Very little has been written about the tens of thousands of homosexuals, who were the damnedest of the damned, the outcasts among the outcasts in the concentration camps. There are really only estimates of figures. During the twelve years of Nazi rule, nearly 50,000 were convicted of the crime of homosexuality. The majority ended up in concentration camps, and virtually all of them perished.
This is one gay man’s story of struggle to avoid imprisonment by taking on his late landlady's identity and becoming a female chanteuse in the supper clubs of Berlin in 1933.
In this tumultuous time of uneasiness, it would seem impossible to imagine that anything like the third Reich or imprisonment camps could happen again in this day and age. However with the anti-gay purge in Chechnya, with secret abductions, imprisonment, torture and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation, one has to wonder if history can indeed repeat itself.
Chanteuse was written not only to tell the story of one man’s journey but also to warn us that sometimes history repeats itself.
