The laws targeting queer and trans people that are proliferating across the United States are a symptom of a much deeper and more insidious reaction, the inevitable outgrowth of a deeply repressive and hierarchical society confronting the possibility of collapse. Today’s gender fascism is not confined to the policies of a single political party. It takes different forms across the political spectrum, bringing together essentialist narratives about identity, a resurgent patriarchal mythos, and the persisting power of the state.

This is not the first time that a reactionary society has sought scapegoats. Like our predecessors in the early twentieth century, if we hope to survive, we have to combat these forces on every level, using a wide range of strategies and tools.

In the following ecstatic history, our comrades revisit queer resistance to the Nazis, seeking tactics and inspiration for our own troubled times.

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Queer Wanderings through the Other Germany and the Anti-Nazi Underworld

“They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humor, cunning, and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call into question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history. A historical materialist must be aware of this most inconspicuous of all transformations.”

-Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

The following stories were first presented at a private memorial in honor of Heather Heyer, a year after she was murdered by a Nazi in Charlottesville in Black August 2017. Versions of this text have been presented twice since, in Seattle and Montreal. We present it here to continue that work of memory.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

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A thriving homosexual underground existed before the rise of the Third Reich and survived during it—just as complex and fecund as the underground that blossomed before AIDS and was all but exterminated by the crisis around the virus. In both cases, most of the traces that are available to us were lovingly preserved by insurgent faggot scholars and mystics.¹

In the genocides inflicted on the gay underworlds of Weimar Germany and the decade of Gay Liberation activity that existed between the Stonewall uprising and the onset of the AIDS crisis, the revolutionaries died first, swept up in the death machines of the state. Fredy Perlman called those machines Leviathan. In the process of studying Leviathan, Perlman developed an analysis of nationalism illustrating how the drive to sacrifice entire populations serves as the basis on which to forge a nation. This sacrifice—holocaust—sanctifies and upholds the power of the state.

The Nazi movement inherited the most advanced techniques of repression developed by the inquisitors, witch hunters, colonialists, slave-masters, industrialists, authoritarian revolutionaries, racial mystics, and other stewards of Leviathan. They drew on these sources to establish new regimes of consensus reality shaped through ritual and aesthetics and fed on blood. Inspired by the racism of chattel slavery, Nazism emulated the example set by Lenin and Stalin, turning the machinery of the state against the population in order to forge a nation by liquidating its internal colonies. Though the Nazi regime was apparently defeated in the Second World War, the victors continued its Leviathanic project, inheriting the same legacy of colonialism and genocidal nation-building. It should be no surprise, then, that the Nazi spirit has persisted in various permutations ever since. We see it in high definition, inflicted upon Gaza every day.

Like the gods, worlds—in the plural—die and are reborn in an unending dance. Some of the worlds forced underground by the progressive march of Leviathan are blossoming again. Over the last decade, the United States has been rocked by unprecedented Black insurrection and prison strikes, struggles to defend the sacred earth from resource extraction, and revolt in island colonies like Puerto Rico. At the same time, yet another wave of white supremacist terror has arisen in response. Whiteness, which constitutes itself through the exclusion and destruction of the Other just as the state does, has reasserted its access to the terror by which it originally came to be.

Through the open door of this inquiry, we seek to glimpse one of the many worlds destroyed by the machinery of Leviathan. We will be traveling into a queer underworld that reached its zenith just before the Nazi Party seized state power, a gay resistance that fought a life-and-death struggle against the Third Reich. Very few of the queer insurgents of that time survived; most remain unknown to us today. To proceed, we must call the dead to the amphitheater and let them speak.

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Purgatorio

Our sources have left us precious few written traces. We begin our inquiry by consulting the revolutionaries of the Gay Liberation era.

In an interview for Christopher Street Magazine in 1980, on the cusp of the AIDS crisis, Guy Hocquenghem and Mark Blasius discussed the challenges of cobbling together a history for the gay community in the process of coming out.

Guy: You know, there was a gay community in Germany before the Nazi period which had all the characteristics of the community we have now—including community centers, balls, newspapers, a scientific research institute—everything. I am struck by the ignorance among gay people about the past—no, more even than ignorance: the “will to forget” the German gay holocaust. That we forgot about these hundreds of thousands of people and about the fact that out of one hundred years of gay life, in thirty of them we had a virtual vacuum—that we forgot in such a radical way is, I think, something of a warning. This has happened to no other minority. Even the Armenian genocide was remembered at least by the Armenians. But we aren’t even the only ones who remember, we don’t remember! So we find ourselves beginning at zero in each generation. Our lesson from history, then, is that we can’t be sure we won’t be suppressed. […]

Mark: We know from experience that it is possible to completely destroy a sexual minority: it is not even a question of being hidden, but of continuing to exist. When we become invisible and act just like heterosexuals, we cease to exist: we lose any historical significance as well as any real expression in the daily life of society.

Guy: As long as gay genocide is not officially acknowledged, it could happen again. This is not to say that it will happen, but that somehow the political forces against us can keep it in mind. Perhaps I sound like a doomsayer. But if you put these two ideas together—gays having become “visible” in American society without having acquired significant political protection or status, and this new role of “scapegoat,” replacing the traditional scapegoats. […]

Mark: As though gay liberation of the past ten years is a dream from which we will soon awaken. Underlying our professed self-confidence, there is a deep feeling of frailty—that we are living on borrowed time.

This exchange strikes us as particularly haunting. In the twilight of the gay liberation period, when the AIDS genocide was poised to “come out” in turn, Hocquenghem prophesied the catastrophe waiting to be unveiled. At the time, Hocquenghem was engaged in a sustained reading of Walter Benjamin; a reproduction of Klee’s Angelus Novus, the Angel of History, hung on the wall of his Paris apartment. His book L’Âme atomique shows Benjamin’s continued Messianic influence on his thinking. Thanks to the publication of Max Fox’s translation of Hocquenghem’s final book, The Amphitheater of the Dead, we can read Hocquenghem’s deathbed recollections of his own initiation into the homosexual and revolutionary undergrounds that preceded the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire (FHAR), his invocation of his dead, and a fleeting fantasy of a suspended life that never arrived.

