The Queer History of Weimar Germany

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On July 31st, 1919, in the town of Weimar, Germany, a new constitution was approved that would change the country forever. This constitution, which solidified the birth of the Weimar Republic, was the result of Germany's humiliating loss in World War One and subsequent revolution, which left it economically devastated, bitter, and in chaos. Struggling in the Weimar's early years with inflation so bad, it rendered currency effectively useless.

Although at the turn of the century, Germany was one of the most progressive and economically powerful nations in the world, within one generation, the far-right social undercurrents that had long been there had grown stronger, only becoming deeper entrenched as Germans struggled with the post-World War One inflation, catastrophe, and despair.

Despite this, the interwar period saw a Weimar Republic that, in many ways, was the complete opposite of the society that it would later dissolve into during World War Two, when Adolf Hitler rose to power and established the Third Reich. The Weimar Republic of the 1920s, much like many other places, saw a brief period of social progressivism, new ideas, and experimentation. Berlin, much like Paris, was world-famous as a social center of at least partial freedom for society's outsiders, in particular, the queer community.

What was life like for the queer folks of the Weimar Republic? Come join me on a trip back in time on a brief visit to Berlin of the roaring twenties and the culture that surrounded it, with a case study on one significant queer German in particular, Conrad Veidt.

So, as usual, some disclaimers. This video is not going to cover literally everything about this topic. I will not be getting too into detail about the World Wars. I may be referencing or using some outdated terms or cis-normative language in this video where relevant to its historical use, or as people would have referred to historical concepts. And while I will make some mention of the Holocaust at the end, I won't be getting into detail on that either. I'm simply focusing on a different aspect of this time period. I appreciate your understanding.

Now, before we get into the video, let's hear a quick word from today's sponsor, Squarespace. If you're an artist these days, a good online portfolio is just not optional. I've had a portfolio site for years, but it's always been a little bit basic and lackluster. So I'm so happy that Squarespace reached out to me because I've been planning on switching over for a really long time. From websites and online stores, to marketing tools and analytics, Squarespace's the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business or showcase your work. Squarespace is so easy to use that I was able to make a super nice-looking portfolio in only a couple of hours. It really looks so much nicer now, and I think that my new site makes my portfolio of work look even better and more interesting. Head on over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com/kazrowe to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using my code KAZROWE. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring this video, and now let's get back to learning about the queer history of the Weimar Republic.

For many upper and middle-class people in urban Germany during the twenties, their first access to the queer world probably came through something called slumming. Slumming was essentially a very popular type of tourism where people would go into lower-income neighborhoods and visit the exciting, salacious, and dirty sites and experiences there. Gay and trans clubs, brothels, saloons, et cetera. It happened commonly in New York City and other American cities too, and yeah, it sucked. There were entire tour guide industries dedicated to slumming itself. And the fact is, you weren't usually going to find these joints in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, so guess where queer people of any class had to go.

The twenties was kind of a Renaissance period for Europe's sapphic women, with cities like Berlin and Paris widely regarded as the world's lesbian capitals due to the general tolerance towards sapphic couples and gender non-conforming women in certain areas of the cities. The Weimar Republic saw the rise of several lesbian-specific magazine publications, and Berlin had the first published lesbian city guidebook. In a wide number of cities, social clubs for gay women began popping up all over the place, holding meetings, parties, and balls. Many of these clubs were frequented by rising or established celebrities, such as openly bisexual actress Marlena Dietrich, who has a life story so wild, I would probably need to make it its own video.

- May I have this?

- Of course. (classic music) (audience laughing)

And leaders of the budding trans rights movements, such as Lotte Hahm, began organizing social gatherings for trans people as well as campaigning for equality and recognition for trans people, which were all too often ignored by gay male advocacy groups, which often sought to distance themselves from femininity or gender deviancy in order to appeal to respectability. The trans community, along with anyone who wanted to dress in a gender non-conforming way, were struggling against paragraph 360/11 and 183, which outlawed gross mischief and creating a public nuisance, which were exactly vague enough to allow the police to harass people wearing the wrong clothes at any given moment. One extremely unsettling form of protection people could obtain was a trans certificate, which would show that the holder was known to police and not violating the law if apprehended. There were also trans passports, which allowed people to travel between jurisdictions, dressed how they liked.

