Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a German physician, sexologist, and LGBTQ advocate whose German citizenship was revoked in 1933 by the Nazi government due to his advocacy.David A. Gerstner, Routledge International Encyclopedia of Queer Culture (2006, ), page 374
Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology, and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform. During the 1920s he based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His Committee carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights".Goltz, Dustin (2008). "Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Movements", In Lind, Amy; Brzuzy, Stephanie (eds.). Battleground: Women, Gender, and Sexuality: Volume 2, pp. 291 ff. Greenwood Publishing Group,
Hirschfeld is regarded as one of the most influential 20th-century sexologists. He was targeted by early fascists, and later by the Nazis, for being Jewish and gay. He was beaten by activists in 1920, and in 1933 his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was looted and its books burned by Nazis. He was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.
Early life Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in Pomerania (since 1945 in Poland), to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the son of highly regarded physician and Senior Medical Officer Hermann Hirschfeld. As a youth he attended , which at the time was a Protestant school. In 1887–1888, he studied comparative linguistics in Breslau, but decided to transfer to the University of Strasbourg (then named the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität) to study medicine and natural sciences in 1889. He left the Strasbourg for the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1890, where he continued his studies for a year before transferring to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1891. Hirschfeld left Munich later that same year to complete his state mandated military service in Heidelberg, continuing his medical studies at Heidelberg University in his spare time. At the end of 1891, Hirschfeld completed his service and returned to Berlin to write his medical thesis on the effects of influenza on the nervous system, with Rudolf Virchow and Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond serving as his oral examiners. In 1892, he received his medical degree.
After his studies, Hirschfeld spent the next two years traveling the world, giving lectures and writing articles. He spent time in the major cities of France, Algeria, Morocco, Italy, and the United States. During his eight month stay in the United States, Hirschfeld traveled to Chicago to document the World's Columbian Exposition for a German newspaper. He became fascinated by the city's homosexual subculture, struck by its similarities to the homosexual subculture of Berlin. As a result, Hirschfeld began to develop his theory about the universality of homosexuality around the world; he researched in books and newspaper articles about the existence of gay subcultures in Rio de Janeiro, Tangier, and Tokyo, all of which shared many of the same cultural similarities.
Hirschfeld returned to Germany in 1894 and opened a naturopathic practice in Magdeburg, where he would develop his lifelong commitment to homosexual rights advocacy. He was struck by the number of his gay patients who had ('scars left by suicide attempts'), and often found himself trying to give his patients a reason to live. Hirschfeld was also deeply affected by the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, to which he made frequent reference in his writings. In 1896, he had one of the most formative experiences of his career; In 1896, a young lieutenant whom Hirschfeld was treating for severe depression took his own life. In the German language, the word for suicide is ('self-murder'), which carried more judgmental and condemnatory connotations than its English language equivalent, making the subject of suicide a taboo in 19th century Germany. The lieutenant addressed his suicide note to Hirschfeld, wherein he wrote that despite his best efforts, he could not end his desires for other men, and so had ended his life out of his guilt and shame. He explained that he lacked the "strength" to tell his parents the "truth", and spoke of his shame of "that which nearly strangled my heart". The officer could not even bring himself to use the word "homosexuality", which he instead conspicuously referred to as "that" in his note. The note closes with the words, "The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute a future when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms sweetens the hour of my death." Hirschfeld had been treating the officer from 1895–1896, and the use of the term "us" led to speculation that a relationship existed between the two. However, the officer's use of , the formal German word for you, instead of the informal , suggests Hirschfeld's relationship with his patient was strictly professional. Hirschfeld would go on to repeatedly cite this incident as the catalyst for his career as a sexologist and gay rights activist.
In 1896, he moved his practice to Berlin-Charlottenburg to pursue this passion and soon published his first work on the subject of homosexuality under the pseudonym Th. Ramien entitled, Sappho und Socrates: Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Sappho and Socrates: How does one explain the love of men and women to persons of their own gender?). The pamphlet argues that homosexuality is a biological, naturally occurring phenomenon which should not be criminalized, quoting the words of Friedrich Nietzsche: "What is natural can not be immoral."