Guy Hocquenghem.

Guy was a youthful star in the FHAR constellation, but we’ll need to shine others’ light on this mystery to see further into the past. Undoubtedly, what Guy knew about the gay counterculture of pre-Nazi Germany was transmitted to him by the eldest member of the movement, Daniel Guérin.

Guérin was a gay anarchist who produced a number of important anarchist historical works. His final book, Homosexualité et révolution, offers theoretical proposals derived from a lifetime’s travels through the revolutionary and homosexual undergrounds. For now, we pass by his theoretical and historical work to consult the memoirs he wrote in the final year of the Weimar Republic and first year of the Third Reich. Due to obstacles to publishing homoerotic material, these records were nearly lost, but they have been recovered and translated by Robert Schwartzwald as The Brown Plague: Travels in late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Schwartzwald’s work offers context, showing that while Guérin was initiated politically by attending a riot in solidarity with Sacco and Vanzetti, it was his first trip to Germany that really offered him entry into the homosexual underworld.

As a teenager, like many other homosexuals from around the world, Guérin traveled to Germany to participate in its unique queer subculture. He returned to Germany in 1932 and 1933 following that same erotic impulse, sublimating it into his interest in “the most organized working class in the world.” In the documents, Schwartzwald presents Guérin as a Virgil guiding us through the underworld before and after what he calls the Catastrophe.

In the following exploration, we also owe thanks to the gay anarchist poet Ian Young, who published an article titled “Gay Resistance: Homosexuals in the Anti-Nazi Underground” in Gay Sunshine Magazine in winter 1977. That article was revised in 1986 and published in the Gay Sunshine anthology, Gay Roots. Taken together, these inquiries paint a living, breathing picture of queer life at the cusp of this catastrophe.

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The Wanderers

Guérin unpacks the draw that Germany held for a young revolutionary homosexual. He wanted to see the organized and virile workers’ movement that had emerged in that country, anticipating a revolutionary clash with the fascists on an epic scale. “The old world was disintegrating and the time had come to risk everything,” he writes.

What he found was much more complicated. The leftist Parties—both Social Democrats and Communists—were unable to halt the spread of what he came to term the brown plague. He documents the sectarian and ideological operations of the respective parties, showing how the Communists acquiesced to the rise of the Nazi Party because they foolishly imagined that Nazi repression would mobilize the working class toward proletarian revolution. Many considered a Nazi regime a necessary step toward a socialist state, itself allegedly a step toward a stateless society.

At the same time, Guérin records encounter after encounter with vagabond youth excluded from employment or adventurously dropping out of a society they regarded with enmity. Guérin claimed that in 1932, half a million vagabond youth wandered the German countryside. Before the Catastrophe, this was known as the Wandervogel movement, a ferment of free love, communal living, ecological consciousness, nudity, vegetarianism, and mysticism that prefigured the counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s.

Participants in the Wandervogel movement.

In “The Undying Appeal of White Nationalism,” first published in the journal Black Seed (described successively as a journal of Green and then Indigenous Anarchism), James Joshua argues that this movement gave rise to many racist and nationalist thinkers inspired by the image of Aryan youth returning to inhabit the so-called natural world, and, in so doing, set the foundations for a new form of life that Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt would call a new “Nomos (order) of the Earth.” Joshua identifies this youth movement as a crucial ancestor of the Nazi doctrine of blood and soil and the template Hitler used to create the Hitler Youth.

Immediately preceding Ian Young’s account of gay resistance in the Gay Roots anthology is a text about the nationalist thinker Hans Blüher, who wrote The German Wandervogel Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon at age 24. In contradiction to Magnus Hirschfeld, the Social Democrat and sexuality researcher who proposed that homosexuals and street queens constitute a third gender (urnings), Blüher proposed that homosexual masculinity and male bonding could form a new Männerbund—a secret society of men—that could constitute a new world order from the ashes of a decadent Weimar. Blüher himself went on to support the Nazi party, believing he had found exactly such a masculine assemblage in the Sturmabteilung (SA), and only withdrew his support after the infamous “Night of the Long Knives” in 1934, the purge of SA leadership that was retroactively justified on homophobic grounds. Prior to that night, an uneasy and ambiguous relationship existed between right-wing segments of the homosexual movement and the Nazi party. Hitler himself initially responded to an emerging scandal around the sexuality of Ernst Röhm, the SA chief, by saying that what he did in his bedroom was a private manner. This ambiguity was settled with the bloody spilt in 1934 and the shift to a more draconian enforcement of Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code—the statute prohibiting “lewd and lascivious” acts between men—in 1935.

As a Jewish leftist and a proponent of a non-masculinist conception of homosexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld could read the writing on the wall. He fled Germany in 1930, three years before the Nazis looted and burned his Institute for Sexual Research and its acclaimed archive. Others were more ambivalent. While Hirschfeld’s scientific and rights-oriented approach was a major current, Adolf Brand and his Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, “Community of the Unique,” exemplified another approach. From 1896 to 1931, Brand was the publisher of Der Eigene, the first gay newspaper in the world and the first publication to revisit the thinking of the godfather of individualist anarchism, Max Stirner, half a century after the publication of his book The Unique and its Property.

The Gemeinschaft was Brand’s attempt to forge what Stirner called a Union of Egoists. Brand’s union was a milieu of writers and a private readership numbering in the thousands. Over the decades, the anarchism of der Eigene became less pronounced as Brand shifted focus toward homoerotic art and culture. The newspaper published erotic photographs and poems, as well as treatises on pagan classicism, romanticism, friendship, and intimate comradeship. Its pages gave space to an ideologically idiosyncratic array of anarchists, nationalists, racists, and anti-racists, including proponents of the liberating potential of masculinity or androgyny. Besides complaining about the dwindling membership in the Gemeinschaft, a consequence of economic turmoil but also of defection to the Nazi Party, Brand largely avoided taking a stance on the Nazis until the controversy around Röhm compelled him to denounce the Party for its hypocritical stance on homosexuality and enforcement of Paragraph 175. While some from the Gemeinschaft joined the Third Reich and others resisted it, Brand retreated from politics and avoided repression, with the exception of a handful of police raids on his office.

