Granand - Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights

Acclaim for Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights

The publication of the 1920 Berlin Garden of Erotic Delightsfive short fictions by Granand in its first English translationis one of the most important discoveries of lost queer literature in decades. This panorama, filled with vivid details, of Weimar Republics gay subculture is an amazing act of recovery. But the real revelation here is Granands prose: poetic and precise, quirky and beautiful it captures perfectly jazz age tensions, excitement and sexuality as much as Scott Fitzgerald or Dorothy Parker. We have waited over a century for an English publication of Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights and it has been well worth the wait.

Michael Bronski, author of A Queer History of the United States and Professor of the Practice in Activism and Media Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality , Harvard University

Granands Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights is essential to understanding that gay life was not always subjugated, but that gay men in the 1920s enjoyed life and flourished. This book is a landmark achievement in reminding us that stories are crucial markers of human experience.

Professor Joseph H. Hancock, II, Drexel University

Michael Gillespies translation of Berlin Garden of Erotic Delights returns to English-speaking consciousness an incredible slice of queer European life in the 1920s. Although clearly of their period, these stories reveal a vibrant queer world that will strike modern readers as immediately recognizable. Banned, suppressed, and long-forgotten, these stories deserve a place on any queer history reading list.

Hugh Ryan, author of When Brooklyn Was Queer

berlin

garden

of

erotic

delights

First Warbler Press Edition 2022

First published in 1920 by Almanach-Verlag, Berlin

Translation, Introduction, and Biographical Timeline Michael Gillespie

Bal homosexuel au Magic City by George Brassa, circa 1931.

Estate Brassa-RMN-Grand Palais

All rights reserved. No part of the this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the publisher, which may be requested at

permissions@warblerpress.com.

warblerpress.com

isbn

978-1-957240-24-4 (paperback)

isbn

978-1-957240-25-1 (e-book)

BERLIN

GARDEN

of

erotic

delights

granand

TRANSLATED AND INTRODUCED BY MICHAEL GILLESPIE

Afterword by Manfred Herzer

Contents

Introduction

by Michael Gillespie

My obsession with Granand and his five short stories on the theme of male same-sex desire began in the mid-1990s. Id visited the Schwules Museum [Queer Museum] in Berlin, a grassroots effort that preserves and interprets the history of LGBTQ+ people, and believe thats where I purchased the 1993 reprint of Granands 1920 publication, by Verlag Rosa Winkel...Or maybe it was at A Different Light bookstore (now defunct, of course, like so many independent bookstores) on Hudson Street in New York, near where I lived, and which would frequently offer the odd outlier on its shelves. My now husband, Marvin, remembers me standing in one of its aisles leaning against the shelves engrossed in reading the Granand text and looking up and telling him, I need to buy this....But I have no such memory. Whatever the case, this magical little collection came into my life and commanded my attention at a moment when I was looking to rekindle my engagement with German literature and with literary translation, which Id set aside as I pursued nonacademic employment.

Ive had an enduring interest, starting from the time of my graduate studies in comparative literature, in literary translation and in how texts mutate as they migrate from their domestic setting to a foreign one. This, combined with a concern for how gay lives are represented in culture, led me to look more carefully at this small gem Id stumbled upon serendipitously. My discovery also coincided with a heady moment in queer theory that challenged traditional notions of gender and identity, and with the evolving nature of the AIDS epidemic, which was still very much a specter haunting gay life, contributing in New York City to a solemn, somber mood. And in the year 1993, my mom died on a frigid December morning in Minnesota. What Granands stories could have to say to a young man faced with these realities at that particular point in time started to unfold for me as I began translating them.

I soon realized what lay before me in Granands all-but-forgotten work was a collection of narratives whose frank depiction of gay lives and sensibilities celebrates the panorama of humanity and takes their erotic desires simply for granted. As I explain below, this is somewhat unusual even for the Weimar period, known today for artistic license resulting from the post-war governments bold yet short-lived decision to end all censorship, in 1919. The authors purpose is to portray a variety of characters in specific situations to offer what he himself, in a short note about the collection included in the original publication, called a slice of life, carefully not specifying that his stories intended to capture a specifically gay slice of life, whether to avoid the censors, who nonetheless prohibited the book and pulped its first edition, or simply to underscore the ordinary, common, garden variety nature of their desires.

Granand writes about what he knows, the details of gay life, in a form with which hes familiar from his background in theater. Indeed, the stories read like short plays. The collection explores the characters emotions, fantasies, and relationships, and does so with irony and wit, while the characters themselves become transformed through their experiences, allowing them to transcend their settings and imbuing them with interiority. The stories do not all end up wellhow much in life does?but for a short collection, Granand manages to portray a surprising range of characters: an unapologetically stylish aesthete who slyly gets the better of a rough-hewn burglar; a Swiss student of art history and a traveling American businessman whose chance meeting in a train compartment leads them to a one-night stand; two clubgoers, the main characters of a rom-com that also offers a glimpse into contemporary gay life in Berlin; a trio of cadets whose lives intertwine within the rigid confines of a military school, whose strictures I know all too well, having attended a similar institutionin my case, a Catholic military school for boys in St. Paul, Minnesota; and a character reminiscent of Gustav von Aschenbach, the doomed protagonist of Thomas Manns 1913 novella Death in Venice, to which Granand cleverly alludes a few times. There is heartbreak and betrayal in Granands stories, but also the thrill of discovering that ones passion is matched by another, the pleasures of dancing, celebrating, and flirting in public, the touch of a hand and the texture of skin, the peculiar happiness of falling in love. But even when Granands stories take a melodramatic turn, which a writer like Mann would probably have disdained, they nonetheless testify to his deep insight into the psychology of gay men in 1920s Europe and the cultural and political atmosphere of the time. And unlike the famous novella written by Mann, who is also a master of irony, Granands texts are not tragic. Instead, they offer a refreshingly candid, witty, and largely exuberant look at everyday lives. This can perhaps best be seen in Nemesis: arguably the most sex-positive of the stories, it is the longest of all and occupies a central place in the collection. Astonishingly, the relationship of the protagonists, Trudy and Erich, is casually described at one point nearly a century before same-sex marriage was legalized in Germany and the U.S.as a marriage (Ehe).