Gay Berlin Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2014 by Robert Beachy

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Beachy, Robert.

  Gay Berlin : birthplace of a modern identity / by Robert Beachy.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-27210-2 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-385-35307-6 (ebook)

  1. Gay men—Germany—Berlin—Identity. 2. Gay culture—Germany—Berlin. 3. Homosexuality—Germany—Berlin. 4. Gender identity—Germany—Berlin. I. Title.

  HQ76.2.G42B43 2014

  306.7660943155—dc23 2014004986

  Jacket images: (top, left to right) transvestites, Eldorado nightclub, 1929, akg-images; Die Freundin, 1928; cabaret poster, Berlin, 1920; (middle) Berlin at night, 1928, akg-images; (bottom) Eldorado advertisement, c. 1920s; game of tug-of-war, anonymous photographer, 1930s

  Jacket design by Evan Gaffney Design

  v3.1

  For Ada

  (1925–2005)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  CHAPTER ONE

  The German Invention of Homosexuality

  CHAPTER TWO

  Policing Homosexuality in Berlin

  CHAPTER THREE

  The First Homosexual Rights Movement and the Struggle to Shape Identity

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Eulenburg Scandal and the Politics of Outing

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hans Blüher, the Wandervogel Movement, and the Männerbund

  CHAPTER SIX

  Weimar Sexual Reform and the Institute for Sexual Science

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sex Tourism and Male Prostitution in Weimar Berlin

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Weimar Politics and the Struggle for Legal Reform

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Sources and Bibliography

  Index

  A Note About the Author

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  “Look at me!” blared the capital of the Reich. “I am Babel, the monster among cities! We had a formidable army: now we command the most riotously wicked night life. Don’t miss our matchless show, ladies and gentlemen! It’s Sodom and Gomorrah in a Prussian tempo. Don’t miss the circus of perversities! Our department store of assorted vices! An all-out tale of brand new kinds of debauchery!”

  —KLAUS MANN, The Turning Point (1942)

  In October 1928, Wystan Hugh Auden, aged twenty-one, moved to Berlin, ostensibly to learn German. The following March he was joined by his friend Christopher Isherwood, who visited for about a week. Later Isherwood also settled in Berlin, and resided there until the spring of 1933. As Auden explained, Isherwood’s arrival prompted him to begin keeping his Berlin journal. In the very first entry, under the heading “Saturday getting tight,” Auden outlined the introductory tour he conducted for his friend: “It begins with the Hirschfeld museum. We waited in an eighteenth century drawing room with elderly ladies and lovely young boys.” The “Hirschfeld museum” was part of the famous Institute for Sexual Science, located at the northern edge of the Tiergarten Park, which the pioneering homosexual rights activist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld had founded in 1918. In addition to its “museum” of sexual artifacts and colorful displays, the institute housed medical exam rooms, a lecture hall, offices, a library, and lodging for staff. It not only attracted curious tourists but also served as a social venue for locals. Only later did Auden and Isherwood realize that those they encountered in the waiting room were not “elderly ladies” but men in drag.1

  From the institute Auden and Isherwood went to eat in a restaurant just south of Unter den Linden, the main thoroughfare of Berlin’s historic center. After the meal, they made their way to Auden’s hangout—the Cosy Corner—best known for its male prostitution. Auden had moved to a nearby apartment a few months earlier, simply to be closer to his favorite pub. The southeast neighborhood surrounding the Cosy Corner, Hallesches Tor, was proletarian and considered very rough. As Auden described frankly in various correspondence, “I’ve moved to a slum…50 yrds from my brothel.” In another letter written soon after that he reported, “I spend most of my time with Juvenile Delinquents…. Berlin is the buggers daydream.”2

  Though few have left written traces as candid as Auden’s, there can be little doubt that Weimar Berlin was an astonishing revelation for many first-time visitors. After discovering the city for themselves, Auden and Isherwood became apostles for Berlin’s uninhibited sexuality, luring a wide circle of English authors, poets, and curiosity seekers. In his own autobiographical account, Isherwood described how Berlin’s openness freed him not only to explore his homosexuality but ultimately to accept and embrace what he came to think of as a sexual orientation and identity. This was a freedom, moreover, that Isherwood—like his compatriots—never felt in London. Writing about himself in the third person, he described the revelation that was Berlin: “[H]e was embarrassed because, at last, he was being brought face to face with his tribe. Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn’t exist and homosexuality were a private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. He had always known, of course, that this wasn’t true. But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen.”3

  Isherwood’s recollection of this apparent “coming out” was composed decades after the fact, of course, and possibly romanticized his experience. But Auden’s Berlin journal offers immediate, contemporary evidence, showing clearly how Berlin shaped sexual identity. In a remarkable entry from April 6, 1929, the aspiring poet described a seemingly trivial event. Rushing to the train station to meet his current boyfriend, Gerhart, for an excursion to Hamburg, Auden had a brief encounter on the tram with a young woman. He describes how she made eye contact, approached him, and flirted: “She—came and stood beside me till I got out. I wanted to make an 18th century bow and say ‘Entschuldigen Sie, Madam, aber ich bin schwul.’ ” The best translation of Auden’s imagined reply would be “Excuse me, Madam, but I am gay.” And what an incredible statement that would have been! Instead of disdain for his admirer, or bemusement, Auden believed her flirtation to be based on a misperception; she mistook Auden for a man who was attracted to women. And although Auden’s command of German—by his own admission—was never great, he formulated an appropriate response that his German admirer would have understood.