He died with his wife when their house was destroyed in an Allied bombing in 1945. Many in his milieu didn’t see a contradiction between homosexual interests and heterosexual marriage.

Der Eigene, arguably the first gay newspaper.

Insurrection against Time

The Catastrophe forced every living person to make a choice. Brand, like countless others, chose the path of quiet submission. But this submission was not universal. The dominant historical narrative, which teaches us that obedience was total, threatens to bury the stories of those who fought back. As Benjamin wrote,

Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.

Ian Young starts his account by discussing another homosexual thinker who was prominent before the catastrophe, the poet Stefan George. Today, George is scarcely remembered in the gay canon, but in his time, he was immensely popular. His contemporaries understood him as an authoritarian, an elitist, and a mystic. The reality was much weirder. Born to a winemaker of peasant stock, Stefan demonstrated a propensity for poetry from a very young age. At nine years old, he invented his own language, much richer than his native German, with which to write his poetry. In his twenties, he travelled throughout Europe studying language and translating Baudelaire. Between 1886 and 1899, he wrote his first book of poetry in yet another language he constructed in order to avoid writing in the vulgar German on offer. Though living in Berlin at the time, he rarely even spoke his native language. He almost exclusively socialized with a small scene of Mexican poets he had met abroad; his second new language resembled Spanish more than any other argot. He was never at home, save for in the words written in his own script.

In his introduction to a book of George’s poems translated into both German and English, Stefan’s student Ernst Morwitz wrote,

George was always proud of never having a permanent home, of not depending upon worldly possessions, and of leading a wandering life with only one aim: the search for men to share his views and his form of being.

He wandered for decades through the city and countryside, among the working class and the estates of nobility, seeking talented young men to take on as students. Outsiders referred to the scene around him as the George Circle; by the late Weimar era, prestigious offices throughout the German Academy and publishing world were held by members of the circle. We don’t know much about the inner activity of the circle, but we know that they put a strong emphasis on beauty, mysticism, rigorous self-discipline, heroic vitalism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of prevailing values, and the aestheticism of the male body and homosexual idealism that were newly emerging with reference to Classical Greece. Though we know relatively little, many have inferred that much of the ritual performed by the group was devotional cultus to a youth known as Maximin who had died tragically. George imagined Maximin as a reincarnated Antinous—the beloved boyfriend of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, deified in the imperial religion after he mysteriously drowned in the Nile.

In sharp contrast to the ambiguity of Brand and others—and surprisingly, considering his seemingly reactionary views—George was firmly opposed to the Nazis from the start. He dreamed of a new civilization, but one distinctly Greek rather than German. He supported the elitism of a spiritual and artistic aristocracy, but considered racial elitism vulgar. Though his poetry specifically prophesied the rise of a new Reich and popularized the term Führer long before Hitler’s rise, he was staunchly resolved that Hitler and his Party were absolutely not the ones. Half of the George Circle was Jewish, and Stefan purged anyone who expressed racist ideas or Nazi sympathies. He did not keep his criticism secret, either.

This didn’t stop the Nazis from offering him a position as Poet Laureate of the Third Reich—or any other position he wanted—in 1933. They were convinced that his poetry would lend a seal of prophetic approval to their new order. Not only did George refuse, but he sent Morwitz, a Jew, to deliver his letter of refusal. Fearing a fate similar to that of Nietzsche—who was utilized posthumously by the Nazis—George fled to Switzerland with his closest supporters, vowing that he refused to be buried in German soil while Hitler was still in power. As Morwitz recounts,

In December 1933, Stefan George died in voluntary exile in the Lago Maggiore. The Swiss sculptor Uehlinger made a cast of his hands and two death masks, which have not been released to the public. The Nazi government wished to take his body to his native land and to inter him with great solemnity in one of the famous medieval cathedrals, but this was refused by the friends who had been called to Locarno. They carried his body to a small chapel where the peasants gather for funerals, and without any publicity, buried him in the early morning. He lies in the Cemetery of Minusio. The grey slab of alpine granite bears only his name in the script he himself evolved and used for his works.

Ian Young tells us that George’s disciples stood vigil so that Nazi grave robbers couldn’t disinter his corpse and return him to Germany. During their vigil, they swore an oath to avenge their master, who they understood had died prematurely as a consequence of the stress caused by exile.

Walter Benjamin wrote a great deal about George, both during George’s lifetime and after his death. In 1933, Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem, saying, “If ever God has smitten a prophet by fulfilling his prophesies, then this is the case with George.” The prophet had foreseen the wrath of God, the dark days that began in 1914 and had not yet reached their end. Following his death, the rising sun of the Nazi regime had “cast new lights and shadows ingrained into his deeply furrowed features. But we do not yet know the aura with which history will illuminate those features on the day they receive their expression in eternity.” For Benjamin, George and his circle, in their classicism, were engaged in a “canonical insurrection against time—a holy war against the century that George himself proclaimed,” but this classicism remained a late and statesmanlike discovery. Benjamin accuses George of having failed to produce any meaningful propositions to sweep away the order he saw dying. The disposition of the George circle was purely critical:

George, whose foreknowledge of the catastrophe sprang from his strict discipline and innate sense of the powers of darkness, was, as leader and teacher, able to prescribe only feeble courses of action, remote from the realities of life. In his eyes, art was that seventh ring with which an order that was collapsing on all fronts was to be bound together one more time.

The products of that seventh ring were enough to hold Benjamin’s attention, if not to gain his endorsement. In an earlier letter to Scholem, Benjamin reports, “My hands were flayed by the thorns of a rose bush in George’s garden that was in surprisingly beautiful, partial bloom.” That bloom was Max Kommerell, who had written a treatise on German classicism. Benjamin himself published a critical review of this work under the title “Against a Masterpiece.” In direct response to Komerell’s claim to be able to see in the heavens over their circle, “a sun, a dawn, and the eternal stars,” Benjamin replied:

If images are timeless, theories certainly are not. It is not tradition but their vitality that determines their worth. The authentic image may be old, but the authentic idea is new. It is of today. Admittedly, this “today” may be paltry. But whatever form it takes, our task is to seize it by the horns so that we can interrogate the past. It is the bull whose blood must fill the grave if the spirits of the departed are to appear at its edge. It is this deadly thrust of ideas that is absent from the work of the George Circle. Instead of offering up sacrifices to the present, they avoid it. Every critique must contain some militant element; it, too, knows the daemon of battle.

