The History of Sex: Prague -- Puritanical Communists -- (Chapter X, Part 11)

For dirty tricks abroad, the Soviets liked to use their satellite spy network in Czechoslovakia, 'the aristocrat of all the Communist intelligence services.'

With its location in the heart of Europe, Czechoslovakia had always been a bridge between East and West, making it more cosmopolitan, prosperous and liberal than the rest of the Soviet bloc.

Its first democratic president, Tomas G. Masaryk, had been a former spook whose spies sided with the Allies during World War One; in 1918, he signed Czechoslovakia's declaration of independence in Philadelphia at the same table used by Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin in 1776.

And in a nod to women's rights, the founder had also added his American wife's surname to his own: the 'G' stood for Garrigue.

Tragically, the Allies had tried to avoid a Second World War by gifting the tiny democracy to Hitler.

Unappeased, the Führer entrusted its subjugation to Reinhard Heydrich, an SS chief who'd helped engineer the Night of the Long Knives, chaired the committee on the Holocaust and masterminded the Salon Kitty project in Berlin.

'May 1945': A Czech poster
commemorating the victory over the Nazis '

When Czechoslovakia was finally liberated, the Red Army captured Prague first, and the Soviets quickly set about undermining democracy.

The Czech foreign minister—Masaryk's son—was one of the democrats who died mysteriously during the Communists' (relatively) bloodless coup, which became the blueprint for subverting democracies in the West.

And after briefly flirting with sexual excess as 'a provocation of bourgeois society,' Czechoslovakia soon pursued the Soviet ideal of 'Socialist puritanism.'

'In the early Fifties, we were more puritanical than in the West,' scoffs Jirina Siklova, a Czech feminist who came of age during the Stalinist era.

As a teenager, she remembers building a bridge as part of a Socialist youth brigade.

At night the sexes were strictly segregated: any boys or girls caught sneaking over to the other side were dismissed and officially blackballed for leading a 'bourgeois lifestyle.'

The History of Sex: Prague -- Spies and Czech Mates: From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis -- (Chapter X, Part 1)

Chapter Ten 

SPIES AND CZECH MATES 

From Big Brother to Big Sister: The Metamorphosis 

'The twentieth century has taught us that every society, every social and political order, has imposed certain prohibitions on sexuality.' 

--Soviet dissident Dr. Mikhail Stern, Sex in the USSR, 1979 

While hounding homosexuals, the Nazis also snooped on heteros, combining the latest technology and the world's oldest profession to pioneer a sinister new form of espionage.

In 1940, the SS converted a brothel in Berlin into a high-tech booty trap with microphones in the walls and a monitoring station in the basement.

Code-named 'Salon Kitty,' the project recruited twenty women to give their bodies for the Fatherland, plying diplomats and potential dissenters, including the Führer's own foreign minister.

The poster for the movie
based on the book by Peter Norden

Of course, sex and espionage were old bedfellows.

In the Old Testament, before the walls of Jericho came a-tumblin' down, two Israelite spies spent the night hiding in a prostitute's house.

As they made their escape, they promised the archetypal hooker with a heart of gold that she could save her family from being massacred by hanging a dyed rope from her window, forever linking the color scarlet to illicit sex.

Several millennia later, with the threat of nuclear annihilation hanging over them, spies on both sides of the Iron Curtain decided that preventing The End justified the means.

As a result, the Cold War finessed the use of sex bombs, making old-timers like Mata Hari look like deluded amateurs.

'I would not have kept her on my payroll,' sniffed Markus Wolf.

The East German über-spy was best known for infiltrating his spies into West Germany while keeping his own identity secret—for 25 years, Western intelligence didn't even have a photo of the spymaster they were fighting.

Wolf after the Cold War

In his memoirs, though, Wolf boasted that his real claim to fame should be his use of 'Romeo' spies.

'If I go down in espionage history, it may well be for perfecting the use of sex in spying.'

Never mind that he was using similar techniques to those pioneered by the Nazis.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- An Uncomfortable Question -- (Chapter IX, Part 27)

At which point, I decide to go for broke and ask a question that sounds more controversial than it should be.

Let me explain: lots of people parrot the Nietzschean maxim that whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger; Roman persecution, for instance, actually stoked the wildfire-growth of Christianity.

However, when you apply that same terrible irony to recent history and the groups that the Nazis tried to kill, well, people start to get uncomfortable: somehow it's not very politically correct.

