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A review by austindoherty
Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Robert Beachy
4.0
My brother asked me, "Did you see TRANSPARENT this season? The segments set in the past, Jill Soloway only referenced this book." And he handed me GAY BERLIN.
If that's true, it's a curious choice for a show about the intersection of trans-, Jewish, and wealthy white Angeleno experience. Robert Reachy makes no bones about focusing only on men who love men, referring anyone interested in women loving women to another book in his introduction. But his limited scope yields dividends. He writes detailed, specific, supported synthesis in favor of his argument: we owe our understanding of gay people today to modern, pre-War Germany.
I found his argument convincing, and for an academic work, it's not too dry. Reachy makes quite expansive arguments for each of his narrow theses, separated across eight chapters. While Magnus Hirschfeld and his advocacy - as well as support for the burgeoning field of sexuality- at the Institute for Sexual Science informs the scenes of TRANSPARENT my brother had talked about, Beachy writes about Berlin from the 1860s until the 1930s with rich, sometimes cinematic detail. The second chapter covers how police, by tolerating gay activity, in fact defined it. Their dedicated team, the Department of Homosexuality and Blackmail, basically demands a pay-cable adaptation. (My preference would be HBO, but if it's goods you're after, maybe root Showtime.) Chapter five covers the work of Hans Bluher, whose gay activism dovetailed with his anti-Semitism, and requires little imagination to recall German youth in the bucolic countryside singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."
Suicide haunts the book, as key actors are outed or ruined or caught in scandal. So too does Germany under Hitler loom over all of the developments, each success in recognition and human rights written in sand before the rising wave of what we know is coming. Beachy's documentation is rich even as images of burning records close out his narrative. It's at once a valuable road map of how we got here today, and a tad cautionary, too. With each boom comes a bust. There's no limitation to unmaking progress.
If that's true, it's a curious choice for a show about the intersection of trans-, Jewish, and wealthy white Angeleno experience. Robert Reachy makes no bones about focusing only on men who love men, referring anyone interested in women loving women to another book in his introduction. But his limited scope yields dividends. He writes detailed, specific, supported synthesis in favor of his argument: we owe our understanding of gay people today to modern, pre-War Germany.
I found his argument convincing, and for an academic work, it's not too dry. Reachy makes quite expansive arguments for each of his narrow theses, separated across eight chapters. While Magnus Hirschfeld and his advocacy - as well as support for the burgeoning field of sexuality- at the Institute for Sexual Science informs the scenes of TRANSPARENT my brother had talked about, Beachy writes about Berlin from the 1860s until the 1930s with rich, sometimes cinematic detail. The second chapter covers how police, by tolerating gay activity, in fact defined it. Their dedicated team, the Department of Homosexuality and Blackmail, basically demands a pay-cable adaptation. (My preference would be HBO, but if it's goods you're after, maybe root Showtime.) Chapter five covers the work of Hans Bluher, whose gay activism dovetailed with his anti-Semitism, and requires little imagination to recall German youth in the bucolic countryside singing "Tomorrow Belongs to Me."
Suicide haunts the book, as key actors are outed or ruined or caught in scandal. So too does Germany under Hitler loom over all of the developments, each success in recognition and human rights written in sand before the rising wave of what we know is coming. Beachy's documentation is rich even as images of burning records close out his narrative. It's at once a valuable road map of how we got here today, and a tad cautionary, too. With each boom comes a bust. There's no limitation to unmaking progress.