Benjamin saw many spirits among George and his Circle—satyrs, centaurs, genius and virtus, kairos, Pan, Fortuna, and Psyche, and other daemons—but it was specifically the spirit of battle that was missing, leaving the heroic ambitions of the circle mere fantasy. Their oath of vengeance was not yet known, and would not be fulfilled until after Benjamin died while fleeing the Nazis in 1940. Before his death, Benjamin wrote in one of his final letters to Theodor Adorno that Adorno’s recent book on George and George’s early student Hoffsmanthal was his greatest work. He cited a passage from Proust’s Sodom and Gomorrah comparing the complicity among homosexuals to the complicity among Jewish people and described his old friend as coming to George’s rescue, having recognized defiance as the poetic and political foundation of his work.

Walter Benjamin hitting the books.

Adorno dedicated the finished version of his book to Benjamin, whose suicide was still fresh when the ink was laid. What he had seized on in George was

The passionate effort to express oneself in language, keeping banality at a distance, the attempt, however hopeless, to extricate experience from its mortal enemy, which engulfs it in late bourgeois society—oblivion. The banal is consecrated to oblivion; that which is given form is to endure as a secret historiography. […] No power on earth can resist transience that is not itself a transient power. Defiance of society includes a defiance of its language. […] As faithful pupils of Baudelaire, George and Hoffsmanthal established happiness where it was defamed. What is allowed withers and vanishes for him, the unnatural is charged with the task of recreating the multitude of visions that were distorted by the primacy of procreation, irresponsible play seeks to overcome the ruinous seriousness of whatever happens to be. Both shake personal identity to the roots with a silent roar, identity, the walls, of which comprise the innermost prison cell of the existing order.

In the final words of his lengthy treatment, Adorno names what survives of the defiance of the George Circle as “determinate negation”—constitution through destruction.

We will return to the remainder of this secret history shortly. First, we must consult the latter half of Daniel Guérin’s travelogue to set the stage for the events that were to elevate the George Circle and other homosexual guerillas to their place in eternity.

The Army Reserve of the Underworld

When Daniel Guérin returned to Germany in 1933, he was shocked by how radically the country had changed in just one year. Gone were the leftist parties and labor unions that had held so much power, along with the notion that repression would foment proletarian revolution. The parties had underestimated how rapidly and ruthlessly Hitler would destroy their infrastructure and assimilate the useful elements into his own apparatus. The Nazis transformed the former headquarters of their enemies into offices for the SS. They changed the lyrics of old communist songs such as “Brüder zur Sonne, zur Freiheit” (“Brother, toward the Sun, toward Freedom”):

Break the yoke of the tyrants who so cruelly oppress you
And brandish the blood-red flag
Above the workers’ world

The red flag became the swastika flag and the workers’ world became the workers’ state. Buildings, songs, propaganda aesthetics, even May Day were gleichgeschaltet—brought into conformity with the new regime. Guérin writes of Nazi youth training in what had previously been a communist neighborhood:

Were it not for the brown uniforms, one could believe that these were the proud Red Front fighters, the former masters of the streets. In the windows and despite the swastikas, the flags, like yesterday, are the color of blood.

Former comrades, too, were brought into conformity. Guérin “saw the uncommitted drift from one camp to another with disconcerting ease.” The seeds of these betrayals had already been germinating the previous year. Guérin recounts spending the night in a youth hostel at which fascists, communists, and uncommitted youths all shared space. At night, they would join in song together, even if at the end they competed to drown each other out in a cacophony of “Rotfront!” and “Heil Hitler!” and other competing slogans. Yet until that moment, all the voices rang out in unison:

As we walk along side by side,
And sing the ancient air,
Which the forests echo back,
Then, we feel it has to happen:
With us will come new times,
With us will come new times.

One of the youths confessed to Guérin that below the thin veneer of ideology, they all wanted the same thing: Revolution, a new way of life.

Not all of the youth were waiting for the politicians to give them that life. In Weimar, Guérin had encountered a small clique of what were referred to as wild-frei (wild and free), vagabonds whom he describes as “a bizarre mixture of virility and effeminacy.” When he sought more information about this enchanting gang, a comrade encouraged him to contact Christine Fournier, a comradely sociologist who had studied them. She divulged what she could when they met at her office:

Wild-clique—a wild gang, a band of adolescents, gone astray, asocials, a community of youths rejected by the larger community.

They lived communally, Fournier explained, with a strong sense of camaraderie and criminal intimacy. They traveled seeking danger and adventure. They wandered

to escape the temptation of suicide. They create a fantasy world for themselves, a world that rests upon precepts that are completely different from those of accepted morality, a world given over to the most unbridled instinct, a world of hatred toward the society which has abandoned them.

They cross-dressed like pirates, bearing crude tattoos and piercings. They took shelter in caves, forests, and abandoned buildings, furnishing their dwellings with only a single central and communal mattress—Stoszsofas—literally “fucking sofas.” Most shockingly, Fournier related, they practiced secret rites of initiation, sometimes in a deserted forest or along a scenic lake outside Berlin. Variants on these rites involved knife fights, submersion in water, fire, or depraved sex acts. To be initiated into some of the gangs, one had to be fucked by every member or to ejaculate on command.

Fournier blushed and went to the restroom. Guérin opened her files and saw the photographic evidence: wild gangs assembled in their queer garb, performing their rites, displaying phallic talismans. When she returned, she told him:

The initiation celebration always degenerates into a drunken binge, a mad orgy. What these youths have read, of course, may have played a certain role: perhaps they are imitating primitive rites. But I rather believe that is really a matter of a spontaneous return to barbarism. Civilization, after all, is but a very thin, recent, and fragile veneer.

