Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 123 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque Simone Stirner Harvard University Abstract: The last decade has seen an increase in scholarship on queer and trans* histories during National Socialism� What has received less attention is the ways in which these histories have been remembered in the first place� This is particularly true for trans* remembrance, where the absence of existing public memorials dedicated to trans* histories echoes ongoing limitations of civil rights and protections� Against this background, this article focuses on the memory of Charlotte Charlaque (1892-1963), whose traces appear in written archives and documentaries, yet whose life story is also shot through by multiple absences� Taking a cue from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” and Donna Haraway’s “speculative fabulation,” this article asks what alternative modes of trans* remembrance exist outside of institutional frameworks by turning to a series of ephemeral appearances of Charlaque - a translucent quilt; digital markers of her former residencies; a fictionalized film - as sites of her memory. Charlaque’s story appears as a constantly changing, multifaceted event in the present that lets the past shine through� This “translucent memory” raises the question what Germany’s culture of remembrance might look like if it not only included trans* histories in existing frameworks of memorialization but took trans* remembrance as an occasion to rethink remembrance culture itself� Keywords: trans remembrance, queer memory, Charlotte Charlaque, memorials, Magnus Hirschfeld On Thursday, 14 February 1963, the Brooklyn Heights Press reports on the death of Charlotte Charlaque, a Jewish, German-American actress and translator, on the front page: “Death Ends Proud Reign of the Promenade’s Queen” reads the main headline� Next to a photo of Charlaque, the words: “The world wasn’t a stage, it was her audience” (Rustin)� Imagine her there, then: on the promenade 124 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 looking out over the East River, the Manhattan skyline in the distance, dressed in all purple, as she tended to, holding court, as the newspaper wrote (Wolfert 102, 103)� Queen of the Promenade I In the front-page obituary and those published in subsequent issues remembering her, Charlaque (1892-1963) appears under the name Charlotte Curtis, “a stage name adapted from the name she bore after she married for the third time, some years ago,” as Richard Rustin writes (Rustin 1)� And that her given name was Lotte� Stories and fabulations accompany her, such as that she was “born in San Francisco in the 1880s, the daughter of the German Consul there,” or that she “hid two Jewish actors, hunted by the Nazis, in her apartment” (Rustin 3; see also Wolfert 104)� Growing historical research on her life as part of a broader recovery work in trans* histories in the last decade meanwhile offers the following details about her background: born into a Jewish family in Berlin, her last name was Scharlach; over the years, she went by Charlotte von Curtius; Carlotta, Baronin von Curtius; Lola; and Lotte Curtis� In 1902, Charlaque moved with her family to the United States before returning to Germany in 1922 where she would be one of the first three people to receive gender-affirming care at Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin� She worked as an actress, translator, and receptionist at the institute. In 1934, she fled Germany with her partner Toni Ebel, first to Czechoslovakia, and then in 1942 to the United States� There is hence a discrepancy between her life story as it appears in the local paper and the archival facts about her biography and yet those newspaper articles, describing an actress who “stole and enlivened” performances, are also no less true to her life (Rustin 3)� When Charlaque explained for instance, as Rustin relates, that the situation in Prague “was not dangerous for me,” because “the Germans claimed they would not hurt an American woman,” and that “they said they were after the men,” then this might not be factually true (Rustin 3): after all, she was to be interned in Theresienstadt and escaped only through the help of her partner Ebel, while her attempts to return to the US were, according to Charlaque herself, complicated by the fact that the authorities in 1942 rejected issuing her a passport bearing a female name� 1 Still, this narrative about an American woman not targeted by the Nazis counterintuitively also conveys a truth about her life as a Jewish trans* woman: her story exceeds the parameters offered by official, state frameworks both during her lifetime and in the aftermath� In this space of excess, we might be able to intimate her life story, beyond the need to capture it fully� This essay follows the memory of Charlaque’s life between Berlin and New York, across different registers of narration, time periods, and media. Made up Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 125 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 of segments on remembrance culture, reflections on method, and imaginative encounters with Charlaque, it attempts to take seriously the idea that trans* remembrance might require not only an adjustment of who is represented in Germany’s culture of remembrance, but also how remembrance takes shape in the first place. Its form pays testimony to the fragmentary, incomplete status of historical evidence on trans* lives under National Socialism all while