The German sex researcher Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, 1868-1935, was one of the world’s greatest gay rights pioneers.
More than 100 years ago, while Oscar Wilde was being tormented in Reading Gaol, Dr Magnus Hirschfeld launched the world’s first gay rights organisation in Berlin.
Whereas Wilde merely lamented the persecution of queers, Hirschfeld organised to fight it. His Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in Germany in 1897, pioneered the struggle for homosexual emancipation. A similar movement did not emerge in Britain until the 1960s, over half a century later. He truly was a man ahead of his time.
Hirschfeld’s remarkable life is bought to screen for the first time in a new German drama documentary, The Einstein of Sex. Directed by the celebrated film-maker, Rosa von Praunheim, it premieres in the UK this weekend at London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.
Hirschfeld was born into a conservative Jewish family in northern Germany in 1868. The film begins with his childhood curiosity and fascination with sex. Against the conventions of his era and the moralism of his elders, even as a young boy he viewed sexuality as something entirely natural and wholesome.
At medical school, he is traumatised by a lecture on sexual degeneracy, where a gay man – who had been incarcerated in an asylum for 30 years because of his homosexuality – is paraded naked before the students like a laboratory animal. Hirschfeld is, it seems, the only student who is revolted by such mistreatment. All the others view it as normal and justified, even his best friend.
Further trauma ensues when, soon after setting up himself as a doctor in Berlin in 1893, he is waylaid outside his apartment at night by a soldier who is desperately disturbed by his homosexuality. Hirschfeld resists the soldier’s pleading for a consultation there and then, telling him to come to his surgery the next day. Overnight, however, the soldier commits suicide.
Hirschfeld’s terrible guilt and remorse motivates him to begin studying homosexuality and, eventually, to write a pamphlet calling for the decriminalisation of gay sex, which was then outlawed under Paragraph 175 of the German penal code.
When his family advise him to study something more worthy and respectable like cholera, arguing that research into homosexuality will not bring him any acclaim or joy, Hirschfeld ripostes: “What are you saying: that cholera brings you more joy than sexuality?”
As his pro-gay reputation spreads, more and more men who are unhappy with their homosexuality come to him as patients. Hirschfeld’s prescription? Lots of gay parties and plenty of boyfriends!
One of Hirschfeld’s biggest problems was hostility from other gays and lesbians. They accepted their second class legal status. Many did not like him rocking the boat. He was a trouble-maker. They refused to co-operate with his sex surveys and political campaigns.
Realising that his lone efforts were not enough, in 1897 Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Its strategy was to promote research and education to debunk homophobic prejudice and to present a rational case for homosexual law reform. The 1890s equivalent of Stonewall, the SHC’s motto was: “Justice through science”. Some of it’s more radical supporters adapted the battle cry of the French Revolution, demanding: “Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite, Homosexualite!”
As well as having to contend with the complacency and disparagement of other gays, Hirschfeld was also attacked from left by militant OutRage!-style campaigners led by Adolf Brand. Advocating direct action, Brand denounced Hirschfeld’s “queeny committee” as a talking shop of respectable, middle class homosexualists.
This criticism was a bit unfair. In those ignorant, bigoted days, to have a group like Stonewall was truly radical – almost revolutionary. This is born out by the way the SHC and Hirschfeld were put under police surveillance as subversives and subjected to repeated harassment.
Thanks to Hirschfeld’s tireless campaigns, in 1898 the German parliament debated the repeal of Paragraph 175. Leading the call for its abolition was August Bebel, head of the left-wing Social Democrats (Hirschfeld was also a prominent member of the SPD). Although defeated, the debate put homosexual equality onto the mainstream political agenda for the first time.
Undeterred by this setback, Hirschfeld decided to tackle the police, in bid to stop them enforcing the unjust anti-gay laws. He took the police commissioner of Berlin on a tour of gay bars and clubs. Instead of the dens of debauchery that he was expecting, the commissioner found that gays were witty, stylish, polite and well behaved – and he enjoyed their company. “I wanted to see Sodom and Gomorrah”, he complains somewhat disappointedly.
To strengthen the rational, scientific case for law reform, Hirschfeld proceeded with his medical research into the causes and nature of homosexuality, in the hope that understanding would discourage prejudice and promote acceptance. Far in advance of others, he concluded that everyone is a mixture of male and female. But this perceptive analysis led him to erroneously advance the idea that lesbian and gay people were an “intermediate sex” that was biologically predetermined at birth. In his view, male homosexuals possessed a “woman’s soul trapped in a man’s body”.
This well-intentioned misjudgement aside, Hirschfeld was right on most other things. He can be forgiven.
As well as his concern for the welfare of homosexuals, he was also a strong advocate of the rights of transgender people. Good fortune shone on Hirschfeld when he was paid a fabulous sum to perform one of the world’s first sex-change operations. The payment enabled him to establish the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919, which predated Dr Alfred Kinsey’s US sex research institute by nearly 30 years.
As well as its research role, the Institute promoted sex education, contraception, marriage guidance counselling, advice for gay and transgender people, the treatment and prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases, gay law reform and women’s rights. It saw over 20,000 people a year.
These were novel ideas at the time, and Hirschfeld’s fame and notoriety
spread world-wide. When told that the American newspapers were hailing him “the Einstein of sex”, he replied that he would feel much happier if they called Einstein “the Hirschfeld of physics”.
But his work bought him into conflict with the Nazis. They ranted against his “perversions”, attacking his public meetings and beating up Hirschfeld and his lover Karl Giese.
While away in the US lecturing in 1933, Nazi stormtroopers attacked and ransacked the Institute for Sexual Science, destroying its priceless research archives. The vast library was burned in the great bonfire of “enemy books”. The Nazis also seized the Institute’s huge list of names and addresses. These were later used by the Gestapo to compile their notorious “pink lists”, which identified homosexuals and led to their arrest and deportation to the concentration camps.
With the Nazis publicly denouncing Hirschfeld as one of the country’s leading “Jewish criminals”, which was effectively a death sentence, friends advised him not to return to Germany. He went to the south of France instead, where he died suddenly of a stroke in 1935. His lover Karl Giese committed suicide in 1938, while on the run from the Nazis.
Hirschfeld’s extraordinary life lives on in this beautiful, remarkable film, which documents his political campaigns, sexual research and the myriad ups and down of his own less than happy personal life. As with so many other human rights campaigners, he often sacrificed his own happiness and comfort for the love of others. A true pioneer and hero of the struggle for queer emancipation!
QX, 4 April 2001.
Copyright Peter Tatchell 2001. All rights reserved.