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Daniel Guérin. The Brown Plague: Travels in Late Weimar and Early Nazi Germany. Trans, with an introduction by Robert Schwartzwald. Durham: Duke UP, 1994. 187 pages.
Daniel Guérin (1904-1988) was a French leftist who traveled across Germany by foot and by bicycle in 1932 and 1933, and recorded his impressions in a travel journal. He published his observations from the first trip in several French periodicals in 1932 and 1933. After the war, he used these articles as source material for a revised account which was expanded to include the second journey as well. The current translation includes the original periodical material and Guérin's book: The Brown PUgue. Divergences between the different versions of the text are set apart or indicated in footnotes.
The extensive forty-page introduction by the translator, Robert Schwartzwald, provides an overview of the socio-political history of Weimar and biographical background on Guérin, oudining his place as an outsider in French political and historical thought. This position is determined in part by Guérin's refusal to follow any particular party line and by his homosexuality.
As Schwartzwald indicates in the introduction, Guérin regarded homosexuality as a "politically transgressive practice" (9), and in some of his writings, such as his autobiography and the essays he wrote for the gay press, there is a greater focus on it than in this work. It is perhaps exaggerated for the cover of the book to bill this text as a part of gay and lesbian studies, since at the time he published the material, censorship was so strong that Guérin could only suggest his sexual proclivities between die lines. Even so, according to the translator in his introduction, die homoerotic undercurrent was sufficiendy strong to delay the appearance of the English version until the present time. It can be sensed, for instance, in the way Guérin describes the people he meets. On the one hand, despite his politics, he is quite taken with the muscular prowess of die Nazi "youths between fifteen and twenty, blond-haired with virile voices . . . tan forearms. Sculptured knees . . . pectorals. Legs were deeply tanned, muscles taut and hard" (49). These "Aryan" beauties decked out in leather evoke in him a clear awareness of the...