he saw, and was attracted to, in the park. Struggling with himself, Theo decided to go to therapy, and he spent a large share of his salary on three psychoanalysis sessions a week. Psychoanalysis was another one of the practices which Jeckes brought with them to Palestine. I asked Roni and many other interviewees about therapy, and all of them insisted that it was not something that they had ever contemplated. Theo, in contrast, believed in the importance of psychoanalysis. He tried four psychoanalysts before he could bring himself to talk about his homosexuality. He remembered the name of the first psychoanalyst, Moshe Wulff, whose 1941 article “A Case of Male Homosexuality” was mentioned above. The fourth psychologist, whom Theo eventually saw for 3 years, was Anna Smeliansky, also mentioned above. Theo recalls that she pushed him to utter for the first time in his life that he was a homosexual. He said that Smeliansky remained neutral and neither approved nor condemned his homosexuality, but following the therapy he was finally able to come to terms with his sexuality. After the 1948 war, Theo left the hotel and got a job as a nutritionist in Kupat Holim (the largest health organization owned, at that time, by the labor union federation known as the Histadrut). His first job was in Afula, in the north of Israel, and he regularly visited a good friend’s parents in Haifa. During those visits in Haifa, he frequented Gan Binyamin, the gay cruising park of the area, and met Erwin Reuven Karo, who had been an opera singer in Berlin. The meeting, which took place in 1950 or 1951, changed Theo’s life, and he talked about it in both the interviews conducted with him, which took place two years apart.10 The following is a selection from the two interviews: We played around a little in the park and then he said he would return to Tel Aviv the next day with his [boy]friend. He asked if I wanted to come with them. […] [on the way] they told me that the [gay] guys met at homes [...] It was the first time [I heard about it]. I had never imagined anything like this. […] He [Karo] was the dean of gay people. Through him, I met more people, people I had no idea that they were gay. The moment of discovering a gay community, that is, the understanding that there are like-minded people who meet regularly and maintain an ongoing social circle, is a significant element which appears in many stories of gays, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people around the world. It happened to Roni when he was 17 or 18 and found the group of older Jeckes who met weekly. For Theo, it happened when he was about a

10

A similar story with almost identical details appeared also in Sumaka’i Fink and Press (1999). The repetition of the same minor details is typical in life-story interviews. People tell themselves and others the same stories over and over again, and the stories become ossified in their memories. The repetitions thus do not verify the facts being told but they do demonstrate the significance to the storyteller of what is being told.

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Figure 6.4: Theo Mainz, not dated; unknown photographer; courtesy of the archive of The Aguda – The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel

decade older, after many years of being attracted to men but too encumbered by shame and terror to act upon his sexual desires. Through Karo, Theo learned that there was a community of people like him, which he joined and later became one of their leading representatives.

The Relocation of Gay Culture This article is based on the two biographies above, one of a sabra whose life was transformed by his encounter with the gay Jecke circle in Tel Aviv, and the second of a Jecke

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

who moved to Mandatory Palestine as a child and developed a gay identity in a cultural environment in which the idea of sexual orientation was prevalent. These two men, Roni and Theo, became key figures in the institutionalization of the gay community in Palestine, and thus, in a sense, conduits of the Jecke gay culture to wider gay circles and to younger generations. Two stories are only two stories. It is impossible to reach definitive conclusions on such a basis, making many of my claims in this article largely speculative. But this is what we have. We consider ourselves fortunate, given the late date of the study, to have gained access to even these narratives, along with a few more bits and pieces of interviews that referred to encounters with the Jecke gays. They are signposts, pointing the way toward the contribution of gay Jeckes to the creation of gay culture in Palestine/Israel. What do we learn from the two stories? First, we learn about the relocation of gay culture from Germany to Palestine. Dark places where men interested in having sex with other men meet regularly have always existed, but gatherings in cafés and private houses, in which gay men meet socially, was a new institution that was copied, according to Roni, from Germany. Second, the gay Jeckes served as models of people for whom same-sex sex had become a central component of one’s identity, and a focus for a distinct social life with its own cultural codes and customs. It is important not to create false binary poles. Around the world, men attracted to other men have found ways to conduct social lives that are not centered around their sexual practices, including in Palestine before the arrival of the gay Jeckes. Without the institutionalization of gay social life, however, such relationships would have remained dependent on individual ingenuity. The invention of homosexuality as a new social category in the urban centers of Central and Western Europe meant the establishment of institutionalized avenues to organize one’s identity and social life around same-sex desires. It offered women and men who felt such a desire the option to adopt a gay identity and to join gay social life and culture. The arrival of homosexuality to Palestine thus means not only the arrival of homosexuals (male and female) but also the arrival of a new choice of social life, based upon sexual identity. Sabras like Roni could join that social world and adopt a gay identity, although, as he testified, only a few actually did so in the late 1940s and the 1950s. Jecke children such as Theo, as well as Giora Manor, the subject of Dotan Brom’s article, who grew up in Palestine, became aware of the new conceptualization through German books and the exposure to a sexual discourse that divided human beings into “homosexuals” and “heterosexuals.” As is evident in Theo’s story, his fellow workers, heterosexual and homosexual alike, made this distinction in their everyday speech and probably identified Theo as a homosexual before he was ready to acknowledge such an identity himself. As elaborated in the second section, the term “homosexuality” entered Palestine during the Mandatory years, but it appeared very rarely in newspapers and other publications and was not widely recognized by the public, as my research suggests. Roni’s determined insistence that he did not recognize the word “homosexual” at all and that it was completely unknown to his schoolmates recurred in all other interviews with sabra

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gays.11 To illustrate, I add two examples. Danny (b. 1941 in Tel Aviv), who had prolific sexual experiences with men starting at the age of 15, said that he first heard the term “homosexual” after his military service (1961). Yigal (b. 1930 in Haifa), who recalled that he had heard the word “homosexual” at home, thought that ”it was a kind of a rare disease” and did not see any connection between it and his own attraction to the British soldiers whom he saw sun-bathing half naked as he walked home from school. This attraction to men notwithstanding, he developed “normal” relationships with women and thought he should marry a woman until he discovered gay sex and gay life in London and adopted a gay identity, choosing to share his life with a male partner. The last two examples show that although a Jecke gay community existed in Palestine/Israel from the 1930s on, it remained invisible to many people, including men attracted to men and even those like Danny, who had multiple sexual encounters with men. Roni, as he himself noted, was exceptional in entering the Jecke circle and adopting gay consciousness. The Jeckes brought with them a new discourse, a new cultural form, that became available to those who ran across it. However, it did not become part of the dominant social discourse until much later. Before ending this article, I should therefore explain the gap between the Jecke world and Yishuv society, which prevented the spread of the new sexual identity discourse until the 1960s.

The Rise of the Sexual Orientation Discourse The sheer number of Jecke immigrants, their economic affluence, and their expertise in many technological, scientific, and cultural fields had immense influence on the Jewish Yishuv. Many of those immigrants—though not necessarily all—had internalized the notion of sexual identity and thought about themselves and others as either heterosexuals or homosexuals (women and men). Yet this discourse did not take the place of the older discourse that perceived male same-sex sex as an illicit or criminal practice performed occasionally by men of lower morality, and more pervasive in Middle Eastern societies. Jecke sexologists, as discussed above, were pushed aside (Kozma 2010). The Jewish society in Palestine was preoccupied with the establishment of a Jewish nationstate, and private issues such as sexual identity and alternative lifestyles were probably considered, if they were considered at all, to be damaging to the goal of nationbuilding. The modern sexual orientation discourse on homosexuality gained strength during the 1950s and 1960s, and from about 1970 it became dominant in mainstream Israeli society. Although this process has yet to be studied, the Jeckes do not seem to have played a major role in it. In a previous article (Yonay 2016), I suggested that the change has been related to the growing openness of post-Independence Israel to Western cultures. News

11

Roni and several other interviewees mentioned the term “nablusi” which was borrowed from Arabic and was used to described men, mostly Arabs, who had a predilection for sex with men or boys. The term literally means a man from Nablus, the main city in the Samaria Mountains, and it might have been a pejorative term used by Palestinians in big cities to mock unsophisticated rural peasants. In the Jewish Yishuv, it was also used as a slur suggesting boorishness and vulgarity, not necessarily as a reference to sexual conduct.

Gay German Jews and the Arrival of ‘Homosexuality’ to Mandatory Palestine

about the controversy over de-criminalization of sodomy in England, articles about Alfred Kinsey’s famous reports, and reviews of movies, novels, non-fictions books, and theatrical dramas with lesbian and gay themes appeared with increasing frequency in Israeli newspapers. Readers and viewers learned that homosexuality is not a rare disease but a trait that may characterize half a million men in Britain alone (Herut, December 21, 1955). A report on a press conference of a high-ranking psychiatrist in London also informed readers that “homosexual orientation among women is more widespread than among men” (Maariv, October 20, 1957). If during the 1950s, the newspaper reports were only about foreign countries, during the early 1960s the first reports on lesbians and gays in Israel appeared in the Israeli media, and a novel by a lesbian writer, introducing the lives of young lesbians and gays in Tel Aviv, was published in 1960 (Maanit 2021). Only the youngest interviewee in my study, born in 1948, told me that he recognized the term “homosexual” when he was a teenager. He is also the only one who was asked, when he met his first sex partner at the age of 15 (1963), “Are you a homo?” Such a question was not conceivable before those men attracted to men learned to think in the binary terms of the new discourse. Anti-gay violence also started, according to my interviewees, only in the 1960s. With the spread of the idea that some people were different because of their “deviant sexuality” came homophobia: the wish to avoid the contamination of society by impure elements. In 1975, the first gay and lesbian organization in Israel was established to fight against discrimination and oppression. The vituperative homophobia that engulfed Israeli society in the 1960s and the gay liberation movement that started in the mid-1970s were influenced by the sexual politics of Anglo-Saxon societies. Immigrants from the UK, US, Canada, and South Africa played a major role in this struggle. It was not the world of the gay Jeckes, who were already quite old at that time. Theirs was a world in which gay people were allowed to lead their lives as they saw fit, so long as they kept their personal lives private. Yet the tolerant approach of heterosexual Jeckes did have a moderating impact on the homophobic attitudes of the Ashkenazi social elites. It was Haim Cohn (1911, Lübeck-2002), another Jecke who immigrated to Palestine in 1933, who, as Attorney General, issued an explicit instruction not to indict consenting adults who committed sodomy (1953; Yonay and Spivak 2016). As a Supreme Court justice, he wrote a famous obiter dictum, expressing his view that the anti-sodomy law was an improper state intervention in the bedroom. The two other justices on the bench—both from the Old Yishuv (the Jewish community of Palestine prior to Zionist settlement), and who had acquired their legal education in England—did not accept Cohn’s opinion. Pinchas Rosen (1887-1978), the head of the Zionist movement in Germany before immigrating to Palestine in 1923, led a liberal approach as the Minister of Justice from Independence to 1961 (with a short break in the middle). During his tenure, a team of professional attorneys, many of whom were Jeckes, drafted an official government proposal that included annulment of the anti-sodomy law. Probably due to resistance from Orthodox parties, the proposal never reached the Knesset. The ban on consensual same-sex relationships was repealed by the Knesset only in 1988. Another prominent Jecke, Giora Yoseftal (1912-1962, b. Georg Josephthal), was a highranking politician in Mapai, the leading party of Ben Gurion. Although married to Santa

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Yoseftal, who also served in many public positions, his homosexuality was an “open secret.” Several of my interviewees testified that they approached him when a member of the gay community got into trouble with the police. It seems that he would pull some strings, indicating that he was not afraid of being “outed.” Yoseftal’s double position as a member of the political leadership on the one hand, and as a member of a gay social “underground” on the other, may best exemplify the double influence of the gay Jeckes. The fact that prominent figures like Yoseftal did not try to conceal their sexuality signaled to other members of the social and cultural elites that homosexuals and lesbians could be good, upstanding citizens. The artists Annie Neumann (1906-1955; Rozin, this volume) and Yossi Stern (1923-1992; from Hungary, growing up in Budapest), the dancer Gertrud Kraus (1901-1977), the cultural entrepreneur and journalist Giora Manor (19262005, born in Prague; Brom, this volume), the fur maker Stephan Braun (1914-1990, from Bratislava; Alkalai 2007), and a few others were well-known individuals whose sexuality was known to insiders although never mentioned in public. They constituted a counterweight to the acrimonious stereotypes of homosexuals and lesbians propagated by professional psychological literature, local and foreign novelists, Hollywood movies, and journalists. All of these figures came from Germany or from countries in Central Europe influenced by German culture, and their relative openness reflects German culture’s tolerance of same-sex sexuality. The influence of gay Jeckes on the attitudes of the political and cultural elites is a subject yet to be researched. As I attempted to demonstrate in this article, the area in which Jeckes had a very clear influence was in the creation of a gay community which, as I have tried to show, was due to their German heritage. The social meetings of the Jeckes, in private homes as well as in public cafes, were the first local form of gay organization. Their lifestyles as singles, the formation of informal same-sex couples, and their open “convenience marriages” (as might have been the case of Hans and Rosie Nathan, or, perhaps, Giora and Santa Yoseftal), were all forms of “coming out” without explicit declaration, and they modeled the ways gay men and women could constitute a recognized subculture within the wider society. This heritage served as the springboard for the queer communities that emerged and prospered in the last decade of the 20th century and the first two decades of the current one.

Bibliography AbuKhalil, As’ad (1993): “A Note on the Study of Homosexuality in the Arab/Islamic Civilization.” In: Arab Studies Journal 1/2, pp. 32-34. Alkalai, Itamar (2007): Stefan Braun. Tel Aviv: Lama Productions. Alyagon Darr, Orna (2019): Plausible Crime Stories: The Legal History of Sexual Offences in Mandate Palestine, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aricha, Yosef (1967): Confession. In his Selected Stories (orig. 1939). Tel-Aviv: Niv. pp. 290-296. (Hebrew) Beachy, Robert (2014): Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, New York: Knopf. Ben-Naeh, Yaron (2005): ”Moshko the Jew and His Gay Friends: Same Sex Sexual Relations in Ottoman Jewish Society.” Journal of Early Modern History 9/1-2, pp. 79-105.

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Ben-Naeh, Yaron (2016): “Judaism and Jews On LGBT: The Attitude of Jewish Halakha and Jewish Communities to Homosexuality, Lesbianism, and Transgendered People: Historical Review.” In Alon Harel/Yaniv Lushinsky/Einav Morgenstern (eds.), LGBT Rights in Israel, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, The Harry Sacher Institute, pp. 117-158. (Hebrew) Boswell, John (1989): “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories.” In: Martin Duberman/Martha Vicinus/George Chauncey Jr. (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, NY: Meridian, pp. 17-36. Cook, Matt (2003): London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cook, Matt (2007): “Chapter 5: Queer Conflicts: Love, Sex and War, 1914-1967.” In: Matt Cook (ed.), A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men Since the Middle Ages, Oxford and Westport: Greenwood, 145-177. Dunne, Bruce W. (1990): “Homosexuality in the Middle East: An Agenda for Historical Research.” In: Arab Studies Quarterly 12/3-4, pp. 55-82. El-Rouayheb, Khaled (2005): Before Homosexuality in Arab-Islamic World, 1500-1800, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Faderman, Lillian (1991): Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America, New York: Penguin. Foucault, Michel (1971): L’Ordre du Discours: Leçon inagurale au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970, Paris: Gillmard. Gelber, Yoav (1990): New Homeland: The Immigration and Absorption of Jews from Central Europe, 1933-1948, Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi. (Hebrew) Halperin, David, M. (1990): One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, London: Routledge. Halperin, David, M. (2002): How to do the History of Homosexuality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Healey, Dan (2001): Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia: The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Houlbrook, Matt (2005): Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Human Rights Watch (2008): This Alien Legacy: The Origins of “Sodomy” Laws in British Colonialism. New York: Human Rights Watch. Ilany, Ofri (2017): “‘An Oriental Vice’”: Representations of Sodomy in Early Zionist Discourse.” In: Achim Rohde/Christina von Braun/Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective: The Homophobic Argument, London: Routledge, pp. 107-120. Ilany, Ofri (2021): “Jewish Youth in Transit.” Conference at the Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdischer Studien, Berlin-Brandenburg, March 4-6, 2021. Katz, Jonathan Ned (1995): The Invention of Heterosexuality. New York: Dutton. Kozma, Liat (2010): “Sexology in the Yishuv: The Rise and Decline of Sexual Consultation in Tel Aviv, 1930–39.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42/2, 231-249. Kurimay, Anita (2020): Queer Budapest, 1873-1961, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lubin, Orly (2003): A Woman Reads a Woman, Haifa: University of Haifa Press and Zmora/Bitan. (Hebrew)

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Lybeck, Marti M. (2015): Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890-1933, Albany: SUNY Press. Maanit, Sarah (2021): Silent Link: The Female Novel in Early Statehood Years, Tel Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) Marhoefer, Laurie (2015): Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Massad, Joseph A. (2007): Desiring Arabs, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pappe, Ilan (2004): A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples, New York: Cambridge University Press. Peretz, Rafi (2010): “Roni and Johnny, a Proud [also “Gay”] Relationship for 44 Years.” Yedioth Ahronoth April 10, (https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L3882311,00.html). (Hebrew) Stein, Edward (ed.) (1990): Forms of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Constructionist Controversy, New York: Garland. Sumaka’i Fink, Amir/Press, Jacob (1999): Independence Park: The Lives of Gay Men in Israel, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Tamagne, Florence (2004): A History of Homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris 1919-1939. Vol. 1-2, New York: Algora. Weeks, Jeffrey (1991): Against Nature: Essays on History, Sexuality and Identity, London: Rivers Oram. Yonay, Yuval (1998): “The Law on Homosexual Orientation in Israel: Between History and Sociology.” In: Mishpat u Mimshal 5/1, pp. 531-586. (Hebrew) Yonay, Yuval (2016): “‘It Is Not Allowed to be Homosexual’: How Gays and Newspapers Thought and Wrote on the Law that ‘Proscribed Homosexuality’.” In: Einav Morgenstern/Yaniv Lushinsky/Alon Harel (eds.), LGBT Rights in Israel, Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press, The Harry Sacher Institute, pp. 921-970. (Hebrew) Yonay, Yuval/Spivak, Dori (1999): “Between Silence and Damnation: The Construction of Gay Identity in the Israeli Legal Discourse, 1948-1988.” In: Israeli Sociology 1/2, pp. 257-293. (Hebrew)

The Hebrew Lesbian Image and Reality in the Hebrew Press in Mandatory Palestine and Israel, 1930s-1960s Orit Yaal

Introduction The Jewish community in Palestine during the British mandate – the Yishuv – and the early years of the State of Israel was a new, youthful society of immigrants. These were young men and women who had come from all over the world to establish a Jewish society and national homeland. Like any young society, its members were occupied with passions and sexuality, which were expressed in both the private and the public spheres. The Hebrew press of the period reflected the public discourse, including on sexuality, and is therefore a good source for examining this issue. Unfortunately, however, while the publications offer evidence of sexuality in heterosexual relationships, they contain almost nothing about lesbian relationships. The Mandatory criminal code of 1936 prohibiting homosexual relationships among men brought these into the public discourse (Alyagon Darr 2017). It is in light of the visibility of male homosexuality that the question arises regarding attitudes towards lesbianism. Importantly, in the first half of the twentieth century, many women in Palestine and later Israel did not obey the code of femininity that was accepted in Europe at the time. Thus, even if they resembled the lesbian stereotype by having a masculine appearance, they were not tagged and did not stand out in the Yishuv and then Israeli public eye. To understand changes in the visibility of lesbians in the public sphere, it is necessary to ask questions such as, when do we find the first mention of lesbians in the Hebrew press? How were lesbians presented and conceptualized in the press? And why? To understand the representation of lesbians in the media of the time, we must consider the personal and marital status of women in this new Jewish society in general. Two socioeconomic positions were clearly articulated in the new Hebrew-speaking community: an ideology of equality, partnership, and collective production; and a liberal worldview, which aspired to create an economy based on free enterprise.

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Representations of the Hebrew Woman It is possible to define four conceptual models of women in the Jewish society of this period, two of them traditional and two Zionist (Stern 2011; Ajzenstadt 2010; Shilo 2005; Elboim-Dror 1994; Bernstein 1998). The traditional types were those of religious women, both Ashkenazi women—who came mostly from Eastern Europe—and Sephardi women—who descended from communities in the Middle East, the Balkans, and North Africa. The two new types, which originated in the Zionist waves of immigration, were the civic-minded-bourgeois woman and the socialist woman. The latter two types became dominant in the Yishuv and were presented as a model for young female immigrants to emulate. The bourgeois women were influenced by modernist Western norms. They dressed elegantly and treated the female body as essentially different from the masculine one. In the context of the national struggle, in and outside of the home, they undertook traditional caretaking roles of wives and mothers and perceived this choice as part of the national effort. The socialist women were members of the labor movement. They fought for gender equality and rejected the use of physical gender differences as cultural or political justification for societal discrimination against women. They endorsed a simple, natural look and objected to the subjugation of women by men within the family unit. While accepting motherhood as part of a woman’s role, they demanded due social recognition, and held that it was a woman’s basic right to work outside the home, for pay equal to men’s, regardless of her marital or economic status. The historian Esther Newton Describes the New European women of the end 19th century and the beginning of the 20th as a woman who adopted men’s habits such as wearing trousers and smoking (Newton 1989). The Zionist pioneer women were even more masculine in their external appearance. The female laborers engaged in traditionally masculine occupations such as agriculture, paving roads, construction, and industry; demanded to take part in military activity; and were involved in politics and public activities (Bernstein 1987).

Intimacy and Marriage Between 1925 and 1948, the young adult Jewish population, especially from central Europe, was characterized by late marriage, high rates of divorce, and a low birthrate (Bachi 1955). In order to encourage marriage, the press began to devote attention to the issue of bachelorhood. Publications from the time exhibited a legitimation of male, but not female, bachelorhood. The bachelor enjoyed the nickname “bahur” (guy), which conveyed a sense of virility, freedom, and independence (Iton Meyuhad, Oct. 10, 1941). Unmarried women were referred to by the similar “bahura” (gal), but in their case it conveyed very different cultural meanings, including, among others, a lack of self-discipline (Iton Meyuhad, Jan. 9, 1942; Dec. 26, 1941; Jan. 29, 1942). In some sectors, a “decent” unmarried woman was known as a “daughter of Israel” (bat Israel), implying that she remained chaste even though she was not married (Yediot Ahronot, Apr. 24, 1942). An unmarried woman who had passed what was considered the recommended age for marriage was referred to as an “old maid” (betula zkena) (Tesha Ba’erev, July 1, 1937).

The Hebrew Lesbian

Unmarried young people were often kept under supervision in a rented room in the apartment of a married couple. Typically, the tenant shared the family’s kitchen, bathroom, and shower, enjoying affordable housing while the family enjoyed additional income, but at the cost of everyone’s convenience and privacy. Here, too, there is evidence of a double standard. A “room with a separate entrance” in a family home was legitimate for married couples or unmarried men, but not for unmarried women (Yediot Ahronot, Jan. 9, 1942; Iton Meyuhad, Mar. 20, 1942). Unmarried women tended not to rent a separate unit, for fear of being suspected of immoral conduct. The press did include, however, descriptions of women couples spending time together or helping one another. These friendships did not appear to attract special attention. Participating in civic action made it possible for single women to keep their personal lives out of the public limelight, as emerges from the obituaries of well-known female public figures who acted and contributed to the Yishuv community and the Zionist movement. These referred more to the personalities and activities of the women, and less to their personal lives and statuses.

The Hebrew Press The Hebrew press in Palestine began as early as 1863 and served as a central instrument in the revival of Hebrew as the spoken language of the Jewish people. In the 1920s, there were three Hebrew dailies: Haaretz, which represented a moderate center line, Davar, the newspaper of the labor movement, and the Jerusalem-based Doar HaYom, which took a right-wing, line. In the 1930s, the number of newspapers increased significantly, expanding to include additional political stands: Haboker of the bourgeois center; Hatsofeh of the Ashkenazi religious Zionists; right-wing papers that changed their names frequently because of British surveillance; Al Hamishmar of the Left; and Kol Ha’am of the Communist party. In addition to the politically based papers, there were also private commercial publications, some of them provocative, such as Iton Meyuhad, which was considered “yellow” because it published sensational stories, and Tesha Ba’erev, which reported on Tel Aviv’s nightlife scene. In the 1940s, additional private newspapers were founded, which were popular but less sensationalist: Yediot Aharonot, the first evening paper, and Maariv, which declared itself free of political or financial interests. In the 1950s, the popular Haolam Haze developed out of Tesha Ba’erev. It specialized in investigative reporting and censorious and sensationalist writing. The research on the press in this period generally differentiates between “elite press,” intended for the cultural and social elite and considered by its creators as high-quality, moral, and decent, and “the mass press,” written for the middle class and less educated readership, which was more entertainment-oriented (Elyada 2015: 10). I would suggest another distinction, between the ideological and political press, committed to causes, and the commercial press, which functioned as a business enterprise, and therefore focused on attentiongrabbing contents. It is evident that the papers that held political or ideological positions, on both the Left (Davar and Al Hamishmar) and the Right (Herut and Haboker), covered few personal subjects, such as romantic relationships and sexuality, and accordingly, they also refrained from addressing the issue of homosexuality. These subjects found coverage in the commercial press (Doar HaYom, Yediot Aharonot, and Maariv)

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and in commercial weeklies (Iton Meyuhad, Tesha Ba’ere/Haolam Haze), often read secretly (Naor 2004: 305-14; Tzifroni 1988; Yaal 2012: 351). The Hebrew press of the day represented the public discourse of Hebrew society no less than it does today, (Penslar 2000) and served as Jürgen Habermas’s “city square” (Habermas 1991). As such, it constitutes a rich source for examining the sexual and gender perceptions that were common in this period.

Media as a Source for Historical Research Newspapers are not merely passive mirrors that reflect reality but rather active players which contribute to shaping that reality (Hall 1980). Amit Kama, Yuval Yonay, and Ofri Ilani have examined the appearance of the term “homosexual” and references to male homosexuality in the Hebrew media (Kama 2003; Yonay 2016; Ilani 2017). The authors differed in their opinions regarding the timing of this development. Ilani argued that homosexuality was discussed as early as the Mandate period, while Yonay placed the first appearance of media discourse on these subjects in the 1950s. Kama contended that they were accepted only in the 1960s and onward (Kama 2003), when groundbreaking articles in Haolam Haze about lesbians (Haolam Haze, Mar. 23, 1960) and homosexual men saw the light of day (Haolam Haze, Mar. 7, 1962). However, no systematic historical research has been published to date on the media representations and images of the Hebrew Lesbian. The present article offers a first examination of the development of representations of the lesbian and the construction of a lesbian identity, as they are depicted in Hebrew print media. It attempts to identify the discourse that shaped these images and the changes that took place over time from the beginning of the modern Hebrew press at the end of the World War I (1918) to the end of the 1960s, a period during which the Hebrew lesbian “came out of the media closet”. It is based on archeological work of collecting bits of information about lesbians from the Hebrew press, followed by the identification of a genealogical process. In this process, I join the tradition of genealogical analysis of media-based and cultural homo-lesbian representations. The research is based on the historical bibliography method (Gilboa 1988), which examines the research subject along the axis of time in a diachronic (longitudinal) cross-section and a synchronic (latitudinal) cross-section of different publications. In order to locate items relevant to the research, I searched for keywords in the online database of the Historical Jewish Press Project of the National Library of Israel. The search included the terms “lesbian,” as well as other keywords that emerged as relevant, such as “homosexuality,” “mannish woman,” and “women’s love.” A search was also conducted in newspapers that are not included in the database, namely Iton Meyuhad and Tesha Ba’erev/Haolam Haze. It became clear early on that there was hardly any mention of lesbianism, and insofar as there was such mention, it was indirect and implicit, usually in reviews of literature, film, theater, and clubs. Because most of the accessed items were short, they served as only a first clue on the trail to additional information about the attitudes and experiences of the people of the time. Thus, for example, a book review led the way to the book itself and a film critique to the film, both of which original sources enriched our understanding of the atmosphere and concepts shared by the Yishuv readership.

The Hebrew Lesbian

To draw historical information from the few and indirect texts, I developed an interpretative process that refers to three levels of information provided by the texts: explicit statements, transparent clues, and concealed clues. The process included using three types of reading – hegemonic, critical, and subversive – to identify social and genderrelated attitudes. Most of the information upon which the research is based was found in transparent and concealed clues, which were read in the critical or subversive methods, respectively. Larry Gross, who examine gay and lesbian representations in the U.S. media, has identified two mechanisms for excluding minorities from the public and media sphere: one is ignorance or silence, that results in the absence of representation; the second is a stereotypical portrayal, a result of shorthand writing that economically encodes certain figures (Gross 1998). Examination of these two mechanisms can be used in interpreting the cultural-social situation of a given time. In doing so, the researcher arranges and classifies the subject in a new way, offering a different perspective. The media disseminate, perpetuate, and reproduce shared social meanings. These two mechanisms are expressed in the texts that served as the basis of the present research. In the course of the examination, I noticed that the representations of non-normative women and “lesbians” changed during the period. The process was not linear, but a clear gradual process of change can be identified, from the perception of lesbianism as a behavior (in the first decades) to its perception as an identity in the second period. Therefore, it was possible to discern a genealogy of representations in the public discourse and to divide the research period into two sub-periods. During the Mandate period, the press referred to gender-oriented conduct and not to sexual identity and was characterized by descriptions of women who were masculine in appearance and behavior, regardless of their sexual inclination. This description fits some of the women who were Zionist activists or pioneer laborers and did not cultivate a feminine appearance; some of them might have been lesbians. However, already in that period, it is possible to detect a distinction between the image of the “essential” lesbian, whose lesbianism played a significant role in her identity and conduct, and who displayed some aspects of masculine appearance or behavior, and the “ostensible” lesbian, who stumbled into a situation of lesbian conduct, but was able to retreat from it and “return to the fold.” (The distinction between “essential” and “ostensible” lesbians is discussed below.) During the 1950s and 1960s, the reference to lesbianism appeared mainly in reviews of cultural events – theatre, movies and literature. These critiques enabled an examination of the social attitude towards lesbians, which reveal homosexual stereotypes, curiosity, and voyeurism, as well as early representations of the “Israeli Lesbian.”

Structure of the Article The present article is divided into two main parts, each of which comprises sections devoted to prominent representations or characteristics of the period. The first two sections focus on characteristics and representations that were common mainly in the Mandate period and presented the image of a woman who was masculine in appearance or behavior and might be a lesbian. The next four sections describe characteristics,

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representations, and attitudes that were prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as changes in the terms used to describe lesbian conduct and identity.

Mandatory Palestine During the period of the British Mandate in Palestine, knowledge about and attitudes towards sexuality in the Yishuv largely corresponded with psycho-medical views that had been brought over from German-speaking countries (Kozma 2010). During the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, newspapers reported the opinions of experts, among them Magnus Hirschfeld, Max Hoden, Max Marcuse, Fritz Kahn, Alfred Adler, Sigmund Freud, Yehoshua Fishel Schneerson, and of physicians, biologists, and neurologists, such as Avraham Matmon, Felix A. Theilhaber, Josef Karmin, and Moritz Pappenheim, who wrote and lectured on sexuality and public hygiene. The medicalization of sexuality, an import from Germany, enabled analysis and terminology, and affected the images and representations of the Hebrew Lesbian.

The Zionist Woman and the “Mannish Lesbian” The Hebrew press of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s included very few references to the existence of lesbians, who were often characterized as masculine women. Esther Newton studied the “mannish woman,” who was masculine in appearance and attire, manner of speech, and occupation. According to Newton, beginning in the late nineteenth century, many women, who were actually straight, rejected the constraining traditional feminine dress and behavior, choosing to behave and dress in a masculine fashion that allowed them freedom and opportunities. In a few cases, this independence was also expressed in sexual relations with a variety of partners, including women. Newton suggests that a relationship with a woman had the advantage of preventing a bad reputation or an undesired pregnancy (Newton 1989). The first mention of a masculine woman which connects performance to lesbianism appeared in 1929 in an article by “Bracha” (signing one’s first name only was an accepted practice at the time). “Adler’s Theory and His Conclusions Regarding Education” discussed gender education according to Alfred Adler (Davar July 19, 1929). The name refers to Bracha Hubbs (1900-1968), one of the few female journalists in the period and the first at Davar. She studied education at Levinsky Teachers College in Tel Aviv and then psychology at Leipzig University. In 1925, she also became a member of the editorial board of the paper. Hubbs’ article described the limited opportunities available for young women in a patriarchal society: There are two different directions, and a woman must choose, either acceptance of the situation and submission to fate, and an effort to nevertheless achieve stature, to be of value, [...] even within this setting of [patriarchal] inferiority. The results: coquetry, softness, femininity, etc. while striving towards the final goal of capturing a man, even under these conditions of inequality, and achieving a family life; or rebellion and revolt against men, against the natural inferiority and the tradition of generations [...] to be-

The Hebrew Lesbian

come equal to the man -- come what may! This is the woman-man type, who already in childhood would frequently join the boys in play, and as an adult chooses an independent life, stands on her own right, has a profession, dresses in a mannish style, adopts the manners of men, avoids dressing up – the intellectual, adventurous, activist, etc. The masculine woman could be identified at an early age. As she matured, she became an independent person, intellectual, and an active citizen who contributed to society. The author’s attitude towards her, however, is ambivalent, because in some cases independence leads to forgoing family life and even becoming a homosexual: In most cases, she does not find the golden path and refrains from family life. The extreme forms are fear of men, homosexuality, and the like. Without this, without the family, the fate of the individual–man, or woman–is to be miserable at some time and to feel abnormal in society. Bracha warned against the misery independence involved. It was suitable only for “special, creative individuals, who set themselves a noble, creative goal and find its rewards to make up for a sense of inferiority and an anchor in life.” It is likely that she is hinting here at ‘singles’ or ‘sworn spinsters,’ women who refuse to marry on principle and are mentioned in another article (Tesha Ba’erev, July 1, 1937). The image of the masculine, independent, and activist woman who is not bound by accepted social and family norms also emerged in an article by “the Wanderer”: The free women – [I use it] without quotation marks. I am referring to free women in the serious sense of this word – free from “stereotype,” the life of housewives. Women who feel that the daily affairs of the family and kitchen interfere with their ability to fulfill a role in society. Women who aspire to stand in their own right – workers who earn a livelihood and fill important positions. We feel great respect for them and their efforts (“Free Women,” Iton Meyuhad, May 22, 1934). The personal independence of the women described in this article is particularly striking because most women were forced to marry to survive financially and socially. The author wrote with esteem of their public activism, enabled by their freedom from the burden of family and home. Despite this esteem, “the Wanderer” referred to these women’s appearance and dress with the derisive term “blue stockings,” implying their association with the Blue Stockings Society (Eger 2008): What are they thinking, our female activists – that the stocking can come off, that their dresses should remind us of the existence of sacks, that their shoeprints should be crooked; that their fingernails… [sic; incomplete in the original – o.y.] in brief, [they are at one and the same time] women and not women. It is as though deliberate sloppiness increases their importance; and being delicate would harm the quality and seriousness of their activity. These women did not read or heed the words of the poet: it is possible to be a serious man and see to the beauty of the nails. Yes, there is certainly reason to be concerned, old and young honorable women activists. (“Free Women,” Iton Meyuhad, May 22, 1934).

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A colorful article, published in Iton Meyuhad in the late 1930s, reported on a court case, and described a “mannish woman,” a “boychik” who was strong, authoritative, and “frightening” (Iton Meyuhad, May 9, 1937). She was criticized for “role reversal” between herself and her miserable, weak husband, who took responsibility for caring for their infant. The article did not discuss the sexual inclinations of the spouses but rather expressed the public attitude towards people who deviate from the accepted gender roles, sneering at feminine men and defaming and ridiculing masculine women. Iton Meyuhad was a marginal publication of questionable reputation. It was closely associated with the views of the Revisionist Zionist camp and reflected the right wing’s critical view of the labor movement and its women. In the labor movement, women who took part in the Zionist effort in a “manly” manner were respected, both for their agricultural work and for their participation in the political and ideological leadership. I did not find criticism in the press of female activists who were single; it seems that their significant Zionist activity protected them against pressure to marry (Yaal 2012: 342-357). Some of them had platonic relationships with men; others had shortlived marriages; and some lived in “Boston Marriages.” Examples of the latter group include Jessie Ethel Sampter (1883-1938), Lea Berlin (1881-1962), Batia Lichansky (18991992), and Anne (Annie) Neumann (1906-1955). Public attitude towards them is also evident in newspaper obituaries, which reviewed these women’s activities and personalities and ignored their unmarried status (“Henrietta Szold,” Davar, Feb. 14-15, 1945; Haboker, Feb. 14, 1945; Haaretz, Feb. 14, 1945; “Annie Landau,” Haaretz, Jan. 24, 1945). In contrast, obituaries of publicly active women who were married with families never failed to mention marital status (“Sara Azarihu,” Lamerhav, Oct. 23, 1962; “Hanna Helena Tahun,” Davar, Mar. 31, 1954; “Hemda Ben-Yehuda,” Al Hamishmar, Aug. 27, 1951).

The Essential Lesbian and the Ostensible Lesbian In was only in the late 1930s that the term “lesbian” appeared in the press for the first time, in an article about author Yosef Aricha’s (1907-72) short story, “Confession” (Aricha [1939]; 1967: 256-309). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first Hebrew story describing a relationship between two women. The newspaper Haboker observed that “In ‘Confession’ we see the soul of a young woman who was enslaved in body and spirit by another woman (in lesbian love), and she – after unsuccessful attempts at correction – makes a last effort at redemption by the love of a young man” (Haboker, Mar. 13, 1939). In this lesbian relationship, described as enslaving and exploitative, a mature ‘essential lesbian’ ambushes a “miserable” young straight woman, controls her, isolates her from her environment using material and emotional temptation, and creates a relationship of dependence. The relationship is described as sick, because of the age gap and its lesbian nature, which allegedly corrupts the soul and the health of the young woman. In this description of a relationship between a woman and a young girl, the story uses a pattern familiar from contemporary Western literature, such as the English movel The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall (1928), the German play Gestern und Heute (Yesterday and today) by Christa Winsloe (1930), and the film Mädchen in Uniform (Maidens in Uniform) that was based on it (1931), and that, when shown in Palestine, was ad-

The Hebrew Lesbian

vertised as “dealing with a sexual catastrophe” (Nov. 17, 1932 Ha’aretz; March 16, 1936 Davar). Aricha’s story includes the confession that the young woman makes— to a man, aboard a ship to the Land of Israel—about the lesbian relationship she had between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, when she was in the United States: [The lesbian] bore none of the outward signs that science usually attributes to lesbian women. She did not act like a man vis-à-vis other women, did not cut her hair short, and did not alter her outer appearance with any signs of imitating masculinity; she was quite feminine in body shape and facial features, and thus outwardly she seemed to be a handsome, charming woman, full of feminine beauty [...] Evidently, she was warned about attracting an exacting eye that would cast suspicion on her, but towards me she would sometimes emphasize her “masculinity,” courting me, caring for me as a “lover,” making me swear that I would not betray her (Aricha 1967:297-298). According to the accepted medical view in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a masculine appearance and conduct were closely associated with sexual inclination. The influence of this view is notable in the Hebrew press as well, and in the words of the young protagonist in Aricha’s story, who describes the femininity of the mature lover as fakery. The ‘manliness’ of the ‘essential lesbian,’ was expressed in compulsive wooing and restriction on the beloved’s freedom of movement, ties with other women and potential male partners. Thus, the ‘essential lesbian’ jeopardized the future of the young woman, leading her off the path of normality. This view of lesbianism paralleled the theory of the gynecologist and sexologist Fritz Kahn, who immigrated from Berlin and worked in Palestine in the 1930s (Sappol 2017). In 1934, as reported in the press, he created the Wandering Show of School Hygiene in Jerusalem, an exhibition that traveled around the country to teach modern hygiene (Doar HaYom, Sept. 27, 1934). Hygiene was a term used for sexuality (Hirsch 2009), and an informative booklet titled The Sexual Hygiene of the Young Woman and Man followed soon after (Kahn 1935). Later Kahn migrated to Paris and published a book, Unser Geschlechtsleben, Ein Führer, and Berater für Jedermann (Our Sexual Life, Kahn 1939). In the chapter on “The Homosexuality of the Woman,” Kahn differentiates between early, noncommittal experiments and “real lesbianism”: In most cases, girls overcome these homosexual phases. The friends part, and look forward to actual love relationships with men and with that, the phase ends. However, if such a girl fails in her first meeting with a boy or is influenced for a long time by an elderly homosexual woman who knows how to hold onto her and develops her into a real lesbian, then the homosexuality takes root to the point that it becomes her second nature (Kahn 1964: 168). Kahn’s work suggests a forgiving attitude to early, ostensible lesbian experiences, as long as they do not become a way of life and block “genuine love relations” with a man. Like Aricha, Kahn assumes a danger that a young woman would develop into a lesbian if she were influenced for too long by an “essential lesbian.” He also mentions additional problems that could lead a young woman to lesbianism, including a miserable marriage, lack of satisfaction due to violent copulation, revulsion from sexual intercourse, keeping

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constant company with other young women, to the point where a female alliance is formed and becomes a natural inclination. In the Mandate period, then, lesbianism was perceived mostly as a behavior. It seems that in the social atmosphere of the time, the lesbian did not stand out, either because of the relatively masculine appearance of public activists and pioneers, or because of the view that close and intimate ties among women were legitimate behavior, and did not signal an inherent lesbian identity. The images of lesbians that appeared in the press were drawn mainly from international attitudes. There one could find the “essential lesbian” that could be considered as having an inherent lesbian identity. More common is the image of an “ostensible lesbian,” whose lesbianism is nothing more than a temporary behavior. In the 1940s, there was almost no reference to lesbianism, not even as a behavior. This can be explained by the combination of dramatic events of that period: the Second World War, the Holocaust, the struggle to establish a state, and the War of Independence.

Disease, Sin, and Crime in the 1950s and 1960s: The Suburban Lesbian, the Erotic Lesbian, and the Criminal Even in the second half of the twentieth century, three stereotypes were still ascribed to male homosexuality: disease, sin, and crime (Gross 2001; Kama & First 2015). Examination of the press suggests that lesbians were also tagged as mentally ill, immoral seducers, and criminal offenders. In the 1930s, they were likely to be mentioned and diagnosed in the medical field; in the 1950s, the frame of reference was mostly cultural, appearing in literature, film, and theater. The “sick” lesbian appears, for example, in the article, “Love in the Contemporary Novel” (Al Hamishmar, Dec. 21, 1951). Aviyatar, the author, described modern novels in general, and their deviant characters, including the lesbian, who added color and suspense to the stories: The heroine can also be a lesbian morphine addict or steeped in another perversion […] but this does not detract at all from her appeal. To the contrary! This power is not explained by her beauty, brightness, or other positive traits. It is a fatal power, outside the boundaries of rational judgement. And he who is attracted to her –hates her but cannot break free from her chains. The authors come to terms with this and don’t even try to analyze the traits of the modern heroine [...] one can add to this list of authors Hervé Bazin, who describes monster-humans, idiots, and traitors; Pierre Moulin, who prefers institutions for the mentally ill; [and] Francoise Mallet-Joris, who specializes in descriptions of lesbian women ... (Aviyatar, Dec. 21, 1951). Two perceived characteristics of the lesbian emerge from the article – perversion and a seductive power that makes it impossible to “free oneself from her chains.” It is exactly this dark charm that captured the hearts of the readers. In Aviyatar’s article, the lesbian was also associated with a second stereotype – the sinner, possessed of erotic characteristics. It is possible to see the development of the

The Hebrew Lesbian

male fantasy of the “erotic lesbian” who has a magical control over men, an irrational magnetic force that the “captive” tries but fails to resist. In the early 1960s, the model of the perverse lesbian also appeared in films (Maariv, Jan. 23, 1965, Feb. 8, 1965; Lamerhav, June 14, 1963; Herut, Dec. 18, 1964), especially those of Ingmar Bergman (The Brink of Life, 1958 and The Silence, 1963) (Al Hamishmar, Oct. 31, 1961, Nov. 13, 1964, Feb. 26, 1965; Lamerhav, Feb. 16, 1962). David Greenberg reviewed Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita as follows: A group of sex perverts and the mentally confused (homosexuals, lesbians, impotents, and nymphomaniacs), whose trademarks are clear and fully visible, as Fellini gathered them especially for his film, demonstrates blatant exhibitionism (Al Hamishmar, Aug. 17, 1960). For Greenberg and his readers, the view of homosexuality and lesbianism as physical and mental illnesses was normative. This characteristic of the lesbian is also evident in the extensive coverage of JeanPaul Sartre’s 1944 play, Huis Clos (No Exit), which describes a triangle of characters locked in a room (Rena Terler, “Letter from Paris”, Herut, Oct. 09, 1953; Al Hamishmar, July 15, 1955; Lamerhav, July 10, 1959; Herut, Apr. 1, 1960). The reviews presented the character of a seductive lesbian, who operates on both women and men, adding interest and novelty to the artistic piece. Lesbian sexuality in a play was perceived as challenging contemporary public discourse. This is suggested in a letter from Sartre to an Israeli friend, in which “he expressed the hope that his play, Huis Clos, showing in the Zira Theater, will not be cut by the Israel censor as happened with (Sartre’s play) The Respectful Prostitute” (Haolam Haze, Oct. 23, 1952). Herut reported that the play “deals with a domestic Crime and Punishment against a metaphysical background”. The author identifies the lesbian as the link that creates the hellish triangle: The three people sentenced to hell are a man and two women, one of them a lesbian. The inevitable occurs – the lesbian tries to acquire the heart of the young Estella, who desires a man. He is indifferent to her, and obsessed by, and attracted to the character of the lesbian. A hellish triangle and a hellish end (Herut, 09 Oct. 1953). The review by Shmuel Or of the French film Dortoir des Grands also focuses on the character of the “erotic lesbian.” The film deals with a young detective who investigates a murder at a girls’ boarding school and discovers a lesbian relationship involving the girls and their teachers. Or writes: The film is actually a nice little detective movie [...] it turns out that the murder victim had been tied to her bed in a game the students played, and the murderer did his deed in the course of the game. [In the film], the director, Henri Decan, tried to include every possible audience-seducing situation offered by the setting of a boarding school, where seventeen young, cute girls spend their days and nights in the company of a strict director and counselors who are either androgynous or lesbians (Herut, Sept. 16, 1955).

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“Not even the pornographic images save the plot,” he adds, and writes that the director’s combination of the erotic lesbianism of “the cute girls” and the masculine lesbianism of the lesbian counselors leaves us with a film that is all in all “insignificant and cute” (idem). The ads for the film emphasized the provocative dimension, as was common in the period. In the 1960s in Italy, there was a wave of Giallo (“yellow” in Italian) films – a genre of horror-erotica-thriller films for adults, in which the lesbian image was used for arousal and interest (Koven, 2006). In 1957, Al Hamishmar advertised a film playing in Haifa that seems to belong to the genre, describing it as “the Italian film Stories of Miserable Loves, that gained acclaim abroad, about the problems of lesbian women” (Al Hamishmar, July 29, 1957) We also learn about the movie “Women’s Prison,” directed by Lewis Seiler Dortoir des Grandes, that presents, “for the first time on the film screen, lesbianism and crime in prison. Women in Prison is suitable for adults only,” the advertisement says, further titillating the potential viewer (Davar, 28 Aug. 1959). The prison setting demonstrates the third representation – “the criminal lesbian.” Movies portraying women in prison were popular since the 1930s, and in the 1950s these films developed into erotic semi-lesbian plots (Morey 1995: 80–87). These films also influenced the view of reality. The article “La Dolce Vita – Made in Israel” alluded to Fellini’s film in writing about the luxurious and hedonistic life of wealthy Israelis. The author reports on a lesbian who mixed in the world of crime and served as a pimp, supplying women to wealthy men: “An old, unmarried Israeli industrialist who supports a well-known lesbian woman, so she will occasionally supply him with a lovely woman, a simple prostitute or a married woman who yearns for a fur coat or a piece of jewelry of pure gold” (Kol Ha’am, Aug. 3, 1960). A similar description appeared in the article “How to Amuse Tourists” in Maariv, about a tour of a brothel in Paris and the character of the manager of the place, whom the author presumes to be a lesbian: Zodiac Cabaret in Pigalle, second floor. “Intimate” lighting, the owner is a short, fat lesbian, who cultivates a soft mustache. Along the bar and next to other tables are about a dozen and a half girls (used, but in pretty good shape) (Maariv, Dec. 20, 1957). The clearest connection between lesbians and crime appeared in an investigative piece in Davar about the women’s prison in Israel, entitled “Friends against a Lesbian Background.” The article deals in depth with the conditions and difficulties of the female prisoners, with only one sentence referring to lesbians: “The prisoners are lone wolves [...] the rare cases of friendship between the prisoners are usually against a background of lesbianism”. But the editor chose this reference as the title for the entire article (Davar, July 11, 1961). An article about the death of a woman, by either murder or suicide, published in Ha’olam Haze, demonstrates all three stereotypes associated with lesbianism – disease, sin, and crime. The article refers to the woman as a “Lesbian, whore, and crazy woman” (Haolam Haze, July 15, 1959, 16): When the police investigation increasingly expanded, the possibility that Yehudit had killed herself by fire was also raised seriously. The police discovered what was not known to most of those who knew Yehudit, with her small mouth and sneering nose

The Hebrew Lesbian

that she was half-crazy, in addition to her virtues as a lesbian, alcoholic, and drug addict (Haolam Haze, July 15, 1959, 16). Although there was no evidence of her alleged lesbianism, the stereotypes were attached to her, supporting the claims that she was involved in crime, helped her prisoner husband in his shady business, and was involved in prostitution. The combination of the three stereotypes can also be found in the Stalags literature, erotic booklets named for Nazi prisoner camps, that appeared in Israel in the 1960s, starting at the time of the Eichmann trial. These booklets were influenced by pornographic literature published in the United States and other places. Eli Keidar (Mike Baden) wrote the first one, Stalag 13, influenced by the film Stalag 17 (1953). Its dramatic success inspired the publication of dozens of additional booklets with similar titles (Haolam Haze, May 23, 1962), which described male or female prisoners who were sexualy abused by the cruel, violent Nazi prison guards (Heilbruner 2019; Ben-Ari 2009; Eshed 2002; Rapaport 2003). Their covers usually showed a picture of a pretty, topless woman in SS uniform, whipping or beating a prisoner, and some also contained illustrations, in black and white, of sadomasochist erotica between women (Eshed 2002). In the Hebrew press, the existence of this genre mostly went unmentioned, with only vague hints that these booklets familiarized the public with lesbianism. Although considered immoral, the booklets were sold at newsstands and easily reached wide portions of the public (mainly young heterosexual men). The only newspaper that extensively covered their story was Haolam Haze. The magazine describes the booklets: … beginning with modest descriptions of perverse relations and then on to sadistic and more distasteful descriptions, that only a sick and distorted imagination could conjure up [...] and thus all the sexual crimes in the world and all the possible deviancies were rendered fit to print. What was until now considered pornography became kosher, as long as it was attached to a Nazi (Haolam Haze, May 23, 1962). Female German prison guards were described as having erotic relationships among themselves and sexually abusing prisoners in camps. But this literature also included some positive references to lesbianism. These included, for instance, a description in the booklet Women’s Love by Madeleine Roshmon, which concentrated on a lesbian love story between an English spy and the wife of a Nazi officer (Eshed 2002). The Stalag image was also used in a positive portrayal of lesbianism that appeared in Haolam Haze: They experienced the same thing that happened to wonderful women in the Stalag literature: they were both amazingly beautiful, both light-haired, one with a young slim, body and small, pointy breasts, the other with her feminine torso and round, heavy and solid breasts (Haolam Haze, Apr. 7, 1965).

Curiosity and Voyeurism The most prominent portrayal of lesbianism at the time was the 1953 translation into Hebrew of the 1928 iconic British novel, The Well of Loneliness, written by Radclyffe Hall (Hall 1953). The publication was accompanied by ads that emphasized that the novel was written by a “self-declared lesbian” (Herut, Nov. 30, 1952; July 16, 1953; July 21, 1954; July 31,

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1955; Maariv, July 29-30, 1953). Critics referred to the book mainly as an opportunity to familiarize readers with the “deviant” phenomenon. In a review in Herut, T. D. referred to lesbianism as a deviance and mental illness, yet cited the book as an opportunity to glimpse unfamiliar ways of the mind that, from his point of view, made the story a fascinating reading experience: Who knows what is well hidden in the depth of the human mind? [...] The narrator, despite her male name, is a lesbian woman herself. Endowed with extraordinary literary talent, she tells the story of a woman whose sexual deviance has been with her from the day of her birth. Of course, this is a defense for the abnormal person, who becomes the victim of persecution and ostracism by the normal world [...] the discoveries of the mysteries of the sinful mind are interesting – discoveries made in the course of probing the depths of the well of the mind to find the reason for the abnormality (Herut, Apr. 17,1953). This voyeuristic approach to lesbianism and the desire to penetrate its mystery were expressed in the context of the review alongside other curious phenomena such as cross dressing. The critic thanked the author, whose high-quality writing opened a window onto the unknown and intriguing “conflicted” and “abnormal” mind. In another review of the same book, in Haboker, a certain N.A. used the term ‘problem’ to refer to lesbianism. This author, too, considered the publication of the book an opportunity to become familiar with the ‘abnormal’ phenomenon that was common overseas, and to learn about the lesbian’s “mysteries of the minds”. The curiosity about the lesbian “secret” was framed as empathy for the few families that were disturbed by it: The problem of lesbian women is not known in our country; at any rate, we do not hear anything about it, as we do frequently hear about other abnormal phenomena in the human mind. But perhaps it is hidden and it disturbs families here and there, and their secret is now known to many (Haboker, Jan. 1, 1954). The Kinsey report Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (Kinsey 1948) was translated into Hebrew in 1954 (Kinsey 1954). (Interestingly, the volume on male sexuality was not translated into Hebrew.) A review of the press indicates that the Kinsey reports on both male and female sexuality generated a more open and curious discussion. A change in the press attitude towards lesbianism was particularly evident after the publication of the volume on women’s sexuality in Hebrew (Al Hamishmar, Mar. 21, 1947; Sept. 17-25, 1953; Maariv, May 21, 1954; Herut, July 9, 1954; Kol Ha’am, Apr. 23, 1954; Davar, Jan. 7, 1954; Lamerhav, June 14, 1956), which was accompanied by lectures on the book (Al Hamishmar, Apr. 25-27 1954). Kinsey’s death in 1956 was also widely reported (Davar, Aug. 26, 1956; Herut, Aug. 26, 1956; Lamerhav, Aug. 26, 1956). Similarly, Miriam Oren’s review of André Maurois’s book, Lélia, The Life of George Sand (Maurois 1953), presents the lesbian option while casting doubt on the description of Sand, the heroine, as a lesbian: Sometimes the reader even feels that what he is reading is simply a disguised lesbian text. The smoking of cigars, the masculine clothing, male customs in general, and love

The Hebrew Lesbian

relations with men who are always many years younger than she is, of weak character and feminine appearance – all this is extremely odd. And perhaps this was no other than an early bud before the spring? Perhaps all that is queer and perverse in this personality was simply something that came before its time? Perhaps the masculine customs were the result of not knowing how to adapt the feminine customs to the battle for women’s rights? And what were her views on women’s rights? (Maariv, Mar. 23, 1956). Although Oren uses the accepted terms of “weird” and “perverse” to describe Sand, a fondness for Sand and the assertive female behavior is evident in her review. The possibility of lesbianism as an explanation for Sand’s behavior is raised only to be rejected, thereby expressing the already prevalent rejection of lesbian identity and behavior. Nevertheless, Oren interprets Sand’s image by expanding the normative gender spectrum, expressing her openness in the sentence: “The right to be honest in love […] today this is elementary to the life of every modern woman, but in Sand’s time, the demand for these rights was a boldness that required aggressive defense and a male battle.”

