"Berlin from Behind": a History of "Gay" Travel to Inter-War Berlin

Abstract

Where did queer men travel before Amsterdam, San Francisco and Sydney became famous gay destinations in the final decades of the twentieth century? How did they locate queer spaces before the advent of gay guides and the internet? What did queer travellers think and write about their experiences and encounters while away from home, and how did their journeys change them?Berlin from Behind investigates if and how same-sex desiring men’s travels to Berlin between 1918 and 1939 have shaped their self-perceptions and contributed to the formation of individual and collective queer identities. It explains why Berlin became a magnet for same-sex desiring men in the inter-war period; it recreates the unique and variegated homosexual scene travellers found there; and it investigates how Berlin impacted on some men’s sense of self during and after their stays. Arguing that time and space matter in the construction of queer subjectivities, this dissertation emphasizes the link travellers provide between Weimar Berlin’s homosexual world and emanci-pation efforts, and later models of gay identity and liberation movements in other places. Aiming to undermine a Whiggish teleology which regards arguably stable gay identities of the present as inevitable outcomes of history, research for this work was originally focussed on the “queer”—yet it has conversely found the “gay”. Examining largely untranslated German homo histories of Berlin, the vibrant homosexual press of the Weimar era, biographies, memoirs, police records and personal documents, this thesis argues that several quite firm models of gay identities, behaviours and emancipation were created and acted out in pre-1933 Berlin. This assertion contrasts with Anglophone histories which hold that no coherent gay identities existed before the Second World War, and that New York’s Stonewall riots of 1969 heralded the start of modern gay liberation. Rather than beholding Weimar Berlin’s queer arena as an isolated world whose influence ended with the ascent of Hitler, this thesis suggests that travellers, who imbibed and disseminated what they learnt while away from home, provide the link between gay identity formations and emancipation drives of Weimar Berlin and those of other Western countries in later decades.