Her 1931 account “Ring Youth Gangs” is included in the English edition of Guérin’s book. In it, she tries to document “a ghost that can be neither grasped nor unmasked, the ghost of the wild gangs.” She calls them gemeinshafts-unguhige, a community of those incapable of living in community. Her social worker colleagues estimated that as many as 14,000 youths belonged to these gangs. She contrasted the wild-frei to the Wandervogel, arguing that whereas the latter

aspired toward a better future, for which their adherents were willing to work, inversely, the gangs, whether deliberately or not, mainly thought about destroying what existed […] They never mastered the vital ability to adapt to social reality. In order to avoid depression and suicide, these gravely mistreated boys & girls create their own fantasy world as compensation for the deprived existence they are force to lead.

Their contempt, she claimed, was evidenced by the names of the gangs themselves: Black Love, Red Oath, Fear not Death, Bloody Bones, Dirty Guys, Forest and Field Sleepers, Tortoises, Brandy Thrush, Black Flag, Forest Pirates, Northern Lights. There were many named after Native American tribes. They carried on criminal activities, including prostitution, out of homosexual bars like the Adonis. Their “bulls” were chosen on the basis of “a record of achievement and a diploma of success in diverse criminal activities and a proven mastery of the whole range of sexual activity.” Each bull had a queen, but all gangs had a beloved, available to all. The gangs provided comradeship, recognition, sexual experience, and adventure. They were the “army reserve of the underworld,” each wearing an edelweiss to identify.

Fournier worried about these youth. As a pious reformer, she knew that only a proper socialist education could save them. Guérin was left with a different anxiety to keep him up at night: he knew that any force that could discipline them would be a terrifying one indeed. He too was cursed with prophecy. When he returned, Fournier told him that one day, a particularly vicious SA captain had called out to her in the streets. She was shocked to recognize that this Nazi was a former bull from one of the gangs she had studied.

Despite this, Guérin assures us:

Not all the wild-frei wound up in the service of the Nazis. On the contrary, groups of youth continued to “wander” and hide in the forests through Nazi rule, including the war years. Some of these groups actively harassed the Hitler Youth and engaged in other anti-government activities.

Slim pamphlets have circulated in the anarchist underground in recent decades detailing some of the exploits of these gangs. In one such text, named for the common slogan “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth,” Wolfi Landstreicher celebrates the non-conformity and resistance of these

youth largely from the exploited classes, attacking the domination under which they lived with audacity even when it took the form of a genocidal totalitarian police state of the most extreme form.

Other accounts have been published on libcom.org and by the Anarchist Federation. All the sources agree that starting in 1938, the Nazi authorities (especially the Hitler Youth and Gestapo) were increasingly concerned with working-class gangs, which they referred to collectively as Edelweiss pirates. Their little revolts included absenteeism, graffiti, illegal leafleting, industrial sabotage, and physical violence against Nazi targets. Surprise attacks on Hitler Youth camping and hiking groups were carried out in the countryside and in the cities. These groups had no apparent ideology and only informal structures. Songs stolen by the Nazis were stolen in turn, adjusted once more to extol freedom and the joy of the attack. The pirates sheltered escapees and deserters and carried out armed raids on military depots. In 1944, they killed a Gestapo chief. By that year, Himmler himself had issued orders for the SS to combat the youth cliques. Some were captured and hanged, but countless more stayed free. After the war, many of the Edelweiss pirates continued their revolt against the new masters: the allied powers.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

The anarchist pamphlets celebrate the resistance of the wild ones who continued to wander, but omit all mention of their queer rituals and form of life. These rites and hustles afforded them the freedom to be the destroyers and creators of their own cosmology. When Fournier tells us that they lived in their own world, she is not referring to the individual delusions of one wild-frei or another, she is speaking to the sensibilities and consensus reality that they shared—an Other Germany below and at war with the Third Reich.

After the Catastrophe, Guérin referred again and again to this Other Germany that existed in the resistance. He sought to take us on a journey to

search out our friends of the Other Germany—a small group of staunch militants who have put the fratricidal quarrels of the past behind them and who continue the struggle under conditions of illegality and terror. They will greet us with this simple sentence: we have remained true to what we were.

Guérin tells us that “the international today is but a tiny flame against the worldwide onslaught. But it still burns, and that is already something, enough so that humankind does not despair […] despite all the determined efforts to extinguish it, that flame still burns, but in the shadows and in the silence.”

In his memoires, he traces a sequence of little fires carried by militant individuals and tended in the hearths of safe houses. These little fires spread across the country, forming constellations. Guérin would ride his bike from rendezvous to rendezvous, carrying contraband handmade newsletters and ephemera between comrades.

Deprived of leaders or having only rare contact with them, these small groups have learned to fend for themselves, taking initiatives and improvising under conditions of illegality. For proletarians once pressed into activity like cogs in a machine, this has been a fruitful test of their sound common sense.

Guérin doesn’t reveal too much. Likewise, he offers few conclusions. The ones he spells out can be summarized by saying that perhaps shared reverence for our martyrs could inspire solidarity and cohesion—that for a decade, the left had failed to give adequate attention to the fascist phenomenon—that all revolutionaries must purge their movements of nationalism or risk paving the way for National Socialism—and that the only way to defeat fascism is with a living example, “a flesh and blood ideal.” He ends his account in the cemetery where the dead of a past generation’s revolution are buried: “This is the only corner of Germany that still belongs to us. Wilted flowers.” He calls his testimony but a minute of a fugitive reality.

A collage by Claude Cahun.

The Secret Germany

Ian Young’s hagiography preserves several accounts of queer participation in that fugitive reality.

Starting in 1940, an aristocrat named Count Albrecht von Bernstorff set out to undermine the regime from the inside. For years, he maintained a reputation as an effete, a useless effeminate and socialite. This served to conceal the fact that he was using his social web to operate an underground railroad smuggling Jews and dissidents out of Germany.

Eventually, he was caught and sent to the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. There, some witnesses report, he was treated horrendously and tortured by the guards, yet still endeavored to keep other prisoners’ spirits up. He promised to throw a big party at his estate for everyone when it was all over. He didn’t survive to host the party, but hundreds remained free because of his efforts.

Count Albrecht had warned his contacts in Holland about the Nazi invasion before it began. Afterwards, the Nazi leadership in Holland consistently reported the persistence of the homosexual weeds in their garden.

