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 -- 'Berlin Meant Boys' -- (Chapter IX, Part 9)

Among the countless foreigners attracted to this milieu was Christopher Isherwood, who'd heard about Berlin from his friend, Wystan (WH Auden to the rest of us).

Writing in the third person, Isherwood made it clear why he moved to Germany in 1929: 'To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.'

Auden had introduced him to his favorite rent-boy bar, where another regular recalled that the blond Aryans wore 'extremely short lederhosen which showed off their smooth and sunburnt thighs to delectable advantage'—with the pockets cut out for ease of access.

Soon after his arrival, Isherwood visited the world's first Institute of Sexology, founded by Hirschfeld a decade earlier in a grandiose building in the Tiergarten.

The doctor's much younger lover—and later Hirschfeld himself—took him on a tour of the center, where Isherwood giggled with embarrassment at the menagerie of 'sex in every manifestation.'

Photos of hermaphrodites decorated the walls, and live specimens were on hand for inspection—including a young man with 'two perfectly formed female breasts.'

Hirschfeld dubbed cross-dressers 'transvestites' and ended up counseling the first sex-change patient, a Danish painter (Einar Mogens Wegener / Lili Elbe) who died after his final operation—a failed attempt to transplant a woman's ovaries into his body so that he could become a mother.

The same year that Hirschfeld opened the institute, he'd also produced and starred in the world's first gay film, shot in the Schöneberg district.

Different From the Others (or Anders als die Andern) was released in 1919 and told the highly didactic tale of a gay man driven to suicide by a blackmailer exploiting Paragraph 175, with a star turn by Hirschfeld as a sexpert.

Classic dowager line at 29:29 -- 'If that boy's completely normal, then I'm a virgin.' Hirschfeld himself appears at 30:50 in this hour-long clip.

The silent film had been banned in the Nazi stronghold of Munich, as well as Vienna, where a gunman fired into the audience.

Hirschfeld himself had been attacked by anti-Semites in Munich in 1920.

'He was so beaten that his eloquent mouth could never again be kissed by one of his "disciples",' a Nazi noted.

Nevertheless, the fifty-two-year-old doctor had bravely returned the following year—and received such a hiding that some papers ran his obituary.

Hirschfeld survived, however—only to be shot at during a lecture in Vienna.

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).