An acquaintance of mine, Andrew Novak, an associate professor at George Mason who is currently teaching a human rights law course in Germany, posted the following entry on Facebook in regard to the book he is currently reading: The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps.
Novak describes the book as follows: "The first, and still the best known, testimony by a gay survivor of the Nazi concentration camps translated into English, this harrowing autobiography opened new doors onto the understanding of homosexuality and the Holocaust when it was first published in 1980 by Gay Men's Press. THE MEN WITH THE PINK TRIANGLE has been translated into several languages, with a second edition published in 1994 by Alyson Books. Heger's book also inspired the 1979 play Bent by Martin Sherman which was filmed as the 1997 movie of the same name, directed by Sean Mathias."
The following comment by Novak referring to Magnus Hirschfeld reminded me that we'd read a book about the latter's work, Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin, back in 2016:
"One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me was actually a note from the translator on page 104. The speaker (a concentration camp survivor recording his story in the 1970s) was calling for homosexual liberation. The translator wrote:
'It is ironic that a man whose testimony makes such a contribution to our history seems to have no knowledge, as late as 1970, of the first phase of the modern homosexual movement led by Magnus Hirschfeld, culminating in the World League for Sexual Reform of the 1920s. The very memory of this had been blotted out by fascism and reaction, and had to be rediscovered by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.'”
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