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

[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.