Berlin today is known as one of the queer capitals of the world, a city with a notoriously lassez-faire approach to love and pleasure of all kinds. Queer rights has a deep history in Berlin, and it’s a mantle that the city bears proudly, but it wasn’t won easily. Today we’re taking a look back at an earlier Berlin, between the World Wars, when the city was again one of the hubs of a nascent international queer movement.
At the center of all this was the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, founded in 1919 by the jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld was an outspoken critic of laws that criminalized homosexuality, and he fashioned the Institute into an early form of what today might be called a “safer space,” a place where queer people could find likeminded individuals and be a bit more themselves. There were costume parties, conferences, dances, and a library devoted to same-sex love and erotics.
The advocacy work at the Institute wasn’t limited to studying homosexuality – Hirschfeld was one of the first European thinkers to take seriously the idea that people possess both masculine and feminine characteristics, an early iteration of gender spectrum theory. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was also the site of some of the first modern gender-affirmation surgeries, and even convinced the Berlin police to issue “passes” to certain individuals whose gender identities didn’t correspond with their assigned sex.
In 1933, the Nazi party began purging gay clubs in Berlin; Hirschfeld was forced to flee the city, and the Institute was ransacked. During the attacks, the vast majority of the library was destroyed – an estimated 12,000 to 20,000 books and journals, and even more images and other archival material was burned in the streets of the city. Even the building itself now no longer exists – it was bombed into rubble during WWII.
Despite the efforts by the Nazis to erase its legacy, the Institute was an instrumental force in developing knowledge and, for some, acceptance around people whose sexuality or gender identity didn’t conform with society’s norms. Today, it stands as a reminder to the people of Berlin and beyond that the pursuit of the truth is stronger than any fire or ideology or historical moment.
by Moses Hubbard