Respectability politics in general swirled constantly around the lives of trans people, drag queens, and gender non-conforming people. They were blamed for struggles on all sides by other groups, usually gender-conforming gay men for supposedly undercutting gay advancements and the fight for acceptance and attitude, which would persist universally until, oh wait, until today, because that actually never went away. Cool.

Anyways, let's talk about the toxic gay masculinity and the Weimar Republic for a sec. Although Germany after World War One experienced a brief period of social progress for gay people and gay men in particular, life was made extremely difficult by the existence of paragraph 175, the law that had prohibited unnatural sexual acts since the adoption of the Prussian penal code in 1871. Later on, in 1926, the (chuckles) absolutely named Filth and Trash law was passed, which targeted mentions of immoral sexuality in print media, specifically.

World War One itself had been a unique experience for gay men, much like what servicemen in World War Two in all countries would later experience. Under the guise of comradeship, men were for the first time able to engage in the traditionally feminine acts of love towards other men and nurturing behavior. Even before the war, gay German veterans were standing up for themselves and creating their own societies that promoted the idea of homosexual comradeship on the front as a hyper-masculine ideal, referencing the homoeroticism of ancient Greek soldiers, which at this point almost every Western European nation was idolizing. There's nothing manlier than being gay and at war, I guess. (laughs)

Veterans such as Adolf Brand, the founder of the Community of Unique Ones, promoted the idea that homosexual men are superior to heterosexuals because gay men can fully worship and idealize the male form, which (laughing) I mean, listen, bud, we don't need to be pushing misogyny to uplift gay men. Oh no, it's too late. We slipped and fell back into authoritarianism again. Whoops! Big shocker. Brand would go on to have allies within the Nazi party.

Of course, not everyone held Brand's ideology, namely his progressive rival Magnus Hirschfeld. Magnus Hirschfeld was in his fifties when he opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in July, 1919. He would write over 2,000 texts on human sexuality and science during his lifetime and is widely regarded as one of the very first gay rights pioneers. Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in what is now Poland to a Jewish family, and his father was a well-established and respected physician who focused on advancements in hygiene and disease prevention. This would be a formative influence on Hirschfeld, whose lifelong practice would continue these values.

Although some of Hirschfeld's work suffered from some pitfalls of his cultural context, it was extremely radical for both his time and his practice in general. As a sexologist, Hirschfeld came into a new school of thought that by nature sought to pathologize and intellectualize homosexuality, gender, and human sexuality in general. All sexologists did this. What set Hirschfeld apart was his core belief in, in his own words, love at the core of his research. Hirschfeld believed that love must be the driving force in all human nature, regardless of sex, race, sexuality, gender, age, nationality, whatever.

This led him to his world tour later in the thirties, where he traveled to different countries to continue his studies in an attempt to reject Eurocentrism and racism from his science. However, it needs to be said that as a German intellectual of this time period, his work is not completely divorced from the culture that it came from, and many aspects of his international work, while making an obvious attempt to challenge racism, still fall into many issues that global sexology would not be able to escape yet. Inherent exoticism, as well as unfortunately reinforcing some colorist or racial hierarchies that the countries he visited held, India in particular.

Although Hirschfeld's world tour was considered wildly successful at the time in many places he visited, and in India, he was a vocal supporter of Indian independence, many of his writings don't hold up too well today and struggle frequently with contradicting themselves. But his world tour also served as a political move too. It came in the early thirties when Germany was beginning to try and completely eradicate sexology as a practice, claiming it was a Jewish study and degenerate. By studying and writing on sexology outside of Europe, Hirschfeld was seeking to prove to his deteriorating home country that human sexuality outside of the norm is both ancient and inherent and cannot be destroyed. It would be another 30 years after this before Germany would allow what remained of Hirschfeld's work to be seen by the public again.

What can be said, though, is that Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science made a massive impact on cosmopolitan German society in the years before the rise of the Nazi regime, and by extension, its influence seeped out in trickles into the smaller towns. He adamantly opposed authoritarianism and religious dogmatism and encouraged people to think socially on a human level. He supported family planning and access to birth control, as well as safe abortions.

