The Schwules Museum

In the bohemian neighborhood of Kreuzberg, just west of where the Berlin wall divided the city, there is the nondescript building at No.61 Mehringdamm. A drab passageway leads into an inner courtyard where there is the entrance to the extraordinary Schwules Museum. [Schwules is the German term for "gay men."] Through the doorway, which is cheerfully flanked by wall paintings of lush trees and blossoms, is an exhibition space, a reference library, and an archive of books, publications, and other rare material relating to the experience of homosexual men--all work that might otherwise have been lost or destroyed. Founded fifteen years ago by Manfred Baumgardt, Andreas Sternweiler, Wolfgang Theiss, and Manfred Herzer, the museum has produced fabulous exhibitions and publications of the highest aesthetic and intellectual quality, without ever neglecting witty and erotic content. A series of illustrated biographies documents the lives of individual men who survived the Nazis. The text of the publications are, so far, available only in German, something unfortunate for much foreign scholarship (because of the collapse of German as a language of scholarship), but the illustrations alone make the books treasures of information, delight, and horror for viewers.

Perhaps the finest exhibition so far occurred in 1997. Through a cultural program funded by the German lottery, the museum received a grant of $1.3 million to mount Good-bye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung [One Hundred Years of Gay Liberation], curated by Sternweiler, Theiss, Herzer, and Karl-Heinz Steinle. Since the modest premises of the museum itself were inadequate for the scale of the exhibition, it was installed in the splendid Akademie der Kunst, a glass palace in the Tiergarten. With rare art collected from all over the world, historic documents, lectures, films, performance art, and live music for dancing in the evening, the event--almost a Gay Worlds Fair--became a cultural focus for Berliners of all sexual orientations.

More recently an exhibition examined Der Kreis/Le Cercle/The Circle, a journal published in Switzerland from 1942 to 1967. This was one of the rare gay illustrated magazines of the epoch--many famous artists and photographers, including Americans, sent their work to be published pseudonymously in its pages--and a staple in the private libraries of many homosexual men. This carefully-documented survey of the journal's highlights is to be seen in Zurich at the Schweizerisches Landesmuseum in May and June of 2000, but there are no plans for its appearance in the United States.

Most recently, at both the Schwules Museum and in the Museum of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, is the largest exhibition ever prepared about the persecution of gays by the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Telling the stories of sixty individual men, it points up the continuing burden of their persecution. The gays who suffered and died in the concentration camps--those marked by the pink triangle--are the only people who never received any form of compensation from the German government. American Army officers, liberating the camps, sometimes refused to liberate the homosexuals. And the West German government kept the Nazi anti-gay laws on the books until 1969. The few gay survivors are reluctant to come forward even now, more than half a century later, for fear the authorities will put them on a list again. They can scarcely be called paranoid. Relentless homophobia by the authorities is pointed up by the colossal new monument, in the heart of Berlin, to be dedicated only to the memory of Jewish victims. Homosexuals and Gypsies, among others, are not welcome at this spot. This display, which runs from March 26 though July 30, 2000, is an important reminder of the consequences of misplaced morality.

In August and September 2000, to honor his eightieth birthday, the museum will present a retrospective of the work of the artist Peter Flinsch, a Holocaust survivor. Flinsch was the subject in April 2000 of a survey of his graphic works at the...