venturing, tentatively, into a different mode of thinking and writing about trans* history itself, one where memory takes shape as an encounter with trans* living and feeling in the present� Fabulations Here is one theoretical backdrop to such a mode of remembering: considering archival gaps and exclusions in the context of the history of transatlantic slavery, “critical fabulation” is the name Saidiya Hartman offers to describe a method that would respond to these absences and the violence that fashions them (Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts”)� Critical fabulation, for Hartman, is “straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of narration�” It is an “impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak)� It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive” (Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts” 12)� Kevin Quashie, writing about Hartman’s fabulation, notes that it “instantiates a sense of presence and presentness - it instantiates a live and lively now to the histories it tells. […] Hartman offers us a past that, in its aliveness, holds relation to our being now” (Quashie 10)� What might fabulations be capable of with regard to the history of Charlaque - and trans* remembrance more broadly? Writing about the case of Liddy Bacroff (1908-1943), Bodie Ashton speaks of the “tyranny of the archive” - a term grounded in the fact that when it comes to “lives that deviate from established heterosexual and cisgender norms,” official records “are underpinned by the security rationales not only of the inter-war state but ultimately of the Nazi dictatorship” (Ashton 81). In the case of Bacroff, the archive leaves us with her male birthname - one that reappears today on a Stolperstein , setting her memory in stone as part of the broader stumbling stone memorial� The archive here offers a record, but, as Ashton shows, this record is “lifeless, devoid of the person herself� By endorsing it, we implicitly elevate the interpretation of Liddy Bacroff by her oppressors over her understanding of herself” (Ashton 98). Such a reliance on the archive would “fulfi[ll] Hartman’s argument that ‘the archive is […] a death sentence […]’” (Ashton 98). 126 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 Like the story of Bacroff, Charlaque’s story too cannot be captured by archival records alone; for her as a Jew and trans woman under National Socialism, archival registration often took the shape of violent categorization and registration� The archive of remembrance that developed in the aftermath of the war meanwhile long neglected stories like hers� What would it look like to remember the life of Charlaque beyond such violent archival containments? To feel into the spaces in which lives like hers were possible, to tell trans* stories and remember trans* lives in a way that “elaborates, augments, transposes, and breaks open archival documents,” as Hartman writes (Hartman, Wayward Lives xiv)? What would it take to elaborate, augment, transpose, and break open existing institutional forms of German memory culture, in which trans* histories long found no representation and yet still formed a consistent undercurrent? Such efforts edge close to another critical concept: Donna Haraway speaks of “speculative fabulation,” a method of storytelling that goes beyond and against archival “facts,” beyond domesticated narrative, constituting a way of making that is also “a model for worlding�” Speculative fabulation can mean “opening up what is yet-to-come in protean entangled times’ pasts, presents, and futures” (Haraway 10)� With these concepts in the background, my goal is hence not to reconstruct the history of Charlotte Charlaque; others have begun the important work of doing so� 2 Rather, I aim to think about the different ways in which her history has been remembered and to follow the sense of trans* aliveness that permeates the margins of the official registers of German memory culture. Erinnerungskultur German memory culture in its state-sponsored form has long excluded the histories of queer and trans* people in ways that rub against the narrative of its purported success and exemplary nature� 3 For gay men in West Germany, the legal framework that structured their persecution under National Socialism did not end with the end of the war; as W� Jake Newsome relates in the words of Pierre Seel, there was a sense among this victim group that “liberation was only for others” (Newsome 57)� Paragraph 175, the main statute used under National Socialism for criminalizing male homosexuality, was only repealed in its entirety in 1994; the legal rehabilitation of the over 100,000 men prosecuted and charged for homosexuality only occurred in 2017� 4 Recent historical research has highlighted how lesbians, trans*, intersex, and genderqueer people too experienced oppression and persecution under National Socialism� 5 The limitation of civil rights for these groups likewise persisted long after 1945� While the implementation of the Transsexuellengesetz ( TSG ) in 1981 meant a significant step in the fight for trans* rights, the law also retained severe discriminatory restrictions of civil rights: up until 2008, it conditioned legal transition upon divorce in case of Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 127 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 married status; until 2011, it required individuals to undergo surgery to conform “external gender markers” to the “new” gender identity as well as compulsory sterilization or infertility up until 2011� If