Hans Soetaert's The Scattered Library is a monumental, original, and extremely well researched history of the afterlife of Magnus Hirschfeld's archive and his closest cooperators. In telling this history, the author reveals surprising networks of Jewish-Gentile and queer-heterosexual solidarity and help that cast a new light on our understanding of the Holocaust. To get there, Soetaert, who is a professional librarian and archivist, has conducted nothing less than an exhaustive detective chase. He takes us, the readers, along with him on his fifteen-year long search, and he spares us very little: the book has 850 pages, a large part of which are footnotes. The story told in The Scattered Library is a complicated one, recounted in a very long book.

At the center of the story is Karl Giese (1898–1938), Hirschfeld's assistant and romantic partner. He was in Berlin on May 6, 1933, when the Institute of Sexual Science was plundered. Soetaert's fine-grained analysis challenges the dominant understanding that almost all holdings of the Institute were destroyed, either on May 6 or a few days later at the Opernplatz book burning. Significant parts of Hirschfeld's collections turned up in subsequent decades, in bookshop auctions, in donations, and perhaps most famously, in a Vancouver dumpster discovered in 1993, after the passing of Li Shiu Tong, Hirschfeld's other romantic partner. Giese, who initially followed Hirschfeld into Parisian exile and then via Switzerland to Brno, Czechoslovakia, where he eventually made settled. Soetaert explains how all the hopeful plans to re-establish the Institute for Sexual Science in either Paris or Brno came to naught: neither France nor Czechoslovakia were as tolerant in the late 1930s as Weimar Germany had been in the previous decade, and Hirschfeld did not hold the same standing. Giese, who was arrested for “indecent conduct” in a Paris bathhouse in 1934 (a fellow bath visitor performed fellatio on Giese), received a prison sentence, after which he was expelled from the country. Soetaert suggests that Giese was potentially a victim of a police agent provocateur keen to silence Hirschfeld's efforts.

Giese relocated to Brno, like hundreds of other German and Jewish emigrants. The Moravian metropolis was the location of the 1932 World League for Sexual Reform Conference, which Soetaert discusses in detail in chapter two, a site of one of Hirschfeld's last triumphs. Brno was also more affordable than Prague and was largely a German-speaking city. Alongside Fredy Hirsch, the gay Jewish sports teacher, Giese was able to become a part of the local queer and Jewish networks, including the lawyer Karl Fein. The Brno sections of the book are probably the most interesting, and Soetaert uncovers a great deal about queer, Jewish, and Holocaust history. He speculates that after Giese's suicide in March 1938 (following a romantic break-up and threatening news of the Austrian Anschluss). Giese tasked his friend Fein to take care of his papers—crucially, including much of the Hirschfeld archive. The author offers, in meticulous detail, a couple views on how the papers could have been rescued: for example, either via Fein and his relatives, or via a group of non-Jewish queer admirers of Hirschfeld, one of whom was the owner of the removal company and its storage unit. While Soetaert is unable to offer a final answer, his insights into the microhistory of Brno in the Holocaust are fascinating.

Unfortunately, for the reader, this exhaustive investigation often feels too extensive. We learn not only about the key players, but also about all their relatives, and their potential queer relationships. As much as I appreciate microhistory, after several hundreds of pages, these final chapters had me struggling to read. The book would have really benefitted from a professional copyeditor who could have tightened and cut down the book, without losing its wonderful detail. Having said that, Soetaert, who is not an academically trained historian, has taken the time to create this monumental book, answering questions that have intrigued so many other scholars, and which have been discussed in email exchanges or informal conversations, but which have never been explored in written form. His book is an impressive achievement, and a must read for anyone interested in queer Central European history, Magnus Hirschfeld, or queer Holocaust history.

Two aspects concerned me while reading, however. The author largely proceeds in writing a detective story, that is, he writes a positivist history. That in itself is not a problem, albeit it is a very different choice from much of the current state of the field in queer (German) history. Soetaert operates with an assumption that most of his protagonists possessed a “homosexual” sexual identity as opposed to merely noting that they participated in queer acts and practices.Footnote ¹ This choice is analytically backward. It does not account for the various male actors who married women and had sex with other men. More troublingly, the author sometimes suggests that single men who lived with the homosexual protagonists of the book were homosexual themselves, without any additional proof. Nevertheless, Soetaert's insights on the Brno architect Otto Eisler and his design for “House for Two Bachelors” with an open terrace shower that was “used for varied sporting activities” (170) put a smile on my face.

Soetaert engages with a significant body of historiography, whether it is the classical publications on gay Berlin, Magnus Hirschfeld, queer Czech history, Theresienstadt, or the French history of sexuality. In that context it is a shame that he does not engage with three of the recent and in this context crucial monographs: Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives, Raimund Wolfert's biography of Charlotte Charlaque, and Laurie Marhoefer's Racism and the Making of Gay Rights. In particular, Marhoefer's book would have offered a corrective to one of Soetaert's most significant missteps: nearly every time he mentions Li Shiu Tong, he describes him as a “young Chinese lover” and only in connection to Hirschfeld—never as a thinker in his own right. Marhoefer's book demonstrated that there was far more to Shiu Tong, his lifelong independent research into sexology, and his other medical studies. Similarly out of place is the author's language in discussing transwomen: once, the author uses “transvestites” and “transsexuals” (353), in another particularly problematic phrase even “men who felt compelled to cross-dress in public” (26). That is unnecessary and disappointing.

All in all, The Scattered Library is an imperfect work. It is, however, a labor of love that greatly changes our understanding on a local and transnational Jewish-queer solidarity that, in saving the Hirschfeld inheritance, even helped outlive the Holocaust, while most of the actors did not. This book will stand as a resource for generations of scholars, and we will all benefit from that.