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An Interview

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Rajiv Mehrotra has been a personal student of HH The Dalai Lama for more than thirty years & describes himself as "a most unworthy chela" of his. Till 2012 he was the host one of the country's longest running, and most widely viewed talk shows on public Television, In Conversations.

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Right after the end of WWII

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That's how it looked like just after the Germans surrendered! (via Konstantin von zur Muehlen & Chronos Media GmbH)

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Post by theuijunkie.

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Persecution of Homosexuals in the Third Reich  Photograph

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Eldorado-Berlin-1929-Bar frequented by gay community until it was shut down in 1933 after Hitler's rise to Chancellor

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for sexual science

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The Movie

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ベルリン・アレクサンダー広場

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01b Berlin Alexanderplatz 1980 14 .G ab e f g gk it k pb sb sp (jp

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TV interview

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Lauter schwierige Patienten 03 - Reich-Ranicki über Erich Kästner

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Uploaded by Mierendorffs Kanal für Reich-Ranicki on 2014-09-27.

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"...that lie...that transformed whole generations of children into obedient officials and narrow-minded bourgeois" p.161

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Pink Floyd - The Wall - The Movie - HDTV - Пинк Ф Часть 2

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Mac, Kristen, Simone

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Mareile's presentation (Reactionaries)

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in Germany

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A clear majority of German MPs have voted to legalise same-sex marriage, days after Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped her opposition to a vote.

The reform grants couples now limited to civil unions full marital rights, and allows them to adopt children.

Mrs Merkel's political opponents were strongly in favour. But the chancellor, who signalled her backing for a free vote only on Monday, voted against.

The bill was backed by 393 lawmakers, 226 voted against and four abstained.

The German legal code will now read: "Marriage is entered into for life by two people of different or the same sex", AFP news agency reported.

Following Friday's vote, Mrs Merkel said that for her marriage was between a man and a woman. But she said she hoped the passing of the bill would lead to more "social cohesion and peace".

During her 2013 election campaign, Mrs Merkel argued against gay marriage on the grounds of "children's welfare," and admitted that she had a "hard time" with the issue.

But in an on-stage interview with the women's magazine Brigitte on 26 June, she shocked the German media by saying, in response to an audience member's question, that she had noted other parties' support for gay marriage, and would allow a free vote at an unspecified time in the future.

The usually-cautious chancellor said she had had a "life-changing experience" in her home constituency, where she met a lesbian couple who cared for eight foster children together.

As the news spread on Twitter, supporters rallied under the hashtag #EheFuerAlle (MarriageForAll) - and started calling for a vote as soon as possible.

Mrs Merkel's current coalition partners - the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), who are trailing Mrs Merkel's Christian Democrats (CDU) in opinion polls - then seized the political initiative.

They called for a vote by the time parliament went into summer recess at the end of the week - prompting Mrs Merkel to complain she'd been "ambushed".

Yes - a recent survey by the government's anti-discrimination agency found that 83% of Germans were in favour of marriage equality.

The day after the Republic of Ireland voted to legalise gay marriage in May 2015, almost every German newspaper splashed a rainbow across its front page.

"It's time, Mrs Merkel" Green party leader Katrin Goering-Eckhart said then. "The Merkel faction cannot just sit out the debate on marriage for everyone."

Angela Merkel voted against legalising same sex marriage. Nevertheless, she'll go down in history as the chancellor who made it possible. Friday marks a historic victory for the political left who've fought for years to bring the bill before parliament.

The bill is one of the very last measures to come through parliament before the September general election. By voting against it, Mrs Merkel has appealed to the more conservative members of her electorate. But, by allowing it to happen, she's cemented her growing reputation as a defender of liberal values and, perhaps more importantly, seen off an issue which might have come to haunt her later on.

If Mrs Merkel wins a majority in September, she's likely to seek coalition with parties who'd already indicated that same sex marriage legislation would have been a condition of partnership.

Why is this happening now?

Because of an upcoming general election. Germans go to the polls on 24 September, and continued opposition to a vote made Mrs Merkel risk looking anachronistic.

Mrs Merkel's coalition partners, the SPD, had ruled out a future coalition deal unless reform was agreed on. The Greens, the far-left Linke, and the pro-business Free Democrats took the same view.

The right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the only party to oppose same-sex marriage.

But conservatives within Mrs Merkel's own CDU were against a change - as was the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), whose votes Mrs Merkel needs in the September election.

Commentators say this partly explains why she has rejected a vote on marriage equality until now - and why she was taken off-guard by the snap vote.

A host of European countries have beaten Germany to a same-sex marriage law.

Civil marriages are legally recognised in Norway, Sweden, Denmark (excluding the Faroe Islands), Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Luxembourg, France, the UK (except Northern Ireland and Jersey), and the Republic of Ireland.

But in Austria and Italy - as in Germany before Friday's vote- gay couples are restricted to civil partnerships.

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Germany gay marriage approved by MPs in snap vote

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A clear majority of German MPs have voted to legalise same-sex marriage, days after Chancellor Angela Merkel dropped her opposition to a vote. The reform grants couples now limited to civil unions full marital rights, and allows them to adopt children. Mrs Merkel's political opponents were strongly in favour.

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The person behind Joachim

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Find and save ideas about Herbert list on Pinterest.

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The 1901 Dorland's Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an "abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster's dictionary similarly defined it as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex." It wasn't until 1934 that heterosexuality was graced with the meaning we're familiar with today: "manifestation of sexual passion for one of the opposite sex; normal sexuality."

