German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus by Marc David Baer (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus by Marc David Baer Geoffrey J. Giles Marc David Baer. German, Jew, Muslim, Gay: The Life and Times of Hugo Marcus. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. xii + 300 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000350 Gay may be the last of the cognomens in the title of this biography, but it is the feature that looms largest in the book. Three of the five chapters have "gay" or "queer" in their title. Yet Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) did not lead an especially active gay love life. Rather, he was prominent in the fight for homosexual emancipation in the early twentieth century, and a close associate of Magnus Hirschfeld and his circle. And he did write a large amount of erotic gay fiction. He never succeeded in winning a life partner, and, as Gerdien Jonker has recently commented, in his final years his letters show that he was lonely. During the last ten years of his life, Marcus was in touch with few people and took refuge instead in the fictional gay character, Heinrich, he created.1 [End Page 487] One gains the impression from Baer's many-sided exploration of this unusual life that Hugo Marcus never entirely fitted in. His passions were intellectual ones rather than personal. His best and closest companion was his pen. He was naïve about the dangers of the real world. Despite a brief incarceration in Sachsenhausen after Kristallnacht in 1938, and a Nazi demand to leave the country, he remained in Berlin in order to finish his work on a German edition of the Qur'an. He used his entry visa for Switzerland only one week before the German invasion of Poland. In some ways, he seems a rather uncongenial character. Indeed, the author notes that, in a portrait painted of him in 1925, he seems, with his wrinkled face and mussed hair, to be scowling. He looks rather grumpy in surviving photographs as well. Since Baer describes these in detail, it is a shame that this book includes no illustrations. The one attractive photo of Marcus as a twenty-one-year-old (and rather stunning he looks, too) graces the cover of the book, but, beauty being in the eye of the beholder, Baer inexplicably dismisses it as "not flattering" in its profile of his "large right ear, bony right cheek, and large sharp nose" (22). There is not so much in this book about Marcus as a Jew, because the remarkable fact about him was his conversion to Islam, with the Ahmadi community giving him a lifetime appointment as the editor of all their German publications. They regarded Marcus as "the most valued prize of our Mission in Berlin" (68). Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith, and praised Islam for not requiring that or even a public affirmation of conversion. He saw it as more tolerant of others, including gay men like himself. And in rejecting violence, it seemed the perfect religion to heal the nations after World War I: "A religion that precedes each conversation with the greeting 'peace be with you' cannot be blood-thirsty." But was Islam really that liberal, even about other religions? Baer has to admit that Marcus was being a bit starry-eyed: "Marcus seems to have forgotten that, normatively speaking, the first pillar of Islam is the Shahadah, the proclamation of faith: 'there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet'" (139). The Berlin imam was instrumental in obtaining Marcus's exit visa from Nazi Germany. However, Baer cannot entirely gloss over the fact that Nazi ideology infiltrated some German Muslims and "helped contribute to the antiSemitic atmosphere in Berlin," even leading some to join the Nazi Party. But to add that "they ultimately frustrated the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe, if only by saving one life" (namely Hugo Marcus), smacks of a bucket of whitewash (115). Of course, the Nazis had stamped him as a Jew, adding the name Israel to his passport, which the Swiss authorities cruelly maintained in their identity papers when he went into exile. And Marcus insisted on his Jewish faith...