It has been said that there is good art and important art (as well as bad art). The same can be said for books. It would seem almost insensitive to call this book good even if it were. It is not. It is, however, important.
Treated in ten chapters the tale is a true story of a young homosexual man from an upper middle class family in Vienna. He was charged with violation of Paragraph 175 of the (German) criminal code that defined homosexuality as a criminal offense. Found guilty, he initially served a term in the Austrian civilian prison system where he was treated adequately if not wonderfully. Subsequently, however, he was sent to Nazi concentration camps from which even his influential father could not extract him.
Eight subsequent chapters tell, chronologically, of the horrors that he witnessed and personally endured. It narrates the horrendous physical reality of the camps but also gives us a glimpse of how he gradually developed a survival strategy.
Following his brutal indoctrination into camp life, he quickly learned the social structure there. Being young, and presumably attractive, he earned the protection of more powerful prisoners. His survival was shakily insured by careful manipulation of the power structure. Among the prisoners and guards he curried favor by providing physical outlets to the more powerful and by becoming indispensable to the war effort required by the German military. He even gained some limited authority rising to the level of “Capo,” a sort of supervisory role, within the prison camp hierarchy.
In the final chapter he described his escape during the chaos of the collapsing Third Reich and his eventual reunion with his family in Vienna.
Although this story needed to be told, it suffers from a Teutonic flatness common to German language works that are literally translated into English. In addition to the Germanic stylistic sluggishness, this reviewer missed any sense of emotional depth. The narrative often felt most like a detailed plot summary for a proposed movie deal. The Men with the Pink Triangle does have a place in any college course in homosexual history. It remains an important book, but not a good one.