But what progressive social reformers like Hirschfeld in the Weimar Republic struggled with was the fact that culturally, Germans viewed the social issues as a singular problem rather than separate, intersectional subjects. So fighting for reform in regards to something like female sex workers or rights for gender non-conforming or trans individuals would also bring homosexuality into people's minds because abnormal sexual behavior was lumped in under the same umbrella. This made it incredibly difficult to get through to the public at large. The compromise ended up being eventually that in places like Berlin, people of sexual minorities had plentiful communities and clubs to gather under the condition that they were out of sight and out of mind.

But hidden operations doesn't mean these communities were entirely limited to the big cities like Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, or Dresden. Lesbian communities, for instance, had a wide variety of common gatherings, even in small towns. After all, the biggest German lesbian novel of the era, "The Scorpion," published first in 1919, takes place largely in the countryside. With the rise of literacy rates, print media distribution, and access to travel, gay and trans communities were rapidly spreading out of the cities and across the Republic. And this spread caused a lot of anxiety for conservative cis-heterosexual society, which was already reeling from their post-World War One fears of the dismantling of traditional values. Sound familiar, America?

Conservative groups fought hard for stricter censorship as immoral and decadent films and art started becoming more widespread, fearing that films that seemed to issue traditional morals and encourage sexual freedom would turn men gay and women lesbian and everybody into a gender outlaw, and the world is going to fall apart. For a while, the fight was in vain, but over the years, these groups managed to weaponize laws, such as paragraph 184, the law against obscenity, to get various films banned. It didn't help that many pro-gay movements, films, and art were being led or created by Jewish people, and so these conservative groups were able to weaponize antisemitism along with their homophobia, claiming that these pro-gay pieces and movements were secretly a way for the Jews to influence and destroy the pure and good traditional German people.

Oftentimes, anti-gay voices would claim that gay men were secretly Jewish or were inherently bad citizens and traitors to the nation, and that sapphic women were too. This led to many pro-gay sexologists to double down on the concept that actually homosexuality and transness is innate and an inherently biological condition. A concept that, in part, still exists today because this way advocates could argue that discriminating against queer people is wrong in a way that people would find harder to argue with.

Hirschfeld argued that through his research, he found that homosexuality is a biological phenomenon because gay men had apparent feminine traits such as menstruation-like phenomena like nosebleeds, backaches, and depression, and they have higher voices and underdeveloped Adam's apples and less body hair and wider hips. (sighing) One sec. What about the bears, Magnus? What about the bears? (laughs)

(sighing) It's time to talk about the arts a little bit. Sorry for the dramatic change in lighting, I had to re-record this section because I had technical difficulties. Say "lovey."

While all of this was going on politically, it was being strongly reflected into the art styles of the Weimar Republic at the time. One of the most prominent of these art styles was German Expressionism. Expressionist art was visual chaos, bringing the artist's world and therefore the reflection of German society outward into a visual form. It was claustrophobic compositions, inharmonic colors, sharp angles, dark shadows, puzzle-like faces and bodies, pain, confusion, despair. It ran in conjunction with the Dadaist movement, which drew a lot of its inspiration from the urban metropolis itself and the social chaos that it provided. Loud noises, confusing sights, and the feeling that you're never 100% sure what's about to happen to you. After all, this period was not too long after the industrial revolution itself, so the industrial world was still new to many people in the grand scheme of things. It didn't feel quite solid or fully real yet, especially in the aftermath of the chaos of World War One. The war left people with broken cities, as well as broken homes, spirits, and bodies. The number of men and women who returned from war injured and amputated or disfigured was uncountable. And with the rise of the film industries across the world, the Weimar Republic was perfectly primed and ready to begin producing film masterpieces that reflected its unsettled and uncomfortable society.

German Expressionist films, such as "Metropolis" starring my favorite girl Brigitte Helm, who was super anti-Nazi, love her. "Nosferatu," "The Hands of Orlac," "Waxworks," and "The Student of Prague" all had a dark and angst-driven look, all of them filled with high drama and despair. As German film critic Lotte Eisner called it, "a sort of twilight of the German soul expressing itself in shadowy, enigmatic interiors or in misty, insubstantial landscapes."

