Book Review	Book Reviews Archive

The Hidden Hitler
by Lothar Machtan
Basic Books
How to order

The Hidden Hitler, by Lothar Machtan (Basic Books, 288 pages, $27.95)

Queer life has always depended on-- not the kindness of strangers-- but the past to validate itself. In the 1870s, John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis came up with a list of famous homosexuals of the past to justify the existence of homosexuals of the present. Who wouldn't want to claim the likes of Plato, Michelangelo, Byron, Shakespeare, and Winklemann as forefathers and compatriots? But this famous-guy school of gay history has always been flawed and sort of silly. Notions of sexual identities are fairly new: Alexander the Great might have liked to fuck boys, but chances are he saw himself as a demi-god conqueror, not a groovy gay guy.

View our poll archive

Reclaiming famous people was supposed to put a positive face on queerness, but what happens when not-so-groovy-gay-guys are outed: like, say Hitler? Lothar Machtan's The Hidden Hitler claims that the Führer was gay-- a revelation that's sure to cause as much angst for the Aryan Nation as it does for the Human Rights Campaign. There has been much ado about the book. Already on the bestseller list in Germany (where else?) it is getting mostly questioning-to-negative reviews in the US, but generating huge interest.

As history, it is not very convincing. Machtan has unearthed quite of bit of curious material-- none of it, however, really proves his point. Machtan is the master of innuendo-- someone may have had homosexual impulses, and their slight connection to Hitler might point to an affair, and there is a good chance that Hitler had the nearly-openly homosexual Ernst Rohm of the SA killed because Rohm knew too much about Adolf. Surely Machtan hits a dazzling feat of historical conjecture when he offers as proof of Hitler's homosexual interactions the fact that the Führer attended Wagner operas at Bayreuth which "was a notorious international rendezvous for prominent homosexuals"-- this must be the "opera queen" theory of history. With proof like this who needs historians.

Even with its tidbits of interesting facts, The Hidden Hitler is silly to useless as history. In the end, Machtan's approach of collecting suspicious evidence and mapping it all out like a game of Clue feels not only old-fashioned but unsophisticated.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com