Ernst vom Rath

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2022

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This Nazi diplomat was assassinated by the Jewish activist Herschel Grynszpan –– and his death became a pretext for the murderous pogroms of Kristallnacht. Grynszpan's lawyer, the flamboyant anti-fascist Vincent de Moro-Giafferi, pioneered in this case what was perhaps the first –– and only morally good –- use of some version of a 'gay panic' or ‘gay blackmail’ defense. But was vom Rath actually gay? ----more---- SOURCES: Jonathan Kirsch, The Short, Strange Life of Herschel Grynszpan: A Boy Avenger, a Nazi Diplomat, and a Murder in Paris, First Edition (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) Museum of Jewish Heritage, The Forgotten Life of Herschel Grynszpan, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLl_iK1xiiE; Gerald Schwab, The Day the Holocaust Began: The Odyssey of Herschel Grynszpan (New York: Praeger, 1990).

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Season 5, Episode 3 of Bad Gays, a podcast about evil and complicated
0:22.2	queers in history. My name is Ben Miller. I'm a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the
0:26.7	Shulis Museum in Berlin. And my name's Heelemi. I'm a writer and author. Last week, we talked
0:32.7	about Joe Carstairs, a dashing, gender non-binary speedboat racer who dated Marlena Dietrich and ruled a private
0:40.4	island in the Bahamas alongside a foot-tall stuffed leather doll. Who are we talking about this week, Hugh?
0:46.2	Well, the name of today's subject probably won't be familiar to most or any of our listeners,
0:51.2	and it's not really a surprise. He was an unremarkable and perhaps even
0:55.3	mediocre man in his life, and would in all likelihood have been forgotten by history, were it
1:00.4	not for his death, for it was the man of his death that would trigger one of European
1:04.4	history's darkest chapters. Today's subject is the German diplomat Ernst von Rath.
1:11.9	But let's talk a little bit about his life before we get to his death, because despite it
1:16.4	being unremarkable, it still holds a symbolic importance, because it was what he was and what
1:21.8	he stood for that made his death so important. Ernst Eduard von Rath was born in 2009 into Wilhelmine, Germany. For German
1:31.1	Conservatives, this was something of a golden age of imperial, technical and cultural prowess.
1:37.5	In the 1870s, the newly unified German Reich really began to turbocharge its colonialist ambitions
1:42.8	in order to help support the ongoing
1:44.8	industrialisation of the new nation. Under the so-called culture camp, there was this attempt to
1:50.3	remove the power of the Catholic Church from German society, and there was also a general ongoing
1:54.9	process of consolidation within the boundaries of the new nation, the lesser Germany, as opposed to
2:00.1	this idea of this greater Germany that was implicit in the community of, the lesser Germany, as opposed to this idea of this greater
2:01.3	Germany that was implicit in the community of German-speaking peoples across central and
2:06.7	Eastern Europe. Germany was a constitutional monarchy, and under the parliamentary system,
	...

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