Everybody
Page 9
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Ideas travel, morph, dwindle, resurge. The sex reformers had a dream of a better world, and a notion of eugenics to get them there. They believed in good and bad bodies, in a scale of human value that I personally find abhorrent. That their utopia – a world of pleasure uncoupled from the institutions of family, state and church – was founded on at best paternalistic and at worst coercive state involvement is one of the many ironies of middle-class socialism.
All the same, their version of eugenics is and must be kept distinct from what arose in Germany in the 1930s: eugenics not as a way of freeing sex from the reproductive imperative, but as a violent and obsessive programme of extermination; eugenics accompanied by a rolling back of freedoms and an installation of fascist laws concerned with controlling every aspect of bodily experience, towards the fantasy of populating the world with that pervasive impossibility, a pure ‘Aryan’ race. The grotesque, warped, pseudo-scientific project of white supremacy, everyone alike, the most hateful notion on earth.
Things changed very fast after the Reichstag fire on 27 February 1933. The next morning, there were mass arrests of communists and intellectuals. The absolute destruction – Auflösung – of the sex-reform movement was among the Nazis’ immediate priorities. Sex might be a private act, conducted in seclusion and by night, but it is also the means by which nations are sculpted and maintained. Control of sexuality and reproduction is an absolute necessity in any totalitarian system, especially one with a collapsing birth rate. As Isherwood explained, the Nazi Party had been promising for years that ‘it would stamp out homosexuality because “Germany must be virile if we are to fight for survival.” ’
That March was unseasonably mild. The porter’s wife in Isherwood’s building called it ‘Hitler’s weather’. His street, Nollendorfstrasse, was scarlet with swastikas. In the squares and parks, loudspeakers played speeches by Göring and Goebbels. Uniformed Nazis thronged the streets, bustling into restaurants to collect donations. It wasn’t, Isherwood recalled, wise to refuse. Impromptu prisons and interrogation rooms sprang up across the city. The political prisoners were taken to the stormtrooper barracks on Papestrasse and rumours abounded about the dreadful things that happened behind its walls. Isherwood heard that people were made to spit on Lenin’s picture, drink castor oil, eat old socks, that people were being tortured, that many were already dead. Even passing these rumours on was treason. Every day, the press announced new ways of committing treason. In April, he heard that three of his friends, all English, all gay, had been arrested. He was so frightened he started hallucinating swastikas in the wallpaper. Everything in his room seemed Nazi brown.
All across the city, the offices and clinics of sexual liberation groups were being searched. Books and documents were confiscated. Activists were arrested and interrogated. Organisations were banned, or forcibly taken over and run along Nazi lines. As a known Jew, communist and prominent sex reformer, Reich was in serious danger. Many of his allies in the movement were arrested and he knew the Gestapo was watching his apartment. Two of his friends were killed in Papestrasse, less than two miles from his own house. He spent weeks hiding in hotels under false names. After his book The Sexual Struggle of Youth was attacked in a Nazi newspaper, he finally left Germany, catching a night train to the Austrian border and escaping over the mountains with his wife Annie, disguised as ski tourists and carrying nothing but their passports. Then, perversely, mysteriously, he came back to Berlin – to get, he said, some clothes and underwear. Sneaking into his apartment, he discovered the Gestapo had stolen his copy of the Kamasutra, which added to his conviction that fascism was an outgrowth of sexual repression. None of his friends would lend him money. No one even wanted to be seen speaking to him. He packed a bag and fled again.
He spent that autumn in exile in Denmark, poring over Mein Kampf and writing The Mass Psychology of Fascism, his landmark analysis of the Nazi appeal in terms of sexual repression. It argues that the patriarchal family is the building block for fascism, and explores how Hitler’s dehumanising of the Jews utilised a deep-seated terror of sexually-transmitted disease, especially syphilis, building a rhetoric of infection and inoculation that would swiftly move beyond the realms of the metaphorical.