Whenever I tell this to people, they respond with dramatic incredulity. That can't be right! Well, it certainly doesn't feel right. It feels as if heterosexuality has always "just been there."

A few years ago, there began circulating a "man on the street" video, in which the creator asked people if they thought homosexuals were born with their sexual orientations. Responses were varied, with most saying something like, "It's a combination of nature and nurture." The interviewer then asked a follow-up question, which was crucial to the experiment: "When did you choose to be straight?" Most were taken back, confessing, rather sheepishly, never to have thought about it. Feeling that their prejudices had been exposed, they ended up swiftly conceding the videographer's obvious point: gay people were born gay just like straight people were born straight.

The video's takeaway seemed to suggest that all of our sexualities are "just there"; that we don't need an explanation for homosexuality just as we don't need one for heterosexuality. It seems not to have occurred to those who made the video, or the millions who shared it, that we actually need an explanation for both.

There's been a lot of good work, both scholarly and popular, on the social construction of homosexual desire and identity. As a result, few would bat an eye when there's talk of "the rise of the homosexual" - indeed, most of us have learned that homosexual identity did come into existence at a specific point in human history. What we're not taught, though, is that a similar phenomenon brought heterosexuality into its existence.

There are many reasons for this educational omission, including religious bias and other types of homophobia. But the biggest reason we don't interrogate heterosexuality's origins is probably because it seems so, well, natural. Normal. No need to question something that's "just there."

But heterosexuality has not always "just been there." And there's no reason to imagine it will always be.
When heterosexuality was abnormal
The first rebuttal to the claim that heterosexuality was invented usually involves an appeal to reproduction: it seems obvious that different-genital intercourse has existed for as long as humans have been around - indeed, we wouldn't have survived this long without it. But this rebuttal assumes that heterosexuality is the same thing as reproductive intercourse. It isn't.

"Sex has no history," writes queer theorist David Halperin at the University of Michigan, because it's "grounded in the functioning of the body." Sexuality, on the other hand, precisely because it's a "cultural production," does have a history. In other words, while sex is something that appears hardwired into most species, the naming and categorising of those acts, and those who practise those acts, is a historical phenomenon, and can and should be studied as such.

Or put another way: there have always been sexual instincts throughout the animal world (sex). But at a specific point in time, humans attached meaning to these instincts (sexuality). When humans talk about heterosexuality, we're talking about the second thing.

Hanne Blank offers a helpful way into this discussion in her book Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality with an analogy from natural history. In 2007, the International Institute for Species Exploration listed the fish Electrolux addisoni as one of the year's "top 10 new species." But of course, the species didn't suddenly spring into existence 10 years ago - that's just when it was discovered and scientifically named. As Blank concludes: "Written documentation of a particular kind, by an authority figure of a particular kind, was what turned Electrolux from a thing that just was ... into a thing that was known."

Something remarkably similar happened with heterosexuals, who, at the end of the 19th Century, went from merely being there to being known. "Prior to 1868, there were no heterosexuals," writes Blank. Neither were there homosexuals. It hadn't yet occurred to humans that they might be "differentiated from one another by the kinds of love or sexual desire they experienced." Sexual behaviours, of course, were identified and catalogued, and often times, forbidden. But the emphasis was always on the act, not the agent.

So what changed? Language.

In the late 1860s, Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny coined four terms to describe sexual experiences: heterosexual, homosexual, and two now forgotten terms to describe masturbation and bestiality; namely, monosexual and heterogenit. Kertbeny used the term "heterosexual" a decade later when he was asked to write a book chapter arguing for the decriminalisation of homosexuality. The editor, Gustav Jager, decided not to publish it, but he ended up using Kertbeny's novel term in a book he later published in 1880.

The next time the word was published was in 1889, when Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing included the word in Psychopathia Sexualis, a catalogue of sexual disorders. But in almost 500 pages, the word "heterosexual" is used only 24 times, and isn't even indexed. That's because Krafft-Ebing is more interested in "contrary sexual instinct" ("perversions") than "sexual instinct," the latter being for him the "normal" sexual desire of humans.

"Normal" is a loaded word, of course, and it has been misused throughout history. Hierarchical ordering leading to slavery was at one time accepted as normal, as was a geocentric cosmology. It was only by questioning the foundations of the consensus view that "normal" phenomena were dethroned from their privileged positions.

The emphasis on procreation comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but from Stoicism

For Krafft-Ebing, normal sexual desire was situated within a larger context of procreative utility, an idea that was in keeping with the dominant sexual theories of the West. In the Western world, long before sex acts were separated into the categories hetero/homo, there was a different ruling binary: procreative or non-procreative. The Bible, for instance, condemns homosexual intercourse for the same reason it condemns masturbation: because life-bearing seed is spilled in the act. While this ethic was largely taught, maintained, and enforced by the Catholic Church and later Christian offshoots, it's important to note that the ethic comes not primarily from Jewish or Christian Scriptures, but from Stoicism.

As Catholic ethicist Margaret Farley points out, Stoics "held strong views on the power of the human will to regulate emotion and on the desirability of such regulation for the sake of inner peace". Musonius Rufus, for example, argued in On Sexual Indulgence that individuals must protect themselves against self-indulgence, including sexual excess. To curb this sexual indulgence, notes theologian Todd Salzman, Rufus and other Stoics tried to situate it "in a larger context of human meaning" - arguing that sex could only be moral in the pursuit of procreation. Early Christian theologians took up this conjugal-reproductive ethic, and by the time of Augustine, reproductive sex was the only normal sex.

