Karl Giese came from a working-class family and was born in Berlin Wedding in 1898. He liked theater and literature and played roles in the gay group “Theater der Eigenen”. In 1919, Giese and Hirschfeld appeared in the first “gay film” in world history, “Different from the Others” by Richard Oswald. Hirschfeld is co-author and actor. The film is about a gay musician who is blackmailed by a hustler. In it, Hirschfeld more or less plays himself, a doctor who explains that homosexuality is not a disease. Karl Giese played a young violinist who takes lessons from the blackmailed man and a relationship develops. The surviving parts of the film can be found on Vimeo.

Karl Giese is 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 to find out about sexual issues, and he helped Hirschfeld write manuscripts.

Hirschfeld and Giese lived together in the Institute for Sexual Science. At the end of the 1920s, Giese’s room at the institute was a meeting place for young homosexual men. Magnus Hirschfeld’s sister rented rooms in the building next door to the institute, often to homosexuals who were also looking 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 also found inspiration there for characters for his books, which became world-famous as the musical Cabaret.

Isherwood writes about Giese, the “committed, serious, intelligent veteran in the fight for sexual freedom that had an extraordinary innocence”, … “Christopher saw in him the rough country boy with the heart of a girl who had long ago fallen in love with Hirschfeld, his father figure. He also called him his ‘ daddy’.”

In 1933, Hirschfeld was on a world lecture tour, so he was not directly aware of the looting of his institute, but Karl Giese was.  As the Institute’s archivist, it must have hit him hard to see his work of the previous decade being looted and then burned. He probably wrote the eyewitness account of the looting of the Institute on May 6, 1933.

Giese now follows Magnus Hirschfeld into exile, initially to Ancona. Hirschfeld’s preference for young guys struck again on the trip around the world, so Hirschfeld and Giese now lived together with the Hong Kong medical student Li Shiu Tong 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. In the same year Giese had to leave Paris because of a “public bathhouse affair”. After having homosexual sex, he was sentenced to three months in prison for “causing a public nuisance” and had to leave France.

He then lived in Vienna, but returned to France illegally in 1935 to pay his last respects to his beloved companion at Hirschfeld’s funeral. Hirschfeld names both lovers as his heirs. Afterwards, Giese lives in Brno, but he does not cope well with the death of the love of his life and suffers from depression. Faced with the threat of the German Wehrmacht’s invasion to bohemia and all its repression, he finally committed suicide in March 1938.

In February 2016, a Stolperstein was ceremonially laid for Karl Giese in front of the entrance to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the site of the institute. The Stumbling Stone of Recha Tobias, Hirschfeld’s sister, can also be found next to it. Isherwoood wrote about his landlady Recha Tobias: “She lived somewhere far away at the back of the apartment, in a clearing within a black forest of furniture. If she occasionally heard the sounds of sexual intercourse, she never complained. Perhaps she even agreed to it in principle – after all, she was Hirschfeld’s biological sister.” Recha Tobias was because of being Jewish deported to Theresienstadt by the National Socialists in 1942 and murdered.