it was true in the 1990s to state that “homophobia has never been discussed within Holocaust studies as an important part of Nazi propaganda, racism, and population politics,” (Müller 11) then the same statement can be made regarding transphobia well into the 2010s, and these conditions shaped how queer and trans* histories could be remembered in public� Today, there might not (yet) be one memorial specifically to Charlotte Charlaque or to the trans* victims of National Socialism� What exists, however, on the heels of grassroots organizing, is a growing number of memorials dedicated to Magnus Hirschfeld and the Movement for Homosexual Emancipation� In 1994, the same year that Paragraph 175 was abandoned, a small pillar of rusted iron was set up at the bank of the river Spree, in proximity to the former site of the Institute for Sexual Sciences� The inscription is headed by the maxim of Hirschfeld and the Institute: “Per Scientiam ad Justitiam - Durch Wissenschaft zum Recht,” “Through Science to Justice�” Below are the dates of Hirschfeld’s life and his work at the institute, as well as a note on the institute’s destruction - including the book burnings - by the Nazis� On the bottom, the inscription concludes: “Destroyed in WW II, the Institute for Sexual Sciences was the first institution in the world to unite sexual sciences - its research and teaching� It was a place of medical treatment and a safe haven for all those who were shunned by society because of their sexuality� July 6, 1994�” One year later, in May 1995, another memorial to Hirschfeld was dedicated in Charlottenburg, near his former home� 6 The memorial, an iron pillar that bears a portrait of Hirschfeld in relief, provides information on his life and credits him with the establishment of the “first German homosexual movement and as the founder of the scientific-humanitarian-committee.” Today, the Hirschfeld memorial by the Spree is joined by others� The riverbank itself was renamed Magnus-Hirschfeld- Ufer in 2008, and in 2017 the Memorial to the First Homosexual Emancipation Movement was built� It consists of six thirteen-foot-tall metal sculptures of calla lilies - a species in which all structures required for reproduction are present in each flower in a nod to gender diversity and non-binary identities. Each of the six lilies is tinted in one of the six colors of the rainbow flag. Next to the sculptures are information panels - installed already in 2011 - relating the history of the movement along with portraits of Anita Augspurg, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and Hirschfeld� The construction of the memorial was the result of ongoing efforts by the nationwide Magnus-Hirschfeld-Foundation Coalition (Aktionsbündnis Magnus-Hirschfeld-Stiftung), constituted of different lesbian and gay archives and research groups, to advance claims for the compensation of homosexual victims of the NS regime� 7 The memory of Charlaque appears adjacent 128 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 to these memorials� Not directly referenced by them, it maintains a presence nonetheless, gesturing toward the absences within the historical archives - and memory culture more broadly� Integration / Usability Considering the representation of queer and trans* histories in an official culture of remembrance, two patterns emerge. The first is one of integration. On the heels of changed legislation around homosexuality, we can observe an adjustment of the memorial landscape to include representations of previously neglected victim groups� It is no coincidence that the two early Hirschfeld memorials appeared shortly after Paragraph 175 was repealed� That the inscriptions mention “those shunned because of their sexuality” and the “homosexual movement” - no mention of gender identities -reflects the changes in the legal framework around sexual minorities in the 1990s; recognition of trans* identities - as in the gesture toward gender diversity in the 2017 Emancipation memorial -lags behind� This is also true for the most notable example of queer public memorialization: the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism (2008), constructed a short walking distance away from the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (Peter Eisenmann, 2005)� That the design by Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset - a dark concrete cube with a small window behind which a looped video shows two men kissing - visually cites the Holocaust memorial across the street seems to affirm that queer history is integrated representationally, yet without significantly changing the terms of remembering itself� Subsequent changes to the memorial in form of a rotation of the video itself, initiated after debates about the privileging of white gay male identities in the original film, expand representation toward other victim groups� In the most recent video by Yael Bartana, photographs of “cross dressers” next to publications by Hirschfeld open up a space for remembering trans* histories within a broader memorial space that remains contested for the ways in which it enacts forms of exclusion along the lines of race and gender (see Evans 167—74)� Next to a pattern of “integration,” another second pattern is best described in terms of what Laurie Marhoefer calls the construction of a “usable past” via memorials (Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic 214)� Focusing on a 2013 poster campaign that aimed to raise money for a memorial to Magnus Hirschfeld, Marhoefer notes that the campaign’s slogan - A black