But I've got to ask.

'In the long run,' I ask, 'do you think it was Nazi persecution that helped make Germany's gay movement as strong as it is today?'

Berlin's monument to the homosexual victims
of the Nazi regime

Karl-Heinz is speechless for a second, struggling to find the right words. 'I—I—I'm not a fan of arguing like that,' he says, gazing out the window.

'Because that gives all these activities a kind of shadow. It means that you're always reacting against something and you don't have your own ideas. If you want to live with all the rights that other people have, you should always fight for your rights.'

He mentions that this struggle is continually evolving.

'There is a new situation now, for example, with the children of immigrants who grew up with their religious thinking that does not fit in with our open thinking. And they would kick me out of this place if they could. So the forms of struggle and the aims will always change,' he concludes.

'There are always other questions and other conflicts.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- It's the Nazis, Stupid -- (Chapter IX, Part 26)

Karl-Heinz shows me around the museum's temporary exhibit entitled 'Paradise' and murmurs appreciatively: 'Here is a very interesting drawing.'

That's one word for it.

The artist was a German POW who swapped erotica for cigarettes with American guards.

The drawing shows a group of naked cuties in officers' caps putting the 'cock' into 'cocktail:' one is peeing into the proffered glass of another.

Mmm… fresh pee-tinis, anyone? 

Images from the museum's 'Paradise' exhibit

Gad told me before coming here that Karl-Heinz 'used to be gorgeous.'

For the record, that seems ungenerous, because he's only fortysomething and still a good-looking guy, with white teeth gleaming against his tan and a salt-and-pepper goatee.

He's also fun to talk with because he engages difficult subjects head-on.

In fact, I like him so much, I've decide to burden him with a couple of questions I've been dying to ask:

'I know that places around the world celebrate Christopher Street Day—even in Istanbul,' I start off. 'But why do gays in Germany focus on commemorating an American event rather than their own, far more important achievement: the founding of the world's first gay-rights movement?'

Karl-Heinz pauses before giving me a diplomatic, respectful answer that amounts to 'it's the Nazis, stupid.'

'You shouldn't forget that the infrastructure that there had been in the Twenties wasn't established again until the Eighties. From 1933, within half a year after the Nazis came to power, this widespread network and infrastructure was totally wiped out and had to go underground or become invisible. What is especially important for all the more history-oriented groups—but even for restaurants or the organizers of fucking festivals—is the knowledge that a very good community can be destroyed in less than half a year. So in Germany and Berlin this is maybe more on the table, as we say, than in other countries.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Home of the Gay Israeli -- (Chapter IX, Part 19)

One of the more unlikely revelers in this new freedom was a gay Israeli who'd moved to Germany a few years earlier.

Since then, he's been portrayed back home as a self-loathing Jew, so he's reluctant to let me use his real name. Instead, I'll call him 'Gad'—as in '-fly' and the gay Jew who survived Nazi Berlin.

Given that I've already met a Bavarian Berliner who talks like a Jewish New Yorker, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised to find a gay Israeli who sounds like a camp Irishman.

But Gad's best friend is from Cork, so he's managed to pick up the accent, even though he's visited Ireland only once 15 years ago.

It's this omnivorous intelligence that makes a talk with Gad so entertaining: he's like Graham Norton with a brain.

Cocking his HB cigarette at a catty, inquisitive angle—'The Brits called them Hitler's Best; I call them Huns' Best'—he outlines his background for me.

On his father's side, he comes from Iraqi Jews, while his mother's family hailed from Galicia. Fortunately for Gad, his maternal grandfather was a Communist.

'He ran away from the Nazis—the only one from his family. That saved him from Auschwitz, which the rest of the family went to. Because he believed the Communist propaganda against the Nazis (about the camps), which of course was the truth.'

After the war, his grandparents tried to return to Galicia, 'but the Yiddish world they'd known had disappeared.'

They spent some time in Sweden, where Gad's mother was born, and then Brazil, before finally settling in Israel in 1951.

Gad's parents met as teenagers in the Israeli Communist movement, so it's probably inevitable that their son should view the world's ills in terms of class struggle.

'I remember the famous, eternal sentence of my grandfather. It was in a café in Israel, and he said: "The Germans are a very bad people. But you know, the Lithuanians are bad people. The Ukrainians are worse. But the worst"—and he stood up, I'll never forget the shame I felt—"are these damn Zionists!"'

