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  • Freedom and tragedy in exile: The story of Charles Mackay

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Freedom and tragedy in exile: The story of Charles Mackay

As an exiled newspaper correspondent living in Berlin almost a century ago, Charles Mackay found freedom – and a tragic death - on the streets of North Neukölln.

At this corner of Hirschowitz’s clothing shop, Charles Mackay was fatally shot in 1929. Today, the building is home to Werbellin-Apotheke. Image: Geheimes Staatsarchivs

The mayor of a town on New Zealand’s North Island, Charles Mackay, was exiled because of his homosexuality. As a newspaper correspondent in Berlin, the man with the walrus moustache found freedom – and a tragic death. Though Mackay’s story is nearly 100 years old, it is one that many modern Berliners will be able to relate to.

Just before midnight on May 3, 1929, a taxi headed down Neukölln’s Hermannstraße. At the corner of Herrfurthstraße, a barricade spanned across the street, made of wood taken from the construction site for the subway line now called the U8. The entire Kiez had been cordoned off by police, who had declared a state of emergency after three days of rioting. Everything was pitch black: street lights had been smashed and shutters closed. Occasional gunshots rang out in the distance.

While he loved the spotlight, Mackay had to hide a secret that he could not share with anyone.

On Herrfurthstraße, 53-year-old Charles Mackay exited the taxi and asked police if he could pass the barricade. When they told him to get lost, he strolled around the block, ending up where he started, at the site of today’s Werbellin pharmacy, which was then Hirschowitz’s clothing shop. All of a sudden, the police started yelling “Straße frei!” (“clear the street”). Maybe Mackay didn’t understand the commands in German or he simply didn’t react quickly enough. Bullets cracked through the display window behind him, and the man with the impressive moustache fell over with a gaping wound on his lower back where a bullet had exited. By the time medical help arrived, all they could do was determine he was dead.

The body was taken to today’s Vivantes Klinikum Neukölln. Richard Schmincke, a doctor who worked for the district council, recalled at a public hearing that the autopsy was “especially interesting”: a bullet had entered through the pubic bone and cut through an artery, causing Mackay to bleed out quickly. Even more interesting than the cause of his death, however, was the course of his life. What had led a lawyer and ex-mayor from New Zealand’s North Island all the way to North Neukölln?

The north island

The town of Whanganui, Maori for “big harbour”, sits at the mouth of a river on New Zealand’s North Island, up the coast from Wellington. In 1906, the 31-year-old lawyer Charles Mackay was elected mayor of this small but rapidly growing city. Mackay was a striver: after getting a law degree and marrying into a family of landowners, he quickly advanced in local politics, serving two non-consecutive terms as Whanganui’s mayor. He helped establish the city’s first tram line as well as the Sarjeant Gallery, which is recognised today as one of the best art galleries in New Zealand.

But the young mayor, who published missives in the local press about countless topics, didn’t always go with the flow. In May 1915, after learning that a German submarine had sunk the British ocean liner LMS Lusitania, a mob of several thousand gathered on Whanganui’s high street and, full of imperial rage against Germany, began attacking a butcher’s, a piano store and other shops owned by people of German origin. Throughout the evening, Mackay pleaded with the crowd to disperse – and was rewarded with a rock to the head.

While he loved the spotlight, Mackay had to hide a secret that he could not share with anyone. He believed he suffered from a neurological disorder that made him feel an unnatural sexual attraction toward men, even seeking what we would today call conversion therapy. In 1920, Mackay’s two lives collided explosively when he met D’Arcy Cresswell. Cresswell, a young poet, turned down the mayor’s advances, and then demanded that he resign or be publicly outed. Faced with blackmail that would put an end to all his ambitions one way or another, Mackay snapped. In an argument, he retrieved a gun and shot Cresswell in the chest. The irony is that the younger man, who survived the shooting, soon moved to London and lived a long life as a relatively openly gay bon vivant. To this day, Cresswell’s motivations remain somewhat obscure.

Mackay, the once respected official, was sentenced to 15 years of hard labour for the attempted murder. But his punishment didn’t stop there: Mackay’s wife divorced him and the family dropped his name, which was also scratched off the marble foundation stone of the Sarjeant Gallery and removed from a Whanganui street. After six years in prison, Mackay was granted early release – on the condition that he abandon New Zealand forever.

