German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus

Marc David Baer

Published by Columbia University Press 2020

German, Jew, Muslim, Gay

The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus

Marc David Baer

Volume 42 in the series Religion, Culture, and Public Life

https://doi.org/10.7312/baer19670

Overview
Contents

About this book

Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) 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.

Author / Editor information

Marc David Baer is professor of international history at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (2008); The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks (2010); and Sultanic Saviors and Tolerant Turks: Writing Ottoman Jewish History, Denying the Armenian Genocide (2020).

Reviews

Robert Beachy, author of Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity:
Perhaps 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.

Sander Gilman, coauthor of Are Racists Crazy? How Prejudice, Racism, and Antisemitism Became Markers of Insanity:
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.

Susannah Heschel, Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies, Dartmouth College:
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.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction Goethe as Pole Star Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Fighting for Gay Rights in Berlin, 1900– 1925 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	22
2. Queer Convert: Protestant Islam in Weimar Germany, 1925– 1933 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	62
3. A Jewish Muslim in Nazi Berlin, 1933– 1939 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
4. Who Writes Lives: Swiss Refuge, 1939– 1965 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	117
5. Hans Alienus: Yearning, Gay Writer, 1948– 1965 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
Conclusion: A Goethe Mosque for Berlin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	190
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	287

Language: English
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;

eBook

Published: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 9780231551786