Sneha Jaiswal (Twitter | Instagram)
Berlin is the place where everything happens—it’s the capital of sin. The narrator emphasizes the word “sin” as the title ‘Eldorado’ spins onto your screen. The 2023 Netflix documentary, directed by Benjamin Cantu and Matt Lambert, revolves around a Berlin nightclub called ‘Eldorado,’ which was a popular party spot for the city’s queer community in the 1920s. The club’s sign screamed “Hier ist richtig,” roughly translating to “here it is right” in English. This phrase symbolizes the freedom and liberation that the club’s glittering confines offered to members of the LGBTQ+ community, almost a 100 years ago, just when Hitler’s Nazi party was on the rise. The documentary thus follows how the queer community was crushed in the German reich.
El Dorado is a legendary mythical city of gold, famously depicted in Voltaire’s Candide (1759) as a blissful wealthy kingdom where everyone is content with their lives. However, in the vibrant era of Berlin known as the Golden 1920s, El Dorado was more than a mere legend—it was a real club pulsating with shimmering costumes, provocative dances, and passionate rendezvous.
About 90 minutes long, the documentary uses file footage, newspaper clippings and re-creates several stories and figures to make its story-telling more compelling.Through these means, significant figures from the 1920s queer community are brought back to life. Like the famous sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who founded the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (‘Institute of Sexual Research’) in Berlin and was one of the earliest advocates of transgender rights in the world. He befriended Jewish-American Charlotte Charlaque, a trans-woman at the club, who along with her girlfriend soon started working for him at the institute. Eldorado also attracted actors, singers, athletes, and notably, a key Nazi figure who was very close to Hitler
The documentary evokes memories of “Goodbye To Berlin” by Christopher Isherwood, a gay American author who formed close friendships at Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute. Similar to Isherwood’s novel, this documentary vividly captures the exhilarating and hedonistic lifestyle that characterized Berlin, where people blissfully indulged themselves, detached from the looming politics of war. However, what seemed like an era of sexual revolution is cut-short after Hitler’s decisive win and the LGBTQ+ community’s freedom is short-lived. Although the Jewish population endured the harshest scale of victimization, it is crucial to acknowledge that anyone who did not conform to the Nazis’ ideal of an ‘Aryan race’ faced a similar fate.
Among the interviewees featured in the documentary, Walter Arlen, a Jewish composer born in 1920, vividly recalls how Hitler’s speeches instilled fear in him during his youth in the 1930s and 1940s. Tragically, his father was captured and sent to a concentration camp, while Walter managed to survive and eventually escape to America in search of a better life. However, Walter Arlen’s story stands as a reminder of the few fortunate ones, as many others were not as lucky. The Netflix documentary pays homage to the countless men and women who suffered persecution due to their sexual orientation, enduring surveillance and being treated as criminals under the scrutiny of the ‘Pink lists.’ Eldorado serves as a poignant reminder of the fleeting nature of freedom, emphasizing that even the most hard-won progress can be swiftly dismantled by a single individual in power.
Stream the documentary on Netflix.