“Self-Confidence and Persistence: Two Hundred Years of History”
Schwules Museum, Berlin
Exhibition and Catalog
(189 pages, 12.00 Euros)
BERLIN’S SCHWULES museum opened its permanent exhibition in December 2004, featuring 200 years of gay German history, 1770–1970. The German word schwul translates as “gay male” and excludes lesbians. Under the direction of the museum’s co-founder Andreas Sternweiler, the comprehensive new exhibit sums up a historical record compiled by twenty years of museum projects in western Germany.
The exhibit uses 55 organizing narratives, beginning with “Persecution before 1800” and ending with “East Germany—breaking new ground after 1970.” The first sections present medieval Europe’s punishments for sodomy. Fast forward to the 18th and 19th centuries, when interest in the topic centered on discussions of the ancients’ practice of pederasty, and hot classical gods with muscular, marble butts were installed in fountains or on pediments.
German homo-activism dates from the 1860’s with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’s radical “Uranian” writings, which landed him in prison and in exile. Adolf Brand founded Der Eigene (“the Peculiar”), the first gay magazine, in 1898. Brand’s best known stunt was “outing” Reich’s Chancellor Franz von Bülow in 1907, which garnered Brand eighteen months in prison. There was considerable conflict among some of the early pioneers, with Brand often at odds with Magnus Hirschfeld, who co-founded the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee) or WhK in 1897. While Hirschfeld believed that homosexuals constitute a “third sex,” Brand upheld a hyper-masculine ideal for homosexual men and ridiculed his rival for championing “sissy boys.”
The WhK, which the Schwules Museum dubs the “the world’s first gay self-help organization,” sponsored public lectures about the “third sex,” trained police to tolerate same-sex cabarets and balls, provided financial and legal assistance for sex radicals in trouble with blackmailers or the law, and petitioned against the infamous paragraph 175, which outlawed sodomy. Hirschfeld supported female prostitutes and unwed mothers (though this is not discussed in the exhibit), and in 1919 he founded the Institute for Sexology (ISS), in many respects the institutional prototype for this new museum in Berlin.
While the ranks of German gay and lesbian “friendship associations” grew during the 1920’s, the post-World War I Weimar-era liberalism sank into economic and political crisis. The Nazis sacked the ISS just days before the infamous book-burning of May 1933. The exhibit catalog features a photograph of the Gestapo pawing through sex magazines before torching them. Other surviving photos show Hirschfeld’s bust taken from the ISS in effigy behind the flames. Hitler’s rise precipitated a swift decline in Berlin’s public homosexual life, driving gay men and lesbians into hiding, into exile, or into the military. Tens of thousands wound up in concentration camps.
Germany’s singular position at the vanguard of gay liberation would never be retrieved, as the divided nation fell under international influence after World War II. But with the support of foreign homophile societies, West German activists succeeded in amending paragraph 175, thus decriminalizing consensual same-sex relations for those 21 and over, on June 25, 1969—two days before the Stonewall Riots in New York. East Germany had actually abolished Paragraph 175 a year earlier, though the state kept a tight clamp on gay activism. It wasn’t until after reunification, in 1994, that Paragraph 175 was abolished for all Germans once and for all.
Beginning in the late 1970’s, gay and lesbian historians began excavating West German archives, unearthing photographs, art, magazines, advertisements, and personal accounts of gay and lesbian life. The Nazis’ obsession with documenting both their achievements and their atrocities (a Teutonic propensity?) paid off with archives full of damning material: death decrees, Gestapo summonses, medical reports, surveillance notes, and mug shots. Nazi-era survivors have come forward to donate hundreds of snapshots, not the least of which is a remarkable photo-booth series of a young couple risking their lives to construct this memento.
West Berlin’s museum industry launched into queer territory in 1984 when gay men from Homosexuelle Aktion West-Berlin (HAW) and lesbians from Lesbian Aktionzentrum (LAZ) combined forces to mount an exhibition in the Berlin Museum entitled “Eldorado: Homosexual women and men in Berlin 1850–1950.” The show was a blockbuster, drawing press coverage and controversy and over 40,000 visitors. But behind the scenes the collaboration was a disaster, with the lesbians apparently objecting to the male nudity and explicit sexual images in the exhibit. From then on, West Berlin’s gay men have worked separately from the lesbians. The men produced exhibits for the Schwules Museum once they obtained funding in 1987, while the lesbians put their energies into the Spinnboden Library, which had been founded in 1978, and into “FFBiz,” a feminist archive, library, gallery, and research institute.
Since 1992 the Schwules Museum has sponsored from three to six exhibits per year. “Goodbye to Berlin: 100 Years of the Gay Movement” in 1997 was perhaps the most ambitious, while 2000’s “Persecution of Homosexual Men in Berlin, 1933–1945,” documented the gay holocaust during the Nazi regime. The latter exhibit included a display at the Sachsenhausen Memorial outside of Berlin, the camp where many homosexuals were incarcerated. The Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., borrowed extensively from this project for its 2002 exhibit, “The Nazi Persecution of Homosexuals, 1933-1945.”
The Schwules Museum’s 2002 exhibit “Mittenmang” (“With the Crowd”) was the first in nearly twenty years to feature lesbians, bisexual women, and trans-identified people in addition to the histories of gay men and male-to-female drag performers commonly shown. One side of the exhibit narrated the story of the East and the other side the West during the post-War occupation and division of the city. Curated by Karl-Heinz Steinle and Maika Leffers, its parallel narratives reveal a city that’s still divided years after reunification. The Lila Archive, founded by East German activist and scholar Ursula Sillge, documents the circle of gay, lesbian, and transgendered activists associated with Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in the 1970’s, 80’s and 90’s, best known in the U.S. from the Broadway production I Am My Own Wife. Leffers and Steinle are to be applauded for moving the Museum to more inclusive constructions of German GLBT identity and community.
The Schwules Museum is a must-see for historically-inclined visitors to Berlin. Exhibit texts are in German and English, and the well-produced catalog also comes in both languages (available for purchase at www.schwulesmuseum.de). Tours in English are offered Saturdays at the civilized hour of 4 p.m. With the Schwules Museum off the “Hinterhof” (courtyard) behind the Café Melitta Sundström at Mehringdamm 61 and the popular Schwuz disco, a weekend visitor need not wander far from this gay compound to experience a variety of memorable activities in Berlin.
Polly Thistlethwaite is Associate Librarian for Public Services at the CUNY Graduate School & University Center, New York City.