In one instance, members of a gay society took measures ahead of the German invasion in preparation for the Catastrophe. The editor of their paper, Levensrecht, burned the entire mailing list of the organization. Another comrade, Arent van Santhorst, committed the entire list to memory.

Willem Arondaus and Sjoerd Baaker joined a very gay resistance group in Amsterdam, associated with Gerrit van der Veen. They carried out a number of attacks, including the dynamiting of a records office that destroyed Gestapo case files on thousands of suspected deviants. The group also forged 80,000 fake IDs for others. This tip gave many the headstart they needed to withstand catastrophe.

Jean Desbordes was an old protégé of Jean Cocteau, who described being disturbed by his “starry gaze.” They spent a summer together traveling and visiting Gertrude Stein and Coco Chanel. At the time, Cocteau was writing Le livre blanc, while Desbordes wrote his pantheistic book, J’adore. His later works included a play and a study of the Marquis de Sade. After the Nazis invaded France, Desbordes joined the resistance, acting as a messenger between the French resistance and members of the Polish resistance who were operating out of London. In 1944, he was arrested in Paris by the pro-Nazi French militia and taken to a Gestapo torture center; another detainee reports having seen his corpse there in a blood-spattered bathroom, disfigured by violence. He kept silent unto death. None of his associates were arrested.

Another resistance fighter, Robert Desnos, whom Ian Young describes as a “gay Surrealist poet,” wrote resistance poems and died in a concentration camp. Before his death, he comforted others by using astrology and palmistry to tell their fortunes. Susan Griffin recounts a story wherein he read the palm of a man waiting in line for the gas chamber. He ecstatically proclaimed long life for the man, leading to a wave of jubilation to spread through the line. The disruption was so bewildering that the guards sent everyone back to their beds.

A portrait of Robert Desnos taken by Claude Cahun.

In his poem, “If You Only Knew,” Desnos wrote,

If you only knew how I love you and, though you do not love me, how happy I am, how strong and proud I am, with your image in my mind,
to leave the universe.
How happy I am to die for it.

A British secret agent named Denis Rake joined the French resistance. Asked about his many acts in the underground during an interview for the film The Sorrow and the Pity, Rake replied,

“I think deep down what I wanted to do was to be able to display the same kind of courage my friends who had become flyers had. Being a homosexual, one of my strongest fears was lacking the courage to do certain things.”

Rake claimed that his previous career as a drag performer helped him as a secret agent. At one point, he had an affair with a German officer who was subsequently transferred to the front and killed.

Most spectacularly, in 1944, a disabled veteran of the German armed forces named Claus von Stauffenberg carried a suitcase with a bomb into a meeting at Hitler’s East Prussian office and hid it under a table. A network of conspirators was positioned to seize power once the Führer was dead. The bomb almost killed everyone in the room, including the Führer himself—it would have succeeded if someone had not moved it behind a marble pillar just before it exploded. Hitler was only slightly wounded, but in the aftermath, 12,000 suspected dissidents were rounded up on suspicion of conspiracy.

Many have heard the story of von Stauffenberg’s attentat, but few know of his background in the George Circle. Von Stauffenberg had been one of the twelve students who accompanied Stefan George to Switzerland and stood vigil over his grave.

Stefan George and the von Stauffenberg brothers.

Ian Young calls von Stauffenberg “a spirit of fire,” contending that he was driven by his spiritual background with Stefan George. He emphasizes the circle’s

heroic vitalism with its reverence for culture and the Greek tradition, its homoerotic mysticism, and its belief that the teaching could save the world if transformed into heroic action by the courage and integrity of the initiate.

Von Stauffenberg inspired his comrades to conspiracy by reciting George’s poem “Antichrist”:

The Lord of the Flies is expanding his Reich;
All treasures, all blessings are swelling his might…
Down, down with the handful who doubt him!
Cheer louder, you dupes of the ambush of hell;
What’s left of life-essence, you squander its spells
And only on doomsday feel paupered.
You’ll hang out your tongues, but the trough has been drained;
You’ll panic like cattle whose farm is ablaze…
And dreadful the blast of the trumpet.

Von Stauffenberg named the conspiracy the Hidden or Secret Germany. Members of the George circle spent a decade infiltrating the Nazi Party and the German military to put themselves in proximity to Hitler in order to fulfill their heroic oath. With George gone, they were left to meet Benjamin’s challenge—to ensure that their dead would be safe from the enemy.

Young argues:

“George’s concept of a semi-secret society, an aristocratic elite of initiates, in love with an idealized version of Attic Greece and employing the tenets of the Master’s crypto-religious Maximin cult in the modern world, must seem to our contemporary standards arrogant, naïve, and at least a little ridiculous. But Claus von Staufenberg’s life proves that, for all its theatricality, the Circle was not so ridiculous after all. For of all its members, Stauffenberg felt most deeply the significance of George’s ideas, and took them most seriously. And when the time came, he acted on them, and gave his life for them.”

Spiritual Warfare

A simultaneous outbreak of subversion within the German military on the occupied island of Jersey can be attributed to a pair of queer surrealist stepsisters and lovers, Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe. Ryan Helterbrand’s “Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise” offers the most extensive English-language treatment of Cahun’s background and resistance since scholars rediscovered her in the 1980s. While a good deal of attention has been paid to her art since the 1990s, Helterbrand looks to the revolutionary anti-fascist praxis of the “other Cahun.”

In Paris, in 1935, Cahun joined Andre Breton and Georges Bataille in forming the group Contre-Attaque, “the combat union of revolutionary intellectuals,” to fight fascists through art and in the street. They wanted to form an organization that would operate outside Stalinist ideology and the structures of bureaucratic communism. Dissatisfied with the popular front, which would soon fail to prevent invasion while practically abandoning the revolution, they vowed to fight fascists and capitalism simultaneously. They wanted to break with all notions of community based on nation or ideology to make way for new communities grounded in elective affinities. In their time together, Breton described Cahun as “possessed of a very extensive magical power.”

Claude Cahun.