The Israeli Lesbian: From a Medical Discourse to a Cultural Discourse It was only in the 1960s that flesh and blood “Israeli Lesbians” made their way into the media. For the first time, there was mention of the existence of lesbian individuals, not only as a medical analysis or an international cultural representation but also as a local phenomenon. One can attribute this change to an event that began a sort of media snowball. Rina Ben Menahem, a “self-declared lesbian,” published in 1960 the novel The Rebels (1960) under the initials S.R.B. It was followed by The Rib or the 13th Rib (1961), and The Mischief (1963), and together they brought the phenomenon of “lesbianism” to public consciousness (Maanit 2018; Tal, Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 13, 2018; Maanit 2021;). The Rebels was sold clandestinely at kiosks, but it made an impact through extensive report in Haolam Haze after a promotional announcement in the preceding issue: In the next issue of Haolam Haze [...] scientists, doctors, and sociologists warn of the spread of the lesbian experience in some strata of the population. What caused this? What is fueling it? What are its proportions in Israel today and how is it spreading? Haolam Haze will bring you the accepted ideas of the scientists, the hidden dark facts, and the frank personal confessions of a well-known Israeli artist who is involved in this experience and explains its motives (Haolam Haze, Mar. 14, 1960). Although the weekly continued the medical discourse with the phrase “scientists, doctors, and sociologists,” it also added the cultural assumption that lesbians were not a certain type of women, but a social phenomenon, a way of life that can spread. The cover of the issue that dealt with lesbianism announced, “The Wave of Lesbianism in Israel,” and was accompanied by other bold headlines, such as “The Confessions of a Lesbian” and “Israel is Part of an International Network.” Under these headlines, the magazine openly presented what had not been written about anywhere else: No scientific estimate of the number of lesbians in Israel can be accurate [...] the only source for evaluation of the dimensions of the lesbian wave in Israel are the lesbians themselves [...] the majority of lesbians in Israel still keep their identity secret. They

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include many married women and even mothers of children. A large portion suffices with a permanent partner, with whom they live and do not appear in public as lesbians (Haolam Haze, Mar. 23, 1960). Haolam Haze presented lesbianism as a “wave,” a sweeping, infectious international trend that had come to Israel from abroad. As proof of this narrative, the weekly cited diverse sources including an interview with a lesbian who spoke about her life and her self-discovery; excerpts from the book The Rebels; statistical figures; international examples; and interviews with experts. Two doctors wrote in the issue, the sexologist Dr. Mordechai Zeidman, who said that lesbians did not have special sexual problems and therefore should not seek therapy; and the psychologist Dr. David Rudy, who bore the torch of sexual permissiveness and Western liberalism (Almog, 1998), and who divided lesbians by the traditional model of “essential” and “ostensible” types. Rudy repeated the trope of the masculine, financially well-to-do “essential Lesbian,” who seduced the young, delicate, and weak “ostensible Lesbian.” According to him, the latter type of homosexuality is more prominent among women than men, because a lesbian core exists in each woman, and derives from the fact that her first object of desire is a member of her sex – her mother. According to this approach, there appears to be a scientific psychological differentiation between ‘ostensible’ lesbianism, which is a common phenomenon among women, and ‘essential’ lesbianism, which was imported to Israel from other places in the world. Against the background of Rudy’s claim, Haolam Haze elaborated that potential for a lesbian wave had already existed in the country: All that was missing were the seducers themselves. Their number among Israeli women was too small to turn lesbianism into a social phenomenon. In recent years, there has been a change. The large volume of immigration, on the one hand, and the influx of artistic troupes, on the other hand, increased the number of real lesbians, who began setting up active lesbian groups around them. The journalist Benyamin Zeev Ben-Haim published an article entitled “A Horror Story” in the right-wing paper, Herut (Herut, Apr. 8, 1960), in which he talked about “a group of intellectuals with intentional sexual deviances”. This sick lifestyle, which in the first years of the existence of the state hardly spread in Israel, has in recent years reached worrisome proportions. The calm with which Israeli society related to the members of this group only causes them to recruit more to their ranks. If until then the vulgarization of Existentialist philosophy was merely a rumor, Ben Menahem here reveals the reality – a life with no future, a sense of depressing void, chronic drunkenness, and orgies that quickly sicken the participants. “Professional literature on a similar subject was usually written for a small group of psychologists who concentrate on the treatment of the mentally ill. But The Rebels is a different kind of book, the first of its type in Israel, intended for the general public.”

The Hebrew Lesbian

By the end of the book, he continued, “the reader feels shock accompanied by repulsion in light of the types who are steeped in filth up to their necks,” and expressed a sense of nausea in light of the spread of “the affliction” and the fear of “its spread” among additional groups. The broad media discussion, in Haolam Haze and other newspapers, increased the volume of sales of The Rebels (Maanit 2021: 285-287). By the time Ben-Menahem’s third book, The Mischief, came out three years later in 1963, Ben Artsi wrote this about it in Herut: “Rina Ben-Menahem [...] has done it again: after her dizzying commercial success three years ago, with the publication of The Rebels, she has published a new book, and it is enjoying the same commercial success.” Ben-Artsi did not refer at all to the content of the book (Herut, Mar. 20, 1963). The integration of a lesbian lifestyle into Israeli society was indicated in an article by Rachel Halfi in Maariv. She described the Jerusalem Taboo club, which she identified with Sartrean Existentialism. Yehuda Einav, owner of the club, told her that it was established to serve as an open meeting place for thinking people, and the lesbians added color to the surroundings: In this bar, there’s a certain atmosphere that creates a sense of freedom for people [...] I want people to create here [...] I don’t care [...] even if they are lesbians and homosexuals. Even if they are foxes, the main thing is that they be existentialists (Maariv, May 6, 1960). Sara Maanit, who researched the three novels written by S.R.B., found that the author’s approach to same-sex love changed from one novel to the next. In The Rebels, homosexuals and lesbians were described as perverse, condemned by society, and reconciled with their condemnation; in The Rib (The Thirteenth Rib), they were presented as people fighting for their place and their right to love and be loved, but who did not dare to undertake this battle openly; and in The Mischief, there was no longer any reason to hide their lesbian identity, as long as it derived from pure feelings (Maanit 2021: 328). Maanit sees a lot of resembles between The Well of Loneliness and the Rebels (Maanit 2021: 282-284), and it is likely that S.R.B. books generated a public discourse change in Israel similar to that of Radclyffe Hall’s book in Britain.

Change in Trend: Lesbian Love and Women’s Love “Wyler is producing a Film on a ‘Delicate’ Subject,” (Maariv, Oct. 20, 1960), reads the headline of an article on the film adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, which was launched on Broadway in 1934. At first, the film, which was directed by William Wyler, was given the same name as the play, and later it was changed to The Loudest Whisper. In 1936, Wyler directed the first film version of the play, which dealt with lesbianism in a delicate, veiled manner, in keeping with the Hays Code (1930-1966), an internal code of censorship of the association of film producers, which prohibited the inclusion of morally sensitive subject matter. In the 1960s, a more explicit version was produced, although it still abided by the rules of the Hays Code. The article described the film, which dealt with “schoolgirls who accused their teacher of […] ‘Lesbianism’,”

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and reflected the change that had occurred in the discourse in the years between the two versions: The play was filmed for the first time twenty five years ago, but at that time it was forbidden to touch this subject, so its content was altered. Today it is already permissible to speak of it openly. Clearly, the teacher is not guilty and emerges as innocent. The world of film – even Hollywood – is different today than it was a quarter of a century ago (Maariv, Oct. 20, 1960). In an article that appeared in Herut in 1962, Shmuel Or focused on the change in consciousness in the United States, and especially in the Hollywood Production Code Committee: It is clear that the attempt to put a subject like lesbian love on the American stage was doomed to condemnation from the start. And if the stage cannot yet withstand such condemnation, the film industry, which is based mainly on a lot of goodwill of very many commercial parties, was not ready to tolerate such an attempt to handle the play. William Wyler, who had already purchased the filming rights thirty years ago [...] sacrificed the glory of his first film to be a victim of defamation of indecency [...] the all-American Production Code Committee was much less severe than previously. Wyler tried again – and succeeded. This time they accused the two teachers, Audrey Hepburn, and Shirley MacLain, of lesbianism – even if it is heard mainly behind sealed glass – the dramatic conflict transcends its original heights (Herut, Nov. 23, 1962). It is not clear whether Or supported the Hollywood producers or opposed their liberalization of the Code. An expression of the acceptance of lesbianism can be found in new, positive terminology in the cultural review columns. An example is the new term “lesbian love,” which was used to describe relationships between women. In a review of Henry Miller’s book, Nexus, the term was “associated with lesbian love of a female painter” (Davar, May 6, 1960). Le Rempart des Béguines (The Illusionist) by French-Belgian author François MalletJoris, was presented as “the story of a young adolescent woman in a French town, who develops a strong friendship with her father’s mistress and is caught in lesbian love” (Lamerhav, Dec. 16, 1960). The term “lesbian love” as a description of an emotion may have been more comfortable for writers and their readers than “lesbian,” which incorporated a perception of identity that had been developing during the first half of the century. Perhaps the use of the term “women’s love,” which does not mention the word “lesbian” at all, similarly reflects a focus on a practice or emotion rather than an identity. This term underwent a semantic transformation to describe lesbian love, from its original reference to women’s total, coddling love of men (Hapoel Hatsair, Oct. 12, 1924; Ktuvim, Jan. 26, 1928; Haboker, Mar. 26, 1941; Davar, May 26, 1950, May 9, 1952; Al Hamishmar, Sept. 15, 1961) or love of men for women. The term “women’s love” carried its new meaning for the first time in an issue of Haolam Haze, which promoted an article about “Revelations that will amaze you: The first serious research on the new phenomenon that has invaded Israeli society after it made its mark on social life in many countries – the Women’s Love” (Haolam Haze, Mar. 16, 1960).

The Hebrew Lesbian

The semantic transformation was gradual, and the term “women’s love” continued to carry its previous meanings as well. The significant breakthrough in use of the term with its new meaning appeared in the translation of the 1968 French film Les Biches (The Does), directed by Claude Chabrol, which in Hebrew was entitled Love of Women. The melodramatic suspense film describes a romantic triangle between a man and two women, who themselves engage in lesbian relations. The film gained wide publicity, and it is reasonable to assume that it contributed to the grounding of the new meaning. In Al Hamishmar, Y. Ben-Ner wrote that the film told the story of “friendship and love between women,” “mutual love of two women,” or “feminist love” (Al Hamishmar, Sept. 20, 27, 1968). The words indicate conflicting trends. On the one hand, the use of the terms “feminist love,” “mutual love,” or “lesbian love” began, in contrast to the preceding decades, to be used relatively comfortably. On the other hand, the earlier “essential Lesbian” –as a controlling and seductive woman of means – still appeared in the discourse and in media reviews. Natan Gross of Al Hamishmar suggested a practical explanation of the use of the new terms in his article, “Love Lesbos Style.” He analyzed three films about lesbianism (Les Biches/Women’s Love, The Fox, and Persona), and claimed that the use of the terms “Lesbian love” and “women’s love” was intended to promote sales: They haven’t seen the films yet, but they already know: films about lesbian love – women’s love […] the rumor was spread through advertising agents seeking sensation […] And so three films, now being distributed in Israel, gained the said publicity because they deal with ‘lesbian problems’ (Al Hamishmar, Oct. 4, 1968). In Gross’s view, the emphasis on lesbianism in the films exploited the voyeuristic curiosity of the audience regarding relationships between women and was meant purely for commercial purposes.

Summary: A Genealogy of Representations It is possible to outline a genealogy of the changing representations of the lesbian over the forty years reviewed here. While it is possible to identify a process that shifted from ignoring to acknowledgment, the process was not linear. It was always accompanied by reservations, which seem to reflect an ambivalence in Hebrew-Israeli society. In the early days of the Hebrew press, there was no mention of lesbians who lived in Palestine. This disregard was consistent with the discreet style of writing about any aspect of personal issues in the Hebrew press of that period (Yaal 2012: 354). The only existing references were in the fields of medicine and psychology, mostly a contribution of immigrants from the German-speaking areas of central Europe. In the 1940s, even these references to lesbians did not appear. In the 1950s and 1960s, the influences of the United States and western Europe reached the realms of film, theater, and literature. The publication of the two volumes of The Kinsey Reports in the 1950s, particularly the second volume about women, which was translated into Hebrew, played an important role in the process of gradual opening up. Their impact in Israel was expressed in the increasingly frequent discussion of sexuality, especially of woman. Similarly, literary

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works like Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness were translated into Hebrew in the 1950s and also influenced the public and media discourse. Publications of Israeli works, such as the three books by S.R.B. and the appearance of the Stalag booklets increased public interest and knowledge. All these changes affected the birth of a local lesbian community and its acceptance by the public, together bringing Hebrew Lesbians into the public discourse (Safran/Hartal/Sasson-Levy 2016). These changes in discourse reflect changes in social attitudes towards lesbianism. Thus, in the 1930s, both the “mannish woman,” who fit the Zionist image of an activist female pioneer, and the “essential Lesbian,” who existed in psychological, literary, and film representations, were prominent. In the 1950s and 60s, curiosity and voyeurism were expressed in stereotypical representations of the lesbian as sick, dangerously erotic, and criminal, images influenced by film and literary images. It is only in the 1960s that a gradual openness can be discerned, represented by the non-judgmental term “women’s love.” The term, present in the German media since the 1920s, became common in the Israeli media in the 1960s. A gradual change is also evident in the stereotypes regarding lesbianism – from a perverse disease to odd, perhaps even arousing, behavior, to its partial acceptance as a legitimate intimate and sexual aspect of women. A final remark is in order. Representations of the lesbian were shaped mostly by changing male perspectives of her image. It is important to remember that most of the writers and editors in the Hebrew press were men. It is evident that the Mannish Lesbian threatened the male just as the “essential lesbian” posed a threat when she seduced and “robbed” men of women. When she was presented as “erotic,” on the other hand, men could also fantasize about her. In other words, the Hebrew lesbian essentially existed from and through the male gaze.

Bibliography Newspaper Cited Al Hamishmar Davar Doar HaYom Ha’aretz Haolam Haze Hapoel Hatsair Haboker Herut Iton Meyuhad Kol Ha’am Ktuvim LaMerhav Maariv Tesha Ba’erev Yediot Ahronot

The Hebrew Lesbian

Newspaper Articles Cited Bracha. “Adler’s Theory and His Conclusions Regarding Education,” Davar 19 July 1929 The Wanderer. “Free Women,” Iton Meyuhad, 22 May 1934. Aviyatar. “Love in the Contemporary Novel,” Al Hamishmar, Dec. 21, 1951) Oren, Miriam, “Lélia is George Sand,” Maariv, 23 Mar. 1956. [author unknown]. “In the next issue of Haolam Haze – The Love of Women,” Haolam Haze, 14 Mar. 1960. p. 10 [author unknown]. “Wave of Lesbianism in Israel,” Haolam Haze, 23 Mar. 1960.

Online Archives Cited Historical Jewish Press: https://web.nli.org.il/sites/JPress/English/Pages/default.aspx# 01

Literature Cited Ajzenstadt, Mimi (2010): “The Jewish Women’s Equal Rights Association of Palestine and its Struggle to Establish the Role of ‘Mother of the Family’ in Pre-State Israel, 1919-1948.” One Law for Man and Woman: Women, Rights and Law in Mandatory Palestine, edited by Eyal Katvan/Margalit Shilo/Ruth Halperin-Kadari. Bar-Ilan University Press. pp. 57-85. (Hebrew) Almog, Oz (1998): “From ‘We Shall Overcome’ to ‘I’m In History’.” Panim, no. 6, pp. 19-29. (Hebrew) André Maurois (1953): Lélia: The life of George Sand, trans. Gerard Hopkins. London: J. Cape. Aricha, Yosef (1967): Confession. In his Selected Stories (orig. 1939). Tel-Aviv; Niv. pp. 290296. Bachi, Roberto (1955): “Israel’s Demographic Development.” Rivon Lekalkala, 8. pp. 38486. (Hebrew) Ben-Ari, Nitsa (2009): “Popular Literature in Hebrew as a Maker of Anti-Sabra Culture.” Translation Studies, vol. 2. pp. 178-195. Bernstein, Deborah (1987). The Struggle for Equality: Urban Women Workers in Prestate Israeli Society. New York: Praeger. —. (1998): “Daughters of the Nation - Between the Public and the Private Spheres of the Yishuv.” Jewish Women in Historical Perspective. J. Baskin (ed.). 2nd ed. Detroit: Wayne University Press. pp. 287-311. Ben-Menahem, Sara Rina (S.R.B.) (1960): The Rebels. Tel Aviv, Hamahberet Publishers, Hadfus Haklali. (Hebrew) — (1961): The Rib or the 13th Rib. Tel Aviv, Hamahberet Publishers, Hadfus Haklali. (Hebrew) — (1963): The Mischief. Hamahberet Publishers, Tel Aviv, Hadfus Haklali. (Hebrew) — (2018): Republished The Rebels, The Rib, The Mischief. Edited by Eli Ben Shaltiel. Tel Aviv: Am Oved. (Hebrew)

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Darr, Orna Alyagon (2017): “Narratives of Sodomy and Unnatural Offenses in the Courts of Mandate Palestine (1918-48).” Law and History Review, vol. 35, pp. 235–60. Eger, Elizabeth (2008): Brilliant Women: 18th-Century Bluestockings. New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press. Elboim-Dror, Rachel (1994): “Gender in Utopianism: the Zionist Case”. History Workshop. 37:1, pp. 99–116. Elyada, Uzi (2015): Yellow World: The Birth of Hebrew Popular Press in Palestine: From Hazevi to Haor 1884-1914. Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press. pp. 10-11. (Hebrew) Eshed, Eli (2002). Welcome to Stalag 13: History of a Literary Genre About Sex, Torture and Concentration Camps. Givat Shmuel: Tarzan and Co. Press (Hebrew) Gilboa, Menucha (1988): “Outlines for a Methodology for Research of the Press”. Kesher, vol. 3. pp. 39-42 (Hebrew) Gross, Larry (1998): “Minorities, Majorities and the Media.” in Media, Rituals and Identity Liebs/Curran (eds.). London, Routledge. pp. 87-102 Habermas, Jürgen (1991): The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: MIT Press, pp. 181-243. Hall, Radclyffe (1928): The Well of Loneliness. Paris: Pegasus. — (1953): The Well of Loneliness. Hebrew Translated by Yitzhak Sverdlik. Tel Aviv: Idit. Hall M. Stuart, (1980). “Encoding / Decoding.” In: Hall/Hobson/Lowe/Willis (eds). Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79. London: Hutchinson. pp. 128–138. Heilbruner, Oded (2019): “Moral Panic and Consumption of Pornographic Literature in Israel in the 1960s”. Iyunim 31. pp. 60-103. Hirsch, Dafna (2009): “We Are Here to Bring the West, Not Only to Ourselves”: Zionist Occidentalism and the Discourse of Hygiene in Mandate Palestine”. International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 41:4. pp. 577-594 Ilany, Ofri (2017): “An Oriental vice: Representations of sodomy in early Zionist discourse”. In National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective the Homophobic Argument. Rohde/von Braun/Schüler-Springorum (eds). London: Routledge. pp. 107-120. Kama, Amit (2003): The Newspaper and the Closet. Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuhad. (Hebrew) —. First, Anat (2015): Exclusion: mediated representations of ‘others’. Tel Aviv: Resling. pp. 165-194 (Hebrew) Kozma, Liat (2010): “Sexology in the Yishuv: The Rise and Decline of Sexual Consultation in Tel Aviv, 1930-39”. International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 42:2. pp. 231–49. Kahn, Fritz (1935): The Sexual Hygiene of the Young Woman. Jerusalem: Sifriyat Briyut Haam, Hadassah Natan and Lena Strauss Health Center. pp. 1-47. (Hebrew) — (1935): The Sexual Hygiene of the Young Man, Jerusalem, Briyut Haam Series, Hadassah Natan and Lena Strauss Health Center, pp. 1-36. (Hebrew) — (1939): Our Sex Life: A Guide & Counsellor for Everyone. New York: Knopf. —. (1939): Unser Geschlectsleben. Zürich-Leipzig Albert Muller Verlag, A.G. Ruslchlikon.

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— (1962): Hayeinu Hamini’im: Madrich Veyoetz Lekol Ish VeIsha (Our Sex Life: A Guide & Counsellor for Everyone). Translated Baruch Kat. 1964 2nd ed. Jerusalem: Ahiasaf and Shahaf. (in Hebrew). Kinsey, Alfred C. (1948): Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. — (1954): Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Translated by N. Ben-Ami. Tel Aviv: Levnon. Koven, Mikel J. (2006): La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film. Lanham, MD., Scarecrow Press, pp. 61-76. Larry Gross (2001): Up from Invisibility: Lesbian, Gay Men, and the Media in America. New York: Columbia University Press. Maanit, Sara (2021): The Silent Link: Israel’s Women’s Novels in the Early Years of the State. Tel-Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew) — (2018): “Foreword”. The Rebel, The Rib, The Mischief. Tel Aviv: Am Oved (Hebrew) Newton, Esther (1989): “The Mythical Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman.” Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Guy & Lesbian Past. Duberman/Vicinius/Chauncey Jr. (eds.). New York: Penguin. pp. 281-293. Morey, Anne (1995): ““The judge called me an accessory”: women’s prison films, 19501962”. Journal of Popular Film & Television. 23:2. pp. 80–87. Naor, Mordechai (2004): Ladies and Gentlemen, The Press, Tel-Aviv: Ministry of Defense, pp. 305-14. (Hebrew) Penslar, Derek. (2000): “Introduction: The Press and the Jewish Public Sphere”. Jewish History. 14:1. pp. 3-8. Rapaport, Lynn (2003): “Holocaust pornography: profaning the sacred in Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS”. Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. 22:1. pp. 53–79. Sappol, Michael (2017): Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shilo, Margalit (2005). Princess or Prisoner? Jewish Women in Jerusalem, 1840-1914. Waltham, Mass: Brandeis University Press. Shnitzer, Shmuel (1990): “Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv and Hebrew Journalism,” Kesher 7. pp. 2125. (Hebrew) Stern, Bat-Sheva Margalit (2011): “He walked through the fields,” but what did she do? The “Hebrew woman” in her own eyes and in the eyes of her contemporaries”. Journal of Israeli History. 30:2. pp. 161-187. Tzifroni, Gabriel (1988): “A Special Paper,” Kesher. 3. pp. 107-112. (Hebrew) Safran, Hannah/Hartal, Rachely/Sasson-Levy, Orna (2016): “Local Lesbian She-Story”. LGBT Rights in Israel. Harel/Lushinsky/Morgenstern (eds.). Jerusalem: Hebrew University Press. pp. 45-79 (Hebrew). Tal, Ronen (2018): “She Rebelled: The First Hebrew Lesbian Author”. Yediot Ahronot, Oct. 13 (Hebrew) Yaal, Orit (2012): Private Relationships in Public Eyes: Couplehood in Pre-State Israel in the Hebrew Press Discourse. PhD diss., Bar-Ilan University. (Hebrew) Yonay, Yuval (2016): “‘It Is Forbidden to be Homosexual’: How Gays and Newspapers Thought and Wrote on the Law that Proscribed Homosexuality.” LGBTQ Rights in

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Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine1 The Journey of a German Jewish Sexologist (February 14–March 13, 1932) Andreas Krass

On November 15, 1930, the German Jewish physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), founder and director of the internationally renowned Institute for Sex Research in Berlin (1919-1933), left Germany for a lecture tour to the United States. Hirschfeld was hailed as the “Einstein of Sex” for his theory of sexual relativity (Herzer 2017: 351). The trip turned into a sixteen-month-long journey that included Japan, China, Indonesia, India, Egypt, and Palestine. In 1933, one year after his return to Europe, Hirschfeld released a four-hundred-page-long travelogue titled Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (“The World Journey of a Sex Researcher”). The book, published in Switzerland, concludes with an extensive report on his visit to Palestine, comprising forty three pages, divided into seventeen chapters (Hirschfeld 1933: 350-392). As Hirschfeld claims in a short preface to his travelogue, it was only at the end of his trip to the United States that he decided to return via the Pacific rather than the Atlantic Ocean: “When I departed from my domain in Berlin, I had neither intended nor planned a journey around the world” (ibid.: v). While travelling and lecturing in the United States, he sensed that he could not return to Berlin because of the Nazis. As Hirschfeld notes in his diary on November 26, 1931, he received numerous letters from Germany “which depicted the situation there in the darkest colours” because of the “surge of the Hitler-movement” (2013: 128). He realized that exile was waiting for him: “To return under these circumstances […] would certainly be utterly unreasonable, so I decided […] to avoid Germany as long as it is under Hitler’s spell. Poor German fatherland! Beautiful, beloved homeland! Will I ever see you again?” (ibid.: 130). On May 1

Many thanks to Yoav Zaritsky (Haifa) and Jan Wilkens (Potsdam) for proofreading and commenting on my paper; to Yuval Yonay and Yoav Zaritsky for translating the Hebrew newspaper articles into English; to Dotan Brom (Haifa) for showing me the relevant places in Haifa, including the Struck Museum, and providing me with helpful information; to Moshe Sluhovsky for pointing out additional relevant newspaper articles and research literature to me; and to Ralf Dose for providing me with archival documents from the Magnus Hirschfeld Society. All translations from German to English are mine.

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15, 1932, two months after his return to Europe, he added: “Can anyone blame me for shying away from returning into a country where such mad deeds are possible?” (ibid: 136). Yet where should he settle? There were three obvious options: Europe, the United States, or Palestine. Hirschfeld decided to move to France, where he died suddenly on May 14, 1935 – three years after the completion of his world journey and two years after his Institute for Sex Research in Berlin was demolished by the Nazis. The following article pursues two goals. It will first reconstruct Hirschfeld’s itinerary on the basis of his travelogue, which has until now been the only source of knowledge of his trip to Palestine (Wolf 1986: 354-362, 365; Herzer 2001: 53-55, 247; 2017: 367-368; Dose 2005: 36-37; 2014: 33-34; Bauer 2017: 120-123). It will put Hirschfeld’s account in chronological order and specify the mentioned places, dates, and persons as far as possible. Furthermore, it will include three additional sources: First, reports published during and after Hirschfeld’s stay in Palestinian newspapers such as Davar, Doar HaYom, HaAretz, Hazit HaAm, and Palestine Bulletin (accessible at the online archive Historical Jewish Press); second, additional documents kept by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin, such as Hirschfeld’s passport, diary, and letters; and third, on-site findings collected during my trip to Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and Haifa in March 2019. Hirschfeld’s travelogue will be quoted based on the abridged English version, translated by Oliver P. Green and published in 1935 both in New York (Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist) and London (Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert); the additional text of the German original will also be incorporated. The US edition provides an introduction (Hirschfeld 1935a: vii-xii) by the psychiatrist Abraham A. Brill (1874-1948) who, as the President of the New York Psychoanalytical Society, had introduced Hirschfeld “to a large audience” at his lecture at the Academy of Medicine. Brill, an Austrian Jew born in Galicia, had immigrated to the United States at the age of fifteen. He praises Hirschfeld as “the famous sexologist” and “foremost pioneer in the tabooed science” who had given “a very attractive and instructive account of his trip around the world.” Brill continues: “As might be expected, it is not just a narrative of places and events seen here and there, but an ethnological study of those sexual manifestations which the average traveller in the Near and Far East either does not see or seeks for the sake of morbid curiosity” (all quotes ibid.: vii). Regarding Hirschfeld’s depiction of his stay in Palestine, Brill writes: “Jaffa, Haifa, and Jerusalem are vividly portrayed from many instructive angles. His reflections on Palestine are of special interest. After visiting the places ‘where stones talk’, he wrote a chapter on Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed, in which he disburdens himself rather philosophically on religion […]” (ibid.: xi). The second part of this article will explore in which ways and to what extent Hirschfeld reflects on his identity as both a Jewish and a homosexual man in the Palestine-related chapters of his book. Shortly after his return to Europe, on May 17, 1932 (three days after his sixty-fourth birthday), Hirschfeld himself raised the issue of his identity in his diary: “The question: ‘Where do you belong – what are you actually?’ leaves me no rest. If I ask: ‘Are you a German – a Jew – or a citizen of the world’ then my answer is at any rate: ‘citizen of the world’ or ‘all of the three’” (Hirschfeld 2013: 140). While explicitly referring to his national and religious provenance, the sexologist and advocate of sexual liberation keeps silent about his sexuality. The same applies to his travelogue – at least on the surface of the text.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

1.

Hirschfeld’s Itinerary

When Hirschfeld left Germany for New York, the first stop on his lecture tour, his partner Karl Giese (1898-1938) stayed in Berlin in order to take care of the institute where he worked as an archivist. After travelling alone for the first six months of his journey, the situation changed in May 1931 when, during his stay in Shanghai, Hirschfeld met a Chinese student named Li Shiu-tong (1907-1993) (Hirschfeld 1935a: 49-50; 1935b: 49). With the permission of his father, Li Shiu-tong accompanied Hirschfeld as a translator for the rest of his tour in China, then stayed with him for the remainder of the journey and the last four years of Hirschfeld’s life. Hirschfeld called him “Tao Li”, a nickname meaning the “beloved disciple.” At the end of their journey, the companions spent twenty-nine days in Palestine. They arrived on Sunday, February 14, 1932, and departed on Sunday, March 13, 1932. During their stay in Palestine, which had been under British Mandate since 1920, they visited Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and the kibbutz Beit Alfa. Hirschfeld notes that he had “repeatedly heard authorities say that of the three large cities of this country, Jerusalem embodies the past, Tel Aviv the present, and Haifa the future” (Hirschfeld 1935a: 276; 1935b: 272) In this respect, Hirschfeld’s tour was also a journey through time. Hirschfeld was looking forward to his visit to Palestine. The visa for Egypt and Jerusalem, issued by the Passport Officer to the Government of Bombay, was already in his hands (Hirschfeld 2013: 132), when he wrote in his diary on November 26, 1931 (while cruising the Red Sea close to Sinai Peninsula on board the steamer Pilsna) that his travel plans had been delayed for three weeks due to a malaria infection he had contracted in Bombay. Now, he was finally able to continue his journey: “I am on my way to Cairo and Jerusalem. How long I will stay there and what will happen next is uncertain. My wish would be: until the end of January: Egypt, February: Palestine” (Hirschfeld 2013: 132). Yet he had to postpone his trip to Palestine again, since his poor health forced him to stay in Egypt for two more weeks.

1.1

Tel Aviv (February 14–20)

Before his arrival in Tel Aviv, Hirschfeld had already made plans with his former colleague Chaim Berlin (1890-1980). The dermatologist, once “one of the most faithful pupils of our Sexology Institute,” worked at the Hadassah Hospital of Tel Aviv (Hirschfeld 1933: 356). He resided in a beautiful Bauhaus-style apartment building at 117 Rothschild Boulevard, only a mile away from the San Remo Hotel where Hirschfeld was staying (cf. the article on Chaim Berlin in the Hebrew version of Wikipedia, with a photo of the now-fully renovated building). Berlin had “promised to secure invitations and arrange my lecture tour […] so that I might address physicians and laymen” (Hirschfeld 1935a: 276; 1935b: 272). Berlin published articles in the newspapers Davar, Doar HaYom, and HaAretz announcing Hirschfeld’s trip to Palestine. On February 12, 1932, the Davar (“Word/Massage”), the most important newspaper of the Zionist labor movement, wrote:

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Figure 8.1: Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shiu-tong in Nizza, 1934; courtesy of Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V., Berlin

Dr. Chaim Berlin tells us that on 14 February the medical advisor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld will arrive to the country. He is the head of the Institute of Sex Research in Berlin. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld is a very well-known personality in the medical world and considered one of the biggest experts of sex. Dr. Hirschfeld returned from a scientific trip to the East. He was in Japan, China, India and Egypt. He will stay in Eretz Israel for three weeks and in the first week he will stay in Tel Aviv. On February 16, 1932, the popular Doar HaYom (“Daily Mail”) published a similar article, adding that Hirschfeld would stay “in the San Remo Hotel in Tel Aviv” and “give lec-

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

tures in Israel”. The most elaborate article, signed by Chaim Berlin himself, appeared on February 15, 1932, in the HaAretz (“The Land [of Israel]”): Yesterday, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the renowned researcher in the field of sexology, arrived in Tel-Aviv. Among the great researchers of sexual issues, the medical advisor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld now takes the lead. Hirschfeld has dedicated his scientific work for almost forty years to this special field which had been neglected before his work and has taken care of this work with extraordinary enthusiasm. In 1896, his first work was published, a small book named “Sappho and Socrates” which was written under the influence of a tragic event: the death of a young homosexual officer who had committed suicide. From that time on, almost every year new books and articles of his have been appearing, the most important ones are: “Sexual Pathology” [Sexualpathologie, 1917–1920], a book for teaching doctors in three volumes, and, in a more popular fashion, “Sexology” [Geschlechtskunde, 1926–1930], a monography on sex life and love in five volumes of 3,000 pages. And there is not a single small question belonging to this field that Hirschfeld wouldn’t precisely answer in his books based on scientific, social, and human examination. For forty years of work, he stood by the motto that science is not a theory for itself but is meant to be for mankind. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sex Research in Berlin, the first institute, and so far the only one in the world, dedicated to not only examining and understanding but also curing sexual disorders. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld shall remain in the land of Israel for three weeks. He was invited to lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He will also lecture in Tel Aviv on behalf of the medical association. We welcome Dr. Hirschfeld with greetings as a firstdegree researcher, as an incredible doctor and as an excellent person. As a matter of fact, Hirschfeld stayed for four weeks in Palestine – not “three weeks,” as Chaim Berlin writes in his article, or “five weeks,” as Hirschfeld claims in his travelogue (Hirschfeld 1935a: 271; 1935b: 267) – namely, one week in Tel Aviv, two in Jerusalem, and one in Haifa and Beit Alfa. On Sunday, February 14, 1932, Chaim Berlin picked up Hirschfeld and Li Shiu-tong at the train station of Lod and drove them to the fancy San Remo Hotel, which was located at the very beginning of Allenby Street, close to the beach. The building was demolished later on; nowadays the Opera Tower, opened in 1993, occupies the place where the hotel used to be. Hirschfeld had decided to spend the first week in Tel Aviv, as in the second half of February, he had been told, the weather would be much nicer there than in “cold, stormy and rainy” Jerusalem (1935a: 276; 1935b: 272). Hirschfeld describes the pleasant and historically interesting car ride from Lod to Tel Aviv: On the way we drove through large plantations of beautiful, big, fragrant Jaffa oranges, past Mikveh Israel, the agricultural school for young Jews of all countries, built as early as 1870 by the Alliance Israélite; past the German settlement of Sarona, one of the model colonies of the community of Württemberg Knights Templar who settled in Palestine in 1868 (1935a: 277; 1935b: 273). Hirschfeld notes that the newly built San Remo Hotel was “named after the place where the Balfour Declaration was recognized – San Remo, where the peace treaty between Turkey and England was signed” on November 2, 1917 (1935a: 272; 1935b: 268). He was

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enchanted by the hotel, “beautifully situated by the sea”, and he was struck by the fact that “[a]ll the employees, from the director to the bootblack, are Jewish” (1935a: 272; 1935b: 268). Hirschfeld was also intrigued by the everyday life of Tel Aviv, which presented an entirely Jewish equivalent of a contemporary European city: Tel Aviv is a remarkable town. First of all, it is the only modern, completely Jewish city, with about 50,000 inhabitants. From the municipal government to the working-class, from the police to the street-cleaners and chimney-sweeps, all are Jews. If they did not speak Hebrew and if the signs on the houses, the door-plates and newspapers were not in Hebrew, one would not know from the people and the streets that one was in an exclusively Jewish city – unless one arrived on a Saturday when all traffic ceases, all shops are shut, and the men, women and children all go out walking in their best clothes (1935a: 277; 1935b: 273; cf. Azaryahu 2007: 33-71). As Hirschfeld also notes, “Tel Aviv ha[d] become a place of deliverance for approximately 50,000 Jews who had grown weary of persecution and contempt in their native lands” (1935a: 281-282; 1935b: 278; cf. Helman 2012). Hirschfeld points out how indistinguishable Jewish life in Tel Aviv was from modern urban life in Europe – except for the language and the fact that the official day of rest is Saturday rather than Sunday. The city also confirmed his belief that Jewishness is not a question of ethnicity and physiognomy but of language and culture: Very seldom – much more seldom, anyway, than in Carlsbad or Marienbad – one sees the characteristic ‘Struck’ heads or the Oriental beauties as they were painted in my youth by Sichel. The so-called ‘Jewish nose’ too, supposedly an Aramaic-Arab characteristic, is hardly more frequent than the pug-nose. Noses of ‘western’ or ‘northern’ form predominate (to use Günther’s nomenclature), and the formation, too, of lips, hair, eyes and hands is hardly different from the average European type. One even sees, especially among the children, a surprisingly large number of blonde and blue-eyed types. In a kindergarten I counted 32 blondes among 54 children, that is, more than fifty per cent (1935a: 277; 1935b: 273). By referring to painters such as Nathaniel Sichel (1843-1907) and Hermann Struck (18761944) – whom he met in Haifa later on – and by rebutting race theorists such as Hans F. K. Günther (1891-1961), Hirschfeld argues that the notion of uniquely Jewish physical features is nothing but a stereotypical fantasy fabricated in orientalizing art and racial theory. In his last book, published posthumously in English in 1938 under the title Racism, he explores and deconstructs the racist theories and practices of his time. Hirschfeld welcomed the opportunity to relax in a city whose promising Hebrew name means, as he points out in his travelogue, Hill of Spring (1935a: 276; 1935b: 272). Impressed by the beauty of the beach, he writes: The wide, white bathing-beach at Tel Aviv is quite magnificent. It is as though it were created for an international health resort – a Palestinian counterpart of Ostend, Biarritz and Miami. When I loitered there during the second half of February, the beach was already very lively – animated by hundreds of swimmers of both sexes. The scenic

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

charm is enhanced by processions of stately camels along the coast, bearing great cases of Jaffa oranges (1935a: 282; 1935b: 278; cf. Azaryahu, 2007: 191-207). Used to the long winters of Berlin, he was delighted that in Tel Aviv “it is possible for the inhabitants to indulge in sea- and sun-bathing for eight months of the year – an advantage which is freely utilized, as I could see in February, 1932” (1935a: 276; 1935b: 272). He enjoyed watching “the fresh boys and girls on the beach of Tel Aviv with ‘the beautiful divine spark of joy’ flashing from their eyes” (1935a: 275; 1935b: 271). They reminded him of the European youth movements: In their simple dress – hatless, bare-necked and with bare legs – in the ingeniousness of their manner, apparently strongly influenced by the modern movement of ‘Wandervögel’ and the Boy Scouts, they seem so full of the joy, strength and affirmation to life that they seem to have overcome all the repressions and unconscious feelings of erotic inferiority frequently found at this age (1935a: 275-276; 1935b: 271-272). Hirschfeld refers here to the Wandervogel (“wandering bird”), a German youth movement founded in 1901 in Berlin, as well the British Scout movement and its German branch, the Pfadfinder (“path finder”). Hirschfeld also went to the theatre. He saw the Yiddish play Di keytn fun meshiakh (The Chains of the Messiah), written by the Russian poet and dramatist H. Leyvicka and performed by the Habima players, whom he had already seen in 1930 in Berlin: “Here in the Tel Aviv theatre, opened shortly before – a handsome ultra-modern building very original in style – I saw an extremely impressive performance of the Russian drama, Chains. Every square inch of the theatre was filled” (1935a: 293; 1935b: 289). Hirschfeld is probably referring to the Mugrabi Opera, an Art Deco style structure located at what is today Bet be-November Square. The building, which also served as a cinema, was opened in 1930, destroyed by a fire in 1986, and eventually demolished in 1989: “[T]he hall served mainly as a cinema. Its central location and imposing architecture made it a famous Tel Aviv landmark, so much so that the spot became commonly and unofficially known as Mugrabi Square“ (Helman 2012: 116; cf. the website of the Tel-Aviv City Archive). Hirschfeld briefly reports the history of the Habima Players: The renowned Jewish theatre group, founded in 1916 in Moscow, “was the prototype of many similar theatre movements in Berlin and elsewhere. After they had completed their triumphant tour of the capitals of Europe and America, they made Tel Aviv their headquarters” (1935a: 293; 1935b: 289). Hirschfeld was also impressed by the ancient port of Jaffa: “In the distance is the picturesque city of Jaffa, jutting out to sea like a promontory, a fortress, along whose banks boats laden with men and cargo hurry to and fro between steamers of all nationalities lying in the docks” (1935a: 282; 1935b: 278). When he visited Jaffa and its surroundings, he talked to an old Jew who told him about his immigration to Palestine: “At a colony in the vicinity of Jaffa I met a venerable Jew, already well up in the seventies, who had come to Palestine fifty years before, following the pogroms of Kishinev, and since made the country his home” (1935a: 303; 1935b: 298-299; since the Kishinev pogrom took place in 1903, he must have come to Palestine thirty rather than fifty years before). Hirschfeld thus had the chance to meet a witness of the First Aliyah (“wave of immi-

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gration”), whereas most of the immigrants he met in Palestine had arrived during the Third and Fourth Aliyot. Aside from leisure, Hirschfeld continued his lecture tour. He held three talks in Tel Aviv: two for a medical audience and one for the public. The professional talks took place on Wednesday, February 17, and Thursday, February 18, 1932, at the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centre at 14 Balfour Street (Hirschfeld 1935a: 284; 1935b: 280). The newspaper Haaretz announced them on Tuesday, February 16, 1932: Tomorrow, Wednesday, at eight fifteen at night, at the hall of the health centre (Balfour Street) a gathering of the local branch members will be held. On the agenda: a lecture accompanied by magic-lantern pictures by Prof. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld – The Sexual Pathology. On the next day (Thursday) a second member gathering [will be held]. On the agenda: a second lecture by the mentioned lecturer at the same place and at the same time – Sexual Anthology (Practices of the sex and love life of different nations). The beautiful building, built in 1928 by the German-born Jewish-American merchant and philanthropist Nathan Straus, now serves as a family health clinic called Beit Straus. Historic portrait photos of the founding couple still decorate the wall above the front desk, and a small photo exhibition in the entrance floor gives an impression of what the interior of the building looked like in Hirschfeld’s time. As Hirschfeld points out, the public lecture was organized by and delivered “before the Culture Commission of the Palestinian Workers, in connection with the Jewish Worker’s Youth Movement” (1935a: 284-285; 1935b: 280-281). It took place on Saturday, February 20, 1932, in the “cinema in Tel Aviv” and attracted a “vast audience” (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281). Haaretz announced the lecture one day before: Tomorrow at ten and a half before noon in ‘Eden’ hall a public lecture by Prof. Magnus Hirschfeld on ‘The Sexual Problems of Our Time’ will take place. The lecture shall be translated into Hebrew. Tickets may be acquired in the culture committee between the 9 and 11 am and between 3 and 5 pm. The Eden, located at 2 Lilienblum Street, was the first cinema to open in Tel Aviv in 1914 (cf. Helman 2012: 115). Only the deteriorated facades of the once beautiful building have survived to this day – as well as a beautiful kiosk on the opposite side of the street, now turned into a café. Hirschfeld also mentions the topics of his lectures: “The themes of the medical lectures dealt with The Present Status of Sexual Pathology and Sex Ethnology; those for the workers were entitled The Most Important Sexual Problems of Our Time” (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281). As it seems, he had a repertoire of standard lectures at hand that he repeated throughout his tour. The lecture series he offered in Shanghai in May 1931 allows for an exemplary insight into his lecturing activities. The lecture series was held in collaboration with the Tongji University Shanghai in the lecture hall of the Paulun Hospital. Soon afterwards, it was published in the university’s monthly medical journal. On May 9, 1931, he talked about sexual biology; on May 13, 16 and 21, 1931, he presented a paper on sexual pathology; on May 22, 1931, he gave an introduction to sexology at the 31st Conference of the Medical-Scientific Society Shanghai (Hirschfeld 1931a/b; 1932; cf. Gebhardt 1981).

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

Hirschfeld met with prominent physicians and politicians of Tel Aviv and collected information about the medical and hygienic situation of the city. He states that: Tel Aviv alone has 160 doctors – that is, one to every three hundred inhabitants, or twenty-two houses. There are among these – as I became especially convinced upon visiting the beautifully equipped hospitals – a great many eminent specialists, some of whom have taken over public hygiene and sanitation work (1935a: 282-283; 1935b: 278-279). In the German edition, he adds that the doctors of Tel Aviv had received the “best European education” (1933: 364). Many of them had lived, studied, and worked in Berlin before immigrating to Palestine, including Chaim Berlin and Theodor Zlocisti. About the latter, Hirschfeld writes: “I shall only mention the director of the infants’ department, Dr. Theodor Zlocisti, who, formerly a well-known Berlin doctor, now dedicates his entire energy to the physical strengthening of the Jewish children in Palestine” (1935a: 283; 1935b: 279). Zlocisti, born in Gdansk in 1874, received his medical degree in Berlin and immigrated to Palestine in 1921, where he “directed the [maternal and infant welfare] centres that WIZO established in Tel Aviv” (Shvarts/Shehory-Rubin 2008: 190). He lived in 30 Idelson Street in Tel Aviv, close to Bialik Square. The still-existing house, designed in 1922 (one year after her immigration) by the German-Jewish architect Lotte Cohn (1893-1983), comprises two stories; while the ground floor served as a clinic, the upper floor was for private use (cf. Sonder 2009: 28-29, 103 [no. 2]). Cohn also designed the Agricultural Girls’ School in Nahalal (ibid.: 32-34, 103 [no. 7]) as well as the Children’s House in Heftziba (pp. 41-43, 106 [no. 18]), both of which were visited by Hirschfeld. In 1937, she designed Zlocisti’s residence on Mount Carmel (ibid.: 69-71, 112 [no. 47]). Hirschfeld also visited the mother’s school run by the World Organization of Zionist Women (WIZO) (1935a: 283; 1935b: 279). He gives a vivid account of what he saw in this institution: In the central school of the WIZO (the World Organization of Zionist Women) at Tel Aviv, I saw a photograph of triplets born a short time before in the maternity hospital with the amusing comment: ‘A protest against immigration restrictions!’ For, not long before the birth of these children, the number of Jewish immigrants had been restricted by the British Government, just as in the case of buying land, restrictive legislation had been passed. In the same women’s hospital, a colleague told me that artificial insemination had been successfully accomplished on a woman who longed for children. Successful instances of this are rare. In the garden of this hospital, stands a somewhat dilapidated but clean wooden building, in front of which was a whole row of young mothers with children. Inside and before this edifice, we saw various tables garlanded with flowers and liberally decked with wine and cakes. Between these, loitered a throng of imposingly dressed men and women. It was the circumcision room to which I was being conducted. I attended several circumcisions which were performed with great dispatch beneath the murmur of blessings (1935a: 283; 1935b: 279). For Hirschfeld, both the efficiency of artificial insemination and the diligence of circumcision performed in Tel Aviv attested to the high medical skills and standards in Palestine at that time.

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On Saturday, February 19, 1932, the day of his second professional lecture, “Professor Magnus Hirschfeld visited the municipality of Tel-Aviv,” as Haaretz reported one day later. At that time, the municipality was located at 27 Bialik Street, just a stone’s throw away from Zlocisti’s home; the building now houses the Museum of the History of Tel Aviv-Yafo (Beit Ha’ir). Hirschfeld writes about his encounter with the mayor, Meir Dizengoff: [H]e was one of the first people I visited in Palestine. The Hebrew words inscribed in my album by the seventy-year-old Dizengoff read as follows: “It gave me great pleasure to receive Dr. Hirschfeld in the city hall of Tel Aviv. This visit shows us that the famous scientist is interested in our creative work of reconstruction and in our national rebirth, of which Tel Aviv has become the symbol. May Dr. Hirschfeld, who has dedicated his life to the benefit of the human race, help us in the regeneration of our nation and may he gaze upon the restoration of Israel and his country with his own eyes” (1935a: 281; 1935b: 277). On Sunday, February 20, 1932, the day of his public lecture, Hirschfeld was honored with a reception at Dizengoff’s gallery (and former residence) in 16 Rothschild Boulevard. Today, the building is called Independence Hall, because the declaration of Israel’s independence took place there on May 14, 1948 – coincidentally, the 80th anniversary of Hirschfeld’s birthday. The history of the building is documented in an exhibition in the Shalom Meyer Tower; the collection is now kept by the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. During this event, Hirschfeld met the actress Hanna Rovina, whom he had first seen in Berlin when the Habima Company guested with S. Ansky’s (aka Shloyme Zanvl Rappoport) play The Dybbuk (cf. Zer-Zion 2005). Hirschfeld writes in the German version of his book: “I also saw Hanna Rovina in person one day before my departure to Jerusalem at a reception in the picture gallery of mayor Dizengoff; she wrote the often-spoken words from the Dybbuk into my album: ‘I shall never find peace in this world’” (1933: 378). Before Hirschfeld left Tel Aviv, he accepted an interview with the newspaper Doar HaYom conducted by the multilingual translator Israel Karnieli on the terrace of the San Remo Hotel (on Karnieli/Carnielli cf. the Jabotinsky Online Archive). The lengthy article was published on March 1, 1932. The first part offers a detailed account of Hirschfeld’s professional biography and publications; the second comprises the interview about sexuality-related issues such as marriage, desire, and celibacy. Karnieli mentions that Li Shiu-tong showed up during the interview and portrays him as a young Chinese student trained in philosophy in England and planning to learn more about sexology in Hirschfeld’s institute in Berlin. Hirschfeld liked Tel Aviv, a modern Jewish city with excellent health care, fine architecture, exciting cultural life, pleasant climate, and a vivid beach comparable to the beaches of international spa cities (1935a: 282; 1935b: p. 278; also mentioning the “hot sulphur springs” of Tiberias). Nevertheless, the city was hardly accessible to him, because Hebrew was spoken everywhere. Thomas Sparr writes in his book on Rehavia, the German neighbourhood in Jerusalem: “Hebrew was the language of the Yishuv yet the immigrants mastered it to different degrees, partly not at all […]. The elderly often failed to learn the language. […] Poor Hebrew skills almost always resulted in exclusion and isolation and led to scorn and skepticism” (2018: 59-61). This was one of the main

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

reasons why Hirschfeld decided not to settle in Palestine. The language barrier was especially inconvenient to him when he talked to the working-class audience in the movie theatre of Tel Aviv. While in the medical institutions he was able to communicate in German or English, this was not an option when he addressed the working class: “In Tel Aviv and Jerusalem I could only deliver my public lectures with the aid of colleagues who rendered them, paragraph by paragraph, into Hebrew, and who also translated into German the countless written questions in Hebrew that were set before me” (1935a: 280-281; 1935b: 276-277). Language was also an issue for Hirschfeld’s colleagues who were based in Palestine: I met a large number of people in Palestine, especially professors of the Hebrew high schools, who told me that they found it terribly difficult to ask questions and give answers on scientific topics in a language completely foreign to such subjects. They had not been able to overcome a feeling of great waste. Among these professors there were good Zionists (1935a: 280; 1935b: 276). Hirschfeld adds that he met an elderly American couple touring the country at the same time: They said they would like to settle in Palestine in their declining years, but that they could not do so because the activities which most interested them – reading about the happenings, lectures, theatre, etc., in the daily press – would be impossible since they did not speak or read Hebrew. This would be an important reason in deterring me from spending my old age in Palestine, much as the people, the landscape, the history and the future of this country means to me (1935a: 280; 1935b: 276). As much as Hirschfeld enjoyed his visit to Tel Aviv – settling there, or in any other place in Palestine, was not an option for him.

