Belgrade Hosts Exhibition on Gays in Nazi Germany

The exposition, revealing the suffering of homosexuals under the Nazi regime, opened in the Belgrade City Museum on December 2 and will run until December 22.

Through displays of around 150 archival photographs, texts and documents, the exhibition tells the story of the 100,000 or so people who were incarcerated on the grounds of their sexual orientation before and during World War II. 

The exhibition’s documents show the rise of systematic and state-sanctioned homophobia, as well as depicting the personal histories of gays under the Nazi regime.

The persecution of homosexuals in Germany continued until the 1970s.

In 2002 the German Bundestag pardoned all victims convicted by the Nazis as homosexuals and honoured them by erecting a monument in Berlin in 2008.

The exhibition’s supplementary programme includes book and magazine promotions, video installations and film projections.

Every weekend for the duration of the exhibition philosophers Dusan Maljkovic, Ivan Milenkovic and Tamara Djordjevic will participate in roundtables about Nazism and control strategies.

A Belgrade promotion of Heinz Heger’s book ‘The men with the pink triangle’ will also be held during the exhibition, as will a promotion of QT, the self-styled magazine about queer theory and culture.

Another book being promoted is David Leavitt’s ‘The man who knew too much’, about British scientist Alan Turing – the victim of chemical castration ‘treatment’.

The public will also have the opportunity to watch Igor Grubic’s video installation East Side Story, covering the violent reactions to gay pride marches in Belgrade and Zagreb, as well as several films dealing with gay rights.

These include the film Paragraph 175, by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, which tells the story of those prosecuted under the German law of 1871, which declared homosexuality a crime, and Sean Mathias’s film Bent, about one gay man’s treatment at the hands of the Nazis.

Belgraders will also have another opportunity to see Yun Suh’s City of Borders, winner of the Grand Prix at last year’s Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival.

The exhibition is organised by Belgrade-based not-for-profit organisation ARTEQ in cooperation with organisation Queer Zagreb, which originally brought this exhibition to Croatia in 2008.