Lust/Hirschfeld
Born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, Magnus Hirschfeld was educated in various cities, receiving his doctoral degree in 1892, opening a practice in Magdeburg, before moving it to Berlin. Hirschfeld had a keen curiosity about the human sexuality, homosexuality in general. His early work created scientific evidence that suicide rates were higher amongst gay men, statistics he would use in his lifelong battle against Paragraph 175, Germany’s law banning homosexuality. Later Hirschfeld would found the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, arguably the first group to advocate for the rights of homosexuals and transgender people (Lauritsen and Thorstad 1974). Hirschfeld’s attempts to normalize homosexuality were largely couched in destigmatizing it through medicalization. He argued that rather than viewing homosexuality as a choice, and therefore a sinful perversion, homosexuality should be treated as a medical condition with which people could live happy, normal lives.
Hirschfeld’s greatest influence in the sexual scene of Weimar Berlin, however, was the founding of Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) in 1919, only made possible by the much more liberal atmosphere of the Republic. The institute was staffed with various doctors and housed Hirschfeld’s immense library of materials involving human sexuality. It also contained a “Museum of Sex,” which was an educational resource open to the public, which supposedly school classes would come visit. Over time many famous Europeans would visit the institute to delve deeper into their own sexualities, including Christopher Isherwood, Christian Schad and Elsa Gidlow. It also became the location of pioneering research and studies of transgender people, being the including the first people to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, both from male to female and vice versa (Arundel). Hirschfeld’s work was an attempt to turn so-called deviant sexualities from irredeemable sins to normal parts of human experience.
Bibliography:
Lauritsen, John, and David Thorstad. The Early Homosexual Rights Movement: 1864-1935. New York: Times Change Press, 1974.
Arundel, Rikki. “Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935).” The Gender Speaker, www.genderspeaker.com/magnus-hirschfeld-1868-1935/. Web. May 2018.