1.2

Jerusalem (February 21–March 5)

On Sunday, February 21, 1931, Hirschfeld arrived in Jerusalem. The trip from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem was easy since [o]n the magnificent automobile roads which were built during and after the war under British military supervision, one now gets from Jerusalem to Jaffa or Haifa, to Hebron or Jericho, to the Dead Sea or Lake Kinnereth, in hours, instead of days. The automobile traffic between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem is quite as smooth and busy as between Potsdam and Berlin (Hirschfeld 1935a: 271-272; 1935b: 267-268). One day later, on Monday, February 22, 1932, the Palestine Bulletin reported that Hirschfeld was in town: “Sex Pathologist Here. Mr. Magnus Hirschfeld, German sex pathologist, who is on a world lecture tour, arrived at the King David Hotel yesterday and will remain here for two weeks. He will deliver a lecture at the Hebrew University” (cf. Hirschfeld 1935a: 293; 1935b: 289). The luxurious King David Hotel had been opened three years ago, in 1931, by the Swiss hotelier Karl Albert Bähler. It is located on 23 King David Street, midway between the Old City and Rehavia, the German-Jewish neighborhood where many academics of

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the Hebrew University lived (Sparr 2018: 103). Inhabitants as well as visitors often nicknamed it “Grunewald of the Orient”, since the parklike settlement resembled the garden city of the same name in Berlin (ibid.: 8). The “spotlessly clean German Templar colony” at King George Street is also close, as Hirschfeld notes in the German edition of his book (Hirschfeld 1933: 379). Being the “first world-class hotel” of Jerusalem, the “majestic King David Hotel, backed by wealthy Egyptian Jews and the Anglo-Jewish financier Frank Goldsmith […], […] instantly became the city’s stylish hub,” as Simon Sebag Montefiore writes in his biography of Jerusalem (Montefiore 2012: 529). In his novel A Tale of Love and Darkness (2002), Amos Oz describes the hotel as a place “where culture-seeking Jews and Arabs mixed with cultivated Englishmen with perfect manners, where dreamy, long-necked ladies floated in evening dresses, on the arms of gentlemen in dark suits, where broad-minded Britons dined with cultured Jews or educated Arabs, where there were recitals, balls, literary evenings, thés dansants, and exquisite, artistic conversations” (2017 [2002]: 3; cf. Sparr 2018: 37-38). Hirschfeld also praised the hotel’s magnificence. After stating that “now the number of first-rate hotels is increasing from year to year,” (1935a: 272; 1935b: 268) he continues in the German version of his book: “among which the mentioned ‘King David Hotel’ by the Swiss Bähler represents the peak of hotel culture altogether” (1933: 351). One of the merits of the hotel was (and still is) the spectacular view: The sight that greeted me from my balcony was a magnificent and vast panorama, a view of compelling beauty. Close beneath me was the old city wall starting from Jaffa Gate and the Tower of David and lovely embracing Zion. Far away were the Moabite mountains and, in the middle ground the Mount of Olives. Chains of hills rose on the one side, above Gethsemane and the Kedron Valley and, on the other, stretched gently to Mt. Scopus, upon which the stately buildings of the new university and library are a crowning beauty (1935a: 293-294; 1935b: 289-290). The proximity of a modern European luxury hotel to the venerable historic site of Jerusalem reminded Hirschfeld of an oriental work of fiction: “I was able to fully enjoy the view of this uniquely animated scenery at any time of day and night since I was lucky to lodge in one of the most beautiful corner rooms of the King David Hotel which seems to be conjured into this setting like a fairy-tale of One Thousand and One Nights” (1933: 379-380). This impression was surely enhanced by the monumental neo-Byzantine-style YMCA-building located opposite the hotel and thus the first sight for everyone leaving the hotel through the main door. Hirschfeld puts the difference between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv in a nutshell by contrasting the young people of both cities. While Tel Aviv is characterized by lively boys and girls enjoying themselves at the beach, Jerusalem is marked by the “sobbing, Chassidic youths along the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem” whose religious ecstasy suggests that “one form of desire was unconsciously substituted for another” (1935a: 275; 1935b: 271). The two cities also differ with regard to their respective relations to time. While Tel Aviv lives in the present, the holy city of Jerusalem – among countless religious sites scattered all across Palestine – is covered with thick layers of religious history and biblical stories:

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

Here lay Sodom and Gomorrah – there Lot’s wife froze into a pillar of salt. Here is Mt. Moriah, where Abraham wanted to sacrifice Isaac, upon which the temple of Solomon once stood, and the Mosque of Omar stands now. There in the cave of Machpelah lie buried Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Leah. Over there is the Mount of Olives; this is the garden of Gethsemane; this, Golgotha. Over there Pilate spoke the words ‘Ecce homo’ as Jesus passed. On this spot we see an inscription on the wall about the story of Veronica's handkerchief. Now we are driving past the walls of Jericho; now through Bethany where Mary, Martha and their brother, Lazarus, lived; and now we come to Joseph’s workshop in Nazareth, where the carpenter’s son grew up under the care of his Mother, Mary; this village is Cana, where the wedding took place. Over there you will see Mt. Tabor, exactly as it was in the time of David and Jesus; there lie Gibeon and Gilead; here Deborah struggled, and over there the events between David and Saul, David and Absalom, and David and Jonathan took place. There, far back on the other side of the Jordan, is Mt. Nebo, whence Moses gazed down upon the Promised Land. It is indeed more than doubtful whether the ‘prophet’ Moses lies buried on Nebi Musa, twenty kilometres from Jerusalem above the Dead Sea. The Mohammedans believe this is so, and they honour him as a predecessor of Mohammed, and visit this probable grave in long processions on a certain day of the year. For hours and for days, with every step, such memories rise out of the oblivion of the past. ‘Stones speak’; ‘the dead awaken’; childhood dreams assume life and form. And it matters little whether this is really the tomb of Moses, David, or Rachel; whether this is really the spot where the Virgin gave birth to Jesus, or whether this elevation is the genuine Calvary, the hill of the crucifixion (1935a: 272-273; 1935b: 268-269). It is remarkable that Hirschfeld refers not only to the Jewish and Christian but also the Islamic tradition, explicitly mentioning Muhammad. Hirschfeld’s emphasizes that his “first visit in Jerusalem was to the Hebrew University and the National Library on Mt. Scopus” (1935a: 294; 1935b: 290). He does not reveal when exactly this visit took place and whether it was connected to one of his talks. The above-mentioned newspaper article claims that one of his lectures was indeed held at the Hebrew University. Here, Hirschfeld met with many academics, mostly natural scientists but also at least one humanist: The professors and instructors who showed me about and talked with me made an excellent impression as human beings and as scientists. These included the zoölogist, Professor Fritz Bodenheimer, Ussishkin’s eminently capable son-in-law from Cologne, the Berlin instructors Pflaum and Reiffenberg, Franz Oppenheimer’s son, also from Berlin, who heads the botany department, the directors of the bacteriology and parasitology departments, Kligler and Olitzki, and many others. It is an impressive fact that these entirely German-trained academicians teach their special subjects in Hebrew (1935a: 295; 1935b: 291). As the list shows, the colleagues to whom Hirschfeld was introduced were mostly German Jews who were born around the turn of the century, immigrated to Palestine in the 1920s, and were now in their mid-thirties. They are, in the order of their respective year of immigration: the agriculturist Adolf Reifenberg (born 1899 in Berlin, immigrated in

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1920), the bacteriologist Israel Jacob Kligler (born 1888 in Kopychyntsi/Galicia, immigrated in 1921), the zoologist Shimon Fritz Bodenheimer (born 1897 in Cologne, immigrated in 1922, married to Menachem Ussishkin’s daughter Rachel in 1923), the parasitologist Aryeh Leo Olitzki (born 1898 in Allenstein, immigrated in 1924), the botanist Heinz Reinhard Hillel Oppenheimer (born 1899 in Berlin as son of Franz Oppenheimer, immigrated in 1925), and the Romance and Renaissance scholar Heinz Pflaum alias Hiram Peri (born 1900 in Berlin, immigrated in 1925). As Hirschfeld mentions later in his book, he also met with Menachem Ussishikin, head of the Jewish National Fund. It is possible that this encounter took place on this occasion as well (cf. Hirschfeld 1935a: 291; 1935b: 287). Hirschfeld was also interested in the National Library which served as the university library: What interested me most in the National Library was the large collection of autographs and portraits of Jewish celebrities from every country and every age assembled at a great personal sacrifice by Abraham Schwadron [aka Avraham Sharon]. Up to then I was quite ignorant of the Jewish origin of many great men represented, and I am sure that many people would be as surprised as I (1935a: 295; 1935b: 291). Avraham Sharon was born in 1878 in the Galician town of Zolochiv, received doctorates in philosophy, law, and chemistry at the University of Vienna, immigrated to Palestine in 1927, and donated his collection to the National Library in the same year. Hirschfeld apparently did not receive a guided tour of the collection by Sharon himself – otherwise he would certainly have mentioned it. As he admits in the German version of his book, he was not overwhelmed by the library: Yet who shortly before visiting Palestine has visited the Arabic libraries in Patna and Cairo with their outstanding manuscripts of Islamic provenance will at first be disappointed by the Hebrew National Library which mostly consists of a donation by Professor [Hermann] Schapira, however there certainly are promising beginnings (1933: 381). He refers to the Khuda Bakhsh Oriental Library in Patna, India, which was opened in 1891, and the Egyptian National Library in Cairo which was opened in 1870. Hirschfeld was also not overly impressed by the university, which “appears to be a promise for the future rather than a fulfilment, which seems to be desirable, since the Muslim university which will soon open its doors in Jerusalem will certainly be a remarkable counterpart – and, hopefully, no rival or even an opponent” (1933: 381). However, it turned out that the plan of establishing the University of Al Masjid el Aksa, as conceived during the World Islamic Congress in 1931, was not realized. The first Muslim university in Jerusalem, the Al-Quds-University, was opened more than fifty years later, in 1984. It seems that Hirschfeld compared the relatively new Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which was opened in 1925, only seven years before his visit, to the fullfledged Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität of Berlin, which had already been established in 1809. Hirschfeld intended to donate his institute to the University of Berlin in order to create a permanent chair of sexology. His will is documented in the deed of foundation, dating December 4, 1918 (§ 10): “In case the foundation will be suspended by the competent authority or expire in any other way, the assets of the foundation

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

shall go to the University of Berlin […] on condition that it will be used as a basis for the constitution of a regular professorship in sexology” (Dose 2015: 47). This wish never came true, since one year after his lecture tour, on May 6, 1933, the Nazis shut down the institute and destroyed its library, archive, and museum. In 1934, Hirschfeld temporarily practiced in Paris, but his plan to re-establish his institute in Paris failed eventually (Herzer 2017: 376). As in Tel Aviv, Hirschfeld held three lectures in Jerusalem: two for a professional audience and one for working-class people. The professional talks had been “arranged in collaboration with the Hebrew University” (1935a: 284; 1935b: 280). One of them was held on Tuesday, February 23, 1932, in the Nathan and Lina Straus Health Centre of Jerusalem, located at 24 Natan Strauss Street. The building, opened in 1929, is now called the Beit Strauss Clinic and belongs to the Maccabi Health Services. The Palestine Bulletin reports on Friday, February 26, 1932: “Dr. Hirschfeld’s Lecture. We are requested to state that the lecture of Dr. Hirschfeld, the sex pathologist, at the Straus Health Centre on Tuesday night was arranged by the Jewish Medical Society in co-operation with the Hebrew University and the Hadassah.” The same article also announces the public lecture: “Dr. Hirschfeld is to lecture again before a larger audience under the auspices of the Jewish Labour Educational Committee.” This lecture took place on Sunday, February 28, 1932, in what Hirschfeld calls the “gymnasium of the Italian School” (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281); I have not been able to identify the respective institution. The Palestine Bulletin reports: “Dr. Hirschfeld to Address Labour Audience. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the sex pathologist, will speak tonight under the auspices of The Workers’ Seminary, in the Hall of the Italian School. His subject is ‘The Sexual Question in Our Times.’ Dr. Brakhyahu will translate the lecture from German into Hebrew, and the public will be allowed to put questions” (an almost identical article was published in the Davar on the same day). Mordechai Brachyahu (1882-1959), who translated Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams into Hebrew, was born near Vilna as the son of a rabbi. He studied medicine in Switzerland and completed his studies at the Moabit Hospital in Berlin in 1912. In the same year, he immigrated to Palestine. In 1919, he founded the Hygiene Department of the Hadassah Medical School in Jerusalem (cf. Zalashik 2012: 75; Rolnik 2013: 170-172, 174-176). In 1946, fourteen years after Hirschfeld’s visit to Palestine, Brachyahu published an educational guidebook titled: The Next Generation. The Issue of Sexual Life. Hirschfeld also mentions an official reception at the Protestant Deaconesses Hospital, which is located near the Straus Health Centre at 9 Natan Strauss Street (corner of Ha-Nevi’im Street). The so-called German Hospital now serves as the Sha’arei Tzedek Medical Centre (an exhibition consisting of numerous panels with texts and images informs about the history of the international hospitals of Jerusalem, including the German Hospital). The walls of the ground floor are decorated with a permanent panel exhibition on the history of the European hospitals in Jerusalem, including the German hospital. Hirschfeld’s event was hosted by the director of the hospital, Dr. Tawfiq Canaan: One of Jerusalem’s most prominent Arab Christians, the superintendent of the German Hospital, Dr. Canaan, arranged a reception in my honor. Arabs, Catholics, Protestants,

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Jews and Christian Scientists were guests. The conversation dwelt on the great past and the fascination of Jerusalem, and ignored every bone of contention. Upon my return from this kindly, peaceful gathering, I sat a long time that mild March night on my balcony at the Hotel looking out at Jerusalem’s silhouette bathed in pale moonlight (1935a: 300-301; 1935b: 296-297). Canaan was Hirschfeld’s equal in many respects (cf. Nashef 2002). Like Hirschfeld, he was not only a passionate doctor but also highly interested in the history of literature and culture (publishing about folklore and ethnography), participated in political debates, and felt obliged to help the needy. Canaan, born in 1882 in the Palestinian village of Beit Jala near Bethlehem and raised in a Lutheran Arab family, had strong ties to German culture. As a child, he studied at Schneller School, which was founded by German missionaries in nearby Jerusalem. After studying medicine at the American University of Beirut and working at the above-mentioned German Hospital, he visited Germany several times between 1912 and 1914 in order to improve his knowledge of microbiology and tropical diseases. In 1913, he opened the only Arab clinic operating in Jerusalem at the time in his own home. In the German version of his travelogue, Hirschfeld specifies the Arab, Christian and Jewish guests he met at the reception. They were Representatives of the Arab community, the old Roher [sic!], head of the Templar community, a Roman-Catholic Father of the German-Catholic Mission, representatives of the German-Protestant community, several Christian scholars, among the Jewish scholars in particular the director of the Hebrew Library, Dr. Huber [sic!] Bergmann (1933: 387). Hirschfeld misspells the names of two guests participating in the reception: Christian Rohrer (not ‘Roher’), leader of the Templar Society from 1860 to 1934 (cf. Wawrzyn 2013: 38, 92, 146, Ill. 6; Kneher 2009, a panegyrical account by Rohrer’s granddaughter), and Samuel Hugo (not ‘Huber’) Bergmann, a professor of philosophy at Hebrew University who had immigrated to Palestine in 1920 and, together with Martin Buber, founded the Brit Shalom movement that promoted a bipartisan area where Jews and Arabs could live under equal conditions (cf. Sparr 2018: 94). Bergmann does not mention his encounter with Hirschfeld in his diaries (1985). As an entry in Hirschfeld’s passport proves, Hirschfeld visited the French Consulate of Jerusalem on Thursday, March 3, 1932, in order to get travel permission to Beirut. There, Hirschfeld embarked for his return journey to Europe on Monday, March 14, 1932 (the permission was valid until March 15, 1932). The embassy, built in 1930, is located just around the corner in 5 Paul Emile Botta Street – a short walk from the hotel. On Friday, March 4, 1932, when Hirschfeld had almost completed his stay in Jerusalem, the right-wing newspaper Hazit HaAm (“Front of the People”) published an article that criticized the lectures organized by the Jewish Labour Educational Committee claiming that Hirschfeld had been instrumentalized by the socialists.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

1.3

Haifa (March 6–10)

Probably on Sunday, March 6, 1932, Hirschfeld and Li Shiu-tong travelled from Jerusalem to Haifa. Again, the trip was easy since the “magnificent automobile roads” made it possible to drive “from Jerusalem to […] Haifa […] in hours” (1935a: 271; 1935b: 267). Although they seem to have spent five days in the Mediterranean port, Hirschfeld does not talk much about it in his book. He notes that the hotel in Haifa was rather simple compared to the luxury hotels in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: “Only in Haifa were conditions the same as before the war. But I have no doubt that when the owners of the hotel, the kind Gross family, with their four handsome sons, have moved into the new house that is being erected, all will be satisfactory there, too” (1935a: 272; 1935b: 268). The hotel may have belonged to the German Colony which had been established since 1868 by the Templars. On the same day, Hirschfeld and his companion paid a visit to the painter Hermann Struck (Chaim Aharon ben David), one of the most important print artists active in Germany and Israel in the first half of the 20th century (cf. Tal 2016: 192). Struck was born in Berlin in 1876 to a wealthy Jewish merchant, the offspring of a family of rabbis. He studied at the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1895 to 1899. A passionate Zionist, he immigrated to Palestine in 1923 together with his wife and lived in Haifa from then on (cf. Ofrat 2005: 143-144; Schütz 2004; Warhaftig 2004). His home, a three storybuilding on 23 Arlosoroff Street in the Hadar HaCarmel neighborhood, was designed by the German Jewish architect Alexander Baerwald (1877-1930) who was born in Berlin, immigrated to Palestine in 1925, and died in Haifa. Since 2016, the beautiful building, which combines local, oriental, and European styles and provides a spectacular view of Haifa Bay, serves as the Hermann Struck Museum. During their visit Struck dedicated a drawing showing an oriental landscape (now kept by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin), including huts, camels, and palm trees, to Li Shiu-tong. It belongs to a series of drypoints showing the landscapes of Palestine: “Haifa, the city of his residence, and Jerusalem, which he often visited, became themes of his oriental landscapes. Characteristic to these are the palm trees magnificently spreading out like fans” (Miller 2016: 173; the closest resemblance is to the images on pp. 108-109: Sea of Galilee IV, 1939, and p. 110: Haifa V, ca. 1923). The English dedication is written beneath the drawing: “To Mr. Tao Li as a souvenir of Haifa. Hermann Struck 6.3.1932.” Hirschfeld notes that Struck suggested to him to settle in Haifa at the foot of Mount Carmel: So I won’t comply with the gracious advice of the magnificent [painter] Hermann Struck – this unique blend of a great artist, devout Zionist, and true Berliner who wrote in my travel diary: “Come back soon, dear Herr Sanitätsrat, and chose a lovely, calm spot at Mount Carmel” – nor with similar invitations I received in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem (1933: 361-362). Hirschfeld declined the offer because of the above-mentioned language issue. Hirschfeld held two lectures in Haifa, one at a medical institution and one for a public audience. He keeps quiet about the date and place of his medical lecture, but goes into detail about his public talk. It took place in the “large auditorium of the Technical College (one of the handsomest modern buildings of Palestine and the work of the de-

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ceased architect Baerwald)” (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281). The monumental building, located a short walk away from Struck’s home, was designed by Baerwald under the authority of the Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden (“Relief Association of the German Jews”). It was almost completed in 1913, but the opening was delayed until 1923 due to the First World War. Albert Einstein visited the campus in 1923 and planted a palm tree in front of the building which still can be found there today – Hirschfeld, the “Einstein of Sex,” certainly took notice of it. After his return to Europe, he compared himself to Einstein, as both were German Jewish scientists threatened by agitation and forced to live in exile: “I had hardly re-entered European soil on 17 March [1932] when the former agitation started over. […] In this respect I certainly am in good company (Einstein!)” (2013: 136). Today, the Technical College houses the Madatech, a national museum of science, technology, and space. The date of the talk was March 7, 1932, the day after his visit to Struck, as Hirschfeld states in the German edition of his book (1933: 367). He remembered this date due to the sudden death of the French socialist politician Aristide Briand which was announced during his talk: In the middle of my lecture in Haifa, the chairman, my old colleague, Dr. Weinschall, President of the Palestinian Jewish Medical Association, got up and requested the gathering to rise silently for a minute in memory of Aristide Briand who, according to the latest radio report, had died in Paris half an hour before (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281). The physician Jacob Weinshall, who chaired – and probably translated – the lecture, was born in 1891 in Tbilisi (Georgia) and died in 1980 in Tel Aviv (cf. the article on him in the Hebrew version of Wikipedia). Being a revisionist Zionist, he immigrated to Palestine after the First World War and began working at the Hadassah Hospital in Tel Aviv. He also was a member of the Tel Aviv municipal council from 1925 to 1928.

1.4

Beit Alfa (March 11–13)

The last destination of Hirschfeld’s visit to Palestine was Beit Alfa, about 45 miles southeast of Haifa. On his way to the communist kibbutz, he made a stop at Nahalal, a settlement of farmers with “an agricultural school for young Jewish girls” (1935a: 287; 1935b: 283). The stay in Beit Alfa is well documented by both Hirschfeld’s travelogue and the Palestinian press. On March 22, 1932, the Davar reports the details of Hirschfeld’s lectures in Beit Alfa: Before Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld left for Damascus, he spent two evenings in the company of the Beit Alfa members and their visitors from the surrounding area. He held a lecture on the question of marriage and sexual life in Soviet Russia. The lecture had turned into a conversation of questions and answers. Dr. Hirschfeld praised the cultural level of the participants that was revealed by their important questions. Hirschfeld writes in his travelogue that his brief stay in Beit Alfa deeply impressed him: “The days I spent at and around Beth Alfa belong to the most memorable and elevating experiences of my stay in Palestine (1935a: 290; 1935b: 286).” He was enthusiastic about the lifestyle of the kibbutz that in many ways corresponded to the ideals of the Sexual Reform Movement. He praised the alternative marriage and family model in Beit Alfa.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

One chapter of his book is dedicated to the children of Beit Alfa, who were raised by the community rather than by their parents (Gemeinschaftskinder, “children of the community”) (1935a: 287-288; 1935b: 283-284), another one to the liberal concept of marriage based on mutual erotic attraction rather than adequate social status (freie Ehe, “free marriage”) (1935a: 288-292; 1935b: 284-286; cf. Nur 2014). It is in this context that Hirschfeld mentions his partner Li Shiu-tong for the first and only time in his account of his stay in Palestine: “Many of the inhabitants of Beth Alfa struck up a warm friendship with me during the short time I was there. This was also extended to my companion, Tao Li, the sight of whom particularly fascinated the children, who had never seen a live Chinaman before” (1935a: 291; 1935b: 287). Writing about the children of Beit Alfa, Hirschfeld mentions two persons who were particularly responsible for their wellbeing. One of them is the Austrian-Jewish mathematician and poet Ernst Elijahu Rappeport (1889-1952) who immigrated to Palestine in the early 1920s together with his wife Sarah Rappeport (cf. Rappeport 2020). He introduced the pedagogical ideals of the short-lived but influential children’s home Baumgarten in Wien to the kibbutz (cf. Kaufhold/Lieberz-Groß 2003: 5, 8). The other one is Fanny Japhé (born 1884), a pediatrician who worked at the pediatric clinic in Giessen before she immigrated to Palestine (she is mentioned in the register of persons working at the University of Giessen in the winter of 1913/14). In the German version of his travelogue, Hirschfeld writes about them: “The children receive both hygienical-medical and pedagogical-educational care. In Beth Alfa the former is provided by the pediatrician F. Japhé in the motherliest way, the latter by the poet Eliahu Rappaport, both supported by a staff of nurses as well as kindergarten and school teachers” (1933: 371). In Beit Alfa, Hirschfeld continued his lecture series. His own account matches the newspaper report: “I gave my two last lectures in the settlement of Beth Alfa in the Emek Valley [Jezreel Valley] — and furthermore, at the request of the intellectual leader of the colony, I spoke on ‘Sexual Enlightenment and the Soviet Solution of Sexual Questions’” (1935a: 285; 1935b: 281). Since the majority of Beit Alfa were “German-speaking Czechoslovaks from Prague, Teplitz, Carlsbad, etc., and Austrians” (1935a: 291; 1935b: 287), including two Berliners (Hirschfeld 1933: 374), Hirschfeld could speak German. As he notes in the German version of his travelogue, the lectures took place in the dininghall of Heftziba, one of the two communities of Beit Alfa beside Ein Harod: Many farmers from nearby settlements attended to my evening lectures which took place in the dining-hall of Heftziba; farmers from Tel Yosef, Ein Harod, also the colleagues from the Central Hospital close to Afula. They came by foot and on horseback, with farm carts and lorries – in short: the entire Emek Valley appeared to be on its way in order to recover from hard farm labour in the realms of science (1933: 375). Although no lecture was scheduled in Ein Harod, Hirschfeld paid a brief visit to the nearby community: Between lectures, I spent a morning at Ain Charod, which is one of the largest and most beautiful colonies in the Emek Valley. […] The view from the broad terrace of the spacious new dining-hall of Ain Charod is a wonderful panorama of the mountains

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of Gilboa, where Saul battled against the Philistines and fell with his son, Jonathan (1935a: 291-292; 1935b: 287). The reference to Saul and Jonathan is a reprise of the list of biblical characters Hirschfeld mentioned before with regard to Jerusalem. As he adds in the German version of his book, he was spontaneously asked to give an additional talk in Ein Harod but had to decline the invitation due to a lack of time (1933: 367). Hirschfeld also visited the ancient synagogue with its famous floor mosaic from the 6th century that had been discovered in 1928 and was now taken care of by the community of Beit Alfa (1935a: 290; 1935b: 286). Hirschfeld’s stay in Beit Alfa ended with a celebration hosted by the kibbutz. On this occasion the people of Beit Alfa danced the horra: On the eve of my departure from Palestine, the people tried to please me by giving a party. They danced the boisterous ancient horra, which is supposed to have been the Jew’s favourite dance in ancient times. But it is not specifically Jewish, for it is native to the whole of the Near East, since time immemorial (1935a: 292; 1935b: 288). Hirschfeld points out that while the horra was traditionally danced by men and women separately, the Palestinian version of the dance mixed both sexes: When I first saw the horra in the Balkans, it was only danced by men. The women stood and sat around, beating time with their hands. Another time, the girls and women formed a circle and whirled around to the rejoicing of the male spectators. But in Palestine both sexes participated (1935a: 292; 1935b: 288). This observation certainly supported Hirschfeld’s impression that the kibbutz actually lived the liberal lifestyle propagated by the Sexual Reform Movement. In the German version of his book, Hirschfeld also reports that one of the leaders of the community wrote a salutation in his travel diary before he left Beit Alfa. The lines confirm that the anonymous leader consented with Hirschfeld regarding his thoughts on sexuality: The inscriptions reflect the sentiments of the farewell-bidding colonists. One of the foremost men of the kvutzah [community] who looked like a farmworker but in fact bore the title of a ‘doctor of laws’ (as I learned only shortly before my departure) wrote along with some photos of Heftziba (1933: 375). The somewhat intricate inscription reads: These little pictures are meant to be a souvenir for the pioneer who liberates and reforms humankind in the realm of sexual problems reminding him of the country in which an old people wishes to liberate and reform itself and of one of the settlements seeking to accomplish human values such as social justice and economic equality in their individual ways of living along with the reform activities of the Jewish people (ibid.: 375). These lines sound like an evaluation not only of Hirschfeld’s visit to Beit Alfa but also of his world tour altogether.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

With his visit to Beit Alfa, Hirschfeld’s journey around the world came to its end. He emphasizes in his book that among all the places he saw throughout his sixteen-month long trip, Palestine made the strongest impression on him. Compared to empires like China, India, and Egypt, Palestine has “the same effect as a fine, delicate ivory miniature beside a gigantic marble statue” (1935a: 271; 1935b: 267). Implementing an almost biblical tone, he claims: “I was allowed to roam over this little piece of earth for only five weeks, but I confess that it was more difficult for me to leave Jerusalem than any other city I visited on my world trip. I was never so sorry to bid farewell to any country as to Palestine” (1935a: 271; 1935b: 267; he repeated this statement on April 1, 1935, in The New Palestine).

1.5

Remembering Hirschfeld

On Sunday, March 13, 1932, Hirschfeld travelled from Beit Alfa to Damascus and from there to Beirut, where he took a steamer to Athens the next day. His further plans are documented in the above-mentioned diary entry from November 26, 1931. He writes: “March: meeting Karl [Giese] in Capri, then pursuing literary and other connections in Paris, Vienna, London. 5th Sexual Congress [in Brno], after taking a cure in Karlsbad, mid-August to the Eugenicist Congress in New York and continue working in America! Qui vivra – verra!” (2013: 132) – in fact, he never returned to the US. In Athens, where Karl Giese joined the arriving companions, Hirschfeld held three lectures before travelling with his companions to Vienna. Several weeks later, he settled in Zurich, where he completed his travelogue. In May 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived together with his friends and continued working and writing. In November 1934, he moved to Nice, where he died on his 67th birthday, May 14, 1935. One week later, on May 21, 1935, Hirschfeld’s colleague Chaim Berlin, who had helped him organize the lecture tour in Palestine, published an obituary in the Davar. After a brief account of Hirschfeld’s life and work, he looks back on Hirschfeld’s stay in Palestine and his following exile (obituaries were also published in: The Sentinel, Banai Brith Messenger, Jüdische Wochenpost, Palestine Post): After the monography [Geschlechtskunde, published from 1926 to 1930] Hirschfeld travelled across the world. The trip lasted almost two years. His final stop was the Land of Israel. Here, he resided for five weeks and held lectures in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and the [Jezreel] valley. The fruit of this trip was his last book The World Journey of a Sex Researcher in which he describes the different nations and their behaviour in the field of love and marriage, childhood, and maturity. Israel occupies an important part in his book. Hirschfeld managed to see and learn a lot here even though he had been far from subscribing to Zionist ideals before then. The chapter about the Land of Israel is full of love and understanding for the Jewish enterprise and the new life in Israel. Three years ago, when he was still in Israel, he received letters from his friends and aides advising him not to return to Germany for the Nazi spirit was already common there. The Nazis hated him for many reasons: because he was Jewish as well as a social democrat, because he was a pacifist who had written a lot against the war, and mainly because he spread progressive views regarding mental sexual diseases in public. Af-

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ter the government had been given to the Nazis, one of their first actions was in fact to demolish the Institute for Sexual Research which, as Hirschfeld had claimed when he gifted it to the Prussian State, was supposed to liberate mankind from mental and physical suffering and social torment. Magnus Hirschfeld was mocked and scorned in Germany, and during the infamous book burning in Berlin his scientific and popular books were also burned. All of this must have affected Hirschfeld. He died in Nizza far from his homeland. In Germany, he received no eulogy. Even his many fans and friends would not dare to eulogise him as they did not dare to say a word of sorrow about the many who were hurt although they had done a lot for the benefits of humanity in this bloody land. The obituary suggests that Hirschfeld maintained a special relationship with the Land of Israel. Berlin renders Hirschfeld’s visit to Palestine as the climax of both his trip and his travelogue. Although conceding that Hirschfeld was neither an eager Zionist nor chose Palestine as his exile residence, Berlin emphasizes how “full of love and understanding” Hirschfeld was for the Jewish inhabitants of Palestine. By referring to the devastating blows struck against the Jewish sexologist by the Nazis who demolished his institute and burned his library, Berlin underlines that Hirschfeld shared the trauma of the thousands of German immigrants who managed to flee to Palestine during the Fifth Aliyah. The Palestine Post also published an obituary on May 20, 1935 (one day earlier than the one in Davar). The brief article sums up Hirschfeld’s life and work, not mentioning his visit to Palestine in 1932: DEATH OF DR. HIRSCHFELD A LEADING SEXOLOGIST Paris, May 16. – The death is announced of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld at Nice at the age of sixty years [sic!]. Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the best-known figures in the world of sexology – a study which he largely helped to raise to the status of a duly-accredited science. The son of a doctor, he early turned his attention to the specific problems of sex relationships, and before the War he acted as medico-legal expert on the subject, being called in whenever cases where sex abnormalities played a part came up. After the War he set up his Institute for Sexual Research, endowing it with a magnificent collection of books relating to the study of sex. The Institute was formally taken over by the German Government in 1923. The Nazis, however, attacked him and his doctrines violently. Before they came to power Dr. Hirschfeld narrowly [e]scaped an attack on his life at Munich, and in 1933 they sacked the Institute, and burnt practically the whole collection of books. Four years later, from February 28 to May 30, 1939, a series of nine advertisements appeared in the same newspaper, demonstrating how Hirschfeld had already been transformed from a historical person to a mythological character. The ad promotes an aphrodisiac drug called “perles Titus” (the French term for the German “Titus Perlen”) that had indeed been designed and put on the market by Hirschfeld since the mid-1920s (cf. Herzer 2017: 308-310). The pill – a precursor to Viagra that was available over-the-

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

counter although it contained hormones – is praised for its ability to restore youthful virility: INTEGRAL REJUVENATION DR. HIRSCHFELD’S PERLES TITUS STRONG A trial will persuade you of their efficacy A scientific brochure, entitled “NEW LIFE,” specially written by the celebrated Prof. MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD, Director of the Sexological Institute of Berlin (transfered [sic!] to Paris) and President of the International League of Sexual Reform, will instruct you, by its contents, and illustrated plates in five colours, on many things still unknown to you about sexual life, sexual desorders [sic!], and sex hygiene. Copies obtainable against remittance of P.T. 5 in stamps from “TITUS ORIENT,” P.O.B. 2105, Cairo. Distributors for Palestine, P.O.B. 1689, Tel-Aviv. In 1939, the ad presents Hirschfeld as a still living person (although he had died in 1935), his Institute of Sex Research as a still active organization in Paris (although it had been shut down by the Nazis in 1933 and Hirschfeld’s attempt to reestablish it in Paris had failed in 1934), the International League of Sexual Reform as still existing (although it had been suspended in 1935), and the writer of numerous massive sexological studies as the author of an illustrated brochure in five colors. Thus, the sexologist’s journey, in a manner of speaking, boiled down to the shipping of aphrodisiac pills from a postoffice box in Cairo to a post-office box in Tel Aviv.

2.

Hirschfeld’s Identity

Hirschfeld wrote and published his travelogue at a time when homophobia and antisemitism were indeed omnipresent in Germany. As not only a formerly well-respected sexologist but also a homosexual Jew, he had to reckon with the possibility of manifold discrimination. As early as 1920, he had been beaten up and left to die by a group of völkisch activists after a lecture in Munich (cf. Herzer 2017: 291-292). Now, the situation was even more precarious, since he had travelled and was now sharing his life with a much younger male Asian companion. In his book, Hirschfeld sticks to the professional perspective of a “specialist in sexology”, exploring the cultural habits of the various countries he visits, as well as the private perspective of a tourist assessing the quality of the roads, vehicles, and hotels he used (1935a: 283; 1935b: 279). However, he keeps silent about his own Jewishness even in the Palestine-related chapters and never refers to his homosexuality at all.

2.1

Jewishness

Hirschfeld was born into a bourgeois Jewish family living in the now Polish city of Kołobrzeg (Kolberg). When he settled in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1896, he lived the life of an assimilated Jew, perfectly blending into the urban culture of the German metropolis. He even used to celebrate Christmas, as proved by a “rare photograph from 1917 showing Hirschfeld with a crowd of children of the domestic personnel under a Christ-

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mas tree” (Dose 2012: 19; Herzer 2017: 405). There has been a controversy on whether or not Hirschfeld identified as a Jew. While Manfred Herzer claims that being Jewish was of little importance for Hirschfeld, J. Edgar Bauer counters that it would be misleading to deny his Jewishness (cf. Herzer 2001: 40-55; Bauer 2004). The truth seems to lie in the middle, since Hirschfeld, an assimilated, seemingly non-practicing Jew, neither emphasized nor denied the religious and cultural milieu he was born into. On the one hand, Hirschfeld was truly interested in the multifaceted manifestations of Judaism in the cities and kibbutzim of Palestine. As stated before, he notices the all-Jewish everyday life in Tel Aviv, talks about the Jewish scholars he met at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, refers to the biblical sites he visited in and around Jerusalem, and praises the alternative Jewish lifestyle in Beit Alfa. On the other hand, he never addresses himself as a Jew in a religious or political way, and he is highly aware of the virulent conflicts between Jews and Arabs, which he compares to a life “on top of a volcano” (1935a: 299; 1935b: 295). Hirschfeld is skeptical about what he calls the “Zionistic experiment.” While he is on good terms with Zionists such as Hermann Struck and in principle approves of the Zionist movement and its cultural achievements, he puts the notions of religion and nationality in context by arguing that, while it is easy to identify the original country of a person living in Palestine by their appearance, it is almost impossible to distinguish whether this person is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim: This Zionistic experiment – of which I highly approve, assuming certain developments, particularly since I was fortunate enough to study its success right on the spot – has been very instructive in establishing what the factors are that unite or divide human beings. For in Palestine there is no way of telling at first glance whether a person is a Christian, a Jew, or a Mohammedan. It is not possible either to differentiate definitely between a Jewish American and another American, or between a Jewish and a Christian Englishman, Italian or other European. But comparatively the easiest is to tell whether someone is an American or English, Turkish or German, Yemenitic or Russian Jew (1935a: 278; 1935b: 274). Moreover, he dedicates more than two pages to the Arab point of view on the political conflict, which he calls the “most dangerous wound” of Palestine (1935a: 295; 1935b: 291). Quoting at length an “influential member” of the Palestinian Independence Party presided by Awni Abd al-Hadi (1889-1970), he clarifies how the Arabs justified their claim on Palestine against Chaim Weizmann’s hapless dictum that “Palestine is going to become as Jewish as England is English” (1935a: 295; 1935b: 291). Hirschfeld also gives a detailed account of the recent massacres and attacks performed by Arab terrorists (Hirschfeld 1935a: 298-299; 1935b: 294-295). In a final step, he criticizes the “highly organized system of British colonial politics” for “preserving […] this tension” since “as long as these sporadic disturbances continue” they can argue that they are “needed ‘to restore peace and order’” and thus protect their economic interests (1935a: 300; 1935b: 296). Instead of taking the Zionist’s side, Hirschfeld points out “into what an exceedingly difficult situation Zionism has placed Judaism in Palestine” (Hirschfeld 1935a: 298; 1935b: 293-294). Quoting the member of the Palestinian Independence Party, he argues that Arabs and Jews should rather feel “themselves blood relatives (particularly in their

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

attitude towards Christians), since they claim Abraham as a common ancestor” (1935a: 297; 1935b: 293). Hirschfeld takes the metaphor of the blood relationship of the three monotheisms one step further by completing his book with the fantasy of total assimilation: I mean the assimilation of humanity as a whole, which dissolves national differences and believes in the United States of the World. There have been times in history in which the supporters of such pan-humanism could truly profess themselves to be citizens of the world. It is not necessary for such a man to relinquish national, familial, religious, linguistic, genealogical or any other ties altogether. Only he must not consider such things more important than humanity. If we could only be human! To overcome the present contentions between men and nations, needs only one bridge: human love, of any kind, provided it is mutual, constructive love. Only this can restore the lost paradise, the golden age; this only can make a reality of [Ferdinand] Freiligrath’s words of hope [in his poem Trotz alledem]: “In spite of all, in spite of all — the time will come when man will reach out his hand to his brother, all over the world” (1935a: 304; 1935b: 300). Hirschfeld obviously subscribes to a humanitarian ideology. Declaring himself a “citizen of the world,” he emphasizes unity rather than division. Consenting with the psychiatrist and sexologist Auguste Forel (1848-1931), he promotes the utopian notion of the “United States of the World” dissolving differences of nation, class, race, religion, and language into the global solidarity of mankind. In Hirschfeld’s view, the lingua franca of this cosmopolitan world should be English. He considers the choice of Hebrew rather than English as the Jewish vernacular in Palestine a cardinal mistake. In his opinion, English as a universal language would have had the power to unite the Jewish immigrants to Palestine from all over the world: Experience has shown that linguistic isolation noticeably increases every nationalistic and chauvinistic instinct. We unintentionally look down from a certain height upon those who are unable to understand us – and who do not know our language. […] Had the Jews decided to accept English as the language of social intercourse and instruction they would, in my opinion, have perceptibly lightened the work of rebuilding Palestine, and without any loss to themselves. It is no more necessary to use Hebrew as a language for general conversation in order to be able to read the works written in the original tongue – especially the Holy Writ – as for the modern Indian to converse in Sanskrit, or the modern Italian in Latin, in order to become acquainted with the Vedda or the odes of Horace. Hebrew literature is excellently translated into almost every language, and nothing is to prevent scholars from still studying the original text (1935a: 279-280; 1935b: 276). If Hirschfeld ever considered Palestine as his potential residence for exile or retirement, the language barrier was crucial for him. In a letter (now kept by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in Berlin), written on December 15, 1934, in Nice to his young cousin Ernst Maass who lived in Milan at that time and was about to immigrate to Palestine, Hirschfeld confesses that, although Palestine and particularly Tel Aviv truly appealed to him, he was too “lazy” to learn Hebrew and would feel inferior without any knowledge of it:

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My dear beloved little cousin. Your letter from 12 December overlapped with my thoughts that have extensively been occupied with you lately. Be sure that even if I rarely get the time to write you, I observe your affairs with greatest interest. I both hope and wish that we will meet again before your trip to Palestine, but for various reasons this won’t be possible until the end of January 1935. Perhaps you can inquire there at a travel agency […] for the cheapest option of getting here and back and whether you need a visa etc. I think I will stay here over the winter. What will come then is totally unclear to me. I have also already thought of Palestine, particularly Tel Aviv which truly appeals to me regarding its landscape and culture. Yet I am too lazy to also learn Hebrew and without it I feel […] too “second class”. However, this does not necessarily mean that he would have chosen Palestine rather than Europe if the vernacular had been English. Hirschfeld was not a Zionist failing to cope with the Hebrew language but a humanist looking for a place where he could live a life free of national, religious, and other restraints. Berlin had come close to this ideal during the so-called “Golden Twenties” – and Hirschfeld himself had greatly contributed to the liberality of this decade. On June 3, 1934, when he was still living in Paris, he wrote to his friend and colleague Harry Benjamin, who lived in New York: “What I wish is to find a place, where I can feel homelike in my old days, where I can live restfull [sic!] and peacefull [sic!] in a spiritual way, especially where I can work and where I have the impression, that I am welcome” (Haeberle Hirschfeld Archive, Humboldt University of Berlin). He finally found this place in Nice.

2.2

Homosexuality

Hirschfeld was an outspoken advocate of the first homosexual liberation movement. In 1896, he published a treatise on male and female homosexuality titled Sappho und Socrates oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (“Sappho and Socrates, or How can the love of men and women to persons of their own gender be explained?”). In 1897, he co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Komitee (“Scientific-Humanitarian Committee”), an organization campaigning against the criminalization of homosexual men (§ 175 of the Penal Code) (cf. Steakley 1975; Dose 2014). In 1904, he released a book entitled Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (“Berlin’s Third Sex”), a guide-like report on the manifold manifestations of queer life in Berlin at that time. In 1914, he published a monumental medical and cultural study on male and female homosexuality (Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes). In 1919, he founded the Institute for Sex Research, which provided a safe space for LGBTI people seeking support and shelter (although the main clientele consisted of heterosexuals). Despite his professional and political commitment to non-heteronormative genders and sexualities, Hirschfeld had to be cautious about his private life, since sexual intercourse between men was illegal and a homosexual scandal could ruin one’s social reputation, as the notorious Harden-Eulenburg affair (1907-1909) had proved (cf. Domeier 2015). From 1919 on, Hirschfeld shared his life with Karl Giese, who was thirty years younger than him (Herzer 2017: 369). As mentioned before, Giese worked as an archivist in the institute and managed it while Hirschfeld was on his world journey.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

From May 1931, Li Shiu-tong accompanied Hirschfeld on his lecture tour and for the rest of his life. Giese joined and lived with them in Paris, but had to leave the country in October 1934 after being charged of indecency and imprisoned for three months, thus losing his residence permit (cf. Sotaert 2018). In his testament, Hirschfeld named Karl Giese and Li Shiu-tong as his sole heirs. While Karl Giese committed suicide in March 1938, Li Shiu-tong returned to China and eventually moved to Canada, where he died in 1993. Hirschfeld mentions him only once in his account of their visit to Palestine, telling the anecdote of how the children of Beit Alfa were fascinated by the Chinese man. Hirschfeld’s close relationship with him is confirmed by the facts that he turned up during a newspaper interview with Hirschfeld held in Tel Aviv and that Hermann Struck presented a drawing to him during a get-together in Haifa. Hirschfeld refers to three types of male homosociality in order to characterize his relationship with Li Shiu-tong: teacher/student, male friends, and father/son. In his travelogue, he describes their union as one of teacher and student: This sort of tie found its strongest expression in the ideal teacher-student relation which bound me to Tao Li throughout almost my whole stay in China and long beyond it. Born of one of the foremost families in the country, a student of philosophy and medicine at the English University in Hongkong and the American University of St. John’s in Shanghai, despite his mere twenty-three years a thorough student of the books of [the British sexologist] Havelock Ellis as well as of the English translations of the works of [Ernst] Haeckel, [Sigmund] Freud, [Carl Gustav] Jung, [Oscar] Forel and Iwan Bloch (The Sexual Life of Our Time), in which he had become acquainted with my name, he offered himself to me, after my first lecture in Shanghai, as ‘companion’ and ‘protector’, to help and attend me wherever I might want to go in China […] (1935a: 53; 1935b: 49). On the one hand, this statement provides a socially acceptable explanation of Hirschfeld’s relationship with his young companion; on the other hand, a reader familiar with discourses on same-sex eroticism could easily notice the allusion to the ancient concept of Greek love, meaning a bond between an older lover (erastes) and his younger beloved (eromenos). This connotation is confirmed by the fact that the nickname of Hirschfeld’s companion was Tao Li, meaning “the beloved disciple” and thus hinting at the notion of the eromenos and, possibly, Jesus’s “beloved disciple” (discipulus quem diligebat), who is frequently mentioned in the Gospel of John (cf. Krass 2019). When Hirschfeld points out that Li Shiu-tong had first “become acquainted with my name” by reading Bloch’s book The Sexual Life of Our Time, he seems to refer to Michel de Montaigne who, in his essay on male friendship, claims that the first encounter with his close friend Étienne de la Boétie was mediated by a book: “And this particular obligation I have to this treatise of his, that it was the occasion of my first coming acquainted with him; for it was showed to me long before I had the good fortune to know him; and the first knowledge of his name, proving the first cause and foundation of a friendship, which we afterwards improved and maintained” (Montaigne 2013: 26-27). In his diary, Hirschfeld alludes to a third discourse in order to characterize his relationship with Li Shiu-tong. On October 11, 1931, he writes:

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One of the greatest yields of my journey has been Tao Li, a well-bred young Chinese who has accompanied me for the last five months. His noble character, his intelligence, his unswerving loyalty and devotion have made this journey so much easier, it’s extraordinary. It is his wish, and that of his father, that he should study medicine and sexology in Germany. I believe to have found in him the student I have sought for so long, one that I can form in my own image (2013: 126-127; cf. Dose 2014: 61). On the one hand, this quote confirms the relation of teacher and student; on the other, it alludes to the relation of father and son. When Hirschfeld points out that Li Shiutong’s father entrusted his son to him (as in Western patriarchal marriage settlements the father of the bride entrusts his daughter to a man he finds suitable), he claims the roles of an adoptive father, and when he writes that he wanted to “form” the young man “in my own image,” he elevates his paternal role by alluding to God the Father, the creator of mankind (Gen. 1:27). The topic of queer sexuality also comes up when Hirschfeld talks about the sexual issues presented to him during his public lectures and by the many patients who consulted him everywhere in Palestine (1935a: 283-284; 1935b: 279-280). He states that he was confronted with all manifestations of human sexuality except one, namely transvestism: I obtained a good idea of what, in this sphere, occupies and depresses these people. In order to anticipate the total result, let it be said that, all in all, their point of view does not differ essentially from that in European countries. […] In short, the whole arsenal of sexual troubles, all too well-known to me from my experiences in Europe, were brought before me here also. Strangely enough, only one group was missing: the transvestites. But this might have only been chance, for, apart from the fact that I encountered Jewish transvestites often enough in other countries (there is even mention in the Bible of women who wear men’s clothes and do men’s work and of men who dress as women) … (1935a: 284; 1935b: 280). By claiming that transvestism is a regular part of Jewish culture and even documented in the Holy Scriptures (Deut. 22:5), Hirschfeld confirms his long-standing conviction that non-heteronormative forms of gender and sexuality are natural and should therefore not be categorized as a sin, crime, or disease. Furthermore, Hirschfeld stages a little gender comedy when he plays, tongue-incheek, the role of a tourist guide presenting the biblical places to a group of travelling ladies: “Over there, my ladies, please see” (Hirschfeld, 1933, p. 353) – obviously alluding to the “bespectacled American women” he met twice during his world journey (Hirschfeld 1935a: 272; Hirschfeld 1935b: 268). Since Hirschfeld was a tourist himself – and possibly even joined the touring ladies on their excursion – he implicitly adds himself to the group of female tourists. The biblical sites he mentions in this context are indeed “talking stones” (1933: 350), since they refer not only to heterosexual couples (Abraham & Sarah, Isaac & Rebecca, Jacob & Leah) but also to places and characters evoking the notion of male homosexuality (Sodom & Gomorrah), passionate male friendship (David & Jonathan), virgin birth (Mary), and unruly women (Lot’s wife) as well as powerful women (Deborah). By explicitly mapping the biblical landscape, the sexologist implicitly maps

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

the diversity of normative as well as non-normative gender and sexual roles. Crediting Hirschfeld with the skill of writing between the lines is not at all far-fetched, since he, a former student of literature and author of a brief literary history of homosexuality, was very familiar with rhetorical and poetical strategies (cf. Krass 2013). Taking all these hints and traces seriously, one could even argue that for Hirschfeld the marginalizing markers of his identity – being Jewish and being gay – were to some extent interchangeable in a metonymic way (cf. Sedgwick 1990: 78-82). Hirschfeld elaborates at length about the entanglement of religion and sexuality, stating that “the fetish of one is the anti-fetish of the other; the belief of one is superstition to the other. What one loves and believes, however, is not the important factor, but that one loves and believes” (1935a: 273-274; 1935b: 269-270). Hirschfeld advocates the freedom of love and belief, claiming that it is also a question of perspective whether a certain religious or sexual inclination is orthodox or heterodox. When Hirschfeld, as stated before, describes Tel Aviv as an almost utopian city where all inhabitants are Jewish and the San Remo Hotel as an almost utopian establishment where only Jews work, he implicitly evokes the fantasy of an all-homosexual city and an all-homosexual hotel – a wish that has come true in some places in the 21st century. However, the queer tendency of Hirschfeld’s book was obscured by the misleading title of the English edition published in London: Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert. By evoking the notion of a male “sex expert” offering a comparative description of women from the “East” and the “West” in general, it suggests a straight, male-centered perspective, thus arousing the curiosity of a mainstream audience ready to objectify women in an orientalizing way.

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3.

Appendix

3.1

Palestine-related Chapters and Headers of the Travelogue

  German version

English Version

Subject

118

Wo Steine reden

112

[Where stones talk]

Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa

119

Moses, Jesus, Mohammed

113

[Moses, Jesus, Mohammed]

Abrahamic religions

120

Die jüdische Stadt

114

[The Jewish city]

Tel Aviv

121

Musste das sein?

115

[Was this necessary?]

Hebrew language

122

Weltbäder in Palästina

116

[World-class spas in Palestine]

Tel Aviv

123

Die Säuglinge von Tel Aviv

117

[The infants of Tel Aviv]

Tel Aviv

124

Lerneifer der Chaluzim

118

[Studiousness of the halutzim]

Hirschfeld’s lectures

125

Im Emektal

119

[In the Emek Valley]

Beit Alfa

126

Gemeinschaftskinder

120

[Children of the community]

Beit Alfa

127

Die freie Ehe

121

[Freedom of marriage]

Beit Alfa

128

Beth Alfa

122

[Beit Alfa]

Beit Alfa

129

Horra und Habima

123

[Horra and Habima]

Dance and theatre

130

Neu-Jerusalem

124

[New Jerusalem]

Jerusalem

131

Der arabische Anspruch

125

[The Arab claim]

Arab-Jewish conflict

132

Wie auf einem Vulkan

126

[Like on a volcano]

Arab-Jewish conflict

133

Schalom

127

[Shalom]

Jerusalem

134

Palästina oder Amerika

128

[Palestine or America]

Assimilation

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

3.2

Hirschfeld’s Itinerary

  Date

Day

Place and event

1

Feb 14, 1932

Sunday

Tel Aviv (three lectures): San Remo Hotel

2

Feb 15, 1932

Monday

Tel Aviv

3

Feb 16, 1932

Tuesday

Tel Aviv

4

Feb 17, 1932

Wednesday

Tel Aviv: 8:15pm lecture at Straus Health Centre

5

Feb 18, 1932

Thursday

Tel Aviv: visit to municipality; 8:15pm lecture at Straus Health Centre

6

Feb 19, 1932

Friday

Tel Aviv

7

Feb 20, 1932

Saturday

Tel Aviv: lecture at Eden cinema; reception at Dizengoff’s gallery

8

Feb 21, 1932

Sunday

Jerusalem (three lectures): King David Hotel

9

Feb 22, 1932

Monday

Jerusalem

10

Feb 23, 1932

Tuesday

Jerusalem: lecture at the Straus Health Centre

11

Feb 24, 1932

Wednesday

Jerusalem

12

Feb 25, 1932

Thursday

Jerusalem

13

Feb 26, 1932

Friday

Jerusalem

14

Feb 27, 1932

Saturday

Jerusalem

15

Feb 28, 1932

Sunday

Jerusalem: public lecture at the Italian School

16

Feb 29, 1932

Monday

Jerusalem

17

Mar 01, 1932

Tuesday

Jerusalem

18

Mar 02, 1932

Wednesday

Jerusalem

19

Mar 03, 1932

Thursday

Jerusalem: visit to the French embassy (visa for Beirut)

20

Mar 04, 1932

Friday

Jerusalem

21

Mar 05, 1932

Saturday

Jerusalem

22

Mar 06, 1932

Sunday

Haifa (two lectures): visit to Hermann Struck

23

Mar 07, 1932

Monday

Haifa: public lecture in the auditorium of the Technion

24

Mar 08, 1932

Tuesday

Haifa

25

Mar 09, 1932

Wednesday

Haifa

26

Mar 10, 1932

Thursday

Haifa

27

Mar 11, 1932

Friday

Beit Alfa (two lectures)

28

Mar 12, 1932

Saturday

Beit Alfa

29

Mar 13, 1932

Sunday

Beit Alfa: departure for Beirut via Damascus

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3.3

List of immigrants mentioned by Hirschfeld

  Name

Birth

Death

Immigr.