The film that most people think of when talking about German Expressionist film is one that defined the look itself in the most concrete way. "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," often cited as the first real horror film. Caligari has something in common with many other German Expressionist films, including "Orlac," "Student of Prague," and "Waxworks." They all star Conrad Veidt, one of the most well-known German actors of the era. In Caligari, Veidt plays Cesare the Somnambulist, a young man with a corpse-like appearance who has slept all his life and yet knows all of its secrets. Because he's a somnambulist, he is a highly suggestible sleepwalker, and under the influence of the depraved hypnotist, Dr. Caligari, he is made to commit murders. It's later discovered that Dr. Caligari himself is the director of the local insane asylum, and he is convicted of his crimes.

The actual story of Caligari is more complex than that, though. The story itself makes it hard to tell what reality is the true one. At first, it seems that the story is being told reliably as the memories of one of the main characters, Francis, but at the end, it is revealed in a twist ending that Francis himself was a patient at the asylum and none of his memories ever actually happened. Dr. Caligari is just a normal guy who works there, and Cesare himself is just another innocent patient. Seems like an open-and-shut case where Francis imagined it all. But the story is just vague enough to leave you a little unsure of what the truth actually is. Which one is the fantasy?

Cesare himself dominates the film and is really the core icon of it. It's not hard to imagine why. From his androgynous appearance to the way he moves, it's as if he himself is a part of the shadows. And Cesare is written as an overtly queer-coded character for a number of reasons, his obvious appearance aside. In the story, he represents a sort of social disruption that reflected German society's fears as a whole. He lives in a literal state of twilight life, half asleep, half awake, almost like the town itself in its jutting, storybook-like set design. People of the town live in an almost frightening and uncomfortable fantasy world, one that would have felt very familiar to German viewers. As Miranda Corcoran writes, "Cesare is figured as a marginal being, existing here between the past and the future. In this sense, he appears as an archetypal Weimar subject, awakening from the crumbling Imperial dream, he inhabits a world that looks simultaneously to a bright, modern future and a lost traditional past. Moreover, Cesare is emblematic of how the new world ushered in under the comparatively liberal Weimar Republic was both seductive and frightening for its citizens. Lithe and lean, yet also spectral and gaunt, Cesare embodies the allure and anxiety of the Weimar fantasy."

In perhaps a deeply symbolic way, Cesare represents, in part, the Weimar citizens' fears about the growing visibility of the queer community. This manifests, in my opinion, pretty strongly in the fact that Cesare, though under Caligari's influence, kills Alan and steals away Alan's, for instance, his object of romantic affection, Jane. Effectively shattering the heterosexual unit twice. This, in combination with his feminized appearance and femininely coded movements and actions by the standards of the era, is a deeply clear coding of Cesare as a representatively queer character that fits cleanly into the landscape of expressionism when the movie was made.

Many expressionist portraits highlighted the shifting landscape of gender, often focusing on queer people, such as the famous portrait of Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix. Hi, editing me here. I know I mispronounced his name. I mispronounced his name, I know it's pronounced Otto Dix, okay? It's pronounced Otto Dix. Which is objectively funnier, and I'm pissed that I pronounced it wrong, and I'm going to say it wrong like three more times. I know, you don't need to tell me, thank you. Sylvia was a lesbian writer, and Dix wanted to paint her because she was representative of an entire era, according to him. Dix's portrait is not a sympathetic representation of a lesbian, and this wasn't unusual for German artists at the time. Many paintings of gay and trans people coming out of Germany in this era read more like scathing caricatures, terrified of the androgenization of the genders. The sexual and social emancipation of women caused more anxiety in German society than it did elsewhere, as evidenced by the massive number of violent and graphic art from this period depicting sex workers having been mutilated or killed. Germany at large was obsessed with the apparent threat of masculine women and feminine men. And Cesare is quite literally a feminine man who was a physical threat to the pure heterosexual world.

Of course, this is not the only symbolism that the character represents. The screenwriters themselves explained that the story at large was meant to be a scathing criticism of the German authoritarian government, with Cesare representing the mindless puppets of the state who unquestioningly kill in war and destroy. As Siegfried Kracauer writes, "according to the pacifist-minded Janowitz, they had created Cesare with the dim design of portraying the common man who under the pressure of compulsory military service is drilled to kill and to be killed." This message was softened during production by the addition of the framing story, which the writers hated. Either way, it's an interestingly complex film that leaves every viewer coming away from it with a different takeaway.

