An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies) - Softcover

Beck, Gad; Heibert, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299165043 ISBN 13: 9780299165048

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000

Synopsis

That a Jew living in Nazi Berlin survived the Holocaust at all is surprising. That he was a homosexual and a teenage leader in the resistance and yet survived is amazing. But that he endured the ongoing horror with an open heart, with love and without vit

About this title

About the Author:

Gad Beck was the director of the Jewish Adult Education Center in Berlin, Germany, until his retirement. He is still very active as a public speaker on life in Berlin during the Nazi period.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Beck, director of Berlin's Jewish Adult Education Center, recalls his youth and his work in the anti-Nazi resistance under most unusual circumstances. Beck was half of a pair of twins (with his sister Margot) born to an interfaith couple in Weimar Germany. Beck was one of those rare fortunate gay men who recognized his sexual orientation while still very young and who had a tolerant, loving, and supportive family who never for an instant were troubled by his lifestyle. He was equally lucky that his kin on the Christian side of the family felt the same toward their new Jewish relatives. Those facts are an inextricable element in his story of growing up Jewish in Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Beck and his family found themselves, like other Jews, almost immediately stigmatized by law and separated forcibly from their non-Jewish friends and neighbors. After a lengthy series of humiliations, he was forced to leave his nondenominational school for a Jewish one. Beck is one of those quietly feisty types who are spurred by rejection into action; plunged into an entirely Jewish milieu, he quickly embraced the Zionist movement. Just as quickly, he embraced many of its male adherents, and the author is charmingly frank (but not explicit) about his sex life as well as his clandestine political activities. He would survive the war living as an ``illegal'' in Berlin, becoming a central figure in the underdocumented Zionist resistance that functioned despite the Nazis. Beck is a witty, chatty figure, and Heibert and Brown have done a splendid job of capturing and conveying his voice. The result is a readable and entertaining memoir of a terrible time. Beck is apparently at work on a sequel that takes him from the end of the war up to the present; its a book to look forward to. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0299165043
• ISBN 13: 9780299165048
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176