While Krafft-Ebing takes this procreative sexual ethic for granted, he does open it up in a major way. "In sexual love the real purpose of the instinct, the propagation of the species, does not enter into consciousness," he writes.

In other words, sexual instinct contains something like a hard-wired reproductive aim - an aim that is present even if those engaged in 'normal' sex aren't aware of it. Jonathan Ned Katz, in The Invention of Heterosexuality, notes the impact of Krafft-Ebing's move. "Placing the reproductive aside in the unconscious, Krafft-Ebing created a small, obscure space in which a new pleasure norm began to grow."

The importance of this shift - from reproductive instinct to erotic desire - can't be overstated, as it's crucial to modern notions of sexuality. When most people today think of heterosexuality, they might think of something like this: Billy understands from a very young age he is erotically attracted to girls. One day he focuses that erotic energy on Suzy, and he woos her. The pair fall in love, and give physical sexual expression to their erotic desire. And they live happily ever after.

Without Krafft-Ebing's work, this narrative might not have ever become thought of as "normal." There is no mention, however implicit, of procreation. Defining normal sexual instinct according to erotic desire was a fundamental revolution in thinking about sex. Krafft-Ebing's work laid the groundwork for the cultural shift that happened between the 1923 definition of heterosexuality as "morbid" and its 1934 definition as "normal."
Sex and the city
Ideas and words are often products of their time. That is certainly true of heterosexuality, which was borne out of a time when American life was becoming more regularised. As Blank argues, the invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class.

The invention of heterosexuality corresponds with the rise of the middle class

In the late 19th Century, populations in European and North American cities began to explode. By 1900, for example, New York City had 3.4 million residents - 56 times its population just a century earlier. As people moved to urban centres, they brought their sexual perversions - prostitution, same-sex eroticism - with them. Or so it seemed. "By comparison to rural towns and villages," Blank writes, "the cities seemed like hotbeds of sexual misconduct and excess." When city populations were smaller, says Blank, it was easier to control such behaviour, just as it was easier to control when it took place in smaller, rural areas where neighbourly familiarity was a norm. Small-town gossip can be a profound motivator.

Because the increasing public awareness of these sexual practices paralleled the influx of lower classes into cities, "urban sexual misconduct was typically, if inaccurately, blamed" on the working class and poor, says Blank. It was important for an emerging middle class to differentiate itself from such excess. The bourgeois family needed a way to protect its members "from aristocratic decadence on the one side and the horrors of the teeming city on the other". This required "systematic, reproducible, universally applicable systems for social management that could be implemented on a large scale".

In the past, these systems could be based on religion, but "the new secular state required secular justification for its laws," says Blank. Enter sex experts like Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in the introduction to his first edition of Psychopathia that his work was designed "to reduce [humans] to their lawful conditions." Indeed, continues the preface, the present study "exercises a beneficent influence upon legislation and jurisprudence".

Krafft-Ebing's work chronicling sexual irregularity made it clear that the growing middle class could no longer treat deviation from normal (hetero) sexuality merely as sin, but as moral degeneracy - one of the worst labels a person could acquire. "Call a man a 'cad' and you've settled his social status," wrote Williams James in 1895. "Call him a 'degenerate' and you've grouped him with the most loathsome specimens of the human race." As Blank points out, sexual degeneracy became a yardstick to determine a person's measure.

Degeneracy, after all, was the reverse process of social Darwinism. If procreative sex was critical to the continuous evolution of the species, deviating from that norm was a threat to the entire social fabric. Luckily, such deviation could be reversed, if it was caught early enough, thought the experts.

The formation of "sexual inversion" occurred, for Krafft-Ebing, through several stages, and was curable in the first. Through his work, writes Ralph M Leck, author of Vita Sexualis, "Krafft-Ebing sent out a clarion call against degeneracy and perversion. All civic-minded people must take their turn on the social watch tower." And this was certainly a question of civics: most colonial personnel came from the middle class, which was large and growing.

Though some non-professionals were familiar with Krafft-Ebing's work, it was Freud who gave the public scientific ways to think about sexuality. While it's difficult to reduce the doctor's theories to a few sentences, his most enduring legacy is his psychosexual theory of development, which held that children develop their own sexualities via an elaborate psychological parental dance.

For Freud, heterosexuals weren't born this way, but made this way. As Katz points out, heterosexuality for Freud was an achievement; those who attained it successfully navigated their childhood development without being thrown off the straight and narrow.

And yet, as Katz notes, it takes an enormous imagination to frame this navigation in terms of normality:
According to Freud, the normal road to heterosexual normality is paved with the incestuous lust of boy and girl for parent of the other sex, with boy's and girl's desire to murder their same-sex parent-rival, and their wish to exterminate any little sibling-rivals. The road to heterosexuality is paved with blood-lusts... The invention of the heterosexual, in Freud's vision, is a deeply disturbed production.
That such an Oedipal vision endured for so long as the explanation for normal sexuality is "one more grand irony of heterosexual history," he says.

Still, Freud's explanation seemed to satisfy the majority of the public, who, continuing their obsession with standardising every aspect of life, happily accepted the new science of normal. Such attitudes found further scientific justification in the work of Alfred Kinsey, whose landmark 1948 study Sexual Behavior in the Human Male sought to rate the sexuality of men on a scale of zero (exclusively heterosexual) to six (exclusively homosexual). His findings led him to conclude that a large, if not majority, "portion of the male population has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age". While Kinsey's study did open up the categories homo/hetero to allow for a certain sexual continuum, it also "emphatically reaffirmed the idea of a sexuality divided between" the two poles, as Katz notes.
The future of heterosexuality
And those categories have lingered to this day. "No one knows exactly why heterosexuals and homosexuals ought to be different," wrote Wendell Ricketts, author of the 1984 study Biological Research on Homosexuality. The best answer we've got is something of a tautology: "heterosexuals and homosexuals are considered different because they can be divided into two groups on the basis of the belief that they can be divided into two groups."