  Auden’s use of this particular word, schwul, is especially striking. An etymology identifies the word as Berlin vernacular and traces its origin to the German for humid, schwül, suggestive presumably of the expression warme Brüder (warm brothers), which was also German slang for men who loved other men. The word was also associated with criminality, and one 1847 publication by a former Berlin police commissioner, Die Diebe in Berlin (The thieves in Berlin), defined a Schwuler as a crook “who loves certain immoralities.”4 Despite this pejorative association, the word was also adopted by self-identified homosexuals. In the third edition of a medical study devoted exclusively to homosexuality—and based on ethnographic research in Berlin—psychiatrist Albert Moll claimed in 1899 that members of Berlin’s homosexual subculture (both men and women) used the word schwul to describe themselves.5 (By the late nineteenth century a section of the Tiergarten Park, where men had long cruised for se
x, had a small path that acquired the nickname schwuler Weg, or path.6) Although the written documentation is somewhat obscure, the term clearly had neutral or even positive connotations by the 1920s for younger homosexuals, who commonly described themselves and each other as schwul.7 It appears as well that there was something of a generational divide. Historian Manfred Herzer recounts in his biography of the pioneering sexologist and homosexual rights activist Magnus Hirschfeld how Hirschfeld chided a homosexual youth for using the word, although it was clearly a feature of the young man’s Berlin dialect.8

  Emerging from Berlin vernacular, the term is the best translation for the English word “gay.” Had Auden had a similar experience in London, however, there would have been no English counterpart. Indeed, his 1928 vocabulary included English-language words such as queer, bugger, pederast, sodomite, molly, queen, fairy, and pansy. Some were clearly used for self-identification—Auden described Berlin as “the buggers daydream,” after all—but they were also pejorative. A few months later, during a brief visit home, Auden broke off his long-term engagement with a woman. “Never—Never—Never again,” he recorded in his journal.9 Auden’s Berlin awakening is striking, and in the late 1920s he could describe his sexuality more articulately even in halting German than he ever could in English.

  The experiences that helped Auden to make this dramatic transition are significant, of course, but of equal interest are the contours of the terminology that evolved to describe the sexual minority to which he now felt he belonged. A central argument of Gay Berlin is that the emergence of an identity based on the notion of a fixed sexual orientation was initially a German and especially a Berlin phenomenon. This makes the Berlin etymology of schwul that much more significant, since language can help us to chart the growth of a new group identity.

  The word schwul was neither the first nor the only German term, however, that shaped modern notions of sexual orientation. The word “homosexuality” was itself a German invention, and appeared as Homosexualität for the first time in 1869 in a German-language pamphlet that polemicized against the Prussian anti-sodomy statute.10 An odd amalgam of Latin and Greek, Homosexualität became the enduring appellation for same-sex erotic love. Its precise definition varied, certainly, and while sympathetic doctors or homosexual rights activists used the word in a more neutral fashion to suggest the condition of having a fixed sexual orientation, others felt that the word suggested that same-sex desire was caused by disease or degeneration.11

  The claim of German originality does not deny, of course, that there have always been men and women who pursued erotic love with their own sex.12 Certainly gay history has identified entire networks of premodern men who sought sex with other men. Fifteenth-century Florence created a special office to police male prostitution.13 Early modern Spain and Germany interdicted and severely punished the crime of sodomy.14 Some historians have even argued that the origins of modern homosexuality can be traced to the early eighteenth century, when premodern same-sex subcultures allegedly fostered minority identities distinct from a “heterosexual” majority. In the decades after 1700, certain London taverns or “molly houses” became exclusive venues for men (“mollies”) seeking sexual contact with other men.15 The eighteenth-century Netherlands witnessed a similar phenomenon of male “sodomites” who established secretive networks based on erotic same-sex attraction.16 Enlightenment Paris also harbored large groups of male “pederasts” who sought the sexual companionship of other men and developed, arguably, the identity of a sexual minority.17 Certainly these Dutch, English, and French subcultures have been well documented with contemporary printed materials as well as police and trial records. But whether they influenced or even conditioned modern sexual identities remains an open question.18

  The nineteenth century has served as the more common focus for locating the origins of a modern homosexual identity. Since Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction in 1976, many historians have argued that a hetero/homosexual binarism developed only after 1869 following the coinage of the term “homosexuality,” which, according to Foucault, introduced the homosexual as a new “species” of being. Some interpretations of Foucault’s work have emphasized the precise moment when the “homosexual” created a radical rupture in Western understandings of sexual deviancy. According to this view, the social and cultural identities based on an exclusively same-sex erotic attraction were virtually impossible before the nineteenth century.19

