This article was published in the Advocate to comment on distortive comparisons between Aids and the Holocaust on the eve on the gay and lesbian March on Washington April 1993. Please also compare: Linenthal, Edward T.: The Boundaries of Memory: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. In: American Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Sep., 1994), pp. 406-433
HOLOCAUST # AIDS – On April 26, just one day after the march, the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington opens its doors to the public. That timely coincidence will force both the Jewish and the gay and lesbian communities to rethink their difficult relationship and we will see if they succeed in sharing a remembrance they have never shared before. It’s a break through that a Holocaust Museum will try to document also the fate of those homosexuals who died in concentration camps – a group that for nearly 50 years has been excluded from the memory of the Holocaust. But Holocaust studies and museums were not alone in forgetting those victims. We did too.
Whom do we remember? Up to one million gays and lesbians as claimed by some gay groups and researchers? Big numbers create big emotions, but here they only document a disturbing indifference in our community towards those ‘victims’ who never existed and whom we assign to mass death in our imagination. What do we need to satisfy by inventing an even harsher history than history itself has been for us?
The Nazi invention of the pink triangle was able to become an international symbol of gay and lesbian pride because we are not haunted by concrete memories of those who were forced to wear them in the camps. No names, no faces, an empty memory. We don’t know more than fifty gay Holocaust victims.
Because we never learned more about their fate, we easily compare their (unknown) tragedy with that of people with Aids. What do we gain or lose by comparing Aids with the Holocaust? In both we can see a refusal to acknowledge gays and lesbians as precious human beings. There are crucial differences between the inaction and hostility of American society and politics towards people with AIDS and the intentional systematic Nazi killing machine. From a gay European perspective is startling that anyone could be interested in giving up these differences and mingling all to one story.
Growing up gay in post-war Germany with the absence of historical knowledge about the men with the pink triangle, was a frightening experience for me and most German gays and lesbians. But only in the last decade we began research on how the Holocaust effected the gay and the lesbian community. Between 10,000 to 15,000 gay men have been forced into the camps, lesbians were persecuted to a far lesser degree. Listening to testimonies of survivors and retracing their fates in Nazi documents reclaims a past that has been ignored too long. Many questions are still unanswered.
Gay and lesbian survivors, persecuted in post-war Germany, with no country to emigrate to and little support by their own community, were forced to keep their secret. Only now have gay groups begun to make contact with survivors. But by inventing big numbers or subsuming their stories under today’s history of Aids, we are in danger to silence them again.
Homophobia is part of what shaped the memory of the Holocaust. Post-war societies in Europe and the States didn’t acknowledge gay Holocaust victims as victims of Nazi persecution. Their exlusion will be an urgent question for future Holocaust research. But we ourselves have to stop to misuse the Holocaust as just a dramatic metaphor and to have to start striving for a memory, which is carefully based on the historical reality of the victims.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCE ARTICLE
Klaus Mueller: Holocaust # Aids. In: The Advocate, Issue 628, May 4, 1993.
*Views expressed on my website are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.