Review: 'Eldorado – Everything the Nazis Hate' Recreates a Moment of LGBTQ+ Liberation

Stop me if you've heard this one before – or if you've seen it outside your own front door: A rapid cultural shift brings LGBTQ+ people to a moment of greater societal and legal acceptance than ever before. Transgender people can live openly. Gay men and lesbians can be together in public, and gay bars are playgrounds for people of all orientations and gender identities.

But then a political movement calibrated to exploit cultural resentments finds its way to power and the outlook swiftly darkens. As the prospects for LGBTQ+ people rapidly constrict, politicians within the government's own legislative bodies begin to rot democracy from within... even as they cozy up to militias that bring violence to the streets.

A moment of LGBTQ+ liberation is snatched away, and terror follows.

That's the story of Germany in the 1920s and '30s, as the Weimar Republic slid, with sudden and catastrophic speed, into what became the Nazi regime, with its attendant atrocities. Among the first casualties were gay and trans people, as well as researchers into the facts – not the politics – of human sexuality, like Magnus Hirschfeld, whose Institute of Sex Research (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) was targeted by a mob of Nazi youth, ransacked, and destroyed (along with much of Hirschfeld's research).

Another institution the Nazis targeted: A gay bar in Berlin called the Eldorado, whose slogan was "Here it's right!" ("Hier ist richtig!"). Eldorado actually had five locations, two of which were gay bars, but there's no need to pick nits when the new Netflix streaming documentary, "Eldorado – Everything the Nazis Hate" is so brim-full of compelling stories, chilling parallels to today's America, and spirited re-enactments of what nights at the Eldorado must have been like: Drag shows, dancing, and – for many LGBTQ+ people, especially trans people just coming to understand themselves – discovery.

We hear the stories of a few of the Eldorado's patrons, including two transwomen (one of them a neophyte at living as a woman, the other Jewish-American intellectual Charlotte Charlaque) who find each other and fall in love; a young married couple that includes gay nobleman and tennis champion Gottfried von Cramm, who had a long-term relationship with another man; and Ernst Röhm, a prominent Nazi who was openly gay, but who thought his proximity to Adolf Hitler would save him from the vicious power struggles within the authoritarian regime (three guesses as to how that turned out... though his delusion seems to be one that's shared by a shocking number of contemporary LGBTQ+ people who hew to the fringe right).

Director Benjamin Cantu seamlessly blends dramatic, well-produced re-enactments of historical settings with archival footage and photographs. Cantu brings in historians to help explain the times and their context (among them podcaster and openly gay historian Ben Miller and historian Robert M. Beachy, who has a shelf full of books on gay history to his credit), and trains his camera on the descendants of some of the people the doc focuses on. But he also includes interviews with people who were alive when the Nazis took over Germany and destroyed an open, democratic, and increasingly accepting society in a mere handful of years. One interviewee in particular, Walter Arlen, stands out: He was not a patron of the Eldorado, but he, too, has a moving same-sex love story to share.

The need to remember history is with us always; the need to remember this particular history is crucial, and urgent, to the exact moment in which we find ourselves. "These people were living the type of life that I live now," openly transgender writer and activist Morgan M. Page notes, while trans historian Zavier Nunn observes, "Even today, you can have these liberties, and they can be taken away from you."

They say those who do not remember history are fated to repeat it, but it seems sometimes in recent years that we've been seeing efforts to actively erase history in order to hasten a repeat of the horrors of the past. Recent cinematic and literary efforts to preserve that history give no one an excuse not to know where we've been and where we might be heading all over again. The only ignorance now is willful ignorance. For anyone who wants the kind of understanding and perspective that the past offers us, "Eldorado – Everything the Nazis Hate" is an accessible, potent slice of history we'd do better to avoid repeating.

"Eldorado – Everything the Nazis Hate" streams on Netflix beginning June 28.