QUEERS/JEWS/GERMANS

A ground-breaking work that will advance our understanding of gay identity as it began to emerge in the Belle Epoque.

Distinguished historian and author of more than 20 works of history and biography, Martin Duberman turns his attention to Germany, in a new book about gay culture in the early decades of the 20th century. JEWS/QUEERS/GERMANS is about the intersection of Jewish, sexual and national identities in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, as personified in the figures of Magnus Hirschfeld, Count Harry Kessler, Walther Rathenau, and Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg. A rich and episodic narrative, set against the backdrop of Kaiser Wilhelm's impetuous rule, World War I and its aftermath, and the coming of Nazism; it begins with the scandal surrounding the death of munitions magnate Fritz Krupp in 1902, and ends with the death of Harry Kessler in 1937. MARTIN DUBERMAN (born 1930) is an American historian, biographer, playwright, and gay rights activist. He is Professor of History Emeritus at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and Lehman College and was the founder and first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. He has written more than twenty books, including ones about James Russell Lowell (a National Book Award finalist), Charles Francis Adams, Sr. (Bancroft Prize winner), Paul Robeson, Stonewall, a biography of Howard Zinn and the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey.