Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935)

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Magnus Hirschfeld was born in 1868 as the son of a Jewish doctor in Kolberg in East Prussia (now Kołobrzeg, Poland). He studied medicine in Breslau (Wrocław, Poland) and Heidelberg and finally came to Berlin, where he obtained his doctorate in medicine in 1892.

He published his first work “Sappho and Socrates or how does the love of men and women for people of their own sex explain itself?” in 1896 under a pseudonym. In it, he also describes the suicide of a young man who had taken his own life out of fear of persecution and humiliation due to Paragraph 175. The paragraph, which was only completely abolished in 1994, criminalized sexual acts between men. In May 1897, Hirschfeld took the story of the young man as the impetus for founding the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee – (Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees – WhK), the world’s first organization for the rights of homosexuals. Among the founding members in his Charlottenburg apartment were Hirschfeld’s publisher Max Spohr, the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow and the lawyer Eduard Oberg. The aim of the committee was to achieve a reassessment and recognition of homosexuality through research and corresponding changes to the law, and  therefore chose the motto “through science to justice”.

In his early medical publications, Hirschfeld explained his “theory of intermediate stages”: he assumed an innate sexual orientation and placed people’s sexuality in a spectrum with many stages from “full woman” to “full man”. According to Hirschfeld, there was no rigid separation of the sexes, nor was there a “fully female” or a “fully male” person, but rather “intermediate stages” as individual, “natural” mixtures of physical, psychological, psychosexual and psychosocial characteristics. Hirschfeld located homosexuality in the transitional area between the masculine and feminine. He saw a wide range of predispositions and an enormous diversity of human sexuality and identity: a plea for the diversity of people and a first cornerstone of today’s queer theory, according to which, in addition to biological sex, there are elements that lead to a person’s diverse (sexual) identity independent of social norms.

From 1899 to 1923, Hirschfeld published a total of 23 volumes of the “Yearbook of Intermediate Sexual Stages“ with the latest scientific findings.

Hirschfeld recognized the importance and necessity of shaping public opinion. When Paragraph 175 was included in the German Reich’s new penal code in 1871, the Minister of the Interior justified this decision with consideration for the “people’s sense of justice”. In response to this, Hirschfeld set up a propaganda commission at the WhK in 1903, which was tasked with educating the public and dispelling false stereotypes about homosexuality. Leaflet literature provided important support for the WhK’s petition to repeal Paragraph 175. 18,000 copies of the WhK’s most popular title, the brochure “What should the people know about the third sex?”, were printed in 1901. Over the course of the next decade, a total circulation of 50,000 copies was achieved.

More than 2,000 representatives from politics, science, culture and business also signed the WhK petition, including the painters Walter Leistikow, Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz, the writers Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Heinrich and Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig as well as the scientist Albert Einstein.

The young Social Democrats also supported the WhK. The party chairman, August Bebel, signed the petition and introduced it as a bill in the Reichstag several times between 1898 and 1904, but was unsuccessful. Much later in 1929, the WhK achieved a great triumph. The Criminal Law Committee of the German Reichstag decided to no longer criminalize homosexuality in the planned new penal code. However, as a result of the economic crisis and emergency ordinance cabinets, there was no vote in the Reichstag.

In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the world’s first institution for sexual research, the Institute for Sexual Science, which quickly gained worldwide recognition. For the institute, Hirschfeld bought the house at Beethovenstraße 3 in Berlin’s Alsenviertel in Tiergarten, where the “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” is located today. Regular lectures, courses and the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, counseling on sexual problems of heterosexual and “queer” people were just as much a part of the institute’s activities as international networking. The institute was an archive, training and research center, museum and refuge for people who were in need because of their sexual or gender identity. The institute also had an international impact, with the result that the research results obtained there were also used to discuss or relax the sexual punishment laws of the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia at the time.

In 1919, Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in “Different from the Others” by Richard Oswald, the first explicitly gay film in film history. The film is about a gay musician who is blackmailed by a sex worker. In the film, Hirschfeld more or less plays himself, a doctor who teaches that homosexuality is not a disease. His partner of 20 years, Karl Giese, also appears in the film. The surviving parts of the film can be found on Vimeo, see the links below the article.

Hirschfeld also campaigned for trans* people. In his publication “The Transvestites – An Investigation into the Erotic Disguise Instinct” from 1910, he introduced the term “transvestite” as a new term. In the Weimar Republic, cross-dressing trans* people could be considered an “excitement of public nuisance” and was punishable by fines or up to two years in prison. Hirschfeld therefore wrote expert opinions and confirmed that a person had to – and was allowed to – wear the clothing of the opposite sex to preserve their mental health with the help of the so-called transvestite certificate. The police recognized this, so that these people were not bothered any further. What was understood by the word “transvestite” at the time would today be expressed in a more differentiated way with the terms trans* person, drag queen, drag king, cross-dressing, non-binary and gender-nonconforming, among others.

Around 1930, Magnus Hirschfeld’s institute was involved in the first gender reassignment surgeries, among other things. Today, the case of the Danish painter Lili Elbe is particularly well known. Her story as a patient is not only the subject of a novel, but also of the film “The Danish Girl”. Lili Elbe died of complications in Dresden after the fourth operation.

Hirschfeld was often the target of National Socialist smear campaigns, especially in the Nazi propaganda publication “Stürmer”. His lectures were disrupted early on and increasingly over time by groups of thugs. As early as 1920, an attempt was made on his life during one of Hirschfeld’s lectures in Munich. On the advice of friends, Hirschfeld did not return to Germany from his trip around the world at the end of 1930. He first lived in Zurich and Ascona in Switzerland, then in Paris and finally in Nice.

During his exile in France, Magnus Hirschfeld and his partners Li Shiu Tong and Karl Giese attempted to re-found the Institute for Sexual Science. However, the attempt failed. In Paris in May 1933, Hirschfeld learned of the destruction of his life’s work “with the deepest emotional shock” when he was forced to watch the looting of his Berlin Institute for Sexual Science by the National Socialists in a newsreel at the cinema.

Magnus Hirschfeld died in exile in Nice in 1935. His grave bears the motto of the WhK in Latin, “per scientiam ad iustitiam” – “through science to justice”.

In today’s assessment, it is important to consider Hirschfeld in the context of his time. Many of his ideas were considered progressive at the time, even if they are viewed critically today. Although he rejected racial hierarchies, he showed a Eurocentric view with the distinction between “natural” and “cultural peoples”. Hirschfeld’s stance on eugenics must be criticized because, despite his humanistic and emancipatory intentions, he advocated eugenic concepts – including the legitimization of forced sterilizations and the biologistic argumentation for the “higher breeding” of humanity – whose concepts and thought patterns were later taken up and radicalized by the National Socialists.

After his death, Hirschfeld’s last book “Racism” was published in English in 1938. Again, he was well ahead of his time, stating that “race” is a social concept invented by man, which cannot be medically proven and encourages false prejudices. He referred to the pseudo-scientific roots of the “doctrine of race” and thus posthumously turned against colonialism and the ideology of Hitler and the National Socialists. It almost seems as if he had suspected that the worst would happen in the following years.