Berlin’s queer walk
We’re too skinny to be bears and too old to be cubs. Nevertheless, we drop into bear bar, Woof, after our walking tour of queer Berlin because, well, you’ve got to, right?
Finn Ballard was our queer tour leader. You might have met him in the previous post. If not, let me introduce you.
He’s an Irishman and a historian who did his doctorate on German folklore. Ten years ago he moved to Berlin, and has been working since then as an interpretive guide. I stumbled across him on the Interweb. He’s strong on German history and has a particular interest in Berlin’s queer culture, much of which is unknown, discounted or erased.
Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories (later adapted for Cabaret ) voiced the foreboding in Berlin at the end of the Weimar Republic.
Finn walks us through Isherwood’s former neighbourhood, Schoeneberg, pausing first to acknowledge the El Dorado, the world’s first queer bar - opened in 1916 as the ‘right place’ for homosexuals, trans men and women, and lesbians.
We stop at a lovely 19th century apartment block on Nollendorfstrasse 17.
The windows on the second floor are the same ones Isherwood himself opened to observe Berlin streetlife, gathering material for his stories. Here’s the opening lines from Goodbye to Berlin:
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices.
Isherwood lived on Nollendorfstrasse between 1929 and 1933, moving to Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Research in the Tiergarten at the time the Nazis wrested control of the Reichstag. He left Germany soon after the Gestapo trashed Hirschfeld’s Institute and its records, including those of gay Gestapo chief Ernst Rohm.
Hirschfeld was a German Jew whose work was decades ahead of the American sexologist Alfred Kinsey. He lived at the Institute with his cross-dressing boyfriend Karl Giese, pioneered the study of sexuality, and was one of the first physicians to assist transgender people.
In doing so, he championed the humanity of LGBTI citizens long before the reality - let alone the terminology - was understood or accepted.
Hirschfeld’s is a fascinating story, as much a part of German cultural and intellectual history as Einstein’s, yet it rarely if ever figures in contemporary tourism info. These are the elisions that interest Finn. ‘It’s about cultural memory,’ he says.
It's always a privilege to spend time with people who are passionate about what they do and who share what they know in engaging ways.
Finn is one of those people. He’s like a living breathing Stolperstein, in the best possible way.
Stolperstein, or stumbling stones, are discovered by chance. In German, the name can suggest a potential problem. If you accidentally stumble over a stone, an anti-Semite might say ‘a Jew must be buried there’.
There are stolperstein embedded in the footpaths of Schoenberg and Kreuzberg and other parts of Berlin, as well as in Koln, Amsterdam and elsewhere.
They’re deliberately placed by artist Gunter Demnig to commemorate Jews, homosexuals and ‘asocials’. Each stolperstein has a small brass plate attached to it, recording the name of the person who lived there, the date of their deportation, and the date of their death, if known.
Demnig has been hugely successful in keeping alive the memories of people and events that otherwise vanish through forgetfulness, willful or otherwise.
Finn and others are doing the same. They’re just working on a different scale, in a different medium.