By 1937, she was disillusioned with street fighting and moved to the island of Jersey, which the Nazis invaded in 1940. The initial Nazi bombing of the island was horrifying, killing many residents. Enraged, Cahun found a pair of revolvers given her by her uncle and began practicing her marksmanship. She prepared to carry out an attack on a gathering of Nazi officers, but Suzanne inspired her to take a different approach.

Rather than die in a shootout, they formed an underground cell: “the Nameless Soldiers and their Comrades.” They published thousands of leaflets aimed at using Surrealism to foment revolt in the ranks of the occupying German soldiers. Their warfare was informed by Cahun’s time in Contra-Attaque and the theory of perpetual insurrection she had developed there. When the couple was arrested in 1944, prosecutors referred to them as “spiritual sharpshooters.” Cahun was found guilty of having waged spiritual warfare against the Nazis.

Helterbrand writes:

What was necessary for true insurrection was neither blind faith nor submission to a particular party or political form, but instead the presence and encouragement of psychic contradiction and complexities. Not ideological certainties, but psychological ambiguities. The true revolutionary embracing their aggressive drives, their own inner alterity, could instantiate a new consciousness.

She believed in writing as a vehicle via which the writer and reader could both transform themselves in the encounter. She understood this transformation as reconfiguring the communal distribution of the sensible. Taking her cues from Bataille’s Acéphale society, she determined that

the organization of the movement had to be formless, headless, no meetings, no leaders. And anyone who felt moved by a particular piece of propaganda could join the resistance simply by performing their own act of rebellion and signing it as nameless soldiers.

This insurrection in sensibility aimed to destabilize the occupation by sowing confusion and paranoia within Nazi leadership and inspiring internal acts of sabotage. The nameless soldiers achieved this by exalting defeatism and encouraging introspection and internal revolt among the soldiers. She encouraged them to become otherwise.

Helterbrand proposes that we see

Cahun’s anarchistic and resolutely individualist program of anti-Nazi resistance on Jersey […] as her own instantiation of a headless, acephalic community, one dedicated to rescuing from the trenches of ideology all those who had been “brainwashed” by the unilateral sensibilities and moralities of fascism, National Socialism, Communism, or capitalism.

One of their earliest tracts reads

FIGHTINGFIGHTINGFIGHTING WITHOUT END
HORRIFIC FIGHTING WITHOUT END

Other tracts simply repeat the phrase ohne Ende, without end. Theirs was a conspiracy without names or ends. Because they were not aiming for a revolution in the power-holders of the state, but rather “perpetual insurrection in the sensibilities of all,” they equipped themselves with new weapons charged with the contradiction, ambivalence, and uncertainly of the without. Weapons without name. Weapons aligned to produce inner and outer alterity. These nameless weapons included reports from the war, tips for psychic self-defense, instructions for casual sabotage, encouragements for desertion (“with violence if necessary”), and aphorisms from Nietzsche ridiculing nationalism and the state. They were composed in German in order to appear to be coming from the soldiers themselves, written on rolling papers and slipped into pockets and through fences around town.

Claude Cahun and Suzanne Malherbe were prepared to be arrested at any moment, so when the day finally came, they swallowed poison en route to the prison. Their suicide attempt failed, but fortuitously delayed them long enough that they missed the last transport headed for the concentration camps. They remained imprisoned on Jersey, where they discovered why they were considered such a threat by their enemies. The prison was filled with German soldiers who had revolted or attempted to desert. They all seemed to be aware of who the women were and showed them care and solidarity. The theory of writing as a means to engage others in a process of becoming had proved itself: Cahun’s and Malherbe’s efforts had succeeded in attuning at least some of the soldiers to the Hidden Germany beneath all the Nazi spectacle.

The courts sentenced them to death. Their executions were to be the ultimate act in their spiritual war, a sacrifice they were prepared to make—but that never came to pass. The war ended before they too became martyrs of the underworld. On the day the Nazis on the island surrendered, they were the very last prisoners to be released, considered the most dangerous.

Claude Cahun.

Epitaph

I lived in those times. For a thousand years
I have been dead. Not fallen, but hunted;
When all human decency was imprisoned,
I was free among the masked slaves.

-Robert Desnos, “Epitaph”

“Stauffenberg, von Bernstorff, Arondaus, Bakker, Desbordes, Desnos, Rake… diverse kinds of people, but all brought together in spirit by a cruel time that demanded heroic action from those who could find the courage within themselves. At least in the cases of Jean Desbordes, the two Dutchmen and the two Germans, their work in the resistance seems intimately linked to an idealism rooted in homosexuality or homosexual ideology. For Rake, an effort to prove himself as brave as the ‘normal’ man resulted in his proving himself braver than anyone could have expected or hoped.

There is something of a common pattern here; the precocious writer of erotic poetry; the amusing drag queen. The kind of people Americans call ‘sissies.’ Beneath the pallid and perhaps limp-wristed exteriors, often lies a character of great strength—strong enough to survive adversity and to flourish. Strong enough, even, to survive the rigors and neglect of what is called History.”

-Ian Young

We need hardly say more. This has been a long time coming and these stories and spirits will take time to assert themselves in the present. For now, we can conclude with a few gestures toward further lines of inquiry.

The Wild-Frei constituted their own underworld. The George Circle conspired in the name of a secret Germany, while Guérin and Cahun devoted their efforts to communicating that Germany’s existence. This space of alterity was created through an insurrection against time in the realm of the sensible; it was built with poetry, ritual, sexuality, and gunpowder. All the ancestors we have invoked here were empowered by and through the ways that their resistance formed a world—secret, hidden, other—in defiance of the world in which the Nazis sought total power.

This project of totality existed in unbroken continuity with the terror inflicted by the forces that constructed Whiteness throughout the world, a terror that returned the apparatuses and techniques of extraction and extermination to the European soil from which they first set sail. This is why there is no “before” or “after” the Catastrophe. As Benjamin puts it, where we see a chain of events, the Angel of History sees a single pile of wreckage mounting toward the sky. The perceived moment of catastrophe was simply an apocalypse in the most ancient sense of the word: an unveiling of what already was, of who we already were.