Though the hetero/homo divide seems like an eternal, indestructible fact of nature, it simply isn't. It's merely one recent grammar humans have invented to talk about what sex means to us.

Heterosexuality, argues Katz, "is invented within discourse as that which is outside discourse. It's manufactured in a particular discourse as that which is universal... as that which is outside time." That is, it's a construction, but it pretends it isn't. As any French philosopher or child with a Lego set will tell you, anything that's been constructed can be deconstructed, as well. If heterosexuality didn't exist in the past, then it doesn't need to exist in the future.

I was recently caught off guard by Jane Ward, author of Not Gay, who, during an interview for a piece I wrote on sexual orientation, asked me to think about the future of sexuality. "What would it mean to think about people's capacity to cultivate their own sexual desires, in the same way we might cultivate a taste for food?" Though some might be wary of allowing for the possibility of sexual fluidity, it's important to realise that various Born This Way arguments aren't accepted by the most recent science. Researchers aren't sure what "causes" homosexuality, and they certainly reject any theories that posit a simple origin, such as a "gay gene." It's my opinion that sexual desires, like all our desires, shift and re-orient throughout our lives, and that as they do, they often suggest to us new identities. If this is true, then Ward's suggestion that we can cultivate sexual preferences seems fitting. (For more of the scientific evidence behind this argument, read BBC Future's 'I am gay - but I wasn't born this way'.)

Beyond Ward's question is a subtle challenge: If we're uncomfortable with considering whether and how much power we have over our sexualities, why might that be? Similarly, why might we be uncomfortable with challenging the belief that homosexuality, and by extension heterosexuality, are eternal truths of nature?

In an interview with the journalist Richard Goldstein, the novelist and playwright James Baldwin admitted to having good and bad fantasies of the future. One of the good ones was that "No one will have to call themselves gay," a term Baldwin admits to having no patience for. "It answers a false argument, a false accusation."

Which is what?

"Which is that you have no right to be here, that you have to prove your right to be here. I'm saying I have nothing to prove. The world also belongs to me."

Fewer than half British 18-24 year-olds identify as being 100% heterosexual

Once upon a time, heterosexuality was necessary because modern humans needed to prove who they were and why they were, and they needed to defend their right to be where they were. As time wears on, though, that label seems to actually limit the myriad ways we humans understand our desires and loves and fears. Perhaps that is one reason a recent UK poll found that fewer than half of those aged 18-24 identify as "100% heterosexual." That isn't to suggest a majority of those young respondents regularly practise bisexuality or homosexuality; rather it shows that they don't seem to have the same need for the word "heterosexual" as their 20th-Century forebears.

Debates about sexual orientation have tended to focus on a badly defined concept of "nature." Because different sex intercourse generally results in the propagation of the species, we award it a special moral status. But "nature" doesn't reveal to us our moral obligations - we are responsible for determining those, even when we aren't aware we're doing so. To leap from an observation of how nature is to a prescription of nature ought to be is, as philosopher David Hume noted, to commit a logical fallacy.

Why judge what is natural and ethical to a human being by his or her animal nature? Many of the things human beings value, such as medicine and art, are egregiously unnatural. At the same time, humans detest many things that actually are eminently natural, like disease and death. If we consider some naturally occurring phenomena ethical and others unethical, that means our minds (the things looking) are determining what to make of nature (the things being looked at). Nature doesn't exist somewhere "out there," independently of us - we're always already interpreting it from the inside.

Until this point in our Earth's history, the human species has been furthered by different-sex reproductive intercourse. About a century ago, we attached specific meanings to this kind of intercourse, partly because we wanted to encourage it. But our world is very different now than what it was. Technologies like preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) and in vitro fertilisation (IVF) are only improving. In 2013, more than 63,000 babies were conceived via IVF. In fact, more than five million children have been born through assisted reproductive technologies. Granted, this number still keeps such reproduction in the slim minority, but all technological advances start out with the numbers against them.

Socially, too, heterosexuality is losing its "high ground," as it were. If there was a time when homosexual indiscretions were the scandals du jour, we've since moved on to another world, one riddled with the heterosexual affairs of politicians and celebrities, complete with pictures, text messages, and more than a few video tapes. Popular culture is replete with images of dysfunctional straight relationships and marriages. Further, between 1960 and 1980, Katz notes, the divorce rate rose 90%. And while it's dropped considerably over the past three decades, it hasn't recovered so much that anyone can claim "relationship instability" is something exclusive to homosexuality, as Katz shrewdly notes.

The line between heterosexuality and homosexuality isn't just blurry, as some take Kinsey's research to imply - it's an invention, a myth, and an outdated one. Men and women will continue to have different-genital sex with each other until the human species is no more. But heterosexuality - as a social marker, as a way of life, as an identity - may well die out long before then.

--
Brandon Ambrosino has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, The Atlantic, Politico, Economist, and other publications. He lives in Delaware, and is a graduate student in theology at Villanova University.
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The 1901 Dorland's Medical Dictionary defined heterosexuality as an "abnormal or perverted appetite toward the opposite sex." More than two decades later, in 1923, Merriam Webster's dictionary similarly defined it as "morbid sexual passion for one of the opposite sex."