Sexual rights activism Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
Magnus Hirschfeld found a balance between practicing medicine and writing about his findings. Between 1 May and 15 October 1896, the ('Great Business Exhibition of Berlin') took place, which featured nine "human zoos" where people from Germany's colonies in New Guinea and Africa were put on display for the visitors to gawk at. Such exhibitions of colonised peoples were common at industrial fairs, and later after Qingdao, the Mariana Islands, and the Caroline Islands became part of the German empire, Chinese, Chamorros, and Micronesians joined the Africans and New Guineans displayed in the "human zoos". Hirschfeld, who was keenly interested in sexuality in other cultures, visited the and subsequently other exhibitions to inquire of the people in the "human zoos" via interpreters about the status of sexuality in their cultures. It was in 1896, after talking to the people displayed in the "human zoos" at the , that Hirschfeld began writing what became his 1914 book Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (The Homosexuality of Men and Women), an attempt to comprehensively survey homosexuality around the world, as part of an effort to prove that homosexuality occurred in every culture. In the book, Hirschfeld found that many homosexuals considered England to be the country with the highest rate of homosexuality. In addition to his book on homosexuality, Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestism in 1910 known as Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress).
In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr (1850–1905), the lawyer Eduard ObergHeinrich Gerhard Eduard Oberg (1858–1917) (1858–1917), and the writer Franz Joseph von BülowFranz Vollrath Carl Wilhelm Joseph von Bülow (1861–1915) (1861–1915). The group aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that, since 1871, had criminalized homosexuality. They argued that the law encouraged blackmail. The motto of the committee, "Justice through science", reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate social hostility toward homosexuals.
Within the group, some of the members rejected Hirschfeld's theory of sexual intermediaries, which conceptualized all traits of sex, gender, and sexual orientation on a spectrum which ranged from masculine to feminine. Offended by the notion of being associated with gender non-conformity, Benedict Friedlaender and some others left the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to form the or 'Union for Male Culture', which argued that male–male love is a demonstration of virile manliness similar to that of the classical Greek tradition. Under Hirschfeld's leadership, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gathered 6000 signatures from prominent Germans on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. Signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Bebel, Max Brod, Karl Kautsky, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauptmann, Martin Buber, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Eduard Bernstein, and even Emile Zola and Leo Tolstoy. The bill was brought before the in 1898, but was supported only by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany. August Bebel, a friend of Hirschfeld from his university days, agreed to sponsor the attempt to repeal Paragraph 175.
Hirschfeld considered what would, in a later era, be described as "outing": forcing out of the closet some of the prominent and secretly homosexual lawmakers who had remained silent on the bill. He arranged for the bill to be reintroduced and, in the 1920s, it made some progress until the takeover of the Nazi Party ended all hope for any such reform. As part of his efforts to counter popular prejudice, Hirschfeld spoke out about the taboo subject of suicide and was the first to present statistical evidence that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide. Collating his results, Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point. He used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for homosexuals.
A figure frequently mentioned by Hirschfeld to illustrate the "hell experienced by homosexuals" was Oscar Wilde, who was a well-known author in Germany, and whose trials in 1895 had been extensively covered by the German press. Hirschfeld visited Cambridge University in 1905 to meet Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, who had changed his surname to avoid being associated with his father. Hirschfeld noted "the name Wilde" has, since his trial, sounded like "an indecent word, which causes homosexuals to blush with shame, women to avert their eyes, and normal men to be outraged". During his visit to Britain, Hirschfeld was invited to a secret ceremony in the English countryside where a "group of beautiful, young, male students" from Cambridge gathered together wearing Wilde's prison number, C33, as a way of symbolically linking his fate to theirs, to read out aloud Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Hirschfeld found the poem reading to be heartwrenching (), going on to write that the ceremony was "the most earth-shattering outcry that has ever been voiced by a downtrodden soul about its own torture and that of humanity". By the end of the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", Hirshfeld felt "quiet joy" as he was convinced that, despite the way that Wilde's life had been ruined, something good would eventually come of it.
Feminism