To that end the Spohr Verlag also produced dozens of small monographs and pamphlets on homosexuality, legal reform, and related topics. From 1898 to 1914 the Spohr house (led by Max Spohr’s younger brother after Max’s death in 1905) published more than one hundred titles on homosexuality, making up 40 percent of the firm’s list. By producing such a wide range of brochures and studies, many authored by lay activists, the publishing firm helped to undermine the monopoly of medical, psychiatric, and juridical scholars on the public discussion of homosexuality.7 Hirschfeld’s own publications alone, beginning with Sappho und Sokrates, were produced in multiple editions running to tens of thousands of copies. The most popular SHC title was Was Soll das Volk vom dritten Geschlecht Wissen? (What should the [German] people know about the third sex?). This eighty-page booklet had a print run of eighteen thousand copies in 1901, and a total of no fewer than fifty thousand had been published by 1911.8 Not all or even most were sold, but instead were distributed at SHC meetings, lectures, and other events. Members were encouraged to leave copies on Berlin trams, in train stations, and in bars and restaurants.9
This pamphlet literature was a critical element in the SHC’s petition drive to reform Paragraph 175. After organizing the SHC, Hirschfeld solicited and won the support of August Bebel (1840–1913), leader of the German Social Democratic Party (whom Hirschfeld had befriended while still a student). Bebel signed the petition and introduced a measure in 1898 to overturn the anti-sodomy statute, sparking a full debate on the floor of the Reichstag. The initiative failed, but the SHC pressed ahead. The brochure, Eros vor dem Reichsgericht (Eros before the imperial court), authored anonymously by a jurist (and published by Spohr), was sent—along with the petition—to officials, attorneys, and legal scholars. Methodically, the SHC targeted professional groups—7,500 Catholic priests in Bavaria, Baden, and the Rhineland in 1899, for example, and 28,000 German doctors in 1904. A “yield rate” for these mass mailings is impossible to determine, but by 1902 the committee had collected 4,500 signatures, mostly public figures, medical doctors, and other professionals. That number had grown to more than 6,000 by 1906.10 In his monumental 1914 study, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes, Hirschfeld claimed that nearly 100,000 “enlightenment brochures” had been mailed to the press; to local, state, and federal officials; and to politicians, attorneys, medical doctors, university professors, religious figures, and school teachers.11
The freedom with which Hirschfeld, Spohr, and the SHC pursued their public campaign is astonishing, especially in light of counter-initiatives to increase censorship and curb pornography. Since the early 1890s, the “Lex-Heinze” (“Heinze Law”), a restrictive censorship law proposed by the Kaiser and named for a convicted pimp and murderer, was hotly debated, dividing social conservatives and free-press advocates. The version promoted by the Catholic Center Party would have preempted most of Spohr’s publications on homosexuality and limited the advocacy work of the SHC. But in 1895 the German Publishers Association organized a successful campaign to temper the bill. The version proposed in March 1900 elicited significant resistance from artists, writers, academics, and public intellectuals, who organized themselves in so-called Goethe Leagues, named to suggest the freedom necessary to inspire the creativity of Germany’s poet laureate. Within a few months a compromise was reached, and the new law, dramatically watered down from earlier drafts, did little more than criminalize the sale of blatant pornography.12 Works on homosexuality with any scientific or educational merit, according to the historian Mark Lehmstedt, were almost never censored: “[T]he books on (hetero) sexual enlightenment were more often the focus of court proceedings and Spohr was rarely directly affected.”13 Certainly censorship remained a genuine threat, and not until the Weimar Republic were Berlin activists and publishers able to establish a vibrant homosexual press. Still, the climate in Wilhelmine Germany was strikingly liberal, particularly in contrast to the rest of Europe.