But perhaps the most clear factor into the queer coding of Cesare the Somnambulist is the casting of the actor who played him, Conrad Veidt, who not only was well-known to be bisexual but had infamously starred the previous year in the film "Different from the Others," directed by Richard Oswald and co-produced by Magnus Hirschfeld, making him both a gay icon of the era and deeply hated by the far right. "Different from the Others" is believed to be the first pro-gay film, though it has a tragic ending. Conrad Veidt stars as the main character, Paul Korner, a concert violinist who falls in love with his student and is later blackmailed. The film caused extreme outrage upon its release. Far-right groups protested at theaters, filling them with stink bombs and releasing rats into the aisles. It was later targeted by the Nazis and destroyed along with most of Hirschfeld's other work, but Veidt continued to be a friend of Hirschfeld and a sort of gay icon for the Weimar gay community until the rise of the Nazi regime.

In 1929, Hirschfeld held a gay men's costume ball, and Veidt attended as the guest of honor. As the writer Christopher Isherwood remembered, "the respectability of the ball was open to doubt, but it did have one dazzling guest, Conrad Veidt. The great film star set apart at his own table, impeccable in evening tails. He watched the dancing benevolently through his monocle as he sipped champagne and smoked a cigarette on a long holder. He seemed a supernatural figure, the guardian god of these festivities, who was graciously manifesting himself to his devotees. A few favored ones approached and talked to him, but without presuming to sit down."

Almost from the very beginning, Veidt was typecast in strange roles or as villains because of his gaunt, lanky appearance and, let's be real here, and kind of spooky hands. He was often referred to as the demonic Conrad Veidt or the man with the wicked eyes. The beginning of Veidt's career was filled with macabre roles, which starkly contrast the kind of person everyone knew him as off-screen. People remembered him as a fun, loving, funny, and kind, but admittedly odd person. But by God, he couldn't escape his looks. So he really enjoyed his roles, which allowed him to be exceedingly dramatic. He had a flamboyance in the way that he moved that ended up seeping into every character he played, and much like any screen star of the twenties in Berlin, he was patronizing the queer clubs. His friends described him as heterosexual when sober and homosexual when drunk. But of course, that didn't really stop him from flirting with pretty much anyone, sober or not. It's just kind of who he was.

But during his second marriage, his daughter Viola was born. Veidt recalled in 1934, "an emotion, the tenderest I had ever yet experienced, surged over me. This was complete, perfect happiness. The coming of Viola made me whole again. Do not ask me how I behaved when my daughter was born. Like a crazy man. Certainly, I did not comport myself like a normal father. You might have thought nobody had ever had a baby before. I wanted to do the craziest, most extravagant, the most useless things." He was so overcome with joy at his daughter's birth that they had to sedate him and keep him overnight in the hospital.

The year before Viola was born, Veidt starred in the Universal film "The Man Who Laughs," directed by German Expressionist filmmaker Paul Leni and produced by Carl Laemmle, who was responsible for most of the Universal monster flicks. You may recognize this film today as the film that inspired the character design of "The Joker," which honestly makes me sad because when you actually watch it, it's a deeply sympathetic character, and the story is more of a romance in my opinion, and a really sweet one at that. Although in the original book by Victor Hugo, the ending is deeply sad and tragic. I'm glad Paul Leni changed it to be honest. It's easily one of my favorite silent films, so yeah, I'm kind of bitter that his image has been reduced to, well.

- Why so serious? (laughing)

Also, there's a dog in the movie named Homo who saves the day. I can't even make this shit up.

Veidt's second marriage didn't last due to his strenuous filming schedule, but he found his forever love in his third marriage to Flora Ilona Lily Barta Prager, a Hungarian Jewish woman. As the threat of the Third Reich loomed, Veidt doubled down in his support and defense of Jewish people, writing his race as Jewish on government forms and portraying sympathetic Jewish characters in films, which earned him personal hate mail from Hitler himself. He and Lily knew that the Gestapo would come for them soon and promptly escaped to London soon after they married, and then to America.