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Christopher Isherwood Documentary Part 2

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Christopher Isherwood Documentary Part 2

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Christopher Isherwood (1 of 4) Author Interviews and Film

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Part 0ne of four which includes early interviews with Isherwood (Monitor from 1959) and other poets/authors Stephen Spender and Edward Upwood. Footage from Berlin in the 1930's. Made in 1986 the year Isherwood died.

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Page 19 - Guide to Nabokov's Butterflies and Moths

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Most of the cases Nabokov mentioned may go back to a book by Arnold Jacobi that focused on mimicry in butterflies and moths and at the time was surely available in Berlin libraries. It adhered to a strictly Darwinian point of view. Nabokov's few additional cases come from diverse sources or were purely imaginary; some were misunderstandings.

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Emigration implies permanent departure from one country and settlement in another and suggests a choice by the émigré not to return to the native country. Émigrés are thus differentiated from refugees, who are seen as people forced from their homeland in abnormal circumstances, usually under threat of violence, who will return once normal life resumes. However, in the case of those who left the Russian Empire in the aftermath of the First World War, Russian revolutions and Civil War, the line between émigré and refugee was blurred. Most Russian subjects who ended up living outside the borders of the empire had been captured as soldiers or had fled and sought refuge from military defeat, hunger, deprivation, or political persecution. It was frequently unclear to international relief organisations and authorities in the country of refuge whom to categorise as a prisoner of war or refugee awaiting repatriation and who was an émigré who would not return. Those who remained abroad often resettled several times in different countries and considered themselves temporary exiles, expecting to go back as soon as the Bolshevik regime collapsed.

The Russian Empire was a country from which relatively few people emigrated until the 1890s when increasing numbers left for Western Europe and the United States, among them students attending foreign universities, liberal and socialist activists pursuing opposition to Russia's autocracy abroad and Jews escaping increasingly restrictive tsarist policies. In Germany, perceived connections between Russia's political and Jewish émigrés intersected with mounting nationalism and anti-semitism. Fears of a revolutionary Jewish threat from the east contributed to a powerful Russophobia in the build-up to the First World War that undermined traditional dynastic bonds between the two countries. Some historians, such as Robert Williams, refer to emigration from Russian territory between 1881 and 1914 as a first wave, while others, including Marc Raeff, reserve this label for the great exodus proceeding from the upheavals of the early 20 th century, with the second and third waves denoting emigration from the Soviet Union after the Second World War and in the 1970s and 1980s respectively.

Departure from Russia in the wake of the First World War took various routes. War prisoners from the Eastern Front were subjected to delousing and placed in camps across Germany. As late as November 1918, after six months of repatriation efforts, over 1 million Russian prisoners of war remained in Germany. Some left Russia in 1917, refusing to accept the outcome of the February or October revolutions. The major contingent of the emigration, however, was created by the Civil War, which ensued from the Bolshevik-led uprising of October. The defeated anti-Bolshevik White armies of General Anton Ivanovich Denikin (1872-1947) and General Baron Petr Nikolaevich Wrangel (1878-1928) were hastily evacuated with Allied assistance in 1919 and 1920 to Istanbul and then to South Eastern, Western and Central Europe. Some soldiers were accompanied by their families; assorted professionals, businessmen, intellectuals, Orthodox clergymen and personalities from the former imperial court and the Provisional Government also joined the exodus. Many evacuees perished during the crossing, while others endured disease, hunger and separation from their families. Civilian refugees also made their way across the unsettled borders between the new Soviet Russia and Poland, Finland, and the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Until 1922 governments and armies defeated by the Red Army in the east crossed over to the Manchurian town of Kharbin, under Chinese control, joined by Siberian Cossacks, merchants and peasants. The deportation of philosophers, lawyers, writers, historians and other intellectuals with their families by the triumphant Soviet regime in 1922-1923 added to the Russian community abroad.

Estimates of the number of citizens of the former Russian Empire settled around the world by 1921 range from 1 to 3 million. Precise figures cannot be ascertained due to the chaotic circumstances of departure, patchy record keeping, illegal settlement, and the constantly changing composition of émigré communities. Émigrés shared the material hardships of their countries of refuge in the 1920s and 1930s. Life was relatively cheap at first in Germany; jobs were hard to find but the low value of the mark meant savings and foreign currency disbursements went a long way. Beginning in 1923, however, inflation and political upheaval prompted an exodus of the Russian diaspora from Germany. Paris, Prague and Kharbin became the nuclei of Russian life abroad. In all countries the émigrés suffered particular difficulties arising from the loss of their belongings, damage to their health sustained en route, employment and welfare discrimination that forced many into poorly paid work to which they were unaccustomed, and from the insecurity of their legal position as foreigners, especially when the Soviet regime was formally recognised by other countries and nationalistic moods heightened. The penury, uncertainty and isolation of émigré existence were alleviated by assistance from international organisations, foreign governments and philanthropists, diplomatic missions of the former Russian regimes, and by efforts of the émigrés themselves. The Czechoslovakian government, for example, implemented the Russian Aid-Action programme, while the Nansen Committee of the League of Nations issued an identity document, the Nansen passport, to émigrés rendered stateless by the Soviet government's refusal to acknowledge them, allowing them to travel and apply for visas and residence permits. Voluntary organisations such as the American-based YMCA and Red Cross distributed food, clothing, medical aid and educational materials and established nurseries and orphanages. Émigré institutions such as the reconstituted Union of Zemstvos and Towns, or Zemgor, previously responsible for running much of Russia's war effort, set up clinics and schools. The Veterans Union, established by General Wrangel, and numerous professional associations helped members resolve both legal and practical problems.

