Marc David Baer - German, Jew, Muslim, Gay

I conducted the research for this book in Basel, Berlin, Bern, Los Angeles, and Zrich between 2009 and 2019.

In Berlin the greatest pleasure was working at the library of the Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO)despite having to pass under a pre-Nazi-era swastika above the early-twentieth-century Mittelhof villas main door. In forested Nikolassee, colleagues and I skinny dipped in the ice-cold Schlachtensee on summer lunch breaks but skidded across icy paths in winter, anxious about the wild boars snorting in the blackberry bushes. At the ZMO library I benefited from the rich collection of the Gerhard Hpp archive, which contains key archival and secondary sources revealing the history of Muslims in Weimar and Nazi Germany.

I had the misfortune to take the S-bahn from Nikolassee to the end of the line at Oranienburg on a hot summer day to walk to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After many bizarre spells of disorientation, I managed to find the library and consult copies of the records of Hugo Marcuss incarcerationnear where inmates were gassedand located his former barracks (marked only by a numbered stone).

I visited Berlins Landesarchiv (State Archive), located in a gigantic, brick, former weapons and munitions factory complex in the far north of the city, to read files on Weimar and Nazi-era Muslim organizations.

Garish Potsdamer Platzs serenely quiet Staatsbibliothek (State Library)whose student canteens Berliner specialties such as Eisbein and wine and beer never failed to intrigue mewas a peaceful place to read through Marcuss early-twentieth-century philosophical, avant-garde, and pacifist publications. The library also surprised me with a tiny portrait of a young Marcus.

Most important, I attended Friday prayers in a tiny, crumbling, painted jewel, the Ahmadi mosque in Wilmersdorf at Fehrbelliner Platz, which gave me a sense of the intimate space where much of this narrative took place.

My understanding of German converts to Islam has been greatly shaped by accompanying anthropologist Esra zyrek on her ethnographic journey, which culminated in Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe (Princeton, 2014). How much of her voice and analysis is in this book I cannot really determine. I especially remember the only in Berlin scene where the gracious and welcoming participants at a mainly German converts gender-segregated Muslim picnic in Tiergarten had to chase dogs away from their prayer mats during prayer while averting their eyes as nude couples made out in the grass. Also in Tiergarten, I read fundamental texts in the gay rights struggle as dust settled at the recently completed library of the expanded Schwules (Gay) Museum, near where prostitutes continue to walk the same streets sex workers have frequented for a century. But I actually had to travel back to California to find all of Marcuss gay writings published after World War II in Der Kreis at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC libraries in Los Angeles.

In Zrich I conducted research mainly at the stately Zentralbibliothek (Central Library), which owns Marcuss Nachlass (estate), including his private letters exchanged with a kaleidoscopic array of Jews, gays, and Muslims; autobiographical texts; personal documents such as Nazi-issued travel document and Swiss police files; unpublished works, including typewritten or handwritten mosque lectures; copies of published works including his hard-to-find early-twentieth-century homoerotic novella; and private photos with passionate inscriptions pasted into private letters spanning his entire life.

I also visited the Thomas Mann Archives at the new, wind-swept mountaintop campus of the ETH Zrich in a blazing, pink sunset.

I examined Marcuss police file at Basels City Archive, located in the over-the-top, brilliant red, frescoed sixteenth-century Town Hall complex. I was fortunate to visit at the same time as the archives extraordinary exhibit, Magnet Basel, featuring photocopies of entire personal police dossiers, annotated and contextualized, striking examples of the very type of file I was reading. Documenting a century of migration to the city, curated for the one hundredth anniversary of the Swiss Federal Foreigners Police, the exhibit offered moving tales about the lives of migrants ranging from Jews during World War II to Syrian Kurds today.

Staff at the Jdisches Museum der Schweiz (Basel) revealed further unknown, dramatic stories about German Jewish arrival in the city during World War II.

When I walked to Marcuss surprising final resting place in Basel, I finally realized why the funeral directors had sent me a photo of a strand of trees taken from a distance. May Hugo Hamid Hans Alienus Marcus rest in peace, and forgive me for exposing his private life in this book.