Johanna Elberskirchen (1864-1943)

(this text can also be heard in the audio clip)

“Incidentally, we women of emancipation are homosexual – well then let us be. Then we have every right to be. Who cares? Only those who are. Who has to come to terms with their abnormality, like the others with their normality? Whose business is it? At most, only nature. God, God created humans in his image, in the image of God, he created them. Even the homosexual.“

Johanna Elberskirchen was born in Bonn on April 11, 1864. Although her parents only ran a small grocery store, she first managed to get a degree from a secondary school for girls, then, in a move that was atypical of her social status, she managed to study law and medicine in Switzerland – women are not allowed to study in Germany. Ultimately she did not graduate, probably for financial reasons.

In 1904 she published her book on homosexuality, “Die Liebe des dritten Geschlechts” (The Love of the Third Sex), with Max Spohr’s publishing house. She confidently admitted her love for women. It made her an important figure in the history of lesbian emancipation, part because she rejected the common sexological theory that homosexual women are “man-wives” and “masculine”. Instead, she viewed lesbians simply as women who desire women.

Beginning in 1914, the now qualified naturopath lived in Berlin and worked in the city’s infant care program. At this time, she was also one of the few women to become “chairman” of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WHK), the world’s first organization to campaign for gay rights, founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, who also founded the first sexual science institute in Berlin in 1919. Elberskirchen became a member of staff at the institute, but little is known about the nature and intensity of her work.

She moved to Rüdersdorf near Berlin with her partner Hildegard Moniac in 1920 and opened a homeopathic practice in the house they shared at Luisenstraße 32 (today: Rudolf-Breitscheid-Straße 57), which she ran until the end of her life.

Until 1933, she also financed her livelihood by writing and giving lectures, which was no longer possible due to the National Socialists. She wrote courageous, provocative, ironic and biting newspaper articles and books on the feminist topics of women’s suffrage, gender-specific education, women’s studies, violence against girls and women, motherhood and pediatrics.

She was also a speaker for the World League for Sexual Reform and took part in the congresses in Copenhagen in 1928, London in 1929 and finally Vienna in 1930. She was a member of the SPD and campaigned for paid work for women and the protection of female workers.

While her contributions to homosexual and female emancipation are undisputed, her involvement in the unreflected spread of eugenic ideas must be clearly criticized. She swam naturally and uncritically with the eugenic zeitgeist, which strove for a controllable higher development of human beings. Eugenics distinguished between “healthy” and “valuable” or “sick” and “inferior” life. Concepts and thought patterns that were later taken up by the National Socialists and radicalized in the worst possible way.

In 1933, Elberskirchen’s partner Moniac lost her job as a teacher as she was considered politically unreliable by the Nazis, which plunged them both into severe financial difficulties. The next few years in poverty were hard until Elberskirchen’s death in 1943 at the age of 79.

Typically for Johanna Elberskirchen, her eventful life also came to an unusual end, even after her death. The urn was secretly reburied 30 years after her death by two women in the grave of her partner Hildegard Moniac. Today there is a memorial plaque at the Rüdersdorf cemetery.