Political and Cultural Activity ↑

Historians tend to evaluate the Russian emigration either as a political phenomenon or in terms of its contribution to world culture. Robert Williams, for example, groups the emigration in Germany into monarchists, liberals, and socialists. He examines abortive attempts by monarchist army officers to mobilise Russian prisoners of war for anti-Bolshevik intervention in the early days of emigration and the involvement of émigrés with the far right and left in German politics. He concludes, however, that the political goals of émigré factions proved divisive daydreams and were supplanted by a flurry of publishing that left a lasting impression of Russia as a source of cultural renewal for the West. Similarly, scholarly works on individual émigrés who had been prominent political figures in Russia, such as Aleksandr Fedorovich Kerenskii (1881-1970), treat emigration as a sad epilogue, while studies of cultural figures such as author Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977), artists Vasilii Vasil'evich Kandinskii (1866-1944), Marc Zakharovich Chagall (1887-1985), and the composer Igor Fedorovich Stravinskii (1882-1971) highlight their impact on the creative scene in the west.

A third interpretation of the significance of the emigration is as an alternative Russia. Marc Raeff argues that those who emigrated became a society in exile, a Russia abroad. This society contained representatives of most classes of prerevolutionary Russia, from ruling elites to intellectuals to craftspeople, workers and even peasants (although not in the same proportions), and replicated Russia's ethnic and religious diversity, including Ukrainians, Russian Germans, Jews, Armenians and others, as well as Orthodox ethnic Russians. The émigrés, moreover, were committed to carrying on a meaningful Russian life, passing on their culture and traditions through education, newspapers and journals, and, for some, a renewal of the Orthodox faith. Raeff, like historian Gleb Struve, identifies émigré literary and artistic endeavour as a branch of Russian culture, vital for continuing and disseminating modernist trends that were suppressed in the Soviet Union. Aaron Cohen has emphasised the importance of a Russia abroad in memorialising the First World War in public sites, writings and celebration, while inside Russia the war's legacy was largely ignored in the mythologising of the October revolution, and later the Second World War, as foundational events. The cohesion of exiled Russian society, however, was undermined within a few decades by geographic dispersal, demographic decline, and the consolidation of Bolshevik power, which weakened the idea of sustaining an alternative Russia in readiness for return and prompted cuts in foreign aid to the émigré community. Furthermore, the political repression by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) in Europe and the Japanese in China, combined with the assimilation of children and later émigré waves, also led to a weakened émigré community.

Siobhan Peeling, University of Nottingham

Section Editors: Yulia Khmelevskaya; Katja Bruisch; Oksana Nagornaja; Olga Nikonova

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The First World War, the Russian revolutions of February and October 1917, and the ensuing Civil War created a wave of emigration from the territories of the Russian Empire into Western and Central Europe and Chinese Manchuria. Émigré life was marked by poverty and uncertainty, bitter political disputes, and a cultural flourishing.

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Ninotchka (1939) Official Trailer - Greta Garbo, Melvyn Douglas Movie HD

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eternal conflicts...

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It was almost 50 years ago that Matthew Spender and his wife Maro abandoned their life and family in London to live in isolation in a crumbling farmhouse in Tuscany. She would paint; he would sculpt and make furniture. The lives of their parents, filled with repression, sexual impropriety, hedonism and guilt, would no longer be at the centre of their lives. While the pair succeeded in cutting themselves off, they left behind an extraordinary world: one that always lingered in the background - ignored but never quite gone.

As the eldest son of Stephen Spender, one of the 20th century's most celebrated poets, Matthew's was a starry childhood. WH Auden was a regular fixture in the house (they would sit together and write poems inspired by Tolkien), and the other figures that flowed in and out of their family home in St John's Wood ranged from Christopher Isherwood and TS Eliot to Sylvia Plath, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. His mother, Natasha, was a beautiful concert pianist. To an outsider their home, where literary dinner parties took place for decades, was a shrine to the intellectual elite.

Yet this was a house with an inherent tension. Stephen Spender may have been married but he was homosexual - quite unashamedly so - and throughout his life was engaged in a series of affairs with men, some sexual, others emotional and most quite public. Matthew's mother was aware of most, if not all, of her husband's infidelities ("You can't keep secrets from women") and even dabbled in some herself, including a platonic but flirtatious relationship with Raymond Chandler, conducted through expensive lunches and sexually charged letters.

But Natasha Spender was also a woman who valued appearance and status above all. From the moment she married Stephen to the day she died, she obsessively, furiously dedicated her life to maintaining the façade that her marriage was nothing but perfect and that her husband was both straight and faithful.

As a result of the iron grip that Natasha maintained over the legacy of her husband even after he died in 1995, the life of Stephen Spender, in all its full brash colour, has never fully been told. And so it was that, on the day his mother died, 21 October 2010, Matthew finally began piecing together a life story she never wanted made public.

It is in the very same farmhouse in rural Tuscany that Matthew and Maro escaped to in the 1960s that I meet them both. In the decades they have lived here, raising two daughters along the way, it has flourished from a Tuscan wreck into a bohemian monument to creativity. Maro, the daughter of the famed Armenian painter Arshile Gorky, who committed suicide in the 1940s, followed in her father's footsteps as an artist, and all the walls are beautifully frescoed in her own hand. In the five years since Matthew's mother died, he has dedicated every moment to researching and writing A House in St John's Wood. In part it is the first brutally honest biography of Stephen, but it is also a family memoir.

