Berlin was the capital city of the German Empire from 1871 to 1945, its eastern part the de facto capital of East Germany from 1949 to 1990, and has been the capital of the unified Federal Republic of Germany since June 1991. Berlin has many LGBTQ-friendly districts, though the borough of Schöneberg is widely viewed by locals and visitors as Berlin's gayborhood. Particularly, the boroughs North-West near Nollendorfplatz identify as Berlin's "Regenbogenkiez" (Rainbow District), with a certain concentration of gay bars near and along Motzstraße and Fuggerstraße.
Many of the decisive events of what has become known as Germany's second LGBT movement (the first beginning roughly in the 1860s and ending abruptly in 1933) take place in the West Berlin boroughs of Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Kreuzberg beginning in 1971 with the formation of the (HAW). Whereas in East Berlin, the district of Prenzlauer Berg became synonymous with the East German LGBT movement, beginning in 1973 with the founding of the HIB (). Schöneberg's gayborhood caters to, and is particularly popular with, gay men.
Berlin's large LGBTQ events, such as the Lesbian and Gay City Festival, Easter Berlin Leather and Fetish Week, Folsom Europe, and CSD, center around Schöneberg, with related events taking place city-wide during these events. Berlin's present-day neighborhoods with a certain concentration of LGBTQ-oriented culture vary somewhat in terms of history, demography, and where the emphasis in each neighborhoods' queer culture falls along the LGBTQ spectrum.
History
Berlin has a long history of LGBT culture and activism. By the 1920s, the city had a reputation for being relatively LGBT-friendly, at least among insiders. By that time, LGBT-oriented publications and organizations already existed in Berlin. The world's first gay magazine, (The Unique) by Adolf Brand was published in Berlin beginning in 1896.
Magnus Hirschfeld, a German physician, founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (German: Wissenschaftlich-Humanitäres Kommittee (WHK)) in May 1897 in the context of his Institute for the Science of Sexuality. Though there are earlier German proponents of decriminalization and de-stigmatization of romantic love and sex between men (Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) is often mentioned in this context), the WHK was the first to do so in a collaborative and organized fashion. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee was also the first not to concern itself only with men's sexuality and gender. The WHK took a liberal, scientific, and legalistic approach to what would now be called LGBT-activism. Hirschfeld and his peers used other terms at the time and viewed themselves as reformers. Men of letters and breeding like Hirschfeld or Ulrichs invented their own terms based on Greek mythology or scientific Latin. Words like "gay" or its German counterpart "schwul" historically alluded to prostitution and things associated with it. Hirschfeld and his peers were, in their own minds, scientists, reformers, "Urnings" (a term coined by Ulrichs), or "members of a third sex" (a phrase coined by Elsa Asenijeff popularized by Ernst von Wolzogen in his eponymous 1899 novel).
During the 1920s and early 1930s, Schöneberg's nightspots catered to LGBT clientele and curious Moderns seeking risqué and "unusual" entertainment. Bars, cabarets, and ballrooms offered same-sex dancing, cross-dressing, racy shows, exotic dancers, and prostitutes seemingly willing to satisfy their customers' desires. Visitors at the time, steeped in Victorian and Wilhelmine prudence, were reminded of the biblical "Babylon". The names, images, and ideas that gain prominence in this period go on to influence what is presently called "queer sensibility". People viewed as freaks and poor wretches deserving of sympathy at best before WWI began to radically define themselves and demand visibility.
The labor movement called the bourgeois family model into question from a leftist perspective, while liberal-minded bosses and industrialists began to see women's participation in the workforce from a business management point of view. It became a real possibility for women to sustain themselves without depending on a man's income or attempting to participate in the "shadow economy". Marriage, child-raising, systems of kinship, and notions of how societies "should" work, were all up for negotiation in many places after WWI, especially in Berlin.
The careers of many artists, actors, writers and thinkers flourished in Weimar-era Berlin. Cabaret singer Claire Waldoff, actress Marlene Dietrich, and many more, were frequent guests and performers in many establishments throughout Berlin. The first gay demonstration also started in Berlin in 1922. The Reichstag nearly decriminalized homosexuality in 1929, but the time was not opportune for change of this kind.
Nazi Germany In February 1933, a coalition of former nobility, industry moguls, and those who pined for the old order, essentially handed the chancellorship over to Hitler and his NSDAP. The SA, in collaboration with the police, immediately began bullying and intimidating Social Democrats, communists, and anyone else they saw fit to. Homosexual men, as well as women who did not look or act the part the Nazis had chosen for "the German woman", were ideal targets for this kind of "sanitizing" operation. The Reichstag fire gave the now NSDAP lead parliament the wherewithal to suspend civil liberties and parliamentarianism indefinitely, essentially making Adolf Hitler the Generalissimo of the Reich.
