Episode Details

I Will Not Abandon You: Queer Women in Nazi Germany (Aevo UTP, 2026) brings to life the unrelenting defiance of queer women in fascist Germany.

In his latest book, award-winning historian Samuel Clowes Huneke shows how love, queer resistance, and collective action survived in the harrowing circumstances of Nazi rule. Drawing on a decade of archival research, Huneke takes readers into a hidden world, from the wartime balls that lesbian activists continued to organize to the concentration camps where women accused of loving women were imprisoned. Following a diverse cast of characters, Huneke reveals both the oppression that queer women faced and how they resisted fascism in solidarity with one another. Arguing that this solidarity – which transcended race, class, and gender – offers a compelling alternative to today’s fractured identity politics, I Will Not Abandon You is a vital, new history of queer life under fascism and a call to rethink the foundations of progressive politics today.

Deep Acharya is a PhD student and a George L. Mosse fellow of Modern European Cultural History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison working on the history of fatherhood in 20th century Germany.

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