Hooked! What I'm Watching: ELDORADO: Everything the Nazis Hate
This is how you make a documentary...
The title of this documentary is “Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate” and I skipped over it because, well, there’s a lot of crap out there. The title is one step away from one of those conspiracy theory History Channel shows that come on at 3am when the room is spinning, like “Ancient Aliens: Meth Nazis in UFOs.”
Maybe the title sounds better in German. Anywho:
This doc is about a queer nightclub called the Eldorado (surprise!) that existed right before World War 2. It was striking to see so many different flavors of queer and trans people thriving and living openly in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. These we people way ahead of their time living in non-traditional relationships and pioneering gender reassignment surgery. Kind of a punk rock fuck you we don’t give a fuck vibe.
The story unfolds in layers, weaving the tales of one of Hitler’s homosexual (remember that funky word?) right-hand men, two trans women, a gay professional tennis player and many other fascinating people. You have clips of authentic old footage intermixed with dramatic scenes where actors bring the people in these stories to life (don’t worry, they usually don’t speak). You also see interviews with people who survived the War. And queer and trans historians describe the forces at work that eventually change the world.
Instead of a documentary, it feels like watching a vibrant movie that makes the screen shimmer (and shimmy).
This doc drops at a critical time. It plots the course of the events that led to the pogroms and the concentration camps. And it’s easy to see how quickly things can change when artists such as drag queens are marked as criminals, and we demonize people who are different. The same forces are at work today to silence and erase people, to attack libraries and block access to doctors. We need to remember the sliding sounds of the enemy crawling on its belly.
I can’t recommend this documentary enough and I may have to watch it again. Streaming on Netflix…
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld was one of the pioneers of gender confirmation surgeries in Weimar Germany, and his last lover, a man of Chinese birth, passed away in Vancouver about twenty years ago. How close we were to true progress!