Holocaust Memoirs by Gay German Jewish Survivors: Constructing a Resistant Identity

This article analyses five memoirs of the Holocaust written or co-authored by self-identified German Jewish gay survivors – Alphons Silbermann, Gad Beck, Walter Guttmann, Jerry Rosenstein and Harry Raymon. While these memoirs narrate diverse experiences of persecution ranging from surviving the Holocaust in exile to experiences of brutality in hiding and in concentration camps, they form a unique corpus because of their gay German Jewish narrative voices. The article examines how each of these narratives differently constructs a gay Jewish identity in the face of extreme genocidal persecution and societal homophobia. In contrast to memoirs written by non-Jewish survivors who were persecuted by the Nazis for their homosexuality under paragraph 175, these memoirs construct gay Jewish identity as a source of resistance. As these memoirs were written fifty years or more from the events described, they also bear witness to a narrative of gay rights progress in Europe and the U.S. in the second half of the twentieth century. The article argues that the authors and co-authors also avail of frames of understanding from the 1990s and 2000s to negotiate a lifetime of trauma and construct a resistant gay German Jewish identity in retrospect.