Bergmann, Samuel Hugo

1883

Prague

1975

Jerusalem

1918

Berlin, Chaim

1890

(Russia)

1980

Tel Aviv (?)

1925

Bodenheimer, Shimon Fritz

1897

Cologne

1959

London

1922

Brachyahu, Mordechai

1882

Vilna (M.)

1959

Jerusalem

1912

Dizengoff, Meir

1861

(Bessarabia)

1936

Tel Aviv

1905

Japhé, Fanny

1884

Jelgava/ Latvia

?

?

?

Kligler, Israel Jacob

1888

(Galicia)

1944

?

1921

Olitzki, Aryeh Leo

1898

Allenstein

1983

?

1924

Oppenheimer, Hillel (Heinz Reinhard)

1899

Berlin

1954

Rechovot

1925

Peri, Hiram (Heinz Pflaum)

1900

Berlin

1962

Jerusalem

c. 1925

Rappeport, Ernst Elijahu

1889

Nitra/Hungary

1952

Beit Alfa

1926

Reifenberg, Adolf

1899

Berlin

1953

Jerusalem

1920

Rovina, Hanna

1889

Berasino

1980

Tel Aviv

1928

Sharon (Schwadron), Avraham

1887

Zolochiv

1957

Jerusalem

1927

Struck, Hermann

1876

Berlin

1944

Haifa

1923

Weinshall, Jacob

1890

Tbilis

1980

Tel Aviv

c. 1918

Zlocisti, Theodor

1874

Borzestowo

1943

Haifa

1921

  Note: The Magnus Hirschfeld Society keeps a sheet of paper listing twenty-one names of persons living in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beit Alfa. The handwritten list – apparently composed by Hirschfeld himself – is part of the bequest of his cousin Ernst Maass, who collected it, together with other materials, after Hirschfeld’s death in Nice. Ten of the listed persons are also mentioned in Hirschfeld’s book (Tel Aviv: Chaim Berlin, Meir Dizengoff, Hanna Rovina; Jerusalem: Fritz Shimon Bodenheimer, Mordechai Brachayahu, Aryeh Olitzki, Adolf Reifenberg, Abraham Schwadron; Haifa: Hermann Struck; Beit Alfa: Ernst Elijahu Rappeport), eleven are not. Five of the persons unmentioned in the book are identifiable (Tel Aviv: Menashe Meirovitch, agronomist, born in 1860 in Nikoleiv/Russia, immigrated in 1883, died in 1949 in Rishon LeZion; Jerusalem: Leo Herrmann, journalist, born in 1888 in Landskron, immigrated in 1926,

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

died in 1951 in Jerusalem, and Lola Herrmann; Beit Alfa: Franz Lederer alias Zvi Dar, born in 1898 in Karlovy Vary/Bohemia, died in 1969 in Heftziba), seven are still to be identified (Tel Aviv: “Schoschanah Perutz”, “Dr med J [?] Ben Raanan”, “Ch Friedmann”; Jerusalem: “Alexander M. Marken”, “Henrietta Diamond”, “Dr W. Berger”; Beit Alfa: “Oswald Jokl”). While the actual purpose of this list is unclear, it seems to reflect the people that Hirschfeld met in Palestine.

Newspaper Articles Cited Davar, February 12, 1932, p. 6. Davar, March 22, 1932, p. 4. Davar, May 21, 1935, p. 3. Doar HaYom, February 16, 1932, p. 4. Doar HaYom, March 1, 1932, p. 2. Haaretz, February 15, 1932, p. 4. Haaretz, February 16, 1932, p. 4. Haaretz, February 19, 1932, p. 4. Palestine Bulletin, February 22, 1932, p. 4. Palestine Bulletin, February 26, 1932, p. 4. Palestine Bulletin, February 28, 1932, p. 4. The Palestine Post, February 28, 1939, p. 2.

Online Archives Cited Historical Jewish Press: https://web.nli.org.il/sites/JPress/English/Pages/default.aspx# 01 Tel-Aviv City Archive: http://tel-aviv.millenium.org.il/NR/exeres/299B498B-2CF0-4D2 B-96D3-610BD9E36FDB,frameless.htm Jabotinsky Online Archive: http://en.jabotinsky.org/archive/catalog-of-files

Works Cited Azaryahu, Maoz (2007): Tel Aviv. Mythography of a City. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press. Bauer, Heike (2017): The Hirschfeld Archives. Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Bauer, J. Edgar (2004): “‘Ahasverische Unruhe’ und ‘Menschheitsassimilitation’: Zu Magnus Hirschfelds Auffassung vom Judentum.“ In: Elke-Vera Kotowski/Julius H. Schoeps (Eds.), Magnus Hirschfeld. Ein Leben im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft Politik und Gesellschaft, Berlin: Bebra (Sifria – Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek 8), pp. 271-291. — (2006): “Magnus Hirschfeld: Panhumanism and the Sexual Culture of Asia.” In: Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context 14 (2006).

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Bergmann, Schmuel Hugo (1985): Tagebücher und Briefe. Ed. by Miriam Sambursky. Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag bei Athenäum. Bomhof, Hartmut (2018): “The Einstein of Sex.” In: Jewish Voice from Germany, 13. April 2018. von Braun, Christina (2004): “Ist die Sexualwissenschaft eine ‘jüdische‘ Wissenschaft?“ in: Elke-Vera Kotowski/Julius H. Schoeps (Eds.), Magnus Hirschfeld. Ein Leben im Spannungsfeld von Wissenschaft Politik und Gesellschaft, Berlin: Bebra (Sifria – Wissenschaftliche Bibliothek 8), pp. 255-269. Domeier, Norman (2015): The Eulenburg-Skandal. A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire. Translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Rochester, NY: Camden House. Dose, Ralf (2015): Das verschmähte Erbe. Magnus Hirschfelds Vermächtnis an die Berliner Universität, Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich. — (2005): Magnus Hirschfeld. Deutscher – Jude – Weltbürger, Berlin: Hentrich & Hentrich (Jüdische Miniaturen 15). — (2014): Magnus Hirschfeld. The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement, New York: Monthly Review Press. — (2012) “Thirty Years of Collecting Our History – Or: How to Find Treasure Troves.” Paper given at the ALMS Conference, Amsterdam, August 1-3, 2012 (http://lgbtialm s2012.blogspot.com/2012/06/thirty-years-of-collecting-our-history.html) — (2017): Review of Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives, in: Mitteilungen der Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft 58/59, Berlin (self-published), pp. 65-73. Gerhardt, Paul (1981): “Die Entwicklung der Jong-Ti Universität und der Wuhan Medizinischen Hochschule in China.” In: Heidelberger Jahrbücher 25 (1981), pp. 57-72. Haeberle, Erwin J. (1982): “The Jewish Contribution to the Development of Sexology.” In: The Journal of Sex Research, Vol. 18, No. 4 (November 1982), pp. 305-323. Helman, Anat (2010): Young Tel Aviv. A Tale of Two Cities. Translated by Haim Watzmann, Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England/Brandeis University Press. Herrn, Rainer (2009) “Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935).” In: Sigusch, Volkmar/Günter Grau (edd.), Personenlexikon der Sexualforschung, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus, pp. 284-294. Herzer, Manfred (2001): Magnus Hirschfeld. Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen. Second and revised edition, Hamburg: Männerschwarm (Bibliothek rosa Winkel 28). — (2017): Magnus Hirschfeld und seine Zeit, de Gruyter Oldenbourg: Berlin/Boston. Hirschfeld, Magnus (1904): Berlins Drittes Geschlecht, Berlin/Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Verlag (Großstadt-Dokumente 3). — (2017): Berlin’s Third Sex. Translated by James J. Conway, Berlin: Rixdorf Editions. — (1914): Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes. Mit einem Namen-, Länder-, Orts- und Sachregister, Berlin; Louis Marcus Verlagsbuchhandlung. — (1933): Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers. Mit 47 Abbildungen, Brugg (Switzerland): Bözberg-Verlag. — (1931/1932) “Einführung in die Sexualwissenschaft. Vortrag gehalten auf der 31. Sitzung der Medizinisch-Naturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, Shanghai, am 22.

Magnus Hirschfeld in Palestine

Mai 1931.” [German/Chinese] In: Medizinische Monatsschrift (Tongji University, Shanghai) 7, No. 5, pp. 159-173. — (1935[a]): Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist. English version by O[liver] P. Green. Introduction by A[braham] A. Brill, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. — (1896): Sappho und Socrates oder Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts?, Leipzig: Spohr. [published under the pseudonym “Th. Ramien”] — (1931/32): “Sexualbiologie.” [German/Chinese]. In: Medizinische Monatsschrift (Tongji University, Shanghai) 7, No. 1, pp. 11-23. — (1931a): “Sexualpathologie. Vortrag gehalten von Herrn Sanitätsrat Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld im großen Hörsaal des Paulun Hospitals am 13., 16., 21. Mai 1931.” [German/Chinese] In: Medizinische Monatsschrift (Tongji University, Shanghai) 7, No. 2, pp. 58-67; No. 3, pp. 77-89; No. 4, pp. 123-130. — (2013): Testament. Heft II. Ed. and annotated by Ralf Dose. Berlin/Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich. — (1931b): “Über den gegenwärtigen Stand der Sexual-Pathologie. Auf dem Dermatologen-Kongreß in Tokyo am 2. April 1931.” In: Liebe und Leben: Zeitschrift für Geburtenregelung und Sexualreform 5, pp. 67-70. — (1935b): Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert. English version by O[liver] P. Green, London: W. Heinemann. — (2019): Magnus Hirschfelds Exil-Gästebuch 1933-1935. Ed. and annotated by Hans Bergemann/Ralf Dose/Marita Keilson-Lauritz, with the co-operation of Kevin Dubout. Berlin/Leipzig. Kaufhold, Roland and Till Lieberz-Groß (2001): “Editorial,” in: Kaufhold, Roland/ Till Lieberz-Groß (eds.): Psychosozial 24, pp. 5-9. Kozma, Liat (2010): “Sexology in the Yishuv: The Rise and the Decline of Sexual Consultation in Tel Aviv, 1930-39.” In: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (May 2010), pp. 231-249. Krämer, Gudrun (2008): A History of Palestine: From the Ottoman Conquest to the Founding of the State of Israel, translated by Graham Harman and Gudrun Krämer. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Krass, Andreas (2013): “Meine erste Geliebte”: Magnus Hirschfeld und sein Verhältnis zur schönen Literatur. Göttingen: Wallstein (Hirschfeld Lecture 2). — (2019): “The Beloved Disciple. From the Gospel of John to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.” In: Ann Marie Rasmussen (ed.), Rivalrous Masculinities: New Directions in Medieval Gender Studies, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press 2019, pp. 234-250. Montaigne, Michel de (2013): Selected Essays. Translated by Charles Cotton. Edited by William Carew Hazlitt, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Montefiore, Simon Sebag (2011): Jerusalem. The Biography, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Nashef, Khaled (2002): “Tawfik Canaan. His Life and Works”. In: Palestinian Quarterly 16, pp. 12-26. Nur, Nordheimer Ofer (2014): Eros and Tragedy: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism, Boston, Massachusetts: Academic Studies Press.

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Ofrat, Gideon (2005): “Berlin – Jerusalem: Kulturhelden,” in: Zimmermann, Moshe/Yotam Hotam (eds.), Zweimal Heimat. Die Jeckes zwischen Mitteleuropa und Nahost. Trans. Elsheva Moatti, Frankfurt am Main: Beerenverlag, pp. 137-146. Oz, Amos (2005): A Tale of Love and Darkness. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange, London: Mariner Books. Rappeport, Sarah (2020): Die Jüdin von Cherut. Andreas Krass/Moshe Sluhovsky (eds.), Berlin/Leipzig: Hentrich & Hentrich (Jüdische Spuren). Rolnik, Eran (2013): Freud auf Hebräisch. Geschichte der Psychoanalyse in Palästina. Trans.David Ajchenrand, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Schütz, Chana C. (2004): “Hermann Struck und Arnold Zweig. Eine Freundschaft im Gegensatz.” In: Bernhard, Julia/Joachim Schlör (eds.): Deutscher, Jude, Europäer im 20. Jahrhundert. Arnold Zweig und das Judentum (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Reihe A: Kongressberichte, Bd. 65), Bern et al.: Peter Lang, pp. 163-178. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy (1990): Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press. Shvarts, Shifra/Zipora Shehory-Rubin (2008): “On Behalf of Mothers and Children in Eretz Israel: The Activity of Hadassah, the Federation of Hebrew Women, and WIZO to Establish Maternal and Infant Welfare Centers – Tipat Halav, 1913-1948.” In: Ruth Kark et al. (eds.): Jewish Women in Pre-State Israel: Life in History, Politics, and Culture, Lebanon, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, pp. 180-192 (text), 372-375 (notes). Soetaert, Hans P. (2018): “Karl Gieses Pariser ‘Badeanstalt-Affäre’ und ihre Folgen.” In: Invertito – Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 20, pp. 60-95. Sonder, Ines (2009): Lotte Cohn – Pioneer Woman Architect in Israel. Catalogue of Buildings and Projects, Tel Aviv: Bauhaus Center. Sparr, Thomas (2018): Grunewald im Orient. Das deutsch-jüdische Jerusalem, Berlin: Berenberg. Steakley, James D. (1975): The Early Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, New York: Arno Press. — (1985): The Writings of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld: A Bibliography. Compiled and Introduced by James D. Steakley, Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives. Tal, Nissim/Aviv Livnat/Irit Miller (2016): Hermann Struck 1876-1944. Collection of the Hermann Struck Museum [Catalogue], Haifa: Hermann Struck Museum. Tobin, Robert Deam (2015): Peripheral Desires. The German Discovery of Sex, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Warhaftig, Myra (2004): “Haifa 1933-1948.” In: Bernhard, Julia/Joachim Schlör (eds.): Deutscher, Jude, Europäer im 20. Jahrhundert. Arnold Zweig und das Judentum, Bern et al.: Peter Lang (Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, Reihe A: Kongressberichte, Bd. 65), pp. 209-218. Wawrzyn, Heidemarie (2013): Nazis in the Holy Land, 1933-48, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter. Wolfert, Raimund (2012): “Wer ist wer in Magnus Hirschfelds Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers?“ In: Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft 49 (August 2012), pp. 9-37.

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Wolf, Charlotte (1986): Magnus Hirschfeld. A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology, London: Quartet Books. Zalashik, Rakefet (2012): Das unselige Erbe. Die Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Palästina und Israel. Trans. David Ajchenrand, Frankfurt am Main/New York: Campus. Zer-Zion, Shelly (2005): “Von einer hebräischen Studiobühne zum Nationaltheater – Die Transformation von Habima in Berlin.” In: Zimmermann, Moshe/Yotam Hotam (eds.): Zweimal Heimat. Die Jeckes zwischen Mitteleuropa und Nahost. Trans. Elsheva Moatti, Frankfurt am Main: Beerenverlag, pp. 77-88.

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Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman Yael Rozin

Figure 9.1: Anne (Annie) Neumann, 1950, photographer unknown, Gabriel Talphir Archive, Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem

In February 2020, shortly before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Israel, I visited the exhibition cluster ”Women Make History: Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism,” curated by Svetlana Reingold, at the Haifa Museum of Art. In one of the group shows, I came across a pair of works by Naama Roth hanging on a side wall: on the right, Annie Neumann/Batia Lichansky, 2019, and on the left, Work and Defense Memorial/Lichansky, 2019.

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The two works were hung side by side, the depicted figures ostensibly facing each other: a digitally manipulated photograph of Annie Neumann’s bust sculpted by Lichansky, looking at a detail from another work by Lichansky, the Work and Defense Memorial. Lichansky sculpted the bust in 1934, first in plaster and later in cast bronze. When the sculpture was featured in an exhibition at the Jerusalem Artists’ House years after it was created, it was deemed ”the most superb of Lichansky’s portraits, depicting her friend, Annie Neumann, with restrained emotion” (Gazith 1961: 195). On the left, as aforesaid, was a manipulated photograph of the famous monument erected in 1929-37 in Hulda Forest, near the eponymous kibbutz and what was later to become known as the Burma Road – a makeshift bypass road between Kibbutz Hulda and Jerusalem, cleared during the 1948 siege of Jerusalem. The monument was erected in memory of Ephraim Tchizik, who had been killed during the 1929 Arab Riots in Palestine while defending Kibbutz Hulda. In addition to Ephraim’s figure standing supreme above all others, it also portrays his sister Sarah Tchizik and Second Aliya pioneer Benjamin Munter – both of whom fell in defense of the Tel Hai farm in the Upper Galilee in 1920, during the early days of Zionist settlement of Palestine. The monumental sculpture reflects a Zionist utopia, combining two formative hegemonic narratives of the time: the ”redemption of the land,” namely Jewish land purchase for the purpose of settlement and toward the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in Palestine – one of the major goals of the Zionist enterprise; and ”defense of the homeland” against Palestinian Arab nationalists who opposed the establishment of a Jewish state. Roth’s work challenges and deflects the male hegemonic gaze, introducing the possibility of a different narrative, by placing Sarah Tchizik – the single female figure in the monument – at the center of her work.1 The chance encounter with the figures/work of Neumann and Lichansky was thrilling, as I found an unknowing ally, a partner to my affection for and curiosity about these two women. I wondered why Roth chose these two specific artists, one relatively known (Lichansky), and the other virtually anonymous (Neumann). Was the young artist aware of their intimate relationship and therefore chose to place them side by side in this manner? I first heard about Neumann and Lichansky in a lecture by Israeli culture and art scholar Nirit Shalev-Khalifa, at a conference organized by the Association for Women’s Art and Gender Research in Israel in February 2019. The title, ”Thy Work to Me was Wonderful,”2 was an anticipatory clue foreshadowing its contents: a lecture centered on Lichansky’s works and the duality that characterized both her life and her art as a woman, as someone who mediated and reinforced the national idea ”through art underlain by universal foundations and contemporaneous trends.” According to ShalevKhalifa, the national narrative was juxtaposed with the story of Lichansky’s life and work, ”being a woman artist and a lesbian, who struggled with her gender identity in complex, tumultuous relationships with women-artists, primarily with painter Annie

1 2

For an elaboration on the monument and the figures in it, see Shalev-Khalifa 2001: 97-122. The lecture's title, "Thy Work to Me was Wonderful: Batia Lichansky and Her Work between the Personal, Feminine, and National," is a paraphrase of David's Lament for Jonathan, "I am distressed for thee, my brother Jonathan: […] thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Samuel 1:26); for an elaboration on Lichansky, see Shalev-Khalifa (ibid).

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

Neumann, who was her partner” (ibid). In light of feminism being a charged term in early Israeli art, and the fact that gender and sexuality began to be discussed and represented only in the 1990s, a clear and unequivocal statement about two women artists living openly as a couple even before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, was surprising and intriguing.

The Place of Women in Israeli Art, or I have No Model in My Mind 3 In the foreword to the anthology Women Artists in Israel, 1920-1970, Ruth Markus makes two interesting claims.4 The first is that in the time frame discussed in the book, there were many women who created art; the second is that women artists were systematically excluded from the narrative of the visual arts in Israel (see also Trajtenberg 2007). Markus discusses these two claims in depth. Why are so few women artists mentioned in the narrative of Israeli art? The prevailing argument, she writes, is that there were no women artists, or that their work was not good enough to enter the canon. This argument was addressed by Linda Nochlin in her seminal 1971 essay, ”Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in which she listed the largely socio-political reasons for the absence of women from the discipline of art history. The major contribution of Nochlin’s essay lies in the call for emphasizing institutional-public rather than individual-private preconditions for achievement in the arts (Nochlin 1988 [1971]; Tal Ben Zvi 2007). To counter the under-representation of female artists, Markus presents at least 121 names in her book, which she culled from books, magazines, artist portfolios and catalogues, in an attempt to compile an index of women artists active in those years. As for criticism regarding the quality of their art, she mentions articles and reviews from the period discussing their work, reporting on the awards and international acclaim which some of them enjoyed. Nevertheless, she states, most of these women have disappeared from the pages of history. There are good arguments against isolating gendered division, in both historical and contemporary research addressing the place and work of women in the history of Israeli art. There are even better reasons why this is necessary and even essential: while feminism changed the face of the 20th century and continues to be a pivotal narrative in the 21st century, its discourse remains somewhat apologetic. Museums are reluctant to embrace feminist art unless it is framed in the context of a ”women’s exhibition,” and 3

4

A quote from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own [1929] in reference to the absence of women in the literary canon: "I have no model in my mind to turn about this way and that" (Woolf 2000 [1929]: 54). Markus (2008: 8) explains the choice of this specific time frame in that research indicates a flourishing of artistic creation in the 1920s with the renewal of contacts between the Jewish community in Palestine and art centers in post-WWI Europe. Concurrently, locally born Jewish women-artists emerged alongside women-artists who hailed from Europe and brought with them the spirit of the "New Woman." The decision to conclude the book in the 1960s was in light of the influence of the second wave of feminism that came to Israel from the United States, which effectuated a change in the place and status of women in the art world, and correspondingly – in the development of research and documentation.

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many women artists still refuse to identify themselves with feminism for fear that it will hinder their acceptance into the art world (Brown 2019). These concerns are manifold when it comes to women who identify themselves (or are identified) as lesbian and/or queer.5 If this is the case, the question arises why continue to declare, define, and emphasize the role and place of women artists in general, and of queer ones in particular? The answer is that art is a cultural system which reflects social and human praxis, articulating society’s idiosyncrasy. The notion of art itself has changed over time, and is now less steeped in its ivory tower, and the concepts of ”art” and ”activism” are often discussed in one breath nowadays. Moreover, activist artists are no longer content to merely criticize the field of art, or the political and social conditions in which it transpires. Instead, they often strive to change these pre-existing conditions through their art. The art-viewing experience, too, elicits a response from viewers, generating a cognitive change in the beholder that can sometimes inspire social activism. The artist, artwork, and viewer form a totality that signifies art’s ability to change perceptions and views, raise issues for public discussion, and motivate activism, which requires involvement and taking a stand. The artistic arena today thus functions as a medium to challenge prevailing perceptions and beliefs, while concurrently serving as a mediator and bridge, a resource for reinforcing social ties and understandings between the various sectors of society. In fact, art not only reflects society, but also influences cultural identity and takes part in its construction. Hence it can propose alternative modes of action and change, provide a platform, and promote the visibility of social minorities. The potential for visibility and change inherent in art has prompted scholars, artists, and social activists to try to expose our matriarchal lineage; to look for ”our mothers,” agents of socialization, and role models. Orly Lubin (1993) argues that critical writing and subversive reading are well-known methods among feminist scholars who, contrary to their marginalization in the hegemonic text, subjectively reposition themselves at the center by rewriting their own narrative. By the same token, placing Neumann and her partner, Lichansky, at the center of this text, as opposed to their marginalization in Israeli art, strives to add yet another layer to the hegemonic story of Israeli art; to replace invisibility with visibility, and the absence of women artists, who were also women who loved women, with their presence.

Gender Identity and Sexuality in Israeli Art Research indicates that only in the 1990s was there a significant change in the art discourse in Israel. At that time, Israel experienced a cultural flourishing, as well as an opening up of the Israeli art scene to international trends. This was the decade in

5

In my use of the term "queer," I follow Amalia Ziv's (2020: 135-154) reflection on its use as "an umbrella term […] equivalent to LGBT, while avoiding the cumbersome need to add an extra letter with every new differentiated category of sexual or gender identity."

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

which postmodern discourse was most distinctly assimilated into local art; the engagement with identity politics, as well as a critical preoccupation with the power structures that dominate the art world, informed the works of many artists. Formerly off-limits topics – whether national, such as the Holocaust, wars, commemoration of fallen soldiers – or personal, such as gender and sexual identity, topics which were marginalized theretofore, became grist for the artistic mill. To return to Nochlin’s question: Have there been no great queer artists? –There clearly have been. Queer artists are not new to the art world. Queer discourse, however, is (virtually) nonexistent in the Israeli art scene, and its absence, the reasons for it, the repression mechanisms, and the obliteration methods have been neither exposed nor confronted. In other words, the discourse and scholarly-methodological field spanning this extensive visual culture is muted and deficient. Research that brings Israeli lesbian artists to the fore is thus a form of queer activism, promoting public awareness of the common tendency to take heterosexual values and codes for granted. Exposure of diversity and writing about otherness help illuminate these notions, articulating the desire felt by individuals who experience the world from a different position. This discourse makes it possible to supplement the canonical narrative with another layer, an important stratum in the multicultural discourse in Israel, of which the queer community is an integral part. According to queer historian Iris Rachamimov (2015: 3), in many instances ”disempowered social groups do not leave a long trail of written documents about their lives.” In the absence of documentation, she continues, the historian will rely on oral history; an archaeologist will focus on the study of material culture, namely the tangible remains of ancient cultures; while a woman, a feminist, and a queer scholar, such as myself, culls memory crumbs, tracing the artworks left behind by an artist such as Neumann to outline a matriarchal lineage of my own.

Berlin – [Tel Aviv] – Jerusalem In his book Berlin–Jerusalem: The Art of the German Aliyah (2015), Israeli art historian Gideon Ofrat discusses an art auction held in Tel Aviv in May 1984, dedicated to the ”German School in Eretz-Israeli Painting.” In an e-mail correspondence with the undersigned (August 2020), Ofrat added that the auction catalogue, edited by the late Arie Galibov (then director of Leyvik House, Tel Aviv), listed 145 works by 66 painters and sculptors who were either born in Germany and Austria, or acquired their artistic education there. Among these were Lichansky and Neumann. Of the two, Lichansky, a native of Ukraine, is the better known. Her lineage and works, which are an integral part of Israel’s national narrative, have granted her a place in the story of Israeli art. She was born in 1900 in Malin, Ukraine, the youngest of four daughters, to Meir Yona and Shoshana Lichansky. In 1910, at the age of ten, she arrived

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in Palestine with her mother to visit her aunt,6 and stayed. Her artistic path led her from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and later she studied in Rome (1920), Berlin (1923-25), and Paris (1925-29), after which she returned to Palestine, and soon after was awarded the commission to erect the Work and Defense monument in Hulda. Despite her connection with the German-born Neumann and their correspondence in German (a language in which she was fluent), the main source of inspiration for Lichansky’s work was actually French sculptor Auguste Rodin. In The Story of Art in Israel (LeVitte and Ofrat, Tammuz 1980: 78), which is considered a classic textbook of Israeli art, Lichansky’s art is described by Doreet LeVitte in the chapter ”The 1930s: The French Influence,” as oscillating ”between the Expressionist experience and the classical-naturalistic experience.” In Lichansky’s 1920s monuments, LeVitte goes on to say, ”unprocessed areas of the stone play an important role alongside the processed, polished ones. She created a series of busts which are among her finest works, marked by realism and an attempt to sketch a psychological portrait.” Lichansky’s partner, Neumann, was omitted from LeVitte’s book altogether. In a 2019 blog entry ”Forgotten Artists: Annie,” Ofrat writes, ”Annie Neumann? How many readers have even heard the name of this artist? Who among the readers has ever seen any of her paintings or drawings? Even yours truly, who struggles to remember and remind, regretfully ignored her work when writing about the artists of the German Aliya (although I did mention her name […]).” Little is known about Neumann’s life before her arrival in Palestine. She was born on August 20, 1906, in the German city of Cottbus, Brandenburg, 125 km southeast of Berlin, to Mendel Neumann and Sarah, née Weinblum. About the Germany of her childhood and youth, however, we know a great deal. In 1918 she turned 12, and her early years paralleled the history of the Weimar Republic, which, along with economic and political crises, witnessed a cultural flourishing in Germany. According to Eric D. Weitz (2018 [2007]: 11): The experience of the war years, for all the horrors at the front and difficulties at home, was also liberating for many women and men. The fury of war destroyed numerous social and artistic conventions. The Weimar era, with its heady enthusiasms, its artistic experimentation, its flaunting of sexuality and unconventional relations, its vibrant, kinetic energy, was a direct result of the vast disruptions of World War I, the distorted reverberations of its crashing destructiveness. The Weimar Republic became synonymous with modernism and tolerance of sexual diversity, and the queer scene flourished in Berlin, Hamburg, and Cologne. Bars, restaurants, and cabarets served as meeting places for gays and lesbians, and as hothouses for the emergence of an extensive social network. Ruth Margarete Röllig (1878–1969), who wrote a city guide to the Berlin lesbian scene in 1928, remarked, ”Here each one can find their own happiness, for they make a point of satisfying every taste” (Whisnant 2016: 96). According to Clayton J. Whisnant (2016), the alleged tolerance of the Weimar 6

Rachel Yanait Ben-Zvi, an agronomist by education, was a writer and educator; a key figure in the local Labor movement, active in the Jewish self-defense efforts in Palestine, and a public figure in the nascent State of Israel. Her husband, historian Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, was Israel's second President.

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

government toward gays and lesbians must be qualified, as there were also conservative political voices that warned against the dangers of liberated modern life, and rejected reforms regarding homosexuality and the attempts of scientists and social activists to repeal Paragraph 175. The latter collaborated with WhK – the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee cofounded by renowned German Jewish physician and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (cf. Beachy 2010). One wonders whether Neumann was part of that vibrant Berlin scene. Was she aware of her sexuality? Had she already been in love with a woman at the time? We will probably never know, but the tolerant atmosphere must have made life more bearable for the young woman. From the age of 18, for about five years (1924-29), Neumann studied painting at the Reimann School of Art and Design (Schule Reimann), founded in Berlin in 1902 by the Jewish artist Albert Reimann.7

Figure 9.2: Postcard with the building of the Reimann School, Berlin: Publishing Department of the Reimann School ca. 1912 - 1936, paper, 10.3 x 14.7 cm; Jewish Museum Berlin, inv. no. 2012/148/4, Photo: Kai-Annett Becker

The young Annie exceled at drawing, and in 1932 she participated in the annual Great Berlin Exhibition – ”Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung” – with two drawings of girls’ heads. The works received favorable reviews in the press, and Neumann won an award from art critic Adolf Donath, on behalf of the daily Berliner Tageblatt. A year after the exhibition, in January 1933, the Nazis seized power, and forthwith set out to suppress gay social and cultural life, leading to a brutal elimination of the thriving homosexual culture. Laws that had previously remained on paper were now strictly enforced, and even stricter, harsher laws against homosexuality and homosexuals were enacted and enforced (Beachy 2010; Savran/Rachamimov 2015; Whisnant 2016). 7

Located at 38 Landshuter Strasse in Berlin-Schöneberg, the school was closed by the Nazis in 1939. The building was bombed by the Allies in 1945.

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Figure 9.3: Neumann’s student card. With the courtesy of Hashomer Museum Archive

Although the Nazi regime did not persecute lesbians with the same fervor it did homosexuals, they, too, were affected by Nazi policy. Their meeting places were closed, publications were forbidden, social clubs were shut, and, like all German women, they were under constant pressure to conform with traditional gender norms, marry, and bear “purebred” children for the German nation. If they met these requirements, the regime showed little interest in their sexual orientation. Most lesbians, however, were neither wives nor mothers, and could not (or did not want to) follow the Nazi doctrine. While they could not be criminally charged under Paragraph 175, lesbians were persecuted on the basis of gender incompatibility, that is, non-compliance with norms attached to femininity, including marriage and the institution of heterosexuality. Jews, Gypsies, communists, and lesbians were persecuted, exiled, and exterminated primarily because they belonged to groups targeted by the Nazis (Whisnant 2016). Due to the Nazi racial policies, from the time of their rise to power until the outbreak of World War II in 1939, most of the Jews who lived in German territory and managed to escape the Nazis, fled to the US, South America, the UK, and Palestine. The great exodus of European Jews brought a large wave of immigration to Palestine, which was under British Mandatory rule at the time. Although immigrants from Germany made up only about 18 percent of the approximately 200,000 people who arrived in Israel as part of “the Fifth Aliyah”, this wave of immigration is often identified by its German component and has been dubbed the ”German” or ”Yekke” Aliyah (Limor/Roth-Hacohen 2017).

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

Unlike previous immigration waves, the Fifth Aliyah was comprised of immigrants whose departure was mainly motivated by Hitler’s rise to power, and not necessarily by Zionist sentiment. This fundamental difference was reflected, among other things, in two conspicuous characteristics of the German immigrants. Unlike previous immigration waves, the newcomers were not assimilated into existing forms of settlement, but continued to speak German, and held cultural and social activities not practiced in the Yishuv (Jewish community in the country) until that time. Furthermore, the German wave of immigration comprised thousands of liberal professionals and artists, whose cultural norms were contrary to the collectivist conceptions prevalent locally in those years. Unlike members of previous immigration waves, who sought to abandon the cultural customs of their countries of origin and replace them with new ones more in keeping with their new surroundings, these Central European Jews cherished their culture of origin, which they deemed loftier than that of the Yishuv, and were reluctant to adopt the local lifestyle. From the point of view of those already living in the Yishuv, the immigrants from Central Europe disparaged the construction of the new settlement and did not consider themselves a homogeneous part of it (ibid). It was to this chaotic melting pot, swarming with refugees of war and marked by Mandatory rule and mutual distrust between the newcomers and the people of the old Yishuv, that Neumann came in 1933 – a lesbian, Yekke, and immigrant artist. What motivated her to leave Germany and relocate to Palestine, one can only speculate. The Nazis had only just seized power, but the fear of the future may explain the decision to leave everything behind and seek a fresh start. Perhaps she was a Zionist and wanted to help establish the Jewish state. Testimonies indicate that she met Lichansky in her early days in the country, and they soon became a couple. Could they have known each other back in Germany? Lichansky studied art in Berlin between the years 1923-25 – Could they have already met then? The circumstances of their meeting and acquaintance remain unknown so it is possible. What we do know is that in the very year of her arrival in the country, in July 1933, Neumann participated in a small group exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, presenting two drawings: Drawing A and Drawing B,8 and about three months later, Neumann and Lichansky both presented their works in another group exhibition, also at the Tel Aviv Museum: ”Exhibition of Palestine-Artists for Settlement of German Jews in Palestine,”9 one of the first exhibitions in the museum, inaugurated only a year earlier.10 The two continued to work side by side, traveling together around the country (as well as overseas in the years following World War II). When Lichansky moved to Kibbutz 8 9

10

The tiny catalogue lists the names of the nine artists who participated in the exhibition, providing the titles of their works in Hebrew and English without accompanying images. The modest catalogue states that Lichansky presented the plaster sculpture Horah, which she later (1946-47) recreated in stone (150x200x150 cm). Today the sculpture is installed in the Onim Youth Village, Kfar Saba. Neumann exhibited Reflections. This catalogue, too, contains neither images nor documentation of the work. The first director of Tel Aviv Museum – commissioned by Meir Dizengoff, the first mayor of Tel Aviv, to establish a museum of art in the first Hebrew City – was Dr. Karl Schwarz, previously director of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Schwarz collected works of art brought over by the German immigrants after the Nazi rise to power.

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Hulda to work on the monument, Neumann joined her. They lived with the founders’ group, sharing a tent. According to Shalev-Khalifa (2019), ”Members of the group testified to the intimate relationship between the two many years ago and noted that it was known to all, but never stated publicly,” at least not formally. In Batia Lichansky (Or in Epstein 1988: 166), Miriam Or notes that ”Annie Neumann was a close friend of Batia Lichansky from the day she immigrated to Israel in 1933 from Germany until her death,” briefly hinting at the nature of the relationship between two women artists who chose to stick together.

”Neumann’s Works Caress the Eyes of the Beholder” (Friedman 1949: 5) The exclusion of women artists from the canonical history of art in Israel makes it difficult to locate their works, even in the form of reproductions. Missing, incomplete, or incorrect documentation severely hampers research on the subject. Accordingly, although Neumann exhibited her work – mainly drawings, but also watercolors, pastels, and even a handful of oil paintings – from the moment she arrived in Palestine, in this article I rely mainly on the critics of the period, a handful of reproductions, and not a single original work. From the few sources available, it appears that Neumann drew her themes from the country’s landscapes, people, and lifestyles. She produced Reflections, Mother and Child, as well as the figures of girls and young women (Friendship; Two Sisters).

Figure 9.4: Anne Neumann, date and details unknown, Design and Visual Information Library, Beit Ariella, Tel Aviv; retrieved January 20, 2019

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

Her oeuvre spans watercolors of Arab Women, a Laundress, an Oriental Dancer, and a female Pioneer. There is scarce representation of boys and men (Jew with Citron, Sleeping Panhandler) and a distinct focus on female subjects of different ages: ”Mothers and girls – angelic figures reminiscent of Rilke’s fragile dreamy girls, the smile on their lips binding them together with a thread of secrecy,” as described by Dr. Lisetta Levi in Dvar Hashavu’a, the weekly supplement of the daily Davar (1949: 33).

Figure 9.5: Annie Neumann, Portrait of Henrietta Szold, 1940s-1950s, details and source unknown

One of the exhibitions in which Neumann participated was staged in early 1935 at the Jerusalem bookstore Diwan in Beit Mani on Zion Square. Next to the bookstore, Hamburg-born Albert (Abraham) Popper, ”the most colorful and creative of Jerusalem booksellers” (Shragai 2019), operated a gallery which presented exhibitions by the country’s top artists. Diwan was popular among the German-speaking community as well as among British government and military personnel. Sir Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, was a regular visitor. The store served as a safe haven for immigrants and a hangout for book and culture lovers, offering them ”a way to preserve their former world and live with their split identity” (ibid).

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Neumann’s exhibition in Diwan was reviewed by Davar critic Mordecai Narkiss (1935: 10) who noted her ”fine” pen drawings and their ”sincere naïveté” favorably. At the same time, he was, ”not impressed with the watercolors – only seven of which were on display,” adding that ”they light a match in the eye, which is quickly extinguished and fades away.” As for the chosen themes, ”the repertoire of motifs is worn out,” he wrote in reference to works depicting an Arab on a donkey or playing the flute. He did, however, find pleasure in a painting depicting a Mother and Child – one of the main motifs in Neumann’s visual universe. According to Graciela Trajtenberg (2008), art criticism is one component in the totality of practices comprising the power structure that has developed over the years in Israeli art. Art criticism, as formulated from the early 1920s to the 1970s, she argues, was characterized by a reduction in the value of women artists. While they were not entirely ignored by the critics, close examination of the reviews reveals a problematic picture, attesting to a gendered social order. The focus on the personalities and feminine traits of the artists and their work reflects, among others, gender discrimination, even in the positive reviews. For example, writing patronizingly about Neumann, legendary theater and art critic Haim Gamzu (1964) asserted that, ”Anni [sic] Neumann was not particularly attracted by Modernism. She preferred to rely on the Masters who have surmounted and survived the centuries.” And, on the occasion of her 1949 solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum, David Arie Friedman wrote that, ”The thread uniting all her works is the delicate, subtle perception of reality and the modest, near shy expression, which settles for the least possible, although this little holds a great deal” (1949: 5). He also observed that it was ”as if she were painting for herself, innocently, gravely, and modestly... therefore she is neither passionate nor stimulating but lovable and endearing.” Returning to Gamzu, in the aforementioned introduction to the album Annie Neumann, published in her memory by her partner Lichansky in 1964, he wrote: ”Annie Neumann was an artistic personality with unusual emotional sensibilities. Her delicate drawings expressed her vibrant heart and profound humanism.” Gideon Ofrat (2019) discusses the connection made by many writers at the time between the nature of Neumann’s work and her character, between the drawing materials and chosen technique (the pastels, watercolors, and pencil), and her ”soft, delicate, fluttering” personality. He notes Neumann’s achievements in Israel and the world, warning of the ”oblivion, evaporation, and disappearance in the infinite void” awaiting the artist whom he considers worthy. Nevertheless, even Ofrat’s positive critique carries the same fragrance of gender discrimination, pointed out by Trajtenberg, since he does not embed the story of the forgotten artist in the canonical historical narrative of Israeli art but rather singling her out as one who operated ”in a womanly manner and with the unaggressive power of femininity […], who gave up respect and power, did not insist on originality, and instead displayed humility, modesty, silence, and… love.” From the distance of time, Ofrat senses ”the pure, refined soul that she was,” which reminds him of ”someone I loved and still love” (ibid). If the place of women artists in Israeli art is determined not only by their talent, but also influenced by the appreciation of art critics, then the emphasis on those elements of female nature which the male critics fall back on to describe Neumann’s oeuvre,

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

then and now, may account for her marginalization and expose the structuring of the gendered art field.

Things I Learned from Ruth about Annie11 The need to find or create an alternative narrative to pit against the hegemonic one sent me chasing after a copy of The Book of Ruth – whose calligraphy, drawings, and illustrations were all created by Neumann – in the hope that I could learn a little more about the artist and the woman she was from her work. The volume was commissioned by Lion the Printer (Yehiel Max Lion), a publishing house that specialized in photograph-based publications (albums, calendars, etc.), and a Yekke cultural institution in its own right (Oren/Raz 2008). I looked for the book online and found a second-hand copy in Haifa. Before it arrived, while visiting my parents, I told them about my current project, writing about Lichansky and Neumann. My mother, in turn, recalled a trip to Hulda and a visit to Lichansky’s famous monument. She rose suddenly, left the room, and returned with a thin book, its brown cover embossed with gilt letters: Ruth. She handed me the book with a smile – it was Annie’s The Book of Ruth. Opening it, I found a dedication inside: ”For lovely Dalia, accept this modest gift for your Bat Mitzvah from the Horovitz family, Kibbutz Geva.” Almost seven decades passed from when the book was given to my mother as a gift from her kibbutz relatives until it came into my possession, making me the proud owner of two copies. Neumann created fifteen illustrations for the The Book of Ruth – line drawings, some airy, others dense. The drawing set begins with Ruth’s portrait: high cheekbones, heartshaped face, downcast gaze. ”A mode of sketching in which the ultra-thin lines are soulful and rife with movement, containing matter in its most condensed form, only what is necessary to revive and eliminate the white space,” wrote Bergman in the daily Davar after Neumann’s death (1955: 3). Ruth’s portrait is followed by a portrait of Naomi mourning her husband and sons. One hand covers her face while the other is bent slightly, as if holding her aching heart. Another drawing depicts Ruth clinging to Naomi, holding on to her so tightly that they appear almost as one body, while Orpah stands apart, observing them. Next, Naomi and Ruth arrive in Bethlehem. People greet them, whispering to one another about the new arrivals. Yet another drawing portrays Boaz, ”with his deep, secretive eyes” (ibid) – the same man who was recruited, and some will argue manipulated, to advance the goals of the two single women.12 The Book of Ruth stands out in comparison to other biblical texts. For the most part, it focuses on women without men, women who exist on the margins of a patriarchal society, writing their own story (Berlowitz 1994). It is the story of survival of independent women who think creatively and act in collaboration and agreement, one complementing the other. Their contrast and completion are manifested not only in their manner, 11 12

An allusion to the title of Ruth Preser's essay "Things I Learned from the Book of Ruth" (2017). "For in a society whose laws deny women all rights, the woman must circumvent and outsmart the law for her survival" (Berlowitz 1994).

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Figure 9.6: Anne Neumann, Portrait of Ruth, date and technique unknown, in The Book of Ruth (Tel Aviv: Lion the Printer, 1949)

but also in their personalities: Naomi is the ”bitter,” dark woman who speaks on behalf of her dead and represents the past, while Ruth is bright and optimistic, standing for the future. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979) discuss this polar female pattern as immanent to male creation. ”The madwoman in the attic” and ”the angel in the house” were the only two roles that men assigned women, and only between them could they act. Whether they chose one option or the other, the authors argue, women were doomed to give up ”themselves,” their personal wills and private desires. No complex relationship between women was possible, they maintain. But then we discover in Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own that ”Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature” (Woolf 2000 [1929]: 81), and are amazed to discover that a complex relationship between women is possible. Was there, in the Book of Ruth, an instance of women’s love? There may have been intimacy, or possibly the ”lesbian continuum” discussed by Adrienne Rich (2006 [1980]) – a term spanning all forms of closeness and the range of practices of intimacy, friendship, support, partnership, and love existing between women (Preser 2017). Maybe there

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

Figure 9.7: Anne Neumann, Portrait, ca. 1930s-1950s, etching. With the courtesy of Kedem – Auction House Ltd.

existed between the two women what contemporary research terms ”queer kinship” – a concept denoting a descriptive affinity to the reality and daily experience of many individuals – queer subjects – who maintain relationships that deviate from traditional conceptualization of kinship, yet ones that they and others perceive as such (Ziv 2020). Perhaps Annie regarded herself as Ruth the Moabite, as one who was forced to leave her homeland and wander to a harsh foreign land to find love and cling to it. Indeed, were not Annie and Batia to each other like Ruth and Naomi – two independent women in a man’s world, bringing about their own redemption through female partnership, creativity, and boundary-breaching so exceptional at that time? The story of Ruth and Naomi introduces several narratives: about exile, bereavement, female bonding that introduces a different kind of alliance, and a different kind of motherhood. Naomi reacquires her motherhood through the fertility of the other

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woman, and thus the drawing that concludes the Book of Ruth depicts Naomi holding the newborn in her arms. Neumann and Lichansky had no children of their own. According to Lichansky, her works were her offspring, and she published Neumann’s artist’s book after her death to ensure that her beloved partner’s work would also be preserved as a legacy. *** I try to turn misfortune into a blessing, often lying in a lounge, surrounded by books, the sky overhead, and many vegetables and flowers all around, and I feel this beauty day in day out. (Neumann in Bergman 1955: 3) The misfortune to which Neumann refers in her letter is her serious illness (probably cancer), which caused her immense suffering, and from which she never recovered. She passed away on July 3, 1955, in Tel Aviv at the age of 49. Philosopher Samuel Hugo Bergman, first Rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, eulogized her (ibid): Annie Neumann, who was buried on the 13th of Tammuz in Tel Aviv, was a great artist with a very delicate, pure soul. […] There was something essentially ethereal about her, something devoid of substance, something intangible in her childlike ways, in her innocence [...]. Neumann was not a feminist or lesbian artist, let alone queer, as we understand and perceive these notions today, if only because the former two were not part of the terminology of the social, political, artistic or scholarly discourse of those years, while the latter term had not yet been appropriated as a gay identity category. But she was not ethereal either. She was an actual flesh and blood woman who made art and love. Just as Ruth followed Naomi out of love, so Annie followed her love, Batia, until she could no longer. Neumann, the artist, left behind drawings that outline a path for us, sketching an important, conspicuously absent layer in the history of Israeli art.   * Thanks to Nirit Shalev-Khalifa, Ph.D., and Ruth Markus, Ph.D., for the conversations, insights, and assistance in locating data; to Edna Kokia and Ziva Koort of Tel Aviv Museum of Art Archive, to Miri Tsdaka of MUZA – Eretz Israel Museum, and to Zohar Monsonego of Beit Hashomer Archive for the great help in making the information available.

Bibliography Anarte, Enrique (2019): ”Ruth Roellig: The Woman who Gave Birth to Lesbian Berlin.” In: DW, April, 26. (https://www.dw.com/en/ruth-roellig-the-woman-who-gave-bir th-to-lesbian-berlin/a-48297418) Beachy, Robert (December 2010): ”The German Invention of Homosexuality.” In: The Journal of Modern History 82/4: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, pp. 801838.

Anne (Annie) Neumann: The New Woman

Ben Zvi, Tal (2007): ”Where does ’True Greatness’ Hide?.” In: Hamidrasha 10: Feminism and Israeli Art, pp. 71-75 [Hebrew]. Bergman, Samuel Hugo (1956), ”Introduction,” cat. Anne Neumann: Memorial Exhibition, The Tel Aviv Museum, n.p. Bergman, Samuel Hugo (1955): ”Anne Neumann: A Week of Her Passing.” In: Davar, July 11, p. 3 [Hebrew]. Berlowitz, Yaffa (1994): ”Taking Their Fate in Their Own Hands: Reading the Book of Ruth between Dominant Text and Hidden Text.” In: Maariv: Literature and Art, May 15 [Hebrew] (https://gendersite.org.il/2013/05/13/%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%95%D 7%A4-%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%94-%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%91%D7%99 %D7%A5-%D7%9C%D7%95%D7%A7%D7%97%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%92%D7%95%D7 %A8%D7%9C%D7%9F-%D7%91%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%94%D7%9F/) Brown, Taylor Whitten (2019): ”Why is Work by Female Artists Still Valued Less Than Work by Male Artists?” In: Artsy, March 8 (https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-edit orial-work-female-artists-valued-work-male-artists). Epstein, Ariella (ed.) (1988): Batia Lichansky, Tel Aviv: MOD Publishing House [Hebrew]. Friedman, David Arie (1949): ” Annie Neumann: On Her Exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum.” In: Davar, August 19, p. 5 [Hebrew]. Gamzu, Haim (1964): ”Introduction,” in: Annie Neumann, Tel Aviv: Hadar, n.p. [Hebrew]. Gilbert, M. Sandra/Gubar Susan (1979): The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP. Levi, Lisetta (1949): ”Anne Neumann’s Paintings (at the Tel Aviv Museum).” In: Davar: Dvar Hashavu’a, August 26, p. 33 [Hebrew]. Limor, Yehiel/Osnat Roth-Hacohen (2017): ”The Fifth Aliya and its Impact on the Development of the Advertising Industry.” Kesher 49, pp. 59-69 [Hebrew]. Lubin, Orly (1993): ”Women Reading Women.” In: Theory and Criticism 3, pp. 65-78 [Hebrew]. Markus, Ruth (2008): ”The Place of Women in Israeli Art History, 1920-1970,” in Ruth Markus (ed.), Women Artists in Israel, 1920-1970, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hamehuchad, pp. 11-22 [Hebrew] Narkiss, Mordecai (1935): ”Anne Neumann’s Exhibition.” In: Davar, February 1, p. 10 [Hebrew]. Nochlin, Linda (1971): ”Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?.” In Nochlin, Linda (1988), Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row, pp. 145-178. Ofrat, Gideon (2015): Berlin-Jerusalem: The Art of the German Aliya. Tel Aviv: Institute for Israeli Art at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yafo [Hebrew]. Ofrat, Gideon (2019): ”Forgotten Artists: Annie.” In: Gideon Ofrat’s Online Text Archive, February 8 [Hebrew] (https://gideonofrat.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/). Or, Miriam, introduction and texts, in Epstein, Ariella (ed.) (1988): Batia Lichansky, Tel Aviv: MOD Publishing House. Oren, Ruth and Guy Raz (2008): ”Zoltan Kluger: Chief Photographer, 1933-1958.” In: cat. Zoltan Kluger: Chief Photographer, 1933-1958. Tel Aviv and Jerusalem: Eretz Israel Museum and Yad Ben Zvi, pp. 7-41 [Hebrew].

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Preser, Ruth (2014): ”Things I Learned from the Book of Ruth.” In: Theory and Criticism 43, pp. 313-319 [Hebrew]. Preser, Ruth (2017): ”Things I Learned from the Book of Ruth: Diasporic Reading of Queer Conversations.” In: De/Constituting Wholes: Towards Partiality Without Parts, Manuele Gragnolati/Christoph F.E. Holzhey (eds.), Cultural Inquiry, 11. Vienna: Turia + Kant, pp. 47-65 (https://www.ici-berlin.org/oa/ci-11/preser_queer-co nversions.pdf). Rachamimov, Iris (1980): ”From the Editor.” In: Zmanim—A History Quarterly 131, special issue: Queer History, p. 3. Savran, Adi/Iris Rachamimov (2015): ”In the Folds of a Skirt: The Many Lives of Karl M. Baer.” In: Zmanim—A History Quarterly 131, special issue: Queer History, pp. 22-33 [Hebrew]. Shalev-Khalifa, Nirit (2001): ”The ’Labor and Defense’ Statue in Hulda.” In: Cathedra 102, December, pp. 97-122 [Hebrew]. Shalev-Khalifa, Nirit (2019): ”Thy Work to Me was Wonderful: Batia Lichansky and Her Work between the Personal, Feminine, and National.” Lecture in a conference on gender, The Association for Women’s Art and Gender Research in Israel, February 24-25 [Hebrew]. Shragai, Nadav (2019): ”A Little Bookshop.” In: Israel Hayom, February 29 [Hebrew] (htt ps://www.israelhayom.co.il/article/695839). Talphir, Gabriel (1971): ”Anne Neumann.” In: 100 Artists in Israel who Passed Away in the Years 1908-1970. Tel Aviv: Gazith Art Publishing, p. 61 [Hebrew]. Tammuz, Benjamin (ed.), Doreet LeVitte, and Gideon Ofrat (1980): The Story of Art in Israel: From the Days of Bezalel in 1906 to the Present. Tel Aviv: Massada, p. 78 [Hebrew] Trajtenberg, Graciela (2007): ”From Conspicuous to Covert: Women Artists in the Prism of Art Criticism.” In Markus, Ruth (ed.) (2007), Women Artists in Israel, 1920-1970, Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hamehuchad, pp. 23-45 [Hebrew]. Weitz, Eric D. (2018 [2007]): ”A Troubled Beginning.” In: Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, Weimar Centennial Edition, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, p. 11. Whisnant, Clayton J. (2016): Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 18801945. New York: Columbia UP, p. 14. Woolf, Virginia (1929): ”A Room of One’s Own.” In: Woolf, Virginia (2000): A Room of One’s Own and Other Essays. London: Folio Society. Ziv, Amalia (2020): ”Queer Kinship.” In: Mafte’akh 15, pp. 135-154 [Hebrew]. The Book of Ruth, calligraphy, drawings, and illustrations: Annie Neumann (Tel Aviv: Lion the Printer, 1949) [Hebrew]. Writer unknown, Gazith, 19: 9-12 [1961], p. 195 [Hebrew].

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?1 On Hugo/Hamid Marcus’s Writings during the First Three Decades of the 20th Century Benedikt Wolf

This article is concerned with the peculiar case of Hugo Marcus, a writer, philosopher, and activist in the First Homosexual Movement. Born in 1880 into a Jewish family, Marcus converted to Islam, changed his name to Hamid, and was eventually forced into emigration from Germany by the National Socialists. In Marcus’s biography and thought, references to contexts often marked as Oriental are crucial: from literary Orientalism to an Orientalizing view on Judaism to conversion to Islam. While Marcus’s involvement with Islam has recently sparked scholarly interest (Daub 2012: 30–33; Baer 2015; Baer 2017; Rubin 2019), I aim to complement the existing scholarship by presenting a reading of his early literary and semi-literary writings and comparing references to the Orient in these writings to those he would later formulate in the journal Moslemische Revue in the 1920s. Thus, I wish to shed light on the origins and evolution of Marcus’s posture on the Orient, and on the relation of his engagement with homosexuality and with Islam. Starting from an account of recent discussions about the role of Orientalism in 19th and 20th -century Judaism and in the First Homosexual Movement in the German-language sphere, I turn to Marcus’s early writings to demonstrate, firstly, that Marcus’s literary engagement with the Orient was a highly complicated one; and, secondly, that Marcus’s literary engagement with the Orient changed its argumentative aims and its models of identification dramatically during the first decades of the 20th century.

1.

Orientalism, Judaism, and the First Homosexual Movement in the German-Speaking Sphere

In her research on 19th -century German-Jewish scholars’ investment in Islam, Susannah Heschel explains that these scholars emphasized the supposedly rational character of

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I am very grateful to Dotan Brom, Ofri Ilany, Andreas Kraß, Moshe Sluhovsky, Robert Tobin, and Orit Yaal, who commented on various versions of this paper.

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Islam in contrast to the supposedly irrational character of Christianity: “European Jews were fascinated by Islam and praised its monotheism, rationalism, openness to science and philosophy, rejection of anthropomorphism, and adherence to a religious law based on ethics.” (2012: 91) During the interwar period, quite a number of Jews went one step further and converted to Islam for similar reasons. They “considered Islam a logical continuation of the Jewish tradition and extolled its rationality and modernity”, as Gerdien Jonker (2016: 8) summarizes his findings on Jewish converts to Islam. Heschel calls this kind of reference to a ‘rational’ Islam “a different kind of ‘Orientalism’, one that imagined an Enlightened Islam and that used it as a vehicle to insist on a ‘purified’, rational Judaism” (2012: 91). This is a kind of ‘Orientalism’, one might add, quite different from Edward Said’s concept of the term. The Jewish scholars and converts did not reach out for a ‘sensual’ (sinnlich) and irrational ‘Other’ destined to be domesticized by Westerners. Rather, their investment in Islam moves within the complex relations of identity and understanding that Andrea Polaschegg (2005) has called a ‘different Orientalism’. Orientalism is to be seen, as the editors of a recent essay collection on the relationship of Orientalism, Judaism, and antisemitism put it, “as a rather fluid concept which underwent many changes in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (Brunotte/Mohn/Späti 2017: 7). Its characteristic oscillation between negative stereotypes of the Oriental Other and identification with a positively-valued Orient that displays traces of lost dimensions of one’s own position (ibid) should make us cautious of taking it only as a special brand of racism. It encompasses not only strategies of defining a western superior subject against the inferior Oriental, but also strategies of self-Orientalization that are aimed at revaluing one’s position by means of identifying with a superior Orient.2 A similar move to that of the 19th -century Jewish scholars, as analyzed by Heschel, and that of the interwar converts, as discussed by Jonker – a shift away from Western and Central European culture towards the Orient – was crucial for the development of male homosexual identity in Germany. The Orient in the German context in the early 19th century, the formative years of German Orientalism, was thought of as extending “from South-Eastern Europe over the whole of the Asian continent (apart from Russia) far unto Southern Africa” (Polaschegg 2005: 276).3 This broadening of the geographical scope of the concept of Orient is important in respect to the formation of male homosexual identity in Germany, because for most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, Italy, where no sodomy legislation was in force, was the desired country for bourgeois homosexual men who sought safe places to pursue sex with partners of their own sex. While the study of Jewish Orientalism has managed to portray a differentiated picture of its object as a complex and at times contradictory phenomenon, the study of homosexual Orientalism in the German language sphere has, in parts, held on to a rather schematic view. Thus, the complexity of historical homosexual reference to the

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In Said’s classical account, a “positional superiority” of the Westerner is seen as crucial to Orientalism (1979: 7, original emphasis). “[V]om süd-östlichen Europa über den gesamten asiatischen Kontinent (abzüglich Rußlands) bis weit hinein ins südliche Afrika“. Unless stated otherwise, all translations from the German are mine – B.W.

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Orient is sometimes obscured by an epistemological framework that is informed more by the researcher’s political investments than by a thorough examination of the historical materials themselves. It is useful to have a brief look at one recent example of such scholarship in order to become cautious of potential pitfalls in the study of this article’s object. The First Homosexual Movement’s references to the Orient are addressed in a recent book by Zülfukar Çetin and Heinz-Jürgen Voß (2016). A critique of a few misleading conclusions this book makes in its discussion of Magnus Hirschfeld’s account of Orientalized Italy can serve to sharpen the perspective of this article’s argument. Çetin and Voß argue that the development of male homosexual identity in the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century was, as such, an Orientalist, and, by extension, racist project. On the basis of Said’s concept of Orientalism, and in apparent ignorance of the more complex debates that have evolved since Said in respect to German Orientalism (Polaschegg 2005; Marchand 2009), German-Jewish Orientalism (Wittler 2013; Wittler 2015), and the connection of Orientalism and homosexuality (Boone 2014), the two authors trace down an Orientalist tendency in Hirschfeld’s alleged differentiation between a ‘genuine’ homosexual orientation and (occasional) homosexual behavior: Hirschfeld, in this passage [from The Homosexuality of Men and Women, 1914 – B.W.], is concerned with “genuine” homosexuality, that is, homosexuality which manifests itself not only in male-male sexual intercourse, but gestures apparently toward something interior and infallible. At the same time, he recognizes this [‘genuine’ homosexuality – B.W.] in the [German – B.W.] travelers – and distinguishes it from the [Italian – B.W.] locals’ sexuality, which he labels as “Oriental” and for which he provides certain specifications. (Çetin/Voß 2016: 11)4 The comparison of ‘genuine’ and ‘occasional’ homosexuality was common in the sexology of the time, and was, in some instances, like the one Çetin and Voss are commenting on here, adopted by Hirschfeld. But it does not play a conceptual role in his theory of sexual intermediates as it did, for example, in mainstream sexology like that of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediates works toward a universalization of the minoritarian, to borrow Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s (2005) terms. In Hirschfeld’s theory, the intermediate positions between ‘absolute masculinity’ and ‘absolute femininity’ are multiplied in such a way that the minoritarian specification becomes universal. No doubt, Hirschfeld, in the passage commented by Çetin and Voß, contrasts the travelers’ homosexuality with the local Italians’ homosexual acts. However, the alleged clear-cut ascription of ‘genuine’ homosexuality to the German tourists and of ‘occasional’ homosexuality to the local Italians is not Hirschfeld’s but Çetin’s and Voß’s. This conclusion is an artifact of their – purposeful, it appears – mutilation of a quote. “And

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“Hirschfeld geht es hier um eine ‘echte’ Homosexualität, eine die sich nicht nur im mannmännlichen sexuellen Verkehr zeige, sondern die offenbar auf etwas Inneres und Untrügliches verweist. Gleichzeitig sieht er sie gerade bei den Reisenden – und grenzt sie gegen die Sexualität der Einheimischen ab, die er als ‘orientalisch’ markiert und mit bestimmten Anforderungen belegt.”

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with regard to homosexual intercourse,” Hirschfeld writes, “the only resource most of them [the homosexual strangers – B.W.] have are the natives, who – without themselves being ‘real’ [homosexuals – B.W.] – place themselves at their disposal for the sake of material gain.” (2000: 649)5 In Çetin’s and Voß’s quote this sentence is followed by “[…]” (2016: 10). The sentence left out by the authors goes as follows: Foreigners many times never, ever meet real homosexual Italian men who, out of a true inclination, are looking for and finding friends who feel the same way. The same goes also for Italian women who have the same feelings. There is absolutely no doubt that they exist in significant numbers in every virile and feminine shade. (Hirschfeld 2000: 649)6 Thus, Hirschfeld clearly does not ascribe ‘occasional’ homosexuality to Italians and ‘real’ homosexuality to Germans. Apart from this manipulation, Çetin’s and Voß’s interpretation takes into account neither the historical context of the German homosexuals’ travels to Italy, nor the textual context of the passage. Hirschfeld analyzes an encounter which appears on the surface as an intercultural one, but is, first and foremost, an encounter of members of different classes. German homosexual men, travelling to Italy in order to seek fulfillment of their sexual desires, were bourgeois men. These bourgeois homosexuals travelled to Italy as homosexuals and encountered a male population of urban and rural lower classes in need of any money they could get from the tourists. Hirschfeld is, in the quoted passage, not talking about German homosexual identity vs. Italian homosexual acts. He is talking about bourgeois homosexual intermediates vs. proletarian sex workers. The passage commented upon by Çetin and Voss perfectly fits within the discourse of the contemporary literature about bourgeois homosexuals vs. proletarian sex workers in the German cities (Prickett 2005; Lücke 2006; Kraß & Wolf 2017: 192-194). Hirschfeld analyses what is clearly a social constellation, not a cultural or ethnic one. Çetin and Voss are right in establishing that Hirschfeld, as his text goes on, marks the specificities of sexual conduct in South Italy as “Oriental”.7 At the same time they neglect the fact that he marks it not only as Oriental, but also as “ancient” (antik) in the sense of Greek and Roman antiquity.8 This double coding of South Italian homosexuality is a strong argument for reading the Oriental elements in the German development

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“[M]eist ist er [der homosexuelle Fremde] in seinem homosexuellen Verkehr auch nur auf Eingeborene angewiesen, die sich ihm – ohne selbst ‘echt’ zu sein – äußerer Vorteile halber zur Verfügung stellen.” (Hirschfeld 1914: 571) “Den wirklich homosexuellen Italiener, der aus wirklicher Neigung gleichfühlende Freunde sucht und findet – ebenso auch die gleichfühlende Italienerin – lernen die Fremden vielfach überhaupt nicht kennen. Daß sie in beträchtlicher Anzahl in allen virilen und femininen Abstufungen existieren, ist ganz zweifellos.” (Ibid) Michael A. Lombardi-Nash translates “orientalisches […] Gepräge” (ibid) as “the stamp of the East” (Hirschfeld 2000: 650). “In this respect, southern Italy in particular has the stamp of the East, presumably one that is based even on ancient tradition” (Hirschfeld 2000: 649–650). “Vor allem Süditalien trägt in dieser Hinsicht schon ein stark orientalisches, vermutlich sich bereits auf antike Traditionen gründendes Gepräge” (Hirschfeld 1914: 571).

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of the concept of male homosexuality as Orientalist not so much in Said’s rendering of the term, but rather in Polaschegg’s sense: as a complex interplay of the two axes of identity and understanding. In the South Italian men who participate in sex with other men, Hirschfeld does not (exclusively) see the ‘Other’ (to be domesticized), but rather a forgotten legacy to be revitalized. It is not the primary aim of my critique of Çetin’s and Voß’s account of Hirschfeld to show the poor quality of their book. Rather, I want to point to the fact that something gets lost when one tries to press historical texts into schematic views that are obviously not so much interested in trying to produce adequate readings as in affirming the researcher’s political perspectives. Often, as in this case, one even has to obscure or omit sections of the text in order to make things fit. From the critique of Çetin’s and Voß’s manipulative citation practice and misleading conclusions follows the necessity of engaging in much more careful contextualization of texts, and of acknowledging the possibility of a flexible employment of Orientalism in early 20th -century discourse. Robert Tobin’s (2015) discussion of 19th - and early 20th -century models of male homosexuality offers a useful basis for the analysis of such constellations. Tobin argues that a competition between a “Jewish model” and a “Greek model” was crucial in the development of homosexual identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Germany. The “Greek model” is a discursive pattern that refers to classical antiquity. It had deep roots in late 18th -century classicism and the cult of friendship around 1800 and developed, adopting Nietzschean ideas, into what scholars have called the ‘masculist’ wing of the German First Homosexual Movement. This faction gathered around Adolf Brand’s journal Der Eigene (“The Special One”, 1896–1932) and his Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Special). This fraction’s ideology was adopted and modified by Hans Blüher, a founding member of the youth movement, who developed a theory of homoerotic Männerbund or male association (Tobin 2015: 53–82). From the middle of the 19th century, the Greek model faced competition from the “Jewish model”, in which the trope of gender inversion played a major role. Tobin argues that since around 1850, homosexuals made use of “the concept of Jewishness” in order to claim the status of a minority, one parallel to the one that German Jews seemed to have achieved in the course of the ‘Jewish emancipation’ since the late Enlightenment. The homosexuals who favoured the Jewish model referred to this religious-ethnic minority as a model because it was the exemplary minority in the German-speaking context (ibid: 83–85). This competition of the Greek and the Jewish model of homosexuality, together with the paradigm of the forgotten legacy, seems to be crucial in the employment of Orientalist elements and strategies in the First Homosexual Movement in Germany. Hugo/Hamid Marcus’s engagement with Orientalism is a fascinating example of the complexity and flexibility of references to the Orient in the context of Jewish homosexual subjectivity in the early 20th century.

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2.

From Hugo to Hamid to Hugo Israel Marcus (and to Hans Alienus)

Hugo Marcus was born in 1880 in Posen (West Prussia, then part of the German Empire, today Poland) as a child of Jewish parents.9 He came to Berlin in 1898, where he completed his studies with a dissertation in philosophy in 1906. Apart from his philosophical books (Marcus 1903; Marcus 1907), Marcus published two literary texts, Das Frühlingsglück (“The Joy of Spring”, 1900) and Das Tor dröhnt zu (“The Gate is Shut”, 1915), as well as his Meditationen (“Meditations”, 1904), which can be described as exploring modes of writing in the contact zone between literature and philosophy. His literary engagement with homoeroticism was paired with homosexual rights activism. In 1900 he became a member of Hirschfeld’s Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-humanitarian Committee, WhK), founded only three years earlier, and became friends with Hirschfeld and Kurt Hiller. The latter’s pacifist Ziel (“The Goal”) yearbooks (1915–1924) included articles he had contributed. After serving as a paramedic in World War I, Marcus came into contact with Muslim circles, which evolved in Berlin after the end of the war. Marcus very soon became a central figure in the Lahore-Ahmadiyya community, as, in 1923, he was appointed the editor of all of their German-language publications, including the Moslemische Revue and the Ahmadiyya’s German translation of the Koran. Although he converted to Islam in 1925, he remained a member of the Jewish community until 1936, a construction that was possible in Ahmadiyya Islam. In the years following the Nazis’ rise to power, the climate deteriorated for those the Nazis persecuted as Jews not only in society in general, but also in the two Muslim communities in Berlin, the Sunnite and the Ahmadiyya. Marcus was incarcerated in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen for ten days in November 1938 and was released only on the condition that he leave the country. In 1939, Hugo Marcus, who had changed his name to Hamid Marcus,10 became violently re-Judaized when the Nazi authorities confiscated his German passport and issued a new identity document with the name “Hugo Israel Marcus”. Marcus managed to flee to Switzerland in the same year. During his years in Swiss exile, he continued to publish philosophical treatises (Marcus 1952; Marcus 1960); he seems never to have lost contact with the homosexual movement or what was left of it after its destruction (Baer 2017: 194), including contributing stories to the Swiss magazine Der Kreis/Le Cercle/The Circle in the late 1940s and 1950s under the pseudonym of Hans Alienus. He died in 1966 in Basel. What is striking in Marcus’s biography is his embrace of a number of the different intellectual tendencies flourishing in fin de siècle Berlin. Adrian Daub characterizes his intellectual path as a “vertiginous […] development” (2012: 30). Starting with the influence of his teacher Georg Simmel, Marcus not only engaged with Hirschfeld’s WhK and Hiller’s pacifist activities, but also cultivated relationships with the circle around

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My account of Marcus’s biography is based on the information in Backhausen 2008: 110–119; Hergemöller 2010; Baer 2015; Baer 2017; Rubin 2019. Unfortunately, I was not able to consult Baer’s (2020) new biography of Hugo Marcus before the completion of this article. In the Moslemische Revue, he first appears as Hamid Marcus in the issue of April 1929 (Marcus 1929b). During his years in Switzerland, Marcus uses his given name Hugo again for at least two publications (Marcus 1952; Marcus 1960).

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Stefan George, whom Daub sees as a “central guiding light” in Marcus’s development (ibid). Marc David Baer has placed Marcus’s turn to Islam in the context of his concept of homosexuality. Ahmadiyya Islam presented itself to Marcus, Baer writes, “as a universal brotherhood that united men of all nations and races, and that […] promotes homosocial bonds” (2015: 155). In light of such an interpretation, Marcus’s conversion to Islam almost seems like a way for a Jewish man to construct an equivalent to Blüher’s (antisemitic) Männerbund conception of homosexuality, a biographical route that did not lead to suicide, as in the case of Benedict Friedlaender (Ilany 2017: 131-133). While Baer’s interpretation is for the most part justified, he seems to neglect a turn in Marcus’s understanding of gender and sexuality in the 1920s. An analysis of Marcus’s literary and essayistic employment of references to the Orient points to an ambivalence that ultimately leads to the formulation of a heteronormative and patriarchal position. Marcus’s path in the first third of the century can be portrayed as a path from writing in ways that are ruled by the epistemology of the closet (Sedgwick 2005), to more overt ways of speaking about male-male affection, to the promotion of heteronormativity, orchestrated by changing strategies of a self-positioning toward the Orient.

2.1

Intertwined Epistemologies: Das Frühlingsglück (1900)

Marcus’s first publication, the short novel Das Frühlingsglück (1900),11 narrates two sets of relationships, with the same male protagonist Guido Erhard at their centre. Guido, a young student, secretly loves Adeline, and she eventually loves him back. The second relationship is between Guido and his fellow student Ernst Rüdiger, with whom he develops a passionate friendship. The dedication of the novel “to all the young” (Marcus 1900: n.p.)12 positions the novel in proximity to the youth movement. It would be relatively easy to ‘detect’ homoerotic semantics in this novel, using Heinrich Detering’s (2002) method of ‘decoding’ camouflaged subtexts by means of reference to non-literary documents that prove the author’s homosexuality. Such an approach has been criticized by Andreas Kraß (2008), who argues both that it does not take into account the aesthetic character of a literary text, and that it perpetuates on the level of analysis what Sedgwick calls an epistemology of the closet (2005: 29–31). Instead of reading Guido’s and Adeline’s relationship as a camouflage of a homosexual relationship, I rather want to develop my argument by taking the following three steps. First, I will point to an autofictional hint (1); then discuss notions of otherness and stigma in the stylization of the main character (2); and finally show how the differentiation of the models of friendship and love is undermined by their inversion (3). 1. The autofictional13 hint concerns the apparent similarity between the author’s and the protagonist’s names: Hugo Marcus – Guido Erhard. The number of syllables as well as the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables is the same in both given and

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The novel is not easily accessible. I am using a digital copy made from the hard copy in Marcus’s estate, which is held by Zurich Central Library. I am grateful to Zurich Central Library for providing me with the copy. “Allen, die jung sind, / gewidmet.” I am using the term “autofiction” in the sense defined by Zipfel 2009.

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last names; both given names end in an -o, and both last names are common given names. In other words, the author of the fictional text, who initiates a fictional pact with the readers by introducing a protagonist whose name is different from his own (and by calling his text a “story”/“Geschichte” in the subtitle), at the same time subverts this fictional pact by alluding to the possibility that the difference between the author’s and the protagonist’s names might not in fact be that fundamental, and thus offers an autobiographical pact ‘under the counter’, too.14 At one point towards the end of the novel, the narrator puts the protagonist in a certain discursive position: [H]e hardly was able to make up his mind to speak about himself, and he hated the “long-winded confessions of self-pitying and, what is more, misunderstood souls”, although he, if unconsciously, wanted nothing more than to be allowed to talk things over, in his inner misery, with someone in whom he would find full understanding, and although this wish amounted to part of the great yearning that had filled his whole life since very early. (Marcus 1900: 115)15 This position, even if the mere content of Guido’s “inner misery” is not clear at all, is the position of the closet. The secret at the core of the closeted position is not clarified, but Guido’s interlocutor, Adeline, “must not know it” (ibid).16 Against the backdrop of this autofictional play and of Guido’s positioning in an unspecified closet, his Catholicism, which is mentioned already on the second page of the novel (ibid: 2), can be read as a masquerade of the Jewish stigma of an author “who never explicitly acknowledged his Jewishness or addressed it in public”, as Abraham Rubin states (2019: 599–600). But this masquerade should not be understood in Detering’s sense of a camouflage that ought to be decoded by scholarly analysis, but rather as a conscious autofictional play. The indication that Catholicism might serve as a masquerade for Judaism within the framework of an autofiction should keep readers alert to the possibility that there might be more instances of masquerade in the text. And in fact, at some point in the novel Guido remarks: “I’m very much in favour of mummery” (Marcus 1900: 74).17 2. Having established the autofictional aspect of Das Frühlingsglück, I want to move to pointing out notions of otherness and stigma in the stylization of the main character. After an encounter between Guido and Adeline on a frozen lake, where the young people of the town go ice-skating, the two sit on a bank with others, who beg Adeline to tell a story. She begins to tell a tale that is, at the same time, an intertextual reference to one of the most prominent authors of German-Jewish literature, namely Heinrich Heine. “In the beautiful land of Arabia”, Adeline begins, 14 15

16 17

For the autobiographical and the fictional pact cf. Lejeune 1989. “[E]r entschloß sich nur sehr schwer von sich selbst zu sprechen, und haßte die ‘langatmigen Bekenntnisse selbstmitleidiger und noch dazu unverstandener Seelen’, obwohl er doch, wenn auch unbewußt, nichts sehnlicher wünschte, als sich in innerer Not mit jemandem aussprechen zu können, bei dem er volles Verständnis fände, und dieser Wunsch einen Teil der großen Sehnsucht ausmachte, die sein ganzes Leben von früh auf erfüllte.” “[W]enn sie es auch nicht wissen durfte”. “Ich bin sehr für den Mummenschanz”.

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

where the fountains spring and the almond trees blossom, and the race of the Asra died, there was once a young royal child that loved the fountains and the almond trees, but she did not love the Asra, for they were poor, weak, languishing slaves (ibid: 22).18 Adeline’s tale goes on to narrate two encounters, one between the princess and an Asra boy, whom she “felt sorry about”, but then “forgot” (ibid: 23),19 and one between the princess and a young hunter, to whose kisses she surrenders, because he “was not of the tribe of the Asra” (ibid).20 With the reference to the obscure, pariah-like tribe of the Asra, the tale clearly refers to Heine’s poem Der Asra from his 1851 collection Romanzero.21 Heine’s source for the Asra story is Stendhal’s 1822 book De l’Amour, which, for its part, presents an excerpt from “an Arabic collection entitled: The Divan of Love […] [c]ompiled by Ebn-Abi-Hadglat”, a manuscript held by the Bibliothèque du Roi (Stendhal 1920: 217).22 In Heine’s poem, the Sultan’s daughter and an Asra slave see each other every day. One day, she asks him for his name and origin, and he answers: My name is Mahomet, I came from Yemmen, And my race is of those Asras, Who, whene’er they love, must perish (1866: 408).23 That Heine’s poem is present as a pretext in Marcus’s novel is emphasized again when Guido, towards the end of the novel, tells Adeline the parable of the butterfly and the flame (replaced by a burning cigarette), where the butterfly, like Heine’s Asra, “die[s] the beautiful death of love” (Marcus 1900: 99).24 The allusion to Heine is an interesting instance of Marcus’s early employment of Orientalism. Heine’s narrative is altered into a version in which the forbidden love of the Asra boy and the princess is presented as paralleled by a legitimate love between equals in rank. Furthermore, the perspective is altered from Heine’s external focalization to an internal focalization in Marcus’s novel. The narrator of the tale, Adeline, informs her audience about the princess’s but not her lover’s feelings. Thus, the narrative is modified in the direction of a typical fin de siècle story about a cruel femme fatale and

18

19 20 21 22 23 24

“In dem schönen Lande Arabien, wo die Brunnen springen und die Mandeln blühen, und das Geschlecht der Asra starb, da war einst ein junges Königskind, das liebte die Brunnen und die Mandelbäume, aber die Asra liebte es nicht, denn das waren arme, schwache, schmachtende Sklaven”. “[Z]war that der Knabe ihr leid, aber er war ja vom Stamm der Asra und ein schwacher, schmachtender Sklave; und sie vergaß sein.” “[D]er war nicht vom Stamme der Asra.” The poem was first published in 1846 in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser (Alberto Destro in Heine 1973–97, vol. 3/1: 646). For this source and other intertextual connections cf. (Goddack 1992). “[I]ch heiße / Mohamet, ich bin aus Yemmen, / Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra, / Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.” (Heine 1973-97, vol. 3/1: 42) “[Er] stirbt den schönen Tod der Liebe.” Perhaps another allusion to Heine’s poem is the formulation that “the girl blushed and the boy went pale” (“daß das Mädchen errötete und der Knabe erbleichte”, Marcus 1900: 100), cf. “Daily grew he pale and paler.” (Heine 1866: 406; “Täglich ward er bleich und bleicher”, Heine 1973-97, vol. 3/1: 42).

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her male counterpart, who is marked by a certain stigma – think of Thomas Mann’s early stories, such as Little Herr Friedemann (1896) or Little Lizzy (1900) (cf. Elsaghe 2007). In the case of the Asra boy, this stigma is social (“slave[s]” in Marcus and Heine) and ethnic (“Geschlecht” [family/race] in Marcus, “Stamm” [tribe] in Heine). Against the backdrop of Marcus’s autofictional play and the reference to Heine, this stigma is comparable to the stigma of the Jew in the German Empire. The Oriental world of the tale is depicted as a world of conventional inequalities and, furthermore, as a society of slaveholders. The narrator’s German present is criticized implicitly by way of comparing it to an Oriental world, that is depicted as an overcome past. But at the same time, the tale is a story within a story, and it is, at the end, ironised. Adeline’s last sentence goes: “You, young people, remember the lesson the tale teaches, […] and now let us start off, or else we shall altogether catch the infamous romantic cold [Schnupfen].” (Marcus 1900: 24)25 Obviously, Adeline, as young as her audience, is not in the position of teaching her peers lessons; furthermore, the lesson itself is not clear at all; and lastly, the tale in its entirety is ironised by the joke about the romantic cold – one more allusion to a poem by Heine. In Heine’s 1820 sonnet The Night Watch on the Drachenfels, the speaker tells of a night that he spent with a group of German youths of nationalist persuasion in a castle, singing nationalist songs and drinking to Germany’s “health […] from Rhine wine beakers”. The position of Adeline’s tale is taken, in Heine’s pretext, by the youths’ romantic fantasies about “[t]he castle-spirit”, “[d]ark forms of armed knights”, and “women’s misty shapes”. As in Adeline’s allusion, the romantic fantasies result in the speaker catching a cold: Such was the night, my friend, that I did pass On the high Drachenfels, – but I, alas, A wretched cold [Schnupfen] and cough took home with me! (Heine 1866: 20)26 While the structure – the romantic tale combined with an ironic punch line – is equivalent in Heine’s poem and Adeline’s tale, the romantic fantasies preceding the ironical disillusionment bear differing ideological connotations. Whereas the pretext mocks German nationalist fantasies, Adeline ironises Orientalist fantasies – ironically including Heine’s own Orientalist Asra poem. Marcus’s text uses Orientalist patterns at the same time that it distances itself from them in a most sophisticated manner. With the technique of employing Orientalism in an ironised intradiegetic story, Orientalism itself is exposed as a technique of mystifying modern occidental inequalities. The reference to Heine, which has remained implicit until this passage of the novel, finally becomes explicit in a conversation between Guido and Adeline, during the course of which Adeline remembers: [B]ut think, I was for some time seriously contemplating the idea of converting to Judaism, at that time when I read Heine’s Hebrew poetries, and how passionately the unfortunate Jewish people and above all poor Yehuda Halevi longs for his beautiful, 25 26

“Ihr jungen Leute, merkt Euch die Lehr’ von der Fabel, […] und nun laßt uns aufbrechen, sonst holen wir uns noch allesamt den berühmten romantischen Schnupfen.” “Sieh’ nun, mein Freund, so eine Nacht durchwacht’ ich / Auf hohem Drachenfels, doch leider bracht’ ich / Den Schnupfen und den Husten mit nach Hause.” (Heine 1973-97, vol. 1/1: 442)

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

lost fatherland, which he loves like a distant beloved and where he eventually dies. (Marcus 1900: 110)27 Adeline traces her idea of conversion to Judaism back to the influence of a certain reading experience of hers, namely Heine’s Hebrew Melodies, the third book of his Romanzero. She especially emphasizes the middle piece of its three long poems, Jehuda ben Halevy, about the most important medieval Sephardic poet, his longing for Jerusalem, and his final arrival there, where he is murdered by a Saracen knight. Again, the topos of the Liebestod, here displaced from erotic to spiritual love, is clothed in an Oriental story. And again, it is the Orient where love becomes tragic, because of unequal or violent societal structures.28 The narrator of the story, Adeline, is the same as that of the Asra story, but this time, the Orientalism is even more distanced from the novel’s main narrative and its narrator: The intradiegetic narrator Adeline summarizes the plot of Heine’s poem. In order to adapt the motif of Liebestod for the purpose of talking about constellations of forbidden love in a context associated with Jewishness, and, as we will see shortly, homosexuality, the motif, which had been given a very German form by Richard Wagner in his Tristan and Isolde (1865), is Orientalized – and at the same time this Orientalization is exposed as the result of a literary practice. 3. Orientalism is functional in the construction of an ambivalent notion of impossible love in Marcus’s Das Frühlingsglück. The homosexual component in this constellation of forbidden love becomes clear by an analysis of the novel’s parallelization of heterosocial and homosocial relationships. The protagonist’s two relationships, the heterosocial one with Adeline and the homosocial one with Ernst, are strictly paralleled throughout the novel. Following heteronormative patterns of classifying relationships, the heterosocial relationship is called “love” (Liebe), whereas the homosocial relationship is referred to as “friendship” (Freundschaft, e.g. Marcus 1900: 27–28). In his study on male friendship, Kraß has called attention to the interdependence and mutual preclusion of the two discursive formations of (heterosocial) love and (homosocial) friendship. For the straight mind, neither friendship – understood as characterized by equality, mutual emotional cathexis, and as ruled by the principle of identity – is imaginable in a heterosocial version, nor is love – understood as characterized by inequality and difference – imaginable in a homosocial version (Kraß 2016: 17–48). This pattern is, in Marcus’s novel, installed and reaffirmed throughout, but it is also subverted. One mechanism of such subversion is the narration of inhibitions in Guido’s heterosocial desire. He seems very ambivalent about the classification of his feelings for Adeline: “[H]e himself did not at all call his affection ‘love’” (Marcus 1900: 25),29 but he utters, in an inner monologue only two pages later: “But I love you” (ibid: 27).30 Guido is much more interested in his desire itself than in its object: “I do not want anything, 27

28 29 30

“[A]ber denken Sie, ich trug mich eine Zeit lang ganz im Ernst mit dem Gedanken, zum Judentum überzutreten, damals als ich Heines hebräische Poesien las, und wie heiß sich das unglückliche Judenvolk und vor allem der arme Jehuda Halevi nach seinem schönen, verlorenen Vaterlande zurücksehnt, das er wie eine ferne Geliebte liebt und in dem er schließlich stirbt.” For Heine’s complex reference to the Orient in this poem cf. Wittler 2010. “[E]r nannte seine Neigung selbst garnicht Liebe”. “Aber ich liebe Dich”.

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anything at all, I am proud and content with my own love, which brings me a lot of joy and bitter grief” (ibid).31 Even when they finally become close, and Guido feels that Adeline would consent to be kissed, he feels that “it must not be” (ibid: 101).32 And when they finally kiss, it is somehow clear to both of them that they “have to part” (ibid: 113),33 the obscure reason for this being “that they wanted to dedicate their strength to great things” and that “they did not have the time to build a nest” (ibid).34 It seems almost a logical outcome of the constant inhibition of their heteroeroticism that the relationship is in many instances referred to with formulations typical for homosocial relationships. After an encounter between Guido and Adeline, they are, for example, called “two comrades who were young and liked each other” (ibid: 81).35 Guido’s friendship with Ernst, whom he knows from school, is, in contrast, constantly in danger of transgressing the conventional boundaries of friendship. After their first attempt at becoming closer during their schooldays, they immediately feel the need to separate from each other, “for they felt ashamed before each other and naked and unprotected” (ibid: 35).36 This encounter is repeated between the adult students during their time at university. After they have met again, Ernst feels the need to ironise the conversation they just had: “Today, we were once again quite sentimental, weren’t we?” (Ibid: 66).37 Whereas heterosocial love is constantly inhibited, Guido uses behavioral patterns of heterosocial love when referring to his male friend: “Guido carried in his wallet Ernst Rüdiger’s picture.” When Adeline notices this, she even suspects: “What do you have there; surely it is a beautiful lady’s picture, show it to me, please!” (Ibid: 104)38 The inversion of heterosocial love and homosocial friendship culminates in a homosocial bathing scene with Guido and Erhard. This constellation of Guido and a second person in a sporting activity is a clear parallel to Guido’s and Adeline’s ice-skating on the frozen lake. Whereas the ice-skating with Adeline took place during a sudden return of wintry weather, Guido and Ernst go bathing in a river during the “hot days” (ibid: 106).39 They swim together, “which they really enjoyed” (ibid: 107),40 and when they get “boisterous”, they “wrestled with each other” (ibid).41 Their homosocial intimacy is perfect, until a girl passes by: “Now Guido noticed that Ernst suddenly shuddered, and at the same time he said to Guido: ‘Let’s go, it is becoming cold!’” (Ibid: 108).42 Guido

31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

“Ich will nichts, garnichts, ich bin stolz und begnüge mich mit meiner eigenen Liebe, die mir viel Freude und bittere Trauer bringt.” “[D]as durfte nicht sein”. “[W]ir müssen auseinander”. “[D]aß sie ihre Kräfte großen Dingen widmen wollten, da hatten sie keine Zeit ein Nest zu baun”. “[Z]wei gute[] Kameraden, die jung waren, und einander lieb hatten”. “[D]enn sie schämten sich vor einander und fühlten sich nackt und ohne Schutz.” “Heute waren wir einmal wieder recht sentimental, nicht wahr?” “Guido trug in seiner Brieftasche das Bild Ernst Rüdigers bei sich. […] / ‘Was haben Sie da; sicher das Bild einer schönen Dame, zeigen Sie bitte!’” “Als die heißen Tage kamen”. “[D]ann schwammen sie zusammen, […] daß es eine Lust war”. “[P]lötzlich packte sie der Übermut toll, da rangen sie mit einander”. “Da gewahrte Guido, daß Ernst plötzlich zusammenschauerte, und gleichzeitig sagte er kurz zu Guido: ‘Komm hinauf, es wird kalt!’”

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

suspects that the girl is the one Ernst loves. This suspicion is answered by Guido’s affect of an “intense anger at ‘the women’” (ibid).43 Homosocial friendship in Marcus’s novel is ruled by the taboo against homosexuality, but tends to transgress its conventional constraints. Heterosocial love, in contrast, seems to be inhibited by rather weak reasons, originating in the protagonist’s psyche. One way of reading this inhibition is to use the allusion to Heine’s Asra as a tool for reconstructing a social barrier between Guido and Adeline that has been excluded from the explicit discourse of the novel. Like the Asra slave, who will never be allowed to love the sultan’s daughter, the Jewish Hugo Marcus’s Catholic alter ego Guido Erhard will never be allowed to love the Catholic Adeline. Between the two Catholic characters, the allusion to Heine’s Asra does not make sense if one does not take the autofictional play into consideration. Taking into account the parallelization of heterosocial love and homosocial friendship, the Asra’s stigma that results in an impossible love might be read, on another level, as the stigma of homosexuality that results in the inhibition of homosexual love and its reduction to passionate friendship. Thus, the double stigma of the Jewish homosexual seems to play a crucial role in the novel’s autofictional play and to rule its text as a shadowy principle of inhibition. By means of this parallel construction of two passionate relationships, the novel succeeds in focusing a twofold inhibition originating in the double stigma of Jewishness and homosexuality by telling a heterosexual love story between two Christians. It is only this double stigma, which remains implicit throughout, that justifies the inhibition of the two relationships and thus provides the novel with something to tell. By means of this quite sophisticated construction, Marcus’s novel achieves additionally that the two stigmas shed light on each other: The linguistic forms of the epistemology of the closet are also implicitly tested in the Jewish case; and the ironised mirroring of the Jewish stigma in the world of a literary Orient suggests itself as a means that might be applicable to the homosexual case as well.

2.2

Adoption of the Greek Model and Rejection of ‘Hebrew Sensuality’: Meditationen (1904) and Das Tor dröhnt zu (1915)

Marcus’s thinking about male homosexuality and homosociality, as expressed in literary texts published after Das Frühlingsglück, in the first two decades of the 20th century, is characterised by a tendency to refrain from reference to the cultural region of the Orient and to Judaism. As against the references to Judaism and the Orient in Das Frühlingsglück, Marcus’s engagement with male homosexuality in his 1904 Meditationen and his 1915 Das Tor dröhnt zu is clearly committed to Tobin’s Greek model of homosexuality, which comes with a rejection of Judaism. 43

“Plötzlich packte Guido eine heiße Wut auf ‘die Weiber’”. The parallelization of heterosocial and homosocial relationships and their inversion is additionally supported by the description of Adeline’s friendship with Margreth that is also in danger of breaking the taboo of homosexuality, when, for example, Margreth tells Adeline: “how much I love you” (“wie ich Dich liebe”), and then “embraced her friend and kissed her with ardor” (“umarmte […] die Freundin und küßte sie mit Inbrunst”). Adeline reacts by caressing the “excited girl[’s]” (“dem erregten Mädchen”) hair (Marcus 1900: 7).

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In Meditationen, a text that Marcus himself situates in the contact zone between literary and scholarly writing,44 he praises “Hellenism” as the “juvenile period of mankind”, emphasizing among the noble traits of the ancient Greeks the “desire to have pedagogical influence, to seek an alter ego in the friendship of one’s own sex” (1904: 17).45 And he goes on to distinguish the ‘Greek’ from the ‘Hebrew’ attitude towards (homo-)sexuality: The Greek knew the art of quasi eradicating sin or even the unnatural by giving them a share of their beauty. The Hebrew had Sodom and Gomorrah, and their sinisterly heatedly sensual [sinnlichen] Onan, the Greeks Leda, Ganymede and Narcissus. In the German of the time, the word sinnlich (‘sensual’) includes, at its core, sexuality. And Marcus goes on to attribute especially to the figure of Narcissus a “sensual side”. However, Narcissus’s sensual side “makes under no circumstances his whole personality; far heavier weighs the fate of his soul […]; it is a modern fate, the Nietzschean fate” (ibid: 17–18).46 This explanation of the Greek Narcissus’s “sensual side”, which is said to be in conflict with the “fate of his soul”, implicitly conceptualizes ‘Hebrew sensuality’ as ruling the whole of Onan’s being. The quoted passage marks a model of sin, the unnatural, and sensuality for its own sake as ‘Hebrew’ and rejects it to the benefit of ‘Greek’ sensuality, which is connected to psychic conflict and a vitalistic Nietzschean position. This Nietzschean perspective attests to an intellectual proximity to Brand’s project of a ‘masculine culture’, as articulated in Brand’s journal Der Eigene. The earlier issues of Der Eigene in particular conceptualized ‘masculine culture’ by referring to individualist anarchism and Nietzscheanism (Keilson-Lauritz 1997: 74–78). Despite his commitment to Hirschfeld’s and Hiller’s more sexologically orientated WhK, Marcus’s thinking before World War I clearly shows traits of the rivaling masculist discourse of Brand and Friedlaender. These masculist views become more obvious in Marcus’s 1915 book Das Tor dröhnt zu. This book, which was not on sale in book shops,47 comprises three literary fragments: A narrative Zwischen Guido und Eduard (“Between Guido and Eduard”), a Fragment des Dialogs “Die arme Stunde” (“Fragment of the Dialogue ‘The Meager Hour’”), and a more essayistic part Aus “Der Adorant” (“From ‘The Adorant’”). All three parts cir-

44

45

46

47

In the preface, Marcus calls the short textual fragments of Meditationen “my aphorisms” (“meine Aphorismen”) and differentiates among them between “mainly scholarly” aphorisms (“vorwiegend wissenschafltiche[]”) and “those of a more poetic shade” (“diejenigen mehr poetischer Färbung”, 1904: 5). In the following, these two categories are, however, not differentiated in any way. “Das Griechentum die Jünglingszeit des Menschengeschlechtes […]; die Griechenseele war Jünglingsseele: […] voll Verlangen pädagogisch einzuwirken, ein alter ego in der Freundschaft des eigenen Geschlechts zu suchen”. “Die Griechen besaßen die Kunst, Sünde, ja selbst Unnatur gleichsam aus der Welt zu schaffen, indem sie ihr von ihrer Schönheit gaben. Die Hebräer hatten Sodom und Gomorrha und ihren finster heiss sinnlichen Onan, die Griechen Läda, Ganymed und Narzissus. Unter allen diesen ist Narziss wohl die tiefste Gestalt. Sie hat entschieden eine sinnliche Seite […], aber das ist unter keinen Umständen alles in ihr; bei weitem schwerer wiegt ihr Seelenschicksal […]; es ist ein modernes Schicksal, das Nietzsche-Schicksal.” This can be seen from a printed statement on the first page: “[Did not appear in trade.]” (“[Nicht im Handel erschienen]”, Anonymous 1915: 1, square brackets in original). This book, too, is very rare. I am using a digital copy of the hard copy held by Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Leipzig.

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

cle around the concept of male friendship (including the function of ‘love’ in it48 ). It is clearly the cultural region of ancient Greece that serves as a point of reference (Anonymous 1915: 14, 21–23, 32). The Hebrew world is not introduced as a contrast to the Greeks any longer. The differentiation between heterosocial ‘love’ and male homosocial ‘friendship’ that we have seen in Das Frühlingsglück is reformulated in Das Tor dröhnt zu in more philosophical-sociological, or one could also say ideological, terms. The third part of Das Tor dröhnt zu brings the difference between heterosocial and male homosocial intimacy into a formulaic shape: “Love for a girl: I want to have you […]. / Love for a friend. I want: not to have you, no, to be like you!” (Ibid: 21)49 Possession of an object is contrasted by identification with a second subject. This intrinsically misogynous, formulaic expression has been put into a certain ideological frame a few pages earlier: “Work and friend form a closed sacred circle. They are, for each other, means and goal, like woman and child are for each other means and goal.” (Ibid: 18)50 The coupling of the male homosocial relationship with social and intellectual productivity and of the heterosocial sphere (thought of as the sphere of familial upbringing of children) with pure reproduction echoes a certain brand of thought that became popular during the late 19th century and the first decades of the 20th , namely the theoretical and literary work evolving around the notion of the Männerbund. This notion differentiates a male homosocial sphere of the polity and the state from a heterosocial sphere of family and reproduction (Bruns 2008; Zilles 2018). Marcus more specifically connects his argument to the theory of the homoerotic Männerbund as formulated by Blüher. Even if Blüher’s full account of his theory, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (“The Role of Eroticism in Masculine Society”), was published only a few years after Marcus’s Das Tor dröhnt zu, in 1917/1919, the third volume of his history of the German Wandervogel, titled Der Wandervogel als erotisches Phänomen (“The Wandervogel as an Erotic Phenomenon”) had already been published in 1912. In 1913, Blüher had been given the opportunity to elaborate on the alleged connection between homoeroticism and sociability in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (“Yearbook of Sexual Intermediates”, Keilson-Lauritz 1997: 39). Taking into account the reference to the youth movement in the dedication of Das Frühlingsglück and Marcus’s involvement in the WhK, it is more than probable that he was familiar with Blüher’s account of homoerotic male bonding. In Blüher, we find the connection of the differentiation of hetero- and homosocial spheres, along with the claim of a socializing function of homoeroticism (Bruns 2008: 279–284). Not least is the reference to Blüher and to George’s poetic Männerbund perceptible in Marcus’s depiction of a circle of young male disciples that Hans, an older man in the “position of a mentor”

48

49 50

“Only where love and friendship are paired, intimacy and distance, can it be that one gives each other things as presents that none has had before” (“Nur wo Liebe und Freundschaft zusammen sind, Vertrautheit und Entfernung, kann das sein, daß man einander Dinge schenkt, die keiner vorher gehabt hat”, ibid: 18). “Liebe zu einem Mädchen: ich will dich haben […]. / Liebe zu einem Freund: Ich will: nicht dich haben, nein, sein wie du!” “Werk und Freund schließen einen heiligen Kreis. Sie sind einander Mittel und Ziel, wie Weib und Kind einander Mittel und Ziel sind.”

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(“Mentorstellung”, Anonymous 1915: 6), gathered in the second piece of Das Tor dröhnt zu: [Ado:] “Oh yes, you were always our leader [Führer], the one who was giving, the one who was guiding!” [Hans:] “Yes, that is what I was, and I had the feeling that I gave you something good when I gave you the belief in a leader, when I made this statue of a leader of myself.[”] (Ibid: 8)51 It is the hierarchical structure of boys, impassionedly loving a ‘male hero’ (Männerheld), that is constitutive in Blüher’s account of the socializing function of homoeroticism in the Männerbund (Bruns 2008: 318–321). References to the Orient do not play a role anymore in the reflections of Das Tor dröhnt zu. Meditationen and Das Tor dröhnt zu mark stations on a road that leads away from a complex employment of epistemologies related to the double stigma of Jewishness and homosexuality. Homoeroticism is de-Orientalized and de-Judaized by an embrace of the Greek model of homosexuality and by splitting off Orientalized Judaism. This development is accompanied by a masculinization that no longer knows any female narrators or speakers.

2.3

Self-Orientalization and Heteronormativization: Articles in the Moslemische Revue of the 1920s

Whereas Marcus employs Orientalism as a distancing tool in carrying out his double construction of hetero- and homosocial relationships in Das Frühlingsglück, and later constructs his masculist concept of Freundschaft by distinguishing it as a ‘Greek’ concept from the Hebrew Orient, his orientation experiences a new turn in the 1920s. His engagement with Ahmadiyya Islam in the 1920s could be read as an attempt at selfOrientalization – directed, however, towards a fundamentally altered Orient: it resumes the engagement with Orientalism – but turns Judaism into Islam; and it resumes masculinization – but turns homoeroticism into heteronormativity. As Baer has pointed out, Marcus’s turn to Islam is characterized by an endeavor to create a “German-Islamic synthesis” (2017: 164). Marcus tried to elaborate on the alleged shared convictions and values of German philosophy on the one hand and the Koran and Hadiths on the other (ibid: 168). Its ideological context is nevertheless “the great fascination with ‘Eastern wisdom’” (ibid: 191) of the time. Ahmadiyya Islam seems to have fitted Marcus’s ideological needs well. The Ahmadiyya branch of Islam is a reformist movement founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835–1908) in British India. Whereas Ahmadis consider their religious movement as the fulfillment of Islam, they are seen as a heresy by most Sunni Muslims; today, they are persecuted in Pakistan and other Muslim countries. Ahmad’s attempts at reform have to be seen in the context of British colonialism. His Islamic missionary 51

“Ach, du warst doch immer unser Führer, der Gebende, der Angebende!’ / ‘Ja, das war ich, und ich hatte das Gefühl, Euch Gutes zu geben, wenn ich Euch den Glauben an einen Führer gab, wenn ich diese Statue eines Führers aus mir machte.[’]”

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

activities were competing with the British Christian missionaries in Northern India. In this context, his religious ideology emphasized its ‘modern’ character. At the heart of Ahmad’s teachings is the notion of ‘religious progress’: The different religions are seen as striving towards convergence in the course of modernization, and Ahmadi Islam is meant to be a pioneering vehicle in this process (Jonker 2016: 6). Such ideas of universal progress are probably one of the reasons why the Ahmadis were quite successful in their missionary activities in Great Britain and Germany. Soon after Ahmad’s death in 1908, the movement split into two groups, one with its centre in the town of Qadian and one in Lahore. Berlin’s Lahore-Ahmadiyya mission was a flourishing intellectual centre in the 1920s and thus appeared attractive to a certain number of Germans, who eventually converted.52 In a programmatic article, Islam and the Philosophy of Europe, that Marcus published in the Moslemische Revue in German (1924a) and in The Islamic Review, the LahoreAhmadiyyas British journal, in an English translation (1925c)53 we find the tendency, already mentioned at the beginning of this article, to depict Islam as rational and enlightened. “Islam, of all the religions, is by far the most rational”, Marcus writes (ibid: 295).54 And he goes on to clarify his point by implicitly making reference to a Jewish philosophical tradition: “In Islam, the historical remains in the background, yielding place, as it were, to the eternal substance of truth. […] Islam attaches very little importance to dogmas” (ibid: 295).55 In differentiating ‘eternal truths’ from historical, rather contingent moral regulations, Marcus obviously follows Moses Mendelssohn, the central protagonist of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries. Mendelssohn had, in his 1783 treatise Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, made this differentiation in order to argue for the rational character of Judaism, not Islam. In contrast to the other two Religions of the Book, Judaism is, in Mendelssohn’s perspective, not contingent upon the revelation of ‘eternal truths’ (that can be recognized by using one’s mind in a rational way), but on the simple announcement of laws designed to lead their followers to recognize the ‘eternal truths’ (1983: 89–102). Marcus seems to adopt the Haskalah idea of eternal vs. historical truths, but uses it to describe Islam rather than Judaism. Thus, in Marcus’s view, Islam appears as a philosophical thought system based on rationalism and much less as a religious system based on dogma and revelation. An idea taken from Marcus’s ‘own’ Jewish tradition is moved into an Islamic context here. In the same article, Marcus explains what he calls the “three stages of inward ripeness”56 in Islam, the first of which is the stage of “Sinnlichkeit” (Marcus 1924a: 86, “material and physical existence” in the English translation, Marcus 1925c: 298), a derivative of the word sinnlich that he had used in Meditationen in order to distinguish 52 53 54 55 56

For the Ahmadiyya’s activities in Europe and in Berlin before World War II, cf. Backhausen 2008; Germain 2008; Jonker 2016. One more English translation of this article was published in The Light, the official organ of the Lahore-Ahmadiyya, based in Lahore (Marcus 1925b). “Der Islam ist unter allen Religionen weitaus die rationalste.” (Marcus 1924a: 84) “Im Islam steht das Historische durchaus im Hintergrund zugunsten der ewigen Wahrheitsgehalte. [...] [Der Islam legt] erstaunlich wenig Wert auf Dogmen” (ibid: 84–85). “Der Islam unterscheidet drei Stufen innerer Reife” (ibid: 86).

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‘Greek’ vitalistic eroticism from ‘Hebrew’ sin and voluptuousness for its own sake. And he continues: “Islam does not condemn the physical aspect of man [Sinnlichkeit] in the way Christianity does.” Instead of Christianity’s futile attempt to “annihilate physical existence [Sinnlichkeit]” by a kind of “ascetism […] which is detrimental to the interests of life”, Islamic asceticism has a “character which is helpful to the interests of life” (ibid: 298).57 By resorting to a commonplace concept of anti-Judaism (cf. Bauer 2009), Marcus argues that the philosophical background of these different attitudes towards sensuality is that, while “other religions” (older religions in the German original) take their criteria as “absolute” – absolute “justice” in Judaism, absolute “charity and love for one’s neighbour” in Christianity, “the criteria […] of Islam are modern – that is to say, relative. […] Islam […] demands of you that you should at every time and occasion, adopt the right middle course between the ‘too-much’ and the ‘too-little,’ both of which are evils.” (Marcus 1925c: 299)58 This “principle of the right middle course between the two opposites” is, in Marcus’s account, an element which connects Islam to the ancient Greek world, namely to Aristotle’s ethical philosophy (ibid: 300).59 Marcus concludes: “But it [the principle of the right middle course – B.W.] has never forced its way into the religions of Europe – that is, it has never, as in the Orient, become, as it were, a commonplace of life” (ibid).60 This reflection about different approaches to sensuality seems to resonate with Marcus’s earlier discussion of ‘Greek’ vs. ‘Hebrew’ sensuality in Meditationen. Whereas in Meditationen the line of difference is between the Greek world and the Hebrew Orient, here it is the Oriental Islam that comes in close proximity not to Judaism and Christianity, but to Greek philosophy. Thus, Marcus constructs a second, so to speak purified, version of the Orient, where the Islamic Orient and the German come close to each other (cf. Baer 2017). In this line of thought, Marcus, in a 1931 book review, differentiates between two kinds of “enthusiasm for the Orient” (“Orientbegeisterung”): “[M]any friends of the Orient search in the Orient only for the gaudy magic of a more colored world. But Islam is that religion which is based fundamentally on the simple, the reasonable, the rational, the abstract, the transcendent and the metaphysic” (Marcus 1931: 61).61 Is57

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“Zur Sinnlichkeit hat der Islam kein absolut ablehnendes Verhältnis wie das Christentum. […] [D]as Fasten [soll] die Sinnlichkeit nicht zerstören, wie es so viele Maßregeln des mittelalterlichen Christentums im Auge hatten. Die christliche Askese hat lebensfeindlichen, die mohammedanische lebenssteigernden Charakter.” (Ibid: 86–87) “Und hier zeigt sich beim Islam ein großer Unterschied gegenüber den älteren Religionen. Denn deren Maßstäbe sind absolut. Der Maßstab des Islams ist modern-relativ. Das Judentum fordert Gerechtigkeit als absoluten, einzigen Maßstab, das Christentum Nächstenliebe. Der Islam dagegen fordert, daß wir zu jeder Zeit und in jeder Lage in unserem Verhalten die rechte Mitte suchen zwischen dem Zu-Wenig und dem Zu-Viel, die beide von Übel sind.” (Ibid: 87) “Indessen ist auch der europäischen Philosophie das Prinzip von der rechten Mitte zwischen den Gegensätzen nicht unbekannt. Vielmehr danken wir es dem größten griechischen Systemdenker, Aristoteles, der seine Ethik darauf gegründet hat” (ibid: 87–88). “Aber in die Religionen Europas ist es nicht gedrungen, und das heißt, daß es nie, wie im Orient, populär geworden ist.” (Ibid: 88) “[V]iele Orientfreunde suchen im Orient nur den bunten Zauber einer farbigeren Welt. Der Islam aber ist die grundsätzlich auf das Einfache, Vernünftige, Rationale, Abstrakte, Transzendente und Metaphysische gestellte Religion”.

