History of the gay movement: Of screams, silence and quenched longing

There are also honest lies. That’s the truth then. Do you understand that, Jan?” The German boy, whose first friends in a school in post-war West Berlin included the philosophically thoughtful boy Oleg from Russia, who doesn’t say sandwiches or bemme, but bread, doesn’t understand a word. It is no coincidence that craftsmen and entrepreneurs once brought the word “butter bread” from German lands to the empire of Tsarina Catherine the Great.

Jan knows that people are starving in Russia. Consequence of Germany’s criminal attack. Berlin is also still marked by ruins, adventure playgrounds for children, not without danger and fatally tempting. They play war between the rubble. And there is still the old spirit that lives on in children’s brains, implanted through adult conversations at the kitchen table: “Anyone who fights against the Russians is good because they always attack.” You have to be careful.”

There are also many refugees in the city on the Spree. Also a result of previous national hubris. »They come with some luggage on their backs, sometimes just wrapped in a blanket. That’s all they have. They come running.”

Now the Germans say: “War is bad.” Everyone Jan knows says that. His mother and father, the blind Grandma Elli, Grandpa Hans and Grandma Maria. The father had to go through the war. That’s why he also knows that the poor district in Lankwitz where the family lives and which is called the Mau Mau settlement does not owe its name to the popular card game. The father, who returned from British captivity, explains that the Mau Mau were a tribe in Africa that rose up against the British colonial yoke. »It’s just chaos there. And misery. And violence.”

Lutz van Dijk offers a finely engraved, sensitive panorama of a time that seems so distant to us today and yet is still so close.

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“We were poor, but not dirt poor,” sums up the first-person narrator. “We children never went hungry and always had something to wear.” Jan wears his older brother Harald’s clothes, as they used to say. Father and mother turned over every penny three times before buying something for themselves. The mother darned and mended socks, trousers and shirts. “There was no car, no vacation trips, no television either… Sometimes there was the same stew for three days, with water added at the end,” remembers Jan, Lutz van Dijk’s alter ego.

The German-Dutch teacher and busy author, born in Berlin-West in 1955, wrote down his childhood memories. And this is preceded by a poem from his own pen: »Although the war is finally over./ At least the one with bombs and bunkers./ Or is there still war in the adults?/ Painstakingly hidden, secretive./ Behind fragile facades./ So much screaming around me./ Then again silence for days./ Silence and screaming./ Screaming and silence./ Was there nothing else?” Yes. »Our speechless longing for love.«

Lutz van Dijk’s autobiographical novel is primarily about love in a loveless world, both large and small. Growing up in a quarreling family (once his mother even ran away, only to then dutifully return to the children and the quarrelsome husband), Jan discovered early on that he was attracted to boys. Lisa’s lovely offers touch him; the first kiss he receives from her is pleasant but not exciting.

With Anton it’s something different. The teenager’s first great love. Secret, tingling, exciting meetings in the basement of her house. The first sex. An innocent love that is taken away from him far too soon as Anton suffers from a bone disease and is sent to a sanatorium far away in West Germany. After years of silence, Jan receives a letter from Anton in which he says that he has found a new friend. One disappointment among many.

In West Berlin, and not only there, there is general anti-gay hostility. Paragraph 175 with Nazi conation is still in force. “Gay” is a swear word, even used by children every day. Classmates who are suspected of same-sex attraction are hunted down and groomed. Even from supposed or actual friends.

And a lot of brown evil spirit is still wafting through society. Lutz van Dijk, who defended his dissertation at the University of Hamburg on the not exactly widespread oppositional behavior of teachers during the Nazi era and has since written many books about the history of the persecution of Jews and homosexuals under the swastika – and also a remarkable tribute to the 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan, who carried out an assassination attempt on the German Legation Councilor Ernst vom Rath in Paris on November 7, 1938, as a pretext for the so-called Kristallnacht, reports an incident at his school, the Beethoven High School. At the time, television, the “Berliner Abendschau”, even reported on this. The school director, senior teacher Zawonski, an old Nazi, is sent into early retirement after his hand “slipped” in class again. This time, however, an 11th grade student didn’t put up with it and paid him back in kind.

Historical turning points are reflected. On the day the wall was built, her mother began to pack her suitcases out of fear of another war; The family is considering emigrating to America. It doesn’t come to that. “We now live on a walled-in island,” states the father, a riot police officer (“Bepo”) despite himself; he would have preferred to work as a goldsmith. If the children’s soccer ball flies over the wall to the east, it’s gone. Forever. “West Berlin as the rest of Berlin,” says the father. The next “world event” Jan notes is the visit of US President John F. Kennedy to West Berlin two years later (“I am a Berliner!”) and his assassination shortly afterwards.

Jan is made politically aware by his classmate, Martin, the son of an American GI. Through him he learns about the African-American civil rights movement. Martin also takes Jan to his first demonstration in support of a political prisoner’s hunger strike in Moabit. “Prisoners also have rights, regardless of whether they are guilty or not,” explains Martin. “Of course I don’t say a word at home,” admits the autobiographer. Because the “Bepo” father is on the other side. The situation escalates. Eggs and paving stones are flying, and the police are brutally attacking the demonstrators with batons and water cannons.

It is also Martin who, unlike many others, shows complete understanding for Jan’s sexual orientation and gives him a paperback for his 16th birthday, “Giovanni’s Room” by the African American James Baldwin. »A sad story about two white gays in Paris. A lot of drama, a lot of fear and lies.«

Lutz van Dijk, who fulfilled his childhood dream – “someday the wide world” – and now lives in Amsterdam and Cape Town, meets his Oleg again decades later during a visit to Berlin, “purely by chance, near the Zoo train station. There he is crouching next to a garbage can. At first I don’t recognize him.” The childhood friend is almost bald, has a can of beer in one hand, and looks worn out. The sight of this pains the autobiographer, as he had once fought like a young lion for Oleg, who had been abused by his father, not wanting to be content with the crime remaining unpunished, but initially no one, including teachers, was willing to intervene seemed.

Lutz van Dijk offers a finely engraved, sensitive panorama of a time that seems so distant to us today and yet is still so close. The author, who was involved in the peace and gay movements, reflects on the years of a world frozen in the Cold War and threatened with nuclear death, years in which student revolts and sexual revolution, anti-Vietnam War protests and anti-colonial struggle laid the seeds for later fundamental social changes Changes were made: for equal rights for all people, regardless of their skin color, gender, social origin and sexual orientation.

And he played his part in it: Lutz van Dijk, who took part in international peace congresses in Budapest, Copenhagen and Paris, among others, and who co-founded Hokisa (Homes for Kids in South Africa) in a township near Cape Town at the turn of the millennium, an organization that focuses on… Cares for children and young people who have lost their parents to AIDS or are infected themselves. Lutz van Dijk deserves thanks and respect for his tireless efforts. An attentive readership is desired for his moving, impressive childhood novel. And a lot of strength to the author in his fight against Parkinson’s.

Lutz van Dijk: At some point the wide world. 216 p., card., 16 €.
Readings by the author: September 3rd, 8:30 p.m., Eisenherz bookstore, Motzstraße 23, 10777 Berlin; September 5th, 8 p.m., Switchboard, Alte Gasse 36, 60313 Frankfurt/Main; September 9th, 8 p.m., Buchsalon Köln-Ehrenfeld, Wahlstrasse 1, 50823 Cologne; September 12th, 7:30 p.m., Löwenherz bookstore, Berggasse 8, 1090 Vienna (also via Zoom); September 18th, 7 p.m., Buchpalast, Kirchenstraße 5, 81675 Munich.