Impulse to Action

Wednesday, August 19, 2020

Books Informing My Understanding of Gay Men and the Holocaust

Larry Wolf, Pink Triangle Portraits (2020)

I started a project of watercolor portraits of the men in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp photo from 1938.

Here is what I've been reading recently that informs my thinking as I spend time with the photograph. The books address the lives of gay men during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as various aspects of homophobia and antisemitism, in Germany and in the US.

Robert C Reinhart: Walk The Night (1994)

Robert Beachy: Gay Berlin - Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014)

Eugen KogonL The Theory and Practice of Hell: The German Concentration Camps and the System Behind Them (1950)

Richard Breitman: The Berlin mission : the American who resisted Nazi Germany from within (2019)

Margaret Bourke-White: Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly (1946)

Martin Duberman: Jews Queers Germans (2017)

Mark Sealy: Decolonising the Camera - especially chapter 2, Race, Denial and Imagining Atrocity (2019)

Martin Sherman: Bent (1979)

Gad Beck: An Underground Life (1999)

Kenji Yoshino: Covering (2006)

Etty Hillesum: An Interrupted Life and Letters from Westerbork (1996)

Judith (Jack) Halberstam: The Queer Art of Failure - especially chapter 5, "The Killer in Me Is the Killer in You": Homosexuality and Fascism (2011)

Read Years Ago

Richard Plant: The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals (1986)

Heinz Heger: The Men with the Pink Triangle (1980)

Christopher Isherwood: Christopher and his Kind (1976)

Further Material

There is a vast literature on the Holocaust and a pretty extensive one on gays in the Holocaust (for example, this one from the Rainbow Round Table of the American Library Association, 2003).

Monday, August 3, 2020

Sachsenhausen - December 19, 1938

Prisoners in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, Germany

December 19, 1938

Unknown Photographer (1938), US National Archive of Foreign Records

This image is often cited as showing homosexual men wearing pink triangles. A variety of triangles, of different colors, were used to indicate the reason someone was in a concentration camp: criminals, political, asocial, Roma, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness. Jews wore a yellow Star of David (two triangles, one of which could indicate an additional reason for being in the concentration camp).

Image Archive: General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of the National Archives. / Hoffmann Collection; Subseries HLB; 35mm prints and negatives made by the Berlin Office, 3/1933 - 7/1944 / Record Group 242: National Archives Collection of Foreign Records Seized, 1675 - 1958

National Archives Identifier: 540175 / Local Identifier: 242-HLB-3609-25

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) has a high resolution version from the National Archive image.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was established in 1936. It was located 35 kilometres (22 mi) north of Berlin. (Google Maps, Wikipedia)

Paragraph 175: Criminalized Male Homosexuality

Pink Triangle
for Homosexuals

May 15, 1871: Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code made homosexual acts between males a crime.

July 2, 1934: Night of the Long Knives - Purge of SA leadership and death of Ernst Rohm.

June 28, 1935: Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code was amended to criminalize a broader range of relationships between men and include harsher sentencing. The changes became effective on September 1, 1935.

April 4, 1938: a directive of the Gestapo declared that men convicted under Paragraph 175 will be sent to concentration camps.

1994: Paragraph 175 removed from the German Criminal Code.

During the Third Reich more than 100,000 German men were charged under Paragraph 175, and of these an estimated 5,000 to 15,000 perished in prisons and camps. [Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin (2014)]

References

Echoes and Reflections: Timeline of the Holocaust

Back to Stonewall: Gay History – April 4, 1938

Persecution of Homosexuals / USHMM

Paragraph 175 / USHMM

Classification System / USHMM

Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Looking Closely - Reflection in My Eye

What is reflected in my eye?

Larry Wolf, Self Portrait Detail (2020)

Monday, June 15, 2020

Family Wisdom

It won't always be this way.

Photograph of older white woman with her eyes closed.

Larry Wolf, Sonya Wein (1970s print/scanned 2020)

My mother attributes this to her mother, Sonya Wein. "It won't always be this way." We interpret this as a wry comment about being present regardless of what is happening. Make the most of this moment. Good things will end. Bad things will end. Who's to say which is which?

Sonya was born somewhere in Russia. As a child, she escaped the anti-Jewish pogroms in the early 1900s with her family, eventually arriving in New York City. All she would say about their escape was the need to keep quiet so as not to be discovered.