Blüher responded to his critics by asserting his own racial purity and implicitly embracing the anti-Semitism with which he had been vilified. In order to defend his support for male same-sex eroticism, he distinguished increasingly between his own version of masculine friend-love and the homosexuality of the “Jewish” science of sexology. “The fact that I express understanding for a sexual orientation [homosexual] that is different from my own [heterosexual] is not evidence of some shortcoming,” Blüher argued. “My racial heritage gives me the security that my own qualities, good and bad, are manifestly German.” In another response to his critics, Blüher asserted, “I love German girls with blond hair and plan to procreate my own race. I consider it my most German characteristic that I not allow my dear enemies and fellow Germans to dictate to me how one has to be German.” Emphatically proclaiming his heterosexuality, Blüher doubled down, so to speak, maintaining his intellectual commitment to the homoeroticism of the Männerbund, but by defining it as non-Jewish and distinctly German. In June 1913 he published a seven-page essay calling for the abolition of the anti-sodomy statute, Paragraph 175. Here he used anti-Semitic rhetoric, arguing for the legalization of male same-sex love, especially that “middle ground between usual friendship and the love of homosexuals.” He argued that the homoerotic was not “essentially a Jewish characteristic” and could easily be combined with a “race-conscious German-ness.”36
Blüher incorporated his anti-Semitism fully into his two-volume study Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft, published during and just after the war, in 1917 and 1919. As a kind of popular historical sociology, Blüher’s new work combined an ethnographic review of important Männerbund models, including ancient Greece, with an outline of his overarching thesis: the erotic Männerbund as the historical agent of social organization and culture, consisting of a uniform age cohort hierarchically structured with an explicit Führer, or leader. In volume two, Blüher included his version of the history of the Wandervogel, emphasizing that the racially German—meaning not Jewish—youth movement was an ideal-typical Männerbund. Reminiscent of German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who viewed the Prussian state as the telos, or culmination, of world history, Blüher posited that the apotheosis of the Männerbund was the state, and specifically the German state.
Blüher articulated his most strident anti-Semitism when he addressed the “Jewish question” directly in his 1922 publication Secessio Judaica, a short (sixty-six pages), racialist screed masquerading as philosophical rumination. Germany today, according to Blüher, “is a battleground of three historical powers…the Roman empire of the Catholic Church, Jewry, and the German Reich of the German nation.”37 These three were incommensurable, Blüher asserted: “One cannot be a Jew and a German; one cannot be a Roman [Catholic] and a German. The German idea distinguishes itself without question from the other two, and the German has no choice.”38 Rehearsing traditional anti-Semitic themes—the Jews are a parasitic race, capable only of mimicry, and guilty of greed and economic extortion—Blüher then praised Zionism for its realistic appraisal and response to the “Jewish question,” namely withdrawal or secession into a separate Jewish state.39 In his own mind, Blüher was not bigoted, however, and he considered his anti-Semitism neither hate-filled nor rabble-rousing; it simply reflected an objective appraisal of contemporary “race” relations. As Blüher himself conceived it, his philosophically grounded anti-Semitism was really only a race-conscious understanding and valorization of what it meant to be properly German.
Blüher’s reputation and popular reception scaled incredible heights during the Weimar Republic when he became one of the best-selling authors in Germany. His influence on both the left and the right was profound. Writing in 1925, Thomas Mann claimed that “since Blüher, this element [the homoerotic], at least with the manifestation of the youth movement, has become psychologically bound to our consciousness…without doubt, the homoerotic today enjoys a certain cultural goodwill.”40 While cultivating völkisch and protofascist interlocutors, Blüher remained friends with a number of left-wing Jewish intellectuals, including Martin Buber, Gustav Landauer, and the SHC activist and openly homosexual communist Kurt Hiller. Blüher also established a written correspondence with the former Kaiser William II, who was whiling away his last decades in Dutch exile. The Nazis never warmed to Blüher, despite the sociological model that he supplied for their movement. Indeed, Blüher condemned both Hitler and his anti-Semitism as early as 1933. Kurt Hiller, just after his release from a concentration camp in late 1933, met Blüher in a Berlin café. The former had been brutalized during his internment and was preparing for exile; Blüher apologized profusely for the anti-Semitism of his Weimar publications.41 After this, Blüher entered an “internal exile” for the duration of the Third Reich. Despite his distance from the Nazi regime, Blüher was unable to reestablish himself after 1945. In the conservative context of the West German Federal Republic, it was likelier that Blüher’s endorsement of homoeroticism and not his erstwhile anti-Semitism made him a pariah. He died in relative obscurity in 1954.