  Other historians of sexuality have supported Foucault’s periodization but questioned his exclusive emphasis on medicalization. In his study of Sweden, Jens Rydström identifies a “paradigm” shift that began to distinguish sodomy from bestiality—effected without the influence of psychiatry—and accompanied the growth of an urban same-sex-oriented subculture in Stockholm beginning in the 1880s.20 Dan Hea-ley’s work on Moscow and St. Petersburg documents a shift in same-sex relations around 1900 from an earlier model of adult men patronizing younger male and female prostitutes to a subculture of men who desired exclusively other men.21 Recent studies of Victorian London and Paris demonstrate, similarly, the growth of erotic same-sex subcultures in which groups of men pursued erotic and social relationships in established venues with other same-sex-desiring men.22 Whether these late-nineteenth-century networks can be traced back to the “molly houses,” “sodomites,” or “pederasts” of the eighteenth century is theoretically debatable, but there are few demonstrable continuities.

  Certainly the cosmopolitan culture and anonymity fostered by nineteenth-century European urbanization permitted the emergence of minority sexual communities. If we concede a qualitative shift, however, and not just numerical growth, we must also consider the kind of conceptual transformation addressed by Foucault. A central—if not the central—element that has characterized modern homosexuality is the understanding of erotic same-sex attraction as a fundamental element of the individual’s biological or psychological makeup. Homosexuality has thus been defined and constructed around the debate over the innate character of sexual identity, whether governed by nature or nurture, biology or culture, genetics or environment. The history of this debate, moreover, suggests that the idea of (homo)sexual personhood has a fairly recent origin.

  This book will argue that the homosexual “species” took root in Germany after the mid-nineteenth century through the collaboration of Berlin’s medical scientists and sexual minorities. This confluence of biological determinism and subjective expressions of sexual personhood was a uniquely German phenomenon, moreover, and it clearly underpins modern conceptions of sexual orientation.

  Foucault failed, however, to consider the German context of his own observations. Although he emphasized the word “homosexuality” and the work of the Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal, he never identified the urban context sources that gave rise to the neologism and its science as specifically German. Foucault’s apparent oversight is even more glaring when we consider that homosexuality was only one in a series of German terms invented to describe erotic same-sex love as a fixed condition and social identity. Those who created this German-language terminology were advocates for legal reform, doctors who studied same-sex erotic behavior, and their subjects; all participated integrally in elaborating a science of homosexuality. The image Foucault has offered of a laboratory test tube in which medical professionals concocted new sexual identities is completely one-sided and misleading.

  My purpose therefore is to historicize the invention of the homosexual and place this sexual identity firmly within the German milieu in which it appeared. In my analysis, I adduce four broad vectors of German history: the criminalization of male same-sex eroticism and the inclusion of the Prussian anti-sodomy statute as Paragraph 175 in the new German imperial criminal code after 1871; the research methodologies of nineteenth-century German forensic and psychiatric professionals; the public engagement of literate middle-class Germans who openly protested Paragraph 175; and, finally, a relatively free press. The Prussian anti
-sodomy statute and Paragraph 175 prompted both public avowals of sexual difference (by self-identified sexual minorities), and theories elaborated by German psychiatrists that sexual orientation was somehow congenital or “hardwired.”23 Scientists such as Berlin’s chief medical officer Johann Ludwig Casper, who studied Berlin’s sexual “deviants” in the 1850s and ’60s, concluded that same-sex love was a natural, inborn characteristic, and not merely the perversion of a “normal” sexual tendency.

  By 1908 the authoritative, broadly circulated, German-language encyclopedias Meyers and Brockhaus—which provided reliable, up-to-date references for Germany’s burgeoning middle classes—included entries for “Homosexualität.” The Meyers article explained that male and female homosexuals suffered from an “inborn and perverse feeling” and that they could be found in all social classes.24 The Brockhaus entry cross-referenced “Homosexual” with “conträre Sexualempfindung” (inverted sexual feeling).25 The encyclopedia entries suggested directly or implicitly that same-sex eroticism was a naturally occurring, if uncommon, phenomenon that affected a small percentage of the general population. Whether neutral or negative, the neologism “homosexuality” helped to suggest that same-sex love was caused by a fixed condition not amenable to treatment or cure.

  We might reject the linguistic determinism of Foucault, yet it is clear that the word had far greater circulation in German than in any other language. Although it appeared in French, English, and Italian translations by about 1900, its usage in these languages remained somewhat rare and extremely uneven. The pioneering work of German sexologists and activists made the term far more common in German texts. Here the Google Books project, which has digitized millions of volumes from the world’s major research libraries, provides an enormous database for measuring linguistic usage. Based on the database, the Ngram chart (above) demonstrates how much more frequently “homosexuality” and its derivatives appeared in German (from 1870 to 1930), as a percentage of the German-language publications entered in the database, when compared to French, English, and Italian.