Hirschfeld was still on his world tour when Hitler came to power. He never came home. The Nazis rescinded his German citizenship and he settled unhappily in Nice, dreaming of re-opening the Institute in France until his death in 1935. Isherwood too went into exile, largely to protect his new lover, Heinz, a working-class German boy of eighteen, with big brown eyes and a broken nose. One of the last things Isherwood witnessed in Berlin was the Jewish Boycott on 1 April. As he pushed past the two stormtroopers guarding the door of Israel’s department store to buy some small, defiant item, he recognised one of the uniformed thugs as a former hustler from the Cosy Corner.
Christopher and Heinz left Berlin on 13 May 1933, accompanied by a red-eyed Erwin Hansen, who had worked as a caretaker and general factotum at Hirschfeld’s Institute and who would later die in a concentration camp. Heinz hadn’t slept at all and Erwin was drunk. Their plan was simple. As Isherwood explained in a letter to his mother, ‘as soon as Heinz has been formally called up and formally refused to return to that madhouse, he becomes, of course, from the Nazi point of view, a criminal. So he must get another nationality, either by adoption or by settling in some foreign country.’
At first exile was an idyll. Isherwood’s old friend from the Institute, Francis, had rented a tiny island just off the coast of Greece and he invited the lovers to stay. Tucked up in a tent, Isherwood was moved to write: ‘Heinz is my one support. He makes everything tolerable. When he swims he says “Zack!” “Zack!” like the crocodile in Peter Pan.’ He assumed he could bring Heinz to England, and travelled home alone, arranging to reunite at the port in Harwich. But when he and Auden went to meet the boat, Heinz wasn’t there. Isherwood finally found him in the customs office, midway through what was clearly an interrogation. The problem, it transpired, was a letter from Christopher that Heinz was carrying. ‘I’d say it was the sort of letter that, well, a man might write to his sweetheart,’ the customs officer announced, eyeing them both. Heinz was denied entry. For the first time a furious, humiliated Isherwood understood why being gay is a tribal identity. From now on, his sexuality would trump any national loyalty.
The lovers spent the next four years shuttling around Europe, shifting countries whenever Heinz’s visa or permit expired, trying all the time to buy him a new nationality. Thirty days here, thirty days there, fighting over money, locked together. They went to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Greece, France, England, Holland, Gran Canaria, Tenerife, Spain, Morocco, Denmark, Belgium, Holland again, Luxembourg, Portugal, Belgium again, France again, Luxembourg again. Jolly holidays that were like bad dreams, the permitted time draining inexorably away. They gambled and quarrelled, gathered menageries of animals that gave them a sense of rootedness but soon had to be abandoned.
In the end Heinz was expelled from Luxembourg as an undesirable. He was forced to return to Germany, where he was immediately arrested as a draft-evader, put on trial for homosexual liaisons, and sentenced in June 1937 for having committed reciprocal onanism in fourteen foreign countries and the German Reich. He was lucky: six months in prison, a year’s hard labour and two years in the army. Miraculously, he survived the war.
During those final pre-war years, any gains in sexual freedoms in Germany were rapidly rolled back, replaced by eugenicist and frankly genocidal laws that gave the state unpre-cedented freedom to control what kind of sex people had and what sort of offspring could be born. On 26 May 1933, thirteen days after Christopher and Heinz took the train to Prague, Paragraphs 219 and 220, which banned education around abortion, were put back into the penal code. On 14 July 1933, the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring made compulsory sterilisation legal in a variety of supposedly hereditary conditions, including epilepsy, schizophrenia and deafness. By the end
of the war four hundred thousand people would be sterilised against their will. At the same time, birth control and abortion became increasingly restricted, except for racial or eugenic reasons. On 28 June 1935, Paragraph 175 was drastically extended (shamefully, it was not fully repealed until 1994). On 26 October 1936, Himmler established the Bureau to Combat Homosexuality and Abortion. On 4 April 1938, a Gestapo directive ordered that men convicted of homosexuality be imprisoned in concentration camps.
