THE WEIMAR ERA in German history (1919– 1933) saw the emergence of what was probably the world’s first organized, public mass movement for queer liberation, complete with its own institutions and fervent political activity. The campaign’s roots can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century, and some of its major players were active from the 1890s onward, in a period known as the Wilhelmine era (1890–1918). A lively queer culture—consisting of meeting points, nightlife, and stage performances, among other elements—flourished alongside this movement and has been celebrated in popular culture ever since, including in the prose of the Anglo-American writer Christopher Isherwood, his story’s spectacular Broadway run (1966–1969) as the musical Cabaret, the show’s Liza Minelli-starring Hollywood adaptation in 1972, and the successful contemporary German TV series Babylon Berlin (2017–present).
With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, both the campaign for expanding rights and the public queer culture suffered a sudden and brutal rupture, marking the beginning of systematic oppression and, later, extermination of sexual and gender nonconformists in Germany. That movement ultimately failed to achieve its goals, but its enduring legacy can teach us a lot about social progress and queer history. I have identified what I see as nine lessons that we can take from the Weimar experience that may be applicable to our own time.
1. (Queer) History is never linear.
It is a commonly held belief that the arc of history is one of progress or improvement, from less sophisticated sociopolitical systems and relations to more advanced forms. However, whether it’s the anti-LGBT rhetoric and policies of Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis or Weimar Germany’s descent into fascism, history reveals that no democratic achievement can be taken for granted. The Nazis destroyed in a matter of months whatever progress the sexual freedom movement had achieved in almost forty years. After twelve years of the Nazi regime, it took West Germany two decades of democracy for its queer movement to become at least as public and vocal as it had been in the Weimar era.* It wasn’t until 1994 that the infamous Paragraph 175, which criminalized sex between men, was finally erased from the German penal code (though it had been reformed in the 1960s, and subsequently was not widely enforced). However, modern legislation pertaining to legal gender recognition is still pending; hatred and fear of LGBT people are on the rise; queer refugees, migrants, and people of color are facing systemic racism and intersecting discriminations; and some right-wing groups are challenging the German LGBT community’s achievements, including marriage equality.
2. Progress is not just about rights.
Looking at the balance of the Weimar queer movement from the standpoint of liberal reforms, one German historian described it as characterized by “apparent achievements and an emancipatory stalemate.” While the movement may not have achieved its primary goals—abolishing Paragraph 175 and raising the overall societal acceptance of sexual and gender nonconformity—it would be misguided to consider it a complete failure. The queer movement of both the Wilhelmine and Weimar eras succeeded in creating, possibly for the first time in history, a group consciousness that extended beyond local, regional, or even national boundaries, as well as positive patterns of individual and collective self-identification for sexual and gender nonconformists. The German queer press of that time, consisting of approximately twenty titles, sparked the establishment of groups across the country that were both political and social in character. It created a fellowship of like-minded people who could, sometimes for the first time in their lives, meet, exchange thoughts, get to know each other personally, and form friendships or even romantic or sexual relationships. The sense of belonging to a community was particularly important for non-metropolitan queer people, who could not always participate in the nightlife culture of great cities.
3. There’s life beyond berlin: Size doesn’t always matter.
While the extravagant nightlife as depicted in Cabaret or Babylon Berlin is usually associated with that city (which, remarkably, has maintained a unique appeal for LGBT people down to the present day), queer public life in Weimar Germany was not limited to the capital. It was present not only in other metropolises, such as Munich and Cologne, but across a host of middle-sized or small cities and even some villages. What’s more, its extent was not always correlated with the size of a given municipality. The significantly larger but geographically isolated cities of Königsberg (modern-day Kaliningrad, Russia) and Danzig (modern-day Gdańsk, Poland, then an independent free city, though predominantly German-speaking) had fewer meeting points for queer people and experienced fewer waves of political self-organizing than, say, the small provincial cities of Liegnitz and Görlitz. The latter benefited from their proximity to regional hubs of queer social, political, and cultural life, such as Berlin or Breslau.
To be sure, the city has always held a special place in the queer imagination as a place of refuge from the supposed conservatism and backwardness of the countryside and as a realm of opportunities—social, sexual, cultural, and otherwise. However, while it certainly offered liberties that were often absent from nonurban spaces, the city could also be dangerous because of the generally greater visibility of queer culture and individuals. Police records and news reports show that legal persecution of same-sex-loving and gender nonconforming people was greater in cities than in the countryside. An article published in Die Freundschaft in 1921 depicts a “hunt” that “a whole army of [police]officials” is said to have launched against the queer people of Breslau, including the surveillance of meeting points and specific people.
4. There is no universal queer experience.
In Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany, as elsewhere, it mattered whether someone was transgender or a cisgender man or woman. Paragraph 175 only penalized sex between men (or people read as such), but it did not mean that lesbians didn’t face discrimination and ostracism. While cisgender homosexual men cultivated a lively public sex culture, and most cities were dotted not only with cruising grounds but also with establishments catering especially to this group, lesbians and trans people prioritized the domestic sphere as their preferred space for socializing. (There were also differences that ran along class lines. While working-class people did not always have the economic freedom to participate in queer sociability and culture, their middle-class counterparts often lacked the social freedom to do so, since their jobs depended on their reputation and respectability. Nonconforming or transgressive gender expression was more common among working-class people, who might have had less to lose if they dressed in a “provocative” manner, though this did expose them to greater risk of harassment and even violence in public places.)
