Revue 'The Lilac People' ': the life of a trans man is upset by Hitler

From the perspective of the 2024 elections, in cable news emissions and in dinner tables, the Americans debated a question that terrified various groups of us for various reasons. If Trump won, would he replace our democracy with fascism?

Given republican Anti-Trans AD expenses estimated $ 215 million On network television alone (“it is for them / them, it is for you”), Trans have had reasons to fear that Trump will bind the civil rights they had won in the last half-century. Indeed, Trump immediately signed a series of anti-Trans decrees collectively described by the EEOC commissioner, originally, Jocelyn Samuels as a plan “Erase the existence of trans people.”

Milo ToddA literary scholarship holder of Lambda and creative writing teacher, centers his first novel on an anterior erasure, largely hidden in a greater history: Hitler's attempt to eradicate the transgender people of Germany in the 1930s. When the Nazis took power, Berlin was an international gay center, which houses 100 queer bars, 25 queer and queer journals and Institute of Sexual SciencesWhere the first surgeries and hormonal sex treatments in the world were carried out by the genre activist, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld. Through the eyes and the heart of the trans protagonist of the novel, Berthold “Bertie” Durchdenwald, we live the news of the takeover of Hitler, who comes while he dances with his girlfriend in a Queer Berlin club.

Music has cut itself off in the middle of a final and persistent note. “We are interrupting to bring you important news,” said radio. “The Hindenburg President has just appointed Adolf Hitler as the new Chancellor of Germany …”

“Don't they know what it will do to Germany?” Sonie Spat. Everything Bertie felt cold.

Just as Trump immediately started to make his “Day 1” campaign promise to “Stop transgender madness” and “Take out the army transgenders”. Hitler immediately labeled transgender people “sexual degenerate” and sent them as much as his brown shirts could catch in the death camps. The institute was burned down by a Nazi student crowd, Each book in his library has burned to Opera Square. “The world had changed overnight,” observes Bertie. “The city was already draped with swastikas. Lively suspended, beating red flags, lounging like dead languages ​​from each corner store … Berlin was bleeding from the inside. ”

Increase the contrast between the trans and post-hitler experience, Todd uses chapters alternating between the beautiful life of Berlin de Bertie and his existence of the 1940s on the farm where he and Sofie hid under the alias throughout the war. Against this tragic framework, the elegance of Todd's prose plants wonders in the mind of the reader. “The asparagus has emerged every springless spring, an old friend, a capsule in the story of when life continued to grow, was born from a better time.”

Shortly after the word of war reached Bertie and Sofie, Bertie discovers an unconscious young man in the patch of the asparagus “in the dirty stripes of a camp camp”. Noting the black triangle sewn to the uniform of man, the Nazis label for trans prisoners, Bertie realizes that man must have escaped Dachau nearby. While nourishing and bathing the stupid foreigner, Bertie tries his luck. “I'm a transvestite,” he says.

“Me too,” says Karl.

“Why were you still in these clothes?” Asked Bertie. “Have the allies not released the camps weeks ago?”

“I fled when the allies came.”

“Is it true? They define everyone except us for free? ”

“The only difference I saw between (the allies and the Nazis) is their style of murder,” replied Karl.

Devastated to learn that the allies also treat trans people as a subhuman, Bertie and Sofie stop waiting to be released and start planning their own release. Their preparations for emigrating to America include the formation of Karl innocent to avoid recognition.

“Maybe when you are rested,” said Bertie, “I can teach you how to transvert.”

“I'm not a man just like that.”

“Or you could wear some of my things,” added Sofie gently.

Here, Todd has his youngest character summarizes the painful central paradox of trans -life – in Nazi Germany almost a century ago, and perhaps in the America of tomorrow.

“So we have to be who we are not to be who we are,” says Karl.

While their need to flee becomes more urgent – this time, allied soldiers who stop queer people while releasing the rest of the country – Bertie must destroy proof of their supposed identities. He lights a fire of joy and burns the thing even that most of the survivors in the event of a disaster grasp the way to the door: photo albums commemorating life without care he lived when he could be who he really was.

“Everything had been burned since this night at the institute,” said Bertie while the flames are licking on images of her happier ego. “First the twenty thousand pounds, then the countless people, then proof that it had ever happened.

While their escape ship stops in the port of New York, Bertie reflects the permanence of his pain. “A great sadness fell on him. Deutschland was behind him forever. He had loved his country. But what he liked was what he was, what had been lost. The things she could have been … the pride of a country was what it could do for her people, not what she could remove. However, they were. And he would need to get used to it. ”

Research in a exhaustive, beautifully manufactured and premonitory way, “The Lilac People” exhumes an buried story that could let us cry our lost democracy if we do not learn and do not act on its tragic lessons.

Maran, author of “The New Old Me” and other books, lives in a bungalow in Lake Silver which is even older than it.