The Closeted Archive
An Evening Dedicated to Queer Biographies during National Socialism
Banner Making Gay History; Jewish Museum Berlin
During the Weimar Republic, the neighborhood around the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) – along with other areas in Berlin – was known for its vibrant queer culture and nightlife: Magnus Hirschfeld opened the world’s first Institute for Sexual Science, creating a safe space for homosexual and trans people. It was later defamed by the Nazis as “Jewish” and forcibly closed. With the increasing disenfranchisement and persecution under the National Socialists, many members of the community, including Jewish protagonists, were deported to camps or forced to emigrate.
Tue 12 May 2026, 7 pm
Where
W. M. Blumenthal Academy,
Klaus Mangold Auditorium
Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin
(Opposite the Museum)
Together with American author and podcaster Eric Marcus, we will bring their voices back to Berlin for one evening, listening to interviews with contemporaries recorded for Marcus’ podcast Making Gay History. Afterwards, Eric Marcus, literary scholar Janin Afken, and historian Kai Brust will discuss the challenges of researching LGBTQIA* biographies in archives and museum collections.
How can we reconstruct diverse and interconnected experiences of persecution? Is the term “queer,” commonly used today, appropriate for historical analysis? And how can lesbian, gay, and trans life stories be traced in archives that often render them invisible through their classification systems?
Eric Marcus
Eric Marcus is an American journalist, founder and host of the award-winning The Podcast | Making Gay History; executive director of the Making Gay History educational non-profit organization, which provides LGBTQIA*-inclusive American history lessons to middle and high school educators. Eric is co-producer of Introducing “Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust” - Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies; a podcast drawn from Yale University’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies. Eric is author and co-author of a dozen books and a founding board member of the American LGBTQ+ Museum.
Kai*Brust
Kai*Brust is a historian at the Free University of Berlin and a research associate in the project LGBTIQ Movements as Agents of Democratization: Historical, Contemporary, and Future Resources for Imagining Inclusive and Diverse Democracies*. Previously, they worked freelance on numerous educational and exhibition projects on trans and queer contemporary history, such as Spektrum des Un_rechts, and were the initiator of the first Stolperstein without deadnaming for a trans person.
Janin Afken
Janin Afken is a literary scholar and staff member at Humboldt University of Berlin in the project Queer Theory in Transit: Reception, Translation, and Production in Polish and German Contexts. She is the author of, among other works, Lesbische Eigenzeiten. Temporalität in der feministischen* Literatur der DDR und BRD, 1971–1983* (2024), editor of the anthology Queere Jüdische Gedichte und Geschichten in homosexuellen Zeitschriften zwischen 1900 und 1932 (2024), and contributor to the project Queer Jewish Lives Between Central Europe and Mandatory Palestine: Biographies and Geographies, 1870–1960 (2021).
Moderation: Anika Reichwald, curator of the JMB permanent exhibition
In cooperation with the Magnus Hirschfeld Federal Foundation