Gad bashes his fist on the table, mimicking his granddad, then leans back and shrugs.

'He lived in Israel—very happily.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Ashamed and Open -- (Chapter IX, Part 17)

No one knows how many homosexuals were killed in the Holocaust: estimates range from tens of thousands to over half a million.

Incredibly, the Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was one of Hitler's few laws to remain in force under the Allies: in postwar West Germany, at least as many men were prosecuted for being gay as had been during the Third Reich.

As a result, many gay survivors were afraid to speak out for fear of being treated as criminals. 

'Germans in general are very good at feeling guilty,' Stephan told me, explaining that in the gay community, this sense of shame often manifests itself in extreme behavior.

He's even seen some gays dress up as Nazis for theme parties or as skinheads wearing jackets over LONSDALE shirts so that the logo looks like NSDAP: the Nazi Party's initials.

'I find it very strange that we would dress up as people who were our predators,' he mused. 'You can be ashamed and open at the same time.'

* * *

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Hitler's Gay Righthand Man -- (Chapter IX, Part 11)

Still, like most of the population, Germany's homosexuals managed to delude themselves into complacency and occasionally even allegiance to the regime.

After all, Hitler's righthand man was gay—he was even a member of the League for Human Rights.

Ernst Röhm was a scarfaced brute who'd done time in jail with the Führer and was one of the select few allowed to call him by his first name.

Röhm had transformed the brownshirted stormtroopers of the SA into Hitler's private army, an odd beast made up of beer-swilling, Communist-bashers who were buggered by their commanders as they ascended the ranks.

Tragically, just as leftwingers had tried to bring down the Kaiser by exposing gays in the government before World War One, it was a socialist newspaper that outed Röhm by publishing his love letters to another Nazi.

Despite the party's official condemnation of homosexuality, Röhm wrote that he was happy to be gay and argued that Paragraph 175 should be repealed.

Goebbels, Hitler and Rohm

Hitler's own attitude to homosexuality seems to have been ambivalent.

Though he publicly condemned it, he also seems to have understood it—possibly intimately, if you believe the scuttlebutt that he'd been a street hustler in Vienna.

Whereas his allies believed the Nazi Party had to be purged of homosexuals, Hitler tolerated sexual 'perverts' so long as they were useful to him.

By the middle of 1934, though, he'd decided that Röhm's ambitions threatened his own bid for power.

So Hitler purged the SA.

During the 'Night of the Long Knives,' he personally oversaw Röhm's arrest in a hotel near Munich.

In the same raid, the SS caught Röhm's deputy in bed with an eighteen-year-old troop leader.

Hitler had both of them executed on the spot.

Later, Röhm was given the chance to commit suicide; when he refused, the SS shot him dead, too.

The History of Sex: Berlin -- 'We Knew Too Much' -- (Chapter IX, Part 10)

But the sniping from his own side must have been even more hurtful.

While young foreigners like Isherwood admired Hirschfeld as a 'heroic leader of his tribe,' many of the doctor's one-time allies had begun to view him as a liability.

From the safety of his own closet, the writer Thomas Mann dismissed 'Hirschfeld and his ghastly Committee,' and the leader of Germany's largest organization for gay groups—the so-called League for Human Rights—even started quoting Nazi propaganda against him:

'It is clear that The People's Observer newspaper'—a Nazi mouthpiece—'does not aim to damn homosexuals universally, but instead by and large is striking out only at Jews (especially Magnus Hirschfeld).'

Which made it okay, then.

AND SO IT BEGINS...

However, soon after Hitler took over as Chancellor in January 1933, his 'Campaign for a Clean Reich' shuttered gay clubs and newspapers.

In May, the Nazis stormed the Institute of Sexology, carting away and torching most of its collection and ceremoniously throwing a bust of Hirschfeld onto the bonfire.

Fortunately, the institute's founder was out of the country lecturing at the time: he had the surreal experience of seeing himself burnt in effigy on a newsreel in a Paris cinema (to this day, the stock footage of the infamous Nazi book burnings is usually from the ransacking of the institute). 

Who knew?
This Nazi was probably throwing sex books on the fire

Hirschfeld died two years later in exile.

The Nazis had branded his research center 'an unparalleled breeding ground of dirt and filth.'

However, one official at the institute had a much more intriguing theory: 'We knew too much.'

As the only place for counseling about sexual disorders, the center had treated people from many walks of life, including goose-stepping Nazis.

