Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement
by Ralf Dose
Translated by Edward H. Willis
Monthly Review Press. 128 pages, $23.
THIS SHORT BIOGRAPHY of Magnus Hirschfeld—about 100 pages, minus the extensive bibliography and notes—first appeared in a German series of “Jewish Miniatures.” Its author, Ralf Dose, seems to assume a familiarity with the basic facts about its subject, and he organizes the life thematically instead of chronologically. This can be disorienting for readers who don’t come prepared with the necessary context. It’s worth persevering, because this is a good biography of someone who matters to us.
Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), an early sexologist, founded in 1897 the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, “the first successful creation of an organization that advocated homosexual rights.” Its key goal—not fully realized until almost sixty years after Hirschfeld’s death—was the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which criminalized male homosexuality. The committee gathered hundreds of signatures on a petition repeatedly submitted to parliament, a petition that Dose calls “the founding document of the homosexual rights movement in Germany.”In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin to conduct sexual research and to educate the public. One of its educational endeavors was the 1919 silent movie Different from the Others, the first open portrayal of a homosexual on film. 
The Institute became an international destination for visitors. People who visited or even stayed there included Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, Walter Benjamin, André Gide, and Sergei Eisenstein.
In the 1920s, Hirschfeld endured attacks in Germany, and not just verbal ones. After a lecture in Munich, he was beaten and left for dead, and he saw his own obituary in print. A Bavarian writer applauded this attack on “the Apostle of Sodomy.” Even after his death, the 1937 Nazi propaganda piece The Eternal Jew said of Hirschfeld that “even his physical appearance is certainly the most repulsive of all Jewish monsters.”
In 1930, Hirschfeld began a lecture tour of America, where he was advertised as “the Einstein of Sex.” (He met the real Einstein in Pasadena.) He continued the tour around the world, but never returned to Germany. As he commented on his exile, “Certainly, I don’t lack for good company (Einstein!).” In 1933, Nazi physical education students attacked the Institute, throwing its books onto a bonfire. Hirschfeld saw the burning in a newsreel in Paris. He died in Nice on his 67th birthday.
Such is the basic outline of Hirsch-feld’s life. Dose’s biography is intent on filling in the details, sometimes in an overly dutiful manner. The biography begins with six pages about Hirschfeld’s family background. Later, it takes several pages to list all of the staff members who worked at the Institute. Dry stuff, but tucked in there is a footnote on Rudolf R., called “Dorchen”: “Dor-chen was repeatedly examined at the institute and submitted to an early sex-change operation, with castration, amputation of the penis, and neo-vagina. Since she could not afford to pay the expense of her operation, she worked in the household of the institute. The figure ‘Dorchen’ in Rosa von Praunheim’s film The Einstein of Sex is complete fiction.” The footnote far outshines the text.
And that is the odd pleasure of this biography: coming across fun facts mingled among the dutiful ones. For example, there are surprise cameos: “While a student in Munich, Hirschfeld earned extra income reading aloud for Henrik Ibsen”; “with Anita Loos he went to see ‘pornographic films’” in New York. Dose refers rather chastely to Hirschfeld’s “friendship” with Karl Giese and “a second friend,” Li Shiu Tong. Fortunately, he includes this from a staffer’s wife who saw the three of them in Paris: “Auntie Magnesia has been making his usual delightful mischief in Paris. He now lives with both flames (Tao and Karlchen). And best of all: both of them are sooo jealous of the old geezer. Surely that must be true love?!”
More seriously, we learn that Hirschfeld began his mission because of the suicide of a patient, a young military officer who shot himself on the night before his wedding and whose suicide note asked Hirschfeld to educate people about homosexuals. We learn that some committee members wanted to advance the cause by outing high-ranking gay men, but that “Hirschfeld always rejected this ‘path over corpses.’” We learn about Hirschfeld’s statement in 1933 that “Recently, the humiliation and degradation of the Jews … is now nearly greater than that of the Negroes in America.” And we learn this from Hirschfeld: “The question: Where do you belong—what are you really? tortures me. If I frame the question as ‘Are you a German—a Jew—or a world citizen?’ then my answer is always ‘world citizen’ or ‘all three.’”
Hirschfeld’s motto was “Per scientiam ad justitiam” (“Through science to justice”). Dose provides a good summary of his scientific work, centered on “sexual intermediacy,” which was not so much a theory as a “principle of classification.” He posited several categories, each with a spectrum from male to female. This was not merely theoretical. As always with Hirschfeld, the practical was uppermost. He described transvestites—and even coined the word—and worked with the Berlin police to issue “transvestite licenses” to help them avoid arrest. He invented what he called “adaptation therapy”: not curing homosexuals, but shaping their self-esteem while advising them on what sex acts were not illegal. In its theoretical formulation, Hirschfeld’s classification system also “had an emancipator political dimension. If every person is an ‘intermediate type,’ even so-called normal people, then ostracizing homosexuals, transvestites, and others loses its logic.”
Among the items in this book is a fascinating 1925 article by an American sexologist about Hirschfeld and the institute: “Both are worth writing about, because both have done and are doing a great deal for our miserable, suffering, groping-in-the-dark humanity.” He lists some of the ordinary people who came to the institute for advice and treatment: “A homosexual wants to have his beard destroyed by the X-ray so he won’t have to shave, and be reminded of his male attribute. It is done”; “A pregnant woman, tubercular and nephritic, wants to have her pregnancy interrupted. She is examined and an affirmative answer is given to her response”; “Man wants to know the normal frequency of coitus so as not to hurt himself or his wife.” This gives a sense of how much needed to be done. By showing him both aiding these suffering individuals and working to change unjust laws, this biography helps restore Magnus Hirschfeld to the prominence he deserves.
Michael Schwartz is an associate editor and a frequent contributor to these pages.
