LAUSR

against, and to have painted a clearer picture of the societal norms and expectations of the times. In 1929, Hugo Marcus, by then calling himself Hamid Marcus, gave a lecture at the Ahmadi mosque in Berlin. He had converted to Islam in 1925 but remained a member of Berlin’s official Jewish community. His speech was given on the occasion of the two-hundredth birthday of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Marcus reminded his listeners that Muslims were committed to unconditional tolerance. But society, he continued, was far from realizing this tolerance. Reading this, one wonders what motivated Hugo Marcus to give this speech. Was it simply a general belief he held, or was he already railing against the changing political climate? The chapter which deals withMarcus’s life in Nazi Germany is the weakest chapter in the book, for the reader is left wanting to know more about how Marcus, who until then had demanded and received a high degree of self-determination in his life, dealt with his sudden subjection to Nazi categorizations. For not only were these categories determined by others, they were also linked to legal restrictions and violent limitations. After the November Pogrom in 1938, together with many other Jewish men, Hugo Marcus was deported to Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. A few weeks later, he was released on the condition that he leave Germany. With the support of his imam, Mohammed Abdullah, among others, Hugo Marcus tried to obtain a Swiss visa. Finally, one week before Nazi Germany unleashed the Second World War, Marcus entered Switzerland as a political refugee. There he remained until his death in 1966. Under the pseudonym Hans Alienus, he published innumerable articles in the Zurich magazine for, in the main, male homosexuals, Der Kreis-Le Cercle. Baer conjectures that Hugo Marcus stayed in Switzerland because male-male desire remained a prosecutable offense in Germany up until 1969. However, the question should also be asked whether Marcus perhaps did not want to return to a country he had been forced to leave because of his Jewish roots. Baer structures the chapters in a way that makes the biography more readable, but it occasionally threatens to force a linearity upon Hugo Marcus’s life, leaving little room for its complexities and paradoxes. Despite the wealth of material at Baer’s disposal, the figure of Hugo Marcus remains strangely nebulous. Yet this in no way detracts from the fact that Baer has written an outstanding and eminently readable biography.