'Not 10% of the men who, in 1933, took the fate of Germany into their hands were sexually normal,' the assistant director said.

'Many of these personages were known to us directly… and of others we saw the tragic results: a young girl whose abdomen was covered with pin scratchings through the sadism of an eminent Nuremberg Nazi; I refer also to a thirteen-year-old boy who suffered from a serious lesion of the anal muscle brought about by a senior party official and to a youth from Berlin with severe rectal gonorrhea…'

'Our knowledge of such intimate secrets regarding members of the Nazi Party and other documentary material—we possessed about 40,000 confessions and biographical letters—was the cause of the complete and utter destruction of the Institute of Sexology.'

The History of Sex: Berlin -- Splitting the Third Sex Into Two Camps -- (Chapter IX, Part 8)

The first gay-rights activist died in self-imposed exile in Italy before he could see the culmination of his life's work.

On May 15, 1897, a nucleus of friends in Berlin founded the world's first gay-rights group to lobby for the abolition of Paragraph 175, the Prussian statute outlawing 'unnatural acts' between men.

Over the next decade, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee's petition collected 6,000 signatures, including those of Krafft-Ebing and many other heterosexuals.

However, infighting soon split the movement into two camps, so to speak—a divide that's still detectable today.

The Scientific Humanitarian Committee headed up the main group, led by a young doctor who advocated the third-sex theory.

Although noticeably effeminate—his friends called him Auntie Magnesia—Magnus Hirschfeld never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality for fear it would make his (already dubious) research look biased.

The fact that he was also Jewish was not lost on his enemies.

Magnus Hirschfeld,
the 'Hero of the Day'
campaigning to do 'Away with Paragraph 175!'

A widely read work on Sex and Character (written by Otto Weininger, a suicidal Jew in Vienna) equated Jewishness with femininity and blamed Semitism for the decay of Aryan culture.

Meanwhile, an erstwhile ally of Hirschfeld's launched the world's first successful gay magazine, Der Eigene—a word meaning 'self,' 'same' and/or 'different.'

Adolf Brand was what we'd now call 'straight-acting,' the ringleader of a radical minority of gay supremacists, many of whom were anti-Semites to boot.

Adolf Brand
is the one in the upper righthand corner

Styling themselves the Community of the Special, Brand and his followers resented being portrayed as 'stepchildren of nature' by eggheaded pansies.

On the contrary, they argued that pederasty was a lifestyle choice that separated truly macho men from the boys.

Romanticizing both the ancient Greeks and Germans, they painted homosexuality as a higher form of love, contending that they should be free to bugger their fellow men while using straight women to further the Aryan race.

In the blank-slate euphoria after World War One, Hirschfeld hoped that Germany's fledgling democracy would follow the lead of the new Soviet Union and legalize homosexuality.

Instead, the ensuing turmoil fueled a degree of hedonism rarely seen since the days of Sodom and Gomorrah.

For the next fifteen years, Germany became a magnet for sexual 'perverts,' with homosexual magazines sold openly on newsstands, thousands of people around the country joining same-sex associations and more than a hundred gay bars operating in the capital (many of them owned by German Jews, as Hitler noted in Mein Kampf).

The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Heaven Help Us -- (Chapter VIII, Part 38)

Since Inge joined the museum in 1986, the number of visitors has more than tripled to nearly 80,000 a year from around the world.

The main hotspot for psychoanalysis now, she says, is Eastern Europe and Russia.

'Present Russian society is very open to any therapeutic help. So we have close connections to Moscow and St. Petersburg, because they have severe issues in terms of family problems, homeless children and alcoholism.'

She also notes that at least one Indian doctor has tried to mesh psychoanalysis with his native culture.

'And I'm no expert on this, but I think one of the very interesting future viewpoints will be if Islamic societies would try to integrate psychoanalytic findings in their culture.'

And I'm thinking: heaven help us.

Time's cover from 1993

Like its namesake, the museum tends to promote the Freudian myth rather than the reality, though maybe it's wrong to expect a place called the Sigmund Freud Museum in the homeland of Hitler to be objective. It might be too much to ask—if this weren't the home of modern self-analysis.

As I'm on my way out, a staff member mentions that contrary to the impression the museum gives, Freud actually had his practice downstairs when he wrote some of his most famous works, including The Interpretation of Dreams.

'So we do some lying up here,' the staffer jokes.

Old Sigmund would feel right at home.

* * *