“This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” -Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

Guérin’s message from the underground—we’ve remained what we were—applies to the Nazis as well. The terror of fascism is woven into the very fabric of the norm. The Nazis foresaw a thousand-year Reich, envisioning themselves eternal. They are, but not because of the future they promised. Rather, they are the inheritors of millennia of development in the techniques of domination and order. Hocquenghem was prophetic in 1980 to insist that the Gay Liberation of the time was neither unprecedented nor irreversible; we’d be wise to remember his warning today. All states are formed through the sacrifice of the Other. “Faggot” shares a signifier with fasces, a bundle of sticks burned for the coherence of the community. We have been that Other many times—but we will not go easily again. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes once more.

Our enemies are fighting for eternity and so are we. The Wild-Frei declared “Eternal War,” and Cahun called it “Perpetual Insurrection.” Our ghosts restore for us the potential of a revolt without end. The right- and left-wing revolutionaries of the preceding century were animated by a masculinist idea of virility, attempting to repeat the mythical final act of the crucified by vanquishing death itself. The fantasy of the triumph of life over death has already born its rotten fruit. In death, we can access an eternity still denied to the transhumanists of our time. Among the dead, we find our greatest co-conspirators. The fact that their worlds have such purchase on the present leaves us the task of redeeming their efforts. Edvard Munch elaborated a vitalism intertwined with death when he wrote, “From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.”

In the rapid escalation of armed attacks by spree shooters, today’s Nazis reclaim their capacity for sacrifice. Our only hope is, in turn, to sacrifice that sacrificial impulse of fascism in the name of non-fascist life, anarchy. Determinate negation: to be bound together through our proximity to death, our personal relationships to our shared dead establishing the ground for a world held in common. In this project, we cannot limit our critique of fascism, neither for ideological nor social comfort. Our hostility to the terror of the norm must be expansive, it must cut to the very core of our being.

The history traced above illustrates how the parties and their leaders have failed to turn back the tide of catastrophe. It is no wonder that Guérin turned to anarchism after living through this mess. Remember, it was the bull who turned Gestapo; George had to die for his circle to blossom; Claude and Suzanne were ready for martyrdom but survived all the same. Ryan Helterbrand proposed the Nameless Soldiers as a mirror of the Acéphale society, which spent the years after Contra-Attack preparing for the Catastrophe through bacchic worship of a headless figure. Reputedly, they desired to sacrifice one of their own. They disbanded because each wanted to be the sacrifice, but none to hold the knife. Cahun succeeded where Acéphale failed: she sacrificed herself and her enemies by choosing the initiating ego death of metamorphosis. Initiation, ego death, opens the door to the immanence of another reality through newfound sensibilities. The Fool’s journey ends by accessing the World. We must be willing to lose our own heads.

Hitler lost his head, too. And despite the decades-long antifascist exhortation for neo-Nazis to follow their leader, their world persists. It went underground following the death of the Führer, that figure invested with so much psychic and political power. It is beyond the scope of this inquiry to trace the survival of Nazism, but the apoliteic proposals of Julius Evola—to preserve the world of fascist sensibility through art and mysticism—have surely played a key role. Fascism, too, is an underworld vying for hegemony in the apocalypse of Liberal Democracy. Now, as then, there is a drifting between worlds. Fascists have appropriated the position of outsider and the promise of fraternity in order to swell their ranks with disaffected young men. Now, as then, queers like Milo or the pick-me faggots of X make the mistake of ambiguity in light of catastrophe.

More troubling are those comrades brought into conformity, either with Nazi militias or with the delusion of “Saving Democracy,” or, worse, the West. We wish there were simple answers to the dilemma of friends turning into enemies while others remain steadfastly what they were. Would that we could reduce it to a matter of strength of will or anti-racist commitments. But eternity demands our discernment. All we can do is honor our friends among the dead, and let their memory nourish the lifeways—queer, anarchic, other—they lived and died for.

Before joining the ranks of the blessed dead, another Willem, wrote:

My trans comrades have transformed me, solidifying my conviction that we will be guided to a dreamed-of future by those most marginalized among us today. I have dreamed it so clearly that I have no regret for not seeing how it turns out. Thank you for bringing me so far along.

In the years since then, we’ve seen an international trans panic surrounding the all too predicable figure of the Child, this time the trans child. We warned over a decade ago that the Child was the black hole of all queer politics. With no viable political response, this seemingly inevitable and uninterrupted path toward catastrophe demands we imagine ways out, sidestepping the dead ends and honeypots of representation and identity. We need methods that anticipate the coming dilemmas. If we consolidate these lifeways, we might imagine another map. Invoking these stories, we pray for the ludic efficacy of their underground forms: the George circle came closest to killing Hitler, the wild boys continued their war when all else acquiesced, and two lesbian poets calling themselves nameless soldiers inspired mass insubordination among the enemy ranks.

Idris saw in Michael Reinoehl the spirit of John Brown reborn.² In writing his letter to the former, he calls to presence the eternal war they both waged. Let’s append a few more names to the unending litany of the fallen in that war. What transmigrations of the soul are demanded now?

I place these names, images and sacred texts upon an altar. At the center, a mirror in which we ourselves are revealed. Before the mirror, a candle for the tiny eternal flame of the international underground. It is a black flame, burning from the sun in the underworld. Before the candle, a knife. I offer the waters of memory and the flowers that, by nature of their secret heliotropism, turn toward the sun.

Down with the Party form!
Long live the revolt of the liminal!
The dead walk among us!

Şehîd namirin!
Bella ciao!

“The Anarchist” by Sascha Schneider, a gay artist who contributed to Brand’s Der Eigene. The illustration at the top of this article is also by Schneider.

Further Reading

• Acéphale
• The Amphitheater of the Dead, Guy Hocquenghem
• The Brown Plague: Travels in late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany, Daniel Guérin.
• The Christopher Street Reader—Mark Blasius’s interview with Guy Hocquenghem begins on page 355.
• “Eternal War on the Hitler Youth—The Edelweiss Pirates, 1938-1945”
• “Gay Resistance: Homosexuals in the Anti-Nazi Underground,” Ian Young
• Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany, Hubert Kennedy
• Plastic / Explosive: Claude Cahun and the Politics of Becoming Otherwise, Ryan Helterbrand