After the war began in September 1939, the restrictions became even more brutal. In 1941 a police ordinance banned ‘importation, production, or sale of any material or instrument likely to prevent or interrupt pregnancy’, with the exception of condoms, vital for preventing venereal disease in the army. In 1943, the death penalty for abortion was introduced ‘if the perpetrator through such deeds continuously impairs the vitality of the German Volk’, though secret directives allowed for abortions on prostitutes, non-Aryans and women pregnant by foreigners. Later that same year, non-consensual abortions began on foreign forced labourers carrying ‘unworthy’ foetuses.
It’s all very well for Foucault to mock the sex reformers for believing that free access to sexual pleasure would automatically usher in a regime of liberty. The opposite, however, is unhappily certain. Sexual freedom is threatening, unruly. It’s no accident that authoritarian regimes, then and now, crack down on homosexuality and abortion, returning each gender to their rigid, pre-ordained duties of procreation, or that these limitations occur as a prelude to more dehumanising acts, the purges and liquidations of genocide.
So many of the horrors that lay ahead were prefigured in the fate of the Institute itself. On the morning of 6 May 1933, trucks pulled up on In Den Zelten, accompanied by the incongruous sound of a brass band. Erwin Hansen ran to the window and saw a raiding party of around a hundred Nazi students, who had been recruited from the Institute for Physical Fitness. He called down that he would open the door, but instead they smashed it, pouring in under the inscription that read in Latin ‘Sacred to Love and to Sorrow’.
There’s a surviving photograph of the raiders that morning, lined up outside the Institute, all dressed identically in a neat uniform of white shirts and what look like culottes. There they are: the good, disciplined bodies, ready to mete out violence against the degenerate and perverted; what a Nazi newspaper described in a report of the day’s activities as fumigating Hirschfeld’s ‘Poison Shop’. Inside, they ran amok, pouring ink on manuscripts and playing football with the framed photographs of transvestites that had once so impressed Margaret Sanger with their dignity and poise. In the afternoon, SA stormtroopers arrived and made a more careful survey of the library. They loaded ten thousand books onto the trucks, along with a bronze bust of Hirschfeld, commissioned for his sixtieth birthday.
Four days later, after the sun had set, thousands of people gathered in Opernplatz, the great square between the Berlin State Opera and the University Library, for the first and most famous of the Nazi book burnings. There were thirty-four fires that night, in each of Germany’s university towns, but the one in Berlin was the largest. Pyres had been built, made of pallets stuffed with Hirschfeld’s vast collection of books on sexual expression, his volumes about transvestites and the gender indeterminate, his magazines on sexology and birth control and the free expression of love.
In the Pathé footage, you can see flag-wielding students silhouetted against the pyres, marching in unison to the accompaniment of another brass band. There are cheers as students and stormtroopers hand books along in human chains, lobbing armfuls into the flames, though when the camera pans to the crowd beyond they seem watchful and still. Goebbels spoke. Isherwood, who was there, called out shame, but quietly. Like everyone, he was afraid. Hirschfeld’s bust was paraded on a spike. When Hirschfeld saw the newsreel in a cinema in Paris a few days later, he wept.
Eugenics regards the human race as a kind of library, some volumes of which need to be removed from circulation. The men ran back and forth, in shiny boots. There were ashes and fragments of burning paper in the air. More and more books were thrown on the fire, books by Freud and Reich and Havelock Ellis: dangerous books, degenerate books, books that dared spell out a lexicon of bodily delights.
4
In Harm’s Way
ON 13 MARCH 1973, a young woman was found dead in her dorm room at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. She’d been beaten in the face and chest, raped and suffocated. Her name was Sarah Ann Ottens and she was twenty. It was spring break, and nearly all the other women in the dorm were away. Ottens’s body was discovered shortly before midnight by the only other student still in residence on the floor, after she came home from seeing a movie with her boyfriend.
It was a grim scene. Ottens’s neck was grossly swollen. Her face and hair had been washed and she was lying naked from the waist down under a bedsheet. There was a bloody broomstick beside her and the sink was filled with bloody water. In the febrile days that followed, rumours began to circulate. Ottens had been raped. Ottens had not been raped while she was alive, but her corpse had been penetrated vaginally and anally with the same broomstick that had been used to choke her. ‘An object had been used to mutilate her’, the Daily Iowan confirmed during the trial. ‘A broom was found nearby with faecal material on the handle and had apparently been used.’ The story, and especially this gruesome detail, lived on in people’s heads. An arrest wasn’t made until May and so for two months women lived in fear of a repeat attack.
