image description: book cover which reads "The Lilac People: a novel, Milo Todd" over a watercolour-style image of a white man in 1940s clothing standing in a wheat field with his back to us
Welcome back to Queer Book Club! It’s November, that wonderful month when the days are so short and the essays are so, so long. What I am beginning to lack in vitamin D and motivation, I make up for in appreciation for this month’s book, The Lilac People by Milo Todd.
First, I’ve got to say that historical fiction walks a very fine line with me. Growing up, I absolutely loved it, and I did end up a history student, so clearly something stuck. Past the age of twelve or so, though, I was repeatedly bamboozled into reading boring, sappy heterosexual nonsense in a Temu matte-painting version of a historical setting. I came to the conclusion that the vast majority of historical fiction for adults is very, very bad. “Justice for the genre!” I said, giving up on it almost entirely. Well, justice for the genre is exactly what Milo Todd has brought, and I love him dearly for it. He went for the hardest niche to salvage — WWII novels, done to death and with little to show for it — and knocked it out of the park on the first try. In fact, I feel like the cover and title are parodying those godawful ones called something like 'The Winter Girls' with a thin white woman in a sepia filter facing wistfully away from the camera on the cover. I may be reading too much into it; however, I am choosing to believe.
The Lilac People is set in a small town in Germany immediately in the wake of World War II. A middle-aged couple have survived the war against all odds: Bertie, a trans man, and Sofie, his bisexual partner, came up in the liberated queer scene of Weimar Berlin only to be forced underground by the rise and terror of the Nazis. One day, a young trans man recently freed from a concentration camp collapses in their garden, and their already precarious life becomes exponentially more dangerous. This book comes with a hearty trigger warning for just about everything — inevitable, considering the setting — but especially for period-typical transphobia and sexual violence. The author deals with deeply traumatic topics respectfully and carefully, and while certain scenes were just gut-wrenchingly hard to read, I never found them gratuitous, gross or played for trauma porn. The language used around gender and sexuality is also period-typical but, again, dealt with so well that it never felt inappropriate.
I will be going on about how well-rooted in history this novel is for ages, because it genuinely blew me away. Many people do not know that the Allied occupying forces did not free queer prisoners from concentration camps and/or re-imprisoned them on homosexuality or “crossdressing” charges. People are also tragically unaware of the brilliant queer communities of interwar Germany, especially in Berlin. These and many other facts make up the background of the novel, but take on a real, vivid life of their own in the narrative. I absolutely loved the flashback scenes — another major strength of this book is managing to be very descriptive and informative without ever once being boring. I could not put it down. Also, having Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld written in as a character was a lot of fun — and the same goes for Dora Richter! I’ll try not to give you homework in every review, but this time really warrants it: please go learn more about trans history, starting with Dora Richter’s Wikipedia page. I do appreciate that the author clarified in his appendices that he had to mess around with the timeline to make it work. I fully support having fun with characters of the past as long as we stay aware that accuracy is important.
I also really liked the bits of German woven into the text: it didn’t interrupt the flow of language at all, instead making the sense of setting stronger and the narrative voice more interesting. The characters were all very lovable and complex, and I enjoyed all the time I got to spend with them. The author had very very interesting things to say and said them in a way that felt original and not heavy-handed at all. The exploration of Bertie and Sofie’s sense of complicity in the Holocaust alongside their own status as victims of the Nazis was so well-developed and nuanced. From great takes on trans men’s relationships with gender-based violence, to patriotism and sense of place, identity, gender and passing, or family, the whole thing is very thoughtful and compelling to read.
The research done for this was clearly both extensive and academically rigorous. One of these days, I’ll work through the bibliography — every book listed sounds amazing — a thousand blessings on the author for including one in the first place. There is precious little historical record of queer life from this period, but The Lilac People still manages to grow beautifully out of the negative space. The author included a wonderful research summary as an appendix at the end, which explains, among other things, that the transmasculine characters in the novel are named after the only three trans men known from interwar Germany: Karl M. Baer (who was also intersex), Berthold Buttgereit, and Gerd Katter. The latter two are known through, respectively, the only extant “transvestite passport” and “transvestite identity card” associated with trans men. Dr. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin is known to have issued many of these documents in the interwar period, which allowed trans people to be legally recognized in public life under their chosen names and (theoretically) be left alone by the authorities. It cannot be overstated how progressive this was for the time; equally, the word “transvestite”, which now sounds awfully outdated to us, was a meaningfully progressive, neutral-to-positive term adopted by trans people as a self-descriptor as well as an official category. All this progress and recogniton came to a halt in 1933 when the Institute, along with nearly all of its records, were destroyed by the Nazis, and exceptions to laws against gender nonconformity and/or sexual “deviance” were no longer tolerated. This event looms large in The Lilac People and in real life: it arguably set queer and trans rights back at least fifty years.
The preservation or erasure of historical record is a frequently returning theme, with the characters repeatedly having to destroy evidence of their queer lives and community in order to be safe. The grief of losing your own mementoes/photos/diaries is compounded by that of knowing you’re robbing future generations of queer history. The conclusion the narrative reaches is that we — queer people, our living bodies and memories — are our own historical record, and we have the responsibility of bearing that forward, creating community and passing along the long story of joy and love which is our heritage. In the big ‘25, as we watch queer people (and especially our trans siblings) be recriminalized and queer history be erased from public spaces, libraries, curricula, and popular culture, this reminder is more timely than ever. This has all happened before, and we owe it both to our elders and to ourselves to take on the lessons of the past. I couldn’t help but think, as I sat with this story, that we have a responsibility to document queer life in a way that will endure– of course not at the expense of safety, but as far as we are able, individually and together. Take pictures, print them, keep them in a biscuit tin; keep diaries, write explicitly about your identity and experiences and philosophy; safeguard personal records; make art; create/buy/store a library of physical books and resources, especially those most likely to be banned. I don’t mean to sound like a doomsday prepper, but physical materials are so incredibly valuable, even if only for future historians.
I’ve neglected to talk about a lot of pretty crucial plot points, but that’s because I think it would detract from the experience to know too much in advance. Just go read it! Restore your faith in historical fiction. This book will have you crying and laughing and doing research and feeling that thing in your heart that only trans & queer joy can spark, and then crying some more. I loved it and I think you’ll love it too. As ever, this is a book club: if you have thoughts, I would be so happy to hear them.
With so, so much love to all. Until next time,
Rowan (she/her)