Britain offers the most striking counterpoint. Like Germany, England maintained a punitive anti-sodomy statute. But unlike Germany, there was no tolerance for advocating homosexual emancipation or even for scientific publications on the subject. The Oscar Wilde trial in 1895, which condemned the Irish wit to two years hard labor, certainly poisoned public and official views. But Wilde’s spectacular downfall was more a symptom than a cause of English intolerance. Publishing the work of an outspoken English activist similar to Ulrichs would have been inconceivable. Both John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), an Oxford-trained classicist, and Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) asserted the innate character of homosexual love and called for legal reforms: Symonds’s A Problem in Greek Ethics, Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion; Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists and A Problem in Modern Ethics were produced in 1883 and 1891, respectively, and Carpenter had two hundred copies of his Homogenic Love printed in 1894.14 But these works were published privately—none was advertised, reviewed, or sold openly in bookstores in Britain.15 Even the works of Krafft-Ebing received a tepid English reception. When an English-language translation of his Psychopathia sexualis appeared in 1892, the “objectionable” sections were rendered in Latin. The British Medical Journal opined that the entire text should have been “veiled in the decent obscurity of a dead language.”16
The most egregious English censorship case, the so-called Bedborough Affair, banned Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, published in 1897. (Significantly, Ellis’s work had already appeared without any difficulty in German translation a year earlier under the title Die Homosexualität, although not published by Spohr.) The leading English psychiatrist of his age, Ellis was inspired by his Sexual Inversion collaborator, Symonds, who died in 1893 before the volume had been completed. Ellis’s relationship with Symonds can be compared to that of Krafft-Ebing with Ulrichs, or Moll with Adolf Glaser, and Ellis cited French and especially German authors, including Casper, Ulrichs, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, and Moll, arguing like the more progressive German psychiatrists that “inversion” was inborn and should not be criminalized. In May 1898 the London bookseller George Bedborough was arrested for stocking the volume. After Bedborough decided to plead guilty, there was no effective defense; both he and Ellis’s publisher were fined. The London Daily Chronicle reported approvingly that “the courts of the law and the criticisms of the press are the responsible organs of public opinion in such a matter and we cannot take the view that the book has any scientific value whatever…. [I]n the discharge of our duty to the public we feel bound to say that the book in question ought never to have been written or printed…even if the science it professes to advance were worth studying.”17 Although Ellis later published the title with a Philadelphia press—which also released the other five volumes in his series Studies in the Psychology of Sex—the stultifying effect of the case on British sexology can scarcely be exaggerated. In 1906 the Edinburgh doctor James Burnet commented, “It is a great pity that medical men in this country, with almost unanimous consent, have agreed to ignore the study of sexual science in its bearing on practice.”18
The mildness of censorship in France was a legacy of the French Revolution.19 Certainly French psychiatric and sexological literature was direct and often explicit. But French publications lacked the empirical documentation of bourgeois and elite case studies that characterized most German scholarship.20 There were no influential French autobiographical works comparable to Ulrichs’s pamphlets, published to inform popular opinion, mobilize a homosexual community, or influence political debate. Nor was there a French equivalent of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, since, of course, adult same-sex erotic relationships had been fully decriminalized in France. The collaborative relationship between medical science and bourgeois subjects that characterized German sexology—and the activism it inspired—was largely missing in France. The limited contact of French medical professionals to non-institutionalized homosexuals—in short, their ignorance of the French homosexual subculture—a
lso accounts for the paucity of ethnographic description in French studies.21