Blüher’s full-throated embrace of “respectable” anti-Semitism marked his final break with the German left wing. As the prewar herald and champion of the youth movement, Blüher had predictably been aligned with progressive causes such as the life reform movement, which included nudism and dietary reform. By casting his lot with the anti-Semites, however, he alienated the left entirely and embraced what he himself would label the “conservative revolution.” Indeed, Blüher was among the first to couple the words “conservative” and “revolution” when describing the extra-parliamentary, right-wing reaction to the new Social Democratic Weimar Republic. The expression became a central concept and virtual synonym for the configuration of old-school conservatives, völkisch German nationalists, and, eventually, Nazis, who comprised Weimar’s antidemocratic opposition.
Blüher’s theory of the homoerotic Männerbund garnered a notoriety that distanced him from many conservative elites, as well as the Nazis, both before and after 1933. However, the Männerbund remained broadly influential and was popularized throughout the Weimar Republic. It was difficult for Blüher and his contemporaries not to view the demobilized troops after November 1918, who formed the Freikorps and other right-wing militia groups, and later the Nazi Party itself, as Männerbund manifestations. Indeed, Blüher’s theory provided a sociological model and intellectual substrate for much of the Nazi movement. For Weimar’s myriad youth groups, spanning the political spectrum from left to right, the Männerbund was a self-evident reality.
The unbearable irony of Blüher’s popular success was how the homoerotic Männerbund disseminated a knowledge of same-sex love, and conditioned its tentative acceptance, despite persistent and often vehement resistance on the part of many conservatives. How could one suppress and punish adolescent homosexual experimentation if it were properly understood, according to Blüher, as healthy and German? And why would one condemn the openly homosexual adult if, as Blüher’s model of the Männerheld maintained, he might also be a virile nationalist and perhaps a military or political leader? A greater irony still was Blüher’s popularization of the “Jewish” sciences of psychiatry and sexology. Via Blüher, even the vehement anti-Semite might internalize an understanding that bisexuality was nearly universal or, conversely, that sexual orientation was hardwired. If mutually exclusive, neither construct could please an old-school conservative. Christian dogma and traditional morality could scarce hold back the tide of sexual modernity. It is difficult, indeed, to imagine the culture of Weimar Germany without considering the Männerbund.
• CHAPTER SIX •
Weimar Sexual Reform and the Institute for Sexual Science
It was formerly the case that ignorance counted as innocence and reticence about sexual questions was considered holy. Much has changed and today we recognize that in sexual questions ignorance means guilt and our sacred duty is to break the conspiracy of
silence. To make cultural progress in this area we cite the words of Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power.”
—MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD, “Opening Speech of the Third International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform in Wigmore Hall from September 8–14, 1929,” in Die Aufklärung, 9 (1929)
In March 1919, just months after the November armistice that ended the Great War, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) in an opulent villa at the northern edge of Berlin’s Tiergarten Park. The first such facility in the world, the institute was supported by the Dr. Magnus-Hirschfeld-Stiftung, a nonprofit foundation with an endowment of thirty thousand marks. Even before the war ended, in May 1918, Hirschfeld gained support for his plan from Berlin’s police president, who then promoted the idea to the Prussian minister of the interior. The institute offered medical and psychological counseling on a range of sexual issues to thousands of individuals, including heterosexual men and women, homosexuals, cross-dressers, and intersex individuals. The institute also represented the first attempt to establish “sexology,” or sexual science, as a topic of legitimate academic study and research. Nowhere else in the world was there so much as a university department or chair devoted to the subject, much less an entire institute. Hirschfeld’s reputation as a sexologist also helped to attract medical doctors and psychiatrists, who visited the institute for research or to participate in seminars and conferences.1
The original plan for the institute called for an equal division between medical practice and research. While the practice was expected to be self-supporting through paying clients and patients, research would rely on the funding provided by the endowed foundation. Hirschfeld’s ambitious design included research departments of sexual biology, pathology, sociology, and ethnography. The medical and therapeutic practices were to include medical treatment and psychological counseling for a range of problems related to sexuality, venereal disease, and birth control. The institute also opened Germany’s first sexual counseling center, the Center of Sexual Counseling for Married Couples, which served as a model for the many clinics opened in the 1920s in Berlin and throughout Germany.
The institute acquired an adjacent property in 1921, which created additional space for the library, an auditorium, and a surgical unit. By this point the entire complex had more than fifty rooms. The basement of the main villa housed the domestic staff and kitchen as well as several offices. The ground floor had reception, waiting, and consultation rooms. Hirschfeld’s personal quarters and the museum were housed on the second floor, where the X-ray apparatus and laboratories were likewise located. The adjoining residential house had clinics for patients and a large lecture hall. The library and other records were housed in a separate building in the courtyard.
The institute’s formal staff was fairly limited and included several secretaries, domestic help, and Hirschfeld’s younger friend and lover Karl Giese (1898–1938), who served as the archivist, librarian, and museum curator. The only salaried medical doctor was Arthur Kronfeld. An endocrinologist, Dr. Arthur Weil, left the institute for the United States in 1923. This was the year of the Great Inflation, which marked a significant turning point, largely by reducing the institute’s initial endowment to a few hundred marks. The institute’s purchase of the adjoining property just two years earlier proved especially fortuitous, since real estate turned out to be one of the best hedges against complete financial disaster. Another victim of the inflation was the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, the scholarly journal of sexual science that Hirschfeld had published with the Spohr Verlag since 1899. The loss of the endowment meant that Hirschfeld was ultimately forced to give up his dream of supporting scientific research. Without funding, the institute depended on unpaid interns or PhD students who volunteered their time in exchange for the opportunity to work there. After 1925, the institute largely forsook the pretense of pursuing original research and focused entirely on medical and psychological practice, its advocacy for legal reform, and its various campaigns to provide public education on sexuality and birth control.2
The institute’s emphasis on public education quickly helped to broaden its reputation, not only within Germany but throughout the Western world. One example of this public outreach was the museum of sexuality, referred to in some sources as the “Hirschfeld Museum.” Geared to titillate and entertain as well as to educate, the museum presentation followed three themes: variation in sexual orientation (primarily homosexuality), the diversity of sexual drives (illustrated with examples of fetishism, masochism, and sadism), and an ethnography of sexual expression from all corners of the world. Much of the display consisted of wall-mounted charts and photographs. But there were also banks of cases filled with objects, including Hirschfeld’s collection of phalluses (from around the globe), objects that had belonged to fetishists, and various sex toys.3
