Tragically, the political paralysis of the Weimar Republic beginning in 1930 prevented parliamentary action, and the committee’s draft revision never came to a vote. The law was not eliminated, nor even liberalized, and instead was made more draconian in 1935 under Nazi rule. Just as the broader homosexual rights movement reflected the variegated politics and culture of the Weimar Republic, its ultimate failure and eventual demise was likewise tied to and emblematic of the fate of Germany’s first democratic state.
The hope of finally realizing legal reform at the beginning of the Weimar Republic seemed especially well justified, since Magnus Hirschfeld’s political allies, the Social Democrats, had displaced the Kaiser and now headed the new state. In February Hirschfeld wrote the new justice minister, Otto Landsberg, invoking the unprecedented support of SPD chairman August Bebel in 1898: “We trust that you will endeavor to reform the legal code as soon as possible…. An emergency law must be introduced to eliminate Paragraph 175, something for which the SHC has fought for years, on legal, biological and ethical grounds. The first such attempt was made by the SPD leader August Bebel, who called for the repeal of the Paragraph directly in the Reichstag…. We therefore request a meeting in order to provide a more detailed explanation of our objective.”2
Landsberg politely demurred, however, responding that he would prefer to meet once Weimar legislators were able to begin a process of comprehensive legal reform.3 The SHC then turned to Paul Hirsch, SPD minister-president of Prussia (the largest and most powerful federal state in the new republic), who responded likewise that the matter could be addressed only with comprehensive reform.4 These responses revealed the SPD’s lukewarm embrace of homosexual emancipation. But they were also indicative of the relative weakness of the new Weimar state and the existential threats it faced from the radical right.
Despite these disappointing rebuffs, Hirschfeld and SHC members pursued their reform agenda. The new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Science—housed in the Tiergarten villa with its adjacent house and additional outbuildings—provided the SHC with office and library spaces and an opulent venue for organizational meetings. On August 30, 1919, the SHC’s annual general meeting met in the institute’s villa and established a new Aktionskomitee, which would direct legal reform efforts with both Adolf Brand’s Community of the Special and the newer groups that had formed since the end of the war. In addition to Brand, Hans Kahnert, who had just founded the German Friendship Association, joined the committee. In the following weeks announcements with calls for contributions appeared in the Jahrbuch, Der Eigene, and Die Freundschaft.5
The action committee was initially spearheaded and dominated by the SHC, including Hirschfeld and his SHC colleague, the Jewish and openly homosexual lawyer Kurt Hiller. Under the auspices of the committee, Hirschfeld and the SHC continued to collect signatures for a petition that demanded the repeal of Paragraph 175. One prominent signatory was Gustav Radbruch, who was named federal justice minister in December 1921. Two months later Radbruch met with representatives of the committee, including Hirschfeld, and expressed his support before drafting a reform law that would have eliminated criminal penalties for sexual relations between consenting adult men.6
Soon after this, in March, Hirschfeld appeared before the Reichstag to present the petition, which by this point had been signed by a who’s who of leading Weimar intellectual and cultural figures, including Albert Einstein, Gerhart Hauptmann, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and the composer Engelbert Humperdinck. Although the petition was also endorsed by leading socialists such as Rudolf Hilferding, and Hermann Müller, who served as chancellor from summer 1921 to spring 1922 (as well as Justice Minister Radbruch), the formal response was disappointing. Instead of agreeing to debate the petition, Reichstag officials responded in December 1922 that they would simply pass it over to the executive branch, which denied Hirschfeld and his allies a public debate or hearing. Despite this defeat, the SHC continued with its campaign to collect signatures and, by 1924, boasted the support of some ten thousand prominent professionals and other public figures. Unfortunately, Radbruch never pursued his initiative, due largely to political instability. By 1925 the right-wing German People’s Party—the party of Wilhelm Kahl—controlled the Justice Ministry, and the reform campaign appeared to be stymied.