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

lam, in Marcus’s view, offers an alternative Orient that is not Europe’s (understood as Greek) Other, but rather its twin brother, an Other who is, at the same time, similar and related. Marcus closes his article about Islam and the Philosophy of Europe with a praise of universalism: The fact that the spirit of Islam and the spirit of Europe should touch one another in so many fundamental thoughts, creates for both of them, on account of the truth contained in these ideas, the right to hope that with a larger understanding for our Oriental brethren and friends, there would come into existence a world-state of humanity and a good world-citizenship [Weltbürger], in the place of the present world-State of jarring nationalities, and a citizenship whose groping ideals can reach no farther than its own State [Staatsbürger]. (1925c: 301)62 Marcus’s new reference to the Orient of the 1920s is a universalist one – starting from a view of Islam as a universalist religion.63 As such, it runs counter to the mainstream of European Orientalism since the late 18th century, which conceptualized the Orient as the particular. Marcus’s universalist hope is a Kantian one, promoting the idea expressed in Perpetual Peace (1795) (Marcus 1925c: 300–301). This Orientalist universalism of Marcus’s rejects its own Oriental Other. Marcus’s rationalist and universalist Orientalism draws a line from Greek antiquity to German idealism and Ahmadiyya Islam. At the same time, Marcus separates his new view of the Orient from the Judeo-Christian tradition, from “the religions of Europe” (ibid: 300). Implicit in this separation from the Judeo-Christian tradition is the separation from that religion – Judaism – which, in Kant’s words, refused to take part in the building of a “church universal”, but “rather excluded the rest of mankind from its communion” (Kant 1838: 168) – the particularist position par excellence. Marcus’s aforementioned reflections on the ‘moral relativism’ of Islam seem to hint at some kind of sexual liberalism. If this is true, then the scope of this liberalism is constrained to heterosexuality. Marcus’s views on gender and sexuality seem to have in fact experienced a turn that must be described as heteronormative. If his earlier views were close to a masculist project of homoerotic homosociality, he now overtly speaks out for patriarchal structures in society. Implicitly opposing classical Orientalist ideas about Muhammad as a “hedonist” (“Genußmensch[]”) with “sybaritic tendencies” (“sybaritische[] Neigungen”, Marcus 1924b: 126),64 he portraits the prophet as a benign ascetic: “He is an ascetic and yet, he is also the opposite of an ascetic: the great al-

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“Daß sich der Geist des Islam und der Geist Europas aber in so vielen grundlegenden Gedanken berühren, das zeugt sowohl für den Wahrheitsgehalt jener Gedanken wie für die Berechtigung der Hoffnung, daß mit besserem Verständnis für unsere orientalischen Brüder und Freunde auch dereinst einmal der Menschheitsstaat und der gute Weltbürger an die Stelle des bloßen Nationalstaats und des guten Staatsbürgers treten wird!” (Marcus 1924a: 88). “Islam claims to be a doctrine that is valid for all humans and all times” (“[D]er Islam erhebt den Anspruch, eine für alle Menschen und alle Zeiten gültige Lehre zu sein”, Marcus 1929a: 8); cf. also Marcus 1925a: 49. The passages of the German article that I am quoting here are not included in the English translation that appeared in The Light in 1925 (Marcus 1925d).

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lowing” (ibid: 126).65 The ‘old’ Orientalism is rejected in favour of a purified, rational Orient. From this position, Marcus goes on, Muhammad’s commands concerning sexuality must be explained. The first that Marcus mentions is that “Muhammad radically separates the sexes” (ibid: 127).66 If one thinks to hear in this emphasis on the separation of the sexes an echo of Marcus’s earlier praise of male homoerotic homosociality, one is informed immediately afterwards that the world Marcus is speaking of here is exclusively heterosexual. Muhammad, Marcus tells us, advocated for the right of every human to the fulfilment of his or her “claim to love” (“Liebesanspruch”, ibid). In order to secure this claim, Muhammad “prescribes marriage […] not as a free choice anymore but as a universal duty without exception. He does not acknowledge the rank of single” (ibid).67 If this sounds like a threat to every homosexual and to every passionate single, Marcus becomes even clearer in the following paragraph: “The result Muhammad achieves is known to us as the so-called patriarchal state” (ibid).68 Women, in his account, are spoken of only as bearers of an “entitlement to love” (“Liebesanrecht”) and as subjects of “motherhood and the happiness that comes with it” (“Mutterschaft und Mutterglück”, ibid). In respect to gender and sexuality, Marcus’s project of a ‘modern’ Islam, as prescribed by Ahmadiyya ideology, was not modern at all, at least not in the sense of the project of modernity the WhK stood for, or any other emphatic concept of modernity. When Baer argues that “Marcus’s attraction to Islam […] may also have been rooted in his own homosexuality” (2017: 188), he might be right in respect to a diffuse connection that a fascination for the Oriental world may have established in Marcus’s thinking between homosexuality and Islam. But on the other hand, Baer seems to neglect the hints in Marcus’s texts that the “conservative revolution” favoured by Marcus’s Islam (ibid: 192) extends to gender relations and subsequent regulations of sexuality. Marcus’s turn to Ahmadiyya Islam in the 1920s can be read as a continuation of his affirmation of male bonding in the first two decades of the century and as a continuation of his gradual self-distancing from the old version of Orientalism. But it needs to be described as a break – at least a partial and temporal one – with his homosexual rights activism. Marcus’s articles in the Moslemische Revue show him as an advocate of heterosexual patriarchy in a version that defines itself as both ‘modern’ and ‘Oriental’. The “erotic” Marcus, it seems, did “flee into religion”, a kind of escape that is, as he states in another article (not referring especially to the homoerotic), not unusual (Marcus 1930-31: 97).69

65 66 67 68 69

“Er ist Asket und ist doch auch das Gegenteil des Asketen: der grosse Gewährende”. “Mohammed trennt die Geschlechter radikal”. “Er verordnet die Ehe […] nicht mehr als freies Belieben[,] sondern als allgemeine, ausnahmslose Verpflichtung. Einen Ledigenstand erkennt er nicht an”. “Das Resultat, das Mohammed erzielt, ist uns bekannt als sogenannter patriarchalischer Zustand.” “[D]as erotische Gebiet ist die typische Sphäre, in der sich das sakrale Verbrechererlebnis auch im Nicht-Verbrecher abrollt. Und dies ist das Band, das Religion und Erotik so eng verbindet. Kraft dieser Verknüpfung beider Gebiete erklärt es sich, daß der Erotiker so oft in die Religion flieht.”

Jewish Homosexual Orientalism?

3.

Conclusion

The readings presented in this paper allow for conclusions on three levels: Marcus’s intellectual development in relation to religion, homosexuality, and Orientalism; the nature of Orientalism itself; and the consequences of varying degrees of literariness for the deployment of Orientalist patterns. Marcus’s reference to the Orient in the first three decades of the 20th century is complex, shifting, and flexible in the constellations analyzed in this article. In the early novel Das Frühlingsglück, references to the Oriental world are characterized by an interplay of distance and identification. The Oriental world serves as a contrasting foil, against which stigma becomes visible in the contemporary central European society the novel is staged in. This Oriental world is distanced from the protagonist’s world by means of the novel’s introduction of intradiegetic narrators, as well as by ironisation. Thus, the novel identifies its characters with characters of the tales staged in the Orient, transgressing vast distances in time, space and culture, while at the same time exposing the literary character of references to the Orient. This kind of refracted reference to the Orient is so flexible that it allows talking implicitly about both the Jewish and the homosexual stigma. In Meditationen, Marcus moves to a different use of reference to the Orient. Connecting his argument with Nietzschean ideas, he rejects ‘Oriental’ Judaism in order to affirm the Greek model of homosexuality. In this line of thought, Das Tor dröhnt zu sketches a model of an elite homosocial circle and clearly resonates with ideas of the masculist wing of the First Homosexual Movement. Marcus’s engagement with the Orient in the 1920s is, in contrast to that of Das Frühlingsglück and of Meditationen, an articulation not of distance and self-distancing but rather of proximity. Its purpose is not to identify with the Other, but rather to retrieve an enlightened past once owned. Whereas the Oriental Other in Said’s account is marked as irrational, despotic, and doomed to be domesticized by the West, Marcus’s Islamic Orient is characterised as rational, as much so as Mendelssohn’s Judaism; liberal; and a buried legacy that has to be revived. But at the same time, this reference to the Orient is a decisively heterosexual and patriarchal one. It remains an open task for research to examine the links between this stance of the 1920s and Marcus’s philosophical writings and contributions to Der Kreis, as well as his revitalized participation in homosexual rights issues during his years in Switzerland (Baer 2017: 193).70 From the perspective of the readings given here, it is not only the “cultural and political dilemmas of German Jewish identity and corresponding modes of self-representation” that “were carried over into his [Marcus’s – B.W.] meditations on Islam” (Rubin 2019: 600). Not only the Jewish but also the homosexual dilemmas are negotiated – with shifting focuses – in a triangular pattern with Islam as the third component and the Orient as a flexible point of reference.

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Baer’s reading of Marcus suggest that the figure of Goethe is a crucial connector of Marcus’s engagement with German philosophy, Islam, and homosexuality before and after World War II (2017: 178–190).

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Marcus’s Orientalism is a strategic, flexible, and fluid one. Far from establishing clear-cut differentiations and (de-)valuations, the references to the Oriental world acquire the function of an instrument useful to advocate for or against anything. This flexibility and negotiability of Orientalism is especially visible in Jewish Orientalism, as Kathrin Wittler has remarked, because Jews were variably seen as Occidental and Oriental and participated themselves actively in Orientalist discourses (2015: 76). This could be extended tentatively to homosexuality, which was seen varyingly as Oriental and Greek, and whose advocates also participated in Orientalist discourses. For the European subject, and especially the Jewish and homosexual one, the Orient seems to have served as an important object for defining the self in relation to it. But neither its meaning – sensual Other or enlightened legacy – nor the forms of reference – rejection, desire, or identification – were fixed. Wittler’s claim that “[t]he interplay of orientalism with power relations should be one of the objects of an open-ended analysis, not its pre-defined start” (ibid: 78–79) is thus resolutely affirmed. To understand Orientalism only as a special form of racism, as Çetin and Voß do, limits from the outset the view on the complexities of the historical materials. The texts that I have analyzed in this paper range from a fictional novel to the semifictional-philosophical genres of aphorism and philosophical dialogue to journalistic writing. Clearly, the most sophisticated way of making use of patterns of Orientalism is made in the fictional novel Das Frühlingsglück. The specific ways of reflection that only literature has at its disposal, including parallelization, intertextual allusion, intradiegetic narration, and ironising, contribute to negotiating the complex societal phenomenon of Orientalism in complex aesthetic forms. In contrast to non-literary writing, the literary text takes as its principle that it produces more meaning than its author intends to. In Marcus’s case, it is the most aestheticized form that deploys an Orientalism that neither rejects the Oriental other, nor identifies with a purified and heterosexualized Orient, but points to the complexities of stigma in Wilhelmine society.

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Queer Messianism1 The Controversial Case of Mordechai Mendel in Interwar Warsaw Piotr Laskowski

The case of Mordechai Mendel, a criminal, and later in life a repentant (baltshuve), famous in the Praga district of Warsaw for his religious devotion as well as for the sexual relations he had with students of local yeshivas (yeshive bokhurim), is unique by every measure. But, as Carlo Ginzburg observed, individual distinctiveness has very definite limits: “As with language, culture offers to the individual a horizon of latent possibilities – a flexible cage in which [one] can exercise [their] own conditional liberty” (Ginzburg 1992: xx-xxi). Thus, the unique can be representative not only negatively, as opposed to a “statistical majority,” but above all “positively, because it permits us to define the latent possibilities” of culture (Ginzburg 1992: xxi). An analysis of Mordechai Mendel’s case may provide us with a new perspective on a ‘flexible cage’ of Hasidic culture in interwar Poland as regards its ‘latent possibility’ of conceiving a Jewish queer form of life, both on the individual and the collective levels. In 1930, Mordechai Mendel became a kind of a folk hero. He was surrounded by a group of young Hasidic followers, whose devotion to him was described by the press in a manner reminiscent of the admiration usually reserved for a Tsadik. One Polish (nonJewish) journal, clearly alluding to a Hasidic tish (a gathering of Hasidim around the Tsadik’s table, which gave them an opportunity to partake in the holiness of their spiritual leader), claimed that during a feast celebrating Mordechai Mendel’s release from custody, his “devotees licked the leftovers from the plate of the holy old man, fighting among themselves for bones and crumbs” (Expres Zagłębia, December 30, 1929: 4). Between December 1929 and March 1930, his name appeared in headlines in almost every newspaper, Jewish and non-Jewish, Yiddish and Polish, published in Warsaw, but also in provincial towns, from the highbrow Jewish Haynt or Nasz Przegląd to Polska Zbrojna,

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I would like to thank Anna Ciałowicz for bringing Mordechai Mendel to my attention, Karo Wegner for her invaluable assistance with translating Federgrin’s novel, Kamil Karczewski for sharing with me so generously the results of his research, and Andrzej Grzybowski for his support in archive searches.

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the semi-official daily of the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs, to popular tabloids like the Yiddish Hayntige nayes (evening paper associated with liberal, middle-class Haynt) or the Polish-language Express Poranny. Every day for three and half months, Hayntige nayes published an episode of a novel about his life. In Mordechai Mendel’s youth, he was one of the most notable of the “Praga fellows” (prager tipn), local thieves and criminals of colorful personalities (Królicki 1974: 150-152). “Strong as a lion,” he became an urban legend, an example of “great (großen) criminal,” characters who – as Walter Benjamin observed – often “aroused the secret admiration of the public” (Benjamin 1996: 239). It is not clear at what point in his life he became a pious repentant and what the reasons were behind this apparently sudden change. His new religious passion did not make him less violent, however; it only channeled his ferocity in a new direction. In 1920s his “fanaticism,” as it was labelled by the press, became political. The former criminal reappeared as a religious fighter, involved in the struggles between the Orthodox and Zionist leaders within the Jewish community in Praga (and Warsaw in general). And yet we are not even sure what his last name was. The press rendered it Stroberg (or Strohberg), Sztraport, Sztrapert, Sztrabert, or Sztrawer. As for his age, he was probably born on Sivan 15, 5628, that is June 5, 1868 (this exact date is given in the novel). Thus, in December 1929 he would have been 62 years old (cf. Nasz Przegląd, December 24, 1929: 2; however, earlier this year the same title claimed he was 56, Nasz Przegląd, May 15, 1929: 9). We lack his own words, a first-person narrative of any kind – a speech, a letter, even a police hearing – apart from a few snippets quoted or rather reported by the press. Our only sources, the press accounts, tell us more about the press itself than about Mordechai Mendel. His case was used, trimmed, and molded according to the needs of those who reported it. But the press narrative has its cracks and breaches, and through the discrepancies among various accounts, the world of Mordechai Mendel begins to emerge (cf. Ginzburg 1992: xix). The specificity of our sources ought to be taken into account when we try to apprehend Mordechai Mendel’s sexuality. In December 1929, when he became widely known for his attacks on a Zionist gymnastic association, Unzer Ekspres, one of the most popular Yiddish daily newspapers, reminded the public that he was also “famous in the whole Praga district for his deeds of deception (maysim taatuim) done in attics with young yeshiva students (yunge yeshive bokhurim)” (Unzer Ekspres, December 24, 1929: 6). Remarks about his sexual attraction to younger men who studied in local yeshivas, a group from which he would also recruit his followers, appear in a number of Yiddish papers. Notably, all of them leaned towards Zionism (even if, like Unzer Ekspres, they did not take an explicit political stance) and they regarded Mordechai Mendel as an implacable enemy of the Zionist cause. Thus, it is not surprising that they spoke of his sexuality in a derogatory tone. On the other hand, in a novel about his life, published in Hayntige nayes, the paper which would otherwise present his sexual relations with bokhurim in a most scandalizing and defamatory tone, he was presented in a completely heteronormative way. The Polish non-Jewish press, which also covered his activities, never mentioned his sexuality. In this paper, I will analyze press portrayals of Mordechai Mendel. First, I will examine his depiction as a religious and political militant, known for his violent attacks on

Queer Messianism

the Zionist sport club. This was the image created by the Jewish press, published both in Yiddish and Polish, generally sympathetic to the Zionist cause. Next, I will examine the derisive image of religious oddity presented in the Polish non-Jewish papers. Against this backdrop, I will discuss the press accounts of the sexual assaults of which he was accused. I will then focus on the third, heroic image of Mordechai Mendel, which was elaborated in a novel about his life. As we will see, none of these images is accurate, but each of them contains elements that may be rearranged in a way that would give new meaning to Mordechai Mendel’s fierce religiosity, his passionate adherence to the Hasidic community, and his violent resistance to modern sport institutions. Such reinterpretation, I believe, requires a reconsideration of Mordechai Mendel’s activities in the context of his queer sexuality. I use the term queer rather than gay or homosexual, as it seems to better apprehend the dynamic and, ultimately, subversive relations between (homo)sexual desire, religious passion, and political militancy. In other words, I will argue that what prompted Mordechai Mendel’s actions was his idea of a specific queer vocation, and that he found in traditional Hasidism a way of life that he considered queerable.

Being Jewish and queer in Warsaw Before we turn to Mordechai Mendel, we need to outline the wider social context of his activity. What did it mean to be a Jewish queer person in interwar Warsaw? Was there any Jewish gay social life? Was there any gay community that would reach beyond religious/ethnic divisions to bring Polish Jews and non-Jews together? What were the available strategies of emancipation? The situation of Jewish gay people in Warsaw differed considerably from, say, Berlin – both as regards their being Jewish and their being gay. As for being gay, an important factor was the fact that the Polish state did not penalize homosexual acts. While in Germany the homosexual emancipation movement set as its primary objective a repeal of infamous Paragraph 175, the Codifying Commission (Komisja Kodyfikacyjna) of the Polish Parliament, created as early as 1919 to unify the civil and criminal laws of the newly founded state, decided already in 1923 not to criminalize “indecent acts against nature” (the Criminal Code was introduced in 1932). The argument was of a scientific and pragmatic nature: it stressed medical incertitude as to the plausible innateness of homosexuality, as well as the fact that such acts would remain largely undetectable on one hand and prone to blackmailing on the other. The Commission affirmed the modernizing ambitions of the Polish state and referred explicitly to the French legislation as a model. In Germany, Magnus Hirschfeld alluded favorably to this model in a sort of public manifesto that was included, in the form of a lecture, in the 1919 film Anders als die Andern, which he co-wrote with Richard Oswald: The persecution of homosexuals belongs in the same sad chapter of human history in which the persecutions of heretics and witches are inscribed [...]. Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere that the Code Napoleon

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was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the fundamental rights of the individual […]. In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research in this field, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated… (Steakley 1999: 183). In Poland, decriminalization did not result in, but rather prevented, the creation of a gay movement and organizations of emancipatory character. The pragmatic legal consent was accompanied by moral disgust and/or derision. This led to internalized shame, selfsilencing and, consequently, the invisibility of gay people. German Ritz observed: In relation to homosexuality, Polish culture takes on the status of a threshold country, situated between the repressive and clearly defined culture of western Europe, on the one hand, and the neutral, that is, less clearly defined, culture of eastern Europe on the other […]. But the difference is not based on greater tolerance, merely on a lesser degree of perceiving sexually different behavior (Ritz 2005: 256). Thus, Polish culture, specifically the literary culture of the elites, could not offer a clear strategy of emancipation. The expression of homosexual desire in Polish literature was highly aestheticized, equivocal, and evasive. It was largely inspired by French authors, Marcel Proust in particular, which is not surprising. Not only were Polish political and, as we have seen, legal systems modelled after the French, French culture was also a primary reference point for the Polish intelligentsia. Polish gay writers would share Proust’s concerns: Can we describe as friendship those relations which flourish only by virtue of a lie and from which the first outburst of confidence and sincerity in which they might be tempted to indulge would make them be expelled with disgust… (Proust 2006: 23). Didier Eribon observed that Proust’s “theoretical essay on homosexuality” in the first pages of Cities of the Plain was a reaction against the “important gay movement already developed in Germany” (Eribon 2015: 132). Proust concluded this essay with a remark: “I have thought it as well to utter here a provisional warning against the lamentable error of proposing (just as people have encouraged a Zionist movement) to create a Sodomist movement and to rebuild Sodom” (Proust 2006: 37). Such views seem to have been shared by those few assimilated Jewish gay men in interwar Poland, particularly in artistic milieus, who found in Proust an expression of their own concerns: the parallel between the Jewish and the gay stigmas, the problem of internalized shame, and the sense of estrangement:2

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The best example would be a painter, Józef Rajnfeld (1908-1940). His letters to Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, his lover, Polish poet of Skamander literary group, are considered among the most important documents of homoerotic desire in Polish literature. In one of them Rajnfeld writes: “there are many things which I cannot put in writing for it is too difficult – […] as Proust says ‘J’ai peur de faire ressemblant’, instead of expressing what I truly wish to express”, in: Portret młodego artysty. Listy Józefa Rajnfelda do Jarosława Iwaszkiewicza, ed. Paweł Hertz, Marek Zagańczyk. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Tenten, 1997, p. 41.

Queer Messianism

[L]ike the Jews again [...], shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them… (Proust 2006: 23-24). Elite Polish culture enforced silence, often full of despair, or, at best, a refined and allusive expression of homosexuality. But in Warsaw, as in any other modern city, there were also other forms of gay life. Until recently, they have not been properly, if at all, investigated. The first comprehensive study on the subject is now being written by Kamil Karczewski as his Ph.D. dissertation Sex in the Time of Nationalism: The History of Queer Life in Warsaw, 1917-1939. Karczewski is the first scholar to conduct a comprehensive investigation of available sources – mostly press accounts (usually of scandalizing character) and police materials (before 1932, the Russian Penal Code of 1903 could be used occasionally but police interventions were normally limited to the cases of alleged prostitution and human trafficking). He has managed to draw a map of queer Warsaw, with its cruising areas, meeting places, and rooms rented for sexual encounters. He has also been able to sketch a group portrait of men who frequented them. The most important cruising areas seem to have been located on the left bank of the river, in the central part of Warsaw: around the main railway station (also known as Vienna Station), the nearby Chmielna Street, with its small hotels and rooms for rent, where gay men would meet, and three large, crowded city squares with their green areas and public toilets (Karczewski, personal communication). Notably, we know of no such places in the Praga district, on the other bank of the river. Karczewski observed, however, that a considerable number of men from Praga would frequent the cruising areas in the city center. The men who met there were – if one may judge from names and addresses collected by the police – both Christian and Jewish Poles. Of the three squares identified by Karczewski as cruising places, one, Grzybowski Square, was in fact one of the centers of Jewish life in Warsaw, with many Orthodox Jews living there, and over 30 synagogues, houses of prayer, and community buildings in the neighborhood. The sources at our disposal concern mostly those men who fell under the police radar as they belonged to the underworld of petty crime, theft, prostitution, and blackmailing. As Karczewski observes, the press and the public would see them as a confirmation of the belief that homosexuality was inseparably related to violence and crime. One may imagine that, before his religious metamorphosis, Mordechai Mendel would have fit in quite well with this group. However, by the 1920s, Mordechai Mendel – now a Baltshuve, a repentant, and a religious activist – would belong to a completely different world, the world into which most Jewish gay people in Warsaw were born and where many of them spent their whole life. Unlike the world of Polish elites (which would accept very few carefully selected assimilated Jewish artists and intellectuals) or the gay underworld (unique insofar as it apparently transcended ethnic divisions), it was exclusively Jewish, Yiddish-speaking, religious, and conservative. According to the 1931 census, the Jewish population (defined by declared faith) constituted c. 10% of the population of Poland (i.e. over 3.1 million people), and c. 30% of that of Warsaw (over 350,000 people). The vast majority among them declared Yiddish or Hebrew as their mother tongue (8.6% of the population of Poland, and 28.3% of the inhabitants of Warsaw). The scale of assimilation

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(with all the complexity of the practices that make up this heterogeneous phenomenon) is very difficult, if not impossible, to estimate (see Landau-Czajka 2006: 23-51). But in general, it seems fair to say that “Jewish assimilation was associated with Germany and other Western countries” (Heller 1994: 183; Heller estimated there were c. 150-200,000 assimilated Jews in Poland, p. 188). From the Western perspective, the Ostjuden appeared as conservative, backward, and benighted. In fact, of the two “pillars” of modernity – “the pillar of regulation and the pillar of emancipation” (Sousa Santos 1995: 2) – only the former was instantly recognized by the majority of the Jewish population in Poland. Confronted by the newly founded Polish state, with its modernizing aspirations and its open hostility to the Jews, reinforced by thriving Polish nationalism, the larger part of Jewish population took a defensive stance and protected their traditional way of life, language, dress code, and the autonomy of religious communal institutions (kehillot). The very limited scale of assimilation and a general distrust of “the pillar of emancipation” obviously had an impact on the way Jewish queer sexuality could have been expressed. But, as Karczewski points out, there are virtually no sources concerning religious Jewish gay men. Mordechai Mendel’s case, unique as it is, may throw some light on their experience. It shows how Jewish non-heteronormative sexuality could find expression, albeit still convoluted and problematic, within traditional Hasidic culture. The Jewish religious milieu, even its Hasidic part, was not uniform. Mordechai Mendel seems to have had particularly strong relations with Hasidic youth, bokhurim, among whom he would find devout followers and sexual partners. In 1930s in Warsaw, there were some 3500 bokhurim associated with Hasidic shtiblekh (small places of study and worship), and another 1000 studying in yeshivas (Huberband 1987: 175-78). About 2000 young men of the former group identified themselves as “Gerers,” that is, followers of the Tsadik of Ger (Góra Kalwaria). The Tsadik was the most influential figure of interwar Hasidism in Poland, and a political figure. He was one of the leaders of the Agudas Isroel party, the party of religious orthodoxy that dominated the Jewish political scene in Poland. The press associated Mordechai Mendel with the Agudas, but – as we will see – his relations with the party were not as close as the papers claimed. “Gerers” were famous for their uncompromising, fierce religiosity and political militancy. The most relentless among them, the so-called “harsh ones,” distinguished themselves with their dress, their haircut, and – most importantly – their way of living. They studied together, ate together, and spent most of their time in their shtiebel. They kept away even from their own families and formed groups headed by “commanders.” Thus, they were “good material as political activists during various election campaigns.” They looked with contempt at their less radical colleagues and at other bokhurim, particularly those studying in yeshivas: “The relations between the young men of the Gerer shtiblekh and the students of other yeshivas were very tense” (Huberband 1987: 177, 179). It is not easy to determine to what Hasidic group Mordechai Mendel and his companions belonged. On one hand, his relations with his followers seem very similar to those of the “harsh ones” with their “commanders.” On the other hand, his companions were usually described as yeshiva students (yeshive bokhurim). Moreover, we know that he clashed with “Gerers,” although it is not clear what the conflict was about. Whatever his stance on internal divisions among Hasidic youth, Mordechai Mendel was known primarily as an implacable enemy of Zionism and, in particular, of Zionist sport or-

Queer Messianism

ganizations. Zionism offered a means of Jewish emancipation, of reaching beyond the defensiveness of tradition and insecurity of assimilation – as did Bundist socialism and communism as well. It is important to look at these movements from a queer perspective. Being essentially modern, they combined the pillar of (national, or class, or both) emancipation with the pillar of (gender, sexual) regulation: The Zionist rejection of Diasporic Judaism, golus, was formulated, at least to some degree, in the binary opposition between the weak, religious, Orientalized, effeminate Jews of the East European ghetto, and the strong, manly halutzim, toilers of the land, creators of a new world. Even when Zionists referred to the Jewish religious tradition, they looked back to biblical heroes, very different from the scraggly students of Torah in shtiblekh and yeshivas. The early Zionist ideologue Max Nordau on several occasions denounced East European Luftvolk and called for Muskeljudentum (muscular Jewishness) of the ancient type of Bar Kochba, the leader of the Jewish revolt against the Romans in the second century CE. Nordau presented his first complete vision of the Muskeljudentum in an article for the Jüdische Turnzeitung, the organ of Bar Kochba gymnastic association (Presner 2007: 1-3). Interestingly, it was precisely the same Bar Kochba association (but its Warsaw branch) that became the target of Mordechai Mendel’s ferocity. The “apotheosis of the masculine” had, as Amit Kama observed, a profound effect on the Zionist attitude towards homosexuality. “Since homosexuality has traditionally been conceived as sexual inversion… formation of a homosexual identity constituted a dire breach of the strict Zionist gender roles” (Kama 2011: 182). Obviously, the stereotype of the Eastern European Jew, which Zionists placed in opposition to their virile ideal, could be viewed as corresponding to the stereotype of the homosexual man. The parallel was so close that in antisemitic literature, homosexuality and Jewishness would become interconnected: “In antisemitic discourse of the fin de siècle, Jews were depicted as ‘feminine’, full of sexual desire and prone to homosexuality” (Ilany 2017b: 136). The Zionists would, to some extent, accept this connection, even if they strove to overcome it. They regarded male homosexual behavior as an “exilic characteristic” (Ilany 2017a: 109; Boyarin 1997) that could undermine the process of Jewish emancipation. In this context, one can consider Mordechai Mendel’s activities as an attempt to reappropriate antisemitic notions about Jewish sexuality in order to give them positive meaning and to actualize the “latent possibilities” of Hasidic culture as regards queer sexuality. In this respect, one may compare Mordechai Mendel to two people of radically different backgrounds: Jacob Israël de Haan and Jiří (Georgo) Mordechai Langer. All three regarded Hasidism as a possible basis for what Ofry Ilany called “a Jewish homoerotic system” (Ilany 2017b: 138). Obviously, contrary to de Haan and Langer, Mordechai Mendel did not theorize this issue; there are only his actions, which invite interpretation in light of de Haan’s and Langer’s writings. Interestingly, the life trajectories of Langer and Mordechai Mendel intersected, as we will see, in a very specific place – the court of the Tsadik of Belz. However, for Langer, son of an assimilated bourgeois family, Hasidism was a subject of intellectual discovery or even re-invention, while for Mordechai Mendel, even if he had not always been a deeply religious person, Hasidism was a living culture that defined his social milieu. One may further observe that both Mordechai Mendel and de Haan had their lives fictionalized. In the 1932 novel De Vriendt kehrt heim Arnold Zweig portrayed the protag-

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onist, Yitzchak Josef de Vriendt (clearly modeled after de Haan), as “a threat to political Zionism because of his embodiment of Judaism, homosexuality, and the Orient”, and because of “his association with Eastern European Jewish traditions and stereotypes” (Plapp 2008: 69, 71). In a sense, Mordechai Mendel incarnated the ideal which Zweig’s de Vriendt (and, it seems, de Haan himself) tried to revive. But, as we are about to see, in a novel about his own life, Mordechai Mendel was presented in a very different way: as a heteronormative “guardian of Israel,” a militant acceptable to Zionist readers. Mordechai Mendel’s case, unique as it was, shows how Hasidism (not the one reinvented by the theoretical speculation of intellectuals, but the one inherent in the life of the popular classes in Eastern Europe) could be interwoven with homosexual desire. This affinity was, as I will try to show, multilayered. It encompassed specific homosocial forms of male companionship; a spirit of dissent and rebellion; messianic threads of Hasidic religiosity, with its peculiar conceptualization of sin and redemption; and Hasidic politics, which strongly opposed modernity and the modern model of emancipation, associated with regulatory practices pertaining also, if not above all, to the sphere of sexuality.

Agudas militant The events that drew the attention of the press to Mordechai Mendel began on the eve of Hanukkah, December 23, 1929. On the very next day, these events were covered by Nasz Przegląd, one of the most important middle-class Jewish daily newspapers in Poland. Nasz Przegląd was an independent newspaper in the Polish language, ideologically sympathetic to Zionism. The paper reported that Mordechai Mendel (Mendel Sztrabert, residing at 10, Brzeska Street) had been found severely beaten in a shtiebel on 11, Ząbkowska Street, and taken to the nearby hospital. The paper explained that the shtiebel was a “terrain of fierce fights” between devout adherents of two branches of the family of the Tsadik Taub of Modzitz and Kuzmir (Nasz Przegląd, December 24, 1929: 2). In the same issue the paper informed about the attack on the Zionist sport club Bar Kochba, located in the building of the Jewish Community (kehilla) on 31, Szeroka Street. A group of young Hasids broke 20 glass windows, then ran away to the neighboring beshamidrash (house of study). The club’s management blamed Rabbi Menachem Ziemba, the pivotal Hasidic figure in Praga, an active member of Agudas Isroel party and close associate of its spiritual and political leader, the Tsadik of Ger, for instigating the youth (Nasz Przegląd, December 24, 1929: 2; on Menachem Ziemba, see Żebrowski 2014b). Apparently, Mordechai Mendel did not take part in this raid, since he spent the night in the hospital. On the night of December 24/25, the Bar Kochba club was raided again, and this time the assault was not limited to breaking a few windows. The equipment at the club was destroyed, the kehilla offices allegedly smeared with feces, and the library of 550 books completely demolished (cf. Żebrowski 2012: 304). Mordechai Mendel was arrested soon afterwards for taking part in the event. On December 26, Hayntige nayes blamed Agudas for inciting the attack of “young men from bes-hamidrash.” The paper juxtaposed the progressive youth of Praga with the “Agudas clique” and its “criminal agitation against

Queer Messianism

Figure 11.1: Map of Praga, 1930 (Prepared by the author based on Orłowicz 1930): (1) Shtibl on 11 Ząbkowska street; (2) Kehilla building on 31 Szeroka street. Praga bes-hamidrash was located on the adjacent plot to the west, on the corner of Szeroka and Jagiellońska street; (3) Praga hospital; (4) Mordechai Mendel’s dwelling place on 10 Brzeska street; (5) Court building on 2 Brukowa street; (6) Kamionek district.

this youth cultural institution.” As for Mordechai Mendel, the paper quoted a witness, shames (warden) Shmuel from the neighboring bes-hamidrash, who denied his involvement in the assault. The paper added: “In general, according to the Praga resident, since the time Mordechai Mendel had been caught because of the disgusting story (heslekhe geshikhte) with young men (yunge bokhurim) in the attic, he wandered around like a lunatic, out of his senses, and thanked God if he was given a piece of bread” (Hayntige nayes, December 26, 1929: 1). We will come back to this “disgusting story.” According to the paper, the Orthodox youth denied their responsibility and tried, unsuccessfully, to blame either Bund activists (who also opposed Zionism), or another sport club. Notably, in their argument, the youth reappropriated the stereotype of the weak, effeminate orthodox boy, used – as we have seen – by Zionists as a counterpart to the muscular, manly, modern Jew. “They claimed that weak, pious guys (shvakhe, frume bokhurim) could not have done such a destruction, for they would not be able to tear out the window frames or jump over the high fence.” This argument is of interest in the context of Mordechai Mendel’s history. While Hayntige nayes questioned Mordechai Mendel’s participation, Nasz Przegląd, in the issue published on the very same day, held him responsible for the attack. The paper described him as a “penitent (baltshuve), a man of criminal past, who was deported to Siberia before the war for a grave felony” (Nasz Przegląd, December 26, 1929: 3). Mordechai Mendel’s past remains somehow enigmatic. By 1929 he was already known as Baltshuve, and this nickname became his second name. However, it is not clear when and in what circumstances he became a fiercely religious penitent (the account of his metamorphosis found in the novel situates it in the early 1900s, but as a whole it does not seem reliable; another version, also doubtful, suggests it took place after the Great War, which plunged Mordechai Mendel into extreme poverty, Przegląd

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Kresowy, January 22, 1930: 4). In the reminiscence in Sefer Praga, we read that at the time a mikveh (purifying bath) was built in Praga (that is in 1911), Mordechai Mendel learnt that it was constructed by Polish workers who worked during Shabbat. By then he was already a self-proclaimed warden, who would make sure that Shabbat was observed. He would also combat workers’ clubs where boys and girls mixed together. Thus, it came as no surprise that one Shabbat he attacked those Polish workers and beat them up (Królicki 1974: 150-152). Like Hayntige Nayes, Nasz Przegląd also informed its readers that Mordechai Mendel had recently been accused of “sexual excess.” According to the paper, after this accusation he had “disappeared for a while,” but shortly before the attack on Bar Kochba he re-emerged to deliver fierce speeches against athletes, whom he considered “guilty of all the misfortunes of the Jewish population.” His “cruelty and fanaticism, felony and piety, recalled mediaeval times” (Nasz Przegląd, December 26, 1929: 3). Within a week, the press established a coherent narrative of the events: “Last Wednesday, a few dozen Agudas members broke into the premises of Zionist association. They were led by a notorious rowdy and religious fanatic called Mendel the Penitent. They destroyed the premises, the equipment, and the library” (Nowy Dziennik, December 28, 1929: 2). At the same time, Nasz Przegląd published a series of comments and letters condemning the attack. They were written by the Zionist members of the kehilla leadership (Nasz Przegląd, December 31, 1929: 9) as well as by other prominent journalists, who interpreted the event in terms of a struggle between the conservative, dark forces of orthodoxy and progressive milieus. One comment, titled “Library Destroyers”, was offered by “Pierrot”, the nom-de-plume of Jakub Appenszlak (1894-1950), editor-in-chief of Nasz Przegląd, writer, and Zionist activist. Behind the mob led by a “mad fanatic” (undoubtedly a reference to Mordechai Mendel), there were, Appenszlak alleged, “backward” men, who tried to “strengthen their position in the kehilla” (a direct allusion to Agudas, which was not named in the text). They would destroy books by “writers, thinkers, [and] reformers, who brought the light of knowledge to the darkness of the spiritual ghetto” in a vain attempt to “stop the course of life, put out the lanterns of education, eradicate the thought of national revival, prevent the march of progressive ideas” (Nasz Przegląd, December 28, 1929: 4). Historians consider the event as an episode in Agudas’ struggle against Zionist influence in the kehilla. The struggle intensified in 1929, on the eve of a communal election. The incumbent presidency of the kehilla, technocratic as it was, prevented the articulation of political tensions in the debate, so the conflict moved to the street (Żebrowski 2012: 303). However, already in November 1923, the Orthodox youth had plundered the kehilla offices, protesting against construction of the House for Jewish Students on the grounds of the Praga bes-hamidrash (Żebrowski 2012: 205, 303; Żebrowski 2014a: 193-197). The spiritual leader of the protest was Rabbi Menachem Ziemba (Żebrowski 2014b: 230). In 1929, the papers recalled that Mordechai Mendel had also taken part in those riots. Apparently, the December attack was not his first – nor his last: he raided Bar Kochba again in January and February 1930 (Nasz Przegląd, January 21 and February 2, 1930). Both Zionist-oriented papers at the time and historians today portray Mordechai Mendel as an Agudas militant, an implacable enemy of Zionism ideologically close to Rabbi Ziemba. Interestingly, according to Nasz Przegląd (January 26, 1930: 3), Mordechai

Queer Messianism

Mendel claimed that he had been paid by Menachem Ziemba. (The latter, who was immediately interrogated by the judge, denied any connection with him.) However, Mordechai Mendel can hardly be regarded as an Agudas activist who pursued the party’s political goals. In 1931, he contested Rabbi Ziemba, who was a candidate of the Agudas in the kehilla election (5-ta rano, April 28, 1931: 2, Żebrowski 2012: 339, Żebrowski 2014b: 231). His hostility to the Bar Kochba club seems to have been not so much about its Zionist political profile as it was about modern sport culture in general. Secular culture, promoted by gymnastic associations, was supported by the Zionist communal leaders, and regarded by the Agudas as impious and morally corrupting, but Mordechai Mendel reproached with particular intensity the specific idea of coeducation in sport, which – I suggest – he considered destructive for a traditional, homosocial Hasidic community. I would go further and argue that the “latent possibilities” of Hasidic culture as regards the expression of queer sexuality were not limited to the specific form of male companionship. The Hasidic conceptualization of sin and redemption, violation of the law and true fulfillment of its precepts, is a key point in understanding what we may call Mordechai Mendel’s queer religiosity. The specific interplay between transgression and sanctity which was central to his spirituality was, to some extent, noticed by the Jewish press. When he was released from custody in December 1929 and appeared in the bes-hamidrash to meet his followers, Nasz Przegląd (December 29, 1929: 3) observed: “Interestingly, despite all his piety, on Saturday he went to the judge in a carriage and came back by tram.” Such negligence would be surprising for a devout Agudas militant. The account of his release was also published in the non-Jewish Polish press, with further (not necessarily reliable) details. Reportedly, he was cheerfully greeted by “crowds of fanatics” who drove him to Praga in a carriage despite the Shabbat, crying: “Don’t worry about Shabbat. Such a holy man can ride without a sin” (Expres Zagłębia, December 30, 1929). This transgressive element in Mordechai Mendel’s spirituality seems to be closely connected with a peculiar aspect of his religious activity. While this aspect was never mentioned by the Jewish press, it became a focal point for the non-Jewish Polish newspapers. Let us now have a closer look at this issue.

The worshipper of the Red Heifer The Polish non-Jewish press was interested neither in the Jewish political world nor in the conflict between Jewish (Zionist) modernity and (Hasidic) tradition. An attack on Bar Kochba, however, could sell well, so the press, particularly the tabloids, produced orientalizing or exoticizing narratives that focused on the “cult,” as they called it, of the Red Heifer, or red cow. The burnt offering of the red heifer (para adumma) is described in the Book of Numbers (19:1-22) and commented upon in one of the tractates of the Mishnah: Parah (cow), of the Tohorot order. In the Jewish Temple, the ashes of the heifer would be used to prepare a water of lustration needed for a ritual purification of those who had come into physical contact with a corpse. Jewish tradition considered the rite as enigmatic and incomprehensible by mere mortals. Two aspects of it are of particular interest with

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respect to Mordechai Mendel. Firstly, the fact that the person who performs the ritual becomes impure in the process, thus the purity of the community (according to Numbers 19:9 it is a congregation of the people of Israel who benefits from the rite) can only be restored at the cost of an individual becoming unclean and excluded. Secondly, according to tradition, the ritual was performed nine times before the destruction of the Second Temple and was not repeated afterwards. This gave it a distinct messianic character, for its next performance would announce the coming of the Messiah. Polish papers described “Mendel Sztraport” (that is Mordechai Mendel) as a “fanatic” who would attempt to “restore the ritual of the red cow” (Kurjer Warszawski, December 27, 1929: 2; Dziennik Wileński, December 28, 1929: 3). He was presented as an apocalyptic prophet who would envisage imminent punishment for impiousness, in particular for sport activity, which he regarded as a source of every evil and depravity (on this point the Jewish and non-Jewish press narrations converged). “He considers ‘red cow’ as one of the symbols of the struggle against the… progress of time.” (Rozwój, December 29, 1929: 5; Dziennik Bydgoski, December 31, 1929: 4). According to the non-Jewish press, Mordechai Mendel’s attack on the Bar Kochba club was an act of retaliation after he had been beaten in the shtiebel on Ząbkowska street because of his plans to burn a red cow (as we remember, Nasz Przegląd, which also referred to the fight in the shtiebel, interpreted it in terms of the conflict between two branches of the family of the Tsadik Taub). Having spent a night in a hospital, Mordechai Mendel allegedly mobilized his supporters, armed them with axes, and attacked the club. The non-Jewish Polish press claimed that he had led such raids before; a year earlier he reportedly had attacked another sport club as well as disturbed a football match (Expres Zagłębia, December 28, 1929: 5). After the raid on Bar Kochba, as soon as he was released from custody, Mordechai Mendel reportedly declared he would take up a search for a red cow in order to burn it in the forest near Otwock (Expres Zagłębia, December 30, 1929). Notably, the Polish non-Jewish press started to write about Mordechai Mendel a few days before his attack on the sport club. Papers described his activities in towns west of Warsaw, where he visited yeshivas and explained that financial troubles (the Great Depression had just begun) were a punishment for sins that only the offering of a red cow could redeem. Despite the protests of local tsadiks and the general reluctance of local communities, he managed to form a group of followers who decided to buy a cow. It turned out, however, that the cow they acquired had white patches that were painted red by a dishonest merchant (Expres Zagłębia, December 21, 1929). The story of the painted cow was widely distributed by the Poles to ridicule not so much Mordechai Mendel himself as the entire Jewish community, torn as it was by religious and political controversies. In 1931 Władysław Zambrzycki, a right-wing journalist, published a picaresque adventure novel Nasza Pani Radosna (Our Lady of Joy). In the novel, a group of friends, having used the hallucinatory drug peyote, travel in time to Pompei, where they meet, among other groups, Jewish worshippers of a red cow, who are constantly quarrelling with the Hellenized Rabbi of Herculaneum (Zambrzycki 1959: 97-100). Zambrzycki focused on the story of the painted cow to mock and stereotype Jews (Zambrzycki 1959: 161-165, 204-205). In his critical review of the novel, socialist activist and journalist Julian Maliniak, translator of Marx and Trotsky, accu-

Queer Messianism

rately observed that “the stories about these Jews are written in a tone similar to szmonces [i.e., Jewish-styled jokes often inherently antisemitic] typical for certain Warsaw cheap tabloids” (Robotnik, December 24, 1931). Indeed, starting in January 1930, Express Poranny, a popular daily based in Warsaw, systematically published on its last, tabloid, page short satirical texts – not without antisemitic resonances – on the activity of “worshippers of the red cow.” These texts, widely reprinted by other journals, were published anonymously. Although they were attributed, based on stylistic criteria, to the famous Polish writer Stefan Wiechecki (see Wiechecki 2012: 353-355), it is much more probable that their author was Zambrzycki himself, who edited this page of the paper (Niciński 2013: 377-388; Niciński 2015: 92). The Polish non-Jewish press was delighted when Mordechai Mendel raided Bar Kochba again in January and February 1930. Express Poranny spared no details in its numerous texts. After the January raid, the paper reported, Mordechai Mendel mounted a horse and rode, in the middle of the day, through the main street of Praga – Targowa – south, to the towns of Wawer and Falenica (Wiechecki 2012: 25-26; Falenica is situated close to Otwock, a town that played, as we will see, an important role in Mordechai Mendel’s biography). Soon he attacked again. He entered the mikveh, chased away the people, performed a purification bath, and proclaimed “great penitence” that would last two and half months and end up with the burning of a red cow (Wiechecki 2012: 30-31; also Expres Zagłębia, February 4, 1930: 5). Interestingly, the mikveh he occupied was the one on 31 Szeroka Street. Eventually, Mordechai Mendel was forced to face the court. In March 1930, he was accused by a public prosecutor of vagrancy and disturbing the public peace, and by Bar Kochba of an attack on the club. He was acquitted of all charges (he argued that for religious reasons he could not have a permanent place of living, but since he stayed in Praga among his followers, he was not a vagrant in a literal sense; Bar Kochba’s accusation was rejected on formal grounds, for the club did not pay the court fee). The non-Jewish press showed great interest in the legal proceedings. Even the daily bulletin of the Polish Ministry of Military Affairs published the account of the trial (Polska Zbrojna, March 23, 1930), and the Catholic, nationalist, and overtly antisemitic paper Wieniec-Pszczółka (April 13, 1930: 235) reprinted Zambrzycki’s text from Express Poranny. The papers derided, with unconcealed delight, the strange crowd of red cow worshippers who came armed with sticks to support Mordechai Mendel. After his acquittal, the crowd reportedly took him on their arms in triumphant procession to the bes-hamidrash, where they feasted (Wiechecki 2012: 65-66; also Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny, March 25, 1930: 5). As we can see, there were two separate narratives on the activities of Mordechai Mendel: one produced by the Jewish press (published both in Yiddish and in Polish), the other presented by the non-Jewish papers. The former regarded Baltshuve as a man of the Agudas, a fierce militant of religious orthodoxy and implacable enemy of Zionists. The latter focused on the exoticized “cult of the red cow,” which – notably – was not mentioned in the Jewish press. Still, the non-Jewish press was hardly interested in serious reflection on Mordechai Mendel’s commitment to the ritual of the Red Heifer. Characteristically, the Polish papers never mentioned his sexuality, and neither did Zambrzycki in his novel. This question was alluded to – in a very light tone –

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by the rather infamous scribbler Kazimierz Brzeski (nom-de-plume of Kazimierz Fliederbaum), author of satirical songs for cabarets, specializing also in szmonces. He edited the satirical paper Trubadur Warszawy, where he published in 1932 his “szmonces song” entitled Ja jeszcze nie wiem (I do not know yet). Its stylistic clumsiness makes the text largely incomprehensible, but allusions to Baltshuve are pretty clear: Maybe soon I will make myself wildly religious / And I will kiss the back of a red cow in Falenica […] / Maybe I will become a harlot […] / I want Satanism, I want insadism3 […] / As for my chastity, ladies, keep away […] / Maybe I will ride on a wild horse to the fields of Otwock (Trubadur Warszawy, June 4, 1932: 5). This satirical text, inept and not very funny (quite typically for Brzeski’s literary production), would hardly merit attention if it were not for the fact that it combined allusions to Baltshuve’s sexuality with references to the ritual of the Red Heifer and mention of his triumphant horse ride. Although Brzeski did it only to ridicule Mordechai Mendel, I believe that it is precisely the question of Mordechai Mendel’s (homo)sexuality that should illuminate his commitment to the messianic ritual. We enter here into the field of speculation, for the character of the press narratives and the lack of Mordechai Mendel’s own words make any assumption tenuous, but I would propose that for Mordechai Mendel his homosexuality, insofar as it was considered impure and condemned him to social alienation, became a messianic vocation. Only a queer outcast, a battered and reproached prophet, might secure the purity of Jewish tradition and save homosocial Hasidic communities from the destructive forces of modernity, embodied in the sport institutions. We may see here two tendencies, which, according to Gershom Scholem, are inherent in the Jewish messianic idea. One is restorative, the other is utopian; both “are deeply intertwined and yet at the same time of a contradictory nature; the Messianic idea crystallizes only out of the two of them together” (Scholem 1995: 3). Mordechai Mendel would strive to restore the ideal of Hasidic community, but the very figure of sinful queer prophet which he embodied was essentially utopian. It aimed at messianic redemption, which Mordechai Mendel symbolically announced with his triumphal ride on horseback through the main street of Praga.

A “disgusting story” As we have seen, the Jewish press alluded, usually very vaguely, to sexual relations Mordechai Mendel was supposed to have had with bokhurim, young men studying in shiblekh and yeshivas. But there was one sexual scandal – referred to as heslekhe geshikhte, a disgusting story – that received detailed coverage by the press. It was described simultaneously in two important Jewish papers: Nasz Głos Wieczorny (May 13, 1929: 2), a Polish-language afternoon paper of popular, scandalizing character, that was linked to the more highbrow Nasz Przegląd (which also published a short note on the incident); and the Yiddish Haynt (May 14, 1929: 3), a liberal, progressive, Zionist-leaning, middle-class daily. The two versions of the story are similar, although Nasz Głos Wieczorny presented 3

A pun typical for Brzeski: wsadyzm is a word play of “put inside” and “sadism”.

Queer Messianism

it in a more sensational manner. The very title is instructive: “Mordche [i.e. Mordechai] the Penitent wanted for indecency. Unusual case of pious pervert, thief, and murderer on the streets of Warsaw.” Haynt chose a title that sounds modest in comparison: “Pious ‘hero’ Mordechai Mendel caught for disgusting deeds.” Both texts start with the recollection of the “pogrom” against the kehilla authorities that took place in November 1923. Haynt reminded its readers also of Mordechai Mendel’s attack on the Maccabi sport club (apparently, the Polish press was right to claim that Bar Kochba was not the first). Nasz Głos Wieczorny went on to characterize Baltshuve as a thief, rustler, human trafficker, and murderer, once sentenced to the galleys. After his release from the galleys he became, Nasz Głos Wieczorny continued, a penitent, bearded, dressed in religious garments, sleeping on hard benches in this or that mikveh, bes-hamidrash, or shtiebel. He wandered between small towns around Warsaw, visiting various tsadiks. On Saturdays and festival days, he engaged in fights with those who did not observe the Shabbat (and, for example, smoked cigarettes). Both papers noted that before he appeared in the Praga district, he had lived in Otwock, a town near Warsaw, but he had to escape because of “immoral deeds” with young men. Haynt wrote: “Now it becomes clear that it was no secret that Mordechai Mendel constantly seduced (farfirt) young boys from the bes-hamidrash. For such deeds (maysim) he was expelled from Otwock, where he had lived before moving to Warsaw.” The scandal of May 1929 concerned 11-year-old Aron, son of Yaakov Yitzchak Robak. Mordechai Mendel allegedly saw him on Brukowa Street, invited him to his place and said: “here’s half a zloty, do my will” (“tu meyn rotsn” according to Haynt). In the Polish version of Nasz Głos Wieczorny these words were rendered as: “here’s half a zloty, appease my desire” (the Hebrew word “ratzon” may mean both “will” and “desire”). The boy managed to escape and reported everything to his father, who started looking for Baltshuve. The next day he found him in the mikveh, but Mordechai Mendel got away. Haynt concluded its report: “Gabbaim (wardens) of every bes-hamidrash and shtiebel in Praga were asked not to let Mordechai Mendel in because of his savage acts (vilde maysim) with young boys (yinglekh).” And Nasz Przegląd (May 15, 1929: 9) added that young men from yeshivas felt “disgusted with his immoral deeds” and that “they searched for him vigorously to deal with him” and to “lynch him.” The reliability of these accounts is not easy to determine. Let us point out that we are dealing here with two separate issues: (1) general remarks on Mordechai Mendel’s sexual relations with young men; and (2) the specific case of Aron Robak, on which the newspapers focused. As for Mordechai Mendel’s attraction to yeshive bokhurim, it seems to have been a well-known fact at the time – even if the papers might have overemphasized it, possibly to insinuate the sexual character of his relations with young devout followers who accompanied him on his raids. The bokhurim were 14-23 years of age (Huberband 1987: 175). Thus, they were much younger than Mordechai Mendel himself, but certainly older than Aron Robak, and they were considered adults both in terms of religious law (they had already had their bar-mitzvah) and state law (the age of sexual majority was 14). The case of Aron Robak was very different, and it was the press narrative that situated it in the context of Baltshuve’s relations with other younger men (notably, while the press usually referred to these men as bokhurim, Haynt used the word yinglekh). Clearly, such an association was intended to strengthen the credibility

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of this particular case. This credibility, though, seems doubtful.4 The case was not undertaken by the public prosecutor during the trial in spring 1930, even though it would have been a much more serious crime (according to paragraph 516 of the Penal Code, in such cases an attempt was also punishable) than the vagrancy of which Mordechai Mendel was accused. Moreover, only a few months after his alleged assault on Aron Robak, a serialized novel on his life began to be published in one of the most popular Yiddish evening papers, which was associated with the Haynt. Mordechai Mendel was presented there in a most favorable way, as a national Jewish hero. Such a literary image could hardly be conceived (and published in this type of newspaper), were it not for considerable distrust or disbelief concerning the May scandal. Both papers that reported the case were overtly hostile to Mordechai Mendel and interested in smearing his reputation. They deeply disapproved of his religious stance (both were progressive, modernizing, and leaned toward mainstream Zionism) and condemned his alleged participation in the protests in 1923 (notably, both recall these events). One may observe that Mordechai Mendel’s words – the key element of the scandal – equivocal as they were in Yiddish (the language he spoke), became unambiguous in the Haynt interpretation and, subsequently, in the Polish translation. It is quite possible that the boy misinterpreted the whole situation (he could have been terrified because of what he already knew or had heard about Baltshuve), or it was for the papers to present it in a way that would discredit Mordechai Mendel and shape his image as a depraved criminal. One should also notice that the key figure in the story seems to have been the boy’s father, Yaakov Yitzchak Robak, whom the press portrayed as the person who stirred up the outrage. Interestingly, he would reappear in December as a figure instrumental in the events that led to the raid on Bar Kochba. As we remember, a day before the raid, Mordechai Mendel was severely beaten. The press presented various explanations for this event: The Jewish Nasz Przegląd claimed it was a result of a feud between two branches of the Taub family, while according to the non-Jewish press, Baltshuve was assaulted because of his adherence to the ritual of the Red Heifer. However, the article “Mordechai Mendel has appeared again”, published in Unzer Ekspres (December 24, 1929: 6) immediately after the brawl in the shtiebel, sheds a completely new light on the story. As regards the course of events, the text corresponds to the note from Nasz Przegląd: Baltshuve was attacked in a shtiebel on Ząbkowska Street, then asked a policeman for help, and eventually was taken to the Praga hospital. But Unzer Ekspres provided its readers with new details which explain the actual reasons behind the assault. The paper reminded the public of Mordechai Mendel’s infamous deeds of deception (maysim taatuim), that is his sexual relations with young yeshiva students, and added sarcastically that “more than once he had been beaten up for his ‘pious deeds’ (maysim toyvim).” This time, Unzer Ekspres claimed, Baltshuve was battered after he had tried to borrow a tallit (prayer shawl) from one of the men who prayed in the shtiebel on Ząbkowska Street – a certain Yaakov Yitzchak. One may assume it was no other than Yaakov Yitzchak Robak.