time for the world came from Berlin. But so did the most colourful movement that there had ever been -“helps to portray a tolerant Berlin that is positioned as a foil to Nazi Germany” (216)� We can see a similar pattern in the 2024 initiative for a Magnus Hirschfeld Day on May 14 in Berlin� Under the slogan “Magnus Hirschfeld - Soul of the Queer Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 129 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 Community,” the day seeks to highlight Hirschfeld’s “great importance to the rainbow capital,” asserting this very “rainbow” character of the capital through the act of remembrance along the way� 8 Integration and usability make meaning within and thereby affirm existing frameworks of remembrance. One can oppose such patterns, as, for instance, the poet Max Czollek has, by making the case for a broader “de-integration” of minorities from mainstream society (Czollek, Desintegriert Euch! )� Where Czollek suggests that Jews should resist the “theatre of memory” that serves to prop up the self-image of a majoritarian German society that has “overcome” the past, queer and trans* remembrance too might refuse to contribute to the image of a “rainbow capital” (Czollek, Versöhnungstheater ; Czollek draws here on the work of Michal Bodemann)� This might mean resisting in the realm of public memory what Ben Miller describes as queer discourse’s tendency to search “for the perfectly marginalized, perfectly political subject, which we know doesn’t exist” - and not to make it “usable” for official cultures of remembrance (Miller n. pag.). Another approach is to look to what Avery F� Gordon, via Raymond Williams, has described as a “living presence” in the realm of memory: “When we ‘convert’ relationships, institutions and formations in which we are still actively involved […] into formed wholes rather than forming and formative processes […] only the fixed explicit forms exist, and living presence is always […] receding” (Williams 128). To think about remembering Charlaque from this angle is to not only think about fixed representations of her life but to attend to a sense of aliveness that surrounds her character and trans* histories in the present, not only to integrate and use her memory but shift the modes of remembering themselves� Quilts Memory art can cue us into a different way of remembering. In his Quilt series (2020-) the contemporary German artist Philipp Gufler seeks to create textile counter-archives of queer and trans* histories. Counting over fifty different quilts to date, the series includes panels dedicated to individuals, spaces and places, from Hubert Fichte and Klaus Nomi to the Weimar Era lesbian magazine Die Freundin and Cosy Pièro’s artists bar “Bei Cosy” (see Gufler). Quilt #52, 2023, is dedicated to Charlotte Charlaque� A photograph of her is printed in purple against a light pink background; on the bottom, also in dark purple, the skyline of Manhattan, as seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade� In blue letters, the words “queen of the Brooklyn Heights promenade” dart diagonally across the panel, opening a three-dimensional space� On white fabric, layered over the middle of the main panel, is another photo of Charlaque, this time with Toni Ebel� On the backside of the quilt, the silhouettes of both figures appear. The particular height at which 130 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 the quilt is installed makes it so that it might just catch and match the shadow of someone walking by, a translucent encounter between past and present� Beneath their photo on the front, we see a letter signed “Dr� Felix Abraham,” attesting to Charlaque’s medical transition, just above another photo of an unnamed person in a salon at the Institute of Sexual Sciences� The main image of Charlaque, according to the artist, is taken from an autographed image� It is dedicated to Christine Jorgensen with the words, “To Christine, whom I would be proud to have had as a daughter” - an imaginative conjuring up of queer kin relation� 9 At 180 x 90 cm, the individual panels of Gufler’s quilt series measure the size of a human body, recalling the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial, a project of commemoration, mourning, and activism alike, individual panels crafted out of a variety of materials by friends, family, lovers, or volunteers� 10 Unlike the AIDS quilt panels, Gufler’s quilts are translucent; photos and memorabilia are not sewn onto the quilt but screen printed, sometimes along with text, onto an open weave fabric� When exhibited, the panels are hung such that light can fall through them, their diaphanous character echoing the ephemerality of remembering - and the status of queer and trans* remembrance in particular� Their porous structure speaks to the gaps in established archives of remembering, making room for speculative engagements with historical fragments� In both projects, the AIDS quilt and Gufler’s quilt series, I see not only an instantiation of queer and trans* remembrance but also the articulation of a method for remembering queer and trans* lives� That remembrance can be made up of a patchwork of different materials like the AIDS quilt, fabricated at the intersection of mourning and activism. It can be porous like Gufler’s quilts, full of gaps that at once let light shine through and hold memory in its open weave, knowing that the person remembered is, if anything, in excess of any dates and names of a memorial plaque� Middagh Street Here is one instance of memory shining through: If you take the small, wooden walkway from Brooklyn Bridge Park up toward the promenade, crossing through Squibbs Park, right on the intersection of Columbia Heights and Middagh Street, you hit upon a light blue historical marker with an inscription remembering the history of 7 Middagh, known as “February House�” In the 1940s, the plaque explains, February House was home to writers, composers, and artists - gays and lesbians “in the era before the gay rights movement�” In When Brooklyn Was Queer , Hugh Ryan imagines - and fabulates - the following scene: Arm in arm with Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers bursts out of the door of 7 Middagh Street and into the cool, sweet, smoky night� Somewhere nearby, a ship is coming Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 131 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 into harbor, and its horn spills long, low notes that reverberate through the narrow blocks of Brooklyn Heights� […] Anywhere else in the world, the two women would make an odd pair: the statuesque burlesque queen, and the gangly literary genius� Some say Carson dresses like a man; some say Gypsy secretly is one� They couldn’t give a fig. (Ryan 5) February House at 7 Middagh no longer stands� It was torn down in the late 1940s to make way for the construction of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, that same thoroughfare that today runs beneath the promenade� But down the street, across a fire station, 57 Middagh is still there, former residence of Charlaque� There is no historical marker located on site� The NYC LGBT Historic Sites Project virtually identifies the Pierrepont Hotel as Charlaque’s last residence, just about ten walking minutes away� On their website, the project details her frequent moves� Between 1947 and 1956, Charlaque was living at 20 Leroy Street, 15 Cornelia Street, and 86 West 12th Street, in Greenwich Village, and 57 Middagh Street, in Brooklyn Heights, the neighborhood where she spent her last years� She was living at the Hotel Margaret at 97 Columbia Heights (demolished) when she had a heart attack in 1961, subsequently moving to the Pierrepont Hotel, a few blocks from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade� She lived at the Pierrepont until her death in 1963� 11 Charlaque did not overlap with the residents of 7 Middagh� If she had, her name too might have appeared on that marker, among the artists, queers, and genderqueers� Absent historical markers to her history, I try to imagine her life in the streets of the neighborhood, on Middagh, Hicks, and Pierrepont, try to follow her steps along the still partly cobblestoned streets leading toward the promenade� “She would start speaking to one person and, before you knew it, others would come over and she would be engaged in a lively, intelligent discussion with a dozen,” one friend remembers (qtd� in Rustin 3)� Empty Library The memory of trans* history attaches itself to places, in excess of memorial plaques� Back in Berlin, one such site is the memorial to the book burnings on Berlin’s Bebelplatz, titled “Empty Library” and opened in 1995� Designed by the Israeli artist Micha Ullmann, the memorial consists of a square space sunken into the ground� Covered by glass, it is made of four walls covered with white empty bookshelves that have room for around 20�000 books - approximating the number of books that were burnt at that site on 10 May 1933� The sunken library symbolizes the absence of the books but also, as the artists himself suggested, the freedom of thought and spirit that cannot be burnt� The memorial’s opening 132 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 precedes that of the large-scale Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) and the smaller memorials to other victim groups in its vicinity - the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism (2008), the Memorial to Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism (2012), and the Memorial to the Victims of National Socialist ‘Euthanasia’ Killings (2014)� Next to the memorial on Bebelplatz, two bronze plates provide information and a warning� To the right, the inscription reads: “In the middle of the square on 10 May 1933, Nazi students burnt the works of hundreds of independent authors, journalists, philosophers and academics.” The left side carries a quote from Heinrich Heine, 1820: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people as well�” The book burnings have long held a central place in cultures of remembrance� On 10 May 1934, German writers in exile in Paris initiated the “Deutsche Freiheitsbibliothek” that included, among others, books burnt or censored in Germany� On the tenth anniversary of the book burnings in 1943, three hundred libraries in the United States set their flags at half-mast. After the war, even at a time when remembrance of the Nazi crimes was still largely repressed in Germany, the book burnings were a focus of collective memorialization� As early as 1947, publisher Peter Suhrkamp designated May 10 the “day of the free book,” a tradition that the PEN center and publishing institutions continue since 1979 as “day of the book�” The central memorial at Bebelplatz is frequently visited, and people lay wreaths at its site� What the memorial does not make visible is that the Berlin book burning was directly connected to a raid of the Institute for Sexual Sciences four days earlier on May 6� Burnt were also thousands of books from the Institute’s extensive library that included studies on