Hugo Marcus (1880–1966) was a man of many names and many identities. Born a German Jew, he converted to Islam and took the name Hamid, becoming one of the most prominent Muslims in Germany prior to World War II. He was renamed Israel by the Nazis and sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp before escaping to Switzerland. He was a gay man who never called himself gay but fought for homosexual rights and wrote queer fiction under the pen name Hans Alienus during his decades of exile.

In German, Jew, Muslim, Gay, Marc David Baer uses Marcus’s life and work to shed new light on a striking range of subjects, including German Jewish history and anti-Semitism, Islam in Europe, Muslim-Jewish relations, and the history of the gay rights struggle. Baer explores how Marcus created a unique synthesis of German, gay, and Muslim identity that positioned Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as an intellectual and spiritual model. Marcus’s life offers a new perspective on sexuality and on competing conceptions of gay identity in the multilayered world of interwar and postwar Europe. His unconventional story reveals new aspects of the interconnected histories of Jewish and Muslim individuals and communities, including Muslim responses to Nazism and Muslim experiences of the Holocaust. An intellectual biography of an exceptional yet little-known figure, German, Jew, Muslim, Gay illuminates the complexities of twentieth-century Europe’s religious, sexual, and cultural politics.

"This biography succeeds in contextualizing his ideas, while leaving the man himself, rightly perhaps, still somewhat in the shadows." - Times Literary Supplement

"Offers a full look at a writer and thinker who successfully lived in and moved among different worlds." - Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review

"Baer delivers an inspiring story that changes our perception about larger historiographical issues." - German History

"It is indubitable that any reader of this extraordinary biography will be rewarded with a profound insight into the nature of religious passion and its intersection with sexual desire, in particular among marginalized, oppressed, persecuted, and exiled individuals such as Marcus." - Journal of the American Academy of Religion

"The book reveals fascinating facets of Marcus’s life as a Jewish, Muslim, and gay German. Yet Marcus belonged to all and none of these categories. If anything, his life and death are a testament to the failure of compartmentalizing identity and intellectual history." - German Historical Institute London Bulletin

"Offers a full look at a writer and thinker who successfully lived in and moved among different worlds. It should bring attention to a long-neglected figure and his writings." - The Gay & Lesbian Review / Worldwide