Poetry is an act of witness. An act of witnessing the world, language, the self, or in my book, A Ghost Has No Fantasies, history. Once the book was published in January, I found myself witnessing the effect it has on myself and others and asking this question: how do we bear witness to atrocity, and how do we react to that atrocity?
In 2017, when I finished the first complete draft, I wept. I cried for ten or fifteen minutes. I wasn’t really paying attention to time. What I remember, sitting at my desk—in front of a thin, translucent curtain that diffused light from another warm, fall day in Houston—was my partner coming over to ask what was the matter. I didn’t know how to respond; I continued crying.
Many people have come up to me to ask how difficult it must have been to have researched the book’s focus on the genocide of queer people during WWII. I tell them the above story, and they shake their heads in understanding. I’m not sure what else to say. My publisher has told me that every time he finishes the book—which has been several times at least by now—he cries. One woman, who reached out to me shortly before the book’s release, told me about one of her relatives being sent to the camps because of his sexuality. She’s been trying to make sense of her devastating family history while also figuring out how to share this information with a public audience.
Another woman asked me about the ethical dilemma of using documentary poetry as a vehicle for showcasing the private lives of people sent to the camps because of their sexual and gender identities. This woman was wrestling with her own ethical concerns regarding her research of a survivor and bringing that information—some of which has never been released to the public—to light in a museum exhibition.
I’m not sure what brings me to tears more: the brutality and violence inflicted on the men, women, and trans people in the book, or the moments of joy and love. Of course, the violent and graphic stories I read during my research made me shake with anger and disgust, but the moments of love and care in that genocidal tempest ultimately helped me complete the manuscript. Reflecting on it now, I think that’s what I was searching for throughout all the research: glimpses of love and hope, scintillating in the ash heaps of brutality.
In the beginning of the book, during the Weimar Era before Nazis enforced Paragraph 175—the law that criminalized homosexuality—men remember their first loves and even the mock-weddings they staged. Josef Kahout, for instance, recalls his relationship with Fred and their “plans / for the future / to stay / faithful.” In another poem, Rolf Hirschberg describes a masquerade party he went to at Magnus Hirschfeld’s, the physician and sexologist who advocated for the rights of queer people in the early twentieth century. At the party, Hirschberg mentions the praise he received for his peacock costume before winning the competition that evening:
At midnight, the costume competition began.
When I was on the two-tiered stairwell,
I fanned my wings outward,
and felt like an actor—people went crazy!
They applauded; they hollered.
Beautiful, marvelous, gorgeous!
—from “Masquerade Ball at Hirschfeld’s”
These moments, however, weren’t just relegated to the pre-war years. A couple of years after the war started, in November 1941, Stefan Kosinski, a self-described “romantic Polish man,” remembers the night when a Nazi Officer, Willi, asked to come up to his apartment, where he “took [Kosinski] in his arms and kissed [him].”
In 1944, after he was released from the Schirmeck concentration camp, Pierre Seel was forced to fight for the Germans on the Russian Front, where he was sent on a perilous mission with a fellow soldier. After the Russians fired at them, Seel’s comrade was shot and killed. Instead of running away, Seel stayed with the soldier for three days and nights. “I loved him,” Seel confesses,
that dead man
next to me.
After three days,
he started to ice over.
—From “Comrade”
Along with anger and disgust, I also felt adrift after reading experiences like these. When I learned that Seel’s lover, Jo, was devoured by German shepherds while wearing a pail on his head, I was unable to imagine it, not just the scene itself that Seel details, but the context around which the scene existed. In other words, I could not square my understanding of reality with the one Seel outlined; it was a reality and a context so far outside the boundaries of how I thought about people, places, and events, that the pictures forming in my brain as I read Seel’s account were impressionistic at best, watercolors that were repeatedly rinsed with more water so that the scene remained blurry and inaccessible.
I didn’t just want to catalogue these evils. After all, they could easily be read about in memoirs, interviews, and archival documents. Nor did I want to present the bureaucracy generating the Holocaust’s machinery of violence like Heimrad Bäcker—whose work partly inspired my project—had done. Instead, I wondered how my experience of language was impacted by the research.
While working on the book, I listened to a lot of William Basinski’s music, not only his most well-known albums, The Disintegration Loops I-IV (2002-2003) but his other work, such as the equally elegiac A Shadow in Time (2017). In The Disintegration Loops, Basinski famously tried to transfer some of his old magnetic tapes from the early 1980s to a digital format, but as he did so, the magnetic backing of the tapes detached, causing them to deteriorate. Today, you can hear this physical breakdown of the tapes as the original songs fracture and degrade over time.
As I struggled to grasp the magnitude of what I read in memoirs and archives, let alone how I could even respond to it, I had my own kind of breakdown—a linguistic one. I wanted, therefore, to try and reproduce this in the poems. Nonetheless, like Basinski’s music, I also hoped to call attention to the recovery inherent in any kind of breakdown. The result of this were poems that used certain forms like the sonnet and sestina and then deliberately broke them down in an attempt to look at them anew.
I tried to do the same thing with language itself in poems like “Pre-War Wedding,” which repeats the same line over and over in different European languages until those languages—and even the text on the page—can no longer contain them in any semantically discernible way. This textual disintegration reaches an apex in the penultimate section of the book, which features poems that have been physically torn and cut open, a commentary on not only the violence throughout the collection but also the violence I’ve inflicted by writing such a book.
The final section of A Ghost Has No Fantasies focuses on people’s lives after the war, and attempts to illustrate what recovery actually looked like for people sent to the camps because of Paragraph 175. Since the law wasn’t repealed entirely until 1994, men were still imprisoned for their sexuality, including men who were incarcerated in concentration camps and later liberated from those camps. Some people couldn’t share with their families and friends why they had been sent to the camps, some married and had kids, and some fought for reparations for decades—and never received any.
A quote from Rudolf Brazda, one of the men sent to Buchenwald and whose portrait sits in my bedroom, inspired me throughout the entire project and continues to inspire me as we fight against another tide of fascism: “I’m not scared.”
