Der Kreis Memorial Panels

On the facade of the building that housed the Barfüsser — Europe's storied gay bar from 1956, today the queer bar Kweer — the City of Zurich installed three historical panels in 2015, unveiled by Mayor Corine Mauch, herself openly lesbian. They mark an extraordinary concentration of history. Here met the Damenclub Amicitia, whose August 1931 gathering was a founding moment of organised lesbian life in Switzerland. And from 1932 to 1967, Zurich was home to Der Kreis — The Circle — the gay journal and organisation that, through the Nazi years and the postwar chill, was for a time the only one of its kind operating anywhere in the world, with subscribers on every continent. Switzerland's relative tolerance made Zurich the unlikely capital of European gay life for a generation. What you see today: the panels on the Spitalgasse side of the building (moved from the Brunngasse entrance when Kweer took over in 2022), readable from the street at any hour — and the bar itself, still queer after nearly seventy years, which is the best possible footnote.