Neil Baker
Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate is available to stream now on Netflix.
During the 1920s and early 1930s, Berlin was liberal, forward-thinking and flourishing when the Nazis began their march toward power; it was a city built on freedom and sexual liberation. Across the sprawling international city, over one hundred gay nightspots, of which Eldorado was the most famed, offered sanctuary to LGBTQ+ people from across Germany and Europe. However, as gay, trans, lesbian, bisexual and straight people danced the night away in the safety of Eldorado’s hallowed hall, a new darkness formed, one that would consume everything in its path.
The LGBTQ+ people of Berlin were not blind to this darkness, nor were they fully liberated, with Germany’s Paragraph 175 a clear, if often unenforceable, threat to their safety. But many believed they had come so far that the tide was too powerful to be instantly reversed by a Nazi party that thrived on hate and intolerance. Benjamin Cantu and Matt Lambert’s urgent Netflix documentary explores the fall of Germany and Austria’s thriving LGBTQ+ community through the experiences of actor Manasse Herbst, his partner tennis player Gottfried van Cramm, trans painter Toni Ebel and her partner Charlotte Charlaque, the famed sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and survivor Walter Arlen and the teenage love he lost, Lumpi.
In Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate, Cantu and Lambert give a long-overdue voice to those who fled, were murdered and imprisoned during Nazi rule in a documentary that is essential viewing. Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate is a powerful, emotional and urgent exploration of our shared LGBTQ+ history and the delicate nature of freedom and equality both then and now.
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