Description
Book SynopsisHugo Marcus (18801966) was a man of many names and many identities. In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus's life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle.
Trade ReviewThis biography succeeds in contextualizing his ideas, while leaving the man himself, rightly perhaps, still somewhat in the shadows. * Times Literary Supplement *
Offers a full look at a writer and thinker who successfully lived in and moved among different worlds. * Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review *
Baer delivers an inspiring story that changes our perception about larger historiographical issues. -- Javier Samper Vendrell * German History *
This extraordinary biography of Hugo Marcus reads like an amazing detective novel of twentieth-century history. Baer recreates the life and times of a gay Jewish intellectual in Germany who converts to Islam and whose life is saved from the Nazis by the Muslim community of Berlin. The story is a thrilling page turner that upends our assumptions about Jewishness, homosexuality, Muslim-Jewish relations, orientalism, and the challenges of modernity. -- Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College
That identity is fluid is no surprise in the twenty-first century: that such fluid identities collided with changing realities in the rapid transition from Imperial to Republican to Nazi Germany in the early twentieth century may also not surprise the reader. Yet the story of Hugo Marcus seems unique: we have other accounts of gay Jews fighting their double stigmatization as well as the lives of German Jews attracted to or indeed converting to Islam during this period. Yet in the tale of Hugo Marcus, elegantly told by Marc David Baer, we have a biography that links complex questions of identity to institutional histories and their dislocation in the German-speaking world. Ending with his ashes strewn on a paupers' grave in Bern, Marcus’s tale is moving, exemplary in its uniqueness for the transitions of German Jewish intellectuals and perhaps indicative of paths yet to be followed by other marginalized individuals in our ever darkening age of rising antisemitism, Islamophobia, and homophobia. -- Sander Gilman, coauthor of
Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of InsanityPerhaps most significant among the important contributions of Baer’s brilliant biography of the queer, German-Jewish convert to Islam, Hugo Marcus, is the new perspective he offers on the history of Jewish-Muslim relations. Not only Marcus’s engagement with Islam but also that of other Jewish converts to Islam—as well as that of Jewish 'Orientalists'—allow Baer to demonstrate the mutual 'Semitic' affinity of Jews and Muslims. -- Robert Beachy, author of
Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern IdentityIt is indubitable that any reader of this extraordinary biography will be rewarded with a profound insight into the nature of religious passion and its intersection with sexual desire, in particular among marginalized, oppressed, persecuted, and exiled individuals such as Marcus. * Journal of the American Academy of Religion *
The book reveals fascinating facets of Marcus’s life as a Jewish, Muslim, and gay German. Yet Marcus belonged to all and none of these categories. If anything, his life and death are a testament to the failure of compartmentalizing identity and intellectual history. * German Historical Institute London Bulletin *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: Goethe as Pole Star
1. Fighting for Gay Rights in Berlin, 1900–1925
2. Queer Convert: Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany, 1925–1933
3. A Jewish Muslim in Nazi Berlin, 1933–1939
4. Who Writes Lives: Swiss Refuge, 1939–1965
5. Hans Alienus: Yearning, Gay Writer, 1948–1965
Conclusion: A Goethe Mosque for Berlin
Notes
Bibliography
Index
