Through haunting poetry and prose, A Ghost Has No Fantasies illuminates the forgotten voices of LGBTQ+ individuals who suffered under Nazi persecution. Drawing from archival documents, survivor testimonies, and Gestapo files, Christian Bancroft weaves together the intimate stories of those imprisoned under Paragraph 175 and beyond — gay men, lesbians, and transgender individuals whose experiences have long remained in the shadows of Holocaust memory.
From the vibrant queer communities of pre-war Berlin to the brutalities of concentration camps, these poems bear witness to love, resistance, and survival in the face of state-sponsored violence. Bancroft transforms fragments of testimony into powerful verse that honors both the lived experiences and the silences that followed liberation, when many survivors faced continued criminalization and denial of their suffering.
At a time when LGBTQ+ rights remain under threat globally, this collection serves as both memorial and warning — a testament to the resilience of human love against the machinery of hatred.
Christian Bancroft received his Ph.D. from the University of Houston and is the recipient of a Michener Fellowship. He is also the author of Queering Modernist Translation: The Poetics of Race, Gender, and Queerness (2020) and the co-editor of the 2018 Unsung Masters Series volume, Adelaide Crapsey: The Life & Work of an American Master. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, The Missouri Review, Prairie Schooner, Petrichor, and Asymptote, among others.
"Here are the voices of Gad Beck and Stefan Kosinski, Pierre Seel and Rudolf Brazda, gay men alive at the most perilous of times. Here are their stories, their prayers, their desires set against the vastness of the Holocaust that would incarcerate them, castrate them, brutalize them, and kill them. Christian Bancroft has produced a kaleidoscopic work of docupoetics, vast in its scope and historical vision, one that draws our attention at last to the intimate voices of individuals otherwise lost in a time that would obliterate them. Brilliant, inventive, and deeply moving, A Ghost Has No Fantasies is poetry and reportage at their most powerful. This is a book that demands our attention." — Kevin Prufer
"Drawing from testimonies, oral histories, legal records, and memoirs, Christian Bancroft has crafted a devastating chorus of voices returned now to haunt our political present. With an ear deeply attuned to the vitality and fearlessness of persecuted lives, in the register of survival from brutalities of the past, these poems configure a 'shape and history of passion' suspended between lyric clarity and the symbolic vandalism needed to refute the impassive inventories of the archive." — Roberto Tejada
"It's easy to forget how many LGBTQIA+ people were legally executed across centuries. Lorca was shot by his government; Cavafy suppressed homoerotic poems to protect his life. One of the most heinous expressions of state-sanctioned executions of gender-expressive people, including women, were perpetrated by the Nazis. The Nazis hunted, imprisoned, and marched gender-expressive people into ovens. Survivors never received restitution. In this stunning debut, Christian Bancroft excavates this history with elegant sobriety. These tender, quiet poems also bite — tactile explorations where pages are scratched, torn, ravaged like our histories and bodies. A Ghost Has No Fantasies holds colliding histories while never abandoning queer desire's beauty: 'When the bombs were falling,/ we made love on the train.' Bancroft's remarkable accomplishment holds both terror and desire simultaneously without burning — a triumphant project of reclamation and exaltation." — Robin Coste-Lewis
