Netflix’s “Eldorado” Reveals Queer Berlin During the Nazi Rise
Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate, reveals a more complex portrait of queer Berlin during the rise of the Nazis.Cantu, German-Hungarian and raised in Berlin, where he’s currently based, professes that before researching Eldorado, he also held fast to legends of Weimar Berlin’s wild parties and sexual liberation.“But when we dig deeper into it,” he says, “it is much more nuanced and much more controversial, especially because the time in the Weimar era in Germany was politically very, very turbulent, and there was a lot of conflicts within society, but also, on a small scale, for people on the streets.
So the tension was quite strong.”The danger was real, for the queer and Jewish artists, performers, and impresarios who were the life of the party at cabarets like the film’s namesake, the Eldorado.As depicted through engrossing archival footage and lush dramatizations (separately directed by Matt Lambert), queer regulars at the Eldorado risked harassment and blackmail, as well as being beaten in the streets by the Brownshirts of the Nazi SA, or jailed in police raids.
And that was before the Nazis took power.“I grew up in Berlin, and I always knew, of course, that there is a large LGBTIQ history 100 years ago,” says Cantu, noting that the Eldorado was housed in a building located “in the neighborhood actually where my parents lived, in Schöneberg, but I was never really in touch with it.