It was precisely the open, public agitation of the SHC that distinguished Germany from other European countries. In the name of popular enlightenment the SHC sponsored dozens of public lectures, primarily in Berlin but also in other major German cities. This work was supported by a number of SHC auxiliary groups or “subcommittees” that were organized in Munich, Leipzig, Frankfurt, and Hamburg. Most often Hirschfeld was featured as speaker, although medical doctors and sexologists who belonged to the committee gave lectures as well. Hirschfeld’s research fascinated a broad swath of Berlin’s educated and economic elites, and the SHC received many requests to stage lectures: elite all-male clubs, groups of businessmen, private associations, and student organizations solicited speaking engagements. Some of these events targeted large working-class audiences with up to one thousand people in attendance. For “mass” meetings (Volksversammlungen) the SHC rented large “class-appropriate” locations: the Ahrendt and Patzenhofer breweries in the northern working-class neighborhood of Moabit were frequent venues, both large enough to host an audience of a thousand or more.22
The practical planning of SHC activities was accompanied by discussions of a more theoretical bent. Though united in their goal to eliminate the German anti-sodomy statute, SHC activists discovered that they were divided by profound philosophical and strategic differences, which would soon split the movement. By no later than 1902, the biannual board meetings, held initially in Hirschfeld’s cramped apartment, had been moved to a prominent hotel. The surviving minutes of a meeting held on July 5, 1903, document the attendance of a range of activists from throughout Germany, as well as observers from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Italy, and Russia.23
The most important initiative had been and remained the lobbying for legal reform. Since the failure of Bebel’s 1898 initiative to abolish Paragraph 175, the Reichstag had commissioned eight leading law professors to undertake a comprehensive revision of the German criminal code. The SHC had already targeted these eight with their materials: two had responded positively and four had promised to review the issue carefully, but the two most conservative members of the Legal Reform Commission had ignored the SHC entirely. At the July board meeting, the avowedly heterosexual anarchist Eric Mühsam suggested making yet another appeal to the jurists on the Reform Commission. The SHC attorney, Joseph Fraenkl, countered that only the two liberals, Adolf Liszt and Alfred Blumenthal, at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, respectively, would ever support eliminating the anti-sodomy statute. The other six, he argued, were simply too conservative. Hirschfeld agreed, adding that, anyway, the SHC lacked any new materials to send to the conservative members of the commission.24
The publisher Adolf Brand spoke repeatedly in favor of a more aggressive strategy, one that would enlist the support of other progressive groups, including the Goethe League, which had played such a prominent roll in minimizing the impact of the Lex-Heinze censorship law in 1900. Brand also suggested that the SHC send the petition to any potential supporters in the Reichstag, requesting that they issue public statements condemning Paragraph 175. Several board members spoke against Brand’s suggestions, however, including Hirschfeld, the anarchist Johannes Holzmann, and the Munich physician Ernst Burchard, who argued that such a “premature action could be damaging.” Echoing Hirschfeld’s position, Mühsam chimed in and warned that the SHC needed to avoid appearing to be politically engaged and should maintain its more neutral profile as a supporter of scientific study. The attorney, Dr. Albert Jakobs, also derided Brand’s suggestion and stated presciently, “I’m a pessimist, and I believe it will take 100 years before we achieve this.”25
As the last agenda item, Hirschfeld described his plan to prepare and distribute popular surveys to determine the percentage of the German population that was “homosexual.” Discussion turned quickly to the difficult issue of definitions. Who was a “homosexual,” and who defined it? Was it a matter of sexual acts or some intangible orientation? These questions had never been asked before, and certainly never debated and discussed, at least not in a systematic fashion, based as it were on empirical evidence. Of course, the ability to enumerate the size of the homosexual population in a city such as Berlin—or in Germany, for that matter—would provide an important and critical statistic for lobbying against the law. Hirschfeld, for his part, argued that the survey should measure sexual practices statistically, since the primary objective was to create a sexual profile of a given demographic. This, in Hirschfeld’s view, would provide the raw data to begin to define the size and character of a given population. Inspired by a recent study completed by Dutch psychiatrist Lucien von Römer—who was in attendance at the SHC board meeting—Hirschfeld hoped to question members of a Berlin metalworkers’ union as well as a cohort of students at Berlin’s Technical University. Römer, for his part, had surveyed some six hundred Dutch university students in Amsterdam and had estimated based on a 50 percent return rate that some 2 percent of the Dutch male population had sexual relations exclusively with other men. 26
