The gay Jew in Berlin who helped establish Islam in Germany

A new biography explores the life of Hugo Marcus, a gay Jew who played a key role in the establishment of Islam in Germany before fleeing from Hitler

BEFORE THE NAZIS CAME to power, the most important German Muslim was a gay Jew. In a new biography, Marc David Baer, a historian at the London School of Economics, chronicles the mostly unknown life of Hugo Marcus (1880-1966), “the only figure to have played an important role in the gay rights movement and in establishing Islam in Germany.”

German, Jew, Muslim, Gay weaves Marcus’ life story into the immense intellectual, cultural, and political complexity of his time.

Baer’s book is forensic and rich in its scholarship, as well as tender and evocative as an account of a peculiar life. In narrating the fate of daring projects of societal transformation, he shows how the astonishing era in European history through which Marcus lived enabled, and then destroyed, an immense sense of potential.

Marcus was born in Posen (which moved from Prussian to Polish control in 1919) to a “bourgeois, liberal and highly Germanised” provincial family. He was a precocious and prodigious writer.

His father owned a wood finishing business and Marcus was expected, like many of his aspirational Jewish peers, to further his education before joining the family business himself.

Instead, Marcus’ early adulthood was defined by moving away from family, and by moving from province to city. His complex feelings about love, place, and fellowship would soon find expression through his writing.

FULL STORY Gay, Muslim, and Jewish in Berlin (Tablet)

Photo: Hugo Marcus (Courtesy Columbia University Press)