4

As this case seems unlikely, I am not analyzing it in the social and cultural context. Scandalous as they were for the middle-class press, such sexual practices deserve wider historical contextualization, which could be illuminated by studies on the figure of “punk” (or gunsel in Yiddish) and jokerpunk relationships in early 20th century America; see Allsop 1967; Boag 2003: 34-35.

Queer Messianism

Robak reportedly said to Baltshuve: “I will not lend a tallit to such a sinful Jew whose dishonesty brings shame upon Jewish people [poshe oykher Isroel]. Such a sinner [balaveyrenik] can pray in a sack” and started to rain blows on him. Was it just the reaction of an enraged father? In the next paragraph the paper characterizes those who attacked Baltshuve in the shtiebel as Gerer Hasidim, Hasids of Ger, the followers of the Tsadik of Góra Kalwaria, who was, as we remember, a pivotal figure in the Agudas. The mention of the Gerer men adds another layer to the story, which, to some extent, corresponds with the explanation offered by Nasz Przegląd. Clearly, Mordechai Mendel was involved in some conflict within the Hasidic community, and it is not improbable that Yaakov Yitzkhak Robak, who opposed him on religious and political grounds, would orchestrate a sexual scandal to discredit him. The limited reliability of the press – deeply involved in the strife over the modernization of the Jewish community, and with good reasons to vilify Mordechai Mendel – makes it difficult to understand what really happened in May and December 1929. Mordechai Mendel was known to have had sexual relations with yeshive bokhurim. He certainly took part in religious and political feuds, both between Hasidim and Zionists and between various factions of the Hasidic community in Warsaw (and apparently his relations with the Agudas were much more complicated than what the liberal-Zionist press suggested since, as we remember, in 1931 he contested the party during the kehilla election). If I am right to regard his activism as motivated by a specific concept of queer messianism, it is easy to understand why some factions of the Gerer community, as well as the Zionist press – both of whom were hostile to Mordechai Mendel on religious and political grounds, albeit for different reasons – would be interested in portraying him as a sexual predator. But what could have caused his conflict with the Gerer community? As we have seen, Baltshuve’s sexuality, his idiosyncratic religiosity, and his political militancy intertwine around the specific, homosocial forms of conviviality characteristic of traditional Hasidic culture. These forms, so dear, it seems, to Mordechai Mendel, became endangered – not only by Zionists, but also by some of the Hasidim themselves. In interwar Poland, the Hasidic community faced new challenges and underwent significant transformation. Part of this transformation was the development of networks of new yeshivas that were meant to replace traditional shtiblekh. “With a frequently strict code of conduct, onsite dormitories for students, and permanent control of the staff, these schools were meant to provide an institutional framework for Hasidic youth and to keep them off the streets, literally, until they could get married” (Tworek 2020: 313). This newly imposed regime of control (which corresponded to modernity and its ‘pillar of regulation’, even if the modern paradigm of emancipation was rejected) directly affected Hasidic youth. One may suppose that Mordechai Mendel, the anti-modern mystic and restorer of traditional forms of Hasidic sociability, would find himself in conflict with those in the Gerer community who supported new regulations.

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A guardian of Israel As we have already mentioned, the story of Mordechai Mendel was instantly fictionalized. A serialized novel based on his life appeared in Hayntige nayes in daily installments from February 16 until June 1, 1930, under the title Mordechai Mendele ‘Baltshuve’ (interesante biografie fun a merkvirdigen tip) – “An Interesting Biography of a Remarkable Character”. The text was written by M. Federgrin, a promising Yiddish writer who started his literary activity in 1928 by contributing to the local journals of the Praga district. Born in 1901 and educated in a yeshiva, he later studied at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin. In 1929, he began to publish regularly in Haynt and Hayntige nayes (as well as in Nasz Przegląd). He was also a Zionist activist and a member of the council of Praga Zionist Organization. Although the novel was written immediately after Baltshuve’s raids on the Bar Kokhba club, it did not narrate these events. It dealt with much earlier chapters in Mordechai Mendel’s life: from his birth in 1868 to the moment of his religious metamorphosis at the very beginning of the 1900s, when he was in his thirties. Nevertheless, the plot clearly alluded to the recent events and aimed to reconcile religiosity and modernity, Hasidic piety and Zionism, in the face of growing antisemitism. The first episode narrates the history of the somehow miraculous birth of the protagonist – named after the famous Tsadik Mordechai Menachem Mendel (1819–1868) of the Warka (Vurke) Hasidic dynasty (the novel constantly underlines his specific relation with Warka tsadiks). Growing up, Mordechai Mendel witnessed drunken Polish peasants abusing Jews every Friday following the market hours in Kamionek, a sub-district of Praga. Already as a six-year-old boy, strong and beautiful, he vowed to become a “guardian (shomer) of Israel,” who would not let any Jew be beaten, and even swore to kill all the goyim. He planned to go to Simhah Bunem (1851–1907), next in the line of Warka tsadiks, to ask him for a blessing. This, however, would happen only many years later, at the very end of the novel: the last scene presents Mordechai Mendel crying and lamenting at Simhah Bunem’s feet in Otwock, where the rabbi indeed resided before he moved to Palestine in 1905, and where – as we remember – Mordechai Mendel reportedly lived before arriving to Warsaw. The choice of Simhah Bunem as a figure that fastens the story together is by no means accidental. The Tsadik was famous for his uncompromised religious observance and resistance to modernity; at the same time, he was the one who, despite the wishes of his wife and congregation, decided to move to Palestine, which resonated with the Zionist ideal. To defend the Jewish people against widespread aggression, Mordechai Mendel has to resort to violent means. One of the fights ends in his killing of a gentile Pole, another with the murder of a Russian policeman. Mordechai Mendel is then forced to escape from Warsaw and to leave his wife. He wanders throughout Europe. In Paris he has a female lover, Lucy, but he leaves her, too, and moves to Liverpool, where he works on the “air-machine” that would liberate people by enabling them to fly (a common literary motif of the time). However, his hopes are shattered as the machine crashes to the earth (it is, metaphorically, the moment of disenchantment with modernity and its model of emancipation). This failure constitutes a breaking point in the story. Mordechai Mendel gets a letter from his wife, who urges him to come back to Warsaw. He is ready to go,

Queer Messianism

but before leaving Liverpool, he sees a Jewish youth being bullied by the crowd on a street. He intervenes: “I will kill the man who will touch him” – he cries in English,5 and is immediately faced with a response from the crowd: “Gentlemen, do you see? He himself is a cursed Jew!” (Hayntige nayes, May 26, 1930). In the ensuing fight that breaks out, Mordechai Mendel kills a man and is forced to run away from Liverpool. He hides on another side of the British Isle, in Hull (Kingston upon Hull; the choice of place is meaningful, since Hull was the city where large groups of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe landed), in a brothel run by a certain Tsirele. In Hull, he discovers a mysterious synagogue, Adass Isroel. The name brings to mind the German-Jewish congregations that advocated strict observance of the law, as opposed to Reform Judaism, but the congregation presented in the novel is very different. The heads of men there are not covered – “like in Berlin on Johannisstraße” – and, as it turns out soon enough, a portrait of Jesus hangs on a wall, which makes it “worse than Johannisstraße” (Hayntige nayes, May 27, 1930). The reference to the Johannisstraße Reform synagogue is not accidental. Federgrin, who studied in Berlin, must have known this synagogue very well: built in 1853, with services on Sunday rather than Saturday and organ music, it “embodied the outlook of Berlin’s Reform Jews: its exterior was sophisticated and religiously neutral – German – while the interior signaled a modern Judaism in harmony with contemporary (Christian) notions of decorum” (Coenen Snyder 2013: 49). The congregation in Hull, Tsirele explains, was founded by “missionaries” and “soulcatchers”. Mordechai Mendel is advised to run away from them. In a dream, he is visited by the deceased Warka Rabbi, who also warns him of dangerous missionaries. Mordechai Mendel decides to confront them. He hears a sermon on the Book of Genesis, in which the missionaries explain that the suffix “-im” in the word “Elohim” is a plural ending, and thus that there were “gods” who created the earth. Mordechai Mendel protests: “There is only one God in the world” (Hayntige nayes, May 28, 1930). Then, unexpectedly, a person who knows him from the past, from the bes-hamidrash in Praga district, stands up and accuses him of being a violent criminal. Mordechai Mendel attacks this man, then runs away and leaves England (with some help from Tsirele, who is frightened that the police will raid her brothel to find him), eventually to return to Warsaw. On his way he has another dream, in which all his victims appear in a strange danse macabre. This is his moment of religious metamorphosis. He comes back to Warsaw as a baltshuve, a penitent, grants a divorce to his deserted wife, then goes to Otwock, to Simhah Bunem, seeking spiritual consolation. The novel thus presents Mordechai Mendel as a tormented hero, who only used violence to defend otherwise unprotected Jews. His violent acts haunt him and lead to penitence. Peppered with motifs taken from Dostoevsky (a virtuous prostitute who takes care of a murderer and becomes instrumental in the process of his religious transformation), the novel explains Mordechai Mendel’s turn to Orthodoxy in terms of defending Jewish identity against shady missionaries and reformers. The declaration: “There is only one God in the world” is a call for Jewish unity. Mordechai Mendel is no longer a 5

The phrases are written phonetically with Hebrew letters. The novel, apparently in pursuit of realism, uses English, Polish, and Russian utterances.

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backward Orthodox man but a true shomer of Israel, a character with potential appeal to Zionists. However, there was a price to be paid for such a reconciliation – Mordechai Mendel’s total heteronormalization by the author. There is no place here for the ‘real’ Mordechai Mendel and his queer messianism. A gay outcast, who strove to restore the traditional homosocial Hasidic community, has given way to a Jewish national hero accompanied by a wife and a female lover.

Queer religiosity In 1933, Mordechai Mendel decided to walk by foot to Palestine “for religious reasons, to hasten the arrival of the Messiah” (Dzień dobry, July 20, 1935: 9). However, he only got as far as the town of Belz, where he stayed at the Tsadik’s court for two full years. At the beginning of 1935, a rumor spread in Warsaw that he was considering going back to Praga. But soon, Unzer Ekspres reported that Mordechai Mendel had sent a letter to a friend in which he strongly denied these rumors and confirmed his desire to go to Palestine. The paper reported what Mordechai Mendel allegedly wrote in his letter about his activities in Belz. He would visit graves of old tsadiks and pray for a bad time (lit. black year, shvartse yor) for “all those sinful Jews who play sports together – boys with girls” (Unzer Ekspres, January 29, 1935: 8). Clearly, he (or the author of the article) had not forgotten about Bar Kochba, and the letter seems to confirm that his main concern was the modern sport culture which could harm the traditional homosocial Hasidic community. Half a year later, in July 1935, Mordechai Mendel allegedly sent another letter to a certain Motele, his “old close friend” in Praga district. There he described – the press reported – his early days in the tsadik’s court in Belz. At the beginning, he says, “people looked at him as some kind of wild beast,” but soon he was taken care of, and came to feel “comfortable at Rabbi’s table” (Unzer Ekspres, July 18, 1935: 8). According to the press, Mordechai Mendel informed his friend about a sudden illness that made him think about coming back to Praga, “for he would not like to die in the foreign land.” Whether he did return, we do not know. The Tsadik of Belz, Aharon Rokeach (1880-1957), was an important religious and political figure whose authority was recognized by many Galician kehillot as well as internationally (in 1936, he hosted the Greek Prince Peter to discuss the situation of the Jewish people in Palestine and Germany). Notably, in 1931, when Mordechai Mendel confronted Rabbi Ziemba in kehillah elections, Rokeach reactivated the party known as Machzike ha-Dat, which became an Orthodox opposition to Agudas and particularly to the political domination of the Tsadik of Ger. Twenty years before Mordechai Mendel’s visit to Belz, when R. Aharon Rokeach’s father, Yissachar Dov Rokeach (1854–1926), was the Tsadik, 19-year-old Jiří Mordechai Langer arrived at the court. Langer, known for his book on Die Erotik der Kabbala (1923) and his friendship with Franz Kafka, spent six years in Belz (1913-1919). During this time, Jiří, from a well-respected, secularized family in Prague, became Mordechai, pious student of Torah. In his masterful Ph.D. dissertation on Langer, Shaun Jacob Halper asked: “Was Langer’s highly unusual decision to run away to the Hasidic court related

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to his homosexuality? Was Belz a refuge for a confused and bewildered adolescent boy? Or did Jiří discover his same-sex desire at Belz among the Hasidim?” (Halper 2013: 34). Looking for the answer, Halper quotes a passage from Langer’s Die Erotik der Kabbala: To understand what kind of love [Liebe] dwelled between the “yoshvim” [talmudic scholars], one only has to step into the beis ha-midrash, where they are enveloped with their studies. Here sit two young men (bachurim), with beards just beginning to cover their chins, “studying” assiduously over thick Talmud-folios. The one holds the other by his beard, looks deep into his eyes, and in this manner explains a complicated Talmud passage. And there, two friends (yedidim) pace around the hall deep in conversation, while embracing one another. (During meals one can see that they always dine out of the same bowl). In the dark corner stand a pair. The younger of the two rests his back against the wall, the elder has the entire frontal part of his body literally pressed against him; they look lovingly in each other’s eyes, but keep still. (quoted after Halper 2013: 35) Halper comments: Whether Langer “discovered” his homosexuality before, during, or after his time living with the Hasidim will probably never be fully determined. That he experienced, or reimagined his experience, in the Hasidic world as homoerotic is undeniable [. . .]. For now, it is enough to point out that for Langer Hasidism was an incubator of male-male love and sexual desire. (Halper 2013: 35; see also Halper 2011) Similarly, in concluding this study, we need to ask what the story of Mordechai Mendel, whose social background was completely different from Langer’s, tells us about this particular affinity between Hasidic religiosity and homosexual desire. Halper explains this affinity in terms of specific forms of Hasidic sociability: “male companionship, [which] created a competing social environment with the home and offered an alternative to the world of family and community” (Halper 2013: 25 n. 70). Ofri Ilany observed that “in Langer’s understanding, one of the only places where the masculine erotic element remained intact was the Hassidic court” (Ilany 2017b: 139). Mordechai Mendel, a penitent sleeping in yeshivas and shtiblekh, surrounded by young devout followers, would also fit this image. But at the same time, he was more of a street fighter than a person “enveloped in his studies.” Thus, I have tried to emphasize the messianic element inherent in his religious passion. The restorative tendency in his messianism would appeal to the vision of Hasidic male companionship which apparently corresponded to that of Langer’s. The will to save, or rather restore, this form of homosocial conviviality would translate into political activism, far from being reduced to Agudas militancy or a defense of Jewish unity, as was conceived by Federgrin in his novel. This activism was stimulated by the utopian tendency which we recognize in Mordechai Mendel’s commitment to the ritual of the Red Heifer, and which should be interpreted in terms of a specific mission of a queer outcast, a sinner, who would become instrumental for messianic redemption. This, however, would mean that Baltshuve regarded queer sexuality as a sin or guilt. Is it then possible that his ‘penance’ and deep religiosity was in fact motivated by the

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will to repress, and not to express his sexuality? Could he have had two conflicting souls in his tormented body: that of sexual sinner, and that of religious penitent? Could he have striven to annihilate – through repentance – his sexual desire? The fact that he openly disregarded the Shabbat (while forcing others to observe it) makes it reasonable to suppose that his activity should rather be interpreted in the context of a Sabbatean reinterpretation of the old rabbinic concept of mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah (a commandment which is fulfilled by means of a transgression). This concept could at times lead to understanding a violation of the Torah as the fulfillment of the true meaning of its own precepts. Gershom Scholem expressed this idea in a formula of “Redemption through Sin” (Sholem 1995: 78-141). This is the context in which one should analyze Mordechai Mendel’s commitment to the ritual of the Red Heifer, where the one who purifies becomes impure. It seems that, for Mordechai Mendel, his queer sexuality in all its “impurity” became a vocation, a path to redemption, and not something that should simply be repressed. But perhaps Mordechai Mendel’s religiosity should be analyzed in terms of a popular religion rebelle, so dear to Pasolini?6 Maybe it had more in common with the religiosity of social outcasts, criminals, and queers of the lower classes, with the religiosity of, say, Jean Genet, than with Hasidic theology? Is it possible to think of Mordechai Mendel as Genet without a pen? For Genet, “saintliness […] is still only the most beautiful word in human language” (Genet 1964: 214). This notion of saintliness dwells on the Catholic tradition (Eribon 2015: 133), but it strives to prevent “restoring to saintliness the Christian meaning which I want to remove from it” (Genet 1964: 215). It is a religiosity without religion: Saintliness: union with God. Saintliness will be when the tribunal ceases, that is, when the judge and judged merge. A tribunal decides between good and evil. It pronounces sentence, it imposes punishment. I shall cease to be the judge and the accused. (Genet 1964: 245). Saintliness appears as a call, an appeal to invent morality and community that would find “its coherence only in itself, in a loyalty to itself, without referring to the majoritarian moral systems” (Eribon 2015: 316). It opens the way out of the transcendent totality of an unjust social order; it is an escape into the unknown-ness of life: “Unable to give a definition of saintliness – no more than I can of beauty – I want at every moment to create it, that is, to act so that everything I do may lead me to it, though it is unknown to me…” (Genet 1964: 208). How is one to understand Mordechai Mendel and his militant queer religiosity? Was he a guardian of the specific form of homosocial conviviality? A mystic striving to actualize a messianic vision of redemption through sin? A popular religious rebel in Pasolini’s sense of the term? Or a tormented sexual sinner condemned to never-ending penance? I believe he could have been all of the above. The sources at our disposal do not allow us to come to a definitive conclusion. Perhaps, then, one should simply remain 6

Cf. papers presented in November 2015 at the conference at the Université Saint Paul in Ottawa: Pasolini: religion rebelle, Réflexions éthico-politiques sur l'œuvre de Pier Paolo Pasolini, eds. Julie Paquette, Marc De Kesel, Théorèmes 10, 2017.

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“loyal to the story,” for, as Arendt has aptly put it, only a “storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it” (Arendt 1968: 105).

Bibliography Press sources: 5-ta rano (Pol.) Dziennik Bydgoski (Pol.) Dziennik Wileński (Pol.) Dzień dobry (Pol.) Expres Zagłębia (Pol.) Haynt (Yid.) Hayntige nayes (Yid.) Ilustrowany Kuryer Codzienny (Pol.) Kurjer Warszawski (Pol.) Nasz Głos Wieczorny (Pol.) Nasz Przegląd (Pol.) Nowy Dziennik (Pol.) Polska Zbrojna (Pol.) Przegląd Kresowy (Pol.) Robotnik (Pol.) Rozwój (Pol.) Trubadur Warszawy (Pol.) Unzer Ekspres (Yid.) Wieniec-Pszczółka (Pol.)

References: Allsop, Kenneth (1967): Hard Travelin’: The hobo and his history, New York: New American Library. Arendt, Hannah (1968): “Isak Dinesen: 1885-1963.” In: Men in Dark Times, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., pp. 95-109. Benjamin, Walter (1996): “Critique of Violence.” In: Selected Writings, vol. 1: 1913-1926, ed. Marcus Bullock/Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, pp. 236-252. Boag, Peter (2003): Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific Northwest, Berkeley: University of California Press. Boyarin, Daniel (1997): Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, Berkeley: University of California Press. Coenen Snyder, Saskia (2013): Building a Public Judaism. Synagogues and Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Eribon, Didier (2015): Une morale du minoritaire, Paris: Flammarion.

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Genet, Jean (1964): The Thief’s Journal, transl. Bernard Frechtman, New York: Grove Press. Ginzburg, Carlo (1992): The Cheese and the Worms. The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, transl. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Halper, Shaun Jacob (2011): “Coming out of the Hasidic closet: Jiří Mordechai Langer (1894–1943) and the fashioning of homosexual-Jewish identity.” In: Jewish Quarterly Review 101(2), pp. 189-231. Halper, Shaun Jacob (2013): Mordechai Langer (1894-1943) and the Birth of the Modern Jewish Homosexual, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/813b/0ccfd40efa2cfc06354718833e386aa7adc9. pdf?_ga=2.183659494.1347707192.1572103342-708816868.1572103342 [November 2019] Heller, Celia S. (1994): On the Edge of Destruction. Jews of Poland between the Two World Wars, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Huberband, Shimon (1987): Kiddush Hashem. Jewish Religious and Cultural Life in Poland During the Holocaust, transl. David E. Fishman, Hoboken, NJ: Ktav. Ilany, Ofri (2017a): “‘An oriental vice’. Representations of sodomy in early Zionist discourse.” In: National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective: The Homophobic Argument, Achim Rohde/Christina von Braun/Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 107-120. Ilany, Ofri (2017b): “Homo-Semitism: Jewish Men, Greek Love and the Rise of Homosexual Identity.” In: Internal Outsiders – Imagined Orientals? Antisemitism, Colonialism and Modern Constructions of Jewish Identity, Ulrike Brunotte/Jürgen Mohn/Christina Späti (eds.), Würzburg: Ergon, pp. 131-142. Kama, Amit (2011): “Parading Pridefully into the Mainstream: Gay and Lesbian Immersion in the Civil Core.” In: The Contradictions of Israeli Citizenship: Land, Religion, State, Guy Ben-Porat/Bryan S. Turner (eds.), London: Routledge, pp. 180–202. Królicki Abraham (1974): “Prager tipn.” In: Sefer Praga, ed. Gabriel Waisman, [Tel Aviv]: Irgun yotse Praga be-Yisrael, pp. 150-152 [In Yiddish]. Landau-Czajka, Anna (2006): Syn będzie Lech… Asymilacja Żydów w Polsce międzywojennej, Warszawa: Neriton. Niciński, Konrad (2013): ”Długi cień Prusa nad Warszawą. Wiech, Zambrzycki, Tyrmand.” In: Realiści, realizm, realność, ed. E. Paczoska et al., Warszawa: Narodowe Centrum Kultury, pp. 377–388. Niciński, Konrad (2015): “Fenomen ‘czerwoniaka’ i legenda międzywojennej Warszawy.” In: Białostockie Studia Literaturoznawcze 7, pp. 89-103. Orłowicz, Mieczysław (1930): Warsaw (Warszawa): City Map. July 26, 2021 (https://rcin. org.pl/dlibra/publication/248/edition/129?language=en). Plapp, Laurel (2008): Zionism and Revolution in European-Jewish Literature, New York: Routledge. Presner, Todd S. (2007): Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration, New York: Routledge. Proust, Marcel (2006): Remembrance of Things Past, vol II: Cities of the Plain, transl. C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Stephen Hudson, London: Wordsworth.

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Ritz, German (2005:. “Inexpressible Desire and Narrative Poetics: Homosexuality in Iwaszkiewicz, Breza, Mach and Gombrowicz.” In: Gender and Sexuality in Ethical Context: Ten Essays on Polish Prose, Knut Andreas Grimstad/Ursula Phillips (eds.). In: Slavica Bergensia 5, Bergen, pp. 254-276. Scholem, Gershom (1995): The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, transl. Michael A. Meyer/Hillel Halkin, New York: Schocken. Sousa Santos, Boaventura de (1995): Toward a New Common Sense: Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition, New York: Routledge. Steakley James D. 1(999): “Cinema and Censorship in the Weimar Republic: The Case of Anders als Die Andern.” In: Film History 11 (2): Émigré Filmmakers and Filmmaking, pp. 181-203. Tworek Wojciech (2020): “Mystic, Teacher, Troublemaker: Shimon Engel Horovits of Żelechów and the Challenges of Hasidic Education in Interwar Poland.” In: Jewish Quarterly Review 110:2, pp. 313-342. Wiechecki, Stefan (Wiech) (2012): Skarby w spodniach, Kraków: vis-a-vis Etiuda. Zambrzycki, Władysław (1959): Nasza Pani Radosna, Warszawa: Czytelnik. Żebrowski, Rafał(2012): Żydowska Gmina Wyznaniowa w Warszawie 1918-1939. W kręgu polityki, Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny. Żebrowski, Rafał (2014a.); “O Żydowskim Domu Akademickim na Pradze.” In: Odkrywanie żydowskiej Pragi. Studia i materiały, ed. Zofia Borzymińska, Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, pp. 188-215. Żebrowski, Rafał (2014b): “Gaon Menachem Ziemba, zwany Pragerem.” In: Odkrywanie żydowskiej Pragi. Studia i materiały, ed. Zofia Borzymińska, Warszawa: Żydowski Instytut Historyczny, pp. 216-240.

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Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet Dotan Brom

In June 1996, Giora Manor (1926-2004), the nearly 70-year-old member of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq, “came out of the closet” in an interview in HaDaf HaYaroq (“The Green Page”), the official magazine of the kibbutz movement to which he belonged. The revelation was in response to a question about why he had never started a family. Manor answered, ”I prefer men. I could not do what many of my [gay] friends did – marry a woman, even though this was not what they wanted. I was not able to live a double life”. (Shaham Golan 1996: 12-13) By the time of this interview, Manor had accomplished many things: he was the first director of Lahakat HaNahal, the most celebrated of Israel’s military choirs, and later worked as a theater and radio director. In 1966-67 Manor studied television production in Denmark, where he fell in love with dance. From the time he returned to Israel and until his last days, Manor was a prominent dance critic and researcher. This article follows Manor’s biography from his childhood in Prague to the “coming out” interview. Accounts of homosexuality in small communities in Israel are uncommon. In this respect, Manor’s story offers a rare peek into the ways a small, intimate, and highly ideological community dealt with a homosexual individual in their midst. Manor’s biography will be used here as a springboard for two main discussions. Firstly, I will describe the migration of knowledge, beliefs, and ideological attitudes regarding homosexuality from the early 20th century German-speaking world into HaShomer HaTzair movement and, subsequently, to the HaKibbutz HaArtzi movement. This history will serve as a background to the second discussion, which will focus on Manor’s experiences as a homosexual man in a kibbutz, his coping mechanisms and strategies, and the social dynamics in the kibbutz surrounding his sexuality. Toward the end of this article, and based on Manor’s story, I will introduce the concept of the transparent closet as a more accurate depiction of the homosexual experience in the kibbutz.

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From Prague to Mishmar HaEmeq Giora Manor, originally named Alex Karpeles, was born in 1926 in Prague, to a wealthy Jewish family. His father was a successful businessman, a member of the Communist Party, and an enthusiastic Zionist. The family house was a meeting place for communist officials and Zionist leaders, especially from HaKibbutz HaArtzi – a kibbutz movement established in Palestine by the Socialist-Zionist youth movement HaShomer HaTzair (Manor 1996: 10-19). Young Alex spoke German, Czech, and English. Like many Jews in the former Habsburg empire, the family was immersed in German culture. At the age of 10, he transferred to an English gymnasium, where he learned English (Manor 1996: 12-23). In the spring of 1936, the Karpeles family spent a month-long vacation in Palestine. The highlight of Alex’s vacation was the time spent in Mishmar HaEmeq with his uncle, Gideon, who was one of the kibbutz’s founders (ibid: 29-30). In March 1939, the Karpeles family was preparing to emigrate to Palestine, and Gideon had arrived to assist in the process. The Nazi occupation caught them unprepared. Gideon, as a subject of the British Crown in Mandatory Palestine, was able to leave Czechoslovakia, and he managed to smuggle Alex out of the country by forging a document claiming that Alex was his son. The rest of the family, including Alex’s sevenyear-old sister, failed to escape and perished in the Holocaust (ibid: 38-43). Thus Alex arrived in Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq in the spring of 1939 and became – effectively, if not formally – the adopted son of his uncle Gideon and his uncle’s second wife, Rachel. Gideon and Rachel were a childless couple. Gideon was a mechanic, and Rachel, a German Jewish immigrant, was an educator and psychotherapist. According to Manor’s autobiography, the boy, whose name was now Hebraized to Giora, grew closer to the Manors than he had been to his biological parents. In any case, children and youth in the kibbutz did not spend much time with their parents. Instead, they grew up in a system that sought to endow them with collective kibbutz values and autonomy. At the heart of this system was the boarding school for children from different kibbutzim that belonged to the HaKibbutz HaArtzi movement: the Mossad Hinuchi (“educational institution”). Manor had to fit into a radically different social environment from what he had been acquainted with in Prague, including a different language and mentality. His class, Kvutzat Oren, lived, studied, ate, and worked together. While most of the children were Hebrew-speaking Jews born and raised on an Israeli kibbutz, approximately a third were immigrants from war-torn Europe. There were only one or two other Czech students besides Manor, and they were nicknamed “počkes” (“wait!” in Czech). Being, as he describes himself, an arrogant smartaleck, Manor did not blend in well with the others, and his reluctance to take part in sports prevented him from gaining popularity among the boys. Coming to terms with his non-normative sexuality under these circumstances must not have been easy.

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

The Mossad In April 1931, Mishmar HaEmeq was made home to the Mossad Hinuchi, HaShomer HaTzair’s first-of-its-kind boarding school. Four men are considered to be its founding fathers: Shmuel Golan (1901-1960), Tzvi Zohar (1898-1975), Mordechai Shenhabi (19001983), and Yaakov Padan (1903-1980) (Platek 1989: 1). I will focus my discussion on the first of these, Shmuel “Milak” Golan. Through his story I wish to demonstrate how knowledge, beliefs, and ideological attitudes regarding homosexuality migrated from the German-speaking world to Palestine and were absorbed into the HaKibbutz HaArtzi ideology. Golan (originally Goldschein) became an active member of HaShomer HaTzair in Lwow (Lemberg) and Vienna during World War I. In June 1920 he joined a group of HaShomer HaTzair members (or Shomrim, as they called themselves) who immigrated to Mandatory Palestine (Mintz 1995: 264-265). By the end of 1920, the Shomrim in Palestine had formed two centers: Gdud Shomria, a camp of pioneers at the outskirts of Haifa; and the smaller Bitanya Illit, an interim settlement on a hilltop near the Sea of Galilee, which Golan joined. Between August 1920 and April 1921, they lived and worked communally. Their ideological commitment was intense, and they spent much time discussing the ideas they had absorbed in Galicia and Vienna, including those of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Otto Weininger, Hans Blüher, and Gustav Wyneken (Nur 2004: 67). In April 1921, Bitanya Illit merged with Gdud Shomria. In November 1922, some former Bitanya Illit members, together with a small group of former members of Gdud Shomria and a few other pioneers, set out to establish Kibbutz Beit Alpha, HaShomer HaTzair’s first permanent kibbutz (Zait 2005: 69). Shmuel Golan was a member of this group. In 1924, Golan and several other members of Beit Alpha established HaShomer HaTzair’s first school in Palestine, named “The Children’s Community at the Foot of [Mount] Gilboa”. The teachers came from different backgrounds and had somewhat conflicting political views. Golan recalled in retrospect the lack of political cohesion among the school staff as “a nightmare.” The disagreements among the teachers (including the fear of a clandestine cell of the Communist party) contributed to the school’s closing in 1928. The school’s closure confirmed Golan’s feelings that there was a need for a school that would be fully controlled by HaKibbutz HaArtzi (Platek 1989: 5-6). Although Hashomer HaTzair’s members had familiarized themselves with Freud’s ideas before they emigrated to Palestine, it was only in the late 1920s that they turned to the Austrian neurologist as a major authority. Psychoanalysis was viewed as befitting the movement’s educational aspirations, and as part of this reorientation, Golan travelled to Berlin in 1929 to study psychoanalysis at the Berliner Psychoanalytische Poliklinik (Rolnik 2007: 202-204). He returned to Palestine in 1933, but to Mishmar HaEmeq rather than to Beit Alpha, because he was appointed as the principal of a new school, the Mossad Hinuchi, built on a hilltop above the kibbutz. Golan remained a Mishmar HaEmeq member until his death in 1960. Golan can be viewed as a carrier of pedagogical and psychoanalytical concepts and ideas from the German-speaking world into Palestine. Sexuality was central to Freudian thinking; for Golan, it was a means to shape the psyche of the next generation of the

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kibbutzim, who would grow up free from bourgeois neuroses and Oedipal complexes. Golan also shared the Marxist orientation of some Central European psychoanalysts. He believed that the psyche was influenced by socio-economic conditions, and that realization of the socialist utopia would require a new generation, in possession of a fully liberated psyche. Golan thus wished to press psychoanalysis into use for the needs of HaShomer HaTza’ir educational system. He translated the groundbreaking 1924 book, Guy and Gal (Bub und Mädel), by the German sexologist Max Hodann, and felt ideologically close to the radical Jewish Austrian Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. Reich argued that sexual morals were used by the bourgeoisie to repress the youth’s free spirit and revolutionary drives (Reich 2012: 49-52, 257-263). But while Hodann and Reich advocated sexual freedom among adolescents, Golan maintained that sexual relationships should be avoided until adulthood (Rolnik 2007: 212). This advocacy of adolescent celibacy can be viewed as a Wynekenian influence or as a reincarnation of HaShomer HaTzair youth movement’s imperative to keep one’s sexual purity. Gustav Wyneken (1875-1964), the educational reformer mentioned above as an important influence on Bitanya Illit’s pioneers, thought that Eros played an essential part in the educational process. Erotic ties should not be consummated, however, but be sublimated through gymnastics, dance, and outdoor nudity. Wyneken sought to replace the pedagogy of same-sex cohorts that were prevalent in the German youth movement, and in some schools, with co-education of boys and girls. He wished to create “free school-communities” (Freie Schulgemeinden), where boys, girls, and staff would live and learn together (Szamet, 2017: 230-232). The quintessential method of sexual sublimation in the Mossad Hinuchi was the sharing of communal showers and communal sleeping quarters by boys and girls together, in what was called “co-education,” after the Wynekenian term. Golan believed that if children grew up with the human body and sexuality not as a mystery but as a natural fact of life, they would develop healthier conjugal relationships, free from fixations and sexual anxieties (Szamet 2017: 243). For this reason, he also introduced sexual education classes at the school (Rolnik 2007: 215). Giora Manor recalled his first encounter with communal showers when he was 13 years old quite nonchalantly in his autobiography: She [Manor’s adoptive aunt, Rachel Manor] did not bother to explain to me that in the Mossad Hinuchi of that time there was what was known as a ‘communal shower’ [...]. Now the reader expects a traumatic and shocking event in the life of an innocent adolescent boy from the diaspora… However, there was no shock. I simply thought I entered the wrong shower, apologized as much as I could, and went off to ask the caretaker what to do. Once it was clarified that I was not mistaken, I accepted it as if it was natural. (Manor 1996: 45)

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

In interviews1 I have conducted with Mishmar HaEmeq’s elders, they also recall the communal shower to be a non-issue, and they claimed that it truly had a de-sexualizing effect (Shoshi, interview, April 3, 2018; Shai, interview, April 3, 2018). By the time Manor entered the Mossad Hinuchi, in 1939, Golan was no longer its head. According to one of Manor’s classmates, Golan gave their class one lecture about ”family life” (Shoshi, interview, April 3, 2018). It is unlikely that same-sex attraction was addressed in Golan’s lecture. No interviewee remembered it, and the topic is mentioned only twice in Sex Education, Golan and Zohar’s 1941 seminal guide for educators. The first occurrence of the term is in a chapter titled In the Lack of Guidance: A few years ago, a shocking incident happened to a 12-year-old boy from an educated family in Tel Aviv. During his walks in the city, he was drawn to a small workshop and was fascinated by the craftsman’s work. [...] After a while, the boy was transferred to a Mossad Hinuchi in the countryside. [...] it was revealed that the older “friend” used the boy for homosexual activities, and while doing so infected him with syphilis. [...] This case […] is enough [...] to report the dangers that lurk here, due to changes in the social composition of the Yishuv. We must remember that the different immigration waves [Aliyot] – especially in recent years – brought to the land of Israel different elements, whose level of morality and sexual conduct are unclear to us [...]. (Zohar & Golan 1941. 82-83). The second occurrence of homosexuality in the book appears in a discussion about the role of sexuality in adolescence. There, the authors write: Everyone admits that in this period, sexuality is not confined to emotional or intellectual experiences. It is also revealed in sexual acts, rather auto-erotically (in the appearance of onanism), homo-erotically (in the appearance of sexual relations between the boys, mutual onanism), or hetero-erotically [...]. If the way to normal sexual life is blocked, other forms of satisfaction appear [...]. (ibid 119). Homosexuality, then, is described in Sex Education as either a perversion common to social elements with low moral standards or as a phase in the sexual development of the individual that must pass to allow normal adult sexual life to develop. Although Manor’s class received but a brief sex education session, the school’s exposure to German sexology did serve a crucial role in Manor coming to terms with his sexuality. The nearly septuagenarian Manor recalls: In my youth, I thought I was the only monster in the world who felt this way. I looked for, and found, answers in books. [...] I used to go to the Mossad [Hinuchi]'s library at the

1

The interviews in Mishmar HaEmeq included nine interviewees, six women and three men, ranging in age between 55 and 83 at the time of research. Seven of them are from Manor’s generation (but most are younger by a decade or so), and two interviewees are from the following generation. Interviews were conducted between September 2018 and March 2019. Interviews with figures from the Israeli dance world, from Israeli theater, and Manor’s associates in journalism were conducted between July 2018 and July 2019. They include 19 interviewees, ranging in age between 50 and 86 at the time of the research, including fourteen men and five women. All interviewees’ names have been changed to protect their privacy.

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age of 13-14 and look for answers in German books about sexual education and sexology because Germany was in the lead in this matter. I started looking to understand what was happening to me. Inside I honestly thought I was a monster [...]. (Shaham Golan, 1996: 12-13). Based on old library inventories found in Mishmar HaEmeq’s archive, it is likely that the books Manor referred to were Auguste Forel’s The Sexual Question (1903) and Freud’s A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (1917). The term “homosexuality” appears in both (in Freud as Homosexualität and in Forel as Die männliche homosexuelle Liebe), meaning that the term was available for Manor’s identity-building processes during his adolescence, but with negative associations. Such associations would have intensified his internal struggles and feelings of otherness: both books associate homosexuality with psychological malfunction (Freud talks about it in the context of neurosis and Forel lists it under sexual pathologies).

Relationships with women After completing his studies in the Mossad Hinuchi in 1945, Manor spent a couple of years on the kibbutz. Little information is available concerning this period, but in Manor’s autobiography we learn that during that time he directed short plays that were performed in Mishmar HaEmeq on holidays. In 1947-48 he studied theater directing in Tel Aviv and worked as an assistant-director, stage-manager, and actor in the Cameri Theater. In the course of that year, Manor was also analyzed by the Psychoanalyst Anna Smeliansky: “The entire time I was undergoing therapy by an old psychoanalyst, ‘the grandma’ […]. Thanks to the analysis I did not give up my year [in Tel Aviv] and return home” (Manor 1996: 64). It is unknown what drove Manor to start his analysis, to what extent homosexual themes were brought up in it, and if they did, how Smeliansky responded. We do know, however, of another homosexual man who was analyzed by Smeliansky at the same time: Theo Mainz (1924-2007). Mainz was only two years older than Manor. He, too, was a German-speaking Jew, who had immigrated to Palestine a year after Manor, in 1940. Mainz was analyzed by Smeliansky sometime between 1945 and 1950. According to Mainz, his main motivation to be analyzed was the tension he felt between the drive to have sex with men and the desire not to act on this drive. Mainz later mentioned that it was through the process of analysis that he concluded that he wanted to be homosexual, but that it was not suggested to him by Smeliansky (Mainz 2015: 57). Manor’s archive in Mishmar HaEmeq documents his attempt to form a relationship with a woman around the same time. Between May 1947 and October 1948, Manor received letters from a woman named Aliza, of which five survive in the archive. Aliza wrote in a mixture of Hebrew and English, indicating Anglo-Saxon background. It appears that Manor and Aliza knew each other from Mishmar HaEmeq but were separated by his time in Tel Aviv and her work on another kibbutz, not far from Jerusalem. “They read our letters here”, she complains to Manor. “I understand that they must, but it is unpleasant. I take this opportunity to send an uncensored letter, and let you know that

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

they read the ones I receive, too.” (Aliza, May 9, 1947, Mishmar HaEmeq Archive). The letter was written only half a year before the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, and the censorship was probably related to conflicts between Jews and Arabs, as well as between Jews and the British authorities. Aliza was disturbed by the idea of others reading her correspondence with Manor because of its intimate nature. He wrote to her about his analysis, and she confessed her love for him. From one letter, it is obvious that she viewed him as her boyfriend: I’ve found a wonderful place for your picture […]. Next to my bed I have a vegetable crate on which my lamp stands; there is a tablecloth which hangs over the border just enough to cover the picture [...]. In that way [...], I just need to lift the tablecloth to look at the picture, and no one else can see it (I don’t like it when people show off their respective girl-or-boyfriends by putting up their pictures in the room for everyone to see, but this is just for me alone). (Aliza, undated, Mishmar HaEmeq Archive) Another example of Aliza’s affections can be seen in a letter from May 14, 1947: My Giora! If only the two of us were now in Mishmar HaEmeq, I would have come to your room, [...] and the two of us would have been a bit shy, and we would have gone to eat together. Next to the dining table, you would have conversed lengthily with everyone but me, but never mind, it is nice to sit with you nonetheless. […] Sometimes late at night, it was so sad with all our sorrows and with your constant fatigue. Nevertheless, Giora, these hours, in which we grew closer, are the hardest for me to give up. Sometimes in the last months, I tried to analyze what there is between us. [...] [M]any things are unclear to me, especially it is hard for me to understand your view on our relationship [ma helkecha badavar]. However, one thing is clear to me: the friendship between us is priceless! Another thing: I am certain that I love you because of this friendship, because of what you are. [...] Well, I am sure that from my side, at least, I can be sure. [...]. (Aliza, May 14, 1947, Mishmar HaEmeq Archive) Clearly, there was an intimacy between Aliza and Manor, but the concerns Aliza articulates in the letter indicate a certain imbalance in the relationship. The archive contains only Aliza’s letters to Manor, and therefore we cannot know with any certainty what she meant to him. But it does sound as if he hesitated to commit himself to Aliza. This was not the only relationship Manor had with a woman. About a decade later, in 1958, while working as director of short skits for national radio, Manor met Anne Vivian Zuckerman (a.k.a. Zucky, 1936-2013). Zuckerman was a Jewish-American choreographer who immigrated to Israel in 1957. Manor, in accordance with his general tendency to avoid discussing his private life, omitted her entirely from his autobiography. However, in the 1996 interview in which he confessed for the first time publicly that he “preferred men” and “was not able to live a double life,” he also noted that he had made several attempts to develop relationships with women. He mentioned one case which I assume – based on the interviews I conducted in Mishmar HaEmeq and with figures from the Israeli dance world – to be that of Zucky: “I had one exceptionally long affair with a woman. She was miserable, and I was miserable. She was so in love with me that I couldn’t leave her.” (Shaham Golan, 1996: 12-13).

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It is unclear when exactly the relationship ended, but it was not later than 1966, and probably much earlier. One of the interviewees, a friend of Manor in his last years, told me: I don’t want to give further details because there is a difficult story there. An unhealthy story, let’s say. She was willing to marry him. I don’t know if she loved him romantically that much, but she admired him. And to a certain extent, he played with her, not exactly an affair and not exactly a partner, but a very deep friendship. (Avi, personal interview, August 9, 2018) Manor was in his thirties when at the time of relationship with Zuckerman. It was probably difficult for him to be a bachelor at that age. Interviewees with members of Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq reported that being single was viewed at the time as a miserable state to be in (Shoshi, interview, April 3, 2018; Nehama & Hovav, interview, October 21, 2018). One might conjecture that Manor entered into a relationship with Zuckerman as a kind of last-ditch effort to live a life that was considered appropriate by his society – and perhaps by himself as well. Even during his time with Zuckerman, rumors surrounding Manor’s homosexuality led kibbutz members to suspect the nature of their relationship: He had a girlfriend. […] They lived together. […] He travelled [with her] […] for a few months. Then, people started talking about that. And there were those who said that he probably had her to prove that he wasn’t... [homosexual]. (Shoshi, interview, April 3, 2018)

Relationships with men In contrast to Manor’s relationships with women, his sexual and romantic relationships with men left no traces in the archives. Nor does Manor mention them in his writings. In the preface to his autobiography, Manor declares his intention to remain silent about private matters, in a way that hints at homosexual contacts: I have decided to diminish the extent [to which I share] facts from my actual private life, because I am not brave enough to be totally frank, as is demanded of an autobiography. I also do not want to get others, whose lives were interwoven with mine, in trouble. They do not deserve that I publicly betray them and share secrets from behind closed doors. (Manor, 1996: 8) The meaning of such betrayal is further elaborated in a quote from his ‘coming out’ interview, only a couple of months after the publication of his autobiography: “I had [relationships with men] all along. I cannot talk about people who were in contact with me. I cannot expose them.” (Shaham Golan, 1996: 12-13) The interviews I conducted are more revealing. They suggest three men as Manor’s sexual and romantic partners: Dan, another Mishmar HaEmeq member, somewhat younger than Manor; Nir, a dancer and choreographer born in the 1950s; and Avi, a

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

psychotherapist, two decades younger than Manor.2 I do not seek to determine the true nature of Manor’s relationship with these men. What interests me is how these relationships were discussed and interpreted by Mishmar HaEmeq members and others who knew Manor. Interviewees from Mishmar HaEmeq spoke about Dan in a restrained manner. Kibbutz members from his generation mentioned rumors surrounding him, namely that he was seen coming into Manor’s room late at night or leaving it early in the morning. But they insisted that they were merely rumors, not undisputed facts (Shoshi, interview, April 3, 2018; Edna, interview, September 12, 2018). One interviewee told me that Dan “had something feminine [about him]” but that he [Dan] did not have “any realization of this issue [his homosexuality]” (Shai, interview, April 3, 2018). This hesitant description may be related to the fact that Dan was married with children. Interviewees from the dance world never mentioned Dan’s name, but their much more unequivocal stories match the more restrained ones from the kibbutz. One interviewee, a female former dancer and dance researcher, told me: I understood he had a boyfriend in the kibbutz for years. […] how do I know that? Because I asked him: “Giora, shouldn’t you be cautious about AIDS?” [...], he told me: “No, I don’t have this problem. I have a steady boyfriend, for many years, in the kibbutz. He is married.”[...]. (Michal, interview, September 4, 2018) Another dancer and choreographer told a similar story: In his last years, he would come to the kibbutz and [...] he had someone to spend the night with. And I know that this guy would come regularly [...]. And I know that he would always run [...] so he wouldn’t be seen. […] He was married in the kibbutz, and he was afraid to be caught. […]. (Nir, interview, August 24, 2018) This interviewee, Nir, was himself believed by other interviewees to have been sexually or romantically involved with Manor. Avi, the third man who was presumed to be one of Manor’s partners, and who was close to Manor in the last decade of his life, described Manor’s relation towards Nir: I suspect […] that he was in love with him. He didn’t say it out loud, but from the way he introduced us and the way he kept in touch with him for years, from the way he helped him to become a dancer and later a choreographer – I smell an affair. (Avi, interview, August 9, 2018) Avi later told me that he believed Manor’s feelings towards Nir were not mutual. In the dance troupes of the 1970s and 80s, rumors of an asymmetrical relationship between the two were also rife. Michal, who was quoted above, related gossip about the two in Bat Sheva, one of Israel’s most celebrated dance companies: [Manor] had a relationship, so they said, with Nir […] So, they would probably say […] “Oh, Giora wrote nicely about Nir, he [Giora] must be screwing him.” You know, something like that. […] All the others [other dance critics] crucified him [Nir] […] and Giora

2

All names have been changed.

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wrote kindly about him, so they would say “Oh, well. That’s because he’s a homo.” (Michal, interview, September 4, 2018) The interviews reveal that it was commonly believed by individuals in the Israeli dance world that since both Nir and Manor were attracted to members of the same sex, it was only natural to assume a relationship between them. This assumption was also made in the kibbutz. For example, one female Mishmar HaEmeq member, slightly younger than Manor, told me: “[Nir] really knows [Manor], from a certain period. He [Manor] really was like his father, and his partner [ben zug]” (Timna, interview, October 21, 2018). Other kibbutz members made similar remarks. One of them, another female kibbutznik roughly of the same age, said: “Nir would come here, and he [Manor] would say: ‘Nir is like my son’. And I knew Nir was homosexual.” (Edna, interview, September 12, 2018) This reading of homosexuality into Manor’s relationship with Nir might have been colored by a widespread stereotype that associates male dancers with homosexuality – a topic that is beyond the scope of this article (but see Burt 1995). Additionally, it is worth noting that both of the kibbutz interviewees linked homosexual and parental relationships. This trope occurred in another interview, with an artist who had known Manor since the 1980s (Beni, interview, July 9, 2018). Manor, being almost three decades older than Nir, was indeed old enough to be his father. Coding their relationship through the paternal metaphor might indicate that the relationship had elements of initiation, guidance, protection, or other attributes of fatherly love. If used by Manor, as quoted above, the metaphor might have wished to denote intimacy without outright implying homosexuality, through the evocation of traditional family roles. The third man who was suggested by interviewees as a possible partner of Manor was Avi, the psychotherapist quoted above. Manor and Avi collaborated in the 1990s on a journal Manor was editing, and in time they grew closer and traveled together in Israel and Europe. Avi was appointed by Manor to manage his estate after his death. This fact spawned rumors within the kibbutz regarding Avi’s role in Manor’s life. One kibbutz member remembered that Manor’s boyfriend [haver] came to Mishmar HaEmeq to demand his share in Manor’s bequest. Another said: [Manor] had [a boyfriend]. [..] He had Nir and another one […] Avi. […] Giora had a huge library […] and when he passed away […] I know he gave it all to Avi. And we don’t know what Avi did with it [...]. But Avi got everything (Nehama & Hovav, interview, October 21, 2018). Perhaps their belief that Manor’s estate was bequeathed to Avi led them to view the relationship between the two as homosexual. Avi himself never mentioned that aspect of his relationship with Manor, nor his alleged desire for men. Whereas Manor’s relationships with women were publicly known, knowledge of Manor’s relationships with men were mostly based on rumor and innuendo. One source of rumors was Manor’s habit of patting men on their buttocks – an apparently uncontrollable urge that started sometime in his late adolescence, persisted throughout his life, and became a kernel around which rumors and gossip swarmed. A male kibbutznik born in the 1930s said:

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

I don’t remember that anyone talked about it [Manor’s homosexuality] in the open. Today many people say “oh, we have always known.” It is true that he would go to boys, especially when we rehearsed plays. Each time he would slap [someone] on the buttocks. Now, I thought of it as… It never even crossed my mind…. The interviewee’s son, a kibbutz member in his forties, added: For us, who grew up in the seventies, it was already common knowledge. […] By the way, it wasn’t a dramatic, disastrous, or a shocking understanding…When [we] saw Giora Manor, all the boys would cling to the wall like that [with the back against the wall], it was a regular joke. (Shai, interview, April 3, 2018) A female member of a neighboring kibbutz, HaZore’a, related in her interview stories told to her by two male members of Mishmar HaEmeq. The first, younger than Manor by about a decade, said: “I would dance with him: he would look at my ass and I would evade [his look].” The interviewee interpreted it as a joke at that stage. However, when Manor was older, that man would come to fix different things in his house, and he told the interviewee that “Giora knew that if he touched me, I would not fix for him.” That statement was interpreted by the woman from HaZore’a as a warning to Giora. The other man whom she quoted, a military man about a decade younger than Manor, said in response to Giora’s gaze at his buttocks: “Slap my ass and let’s get it over with” (Leah & Uri, interview, July 22, 2019). This last story reveals that sometimes the discourse around Manor’s same-sex attraction may not have been confined to rumors or indirect interactions but was expressed in direct interactions that people had with Manor. This case, however, was the only example of such an interaction that came up in the interviews.

