Martin Duberman's Jews Queers Germans: A Novel

Please join us on Tuesday, March 28th at 7pm in the  Margaret Liebman Berger Forum as Martin Duberman and Alisa Solomon discuss  his new book Jews Queers Germans: A Novel. A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. 

Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II'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 and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after.

Martin Duberman is Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus at Lehman College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and was the founder and first director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. He has authored some two dozen books, including James Russell Lowell, finalist for the National Book Award; Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community; Paul Robeson; Stonewall; the memoir Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey; and Pulitzer Prize Finalist for The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein. In 2012, Amherst awarded Duberman an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters. He lives in New York City. His papers are held in the New York Public Library’s Manuscripts & Archives Division.

Alisa Solomon teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where she directs the Arts & Culture concentration in the MA program. A theater critic and general reporter for the Village Voice from 1983 to 2004, she has also contributed to The New York Times, The Nation, NewYorker.com, Tablet, The Forward, Howlround.com, killingthebuddha.com, American Theater, TDR – The Drama Review, and other publications. Her first book, Re-Dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender, won the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism.  Her most recent book is Wonder of Wonders: A Cultural History of Fiddler on the Roof.

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