Berlin in the 20s/30s Book Suggestions

[weimar27]

I'm writing a story about 1920s/30s Berlin, (Its set in 1934), and I realized that while I know a lot about the politics of the era I know nothing of the city itself during this period

Comments

[felis_ultharus]

Actually, the concept did exist at the time. You just have to read the works of Magnus Hirschfeld, Christopher Isherwood, or Elsa Gidlow detailing Berlin at the time to get a picture of that.

(Gidlow details it as far back as the 1910s in Montreal.)

For Britain, you can get a good picture from the works of Quentin Crisp.

There's also Heinz Heger's moving first-person account of the community and its destruction in The Men With The Pink Triangle.

These communities go back a long time. John Boswell argues that such communities existed in Europe in 11th century. There are exposés of the "molly" community dating back to the 1690s, which the historian Rictor Norton has written up in great detail in his books.

British gay men even had their own cant - Polari - with traces at least as old as the Renaissance, and possibly medieval.

There are also communities of effeminate homosexual men in the works of Roman writers and poets that look an awful lot like the "fairies" Crisp writes about in early 20th-century Britain.

Sorry for the long response, but this is kind of my pet peeve. I've also noticed that the date gay communities were supposedly invented keeps moving up. The Postmoderns claim we were conjured into existence in the 19th century. Now it's as late as the 1930s already.

I fully expect it to overtake my life eventually, and I'll have to be explaining to incredulous youngsters that, yes, there was a gay community in the 1990s and I was part of it. I'm sure I won't be believed.

thanks

[weimar27]

thanks, this looks promising.

Re: thanks

[felis_ultharus]

Your welcome! Isherwood and Heger are probably your two best sources for the period.

[zeecoldwater]

It's one of my pet peeves too -- the notion that LGBT is a modern concept, some weird modern novelty that has absolutely no precedent.

We've been here as long as the rest of humanity, damn it.

[felis_ultharus]

Exactly. I mean, it may just be an academic desire to oversimplify and erase complexity - every thesis makes a silver-bullet argument by erasing competing theories after all - but I suspect there's a deeper homophobia at work.

There's very little Postmodernism has to say about the history of homosexuality that wouldn't sound right at home in the mouth of, say, an ex-gay spokesperson or other antigay Christian mouthpiece.

It's also kind of funny how the people who parrot the stuff hold it up like it's a kind of science. The real scientists in the field - the biologists, pyschologists, and psychiatrists - seem to think that homosexuals are born that way, and that sexual orientation is fixed before or just after birth.

[atropos_lee]

Oh my _ _, yes - it's like every generation believing they invented sex!

The story of the London Molly Houses* goes back into the 17th Century.

* Private social clubs for working class gay men

[felis_ultharus]

Some fields of research suggest they were already established in some form in earlier centuries. There certainly seems to have been a community of some kind before then, though whether there was such a system of safe houses or just a less formal network is still in question.