Life in Weimar Germany was, well, a cabaret. For a few years between the two world wars, before the Nazis came into power, Germany’s gay community was progressive, accepted, and even vocal.
“We found one song, called “˜Lavender Nights,’ that was a gay pride anthem from that period,” said Dennis Coleman, artistic director for the Seattle Men’s Chorus, which will be performing a two-part staged production called “Falling in Love Again,” a story of gay Germany from just prior to the Holocaust to today.
“It’s a unique story that a whole lot of people don’t know,” said Dee Simon, co-director of the Washington State Holocaust Resource Education Center.
Seattle Men’s Chorus has partnered with the Holocaust Center and Music of Remembrance, a local organization that commissions orchestral pieces based upon music and musicians lost in the Holocaust, to create a full package of a museum exhibit, speakers, and education for the April 2 and 3 performances.
Homosexual men were in some ways the canary in the coal mine for what the Nazis would later do to Jews across Europe.
“Much of it happened before the war — it was between 1933 when the Nazi party took power and 1939 when they invaded Poland and Czechoslavakia,” Simon said. “They were some of the first to be sent to concentration camps.”
The persecution of gay men — not women, because they could bear children — came as a result of paragraph 175 of Germany’s criminal code, originally enacted in 1871, which made homosexuality illegal. An amendment in 1935 allowed the Nazis to send the men to the camps, though many did survive the war.
After the war ended, however, paragraph 175 was not repealed — until 1969.
“What’s fascinating to me about the story is that when the gay men who were sent away to prison camps and then were freed and did live beyond that, they really had to go back into the closet and hide that because homosexual acts were still illegal,” Coleman said.
Coleman has long had an interest in the music of Weimar Germany, and during a visit to West Berlin nearly 25 years ago he saw a chorus perform music inspired by that period’s cabaret scene. The first part of “Falling in Love Again” will be reminiscent of that performance, an entertaining mix by luminaries such as Kurt Weill and Cole Porter that would make Marlene Dietrich proud. Spectrum Dance Company will do an on-stage interpretation.
“It’s about the furthest thing you can think of a choir standing on risers and singing,” Coleman said.
The second act, however, will be much more solemn. “For a Look or a Touch,” a piece originally written for a five-piece orchestra and performed in 2007 by Music of Remembrance, has been recast by composer Jake Heggie for the men’s chorus.
“For many years I had wanted to commission the work that highlighted the persecution of homosexuals,” said Mina Miller, executive director of Music of Remembrance. “This piece is very close to my heart. It means a great deal.”
“For a Look” is based upon the true story of two young men, Manfred and Gad, who fell in love but were separated and sent to concentration camps. Manfred, who was also Jewish, perished, but Gad survived and today, now in his 80s, still lives in Germany.
The piece has been expanded, with Heggie writing two new movements for the men’s chorus. Local actor David Pichette will portray the older Gad, a man who deeply suffered for the love he had lost and the decades of persecution he lived through even after the war. Baritone Morgan Smith, now an internationally known opera singer who trained with the Seattle Opera’s young artist’s program, reprises his role from the 2007 concert as the ghost of Manfred.
The chorus, initially behind a screen, will appear first as prisoners in the concentration camps and then reappear out of makeup “in present-day terms as a generation of gay men who have gone on beyond the Holocaust and today are, in a sense, fighting some of the same battles,” Coleman said.
While the second act of the performance is much heavier than the first, Coleman said he believes the audience will appreciate its beauty.
“I’m hoping people will see the art of the love that is lost and regained when Gad accepts who he was and the love that he had,” Coleman said. “That’s why we called the concert “˜Falling in Love Again,’ because Gad had to, in a sense, fall in love again with himself, with his relationship with who he was.”
Miller said she is very excited to see the new translation of “For a Look,” in particular with the stage direction and costumes.
“I think it has a huge audience ahead of it,” she said. “The message is going to go out in a much more diversified way than Music of Remembrance could do.”
Seattle Men’s Chorus partnered with the Holocaust Center to provide the educational background, including a 28-panel traveling exhibit from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945,” will be on display and open to the public at McCaw Hall for the week leading up to the concerts.
Simon, prior to the performances, will compare the ideology and propaganda of that era to today.
“The concept is that yes, this happened in the past, but how does that relate to today and the laws that we’re voting on and not voting on?” Simon said. “It’s really bringing those lessons up to today, and persecution of homosexuals today, especially in schools and bullying.”
Miller will also lead a discussion featuring Heggie, Coleman, and the directors of the two acts that will put the artistry and the Holocaust into context.
“This becomes a community-wide lesson that we can all learn from,” Miller said. “It’s more than a Jewish thing, it’s a thing of human rights.”
Seattle Men’s Chorus, the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, the Pride Foundation and the Holocaust Center collaborated to co-sponsor the exhibit and the educational aspects of the program to show that freedoms people have today may not always exist.
“I don’t think we can ever assume that the rights we have will always be there, because I believe that’s what they probably thought during the Weimar period,” Coleman said. “The present-day [gay] community owes something to this period in time when this discrimination and extermination to some degree took place, and how the human spirit of this gay population was able to live through that…and in a sense bring us to where we are today.”
“Falling in Love Again” will be performed on Sat., April 2 at 8 p.m. and Sun., April 3 at 2 p.m. at McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St., Seattle. Speaking engagements will begin 45 minutes before each show. For tickets, visit www.flyinghouse.org. The touring exhibit “Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals 1933-1945” is free and open to the public from March 30—April 2 from noon—10 p.m. and on Sun., April 3 from noon—5 p.m.