Gay may be the last of the cognomens in the title of this biography, but it is the feature that looms largest in the book. Three of the five chapters have “gay” or “queer” in their title. Yet Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) did not lead an especially active gay love life. Rather, he was prominent in the fight for homosexual emancipation in the early twentieth century, and a close associate of Magnus Hirschfeld and his circle. And he did write a large amount of erotic gay fiction. He never succeeded in winning a life partner, and, as Gerdien Jonker has recently commented, in his final years his letters show that he was lonely. During the last ten years of his life, Marcus was in touch with few people and took refuge instead in the fictional gay character, Heinrich, he created.Footnote ¹

One gains the impression from Baer's many-sided exploration of this unusual life that Hugo Marcus never entirely fitted in. His passions were intellectual ones rather than personal. His best and closest companion was his pen. He was naïve about the dangers of the real world. Despite a brief incarceration in Sachsenhausen after Kristallnacht in 1938, and a Nazi demand to leave the country, he remained in Berlin in order to finish his work on a German edition of the Qur'an. He used his entry visa for Switzerland only one week before the German invasion of Poland.

In some ways, he seems a rather uncongenial character. Indeed, the author notes that, in a portrait painted of him in 1925, he seems, with his wrinkled face and mussed hair, to be scowling. He looks rather grumpy in surviving photographs as well. Since Baer describes these in detail, it is a shame that this book includes no illustrations. The one attractive photo of Marcus as a twenty-one-year-old (and rather stunning he looks, too) graces the cover of the book, but, beauty being in the eye of the beholder, Baer inexplicably dismisses it as “not flattering” in its profile of his “large right ear, bony right cheek, and large sharp nose” (22).

There is not so much in this book about Marcus as a Jew, because the remarkable fact about him was his conversion to Islam, with the Ahmadi community giving him a lifetime appointment as the editor of all their German publications. They regarded Marcus as “the most valued prize of our Mission in Berlin” (68). Yet he did not renounce his Jewish faith, and praised Islam for not requiring that or even a public affirmation of conversion. He saw it as more tolerant of others, including gay men like himself. And in rejecting violence, it seemed the perfect religion to heal the nations after World War I: “A religion that precedes each conversation with the greeting ‘peace be with you’ cannot be blood-thirsty.” But was Islam really that liberal, even about other religions? Baer has to admit that Marcus was being a bit starry-eyed: “Marcus seems to have forgotten that, normatively speaking, the first pillar of Islam is the Shahadah, the proclamation of faith: ‘there is only one God and Muhammad is his Prophet’” (139).

The Berlin imam was instrumental in obtaining Marcus's exit visa from Nazi Germany. However, Baer cannot entirely gloss over the fact that Nazi ideology infiltrated some German Muslims and “helped contribute to the anti-Semitic atmosphere in Berlin,” even leading some to join the Nazi Party. But to add that “they ultimately frustrated the Nazi attempt to annihilate the Jews of Europe, if only by saving one life” (namely Hugo Marcus), smacks of a bucket of whitewash (115). Of course, the Nazis had stamped him as a Jew, adding the name Israel to his passport, which the Swiss authorities cruelly maintained in their identity papers when he went into exile. And Marcus insisted on his Jewish faith after the war, when pleading for reparations payments from the West German government, while at the same time dunning his Muslim friends for cash support.

Baer walks the reader who is unfamiliar with Islam carefully through Marcus's beliefs, which reflected the Weimar period in the 1920s. He also assumes little knowledge of the homosexual movement and gay literature, though this will be more familiar to many followers of German history. He carefully parses Marcus's strange idée fixe about Goethe as the perfect Muslim and the ideal gay man. One of Baer's most telling remarks is that “Marcus's Islam is strangely devoid of Muslims” (68). We see nothing of the Islamic past apart from Muhammad as the founder. Everything really comes back to Goethe, who he claims had effectively converted to Islam (74). Relying heavily on Robert Tobin's book, Warm Brothers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), about this icon of the German literary scene, he discusses at considerable length Goethe's embrace of homoeroticism. Marcus, too, clung to the belief that this represents the purest form of love. The subtext of his novels written in old age is that “pure, unconsummated homosexual desire … is superior to the love between men and women because it can never be requited” (185).

Even Baer has to wonder whether the elderly Marcus was regretting the absence of a more physical love life. His happiest years must have been around the turn of the century. He was a close friend of the leaders of the homosexual emancipation movement, frequently strolling through the Tiergarten with Magnus Hirschfeld, and attending the famous criminal trials where the latter testified as an expert witness. An uninhibited, all-male Wandervogel hiking group drew him into its ranks. He once spent a vacation on Capri, when the famously gay Friedrich Alfred Krupp shared the same hotel, and Marcus fantasized about having an affair with him. Lectures at the University of Berlin led to a crush on his professor, Friedrich Paulsen. He does appear to have had an actual love affair with a younger Polish Catholic friend. But after 1933 and the Nazi seizure of power, it seems a rather sad life of inner emigration into the realms of philosophy and literature. Baer sees this as strength, however, claiming that “Marcus best illustrates [George] Mosse's German Jew who remains loyal to Bildung and dedicated to rationalism to the very end” (18). Yet some readers will find less inspiration here than regret about opportunities missed, for example, in effective resistance against National Socialism, or for more outspoken support of homosexual emancipation in his later years. Hugo Marcus crafted a multihued life for himself as a young man, but the color rather quickly drained out of it in middle age.