But when Veidt had to return to Germany for a film, he was detained by authorities and imprisoned. Basically, Hitler was pissed off that Veidt had agreed to star in the pointedly pro-Jewish British film "Jew Suss." The story of an 18th-century Jewish man who seeks a fortune so he can help free his people from the hatred and oppression of the Germans. Obviously not a good look for Nazi Germany, which was hilariously sensitive to world opinion, despite doing literally every bad thing. The authorities constantly interrogated Veidt at all hours of the day, demanding that he quit the film. They verbally abused him and deprived him of sleep, forbidding him from contacting the outside world or getting a lawyer. Eventually, he was finally released back to England. Veidt hadn't given into their demands, nor had he raised his salute to Hitler, even once. He was staunchly anti-Nazi until the day he died, sending his life savings and much of his film earnings to Britain to support the war effort. He smuggled his in-laws over the German border to Switzerland in his car, and in London, he sheltered children in his home from the London Blitz.

All of this sounds quite at odds with his other most famous role, doesn't it? His role, of course, as Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca. It gets even funnier when you find out that Veidt helped his Casablanca co-star, Paul Henreid, escape from Europe during World War Two. This wasn't his only role as a Nazi, either. Upon finally immigrating to LA to join Hollywood, Veidt knew what was going to happen to his career. He'd seen it happen time and again with his acting ex-pat friends, typecast in sideline roles or as villains or in offensive roles. Hollywood, it seems, had little room for heroes with an accent that wasn't American or British.

Okay, really quick side tangent here. I like to collect vintage or antique ephemera, and I actually have this really cool letter from Mary Irene Woodruff, which was sent to Forrest Ackerman in 1934, and it just so happens to be about Conrad Veidt, and I think it's hilarious. She says, "There would seem to be a few who admire Conrad Veidt. He's a fascinating screen personality, that is to me, he is fascinating. Many people can't stand him at all because he is not handsome. I loathe the conventional pretty boy type anyway. I like a man with a face that means something, if you get my point. A face that indicates a mind behind it. I'm afraid if Hollywood did get Conrad Veidt, it would insist upon putting him in some silly picture and make him ridiculous. An actor of his stamp must be very carefully cast, or the effect is ruined. There's an intensity, a vividness about him that requires a suitable vehicle. Most actors can be put into anything and it makes no difference, but Veidt is not of that neutral character. He's too positive, too alive." And it continues like this. You can pause to read if you want. Anyway, it cracks me up because this letter was sent in 1934, and basically right after this letter was sent, promptly, Hollywood did start putting him into some roles that some would consider ridiculous. (laughs) It's just a cool piece of history. Thank you for letting me talk about that for a sec.

As observed by Gabor Gergely in "An Imagined Binary: The Exilic Body and the Host Nation in the Hollywood Films of Peter Lorre, Bela Lugosi and Conrad Veidt (1930-1956)," (chuckles) that was a mouthful. "He may have been a British actor when it suited the needs of the domestic industry, but he became a hostile alien the moment complete national cohesion in the face of a mighty foe became imperative. The fickleness with which bodies are claimed as a nation's own and then discarded or repudiated when the need arises is a theme that runs through in some form or another most of mainstream cinema where emigre actors are used."

Veidt had played eccentric roles his entire career, but this was different. With "The Thief of Baghdad" in particular. And in the golden age studio system, there was little room for actors at large to choose their own roles, especially for Veidt, who was fleeing a Germany that had put out a death sentence for him. Where else was he going to go? But that doesn't excuse how bad this role was, and it's almost certain that "The Thief of Baghdad" as a whole served to reinforce stereotypes about Asia. And as a rather menacing-looking German man, Veidt knew that he would be shuttled into Nazi roles. So he specified in his contract that if he were to play a Nazi, the character must be undeniably the villain. And so he went down in history as one of cinema's most famous screen Nazis, and the money he made went right back across the Atlantic to fight the real ones.

But long before this, long before the Third Reich, he gained stardom for embodying on screen the very anxieties his home country was grappling with. Elizabeth Otto writes in "Schaulust: Sexuality and Trauma in Conrad Veidt's Masculine Masquerades," "Veidt's overwhelming popularity as a star was based in the repeating echoes of motifs through a wide array of roles in varied film genres. In performing as the sensitive gay musician, the effete but dangerous sleepwalker, the wounded and traumatized concert pianist for the period drama hero and lover, Veidt was also bringing to mind elements of various other masculine masquerades that spoke to the essential discourses in Weimar culture: a gay man struggling with a homophobic society, a man with a criminal past, a lost object of modern men and women, and a combination of all of these, an ex-soldier who must struggle to integrate into post-war society. Veidt's representation and exploration of these types and tropes was essential work as Weimar Germany struggled to heal from its past and imagine its future."

