Wrik Mead | Camp / 2000

staying alive

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead (screenwriter and director) Camp / 2000 [12 minutes]

 

Unlike so may of Canadian director Wrik Mead’s wonderful shorts, Camp has no coy humor and serves as a totally serious documentary about the arrest and murder of German homosexuals during Hitler’s reign.

    It begins quickly with almost abstract images of male flesh, representing the bars of Berlin in the Weimar Republic, some of the most open gay and lesbian friendly places on earth. Almost immediately in this compressed recounting, they are closed with new laws against public lewd and sexual behavior, where now suddenly even a look at someone for too long but result in arrest and imprisonment.

     175ers (named after the law against homosexual behavior had remained in place even during the last days of the Weimar Republic, but had basically been ignored) were now arrested and offered freedom if they identified others. But, of course, the promises of freedom were never kept. In fact, an amendment to the law regarding public hygiene offered castration as an alternative. Up to 100,000 homosexuals were arrested, and 15,000 sent to camps; but the narrator tells us that those numbers are probably far lower than reported since up until the early 21st century, the survivors were still seen as law-breakers. The conditions at the camps, as we all know now because of the stories from Jewish Holocaust survivors, were horrific, although it’s rather unfortunate that Mead does not at all mention that the camps were mostly created for the extermination of the Jews.

     And unfortunately, as well, Mead spends several moments of this short with a bar-like slot, a man behind it mostly blinking. But he follows up with the narrator commenting that homosexual were not “systematically eliminated” like other groups. “It was believed that their behavior could corrected. Can a homosexual be fixed?

    The screen shows a knife cutting the words in blood across a man’s chest: “hard labour isolation,” followed by brief cuts to images of prisoners struggling in the camp before returning the man’s chest with new words being cut across his lower chest and abdomen: “torture, beatings, hormones.”

     Again we watch prisoners in the midst of their sufferings before the screen returns again to the bloody body where one more word is etched in blood: “castration.”

     Homosexuals, we are told, were often ostracized from the other prisoners and were not allowed any communion, although the narrator claims this was not so bad since otherwise their were often beaten by other prisoners as well as camp commanders.

    To keep the homosexual prisoners from masturbating they were not allowed to sleep at night with their hands under the covers. If they were found breaking the rules, some were dragged out into the cold snow naked, water poured over their heads. Those who did survive, were often denied treatment in the clinic.    

     The longest sequence of this 12-minute work shows a shivering, naked man sitting on his bed, while another naked man crawls toward him, the two simply touch and hugging.

     While the pink patch is actually stitched into a prisoner’s skin, the narrator reads a letter from a prisoner home, explaining that he in now in a hospital, which is several ways worse than the camp because of constant surveillance. He wonders can he ever be free of the stigma.

     The entire landscape that Mead shows us at the end as turned pink.

     Although this is a truly moving film about a subject that needs far more attention and recollections, Mead is not, if this is evidence, a brilliant documentarian. There have been far more moving and intelligent recountings of the gay prisoners in the camps, including the Martin Sherman play made into the 1997 movie by Sean Mathias, Bent. And it is crucial, it seems to me, that the Nazi attack on the gay community, as horrific as it is, is always presented in the larger context of the 6 million European Jews that died in the Nazi camps. No one, moreover, hardly even mentions, anymore, the death of the Romansch people also perceived as dangerous outsiders.

     Yet, it is important and fascinating to watch how the brilliant filmmaker Mead approaches such a serious gay subject. And it is important also, that the Nazi treatment of homosexuals not simply became a footnote to the far more devastating Holocaust.

 

Los Angeles, February 27, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2026).