| Abstract | Public knowledge and awareness of the persecution of homosexuality in National Socialist Germany remained until 1979, when the play Bent by Martin Sherman dramatized for the first time the lives of homosexuals during the Nazi era for Anglo-American theater audiences. Here, Seifert discusses how contemporary Anglo-American fiction has tried to understand the persecution of homosexuality in Nazi Germany in terms of the better-known history of the events that have been named the Holocaust or the Shoah. He investigates the nature of the specific epistemological framework that the writers have adopted for their understanding of the historical events and the purposes it has served in contemporary contexts.
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