“I Know One Day a Miracle Will Happen”:

Bruno Balz and the Position of the Gay Artist in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Bruno Balz, a popular gay German song writer, persecuted by the Nazis, composed the lyrics to the two most popular songs in Nazi Germany for the last three years of the war. Balz’s songs from the Nazi period cast significant light on how gay popular artists attempted to accommodate themselves to the needs of the fascist state in order to survive and earn a living. Using a practice of double entendre, Balz found a way to express his own desires in song, albeit in a coded form.  His lyrics, which reflect his experience of persecution as a gay man, came to define the German home front, but they could only have done so by containing a careful ambiguity of meanings. This article unearths the remarkable history behind the songs and the film, and reveals how limited and complicated the agency employed by artists in Nazi German popular media actually was.