“Visited this remarkable Institute,” reported the English feminist Dora Russell—second wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell—in 1926, “where the results of researches into various sex problems and perversions could be seen in records and photographs. We actually met two people whose sex had been changed by operation.”4 Margaret Sanger, American founder of Planned Parenthood, described how “this most extraordinary mansion…was furnished sumptuously. On the walls of the stairway were pictures of homosexuals—men decked out as women in huge hats, earrings, and feminine make-up; also women in men’s clothing and toppers. Further up the stairs were photographs of the same individuals” but in their regular clothing, demonstrating their “normality.”5 New York physician and prominent activist for birth control Dr. William Robinson published a short account of his visit to the institute in 1925. Like Russell and Sanger, Robinson was struck by the institute’s research on homosexuality; he reported an encounter with a male cross-dresser who passed for a woman. But Robinson also recognized the broad, general emphasis on human sexuality and sex reform: “The scope of the Institute is a much wider one, embracing the entire field of sexology. It is an institution absolutely unique in the whole world…which I hoped to establish in the United States but which I felt would not thrive on account of our prudish, hypocritical attitude to all questions of sex.”6
As these laudatory accounts suggest—especially Robinson’s—the institute’s activities expanded to include the interests of heterosexuals by providing public education and promoting a broad political agenda. This included marital counseling, information on birth control, treatments for venereal disease, and experimental medications for impotence. According to a published report, the institute attracted some 3,500 visitors its very first year, including 1,500 medical doctors and students and another 2,000 “lay” visitors. Of these, some 30 percent “belonged to neither the one nor the other sex but rather to the intersexual variant,” meaning homosexuals, lesbians, cross-dressers, and intersex individuals.7 Although the term is anachronistic, “transgender” persons became a new constituent group served by the institute. With the X-ray, laboratory, and surgical facilities, the institute provided much more than counseling: Hirschfeld and his medical colleagues also pioneered some of the first primitive hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgeries, effectively creating a nascent science of transsexuality. In addition, the institute housed the office and library of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and thus served as an all-purpose political lobby, social club, and clinic for sexual minorities. Becoming a popular tourist destination, the institute was one of the singular institutions that helped to define Weimar Berlin.
The founding of the Weimar Republic inaugurated a period of violent chaos—verging on, if not lurching into, at least episodically, civil war—of profound economic and social dislocation, and of a heady optimism about the prospects of Germany’s fledgling democracy. In his New Year’s message to SHC members at the beginning of 1919, Hirschfeld wrote, “[T]he great revolution of the last weeks can be greeted only with joy. This new time brings us freedom to speak and to write, and we assume with
certainty the emancipation of all those previously oppressed.”8
One of the great promises of the Weimar Republic was the elimination of all censorship. Although imperial Germany arguably had produced more titles on sexual minorities—scientific, literary, and popular—than the rest of the world combined, censorship had always been a threat for authors, activists, and publishers, including Adolf Brand, Max Spohr, and Hirschfeld. Thus the announcement on November 12, 1918, that “there is no more censorship” was a momentous development that let loose a prodigious outpouring within the arts and sciences, making the Weimar period one of the most creative in German history.9 Certainly the open discussion of homosexual themes in popular films or the boulevard press illustrated Hirschfeld’s claim about the new “freedom to speak and to write.”
One of many examples of this was the publication of Die Freundschaft (Friendship), the world’s first homosexual newspaper sold openly at kiosks. The paper appeared in August 1919, edited by the merchant Karl Schultz (with the support of the SHC). Unlike Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch or Adolf Brand’s literary journal, Der Eigene, Die Freundschaft had a wide and mostly unhindered distribution as well as broad popular appeal. Die Freundschaft also helped to establish Berlin’s expansive homosexual press, which produced nearly thirty periodical titles throughout the period of the Weimar Republic (see the list provided at the beginning of the bibliography).
The 1920s was also the age of the feature-length film, and Hirschfeld quickly recognized the power of this new medium. Before the end of the First World War, Hirschfeld had begun collaboration with director Richard Oswald to produce Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), the first movie to address the social and legal travails of homosexuals. The title was drawn from a novel published in 1904 by Hermann Breuer (using the pseudonym Bill Forster) about the unrequited love of a teacher for his male student. The novel ends with the protagonist’s suicide.10 Although the film depicts the concert violinist Paul Körner falling in love with his student, the plot has little in common with the novel, apart from themes of same-sex erotic love and suicide. Instead the film’s central message is the insidious effect of Paragraph 175 on the lives of male homosexuals. The budding romance between Körner and his student is thwarted by family members and the nefarious work of a male prostitute who blackmails the musician. Although the blackmailer is sent to prison for three years, the musician is also found guilty and given a nominal sentence, destroying his career and leading to his suicide. The film also features Hirschfeld as a sympathetic medical doctor who helps to explain both the phenomenon of homosexuality and the injustices of the law.11
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