Many in the meeting reacted to Hirschfeld’s proposal with skepticism. Some questioned whether survey participants would have the courage to divulge information about illicit sexual acts, even with the guarantee of anonymity. The attorney Rudolf Schulze argued that most homosexual men were completely “cowardly.” “They will never acknowledge that they are homosexual,” Schulze claimed, based on his experiences living in France, England, and different regions of Germany. “Considering the difficult legal situation, they do not have the strength to make such admissions.” Berlin merchant Georg Isaaks agreed that it would be impossible to establish a clear picture based on a voluntary survey, but for a very different reason: “[M]any young men between seventeen and twenty,” Isaaks argued, “imagine themselves to be homosexual, but they are mostly inclined to masturbation…. How many of these [youths] have confessed their homosexuality, when in reality they are not at all?” The Munich activist Ernst Burchard agreed with Isaaks, claiming that the misleading responses of seventeen- to twenty-year-olds would actually discredit the study, making it fairly useless and even a source of ammunition for “our enemies.”27
The more contentious issue, however, revolved around the precise meaning of homosexuality. The entomologist Dr. Benedict Friedlaender, an independent scholar who also contributed generously to the SHC, opined that a statistical study was completely impractical and would account only for those who had “a completely extreme orientation.” Men who practice a kind of “bisexuality,” he argued, would never even be detected by such a study. The author Edwin Bab complicated the issue by demanding that homosexual inclination and not just practice should provide the critical measure. As Bab argued, “It doesn’t matter who has had homosexual experiences, but rather who has already detected in himself a homosexual orientation.” Mühsam concurred that the critical factor to measure was “the number of those who felt themselves to be homosexual.” Friedlaender responded that the best survey study would somehow measure both “orientation” and actual sexual practice.28
Hirschfeld reiterated his view that the most important index of orientation was sexual practices and that the critical first step in assessing Berlin’s homosexual population was to establish “how high might be the percentage of those who are completely homosexually oriented, that is those who can only have intercourse with the same sex.” Clearly not all accepted Hirschfeld’s assumptions. Board members agreed, however, to elect a special commission to consider a statistical study, composed of Friedlaender, Römer (in Amsterdam), Burchard (in Munich), and Hirschfeld himself.29 The study was begun in 1903 and completed in 1904. Hirschfeld published his results in Jahrbuch, and, extrapolating from the two polling samples, estimated that roughly 2 percent of German men were exclusively homosexual. Hirschfeld also claimed to prove, definitively, the existence of bisexuality.30
Although the study received generally positive reviews, Hirschfeld’s gre
atest publicity came inadvertently from a libel lawsuit. Four of the students who received the questionnaire successfully sued Hirschfeld, who was defeated on appeal, and then a second time as well. The nominal fine that the judge imposed was well worth the additional positive publicity that Hirschfeld received; critics of the guilty verdict praised the quality and care of Hirschfeld’s sexological research and his broader project of developing a science of human sexuality. Indeed, Berlin’s liberal press lionized Hirschfeld, condemning any attempt to muzzle free expression or the pursuit of science. Science, it would seem, was truly the path to justice.31
The SHC owed much of its early success to Hirschfeld’s astute instrumentalization of positivist research and his savvy exploitation of Berlin’s liberal press. Both the organization and its leader were heavily indebted to Germany’s cultural climate at the turn of the century. For one, the powerful publishing industry together with prominent literary figures defeated the most draconian version of the new censorship law passed in 1900, which allowed the SHC to establish a broad public platform for its various projects. This continued a liberalization that had begun already in 1890, when the anti-socialist laws of 1878 were finally allowed to expire. Once the nominally Marxist Social Democratic Party was permitted to organize openly, it quickly became Germany’s largest political party. Certainly parliamentary government was hobbled in Germany. There were no democratic constraints placed on the imperial cabinet, which served at the pleasure of the emperor, for example, and at the state level, a three-class suffrage system all but eliminated the influence of salaried workers, who otherwise comprised an electoral majority. Still, Germany’s Social Democrats created a haven for opponents of the conservative industrial and aristocratic establishments. Moreover, much—if not all—of the party leadership embraced Hirschfeld and the SHC, making homosexual rights a progressive cause. Not only the party leader August Bebel, but also the leading party theoretician Karl Kautsky and the important theorist of “evolutionary reform” Eduard Bernstein, who represented the party’s right wing, were among the first to sign the SHC petition.32
Gay Berlin Page 13