German speakers, please help

[kindkit]

Recently I've run into the German term "warmer Bruder" (warm brother). I know it's slang for a gay man, but I'm wondering about connotations. Is it derogatory? And, to the best of your knowledge, would it have been derogatory in the 1940s? (I.e. is it a term like "Negro" in English that has moved from being standard/polite to being objectionable?) Google has not really helped me with this, although the term does turn up in a list of German expressions that foreign speakers should avoid using.

Comments

[shadowvalkyrie]

It's something that used to be neutral, even polite, possibly derogatory, but then only due to tone of delivery. I think you could get away with using it any way you like, really, if you make the tone clear, but it definitely wouldn't have been an outright insult in the 40s. More of a euphemism, similar to the English "working girl" for a prostitute.

I'm surprised it's on an "avoid this!" list, as it fell out of use pretty much completely since then, at least as far as I am aware. (The one time my grandma used it, I had no idea what she meant and had to ask, and she only used it while telling a story about her youth, in a modern context she says "schwul"=gay like anyone else. I've heard/read it used maybe three or four times total since -- keeping in mind that I'm definitely more interested in queer things than the average person; I'm betting most people my age wouldn't even know the term at all, unlike "Neger"=Negro.)

To me it sounds less derogatory and more... ridiculous. Fussy to the point of primness.

Hope that helps? :)

(Edited for my lack of reading comprehension.)

[kindkit]

Thanks! I don't mean to use the term myself in a fanfic (although now that I think about it, it could be interesting . . .), but I saw it used in a fascinating context in a WWII POW memoir: the commandant of a German POW camp randomly asks the Senior British Officer how many "warme Bruder" there are in the camp, the unofficial translator is momentarily nonplussed at how/whether to translate the question, the SBO vehemently denies that there are any homosexuals in the British forces, the commandant is doubtful, and the narrator slyly invites the reader to be doubtful as well.

[selenak]

What Shadowvalkyrie said. It's very old fashioned slang, and unless delivered in a hostile tone would not have been insulting in the 1940s. I can think of a direct source reference from the early 1930s to illustrate. Kurt Tucholsky (= one of our best and wittiest writers in the Weimar Republic years) wrote in a 1931 article (presumably in response to another article) about how he considers attacking the Nazis for Ernst Röhm's homosexuality instead of, oh, everything else about them both stupid and below the belt, and the only justification for bringing up Röhm's sex life at all would be if a Nazi goes into a homophobic rant; then, one could say, shut up, you have "warme Brüder in Eurer eigenen Partei" ("warm brothers in your own party").

Tucholsky also uses the expression in a letter to his publisher Siegfried Jacobsohn (I should add the entire correspondance is very witty and affectionate - S.J. was a Weimar Republic legend in his own right), in response to S.J. complaining about K.T. sounding a bit bland in the last letter: "If you want warmer expressions you'll have to go to a warm brother".

[kindkit]

Thank you, that's very helpful. This has got me thinking about the fanfic possibilities (for Colditz, a British TV series about POWs in the Second World War) about the fact that German then had a commonly used polite/neutral informal term for gay men, and English didn't.