Conrad Veidt died very suddenly of a heart condition while golfing in 1943, at the age of 50. He never lived to see Nazi Germany fall, but he left his mark on the culture in many ways. And even though most will remember him as the guy who inspired "The Joker" or the Casablanca Nazi, I think the often-forgotten Paul Korner in "Different from the Others" deserves much more attention than he gets. The very first onscreen sympathetic gay character, played by a bisexual actor who would go on to define innumerable aspects of pop culture. And it's really a miracle that we still have most of "Different from the Others," since the Nazis tried so hard to wipe it from existence, they almost succeeded. And when it comes to Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute, they did, for the most part.

We all know what happens next. In 1933, Adolf Hitler seized power, and any social progress that minorities had made was stamped out. Julia Iannucci writes, "The people and places that became symbolic of the homosexual social movement suffered the consequences of Hitler's regime. First, serious steps were taken against male prostitution. Afterwards, the Decree Against Public Immorality was released to newspapers on the 24th of February, 1933, mandating the closure of all clubs and bars for homosexuals. In addition, on the 4th of March, 1933, the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt stated, 'Night clubs closed. Restrictive regulations for dance halls and bars. A few days ago, the police chief threatened harsh measures against inns and taverns against which moral complaints had been raised.'"

On May 6th of that year, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute was sacked and destroyed. His papers and writings were burned along with the films he produced. His research materials were confiscated and destroyed. Hirschfeld himself would become a mascot of the enemy in the coming years, in innumerable caricature drawings placing him as Jewish gay public enemy number one. Long before this, too, Hirschfeld was a prominent target. One incident in the 1920s saw him attacked in the street and knocked unconscious. But despite this, he still continued his work. Magnus Hirschfeld died in 1934 in exile.

Lesbians were not spared social wrath under Nazi rule, as many believed they were "racial degenerates" who seduced heterosexual women away from playing their part in the development of the Reich by giving birth to as many pure-bred Aryan children as possible. Lesbianism was also used as an excuse to destroy the women's movement for advancement, as they were accused of having been infiltrated by lesbians. I don't know about you, but I think if lesbians were actually this organized, we wouldn't have so much trouble asking each other out, but what do I know.

In 1936, the Third Reich established the Reich Office for Combating Homosexuality and Abortion, which led to the registration of gay men and trans along with the imprisonment and sometimes forced castration of them, and later the concentration and death camps. It's deeply sad to see the way that so many people fought for years to build a comparatively progressive society for its time, the first of its kind, only for all of it to crumble and burn so fast. For what?

Many people in the last 80 years, smarter than I have, have answered that question, but we still grow complacent. As Richard J. Evans observed in "The Coming of the Third Reich," "If the experience of the Third Reich teaches us anything, it is that a love of great music, great art, and great literature does not provide people with any kind of moral or political immunization against violence, atrocity, or subservience to dictatorship." TL;DR: You are not immune to propaganda. And people who believe themselves to be smart, educated, good people can be influenced to do and think horrible things. Like Cesare, walking in his sleep to kill innocent people, frozen somewhere outside of reality.

Sorry to get even more serious at the end here, but it's important to say. My grandpa is a Holocaust survivor, and there aren't many of them left. My entire childhood growing up was in the shadow of these stories. Something deeply painful to me as I watched my classmates in school not take it seriously. And as the years go on, less and less people know basic details about it, or even believe that it happened. Complacency and ignoring history will not save you. Respectability will not save us. And as much as I hate saying it, knowing history just isn't enough. You need to really sit with it and hold it up to what we're in right now to see how much of it gets reflected back.

Thank you for learning about the queer history of the Weimar Republic with me. These topics are rough, (laughs) but very important. So I'm glad you came and stuck through with it to the end. If you're looking for a movie to watch, maybe check out some German Expressionist silent films. They really just hit that part of my heart that loves anything a little angsty and spooky. So, of course, as usual, wash thy hands, wear thy mask, and if any creepy old men at the local fair tell you to come and attend and check out a guy he keeps locked into a cabinet, don't go in there. (rock upbeat music)