homosexuality, trans* healthcare, intersexuality, abortion rights, and sexual freedom� Alongside books, a bust of the institute’s director Magnus Hirschfeld was thrown in the fire too. Magnus Hirschfeld died in exile in 1935, but had he returned to Germany after the war, his own homosexuality would have been grounds for continued criminalization and imprisonment under Paragraph 175� In 1995 when the memorial opened, Paragraph 175 had only been repealed for one year� Substantial engagement with the opposition to gender non-conformity and trans* identities within National Socialist ideologies and their continuation in postwar legal frameworks is still missing at that time and so is the story of Charlaque’s life, her role in Hirschfeld’s institute, and the history of the institute’s role in the book burnings� Transparent Here is a different mode of remembrance of the book burnings, one in which the figure of Charlaque makes a wayward appearance: in the second season of Joey Soloway’s TV Series Transparent , a number of flashbacks move from the Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 133 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 main story of a Jewish trans* woman and her family in present-day LA back to 1930s Berlin where we encounter “aunt Gittel,” who is also trans* and frequents Hirschfeld’s institute� Soloway credits Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: The Birthplace of a Modern Identity with inspiration for the historical backdrop of their show� Beachy does not mention Charlaque and neither does Soloway, but when we see Gittel dancing at a party at the institute, Charlaque seems to be in the room, the fictional character of Gittel echoing fragments of her life. In season 2, episode 9, the show conjoins the past and present day storylines: the character Ali, grand-niece of aunt Gittel, stands at a bonfire at a women’s festival that had just exposed its transphobic character when the character of her young aunt appears, surrounded by men in Nazi uniforms throwing books into the flames and dragging Gittel away� Trans* history here haunts the present, pop cultural archive, and Charlaque’s story haunts the show, in the sense that Gordon speaks of haunting: “a tangled exchange of noisy silences and seething absences,” the “sociality of living with ghosts, a sociality both tangible and tactile as well as ephemeral and imaginary” (Gordon 200—01)� Eldorado In 2023, almost a decade after the show Transparent , the Netflix documentary Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate brought Charlaque to the screen directly. Directed by Benjamin Cantu, the film unfolds from the site of the Eldorado nightclub, a queer venue that was frequented by known figures including Hirschfeld, Ernst Röhm - and Charlaque� In a conversation between Cantu and Klaus Müller, who served as dramaturgical and historical consultant to the documentary, the generational shift - and what it means in terms of trans* remembrance, is highlighted� Over twenty years before Eldorado , Müller had initiated the 2001 documentary Paragraph 175 that focused on the persecution of homosexuals under National Socialism� As Cantu says, the goal was to reprocess the history of a time when “ LGBT people experienced their sexual and emotional freedom and, at the same time, extreme oppression” (Müller and Cantu n� pag�)� Reflecting on the changing state of research on LGBTIQ * histories, Cantu notes, “the stories of trans people have been added� They were unknown at the time, and even today we’re just at the beginning” (Müller and Cantu n� pag�)� In Eldorado , Charlaque is introduced by writer, historian, and activist Morgan M. Page. Page had provided the voice-over for the opening of the film, introducing the Eldorado as a spectacular nightclub, “fantastic sign out front - ‘Here it is right’ �” Now, she zooms in on Charlaque: “One of the people you will meet here is Charlotte Charlaque, a Jewish American-German intellectual� She’s traveled the world, she’s lived in America, in Germany, in France, and is about to become one of the first people to undergo sex-reassignment surgery in the world.” While 134 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 Page speaks, we see photographs of Charlaque, one of her alongside Toni Ebel and Dori Richter, the other one a portrait of her alone, before the film cuts to a fictionalized reenactment of a night at the Eldorado where Charlaque, played by actress Eli Otto Kappo, appears in the crowd of patrons in evening gowns and smokings, dancers and waiters, a cigarette in hand� In subsequent clips, we hear of her relationship to Toni Ebel, of the way in which their relationship developed, of Toni’s conversion to Judaism, of the two women’s decision to leave Hirschfeld’s institute and flee to Czechoslovakia, and eventually of Charlaque’s escape to the US� In the final ten minutes of the documentary, we see old footage of the Brooklyn Bridge and the streets of New York, hear briefly of Charlaque’s time there, before the film cuts back to present-day Berlin and to Page, this time on one of the boats on the Spree, reflecting: “I think about what I would do in that situation. Do I need to flee? You know, where would I go? ” There is an overlaying happening here between the past and the present, the filmic montage supporting the connection between the East River and the Spree, between fictionalized reenactments and archival footage creating the sense that the present is porous toward the past� The patchwork story of Charlaque’s life includes not only fragments from her own lifespan; interwoven