Where'd you go, Magnus Hirschfeld, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you

 If, in some sense, one can speak of a “sexual revolution” in the twentieth century, then surely Magnus Hirschfeld was its Trotsky or Lenin. The arson that destroyed the Reichstag in 1933 has received a vast amount of attention, as it was the pretence that led to the Nazi seizure of power. Similarly, one can view the sack of Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology in Berlin on May 6, 1933 as a definite defeat in the struggle for sexual enlightenment.

In the 1980s, in the revisionist currents that were then emerging in Germany, two historians attacked Hirschfeld as a eugenicist whose theories preceded the Nazis, who attacked him not because he was Jewish and gay but because they no longer “needed” him. In the late period of the Cold War, with the fall of the prestige of Marxism in academia, anything went.

In an interesting response by Liliane Crips, she showed that Hirschfeld, that making a bow to the then prevalent eugenicist ideology, did not thereby show any commonality with the Nazis. He used arguments that were social – founded on his belief that women who had to many children were often strained to the breaking point – to argue for contraception and the right to abortion; all of which fit into his panorama, so to speak, of enlightened Sex-pol, which would include removing laws against homosexuality, and viewing all sexual laws in the light of a notion of the greater good that must include human sexual pleasure.

Hirschfeld was born in the 19th century – in 1868 – and thus was well into his fifties when the World War took place. It was in his sixties that he had his greatest successes, with his program of liberalization adopted, in part, by the Weimar Social Democrats. Even in Wilhelmine Berlin, he had achieved enough celebrity that there was a cabaret song about him entitled “The Hirschfeld comes”. I should probs say that “comes”, here, is no play on words – that linguistic crossing had not been constructed at the time, I think. Rather it is a reference to the Sandman.

Yet a story that ends with the Nazis and Hirschfeld dying in exile in Nice is evidently not one of onward and upward. Fascist sex-pol emerged at the end of World War I at the same time as leftist sex-pol.

For instance: In October, 1920, Hirschfeld came to Munich to give a talk. Munich was just coming out of the reaction that followed the overthrow of Munich’s Soviet Republic – a Republic that was less Soviet than Dada. After giving a talk on the 4th, Hirschfeld was followed by a crowd of what the newspaper called Swastikers, who attacked him with kudgels and left him for dead. His body was retrieved by his comrades, who got him to the hospital in time to be saved. Recovering, he had that rare chance: reading his own obituary.

It is one of the hard truths of intellectual history that even those intellectuals one looks up to – Hirschfeld as the Trotsky of the sexual revolution, to use my image – are never straightforwardly heroic. On October 4, 1920, Hirschfeld’s talk was about a man named Steinach. Steinach had a rather nutty surgical theory about being able to transplant glands to prevent aging, and as an addendum, he claimed to “cure” homosexuality. Though Hirschfeld had every reason, personal and scientific, to oppose Steinach, he thought Steinach was onto something. At least in 1920.

Hirschfeld, then, sometimes let his science envy get in the way of his intuition. But he continued even after the near death experience of 1920 to lobby for the abolition of the legal prohibition of homosexuality, Paragraph 175 to the Legal Code; in 1929, a Reichstag committee of Social Democrats and Communists voted to abolish Paragraph 175, but this was never implemented, and the Nazis of course reversed it. Astonishingly, it hung on in West Germany until 1992. In East Germany, it was abolished. So, in one of those bits of liberation that Cold War histories forbid us to peek too much at, in East Germany people were not imprisoned for homosexual sex; in West Germany, maybe about 50,000 people were convicted, mostly in the Adenauer era.

Interestingly, Kurt Tucholsky, otherwise a man of impeccably enlightened sentiments, wrote an article about Hirschfeld’s assault that begins by assuring the reader that Tucholsky finds Hirschfeld a kitsch personage, and only then goes on to howl about the brutality of the assault and the complicity of the police in hiding the assailants. Tucholsky, as he said in a latter article, “could hardly imagine man on man sex” – which, of course, is a rather suspicious denial. However, in 1929, he came out for the decriminalization of gay sex on grounds that Hirschfeld had laid down:

“To me, the sexual relationship of a man to another man is hard to imagine – but I would never dare to make my sentiment the basis of a moral law. One could, with the same right, create a law against redhaired women or against men who are heavy perspirers. So long as sexual play does not harm society, Society has no right to attack it. … A legal code is not an ethical fable, and the ethical principles of the Catholic Church, which by its indisputable service to society bears most of the guilt for this legal fabrication, are debateable, and not the basis of all things. This is Terror, which we cannot tolerate.”

One should remember what role homophobia played in the rise of the radical right in Germany. The NYT and the Centrists are playing a dangerous game by tossing trans rights in the garbage can. But it was ever thus with centrists.

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