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Yvone Brem
The film is about the lives of LGBT people in the Weimar Republic and during the reign of Nazi Germany. The documentary film explores the titular Eldorado, a queer night club in Berlin. The film discusses queer figures in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, such as Ernst Rhm, Magnus Hirschfeld, Gottfried von Cramm, Manasse Herbst, Charlotte Charlaque, and Toni Ebel.[3] The film includes interviews with Walter Arlen, who grew up as a young gay Jew in Interwar Austria,[5] and discusses the use of Paragraph 175 in Weimar Germany, in Nazi Germany and, in narrative closing credits, in post-War West Germany.
Another gay man prominently featured in the film is Walter Arlen, who spryly recounts his love for Lumpi, whom he met as a teenager and shared an intense friendship. Arlen, who is still alive, snickers recalling an erection when they took a bath together. But again, as the Nazis rose to power, Arlen and Lumpi are targeted because they are both Jewish and gay.
Likewise, noted sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institute was a safe space for trans and queer people in Berlin, is briefly discussed as someone who patronized the Eldorado. His scientific contributions made him a target for the Nazis, who destroyed his Institute in 1933.
The filmmakers present all of this information with sleek, glossy nightclub scenes that work better at creating a sense of time and place than the character segment reenactments. The documentary interviews with historians, including trans historian Morgan M. Page as well as Dr. Klaus Mueller, among others, provide plenty of information to absorb, but at times it can feel too dense. The reenactments provide breathers as the filmmaker(s) cut back and forth between the profiles and the history to maintain a chronological timeline. Given how the story unfolds, the subjects in one scene may not be alive in the next, an approach that keeps viewers engaged.
Thankfully those moments are few and far between in Eldorado. Instead, it succeeds in preserving these nearly lost stories and lets queers of the world add another historical haven to our canon. Long live Eldorado.
Eldorado was a legendary queer nightclub, which hosted everyone from Magnus Hirschfeld, a sexologist who pioneered trans healthcare, to Ernst Rohm, an infamous gay Nazi who, prior to his murder by the regime he helped to usher in, was a close friend of Hitler. Using the history of this venue as a starting point, the Netflix documentary explores how a period of freedom, fluidity and experimentation gave way to violence, oppression, and the reinscribing of rigid gender roles. The period is brought to life through a combination of archive footage, interviews with survivors and expert historians, and new dramatisations which capture the raucous atmosphere of Weimar Berlin in vivid detail.
Matt Lambert: For me, it was about trying to create an accurate representation of what that nightlife scene would have been like. We really tried to build a living, breathing world. Everyone was there in character, no one had their phones, and everybody took a dance class prior to the shoot, because if they were going to move freely and embody a character, they had to know exactly how to exist in that space. We worked with some very experienced actors and performers, some of whom are only on screen for 30 seconds. Because of the desire to tell this story, to pay homage to the queer past of this city, we got a lot of amazing people to step up.
In terms of fashion, 1920s Berlin was one of the most exciting eras of history, and I think we really nailed it. This documentary gives you a lot of information and takes you down a dark path at times, but we wanted to start by showing how absolutely amazing this time was, and how many incredible people were there.
There are some disturbing parallels between the story this documentary is telling and what is happening to the LGBTQ+ community today, in terms of the rise of the anti-trans movement. Is this something you were conscious of as you were making it?
As depicted through engrossing archival footage and lush dramatizations (separately directed by Matt Lambert), queer regulars at the Eldorado risked harassment and blackmail, as well as being beaten in the streets by the Brownshirts of the Nazi SA, or jailed in police raids. And that was before the Nazis took power.
Gratitude is very important. It is among the most empowering forces in the universe. It certainly felt that way Sunday when news came that President Joe Biden will not run for a second term, that he was instead endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for top spot on the ticket.
For a moment, I was leery, as my husband had tricked me with a parody headline a few days earlier with essentially the same news, but not at all the same content after clicking. But as my phone began blowing up, I felt confident that these new headlines would not again return a pornographic-pic gag.