The prospect of eliminating the anti-sodomy statute in the early 1920s was certainly one factor that motivated the cooperation of the SHC, Adolf Brand, and the Berlin Friendship Association. The greatest energy, arguably, came from the latter (founded by Hans Kahnert in 1919), which promised not only to lobby for legal reform but also to coordinate social events for the homosexual community. Branch associations were soon organized in Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hamburg, and Hanover, and in August 1920 the regional chapters formed an umbrella group, the German Friendship Association. The larger organization pledged to fight against Paragraph 175 and offer legal support for members who fell afoul of the law. By 1923, thirty-six local branches in twenty-eight German cities had been organized.7
The rapid expansion of the Friendship Associations was a product of the new cultural climate created by the Weimar Republic. The original Berlin chapter registered as a formal Verein, or club, in September 1920—a bold step, since it required the submission of a membership list. (In the early twentieth century the SHC had debated and decided against this; they finally registered as a Verein in June 1921.)8 Although there are no surviving club records, the Friendship Associations had a dramatically different membership profile from those of the SHC or Brand’s CoS. Members were younger and less fearful of being associated with a homosexual organization. It is also likely that many soldiers returning from the Great War filled their ranks.
Although the clubs engaged politically for legal reform, their stronger attraction was likely the social opportunities they fostered. The branches in Weimar and Hamburg maintained free lending libraries. Berlin had several chapters, including a gay theater troupe, the Theater of Eros, and a Christian worship society, which held Sunday-afternoon services at the Church of the Redeemer. The friendship clubs also sponsored separate lesbian chapters in Berlin, Magdeburg, Munich, and Dresden.9
Hirschfeld and the SHC could scarce fail to notice the emergence of what seemed to be a mass movement. In 1922 the committee sent a young law student, Fritz Flato, to the second congress of the German Friendship Association in Munich. Flato had joined the SHC only after the war, probably through an introduction made by Kurt Hiller (whose family had social ties with Flato’s).10 Not finished with his legal training, Flato was only twenty-seven and therefore the perfect age to serve as an SHC representative. In his memoir, Hiller gave a report on Flato’s experience: “It was an enormous rendez-vous, apparently, with a noble objective, of course, but a surfeit of dilettantism, parochial cluelessness, and people who were well-meaning but ignorant—exactly what corresponds to a ‘movement’ based on the masses instead of on biologists, ethnographers, psychologists, jurists, philosophers, literary critics, and authors.”11
This account certainly betrays Hiller’s (and presumably Flato’s) snobbish elitism, and, by extension, the general sensibility of the SHC. Since the late nineteenth century, the SHC had lobbied against the anti-sodomy statute by disseminating its sexological research and by attempting to shape the opinions of influential elites: politicians, bureaucrats, professionals, and cultural figures. The motto “Through science to justice” suggested a reliance on elite education and training and did not afford a role for the “common man.” Certainly the SHC sponsored countless “popular” events and lectures before 1914, attempting to influence the views of large crowds in beer halls and theaters. But actual membership in the SHC remained an exclusive prerogative for primarily men of means, usually from commercial, professional, and cultural groups. What Flato’s account signaled—filtered through Hiller’s retelling—was the potential for a genuinely populist movement. Of course, this was pr
edicated on the willingness of large numbers to risk discovery for the sake of a more open and likely more conventional existence. Although the SHC faced real competition for members and financial support, Hirschfeld and his colleagues ultimately embraced the growth of the Friendship Associations, both for what they reflected about Weimar republican culture and for how they might contribute to the struggle for legal reform.
The SHC’s more surprising political collaboration in the early 1920s—though very short-lived—was with Adolf Brand and the Community of the Special. Brand’s conflicts with Hirschfeld were legion and dated to the early twentieth century. Brand had always despised Hirschfeld’s “scientific” analysis based on the study of “sexual intermediaries,” and, by contrast, had emphasized “Graecophilic” male-male friendship, especially an idealized relationship between adult men and adolescent or young-adult males. The attention that Hirschfeld seemed to lavish on hermaphrodites, cross-dressers, and effeminate men offended Brand’s conception of elite, virile masculinity. Brand also begrudged Hirschfeld the recognition he received as a sexologist and was especially embittered by what he considered Hirschfeld’s betrayal during the Eulenburg scandal. Recall that after the sexologist refused in 1907 to attest that Bernhard von Bülow was homosexual, Brand was successfully sued for libel and received an eighteen-month jail term, which he forever blamed on Hirschfeld.