The Eldorado, having gained notoriety beyond the city limits of Berlin, had already been the target of raids ordered by the new police chief before the Nazis were officially in power in 1932. It was hurriedly turned into an SA base and torture house, but it was eventually re-opened under the watchful eye of the Gestapo and things almost went back to normal.
When wealthy tourists came for the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, there was much praise from all sides about how Hitler had "cleaned Berlin up", and what a "safe" city Berlin had become, how he and his Brownshirts had "put Germans back to work, and how grand it all was."
What went unnoticed by many was what was no longer to be seen. Communists, social democrats and other dissidents, and those who had been labeled "undesirables" by Nazi standards had been either in cooperation with the regular police force, incarcerated, or had fled the country. Any reference to their having existed was erased.
The sacking of Magnus Hirschfeld's villa and institute on on May 6, 1933 (incidentally not by the SA, but by organized members of the student body of the university, with the explicit backing of the faculty who marched the bust of Hirschfeld, stolen from his institute, down Unter-den-Linden to the May 10, 1933 book burning Opernplatz by themselves, wearing their full academic regalia), is only one example of the fascist purge that began with the Reichstag Fire as a justification only one month after the government had been handed over to Hitler's Nazis.
The Nazi purge against real and presumed adversaries of the new German government was so thorough that, after 1945, the remaining histories had to be pieced back together, including that of the first gay movement. The works, biographies, and existence of Magnus Hirschfeld had to be reconstructed in minute archival work beginning in the 1970s. This can largely be credited to the activists of the publishing house, established in 1975 in West Berlin by activists of the (HAW).
Of the millions of people killed in German SA dungeons and work camps, through slave labor, and in extermination camps between 1933 and 1945, several thousand were men who had been sentenced according to section 175 of the Reichs Criminal Code. About 6,000 were actually interned to camps. The death rate is presumed to be high, but reliable numbers are not available. Upon the liberation of the camps, their inmates greatly feared being re-incarcerated; such fears proved to be justified.
The number of queer women interned during the Nazi period is the subject of great debate in the present. As there were no explicit laws against women having sex with women, or against exhibiting non-gender-conforming behavior, law enforcers had to find other ways to criminalize queer women. Women could be incarcerated for so-called anti-social behavior. The definition of what this constituted was extremely vague. Many thousands of people were arrested on the basis of laws against anti-social behavior. Here again, reliable numbers are not available.
The Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism is across in the Große Tiergarten across Ebertstraße from Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and down the road from the Porajmos memorial (The Memorial to the Sinti and Roma Victims of National Socialism) in Tiergarten.
Postwar era In 1950, the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) returned to the pre-Nazi version of Section 175; Section 175a continued to be applied. From the late 1950s onwards, homosexual acts among adults were no longer punishable. In 1968, the GDR enacted a completely new penal code, which made same-sex sexual acts with minors a punishable offense for both women and men in § 151. With effect from July 1, 1989, this paragraph was deleted from the East German law books completely.
For two decades, the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) stuck to the versions of Sections 175 and 175a from the Nazi era. During the period from 1945 to 1969, 50,000 men were convicted according to Section 175 in West Germany. That is roughly the same amount of convictions as during the Nazi era. The first reform came in 1969 and the second in 1973. These changes effectively made only sexual acts with males under the age of 18 punishable by law. The age of consent for lesbian and heterosexual acts at the time was 14 years.
In 1994, four years after the unification of East and West Germany, Section 175 was completely repealed for the territory of the old Federal Republic. Those who had been punished under the broader version of Section 175 that was in effect until 1969, and many of whom had suffered imprisonment and an entry under their names in the national criminal record leading to life-long consequences for their employment and housing situations, were not rehabilitated until 2017. Compensation payments, provided those affected were eligible for them at all and still alive, were negligible. Compensation of 3,000 euros and an additional 1,500 euros "for each year of detention suffered" was only granted to those men who were actually convicted.
The (HAW) (Englisch: Gay Action West Berlin) was the first founded in 1971. In 1985, Berlin opened the world's first gay museum, otherwise known as the , "an institution dedicated to preserving, exhibiting, and discovering gay and lesbian history, art, and culture". Contemporary Berlin actively promotes tourism in gay neighborhoods, including Schöneberg.
Gallery
Contemporary Berlin (1945–present) While a sometimes infamous openly queer scene existed during pre-war Berlin, it is historically inaccurate to attribute contemporary queer culture to these beginnings. Rather, many sexual and gender minorities left Germany in mass exodus during the Nazi regime, while those who did not were persecuted in concentration camps. When the Nazis came to power, they burned down Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science and the decades of research that it held. This included documentation of the gay liberation movement prior to World War I and studies of the first gender-affirming surgeries and philosophical argumentation on same-sex attraction as inborn, along with many more ideas. As historian Klaus Mueller argues in Eldorado: Everything the Nazis Hate, "today's queer Berlin certainly isn't a continuation in any shape or form of the 1920s. That really was lost. No names. No memory. Nothing."