Everything about Alf, German writer Bruno Vogel’s 1929 gay love story, is auspicious. The facts of its existence alone are a sucker punch from the most turbulent place and time of the 20th century. A gay teenage romance novel from Weimar Germany, set just before and during the First World War.
This was one of the first books thrown onto the bonfires when the Nazis seized power. Barely four months after Hitler was made Chancellor in January 1933, the book burnings began. The first target of the fascists was Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexology institute. Hirschfeld was a pioneer in gay and trans rights. His groundbreaking Berlin institute even performed gender affirming care. Both gay and Jewish himself, it is not hard to see how Hirschfeld’s very existence triggered the paper-thin skin of the Nazis.
Lost in those Berlin bonfires was a queer Library of Alexandria. So much of Hirschfeld’s contributions and research was successfully wiped out. Among those books so offensive to history’s greatest monster that they had to be burned and banned, was this novel called Alf.
Vogel was a contemporary and employee of Hirschfeld, and a gay rights activist in his own right during the Weimar Republic years. That brief kiss of inter-war freedom sparked a flourishing of advocacy, much of it centered around campaigning for the repeal of Paragraph 175 - the German sodomy laws.
This is the central theme of Alf, too, and we discover in the novel the heartbreaking history of a state-sanctioned homophobia that would outlive even the author. Parts of Germany prior to the 1871 unification had for centuries taken the more French approach, where the Revolutionary constitution had done away with the legal threats against gay men’s lives. But when Bismarck stitched together the German Empire, so too came the criminalisation of gay men. Paragraph 175 resulted in tens of thousands of gay men being convicted and sent to concentration camps under Hitler, and gave us the pink triangle symbol we know today. After the concentration camps were liberated in 1945, gay men were sent back to prison. Their time in the camps not counted as part of their sentence. While East Germany relaxed and finally repealed the law in the 80s, West Germany tightened prosecutions and over 50,000 men were convicted in the second half of the twentieth century. Only in 1994, with the reunification of Germany, was Paragraph 175 finally repealed. But by then, Vogel had passed away, and the book he wrote railing against this injustice had practically been lost to memory.
We might compare Alf to Maurice, the seminal English gay novel by E. M. Forster. Both books were likely written around the same time, offering first-hand insights into gay life in early twentieth century England and Germany. But while Maurice boasts 4,500 reviews on Goodreads, Alf has four. Burned books are hard to bring back to life.
So what was it about this novel that terrified the Nazis so much? What salacious, titillating or scandalous details does its pages contain, that led Brownshirts to tear Vogel’s book from the shelves and build their genocidal empire from its ashes?
Well… nothing, actually. Today, we might classify Alf as young adult. It details the life of a teenager not fitting in with his family. Struggling against his strict school and buttoned-up religion. Feeling guilty about masturbation and being beaten up by bullies. When Alf meets Felix, there is further detail about their relationship apart from the fact it exists. Forget closed-door sex scenes, we’re never even left alone with Alf and Felix.
As Alf uncovers the reality of Paragraph 175, he’s torn over the danger he’s been subjecting Felix to. Felix, for his part, feels Alf pull away, and joins the army at the outbreak of the First World War. The second half of the novel is told in letters between the boys, giving us an incredible account of the German side of the war that few English readers are exposed to. Spoiler alert, it’s just as horrendous and pointless as the other side of the trenches.
And that’s it. That’s the extent of Alf’s imminent danger to the Third Reich. Just that ordinary gay teens find it hard to grow up in a world that criminalises them, and ordinary soldiers object to mass slaughter for reasons of ‘national pride.’ This is how fickle the fascists are, that something as banal as Alf can lead them to burn books and exile their writers.
But that is the enduring importance of Alf, it’s banality. That this novel has the audacity to still exist is in itself, auspicious. The fragments of life in Germany it reveals are just as normal, just as banal, as the fragments of life in any other place or time. Boys fighting with their parents. Boys bored in Greek classes. One boy is even taking Hebrew in high school — in 1914. The social fabric that Alf shows us is utterly normal. Catholics, Jews and Protestants. Secret gay couples living downstairs. Parents who married after a pregnancy was discovered. Identities being repressed under the tides of nationhood. The call to war destroying any sense of rationality or reason.
The ingredients for Nazi Germany are laid out in Alf, and not a single element of the society described is unique or alien to us today. Rather, it is the things that happened to this book as a whole which elevate this story to a radical act of survival. When we think of banned books today, it is easy to assume they contain some awful element that society must protect itself from. But Alf holds the lesson that there is nothing more banal than a banned book. For it is not the book itself the fascists want to burn, but the people who are written about inside its pages.
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