The Kibbutz, Manor and the Transparent Closet In 1977, the sociologist Joseph Shepher wrote in his Introduction to the Sociology of the Kibbutz: The Kibbutz is known in Israel and around the world as a social structure free of deviance [...]. We must express a bit of doubt as to this unambiguous statement. […] The Kibbutz has a broad authority of internal jurisdiction and it is possible that some types of deviance, which are considered a criminal felony according to the Israeli law, are judged by the Kibbutz and punished according to the Kibbutz’s normative rules, in which, as we have seen, the most drastic punishment is excommunication. […] Most researchers wrote with amazement about the phenomenon of the inexistence of homosexuality in the Kibbutz. We have no established knowledge on the matter, mainly since it is far easier to prove the existence of a phenomenon than the opposite. It is possible that the intensive social supervision of the Kibbutz is successful in nipping such phenomena in the bud, without their existence ever becoming known to the public, but it is also possible that the Kibbutz’s mission-focused character, which leaves relatively little free time and little privacy, prevents the appearance of homosexuality. (Shepher, 1977: 208-209)

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Figure 12.1: Giora Manor, 1983. Photographed by Boaz Lanir. Yad Ya‘Yari Archive.

We now know that the kibbutz was not a “deviance”-free society, as Shepher assumed. The researchers’ overtly positive report is perhaps more telling of the overall fascination with, and exotification of, the kibbutz phenomenon in the 1970s. The lack of statistics pertaining to deviant behavior in the kibbutz was probably the result of a tendency to hide sensitive matters and avoid “airing the dirty laundry”. HaKibbutz HaArtzi was a collectivistic movement, in which efforts were made to organize public life according to the movement’s ideology. The pressure on individuals to conform, paired with the density of human encounters due to the small size of the kibbutz and its social life, made it an extremely hard place to keep a secret. Most of

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

my interviewees from Mishmar HaEmeq were unsure how and when they learned the term ”homosexual,” but were convinced that, whether or not they were familiar with the word, they knew Manor was different or that he was ”like that”. Some claimed to have been uninterested in these matters or to have known nothing of this sort until quite late in Manor’s life. Others were positive that Manor’s homosexuality was common knowledge. In general, it seems that Manor’s attraction to men could not have been kept a complete secret. However, it would not have been possible for kibbutz members to express same-sex desires due to homophobic views and the pressure to conform. As we have seen earlier, from the late 1920s on, HaKibbutz HaArtzi’s educators were affected by a sexological discourse associating homosexuality with sexual violence, disease, and mental illness. Homosexuality was also associated with an “oriental”, philistine behavior, as seen in a letter Golan sent to the Jewish educator of German origin, Ernst Akiba Simon, in May 1942: Cities and moshavot around the country are currently flooded by the harshest, most dangerous expressions of sexuality. Prostitution, the military, cheap and easy morals, the homosexuality of the Arabs (that has a quite severe influence on our youth, too), etc., are calling for an honest education campaign [hasbara] as a prophylactic education (Golan 1942, National Library of Israel). The image of oriental homosexuality was not confined to non-Jewish Arabs but was attributed to Jews from Muslim societies as well. A protocol of a conference held on October 1951 in Kibbutz Giv’at Haviva to discuss the sexual problems of the Mizrahi immigrant youth groups [havarot ha’noar me’adot ha’mizrah], for example, reflects these beliefs. A youth leader of Mizrahi immigrant youth from Kibbutz Ein HaMifratz described that ”manifestations of homosexuality are ’accepted’. Boys hug and kiss each other. Lick one another. Two boys sleep together in one bed”; and a youth leader from Kibbutz Dan explained that in North-African Jewish communities, ”the men, who live in total separation from the women, develop onanism, homosexuality, etc.” (Yad Ya’ari Archive). Thus, as I stated above, same-sex desires could not have been publicly expressed in the kibbutz. A public expression of deviance threatened the community’s norms, but so did a public exposure of a deviant member of the community. The kibbutz needed to find a way to contain the deviant behavior without casting out the deviant member, a mechanism that would simultaneously keep homosexuality both private and policed. In attempting to reconcile this alleged paradox, we might note that a secret is not a binary phenomenon. The literary scholar Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick broadens the definition of secrets in her analysis of the gay closet: [C]oming out is a matter of crystallizing intuitions or convictions that had been in the air for a while already and had already established their own power-circuits of silent contempt, silent blackmail, silent glamorization, silent complicity. [...] Living in and hence coming out of the closet are never matters of the purely hermetic; the personal and political geographies to be surveyed here are instead the more imponderable and convulsive ones of the open secret (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990: 79-80).

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Even within the classic closet metaphor, Sedgwick claims, the closet doors are always somewhat open. The secret, to an extent, is an open one. It was even more so, for reasons already discussed above, in the kibbutz. And Manor’s case illustrates it well. Decades before his public “coming out” in the newspaper, there was a collective awareness surrounding his sexuality. Another literary scholar, D.A. Miller, claims in his analysis of secrecy in novels that the fact that the secret is always known – and, in some obscure sense, known to be known – never interferes with the incessant activity of keeping it. […] the social function of secrecy […] is not to conceal knowledge, so much as to conceal the knowledge of the knowledge (Miller, 1988: 206). Drawing on this passage, I would say that in Manor’s case, the secret was known, and most likely known to be known. But for the most part, a collective veneer was maintained, as if the fact of its disclosure was unknown. So what did it mean for Manor to “come out of the closet” in the 1990’s? I propose that the term “closet” is an inaccurate metaphor for describing homosexuality in the context of kibbutz life. The expression suggests a homosexual individual who has determinedly kept his or her identity hidden from the public until the moment of “coming out”. The homosexual is imagined as living in a cocoon, from which the timid misfit to societal sexual norms will eventually emerge a gay butterfly (unless, of course, the closet doors are forced open prematurely). However, the kibbutz – a small, interwoven community – was a place where it was extremely hard to keep secrets. Nonetheless, I believe the closet metaphor is not entirely irrelevant. If the closet serves as a spatial visualization of a personal secret (in the case of the gay closet, as well as in such idioms as “a skeleton in the closet”), the open secret can be envisaged through the metaphor of the transparent closet.3 We can imagine several models of the closet’s optics, in different combinations of gaze directionality (bidirectional gaze, gaze from within outwards, gaze from without inwards) and level of opacity (ranging from the completely gaze-impermeable opaque to the absolute transparent). The model I find the most suitable to describe Manor’s position within the kibbutz is

3

Sedgwick uses several metaphors to describe different nuances of the open secret, one of them being that of the “glass closet” (Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1990: 80, 165, 228). The exact definition of the term and its distinction from other terms (“open secret”, “empty secret”) is not entirely clear. For the sake of cohesion and clarity, I will use the metaphor of the transparent closet. After completing this research, I have been made aware of the fact that the same metaphor has been used by the Slovenian sociologists Alenka Švab and Roman Kuhar (see Švab & Kuhar, 2014). As defined by the authors, the transparent closet “refers to those social situations where a child’s homosexual orientation is acknowledged within the family but is not further discussed. Parents (or other family members) refuse to accept and deal with the consequences and meanings of the new information” (Švab & Kuhar, 2014: 19). Although somewhat similar to my use of the term, Švab and Kuhar’s transparent closet occurs after a coming out of the closet of a family member, and the silence around his or her sexuality is signaling the family’s unwillingness to accept that member’s homosexuality. In the way I use the term, the transparent closet describes those social situations in which no formal coming out occurred, yet the deviant sexuality is known as an open secret.

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

that of a closet which is permeable to gazes from both the outside and inside but not entirely transparent. The kibbutz could gaze into this closet and see who Manor was, and Manor could also look outside to see them gazing. What makes this structure a closet and not an open space is the same thing that creates the opacity of the closet walls: the social theater, in which Manor played the role of an ordinary heterosexual kibbutz member and everyone else made an effort to keep up that façade, by not “outing” him publicly. Instead, they gossiped. I have addressed some of this gossip in previous sections. As we have seen, the gossip had to do with the nature of Manor’s relationship with women, with the supposedly sexual or romantic nature of some of his relationships with men, and, of course, with the very fact of his attraction to men. Although Mishmar HaEmeq members prided themselves on the respect for privacy in their kibbutz, gossip was a policing force. As one kibbutz member told me: “From the time I am in the kibbutz, I think that gossip had the role of a law-keeper. In some way, even of police” (Edna, personal interview, September 12, 2018). Gossip was an essential part of the transparent closet, a social practice or norm within the kibbutz that prevented the public exposure of sensitive knowledge. It was also instrumental in policing behavior, as was implied in the quote above. This was a direct result of the nearly panoptic quality of kibbutz life. Manor knew that he was, for all intents and purposes, under constant surveillance. Anytime a man entered his room, a suspicious eye might interpret it as an affair, and a gossiping tongue might be available to disseminate the information. The transparent closet metaphor differs from the closet metaphor in the sense that it does not assume a dichotomy between the secret and the life “out of the closet”, but rather suggests an in-between mode, an open secret, safeguarded by the social imperative not to discuss homosexuality publicly and maintained by gossip. This tacit arrangement was a product of specific historical forces. Manor’s decision to talk openly about his homosexuality in 1996 suggests that the 1990s, with the immense changes they brought to the lives of gays and lesbians, constituted the fault line between the transparent closet and our contemporary closet metaphor. I claimed above that Manor played a role in the social theater of the open secret. But his behavior was not only a strategy to secure his social status in the kibbutz. It was also a manifestation of an internalized ideal of the proper manner of behavior for a man whose desire is for other men. Sociologist Dana Rosenfeld argues in her book about American gay and lesbian elders that: Informants fell into one of two identity cohorts: the discreditable one, consisting of those who adopted a homosexual identity before the late 1960s and thus through the properties of the stigmatizing discourse, and the accredited one, consisting of those who adopted a homosexual identity during or after the late 1960s and thus through the properties of the accrediting discourse (Rosenfeld, 2003: 11, emphases in the original). The accredited cohort, whose identities took shape in a historical period when positive discourse surrounding homosexuality was available, developed “coming out of the closet” as their primary strategy for interaction with the heteronormative world. In contrast, the discreditable cohort, whose homosexual identities crystalized within the historical context of stigma and without exposure to accrediting discourse regarding

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a homosexual or lesbian community, developed a strategy of “passing as straight”. Remaining unnoticed by the heterosexual surroundings was not only a means of survival for homosexuals of this generation. Rosenfeld asserts that competence in “passing” became the most significant aspect of this group’s sexual identity (ibid, 124-125, 182-183). Successfully “passing” was internalized as an ideal, a source of pride and a way to assess the status of other homosexuals. Given that the politicization of the homo-lesbian community in Israel started in the mid-seventies but developed substantially only in the 1990s, it seems that in the Israeli case, the “discreditable” identity cohort included all the men and women of Manor’s generation who desired people of their own gender. Perhaps the most telling fact of Manor’s relationship to homosexuality and the kibbutz is an article Manor himself wrote in February 1996, only four months before his revealing interview in HaDaf HaYaroq. There, he reacts to an interview with a younger kibbutz member, from another kibbutz, who emigrated from Israel to live as a gay man in the USA. His friends’ and family’s relation to him causes him suffering, but the main “fault” is in the kibbutz, described [by the man who left] as a hornet’s nest of gossip. Of course, there is gossip in the kibbutz, like in any village around the world, where everyone knows everything about everyone. It is not easy to make peace with the futility of your camouflage attempts. However, precisely the unveiling of the deceptive cloak may allow you to live in peace with yourself and your kibbutz. This is the price you must pay for not being anonymous in your kibbutz, not being another unidentified bacterium as a person might be in big San Francisco, where you are allowed, allegedly, to do whatever you want because no-one cares about you. I know from my personal experience that it is extremely hard for a boy or a young man who lives in solitude with nobody with whom to share his emotions. However, loneliness is different in Tel Aviv, Paris, and London. In any case, the change towards homosexuals in the West is felt in the kibbutz too. It is proved by the fact that I was approached on several occasions by young men, who sought someone close with whom they could discuss the issue of their sexual identity openly and knew who and what I was. The kibbutz is a greenhouse with good conditions for growth, but also with burdensome crowdedness. I know many young people with a problem of being “different”, not only sexually, who suffer great social pressures. However, I also know people who have found themselves and their path in the kibbutz because they chose to live in a social structure that is not indifferent to its members, and this is the price [one pays] (Manor, 1996a: 29). This text is at once a defense of the kibbutz lifestyle and of Manor’s own life choices. To Manor, life in the kibbutz, with its collective gaze and bothersome gossip, is balanced out by its caring members, and is innately superior to a life lived in isolation in a cold and indifferent society.

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

Conclusion Taking Giora Manor’s biography as a case-study, combined with the histories of Mishmar HaEmeq and the adjacent Mossad Hinuchi, this article traced the migration of sexual knowledge, attitudes, and ideologies from the German-speaking world to Mandatory Palestine. Later, Manor’s biography served as a rare opportunity to look at the social dynamics that were generated around a homosexual individual in a kibbutz. This analysis led me to develop the transparent closet as a spatial metaphor to describe the web of innuendoes, rumors, gossip, doubts, and pretense that comprise the social theater of the open secret in the kibbutz. Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq is a dense site that holds together both parts of this article: the history of kibbutz pedagogy and sexual education, heavily influenced by German sexology; and the history of homosexuality on the kibbutz. Accordingly, it invites further research into the effects that German-written knowledge had on the sexual discourse and dynamics on the kibbutz, and more broadly in Mandatory Palestine and Israel. The kibbutz is a core chapter in the history of Zionism and a uniquely Israeli phenomenon. As such, it deserves special attention in the history of sexuality and queer history; and vice versa – the sexual and queer episodes in its history should be part and parcel of the history of the kibbutz. Thus far, very few steps have been taken in that direction. My hope is that this article has shed some light on these under-researched but fascinating aspects of Israeli history.

Bibliography Burt, Ramsay (1995): The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Cavaglion, Gabriel (2004): “The Rise and Fall of Sex Education in the Kibbutzim of Hashomer Hatzair.” In: Cathedra: For the History of Eretz Israel and Its Yishuv 113, pp. 53-82. [Hebrew]. Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve (1990): Epistemology of the Closet, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Mainz, Theo. (2015): “‘All My Life I Am Different’: The Life of a Gay Yekke.” In: Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly 131, p. 57. [Hebrew]. Manor, Giora (1996): The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: An Attempt at Autobiography, Israel: TAG. [Hebrew]. Manor, Giora (1996a): “The Whole World Is Against Him.” In: Davar HaShavu’a February 23, pp. 29. [Hebrew]. Miller, D.A. (1988): The Novel and the Police, Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: University of California Press. Mintz, Matityahu (1995) Pangs of Youth, Jerusalem: Hassifria Haziyonit. [Hebrew]. Nordheimer Nur, Ofer (2014): Eros and Tragedy: Jewish Male Fantasies and the Masculine Revolution of Zionism, Brighton: Academic Studies. Nur, Ofer (2004): “Sex, Eros and Physical Labour: ‘Ha-Shomer Ha-Tsa’ir’ and Psychoanalysis, 1918-1924.” In: Zmanim: A Historical Quarterly 88, p. 66-73.

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Platek, Yitzhak (1989): The Mosad: The First Hashomer Hatzair School in Mishmar Haemek 1931-1940, Giv’at Haviva: Yad Tabenkin. [Hebrew]. Reich, Wilhelm (2012): Sex-Pol: Essays, 1929-1934, London & New York: Verso. Rolnik, Eran J. (2007) Freud in Zion: History of Psychoanalysis in Jewish Palestine/Israel 1918-1948, Tel Aviv: Am Oved. [Hebrew]. Rosenfeld, Dana (2003): The Changing of the Guard: Lesbian and Gay Elders, Identity, and Social Change, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Shaham Golan, Mira (1996): “Please, burn my body.” In: HaDaf HaYaroq June 12, pp. 1213. [Hebrew]. Shepher, Joseph (1977): Introduction to the Sociology of the Kibbutz, Tel Aviv: Rupin Agricultural College. [Hebrew]. Švab, Alenka & Roman Kuhar (2014): “The Transparent and Family Closets: Gay Men and Lesbians and Their Families of Origin.” In: Journal of GLBT Family Studies 10, pp. 15-35. Szamet, Miriam (2017): ”Eros and Pedagogy in Hashomer Hatzair Movement in the Jewish Community in Palestine.” In: Ruth Fine/Yosef Kaplan/Shimrit Peled/Yoav Rinon (eds.), Eros, Family and Community, Hildesheim, Zürich & New York: Georg Holms, pp. 221-251. Zait, David (2005): Visions in Action: The Life Story of Mordechai Shenhabi (Part I), Tel-Aviv: Yad Ya’ari. [Hebrew]. Zohar, Tzvi & Shmuel Golan (1941): Sex Education, Merhavya: Sifriyat Poalim. [Hebrew].

Archival Material Golan, Shmuel. 1942. Letter to Ernst Simon. May 10, 1942. Akibah Ernst Simon Archive. National Library of Israel, Jerusalem. HaKibbutz HaArtzi Youth Department’s Collection, Yad Ya’ari Archive, Giv’at Haviva. Giora Manor’s personal collection. Yad Ya’ari Archive, Giv’at Haviva. Mishmar HaEmeq Archive. Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq and Shomria Archive, Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmeq.

Giora Manor, the Kibbutz and the Transparent Closet

Quoted Interviews Edna, personal interview, September 12, 2018. Beni, personal interview, July 9, 2018. Michal, personal interview, September 4, 2018. Shai, personal interview, April 3, 2018. Timna, personal interview, October 21, 2018. Leah & Uri, personal interview, July 22, 2019. Nir & Gili, personal interview, August 24, 2018. Shoshi, personal interview, April 3, 2018. Nehama & Hovav, personal interview, October 21, 2018. Avi, personal interview, August 9, 2018.

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Contributors

Janin Afken is a research assistant for German literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin and works at the Einstein-Project ’Jewish Homosexual Modernism in the German Speaking World and in Mandatory Palestine/Israel (1890-1945)’. From 2016 to 2019, while a Ph.D. student, she participated in the research projects ’Cruising the 1970s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures’ and ’Jewish Presence in Weimar Gay and Lesbian Culture and the German Jewish Contribution to the Emergence of Gay Culture in Palestine/Israel, 1933-1960’. Her dissertation explores aesthetic structures of time in narrative literature by and about lesbian women in the 1970s and 1980s in GDR and FRG. She is co-editor of Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970s. A Golden Age for Queers? (2019). Dotan Brom is a graduate student in the Department of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa. He is a co-founder of the Haifa Queer History Project, a grassroots research initiative of the city’s queer past. Susanne Korbel is an FWF-funded researcher and lecturer at the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Graz, specializing in Cultural Studies, Migration Studies, and Jewish history. She is currently working on a history of Jews in Vienna around 1900 based on everyday encounters and relations, aiming to overcome narratives of particularity. Her first book is entitled Auf die Tour! Jüdinnen und Juden in Singspielhalle, Kabarett und Varieté zwischen Habsburgermonarchie und Amerika um 1900 (Böhlau 2021). She has held fellowships in Jerusalem, New York, Southampton, and Tübingen, and taught as visiting faculty at the Andrássy University in Budapest and the University of Haifa. Andreas Krass is a Professor of Medieval German Literature at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He chairs the Research Center for the Cultural History of Sexuality and is affiliated with the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies. Recent publications include: “Meine erste Geliebte”: Magnus Hirschfeld und sein Verhältnis zur schönen Literatur (Wallstein 2013) and the first edition of Sarah Rappeport’s novel Die Jüdin von Cherut (Hentrich & Hentrich 2020, co-edited with Moshe Sluhovsky).

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Piotr Laskowski is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences and co-founder of the Research Centre for LGBT+ History and Identities at the University of Warsaw. His research focuses on the social and political philosophy of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular anarchism and revolutionary syndicalism, as well as Jewish political life in the Polish lands in this period. He co-edited three volumes of the Warsaw Ghetto underground press from the Ringelblum Archive. Dr. Hilla Lavie (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is a cultural historian and a documentary filmmaker with a primary interest in late modern German history, film history, and LGBTQ and women’s history. Andreas Pretzel is a cultural historian. From 2012 to 2016, he was a research assistant at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He is a member of the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft in Berlin. In 2019, he co-organized the ALMS conference in Berlin. Recent publications include: Vom Dorian Gray zum Eldorado. Historische Orte und schillernde Persönlichkeiten im Schöneberger Regenbogenkiez (2012); Rosa Radikale. Die Schwulenbewegung der 1970er Jahre (ed. with Volker Weiss, 2012); NS-Opfer unter Vorbehalt. Homosexuelle Männer in Berlin nach 1945 (2002). Yael Rozin, Ph.D. is the Project Entrepreneur of ARTIQ - Israeli Queer Art and the founder and curator of the virtual visual archive as part of the Feminist and Lesbian Archive at the Isha L’Isha Center, Haifa. She is a research associate at the HFI (Haifa Feminist Institute). Her research focuses on visual and artistic cultural representations of the LGBTQ community in Israel. For the past ten years, she has been a lecturer at the Open University of Israel and, since 2015, has taught courses centered on interdisciplinary queer art at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. Moshe Sluhovsky is the Paulette and Claude Kelman Chair in the Study of French Jewry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and has served as Director of the Lafer Center for Women’s and Gender Studies and as Chair of the School of History at the Hebrew University. Benedikt Wolf is Research Associate at Bielefeld University, Germany. Recent publications include Penetrierte Männlichkeit. Sexualität und Poetik in deutschsprachigen Erzähltexten der literarischen Moderne (1905–1969) (2018), Sexual Culture in Germany in the 1970s. A Golden Age for Queers? (edited with Janin Afken, 2019), and Mit Deutschland leben. Felix Rexhausens Literatur zwischen Zersetzung und Formspiel (2020). Orit Yaal is a historian of gender and of the Hebrew press. She earned her Ph.D. at Bar-Ilan University and is currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is a lecturer at Kinneret Academic College on the Sea of Galilee in Israel. She also educated Israeli youth on gender and sexual equality. Yuval Yonay is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, University of Haifa. He has written on the history and sociology of economic knowledge, the socio-

Contributors

economic status of Israeli Palestinians, and the legal and political standing of lesbians and gays in Israel. His book with Vered Kraus, Facing Barriers: Palestinian Women in a Jewish-Dominated Labor Market, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. In the past several years he has studied the gay history of Israel, focusing on the life experiences of gays and lesbians during the late Mandatory period and the first decades of statehood.

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Acknowledgments

The origins of the project that led to the publication of the present collection are rooted in an exploratory effort conducted by Andreas Krass and Moshe Sluhovsky, supported by a joint research grant from Humboldt University of Berlin and Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It was the indefatigable Dagmar Herzog who first put us in touch with each other, and has continued to follow this project throughout. We thank our students Aviel Astanovsky, Neta Bar Ziv, Luisa Böck, Noam Herzog, Lior Rashty, and Omri Regev for their invaluable archival work tracing individuals whose lives (or at least names) embodied the Jewish presence in gay and lesbian Berlin and led to the creation of a gay and lesbian scene in Palestine/Israel. Generous support from the German Israel foundation (GIF grant i-1335-111.4/2016) then enabled Krass, Sluhovsky and Yuval Yonay to widen the scope of the investigation. Ofri Ilany, who knows more than anyone about samesex ideologies in Wilhelmine Germany and same-sex life in Mandatory Palestine and then Israel, was a crucial member of our team, and we thank him for his continuous contribution. The DAAD Center for German Studies at the European Forum at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem supported a conference in Berlin in 2020 in which some of the papers included in this collection were first presented. Robert Beachy, Ralf Dose, Susannah Heschel, Tamar Hess, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, and Robert Tobin kindly agreed to participate in our final workshop in Berlin, and we thank them all for their helpful insights. The intellectual and organizational talents of Nimrod Waehner-Levin made much of this possible, and Sara Tropper was an excellent and thoughtful editor.

List of Images

Cover: On the Beach in Tel Aviv, mid 1920s; a photograph by S. Korbman; by special permission of the Administrator General, The State of Israel, as the Executor of S. Korbman Estate & Mus, Eretz Israel Museum, Tel Aviv. Cover: In the Eldorado, a transvestite bar in Motzstraße, Berlin 1926; courtesy of bpkBildagentur. Figure 5.1: Curt Bois in the 1929 Berlin re-production of Charleys Tante (image taken from Zolchow and Muschelknautz 2001, 27), p. 112. Figure 5.2 “Marlene Dietrich” –– portrait of the “Damenimitator Barbette in knapper Bekleidung” by D’Ora Benda, Vienna, November 6, 1926; Bildarchiv Austria, 204912D, p. 114. Figure 5.3: Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, Louise Abbéma, 1879, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; used with the permission of the Museum, p. 118. Figure 5.4: Announcement: Last Performance of the “Damenimitator” Mr. Man de Wirth in Olomouc on April 27, 1896, published in the Mährische Tagblatt, p. 121. Figure 6.1: Roni Tal, not dated; unknown photographer, a present of Roni’s sister to the author, p. 139. Figure 6.2: Roni Tal and his partner, Isidor Nebenzahl, at their apartment, not dated; unknown photographer, a present of Roni’s sister to the author, p. 141. Figure 6.3: Theo Mainz, not dated; unknown photographer; courtesy of the archive of The Aguda –The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, p. 145. Figure 6.4: Theo Mainz, not dated; unknown photographer; courtesy of the archive of The Aguda – The Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, p. 150. Figure 8.1: Magnus Hirschfeld and Li Shiu-tong in Nizza, 1934; courtesy of MagnusHirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V., Berlin, p. 186. Figure 9.1: Anne (Annie) Neumann, 1950, photographer unknown; Gabriel Talphir Archive, Information Center for Israeli Art, The Israel Museum, Jerusalemp, p. 221. Figure 9.2: Postcard with the building of the Reimann School, Berlin: Publishing Department of the Reimann School ca. 1912 - 1936, paper, 10.3 x 14.7 cm; Jewish Museum Berlin, inv. no. 2012/148/4, photo: Kai-Annett Becker, p. 227. Figure 9.3: Neumann’s student card; courtesy of Hashomer Museum Archive, p. 228.

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Figure 9.4: Anne Neumann, date and details unknown; Design and Visual Information Library, Beit Ariella, Tel Aviv; https://www.facebook.com/tlv.libraries/posts/227407 7522624594, retrieved January 20, 2019, p. 230. Figure 9.5: Annie Neumann, Portrait of Henrietta Szold, 1940s-1950s, details and source unknown; https://gideonofrat.wordpress.com/2019/02/08/, retrieved July 22, 2021, p. 231. Figure 9.6: Anne Neumann, Portrait of Ruth, date and technique unknown, in The Book of Ruth (Tel Aviv: Lion the Printer, 1949), p. 234. Figure 9.7: Anne Neumann, Portrait, ca. 1930s-1950s, etching; courtesy of Kedem – Auction House Ltd, p. 235. Figure 11.1: Map of Praga, 1930; prepared by the author based on “Warsaw (Warszawa): City Map” by Mieczysław Orłowicz, https://rcin.org.pl/dlibra/publication/248/editi on/129?language=en, p. 273. Figure 12.1: Giora Manor, 1983, photographed by Boaz Lanir; Yad Ya’ari Archive, p. 302.

Index of Places

A Aachen 44 Afula 149, 201 Allenstein 196, 214 Amsterdam 38, 41, 144, Argentina 55 Arnsberg 60 Ascona 98 Athens 13, 203 Auschwitz 44, 48-49, 55, 58, 60, 63, 89 Austria 15, 49, 53, 55, 60, 82n6, 85, 113n4, 120-122, 131, 147, 184, 201, 225, 293-294 B Barcelona 115 Basel 12, 46, 244 Beirut 198, 203, 213 Beit Alfa 185, 187, 200-203, 206, 209, 212-215 Beit Jala 198 Belz 271, 284-285 Berasino 214 Bergen-Belsen 60 Berkeley 39 Berlin 8-14, 17-20, 29-65, 77-92, 97-109, 112, 132, 135, 148-149, 164165, 183-187, 189, 191-197, 199, 201, 203-205, 207-208, 214, 225-227, 229, 244, 255, 267, 282-283, 293 Bernburg 59, 65

Bessarabia 214, Bethlehem 198, 233 Beverweerd 39 Bitanya Illit 293-294 Blankenburg 42 Bloomington 49, Bonn 42, 48, 79n2 Borzestowo 214 Bratislava 154 Brazil 61 Bremen 41, 99 Breslau 47, 49, 53, 61 Bristol 44 Brno (Brünn) 36, 44, 203 Bromberg (Bydgoszcz) 19, 147 Brooklyn 47 Budapest 8, 115, 124, 132, 154 Buenos Aires 50, 60 C Cambridge 30 Canada 153, 209 Capri 55, 147, 203 Charlottenburg (Berlin) 12, 17, 30, 38, 46, 51, 53, 56-57, 60, 62, 65, 81, 205 Chicago 42, 137n3 Cologne 48-49, 82, 195-196, 214, 226 Copenhagen 52 Cottbus 226 Cyprus 133 Czczecin (Stettin) 147

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Czechoslovakia 44, 122, 131, 141, 147, 201, 292 D Dachau 50 Denmark 52-54, 98, 291 Dresden 44, 49 Drohobych 53 Dubrovnik 49 Düsseldorf 44, 51, 115 E Eerde 39 Ein HaHoresh 18 Ein Hamifratz 303 Ein Harod 201-202 Ein Hod 19 Erlangen 41, 46 F Falenica (Warsaw) 277-278 Ferrara 19 Florence 10, 49, 98 France 8, 17, 38, 47-48, 50, 56, 58, 101, 117, 147n8, 184 Frankfurt am Main 36, 39, 48-50, 59, 63, 144 Freiburg 39, 50, 58 Friedenau (Berlin) 61 Friedrichroda 54 G Galicia 43, 53, 184, 196, 214, 293 Germany 8-10, 12, 14-15, 17, 20, 29-76, 77-95, 97-110, 121, 131-156, 162, 183, 185, 198-199, 203205, 210, 221-238, 239-263, 267-268, 270, 284, 296 Givat Brenner 18 Givat Haviva 303 Great Britain see United Kingdomsee United Kingdom Grunewald (Berlin) 18, 39, 45, 47, 51, 194, Gurs 56

H Haifa 18-20, 149, 152, 168, 183n1, 184185, 187-188, 193, 199-200, 203, 209, 212-214, 221, 233, 293, Halberstadt 42 Halensee (Berlin) 42 Halle 46 Hamburg 43, 53-55, 62-63, 65, 81n4, 92n15, 226, 231 Hanover 48 Harvard 30 Havelberg (Brandenburg) 89 Heftziba 191, 201-202, 215 Hollywood 54, 154, 174 Hulda 222, 226, 230, 233 Hungary 52-53, 115, 119, 131, 140, 143, 154, 214 I India 133, 183, 186, 196, 203, 207, 254255 Iowa 30 Ischia 49 Israel 10, 13, 17, 19-20, 31, 34, 53, 131-156, 157-180, 183-219, 221-228, 230, 232, 236, 272, 276, 282, 284, 291-309 Italy 36, 49-51, 54-56, 168, 240-242 J Jaffa 16, 184, 187, 189, 193 Jelgava 24 Jerusalem 17-19, 30, 159, 165, 173, 184185, 187, 192-199, 202-203, 206, 212-215, 221-222, 225226, 231, 236, 249, 255, 296 K Kalia 146-148 Kaliningrad (Königsberg) 58 Kamionek 273, 282 Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad) 215 Karlsruhe 49 Kassel 46

Index of Places

Kenya 57, 89 Kiev 51 Kreuzberg (Berlin) 59, 64 L Landskron 214 Latvia 214 Leipzig 36, 48, 61, 162 Lichtenburg 17, 46, 61 Liegnitz 56 Linz 121 Lisbon 44 Lodz 59, 61 London 35-36, 43-44, 46, 48, 50-53, 55, 60, 62, 78, 90, 98, 101, 106, 117, 152-153, 184, 203, 211, 214, 306 Lwow (Lemberg) 293 M Mallorca 49 Mannheim 52 Marburg 46 Mauthausen 55 Miami 58, 188 Minsk 43 Mishmar HaEmeq 291-293, 295n1, 296301, 303, 305, 307 Moravia 120 Moscow 37, 55, 189 Munich 17, 36, 44, 47, 49, 52, 55-56, 85, 98, 204-205 Münster 55 N Nablus 152n11 Nahalal 191, 200 Nairobi 88 Naumburg 54 Neisse 17 Neu-Isenburg 54 Neukölln (Berlin) 53, 58, 90 New York 36, 46-49, 51, 54, 57, 118, 185, 203, 208 Nikoleiv (Russia) 214

Nitra (Hungary) 214 North Carolina 47 O Olomouc (Olmütz) 120-121 Oranienburg 37 Osthafen (Berlin) 89 Otwock 276-279, 282-283 P Palestine 89-90, 108, 132-156, 157-180, 183-219, 221-238, 282, 284, 292-293, 296-297, 307 Paris 47, 49-51, 56, 63, 84, 90, 98, 113n4, 117, 136, 165, 168, 197, 200, 203-205, 208-209, 226, 282, 306 Plötzensee (Berlin) 44, 61 Poland 58, 61, 135, 142, 147, 244, 265289, Pomerania 46, 62 Portugal 44 Poznań (Posen) 19, 39, 244 Prabuty (Riesenburg) 58 Prague 8, 13, 35, 44, 46, 54, 57, 122-125, 132, 154, 201, 284, 291-292 Prenzlau 59 Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin) 60-61 Princeton 39, 47 Prussia 12, 38, 41-42, 84, 97-98, 204, 244 R Ravensbrück 49, 59, 65, 87 Regensburg 56 Rehavia (Jerusalem) 18, 192-193 Rehovot 18 Riga 46, 50, 55, 62 Rishon LeZion 214 Russia 9, 15, 17-18, 37-38, 51, 55-56, 58-59, 84, 117, 133, 135, 148, 189, 200, 206, 214, 240, 282, 283n5 S Sachsenhausen 244 Salem 30

321

322

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Schmargendorf (Berlin) 42, 60 Schöneberg (Berlin) 47, 50, 54, 57-58, 60, 79, 81-82, 84, 86n9, 91, 227n7 Schöneweide (Berlin) 54 Shanghai 35, 41, 62, 64, 185, 190, 209 Siegen 17 Silesia 17, 49, 54, 56, 58, 62 Słupsk 56 South Africa 153 Spain 38, 44, 56, 136 Stanisławów 61 Stockholm 55, 59 Strasbourg 45 Sweden 36, 41-42, 55 Switzerland 36, 39, 47-50, 52, 54, 57, 61, 63, 82n6, 91, 183, 197, 244, 259 T Tanzania 57, 88 Tbilis 200, 214 Tehran 47-48 Tel Aviv 13-14, 16, 19, 43, 56, 61, 135, 138, 140-141, 143-144, 147-150, 152-153, 159, 162, 184-194, 197, 199-200, 205-209, 211215, 225-226, 229-230, 232, 234, 236, 295-296, 306 Theresienstadt 42, 44, 53, 91 Tiergarten (Berlin) 46 Trieste 119 Tübingen 48, 58, 85 U Uganda 133 Ukraine 61, 225 United Kingdom 117 United States 30, 36, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 62, 79, 88, 113, 115, 117, 165, 169, 174-175, 184, 207, 223n4 Utrecht 99 V Vienna 19-20, 46, 52, 55, 59, 62,112-114, 120, 122, 125, 132, 147, 196, 203, 269, 293

Vilna 197, 214 W Warka 282-283 Warsaw 8, 13-14, 55, 59, 65, 142, 265-289 Wawer (Warsaw) 277 Wilmersdorf (Berlin) 46, 56-57, 81 Wisconsin-Madison 30 Würzburg 60 Y York 30 Z Zolochiv 196, 214 Zurich 52, 112, 203, 245n11

Index of Names

A Abbéma, Louise 117-118 Abels, Anneliese see Hartwin, Ann K. Abraham, Felix 29, 35-36 Adler, Alfred 135, 162 Ahmad, Mirza Ghulam 254-255 Alienus, Hans see Marcus, Hugo (Hamid) Amberg, Karl 60 Apitz, Helene 58, 65 Appenszlak, Jakub 274 Arco see Wongtschowski, Kurt Arendt, Hannah 8, 287 Aricha, Yosef 136, 164-165 Aron, Peter 61 Ascher, Alice 29, 62 Ataron, C hai see Rozenkranz, Hans Auden, W. H. 52 B Bab, Edwin 37 Baden, Mike see Keidar, Eli Baeck, Leo 50 Baer, Karl M. 29, 42-43 Baerwald, Alexander 199-200 Bähler, Albert 193-194 Barbette 113-115 Bassenheim, Käthe von 49-50 Basté, Risa 111, 120, 126 Baum, Vicki 108 Beck, Gad (Gerhard) 20, 42, 44-45, 107 Behmack, Otto 64

Ben-Haim, Benyamin Zeev 172 Benjamin, Dora 84, 101 Benjamin, Walter 84, 101, 266 Benjamin, Harry 208 Ben-Menahem, Rina 171, 173 Ben-Ner, Y. 175 Berger, W. 215 Bergmann, Karl 82 Bergmann, Samuel Hugo 198, 214 Bergner, Elisabeth 51, 53 Berlin, Chaim 185-187, 191, 203, 214 Berlin, Lea 18, 164 Berliner, Cora 42-43 Bernhardt, Sarah 56, 117-118, 126 Bloch, Iwan 209 Blüher, Hans 13, 41, 243, 253, 293 Bodenheimer, Shimon Fritz 195-196, 214 Boehm, Joachim 41 Bois, Curt 111-112, 115, 126 Boldes, Walter 29, 61, 63 Bondy, Walter 49 Borel, Eugen 57 Boye, Karin 59 Brachyahu, Mordechai 197, 214 Brand, Adolf 13, 36-37, 252 Branda 104n8 Braun, Stephan 154 Brecht, Bertolt 52 Brill, Abraham A. 184 Brooks, Louise 81

324

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Brzeski, Kazimierz 278 Budzislawski, Herbert 29, 42, 44 Bunem, Simhah 282-283 Burlingham, Dorothy 62 C Canaan, Tawfiq 197-198 Carlé, Alice 48 Chabrol, Claude 175 Chaplin, Charlie 57 Charell, Erik 51-54 Cöchelbergher, Gérado 119 Cohn, Haim 153 Cohn, Lotte 191 Conrad, Elsa 29, 57, 78, 81-82, 84, 86, 88-89 Conrad, Wilhelm 57, 81 Cramm, Gottfried von 53 Crevel, René 83 Cruys, Wilhelmine 50, 65 Czinner, Paul 53 D Dar, Zvi see Lederer Franz de Haan, Jacob Israel 16, 271-272 Decan, Henri 167 Derp, Clotilde von 56 Diamond, Henrietta 215 Dietrich, Marlene 57, 80-81, 114 Dizengoff, Meir 192, 214, 229n10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 283 E Ebert, Elfriede 58 Ebn-Abi-Hadglat 247 Eick, Annette 29, 40, 45, 48, 57, 78-80, 82-84, 86, 88n13, 89-90, 102 Einav, Yehuda 173 Ekkehard, Erich see Stauff, Philipp Elberskirchen, Johanna 102 Engle, Avi 144 Eulenburg, Philipp Prince of 8, 12, 32, 35, 208 F Färber, Benno 61

Federgrin, M. 282-283, 285 Feist, Hans 63 Fellini, Federico 167-168 Feuchtwanger, Lion 80 Fischer, Erica 60 Flato, Fritz 29, 35-36, 40, 60 Fleischmann, Käthe 78, 81-82, 86-89 Fliederbaum see Brzeski Fontheim, Kurt 29, 35-36 Forel, Auguste 207, 209, 296 Frank, Edgar Levin 51, 55, 206 Freud, Anna 62 Freud, Sigmund 17, 62, 132, 162, 209, 293, 296 Freund, Giesèle 49-50 Friedlaender, Benedict 13, 37, 245, 252 Friedländer, Lucie Friedmann, Ch. 215 Friedmann, Sali see Basté, Risa Frommel, Wolfgang 39 Fuchs, Gerda 18 Fürst, Georg 58 Fürst, Gerda 58 G Gahrmann, Margarete “Deta” 51, 54, 62, 92n15 Galinski, Heinz 45 Gansz, Liesel 43 Garbo, Greta 57 Gay, Peter 10, 115 Gee, Hanna Dorothy see Gronemann, Hanna Genet, Jean 286 George, Stefan 38-39, 47, 245 Gerasch, Alfred 55 Giehse, Therese 51-52 Giese, Karl 35, 62, 185, 203, 208-209 Golan, Shmuel “Milak” 293-298, 303 Goldfaden, Edith 20 Goldmann, Luise 59, 65 Goldmann, Magdalena 50, 62 Goldschein, Shmuel see Golan, Schmuel Green, Oliver P. 184 Greenberg, David 167

Index of Names

Gronemann, Hanna 59-60, 65 Gross, Natan 175 Grossmann, Charlotte 91 Grossmann, Reinhold 91 Gründgens, Gustaf 47, 51-52, 54 Grune, Richard 50-51 Gutmann, Eva 18 H Hahm, Lotte 81-82, 89 Hahn, Käthe see von Bassenheim, Käthe Halevi, Jehuda 248, 249n27 Halfi, Rachel 173 Hall, Radclyffe 164, 169, 173, 176 Haller, Max Josef see Hansen, Max Halpern, Beile 43 Halusa, Marta 8-9, 54 Hamburger, Hans 17, 146-147 Hamm, Lotte 87n10 Hampson, John 52 Hanel, Margot Leonie 59 Hansen, Max 51-52 Harden, Maximilian 12, 32, 35, 208 Hartwin, Ann K. 45-46 Havkin, Yedidia Eduard 17 Heine, Heinrich 246-248 Heinemann, Leopold 45-46 Heinemann, Mendel 46 Heinemann, Rosalie 46 Hellman, Lillian 173 Hellmert, Wolfgang 63 Herbst, Manasse 53 Hermans, Susy 91 Herrmann, Leo 214-215 Herrmann, Lola 215 Herz, Margarete 42, 62, 79n2 Herzfeld, Charlotte 2, 42 Hessel, Franz 1 Hessel, Helen 1 Heuss, Theodor 50 Heymann, Harry “Hambo” 51, 53 Hiller, Kurt 4, 29, 35-36, 47, 49 Hilsley, William 38-39 Hirsch, Alfred 42, 44

Hirschfeld, Magnus 11-14, 29, 32, 35-38, 43, 49, 58, 62, 65, 79, 82n6, 84, 101, 104, 135-136, 162, 183219, 227, 241-244, 267 Hodann, Max 135, 294 Holzmann, Johannes 37 Holzmann, Margot see Liu, Margot Hoppe, Marianne 54 Horowitz, Vladimir 51, 62 Hoy, Senna see Holzmann, Johannes Hubbs, Bracha 162 I Isherwood, Christopher 44, 64 Israel, Wilfrid 8, 42-44 J Japhé, Fanny 201, 214 Jawslensky, Alexej 56 Jokl, Oswald 215 Jooss, Kurt 55 Josephthal, Georg see Yoseftal, Giora Joyce, James 118-119, 125 K Kadri, Shraga 136 Kafka, Franz 123-125, 284 Kahn, Fritz 162, 165 Kalich, Jacob 122 Kant, Immanuel 257 Kantorowicz, Ernst 38-39 Karina, Lilian 55 Karmin, Josef 162 Karnieli, Israel 192 Karo, Erwin Reuven 149-150 Karpeles, Alex see Manor, Giora Kaspi, Penina 136 Katz, Alexander see Leontjew, Sascha Kaufmann, Nico 51 Keidar, Eli 169 Kessler, Harry Graf 11, 45 Killmer, Evelyn 88n13, 102 Kinsey, Alfred Charles 153, 170, 175 Kirdorf, Emil 46 Kittel, Jörg Kitta von 50

325

326

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Kligler, Israel Jacob 195-196, 214 Klingel, Gertrud 48 Knittel, Margarete 63 Kohn, Adolf see Hellmert, Wolfgang Kokula, Ilse 87-88, 98-109 Kollwitz, Käthe 85, 98 Koplowitz, Oskar see Seidlin, Oskar Koslowski, Hedwig 50, 91 Kraeger, Heinrich 32 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von 241 Kraft, Kurt 60 Krakauer, Siegfried 48 Kraus, Gertrud 19, 154 Kreisler, Otto 122 Kreutzberg, Lola 55 Kuckuc, Ina see Kokula, Ilse Kühn, Leonore 102 Kuse, Kitty 98-99 Küster, Paul 61, 63 L Laban, Rudolf von 55 Lachmann, Vera 29, 45-47 Landshoff-York, Ruth 45, 47, 49, 51, 62 Langer, Jiři (Georgo) Mordechai 13 Laqueur, Walter 10 Laserstein, Käte 29, 42, 63 Lasker-Schüler, Else 37, 46, 84, 108 Laufer, Julius 44-45 Lederer, Franz 215 Lenné, Fred see Leschnitzer, Alfred Leontjew, Sascha 51, 55 Leschnitzer, Alfred 17, 20, 51, 56 Levy, Rudolf 49 Levy, Ruth see Landshoff-York, Ruth Lichansky, Batia 18, 164, 221-222, 224225, 229-230, 232-233, 236 Lichansky, Shoshana 225 Lichtblau-Leskly, Erich 53 Lichtenstein, Alfred 45-46 Liu, Chi-Lan 54 Liu, Margot 54, 65, 92n15 Loch, Frieda see Leschnitzer, Alfred Lotz, Ernst Wilhelm 49 Louis, Richard Walter 62

Löwenberg, Erich Karl see Charell, Erik M Maas, Ernst 207, 214 Madame D’Ora 113-115 Madsen, Gerda 104n7 Mainz, Theo 137, 144-145, 150, 296 Maliniak, Julian 276-277 Mallet-Joris, François 166, 174 Man de Wirth, Mr. 120-121 Mann, Erika 29, 49, 51-52, 54, 63 Mann, Klaus 17, 45, 47-48, 52, 62-63 Mann, Thomas 17, 47, 52, 55 Manor, Gideon Manor, Giora 144, 151, 154, 287-309 Manor, Rachel 294 Marcus, Hugo (Hamid) 14, 239-263 Marcuse, Max 136, 162 Marken, Alexander M. 215 Marte X 102, 104, 107-108 Matmon, Avraham 135, 162 Mautner, Jan 44 Mayer, Hans 45, 48 Meidner, Ludwig 49-50 Meirovitch, Menashe 214 Mendel, Mordechai 13-14, 265-289 Mendel, Mordechai Menachem 282 Mendelssohn, Eleanora von 51 Mendelssohn, Francesco (Franz) 51 Mendelssohn, Moses 255 Mennecke, Friedrich 59 Meyer, Max Salomon 60-61 Meyer, Selma 41 Meyersohn, Hans 61 Meysel, Inge 51, 53 Miller, Henry 174 Modigliani, Amedeo 49 Möller, Lies 18 Moltke, Kuno von 7, 12 Moreck, Curt 56, Morwitz, Ernst 38 Moses, Walter 17, 148 Mosse, George L. 10, 29-30, 42 Mosse, Martha 42, 83n7 Mühsam, Erich 37

Index of Names

Munter, Benjamin 222 Murnau, Fritz 47 N Narkiss, Mordecai 232 Nathan, Hans 17, 19, 147-148, 149, 154 Nathan, Rosie 147-148, 154 Nebenzahl, Isidor 140-141 Neumann, Anne “Annie” 18, 154, 164, 221-239 Neumann, Frieda 18 Neumann, Mendel 226 Neumann, Sarah 226 Nietzsche, Friedrich 243, 252, 259, 293 Nohl, Johannes 37 O Olitzki, Aryeh Leo 195-196, 214 Ollendorff, Rose 42, 63 Oppenheimer, Heinz Reinhard Hillel 196, 214 Oppenheimer, Franz 195-196 P Padan, Yaakov 293 Palm, Elli 63 Pappenheim, Moritz 111, 162 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 286 Peri, Hiram 196, 214 Perutz, Schoschanah 215 Pflaum, Heinz see Peri, Hiram Picon, Molly 111, 121n12, 122-123, 126 Plant, Richard 29, 45, 48-49 Popper, Albert Abraham 231 Pringsheim, Katia 47 Proust, Marcel 268-269 R Radszuweit, Friedrich 40, 82, 83n7 Radusch, Hilde 99 Ranaan, Ben 215 Rappeport, Ernst Elijahu 201, 214 Rappeport, Sarah 201 Rathé, Ellen 51, 54, 62, 92n15 Rathenau, Walter 11-12, 14, 43 Raymon, Harry 29

Reich, Wilhelm 294 Reifenberg, Adolf 195-196, 214 Reimann, Albert 227 Reinhard, Heinz see Oppenheimer, Hillel Reinhardt, Max 51-52, 54 Reutter, Otto 35 Rilke, Rainer Maria 231 Ringelnatz, Joachim 41 Robak, Aron 279-280 Robak, Yaakov Yitzchak 279-281 Rodin, Auguste 226 Roellig, Ruth Margarete 78-81, 88 Rohrer, Christian 198 Rokeach, Aharon 284 Rokeach, Yissachar Dov 284 Rosen, Pinchas 153 Rosenberg, Berta 81 Rosenberg, Elsa see Conrad, Elsa Rosenberg, Hans 85 Roshmon, Madeleine 169 Roth, Naama 221 Rothaug, Amalie 57, 81, 88 Rovina, Hanna 192, 214 Rozenkranz, Hans 117-118 Rubinstein, Arthur 51 Rudy, David 172 Rühling, Anna 102 S Sacharoff, Alexander 51 Sachs, Nelly 46 Sampter, Jessie Ethel 18, 164 Sand, George 170 Sandmann, David 98 Sandmann, Gertrude 29, 46, 49-50, 59, 78-81, 85-86, 91, 98-108 Sartre, Paul 167 Schaefer, Hans Otto 51 Schapsky, Ms. 18 Scharf, Elsa 19 Schermann, Henny 29, 59, 65, 87n12 Schmidt, Otto 61 Schnapper, Isidor 61 Schneerson, Yehoshua Fishel 162

327

328

Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine

Schneider, Peter 56 Schnitzler, Arthur 48 Schoeps, Hans-Joachim 12, 29, 41-42 Schragenheim, Felice Rachel 29, 60, 92n15 Schulz, Walter D. 35 Schwadron see Sharon Schwersenz, Jizchak 19-20 Schwersenz, Margot 63 Seeler, Moriz 45-46 Seidlin, Oskar 45, 48-49, 63 Senff, Werner 60 Sharon, Avraham 196, 214 Shenhabi, Mordechai 293 Shiu-tong, Li 35, 136, 185-187, 192, 199, 201, 210 Sichel, Nathanael 188 Siewert, Eva 45, 47-48 Silbermann, Alphons 29 Simmel, Georg 244 Simon, Ernst Akiba 303 Sintenis, Renate Alice see Sintenis, Renée Sintenis, Renée 49-50, 62 Smeliansky, Anna 135, 149, 296 Spiegel, Julius Hans 51, 55 Sprenger, Erna 42 Stark, Willi 49-51 Stauff, Philipp 32 Stendhal 247 Stenzel, Bertha 57, 88 Stern, Fritz 10 Stern, Yossi 154 Sternheim, Carl 49 Sternheim, Elisabeth Dorothea 49 Sternheim, Mopsa see Sternheim, Elisabeth Dorothea Sternheim, Vera 49 Storrs, Ronald 231 Straus, Lina 190, 197 Straus, Nathan 190, 197 Strauss, Richard 147 Streck, Tamara “Röschen” 99 Stroberg, Strohberg, Sztraport see Mendel, Mordechai

Struck, Hermann 188, 199-200, 206, 209, 213-214 Sulke, Gerda see Fürst, Gerda Sultan, Grete 46 T Tal, Roni 137, 139, 141 Tao Li see Shiu-ton, Li Tchizik, Ephraim 222 Tchizik, Sarah 222 Theilhaber, Felix A. 162 Thomas, Brandon 111 Trude, Francis 48 Tucker, Tui St. George 47 U Uexküll-Gyllenband, Woldemar von 39 Unfried, Hans see Wolf, Friedrich Ussishkin, Menachem 195-196 Ussishkin, Rachel 196 V Valentino, Rudolph 57 Vallentin, Berthold 38 Vollmöller, Karl 47, 54 Vortriede, Werner 38-39 W W., Anneliese “Johnny” 86n9, 87n10, 138, 140 Wagner, Richard 249 Wallach, Paul 61 Weber, Aenne 82 Wedekind, Klaus 47 Wedekind, Pamela 47 Weinblum, Sarah see Neumann, Sarah Weininger, Otto 83 Weinshall, Jacob 200, 214 Weihrauch, Anna 108 Weiß, Rudolf 50 Werdriner, Fritz 17 Wiechecki, Stefan 277 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 38 Winsloe, Christa 164 Wolf, Friedrich 37-38

Index of Names

Wolff, Charlotte 29, 58, 78, 80-81, 84, 86, 90, 100n4, 101-102, 106107 Wolff, Helene 42, 62, 79n2 Wolters, Friedrich 38 Wongtschowski, Kurt 41 Woolf, Virginia 223n3, 234 Wulff, Moshe 135, 149 Wüst, Egon 56 Wust, Elisabeth “Lilly” 60, 63, 92n15 Wyler, William 173-174 Wyneken, Gustav 293-294 Y Yona, Meir 225 York von Wartenburg, David Graf 47 Yoseftal, Giora 17, 140n5, 153-154 Yoseftal, Santa 153-154 Z Zacharias-Langhans, Erich 54 Zadek, Hilda 19-20, 147 Zambrzycki, Władysław 276-277 Zeidman, Mordechai 172 Ziemba, Menachem 272, 274-275, 284 Zlocisti, Theodor 191, 214 Zohar, Tzvi 236, 293, 295 Zuckerman (Zucky), Anne Vivian 297298 Zweig, Arnold 271-272 Zweig, Stefan 124-125

329

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