Karl Giese (1898-1938)

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

Karl Giese came from a working-class family and was born in Berlin-Wedding in 1898. He liked the theater and literature and played roles in the “Theater der Eigenen”, which was run by a group of homosexual men. Giese and Hirschfeld also took part in the first “gay film” in world history “Different than the others” by Richard Oswald in 1919. Hirschfeld co-authored the screenplay and more or less played himself as a doctor who believes that homosexuality is not a disease. Karl Giese played a young violinist who takes lessons from a teacher and enters into a relationship with him. The surviving parts of the film can be found on Vimeo.

After 1919, Karl Giese was employed at Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, first as secretary and later as head of the archive and library. He gave guided tours of the in-house museum, gave lectures, which were popular as they were one of the few opportunities for visitors to find out about sexual issues, and helped Hirschfeld write manuscripts.

Hirschfeld and Giese lived together at the Institute for Sexual Science. At the end of the 1920s, Giese’s room at the institute was regarded as a meeting place for young homosexual men. Magnus Hirschfeld’s sister rented out rooms in the building next door to the institute, often to homosexuals who also wanted to be close to the institute for social reasons. Many gay men, such as the archaeologist Francis Turville-Petre and the English writer Christopher Isherwood, met regularly at Giese’s place. Isherwood found inspiration for the characters in his books “Mr. Norris changes trains” and “Goodbye to Berlin”, which became world-famous as the musical “Cabaret”. Liza Minelli played the leading role in the 1972 film version.

Isherwood later wrote about Giese in his memoir “Christopher and his kind” that the “committed, serious, intelligent veteran in the fight for sexual freedom” possessed an “extraordinary innocence”. Isherwoods saw him as a “rough country boy with the heart of a girl who had long ago fallen in love with Hirschfeld, his father figure. Giese also called him his ‘Papa’.”

In 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld was on a world lecture tour, so he did not have to witness the looting of his institute directly, but Karl Giese did. As the Institute’s archivist and Hirschfeld’s life partner, it must have hit him hard to see how their collective work from the last decade was looted and then burned. He probably wrote the eyewitness account of the looting of the Institute on May 6, 1933, which was published anonymously.

Giese now followed Magnus Hirschfeld into exile, initially to Ascona in Switzerland. There he met Hirschfeld’s new lover, the Hong Kong medical student Li Shiu Tong, also known as Tao Li, whom Hirschfeld had met on his trip around the world. From then on, the three lived in a “ménage à trois”. In exile in Paris, Hirschfeld and Giese made an unsuccessful attempt to re-found the Institute for Sexual Science in 1934, and in the same year Giese had to leave Paris and France because of a ” bathhouse affair”. After having homosexual sex in a Parisian bathhouse, he was sentenced to three months in prison for “causing a public nuisance”.

Giese then lived in Vienna but came to France again illegally after Hirschfeld’s death in 1935 to pay his last respects to his beloved companion at his funeral. In his will, Hirschfeld had named his two lovers, Karl Giese and Tao Li, as his heirs. Giese subsequently settled in Brno in what was then Czechoslovakia, but he was apparently unable to come to terms with the death of the “love of his life” and suffered from depression. Faced with the threat of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Czech Bohemia and all its potential repressions, he committed suicide in March 1938.

In February 2016, a stumble stone was ceremoniously laid for Karl Giese in front of the entrance to the House of World Cultures, formerly the site of the Institute for Sexual Science.