5. Make romance, but don’t romanticize.
Both in popular culture and among historians, the Weimar period is often idealized as a golden era for all gender and sexual dissidents. Although in many ways the outburst of queer activism and culture of that time was unprecedented, this view usually obscures the often harsh reality that sexual- and gender-nonconforming people faced: the various forms of legal persecution (including not only anti-sodomy laws but also indecency and obscenity laws), blackmail, and exposure to violence. Then there were the cultural tropes such as that of the “fairy” or the homosexual vampire, censorship of the queer press, and threats from law enforcement and anti-vice organizations.
Then, too, some of the major figures and leaders of the queer movement were far from being above reproach. Magnus Hirschfeld, usually hailed as the father of queer emancipation and an early role model, was implicated in colonialism, racism, and eugenics; and, while publicly avowing women’s rights, he marginalized female scientists and their work. Adolf Brand, another important figure, was a fervent misogynist and anti-Semite, and Friedrich Radszuweit built the largest queer organization of the Weimar era while excluding sex workers, the jobless, and other less than “respectable” social types. As the power of the Nazis grew, Radszuweit also wrote an open letter to Adolf Hitler and appealed to him to reconsider his position on homosexuality, though this was probably due to his naïveté and lack of judgment more than to his presumed pro-Nazi sympathies.
6. Divisions don’t help; unity does.
Despite the precarious legal and social condition of queer people in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany and the resulting urgent need for unity, the movement of that time was riven by internal conflicts. It consisted of several rival political camps that differed not only on ideological but also on strategic grounds. Moreover, these factions were all run by men with big egos, each of whom aspired to become the sole leader of queer emancipation. They often engaged in petty arguments that played out publicly, and their personal feuds lasted for years, until the end of organized queer activism in 1933. Instances of cooperation and overcoming their pride were rare but usually crowned with success, such as the joint campaign for the decriminalization of sex between men in 1929 (which was passed that same year by a parliamentary committee but never implemented due to supervening political circumstances). This “lack of unity” and “internal quarrelsomeness” were later cited by one of the major figures of the queer movement, Kurt Hiller, as among its key weaknesses and one of the reasons it did not achieve its goals.
7. Unity is not built by exclusions.
The 1929 vote by the German parliamentary committee on legal affairs in favor of decriminalizing sex between men had its downside. While the proposed reform was intended to abolish the longstanding and infamous anti-sodomy law, it would have criminalized male prostitution and set a very high age of consent (21) for male-to-male sexual behavior. In addition, there were several social groups that various queer circles barred from their ranks and gathering places, including sex workers, the jobless, and “fairies” (flamboyant, usually cisgender men who dressed and behaved in a gender nonconforming manner). Most of the time, this was a strategic ploy to win the support of the heteronormative majority, though at the cost of solidarity. This was contested already in the Weimar era and became a frequent source of conflict among the various queer groups.
8. Rauchfangswerder was (also) a riot.
The Stonewall Rebellion of 1969 has gone down in history as the first time that LGBT people actively stood up to police harassment. However, earlier incidents of resistance stretch back at least as far as the Weimar era. On July 5, 1930, members of a Berlin-based queer organization clashed in a brawl with a local police sports club whose members were engaging in provocative behavior and harassment of the queer participants. This happened in front of an inn that the two groups happened to visit at the same time, on the Rauchfangswerder peninsula in southeast Berlin. Hence, I refer to it as the Rauchfangswerder incident. Just as at the Stonewall Inn, there were transgender people on hand, including Gerda von Zobeltitz, a dressmaker of noble birth whose adoption of stylish feminine garb led to headline-making arrests. While challenging the assumption that Stonewall was the first act of violent resistance, this example also reframes the conversation around queer historical narratives, encouraging us to see developments in queer history not as isolated events but as part of a process. The Rauchfangswerder incident might seem to have been an isolated occurrence, but, like Stonewall, it was indicative of a wider trend—of a growing self-confidence and sense of agency, itself the result of years of political work and campaigning by queer organizations.
9. Agency, not victimhood.
While LGBT people have clearly been victimized by oppressive regimes, they have often tempered their victimhood with resilience, developing strategies with which to resist the disciplining power of the state and society, as they did in both Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. Like other oppressed minorities, they would flee their personal circumstances and move to places that were more congenial to their lifestyle. In court trials, defendants accused of engaging in sodomy would fabricate their testimony and insist that only behaviors that were not punishable had taken place. Cross-dressing defendants charged with being a public nuisance defied the law by appearing in court in the apparel of their choice. Their resistance led to the introduction of the so-called “trans-certificates” (one of which Gerda von Zobeltitz obtained) in some cities, which allowed them to roam the streets without fear of arrest. These certificates were still in use until the 1960s. Many people facing trial sought aid from queer organizations, which were sometimes successful in securing a positive or more favorable outcome.
* This refers to West Germany. In East Germany, a satellite state of the Soviet Union, political self-organizing of same-sex-loving and gender nonconforming people was slower and less spectacular, which was due, among other things, to the limitations of its political system.
Mathias Foit is the author of Queer Urbanisms in Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany: Of Towns and Villages (2023). An earlier version of this article appeared in Notches (notchesblog.com).
