I could simply call this a historical novel, and be done with it. But it isn’t quite. Nor is it a traditional work of history. It forges a path somewhere between the two, and thus requires some explanation.
I started out wanting to learn more about the crucial period at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries when a critical mass of research, theory, and debate over issues relating to gender and sexual orientation first arose—issues constantly reformulated since, and still vitally contested today.
I began my research with the pioneering figure of Magnus Hirschfeld—Jewish, openly homosexual, and German—the pre-eminent sexologist of his day. Until recently Hirschfeld has not been well-served by historians. Thanks to the emergence of LGBTQ studies, the enormity of his impact on our understanding of sexuality has begun to be appreciated, along with an acknowledgement of the limitations, in some regards, of his theoretical views (his notion, for example, that homosexuals constitute a “third sex”).
Along with Hirschfeld, I soon became intrigued with the personalities and perspectives of three of his contemporaries—Count Harry Kessler, Walther Rathenau, and Prince Philipp of Eulenburg—along with a host of other contemporary figures, including Kaiser Wilhelm II; the munitions king, Fritz Krupp; the journalist Maximilian Harden; and the head of Hitler’s SA, Ernst Röhm. Taken together, they present a kaleidoscope of sexual—and political—scenarios available in the first three decades of the 20th century—one that illuminates, and perhaps challenges, our contemporary range of declared identities. Jews Queers Germans attempts to weave a tapestry of interlocking personalities and events that “queers” standard histories of the period. The aim is to open up a reconfigured landscape that questions traditional fictions of “normalcy” and highlights the fact that innovation often moves from margin to center.
“Historia,” we might remember, means “inquiry” in Greek. And inquiry, in turn, implies imagination—an adjunct of objectivity, not its enemy. Traditional definitions of “evidence” ignore the incontestable fact that professional historians base their versions of the past on whatever accidental (and therefore distorted) fragments—remnants of what actually happened—have come down to us. The reconstructions we create from residual evidence pay little heed to the fluky ambushes of chance that actually mold events or, from the inside, the subjective world of fantasies and feelings that lay behind external behavior. Add to all this the idiosyncratic values (often unconsciously held) which the historian brings to bear on whatever evidence remains, and the result is necessarily a skewed, subjective product that at best approximates “objectivity” but can never achieve it. As Maya Jasanoff has recently put it, “If postmodernism taught historians anything, it’s that subjectivity can’t ever be avoided . . . [Yet] historians writing for a general audience still more or less follow the forms set by the Victorians.”*
In my view there remains room in historical writing for informed speculation that moves beyond traditional constrictions. In Jews Queers Germans I’ve let my historical research point me to presumptively “likely” feelings and opinions for the personalities involved, though the actual historical record won’t definitively say so. I’ve also occasionally blurred a date in order to maintain a dramatic narrative line, and have let my own interests—particularly in regard to sexuality and anti-Semitism—thematically dominate, rather than doing some traditional worry dance about “inclusiveness.” Additionally, to heighten immediacy, I’ve used the present tense throughout.
In a recent interview about her “process,” Hilary Mantel comments, “For me, it is about using everything that is there and using the gaps in the record, figuring out why the gaps might be there. . . . I try to make it up based on what is on the record. So even my wildest speculations will have a root somewhere.”
Exactly. Jews Queers Germans is reliably based on “the latest word” in historical scholarship—though I’d also like to believe that it profitably moves through and beyond it. As someone once said, “History cannot teach us, but historians might.”
* New York Review of Books, October 13, 2016.