"To set the page, we have to remember 2020," Lynett tells Metro Weekly, drawing us back to that protest-filled summer and autumn. "I was living on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin, where the cops were there every single night, tear gassing people."
In that atmosphere of roiling racial tension, Joe Biden had selected Kamala Harris as his running mate, and Lynett, who is queer, Black, and Latinx, was hopeful about this dynamic, Black and South Asian female leader rising to power. Yet, she recalls, as someone from California, she was skeptical of Harris' complicated history as a tough-on-crime prosecutor in the state.
The Toronto Pride Parade kicked off at 2 p.m. on Sunday, June 30. Three and a half hours later, it came to an unexpected halt, as the Coalition Against Pinkwashing blocked it, the Toronto Star reports.
The series "Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey," explores the world of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which built a community of as many as 700 people on the Yearning for Zion Ranch in Schleicher County outside the small town of Eldorado.
He was ultimately extradited in 2011 to San Angelo, where he was found guilty of sexual assault of a minor and aggravated sexual assault against a child for the girls he married at the ages of 12 and 15.
Filmmakers Benjamin Cantu and Dr. Klaus Mueller in conversation about new Netflix documentary "Eldorado - Everything the Nazis Hate" Benjamin Cantu (pictured on the left) and Klaus Mueller (picture on the right)
Benjamin Cantu: Your film Paragraph 175, which was released a good 20 years ago, in 2001, deals with the Nazi persecution of homosexual men and women. The film was like a driving force for us at that time. When Nils and I saw it, it was clear to us that this was a topic we wanted to go deeper into. It awakened the question in us: If all happened here in Germany almost 100 years ago, what do we really know about it? At that time, you as a filmmaker, were in contact with survivors of the Nazi persecution of homosexuals. And I'm in touch with you now.
Klaus Mueller: More research is needed, including in the archives, to make long-marginalized lives visible. Were you planning from the beginning to tell these very different stories in one film?
Benjamin Cantu: We wanted to show queer lives that took place in Berlin and who experienced the shift from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism. I was looking for stories that were not known to a broad audience, because they have been stigmatized and marginalized since their persecution and in post-war research. From the world-famous tennis player, Gottfried von Cramm, we come to his long-time friend and lover, Manasse Herbst. He was a discovery for us. And it was a total stroke of luck that you did research on Gottfried von Cramm already many years ago. From the likewise world-famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, we focus on the story of the relationship between Charlotte Charlaque and Toni Ebel, which has never been told before. We already know a fair amount about the Nazi Ernst Rhm, who also plays a role in the film. What was important to me was to show how homosexuality was defined at that time from different directions - socially, scientifically and politically. It was completely new at that time to talk so broadly and publicly about homosexuality. The topic was politically instrumentalized by the Nazis as well as the Social Democrats and Communists. The characters this film is about were affected by these dynamics in different ways. Within a few years, many LGBT people experienced their sexual and emotional freedom and, at the same time, extreme oppression. The film attempts to trace these major movements.
Klaus Mueller: My goal for Paragraph 175 was simple at the time. The film was the last chance to tell this story in the voices of homosexual survivors themselves. The film is based on interviews with these survivors. We show their persecution not by using Nazi sources, but by listening to them. We talk about men who were nearly 90 years old, or beyond. It was a race against time.
Klaus Mueller: The gay survivors I worked with didn't experience public empathy nor political recognition as persecuted victims. Their voices are still missing from the Holocaust remembrance culture today. After all, they were never part of commemorative events, never addressed as survivors. Their persecution, even after 1945 has isolated them; they have not been able to speak with other homosexual survivors. This is a big vacuum that is hard to fill.
That's why Eldorado is so important, because the film tries to keep people and fates in our collective memory today.
Benjamin Cantu: Back then, you preserved memory based on lived individual experiences. I don't have that possibility today. But I want to make these experiences tangible through cinematic means that make the personal level between us today and the people back then tangible again. We do this through historically researched reenactments, that were directed by my colleague Matt Lambert. We combined these reenactments with meticulously researched archival footage. In the end it became a character-driven historical documentary. We want to make the lives of these people experiential.
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