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Newlyweds: Stephen and Natasha Spender soon after they were married, in 1941. Photograph: Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection

"My mother would have been tremendously offended by my retelling of her past," says Matthew, handing me a cup of coffee. He has a kind face and his thick white hair and equally thick eyebrows both have that dishevelled, windblown quality distinct to an Englishman abroad. From the old black and white photos I've seen, he also looks disarmingly like his father.

"Her take on her marriage is that my father, when he met her, had put his former homosexual life aside and become totally straight and faithful to her. This is a myth that meant a great deal to her, even after Dad had died. But she knew that I didn't really go for it, and she knew that I felt that once Dad was dead his life should be reinterpreted in a different way. For a start, my father left hundreds of indiscreet letters all over the place. But there was never a confrontation; we just simply didn't mention it, either of us."

Matthew, now 70 years old, was always fascinated by his mother's determination to remain in such fierce denial of the past. Stephen wrote a frank autobiography of his life before his marriage to Natasha, so it is publicly documented that he knew he was gay from the moment of his arrival at Oxford. He lost his virginity to WH Auden and in his early 20s, alongside Auden and Isherwood, spent a hedonistic few months sleeping his way through the men of Hamburg and Berlin. His first boyfriend, Tony Hyndman, was a male prostitute he picked up while cruising in Soho.

So why marry Natasha? Matthew's theory is simple. "His relationship with Tony was so intense that he came to the view that it was impossible to live with somebody who is too like you and to whom you always have to define the role, as he felt you had to in a gay relationship."

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'Stephen was longing for Matthew to be gay': Maro Spender with husband Matthew, shortly after they met. Maro is the daughter of painter Arshile Gorky. Photograph: Lizzie and Matthew Spender Collection

Maro pipes up from the next room: "Mainly I think your father wanted children."

Matthew pauses. "Yes, that's true," he concedes.

Despite Natasha's best efforts, Stephen revelled in introducing his numerous lovers both to his social circle and also to his son. Even before writing the memoir, Matthew was aware of almost all of his father's great loves, having met most of them in his childhood. Their names are scattered throughout the book, right up to Bryan Obst, his father's final lover, a tender 22 to Stephen's 75. Tony Hyndman also remained - cruelly, I suggest - a continual presence as the family handyman and gardener. Matthew recounts one extraordinary Christmas in 1957 when Stephen's lover Reynolds Price came and stayed with them in the family home when Natasha was away in America visiting Raymond Chandler.

"My father wasn't particularly secret about his sexuality," says Matthew. "On the contrary, he wanted to enlist me in this sort of conspiracy of men against women, which I resisted. There was a gleeful thing about having a lover. It was a secret that he so wanted to share with me, so he always introduced me to his lovers."

Maro settles down at the table. She, too, is no stranger to a turbulent family set-up. Her father, Arshile Gorky, and her mother, American socialite Mougouch Magruder, had a famously tempestuous relationship and Maro never forgave her mother for having an affair just before her father killed himself in 1948. It's not hard to see how their parents' sex lives have been a constant source of conversation in Maro and Matthew's house for 50 years.

"Stephen was nicknamed Brenda Spender," Maro says in her disarmingly blunt way, also helping herself to coffee. "And at the Slade, where I was studying, a lot of people would tell me they'd seen him cruising around Soho at midnight."

"Yes," Matthew sighs. "Living dangerously. I didn't want to get involved in that side of Dad's life, but I didn't disapprove of it."

"I think your form of rebellion was to become straight," says Maro, addressing her husband before turning back to me. "He was longing for Matthew to be gay, so if I hadn't come along..."

"He did try and bring me into that world," agrees Matthew, talking of Stephen's circle, from Lucian Freud to Francis Bacon.

"Stephen wanted Matthew to be David Hockney and would always hold him up as an example."

A long pause fills the kitchen. "Yes, it's true," says Matthew. "That was so irritating."

The campaign continued well into Matthew's 40s. He recounts his father's "nicest and last attempt to make me successful" by getting Francis Bacon to buy one of his sculptures. The pair took a bemused Matthew to the infamous Colony Room, the Soho members' club. It is not an experience he looks back upon fondly. "As we were going in, these two queens shouted at us: 'Oh here comes Spender. You know why he's called Spender, because he hasn't got the bottoms of his pockets,'" Matthew recalls. "I suppose the illusion is so he can keep masturbating the whole time."

He stops, looking like he's changed his mind about telling the anecdote, that he may reveal too much, but then shrugs and continues. "Yes, well, all of a sudden here I was on the fringe of a world that I had totally avoided for all these years. And all I could think was: what am I doing here? Francis went over to the bar, shouted for a large bottle of 'Tattinger '52 please'. And as I sat there for about half an hour, the chaos just got worse and worse. There was this huge stuffed bird hanging over the Colony Room with a cage over it, and I remember staring at this thing and feeling like I was stuck in a Francis Bacon painting.

"In the end I just said: 'Francis, this has been the most happy day of my life, you buying my sculpture, but I think I'm going to lie down' and left. Afterwards Dad was very disappointed and said: 'Finally I'd set you up with this whole world.' And all I could reply was: 'Dad, thank you very much but - and I know you find this hard to believe - I'm happily married, with two children. This is your world, not mine.'" Matthew pauses. "I don't think he ever really came to terms with it."

