Martin Duberman will discuss his new novel Jews Queers Germans (Seven Stories Press, 2017) with journalist and author Masha Gessen.
Jews Queers Germans is a historical novel by Martin Duberman that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II from 1907 through the 1930s: a period of great human suffering and destruction but also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old world still mattered, while art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style.
Adhering closely to the historical record, Duberman portrays the gay life of a very upper-crust intellectual milieu. The story revolves around three of Kaiser Wilhelm's closest friends: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, the emperor’s closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic, and political events of the day while alluding as well to his own homosexuality.
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