“What’s fascinating is if you look at the ’20s in Berlin, everyone just has this very eclectic, extreme image of partying and nightlife,” says Benjamin Cantu, whose new Netflix documentary Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate, reveals a more complex portrait of queer Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.
Cantu, German-Hungarian and raised in Berlin, where he’s currently based, professes that before researching Eldorado, he also held fast to legends of Weimar Berlin’s wild parties and sexual liberation.
“But when we dig deeper into it,” he says, “it is much more nuanced and much more controversial, especially because the time in the Weimar era in Germany was politically very, very turbulent, and there was a lot of conflicts within society, but also, on a small scale, for people on the streets. So the tension was quite strong.”
The danger was real, for the queer and Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios who were the life of the party at cabarets like the film’s namesake, the Eldorado.
As depicted through engrossing archival footage and lush dramatizations (separately directed by Matt Lambert), queer regulars at the Eldorado risked harassment and blackmail, as well as being beaten in the streets by the Brownshirts of the Nazi SA, or jailed in police raids. And that was before the Nazis took power.
“I grew up in Berlin, and I always knew, of course, that there is a large LGBTIQ history 100 years ago,” says Cantu, noting that the Eldorado was housed in a building located “in the neighborhood actually where my parents lived, in Schöneberg, but I was never really in touch with it. My colleague, Nils Bökamp, the producer, also had a very good instinct on the subject, and he had the original idea. And once we dove into it, we became obsessed with that period.”
Combining nonfiction and narrative elements — as Cantu did in his debut feature Harvest — the film, co-written with Felix Kriegsheim, recounts that precarious period through the intensely personal stories of several who frequented the Eldorado.
Unsurprisingly, one of those regulars was a high-ranking Nazi himself — Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA, a closeted homosexual, and, as shown in Eldorado, a classic case of self-loathing hypocrisy in power.
On a more tender note, the film also tracks the star-crossed romance of prize-winning German pro tennis player Gottfried von Cramm and his lover Manasse Herbst, a Jewish actor-performer. Gottfried was married to a woman, Lisa, who, according to the movie, didn’t come between Gottfried and Manasse. Rather, it was the Nazis who unleashed tragedy in countless lives dramatized in Eldorado.
Eldorado
“One of the most compelling experiences, or the most touching experiences, when making this film was actually telling the story of Walter Arlen and his young friend from his youth, Lumpi, Fülöp Lóránt,” Cantu says.
“Because when I first talked to Walter, he’d just turned 100 years old — he’s now turning 103 years old — and I just called him and asked him if he’s interested to talk to me about a project that I’m planning. I told him I’m from Budapest, and he instantly opened up and told me his very touching story, where he and Lumpi were very, very close in their youth. And in 1938 they lost track of each other because of the Nazis.”
Arlen, who now resides with his partner “happily a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean,” asked Cantu if the filmmaker could help him find the traces of his dear Lumpi.
“He would not expect that he’s still alive,” explains Cantu, “but he wanted to know for sure. This was on his list in his life, that was very important to him.” Cantu shares the results of the production’s investigation with Arlen on-camera, and the director was moved, he says, to be allowed by Arlen “to tell this very personal, very private story of his life.”
The story of the actual Eldorado came to an end with its forced closure in 1932. Used then as a Nazi propaganda headquarters, the space eventually would become another nightclub, then a drug rehab. “And now today, it’s an organic supermarket,” says Cantu.
“You can completely go into that shop and have no traces of its history whatsoever. It’s totally a fancy organic supermarket, but there is a small writing on top, below the supermarket sign that says the Eldorado. And so people who want to find it can still find it.”
And, as the film points out, people can also still find versions of Nazi-era anti-gay, anti-drag furor around the globe — from an increasing number of attacks, verbal and physical, in Germany, to alarming anti-LGBTQ policies in parts of the U.S.
“I think what the film shows is that the mechanisms are quite similar, that people in power who want to establish a role within a large part of society that is so-called conservative right leaning, pick up on scapegoats or on marginalized groups, and the LGBT community is always very handy for that,” Cantu says.
“This is not the same story that we saw 100 years ago in Weimar Berlin, but it is a repetition, it’s a repeating backlash, whenever it comes in handy, to build up power against the minority, to establish the feeling of power for the majority. So in totalitarian countries, and places where conservative and liberal powers are in struggle, like in the U.S. now, I think it’s unfortunately always repeating.”
Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate is available for streaming on Netflix. Visit www.netflix.com.
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