Image: Geheimes Staatsarchivs

Money, mystery and bloodshed

Adelphi is the name of a few of blocks on London’s river bank, between the Strand and the Thames Embankment. Known then as one of the hubs of London’s queer community, full of gay bars and cruising spaces, this is where Mackay settled when he first arrived in Europe. Involuntarily freed from the conservative atmosphere of his home island, Mackay could finally be himself in the imperial capital.

Yet, another metropolis was calling. Berlin in the 1920s was no longer the centre of a globe-spanning Reich – much of the once-wealthy city had fallen into poverty. Instead, it became a gathering place for the world’s artists. As German-American historian Peter Gay wrote: “To go to Berlin was the aspiration of the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its hundred and twenty newspapers, its forty theatres, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented.”

Mackay planned to stay in Berlin for half a year, but like so many of us, he got stuck here. He settled at Winterfeldtstraße 8 in Schöneberg, in the heart of what was then and still remains the ‘Regenbogenkiez’. In the words of writer Daniel Brandl-Beck, Berlin then boasted “the greatest and most differentiated homosexual infrastructure in the country – arguably the world”, with dozens of queer publications and bars.

Like so many Berliners then and now, Mackay survived doing “something with media”, publishing correspondences in New Zealand and Australian newspapers and supplementing his income with private English lessons. He could make a decent living because, as reporter Sefton Delmer noted in his autobiography, “Berlin in 1928 had just about everything which the editor of a popular daily yearns for – sex, murder, political intrigue, money, mystery and bloodshed.”

Mackay planned to stay in Berlin for half a year, but like so many of us, he got stuck here.

When rioting broke out on May 1, 1929, Mackay felt both a professional calling and a personal drive to go to the centre of the action. He told his fellow reporters that “there would be the greatest night” after police declared a state of emergency – something “unusual” was sure to happen. After dark, Mackay and a colleague took a taxi first to Wedding and then to Neukölln – where he was shot dead by a sniper. The gay New Zealander was the 33rd person killed by the police during the three days of turmoil.

Accountability

After the shooting, police falsely claimed that Mackay had been in Neukölln earlier in the day and been warned not to return. Even after other journalists exposed this lie, there was no official apology. Mackay was buried at Friedhof Priesterweg in the presence of other foreign correspondents, but his gravestone has since been removed.

There has never been any public accountability for what Berliners today call the Blutmai, the Bloody May Day massacre of 1929. Since the parliament and the courts refused to hold any kind of trial, human rights activists founded their own Untersuchungsausschuss (“board of inquiry”) to investigate the murders.

Historian Paul Diamond first heard about Mackay back in 1997, while reading an anthology of gay New Zealand writing, Best Mates, contains a single paragraph about the 1920 shooting of Cresswell, but it omits Mackay’s name and falsely says he became a “communist journalist” in Berlin. This was enough to fascinate Diamond; in the early 2000s, working for a radio broadcaster, he travelled to Wanganui to record a segment about the former mayor. The segment was never finished, but Diamond started working on a book, which was published in 2022, after well over a decade of research.

In New Zealand, Mackay’s story has now been told in novels, plays and newspaper articles – in 2013, his name was re-added to the Sarjeant Gallery in gilded letters.

Berlin, meanwhile, has forgotten the man who found both freedom and death here. Blutmai was largely put down the memory hole, overshadowed by the far greater massacres that followed – at least until it was recounted in Volker Kutscher’s detective novel, Der nasse Fisch, subsequently filmed as the first season of Babylon Berlin.

Diamond happened to find himself in the middle of a set. One night just before midnight, he was in Hermannplatz station and he noticed the magazines at the kiosk were from 1929, while prices were in Reichsmarks. “It’s as if the story I was researching had come to life,” he recalled. Many researchers have the surreal experience of getting lost in their subject – of “becoming the file” – and he experienced this via Babylon Berlin.

Mackay’s story evokes some of the struggles that many immigrants in Berlin still face. In that light, wouldn’t it be time for Berlin to commemorate Mackay? The corner of Herrfurthstraße, on the way to Tempelhofer Feld, would certainly be the perfect spot for a historical plaque.

  • This article relied on Paul Diamond’s book Downfall: The destruction of Charles Mackay, available from Massey University Press