Eldorado Everything the Nazis Hate Review: Also known as Eldorado Alles was die Nazis hassen, is a German-English documentary film that came out on Netflix on June 28, 2023. It was directed by Benjamin Cantu, and written by him alongside Felix Kriegheim. The investigative and intimate approach of the docufilm involves narrations by prolific historians who bridge the gap between a drear past and the contemporary modernity, reminding us that history is not too far apart from the present. If forgotten, there’s nothing stopping it from being repeated and casting a shadow on the world and people we know now.
With a runtime of 92 minutes, the Netflix documentary maps out Hitler’s rise to power in Berlin in the 1920s, and with that context in mind, it fleshes out the lives of the LGBTQI+ community, and their ultimate heart-rending persecution.
Eldorado Everything the Nazis Hate Netflix Review Does Not Contain Spoilers
Eldorado Everything the Nazis Hate Review: Discussion
In hindsight, whenever the present looks back at the Nazi history, regardless of what particular context we may be diving into, or whichever lens we choose to look through at those persecuting years, the one aspect and vision that stays common in all of these narratives is the portrayal of their ways of life as hyper-masculine, in all ways possible. Ultimately, leading to be a very skewed way at that, it in turn gave rise to toxicity. Yet again, this Netflix docufilm probes into how this fixation on hyper-masculinity, shuts off people’s agencies to be sensitive to others who don’t adhere to the normative lifestyle, leaving them with barely any room to breathe as themselves.
Going through these words again reminds us that if we were to take away just the Nazi word out of that explanation, it would very much expound on one of the major factors contributing to hate against the LGBTQ+ community even today. The conversations happening therein, open the viewer’s mind to acknowledge the similar toxic outlook that prevails in the present day as well.
Early on, the movie sets Eldorado, a hedonistic and glamorous nightclub, at the centre of its discussion and the heart of the LGBTQ+ community back then in Berlin, offering its counterparts a “window of queer life”, and to enjoy their lives to the fullest as the most authentic version of themselves. In order to send the message across, and set the storyline in realism, alluring re-enactments of the past are painted to keep the audience interested, and the visuals so dealt out are almost synonymous to the image of a free old Hollywood landscape, with the Eldorado sign shining as a beacon of light and hope in the dreadful darkness surrounding it.
The many characters introduced to us are Magnus Hirschfeld, a human sexuality researcher, two transwomen, the gay nobleman and tennis player Gottfried von Cramm, and his polygamous relationship with Lisa and Manasse, Ernst Röhm, aka a renowned Nazi who was openly gay, but also on first name terms with Hitler himself, and many others. By laying out these many names at the onset of the film, Cantu’s direction grounds it in reality, and as for the present subplot, he also welcomes first-hand accounts from the survivors of the past horrors.
He first builds up the beauty of this line of nightclubs in Berlin, and the re-acted sequences almost transport us back to the moment, making the viewer feel that they have personal insight into conversations and intimacy of the club where people honed their true identities. It then all comes falling apart once the Nazi regime, hell-bent on creating the “pure Aryan” worldview, targets the third gender and the queer community.
Not only is the one place this community saw as a safe haven completely brought to the ground, the counterparts of the story are also tried as criminals, which again goes on to be in sync with how many people generalise the queer community as either “perverted” and “mentally ill” in the new age. While we may have gained a lot of acceptance over the years on this front, these conversations still haven’t been normalised on the general world map. The speaking heads set in the present in this documentary also take a moment to put themselves in those old people’s shoes, who’ve now but become mere characters for us.
The choice of sombre and classical tone of background score also cements the fragility of these seeming liberties that may be available to a particular community at a given moment, while also foregrounding the fear of them being taken away, just like they were for the people spoken about in the context of early 1900s Berlin context.
Final Thoughts
One of the speaking head interviewees reminds us why it’s important to document the queer history of Berlin’s past. Due to the lack of documentation and written history, their names have completely faded out, and what was there in the 1920s, never got a chance to continue itself in the present. While the image of the present queer community may be more diverse now, remembering documentations like these nudge us to take a moment and remember those who came before us, because even if their names may be lost in oblivion now, it doesn’t mean that they never existed.
If you have a knack for historical accounts, especially of stories that may have remained untold in the mainstream, then this film is right up your alley. Although the initial introduction of many names may catch the viewer off-guard, it’s essential for the narrative to set their names in stone at the beginning because its their story, and ultimately Cantu’s aim here is to remind us that they existed after all.
The Eldorado Everything the Nazis Hate 2023 documentary film is now streaming on Netflix.
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