As I watch the couple bustle about making lunch - peeling garlic, tearing basil and chopping tomatoes from the garden - I wonder aloud whether Stephen ever regretted choosing to marry Natasha. Matthew looks troubled: "I think he would have preferred for his homosexual life to have been much more open than it was."

As for his mother: "I felt sorry for my mother. I hope that comes across."

In 1955 Raymond Chandler became infatuated with Natasha, and the pair would exchange letters until he died four years later, with him desperately pleading for her to abandon her life in the UK and live with him in California.

It was not until Matthew found a sealed file marked "To be destroyed without opening" in his mother's possessions after she died, containing passionate love letters from Chandler, that he discovered the true depth of their relationship. "It was fabulous to read my mother's letters," he says with a smile. "I saw something different in her from those letters. They were flirtatious. It was fun for her to feel that she was desired."

A House in St John's Wood: In Search of My Parents by Matthew Spender is published by HarperCollins at £25. To buy a copy for £20, go to bookshop.the guardian.com

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Matthew Spender: 'Sorry, Dad, I'm not like you. I'm straight'

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It was almost 50 years ago that Matthew Spender and his wife Maro abandoned their life and family in London to live in isolation in a crumbling farmhouse in Tuscany. She would paint; he would sculpt and make furniture.

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Christopher Isherwood Documentary Part 1

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Christopher Isherwood Documentary Part 1

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Christopher Isherwood and his kind (4 of 4) Author Interviews and Film

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Final part of this film on author Christopher Isherwood featuring an interview with Ludovic Kennedy on Tonight (1977). Poet and friend Stephen Spender talks about the author.

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After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1929 and the Civil War, more than three million people fled Russia. For many, Berlin was the first place of refuge, and the biographies of nearly all of the most prominent intellectuals, artists, writers of the first-wave emigration include a Berlin chapter. In the early 1920s, the German capital became home to almost 400,000 Russian emigres. A vibrant center of the dispora, it was the first and most active center of emigre publishing between 1920 and 1923.

It was here that Valdimir Nabokov made his literary debut under the pseudonym V. Sirin, with his short stories and poems appearing in emigre periodicals, with his first novels published by Berlin-based publishing houses. The Berlin chapter of his creative biography is very rich, even though Nabokov never felt at home in the city. After fleeing Russia in May 1919, the Nabokovs settled in the German capital, and the young author visited his parents often while studying at Cambridge, moving to the city after graduation in 1922-the year his father was killed in Berlin, during an assassination attempt on the life of Pavel Miliukov, who was a prominent politician and proponent of constitutional monarchy in Russia. Having fled Nazi Germany in 1937 with his wife Vera and their son Dmitry, the writer never visited Berlin again.

Vladimir Nabokov's short story "A Guide to Berlin" (1925) features vignettes of the city seen from an outsider's perspective. The text does not simply capture the author's subjective impressions of Berlin, but rather can be seen as staging a dialogue with it-across space and time.

In this story, the city is written by an anoymous narrator, a "walker," in Michel de Certeau's terminology, one of the "ordinary practitioners of the city [who] live "down below'" and who explore it first-hand, moving through the crowds, weaving their bodies through urban fabric*. Our narrator shows no interest in the traditional historical and cultural landmarks of Berlin and presents a personal view of the city as seen from the perspective of a pedestrian.

The narrative makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the reader to follow in the narrator's footsteps around Berlin, or to actually use his guide. The topography of Berlin in the story lacks geographical precision and is not clearly defined. The name of the city appears exclusively in the title, and the text includes only three, possibly four, landmarks that could actually be mapped: the Zoo, the Aquarium, the hotel "Eden" across the street, and the pub "Löwenbräu" where the two friends meet.

When the elusive Russian émigré who takes the reader on a tour of Berlin does give some indication of where a particular site is located, he is intentionally vague, as when stating that the roadworks he is watching from the streetcar take place "at an intersection," or using a point of reference that the reader cannot know, as when situating the pipes "in front of the house where [he] live[s]."

The absence of identifiable landmarks, street names, exact locations is all the more striking in a story with a title that sets up the expectation that the text is written in the very genre that would require such information to be provided.
The three interactive maps illustrate the unconventional nature of Nabokov's "Guide."
Map 1 shows the historical sites of Berlin as presented in a 1908 official tourguide, as well as the major sites of Russian Berlin. Nabokov's story belongs to neither of these cultural spaces within Berlin exclusively.

Maps 2 and 3 show the position of the "landmarks" from "A Guide to Berlin" in relation to the sites of Russian Berlin and to the traditional landmarks highlighted in the tour guide to the city respectively.

note: The starting point of the narrator's journey through the city is his home in Berlin. It is worth noting that the narrator of the story should not be identified with the author himself, but for the sake of plotting that point on a map, the location of the house where Vladimir Nabokov was living at the time of writing "A Guide to Berlin" was used.

[*Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Randall (Berkeley: University of CA Press, 1984) 93.]

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After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1929 and the Civil War, more than three million people fled Russia. For many, Berlin was the first place of refuge, and the biographies of nearly all of the most prominent intellectuals, artists, writers of the first-wave emigration include a Berlin chapter.

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The Jewish refugees the US turned away - BBC News

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In 1939 the SS St Louis, carrying Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, was refused entry to the US.

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Auf wiedersehen, Putin: Berlin’s new Russian émigrés

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Auf wiedersehen, Putin: Berlin’s new Russian émigrés

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click below to read:

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A link to a web page on Nabokov's Berlin

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A link to a web page on Nabokov's Berlin