Sigrid, Hasting’s grandmother, was born in Charlottenburg in 1928 into a bourgeois Jewish family. She remembered an egg yolk in a glass of red wine for breakfast and walking with her mother in Tiergarten. She remembered her school for Jewish children and the Hitler Youth. Sigrid claimed she once marched with her friends in the League of German Girls, the female wing of the Hitler Youth, her friends marvelled at her fundraising skills; she was the best. Sigrid’s Mother; Trudi was horrified, she tracked Sigrid down and dragged her home. Later that evening Sigrid’s little Aryan friends gathered under her window and chanted ‘Long live the Jewish race’.
Sigrid grew up on the same street as the iconic Eldorado; a prominent Weimar era queer caba- ret where cross–dressing was permissible and Nazis such as Ernst Röhm rubbed shoulders with drag queens. Sigrid remembered Albert Einstein, who played the violin with her uncle in the German Medi- cal Orchestra. She remembered the burning of the books; the smoke from countless pages looted from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexology and Sexual Medicine). Sigrid remembered Emmy Göring – “The first lady of the Third Reich” – with her large bosom and fur stoles, an acquain- tance of Sigrid’s mother, who eventually secured her passage from Germany to the United Kingdom in 1938 with false documents. Sigrid left too many behind, and they were never named, yet even now, their weight presses down on us.
In 2023, Hastings and their family were naturalised as German citizens under the restoration of German citizenship laws. Six years after Sigrid’s passing, becoming German returned us to the world of her childhood in Berlin. Sigrid grew up in a valley between two regimes; an unstable epoch where Nazis, queers and jews occupied the same streets. All we had to reconstruct this world was a handful of photo- graphs and memories of conversations that took place over the last few years of Sigrid’s life. Sigrid’s memories exhibited a profound denial of what she endured. The impression was of a life unfolding like a beautiful dream, whilst the wolves and ghosts circled in the periphery. Here, we attempt to understand and experience Berlin as Sigrid did and to learn from what she knew.
Good Society grapples with the contradictions of the Weimar period, during which time both National Socialism and the homosexual rights movement gathered pace. Homosexual rights activism, studies of transvestism and the opening of the world’s first institute of sexual science in Berlin in 1919 transformed the lives of associated gay and transgender people. However, this brief liberation was curtailed by the rise of Nazism and imbricated with the violence of the period: haunted – by not only an- tiqueer attacks but also colonial violence, racial oppression, and the unequal contribution of power within a society that denied full citizenship on grounds of gender (The Hirschfeld Archives, Heike Bauer, 2017).
These violent contradictions persist today. Recent displays of Germany’s militarised police force attacking civilians at pro-Palestinian rallies and censoring solidarity have been experienced by many, not just as a violation of basic human-rights, but as a painful reenactment of this historical violence.
Remembering the violence of the past, or a past defined by violence, or the violence of a past that only enters life as memory... is a challenging task. It might be difficult to even know if there is a past. (Queer Tempo- ralities and the Chronopolitics of Transtemporal Drag, Antke Engel, 2011).
Text: Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, Berlin 2024.
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