in its porous texture is also that of future trans* lives and stories� Queering the Map Consider another tangled exchange between past and present: the interactive, crowdsourced project Queering the Map is “a digital atlas that invites L�G�B�T�Q � people to tag any point on earth with an anonymous message describing what the location means to them” (Oung n� pag�)� In 2023, the site surpassed half a million submissions� Sometimes, the pins point to known places of queer history, but most of the time, they indicate everyday sites, first kisses, a missed connection, moments of coming out, first HRT treatments, crushes, heartbreak� There is no shortage of notes, neither in Berlin nor in New York, the two places in which I trace the memory of Charlaque’s life� I zoom in on Brooklyn Heights� Pinned in the middle of the East River, in view of the promenade, a note: “we were on a boat for our junior prom, and she came up to me […] i love her with my entire dumb lesbian heart�” On Clark Street, three blocks south of Middagh and two blocks east from the promenade, the following short note: “realized I wasn’t cis�” In Berlin, I look for Nollendorfplatz� At the corner of Else-Lasker- Schüler Street, a pin that asks in disbelief: “seriously no one tagged this place yet? ? It’s the gay epicentre of Berlin�” Further down on Maaßenstraße, another pin: “In memoriam Magnus Hirschfeld�” And on Motzstraße, just two blocks down - and next to a pin that notes “first date with a girl I met on Tinder. She Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 135 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 had the most beautiful eyes” -the following: “Here was the legendary ballroom Eldorado� Look it up! ” Charlaque does not appear on the map� But in between these pinned notes left in an anonymous online space over the last ten years or so and the historical fragments of her life that tie her to these places, a web emerges, translucent like Gufler’s quilts, that holds her life story too. Openings The past decade has seen growing historical research on trans* people under National Socialism� Most recently, Jennifer V� Evans’s study The Queer Art of History: Queer Kinship after Fascism , offers a multifaceted, “capacious history of LGBTQIA life after fascism,” developing a “methodology that allows us to think intersectionally, across difference, to open the frame to new and diverse ways people have come together historically, to truly queer history” (Evans 215)� Evans’s notion of queer kinship holds space for trans* experiences too� If there is, as Evans shows, a “queer art of history,” I wonder what a “queer art of memory” looks like, and a “trans* art of memory” too� Memory studies, as the field of research that dedicates itself to the study of “the social, cultural, cognitive, political and technological shifts affecting how, what and why individuals, groups and societies remember, and forget,” 12 has oriented itself along concepts such as trauma and testimony, “postmemory,” “multidirectional memory” or “transnational remembrance” (Hirsch; Rothberg; Huyssen)� Over the last two decades, these concepts have profoundly reoriented the discourse on collective memory, articulating the stakes of transgenerational trauma, the relational effects of remembrance in an age of decolonization, as well as the movements of memory in a globalized world� How would trans* experiences and histories inflect the valence of these concepts? In the realm of public memorialization, meanwhile, it seemed like Germany over the last decade was headed toward a transgender tipping point� Growing historical research on the lives of trans* and gender non-conforming individuals during National Socialism expanded the scholarly understanding and public visibility of stories like that of Charlaque, and it became possible to imagine that, following the opening of the Berlin Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazism in 2008, there might soon be a similar move to include the specific history of trans* people in the official memorial landscape. This might come in the shape of a representational memorial, centering figures like Charlaque, or abstract, like the Berlin Holocaust Memorial and its aesthetic continuation in the Memorial to Persecuted Homosexuals� Claus Richter’s “Ein seltsam klassisches Denkmal,” dedicated as an LGBTIQ + site of remembrance that opened in Düsseldorf in 2021, is a first to explicitly integrate gender diversity, including 136 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 non-binary identities through representational sculpture (Yildirim n� pag�)� Other cities might follow, if the political conditions allow for it, that is� The fact that trans* remembrance has not yet undergone the integration into an official culture of remembrance, that it has not yet been turned into a “usable past,” might also offer a moment of potential, where the stakes of remembrance can be rethought - and rearticulated. Following Charlaque can offer an invitation to think about remembrance after National Socialism not only as the recollection and acknowledgment of persecution and death but as a way of attending to the aliveness of trans* histories: to make a life in the present that is bound up with the lives of trans* figures, to understand trans* histories as bound up in the fabric of contemporary social life� Stonewall On Thursday, 13 February 2025, the official entry about the Stonewall National Monument on the National Park Services website was purged of specific references to trans* people, followed by the