Originally posted to Temple Anshe Amunim’s bulletin.
This Spring, I had the honor of being invited to speak from an LGBTQ+ perspective at Temple Anshe Amunim’s screening of Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate. The reception was warm, and everyone shared a background we can relate to: people concerned with signs of fascism as early targets of fascism. I went in aware of many of the key moments that still haunt our communities today: from the infamous burning down of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, to the known, researched, and accepted existence of those of us throughout the rainbow.
What I was not prepared for was the ease of joy and celebration that parallels (and in many places, exceeds) today’s targeted communities’. While intellectually I understand there always have and always will be transgender people, and people attracted to the same gender – I was not prepared for Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, introduced by a trans woman describing (with a Mona Lisa smile) the tendency for sapphic women like themselves to start out as mentor and mentee before falling fast into love. I cannot count the number of trans lesbians that have coupled off, both in my own life and in historical examples of ‘crossdressers’ who went exclusively by feminine names in their friend circles. Immediately, these women echoed both beacons of hope from the past and beloved friends of mine who exist and love deeply today.
Nor was I prepared for the level of normalcy in the love stories between queer men – a normalcy that dwarfed my own post-AIDS epidemic struggles. In contrast: Walter Arlen fell in love as a child with another boy, introduced to us as ‘Lumpi’. For years, they were together. Even after Lumpi fled for his life, Arlen continued to think of, miss, and search for him for as long as it took to find an answer. Their relationship ended not due to anything between them: their love was sent too far to reach solely because of the dangers of Nazi Germany.
Another important example of the power of love was an enthusiastic triad formed between Baron Gottfried von Cramm, his wife Lisa von Dobeneck, and his lover met at Eldorado – a Jewish singer and actor by the name of Manasse Herbst. As a popular blond haired, blue eyed international tennis champion, Hitler and others attempted to prop von Cramm up as the Aryan ideal. His title and status diminished the risk of open persecution but did not eliminate it: von Cramm still faced jail time and career sabotage over his relationship with (and continued support of) Herbst and his Jewish neighbors.
Like Lumpi, Herbst eventually had to flee for his life. Because his relationship with Herbst was being used by the Nazi administration to bar him from his career, it is implied that von Cramm made the choice to reach out to Herbst to try and appeal the decision: not by either himself, von Dobeneck, or Herbst lying and claiming the romance never happened, but by stating the timeline clearly with the hope that it was overturned for the nonsense that it was.
Herbst returned to Germany in 1938 to testify for him: by 1938, Nazi Minister of Economics Walter Funk had boasted of them already having viciously stolen over “two million marks” (about $5,000,000 USD then – equivalent to about $114,000,000 today, or 1,872 German households’ annual incomes’ worth at that time) by means of eroding Jewish citizenship rights through new categorizations and criminalizations. For the sake of a better life for someone he loved, Herbst risked death and came back.
Though all survived the ordeal, it did not end well for either von Cramm or Herbst. Von Cramm’s tennis career continued to be repeatedly sabotaged. He was forced into military service at an unusually low starting rank, assigned to places with higher likelihood of his death, and was unable to see a full return to tennis until the fall of the fascist regime. Despite Nazi Germany’s efforts to render him invisible, he still continues to hold the record for most German Davis Cup tennis wins. Herbst’s acting and singing career has not yet been accessibly archived post-Nazi Germany: all I’ve found currently is that he at some point retired in Hallandale, FL after some time in Portugal and France. Dobeneck’s life is even more mysterious, remarrying twice with whispers of her business acumen – also currently outside of easy public reach.
Arlen found love again. Herbst lived to 83, von Cramm 67, and von Dobeneck to 60. Though Charlaque and Ebel were separated in flight, they lived full if complicated lives to ages 70 and 79. The losses of a fascist regime are horrifying, terrifying, and live on for generations. So, too, do the ways we survive it and prevent it from taking stronger hold than it already has. Much of what has been brought to light with this documentary was not widely known before it, retrieved and translated by Yiddish and German speakers.
Stories like those brought forward by Eldorado are survival guides that show us different, fuller, braver paths ahead. Stories like these shared among those of us motivated to keep the Shoah from ever happening again – including temple members and readers like yourself – give our communities the tools to fight back.
I hope you, too, can find strength, inspiration, and ways to bring community together by passing on and creating new stories of thriving in adversity: no matter the odds.