The murder occurred at a moment when attitudes around gender and sexual freedom were once again in rapid flux. Ottens was killed less than two months after Roe vs. Wade was passed in the Supreme Court, securing a woman’s right to legal abortion. The right to abortion had always been part of the sexual liberation movement fought by Reich and his colleagues in the 1920s. But the new women’s liberation movement now gathering force around the world had a subtly different agenda. It wasn’t focused so much on liberation to as liberation from.
Women’s liberation in the 1970s meant liberation from violence, rape, structural sexism, exclusion, wife-beating, abuse, unwanted pregnancies, all the miserable apparatus that accompanies living inside a body gendered as female. Murder too, of course; stripped and harmed, discovered by a stranger. The fear was not abstract. It was driven by what happened to actual people: women you knew or heard about, stories you read in the papers that impacted directly on your own physical experience of living in the world, from what clothes you wore to what routes you travelled to what words you said to what voice you used.
The women’s liberation movement broke into the mainstream in 1970 with the publication of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics: a revolutionary analysis of sexual dynamics in literature and psychoanalysis. Millett painstakingly revealed that the superstructure of patriarchy was not confined to economics or the law, but permeated even the furthest reaches of the culture, infiltrating and informing the domestic and erotic. She found in the novels of Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer evidence of a communal misogyny so widely shared that it was assumed to be the natural texture of reality itself.
One of the few men to receive Millett’s approval was Reich. Like many of this new generation of feminists, she drew on his work, not only for her title but also for her analysis of the patriarchal family. She quoted from his biting critique in The Mass Psychology of Fascism: ‘The authoritarian state has a representative in every family, the father; in this way he becomes the state’s most valuable tool.’ A full-page review in the New York Times predicted Sexual Politics would become ‘for lack of more inspired terminology – the Bible of Women’s Liberation’, which is exactly what happened. A copy sat on my mother’s shelves all through the 1980s, bolstering a green armada of Virago paperbacks, likewise a legacy of feminism’s turbulent second wave.
1970 saw an uprush of demonstrations. In March over a hundred women occupied the editor’s office at Ladies’ Home Journal in New York, demanding to put together a ‘liber
ated’ issue of the magazine while sprawling on his desk and helping themselves to his expensive cigars. In August, fifty thousand women marched down Fifth Avenue during rush hour as part of the first national Women’s Strike for Equality. On 20 November, activists threw stink bombs and rotten tomatoes at the Miss World contest in London, causing the host, Bob Hope, to temporarily flee the stage (‘Anyone who would try to break up a wonderful affair like this has got to be on some kind of dope,’ he announced on his return to the mic).
In January 1971, radical feminists organised the first Rape Speakout at St Clement’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, breaking the silence on rape, and in March the first national demonstration of the Women’s Liberation Movement assembled in the snow in London, marching behind a giant crucified mannequin, her outstretched arms burdened with a pinny, a pair of silk stockings and a string shopping bag. A chant of choice: ‘Biology isn’t destiny.’ Enough of being reduced to a body, a dispensable object. That autumn, the world’s first refuge for victims of domestic violence was established in London.
All this is to say that Ottens was murdered just as despair was shifting into rage, rage spiking into action. In the wake of her death, female students at the University of Iowa established one of the first rape crisis lines in the country, the Rape Victim Advocacy Program. It began that spring as a twenty-four-hour helpline, run by volunteers who spent restless nights on a camp bed, taking calls from a single landline in the Women’s Center, which had itself been founded by the Women’s Liberation Front two years earlier. Nothing was official yet. Everything was DIY, a trial run, makeshift, impromptu, improvised. You wanted things to change, but how? How could you communicate your distress, your fear, your refusal to participate in a society that so readily facilitated your destruction?