The history of this acrimony makes the rapprochement after 1918 that much more remarkable. At the SHC’s general assembly in August 1920, Brand was elected an Obmann, a member of the SHC’s governing board. At the same gathering Brand agreed that the CoS would make common cause with the SHC (and the Berlin Friendship Association), under the umbrella of the Action Committee, to promote legal reform. And in 1922 Brand participated in the twenty-fifth-anniversary celebrations of the SHC, held in the villa of the Institute for Sexual Science. A possible factor in Brand’s new attitude—apart from the general optimism inspired by the founding of the republic—was a general improvement in his own fortunes. For one, he entered a lifelong romantic partnership with Max Miede, twenty-six years his junior, who seemed to help him fulfill and live out his own sexual identity and ideology. It appears that the young man joined Brand (along with Brand’s wife and extended family) on the Wilhelmshagen estate just outside of Berlin at the end of or soon after the war.12
By November 1919 Brand had resumed editing Der Eigene, the first issue published since 1906. With the relaxation of censorship laws, he regularly printed photos of nearly nude boys, adolescents, and young men. In 1921 Brand introduced a special feature, the Extrapost, devoted to personal ads. Although censored and fined five thousand marks in 1922 (a relatively modest sum considering the course of the German inflation) for the crime of “solicitation”—the charge was not anti-homosexual, since heterosexual publications were similarly censored for personal ads—Brand later resumed publication of the Extrapost, but without open distribution at kiosks and newsstands. Brand also published the tabloid Freundschaft und Freiheit (Friendship and freedom), modeled on Die Freundschaft, in eleven issues in 1921. Later he launched a more successful journal, Eros, which included personal ads and appeared from 1927 to 1931. The notices in Eros were posted by men from Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, Russia, England, France, and the United States.13
Brand was also able to reinvigorate the CoS, for which he opened a dedicated Klubhaus in central Berlin with a calendar of events. Post-inflation (that is, post-1923) membership rates were set at thirty-six marks for basic and sixty marks for the exclusive membership. The less expensive option included a subscription to Der Eigene as well as copies of Rasse und Schönheit (Race and beauty), an occasional insert of male nudes, as well as free legal advice (concerning Paragraph 175 criminal charges or blackmail threats) and invitations to all social events. The elite membership included additionally the Extrapost and the right to place free ads. By 1925, Brand claimed to have established CoS branches, or “Roundtables,” in Leipzig, Frankfurt, Breslau, Königsberg, Munich, Hamburg, Dresden, and Cologne.14
The ideology of male-male eroticism promoted by Brand and the CoS received a more explicit elaboration now than it had before the war. Here it is tempting to identify the influence of Hans Blüher and his theories. As before, the mutual love of two male friends was considered the most noble relationship. But now the basic bisexuality of all human beings—the Freudian conception likely filtered through Blüher—was more strongly emphasized. Without ambiguity, Brand also identified same-sex erotic love as an absolute good, equal to a merely spiritual relationship (or, for that matter, to heterosexual love), so long as it was part of a committed, loving partnership and did not devolve into mere “animal lust.” Brand and the CoS also sanctioned the mentoring friendship—with or without an erotic element—of older and younger men or adolescents. Thus the maturing youth should seek his “highest pleasure, his moral strength, his physical release, and spiritual calm” with another male. Masturbation or self-love was unhealthy and dangerous, sex with female prostitutes risked disease, and premarital heterosexual intercourse was strongly discouraged.15
As expected, the CoS maintained its strong opposition to Paragraph 175, which, of course, explained Brand’s sometime cooperation with Hirschfeld. Yet to some extent the CoS identified more closely with the right side of Weimar’s political spectrum. Here again, it is easy to discern Blüher’s influence. The state, it was felt, should not impinge on the private sphere of human sexuality, and this translated into support for a woman’s right to abortion. Yet the larger objective in the decriminalization of same-sex love was the regeneration of German society and culture. To that end, the CoS represented an elite vanguard of superior German men who would lead this renewal. Implicit was a strong suspicion of Weimar democracy and Reichstag debate, as well as latent and often explicit anti-Semitism. Germany would benefit most not from the squabbling of democratic institutions but from the autocratic control of a great leader. Blüher’s Führer principle seemed to provide a model for organizing both personal and public life.16