erasure of the terms “intersex” and “queer�” Instead of a memorial to LGBTIQ+ histories, communities, and lives, the site of the Stonewall riots that marked the beginning of a new era in the struggle for LGBTIQ + rights is now an “ LGB monument” (Nowell n� pag�)� What looks like an awkward and clumsy error on the page is a visual manifestation of the erasure of queer and trans* lives from the civic sphere - one that materializes in people’s lives in 2025 as the sudden loss of access to healthcare, in passport documents rendered invalid, and immigration and travel statuses imperiled (Gessen; Carmel)� The changes to the Stonewall memorial show the fragility of representation in public, state-sponsored memorials� Once given, it can also be taken away at any point. Official trans* remembrance can expose what Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton have described as a “trap door” dynamic, where the promise of representation in a liberal society and the visibility and exposure that come with it can tip over into experiences of increased violence (Gossett et al�)� Acts of speculative memory, of fabulation alongside grassroots artistic and community memory might offer a different mode of remembering that is not (or not only) about bringing trans* histories out of the shadows, not about ridding trans* histories of their “haunting” status and stabilizing them into an official remembrance culture but rather a way of attending to the aliveness of trans* histories as they permeate the present� And yet this is not an argument against public forms of remembrance either� In fact, the case of the Stonewall monument raises the question what the present would look like had public memorialization of trans* histories occurred earlier� What if public remembrance of the book burnings, for instance, had included from the beginning an awareness Translucent Memories: Trans* Remembrance and the Case of Charlotte Charlaque 137 DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 of the role that the oppression and indeed erasure of queer and trans* identities took within National Socialist ideology? Could the current erasure have been prevented? Queen of the Promenade II From the Stonewall Monument, it is about a ninety-minute walk to Brooklyn Heights� Too long perhaps for a casual stroll, but if you set out on this walk, you would likely cross through the West Village into Lower Manhattan and then via the Manhattan or Brooklyn bridge into Charlaque’s old neighborhood� There are no photos of Charlaque on the promenade, but it is not hard to imagine her in this place, even sixty years after her death, when the brownstones of Brooklyn Heights outprice most other neighborhoods in the borough, no longer a place where someone like Charlaque living on $83 a month could find a home (Wolfert 90). Even so, the light must still be the same, the sounds of ships carrying over the water, the rhythm of pedestrians on the promenade inevitably slowed down by the sprawling views� Even today, this could still be her promenade� If you ever visit, remember her there� Notes 1 Det Kongelige Bibliotek (Kopenhagen): Charlotte Charlaque (“Charlotte von Curtius”) an George William und Florence Jorgensen, [1952/ 53] (cited in Wolfert 16)� 2 To date, Raimund Wolfert offers the most comprehensive biography of Charlaque� 3 Susan Neiman, for instance, famously suggested that other nations could and should be “learning from the Germans” - an argument that has also more broadly been a central tenant in public discourse on memory culture both in Germany and the US over the last decade� Neiman has since retracked her argument in confrontation of what she describes as “memory culture gone haywire” in the aftermath of 7 October 2023� See Neiman, Learning from the Germans ; Neiman, “Historical Reckoning Gone Haywire�” 4 For a more comprehensive discussion of the legacy of Paragraph 175 and the Nazi past in West Germany and a comparative perspective to the GDR see chapter 2 of W� Jake Newsome’s Pink Triangle Legacies � 5 Recent research on lesbian and trans* victims of National Socialism as well as broader historical research into queer history during the Nazi period include the work of Bodie Ashton, Jennifer Evans, Anna Hájková, Samuel Clowes Huneke, Laurie Marhoefer, and Claudia Schoppmann� 138 Simone Stirner DOI 10.24053/ CG-59-0007 6 https: / / www�berlin�de/ ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/ ueber-den-bezirk/ geschichte/ persoenlichkeiten-und-gedenktafeln/ artikel�125707�php 7 For details see: http: / / www�hirschfeld�in-berlin�de/ stiftung/ foundation�htm� 8 For details see: https: / / www�berlin�de/ sen/ lads/ schwerpunkte/ lsbti/ magnus-hirschfeld-tag� 9 Conversation with the artist on 10 February 2025� (See Wolfert 96—97) 10 See also: https: / / forummuenchen.org/ en/ six-quilts-by-philipp-gufler-apublic-art-project� 11 https: / / www�nyclgbtsites�org/ site/ charlotte-charlaque-residence/ 12 As defined by the journal Memory Studies � https: / / journals�sagepub�com/ overview-metric/ MSS Works Cited Ashton, Bodie A. “The Parallel Lives of Liddy Bacroff: Transgender (Pre)History and the Tyranny of the Archive in Twentieth-Century Germany�” German History 42�1 (2024): 79—100� Bodemann, Y� Michal� Gedächtnistheater: Die jüdische Gemeinschaft und ihre deutsche Erfindung � Berlin: Rotbuch, 1996� Carmel, Juno. “How Changes to U.S. Gender Policy Could Affect Your Passport.” nytimes.com � New York Times, 27 Feb� 2025� Web� 15 Jan� 2026� Czollek, Max� Desintegriert Euch! 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