It is hardly surprising that such pronounced philosophical differences (with Hirschfeld and the SHC) would lead to a breach. In April 1923 Brand withdrew the CoS from participation in the Action Committee. He explained the decision by citing the need for national unity: the French occupation of the Ruhr and the Great Inflation made agitation for legal reform horribly inappropriate.17
Brand’s nationalism alone, however, could hardly explain his increasingly vulgar, anti-Semitic attacks on Hirschfeld. The critical factor here appears to have been the influence of several young CoS associates. One of these, Ewald Tscheck (1895–1956), a Berlin native, began publishing stories, poems, and essays in Der Eigene in 1920. Tscheck was heavily influenced, it appears, by the homoerotic anarchism of John Henry Mackay as well as the masculinist writings of Benedict Friedlaender, Blüher, and Brand himself. He also had a serious flirtation with the fledgling Nazi Party, and possibly joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1924. His introduction to the National Socialists was through Dr. Karl-Günther Heimsoth (1899–1934), who became Ernst Röhm’s lover in 1924. (Heimsoth was shot in July 1934 by the Schutzstaffel, the SS, a few days after the assassination of Röhm and some other eighty SA members in the so-called Night of the Long Knives.) Like Tscheck, Heimsoth was influenced by the masculinist wing of the homosexual rights movement, and was a combatant on the Western Front in the last years of the First World War, before beginning his medical studies.18
As young, anti-Semitic nationalists, Heimsoth and Tscheck represented the extreme right wing of Germany’s homosexual rights activists. They also helped to inspire Brand’s intemperate and erratic behavior. In 1925 the two young protofascists collaborated with Brand to publish a special issue of Der Eigene that viciously maligned Hirschfeld and the SHC. Titled “Tante Magnesia” (Aunt Magnesia)—a feminizing allusion to “Uncle Magnus” (Hirschfeld)—the special issue included crude and vulgar cartoon caricatures as well as scathing essays, impugning the science, rig
hts activism, and intrinsic “German-ness” of Hirschfeld, the SHC, and its members. In one piece, Brand rehearsed the events of the Eulenburg scandal, ancient history no more, and blamed Hirschfeld for his imprisonment: “The eternal and enormous difference between sexuality and love…which was given expression by the two leaders of the movement [Brand and Hirschfeld] demonstrated clearly the elementary conflict between an Oriental and a Nordic sensibility.”19 In other words, Brand’s emphasis on masculine friendship expressed his true “Nordic,” or German, identity, in opposition to Hirschfeld’s effeminate, medicalized “sexuality,” which sprang from his “Oriental,” or Jewish, nature. In a pamphlet authored by Tscheck—and published by Brand soon after this issue—Tscheck claimed that Hirschfeld, “as a Jew…was the most unsuitable leader in the affair of Eros.”20
Brand’s association with Heimsoth and Tscheck was over by the end of the year, however, and he never published material by either author again. Within a short time, moreover, he appears to have recommitted to the challenge of reforming the law. Although he eschewed any future cooperation with Hirschfeld or the SHC, his admiration for the völkisch right wing had clearly abated. Incredibly, by 1926 he was admonishing CoS members and the readers of his publications to vote for left-wing parties: “The advocates of Friend-Love should support with money and votes only those political parties that have had the courage to present our demands openly in the Reichstag…. No one among our supporters can doubt that it is alone the Social Democrats, the Communists, and the Democrats who have done this. Only they alone might have our votes in the future.”21
How Brand made such a rapid about-face yet again is difficult to imagine, although his contemporaries were likely unsurprised. In a pithy character sketch, Kurt Hiller described Brand as a “dilettante” with a “shallow intellectual Niveau” and inadequate “knowledge.” According to Hiller, “Brand exhibited anarchist and German-völkisch traits, as well as those of the ultra left and the ultra right, and this made cooperation with him within a movement that hoped to influence public opinion and contemporary legislation nothing but torment.”22 However erratic, naive, or stupid, Brand clearly knew something. He was either scared by the right or understood that parliamentary paths were the only hope for achieving legal reform.
Gay Berlin Page 29