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  The success police had in tracking down suspected blackmailers—at least those cases reported in the papers—suggest that the Department of Homosexuals and Blackmailers was especially efficient. Many accounts mentioned the positive identification of a suspect, often in conjunction with the use of the Verbrecheralbum.123 The department also offered advice and counsel to the victims of blackmail: Commissioner Tresckow actually received an annual stipend during his tenure as director for the separate office in his apartment where he counseled victims between 5 and 6 p.m. Krupp, for one, had sought Tresckow’s advice in 1902—via his personal secretary—although the commissioner’s frank warning to avoid perjury might have hastened the steel baron’s suicide. Beyond simply identifying suspected blackmailers, Tresckow and his men helped victims entice their tormenters to meet them in public places, where they might be arrested by officers in hiding. They accompanied other victims on tours of homosexual cruising areas to identify and arrest a suspected blackmailer.124

  It appears that Berlin officials earned and maintained a positive reputation within the city’s homosexual milieu. One newspaper report explained in 1905, “[W]e have been informed that the number of blackmail cases is not multiplying, rather blackmailed persons have the trust now to turn to the police. Earlier they either accepted the ongoing extortion or ‘for unknown reasons’ ended their lives.”125 Whether greater trust in the police explains the increase in the number of reported cases is impossible to determine, though victims of blackmail were certainly reassured by the relatively sympathetic treatment they received in court. A prison sentence for a violation of Paragraph 175 was rare and, when imposed, only nominal. Dr. Ackermann was deemed to have violated Paragraph 175, but was released after trial for “time served” during the investigation. Judge Hasse attempted to kill his blackmailer, but went unpunished due to “incapacitation.” By contrast, the men who blackmailed Ackermann and Hasse received up to ten-year prison sentences. The merchant “Kasparin K.” was imprisoned for a month, but his erstwhile companion, Max Minuth, was locked up for two years. When it came to contradictory testimonies, elite and bourgeois blackmail victims almost always had the upper hand. In 1914 a medical student reported two alleged blackmailers, whom the police quickly identified as prostitutes with a long string of convictions. The blackmailers accused the student, in turn, of violating Paragraph 175, a charge the public prosecutor decided to pursue. After a city judge rejected the blackmailers’ countercharge, the prosecutor appealed to a district court, but the initial decision was upheld.126 Despite their apparent leverage with potential blackmail victims, prostitutes were deemed to have very little credibility when blackmail cases were brought to trial.

  In Magnus Hirschfeld’s estimate, nearly 30 percent of Berlin’s homosexual community was blackmailed at some point.127 This might have been exaggerated, although published crime statistics always indicated many more prosecutions for blackmail than for violations of Paragraph 175, often by a factor of four or more. Berlin’s annual statistical almanacs only began tabulating figures for blackmail in 1906. This also reflected the perception that there were many more incidents than before. Denunciations for homosexual blackmail peaked in 1910 (477 in that year alone), as did the number of resulting arrests (106). Particularly telling are the corresponding figures for denunciations and arrests for sodomy—359 and 20, respectively. While fully one in four and a half blackmail denunciations led to an arrest, only one out of eighteen Paragraph 175 denunciations resulted in arrest.128

  What demonstrates most clearly the enforcement priorities of Berlin officials are the city’s criminal statistics.129 Published annually beginning in 1876, arrests for sodomy remained remarkably low throughout the imperial period (likewise during the Weimar Republic). Before 1890 the greatest number of arrests recorded for a single year was only eleven (in 1882), and 1911 set the record with just thirty-five. The difficulty of enforcing the law is underscored further by the rapidly growing number of denunciations. While the tips given to police of suspected homosexual activity increased fivefold from 1890 to 1910 (from 67 to 359), the number of arrests increased only modestly. This figure—the number of denunciations—also suggests the increasing visibility of homosexuals in Berlin. If we consider the city’s significant population growth, from 825,000 inhabitants in 1871 to just over 2 million in 1914, the per capita number of arrests remained virtually constant.

  As Hirschfeld claimed, it was “not the act, but rather bad luck” that was punished.130 Hans Ostwald observed more cynically that “now and then the police seize one from the thousands on the Päderastenlist…. [T]hey maintain their respect and ‘significance’ with an occasional arrest.”131 In 1920 the Berlin police commissioner Dr. Heinrich Kopp, who had worked in the Department of Homosexuals and Blackmailers since 1904, reported that the beat officers in his division “had only once in sixteen years happened upon a situation that actually represented a violation of the law.” In other words, only once between 1904 and 1920 had two men in Berlin been caught in flagrante delicto in a sex act that violated Paragraph 175.132

  Of equal significance was formal police toleration of same-sex locales. After 1885 there were no recorded cases in greater Berlin—except those involving flagrant prostitution, or criminal activity unrelated to Paragraph 175—where police raided a same-sex male or lesbian bar, at least not before the Nazis came to power.133 As late as 1932, Berlin officials articulated the policies that Commissioner Hüllessem had implemented forty-five years earlier. In March of that year members of a men’s club from the provincial city of Bautzen, after visiting Berlin for an annual convention, submitted a letter to the Prussian minister of the interior in which they complained bitterly about the “locales” where “young men appear in women’s clothing.” The letter continued, “It undermines respectable, German manners when our officials tolerate such a thing…. We consider it a pressing matter that state officials counter this immoral mischief [Unfug] with all available means.”134

  Whether these concerned citizens received any response is unclear, but the internal correspondence between the Berlin police president and ministry officials is highly illuminating. In a note dated April 29, 1932, the police president explained that

  the general toleration of locales with a homosexual public corresponds to an old practice of the Berlin police that was established already in the last century…. The existence of these locales has two practical advantages: it simplifies the observation of these circles for the criminal police, and it keeps them from causing public disturbances in the streets…. Although the complainants appear to suggest that such pubs contribute to the spread of homosexuality, this view is mistaken. There are still differences of opinion about the cause of a same-sex orientation, but no serious scientist today has the view that this perversion of the sexual impulse can be influenced from outside.135

  This enlightened response to a diverse community of sexual minorities helped to define and eventually entrench an incipient identity. What Hüllessem, Tresckow, and their colleagues accomplished was nothing less than the creation of a homosexual milieu in which same-sex-loving men and women were permitted to drink, dance, and socialize without fear of arrest. Hüllessem and others also facilitated access to this exotic world for medical and media professionals who theorized and broadcast the emergence of a new urban culture, the representations of which became an integral feature of Berlin in the first decades of the twentieth century.

  • CHAPTER THREE •

  The First Homosexual Rights Movement and the Struggle to Shape Identity

  Within the larger world, the homosexual portion of humanity creates a world of its own, small in relationship to the rest but large enough to be studied in its own right. Whoever correctly recognizes and assesses this terra incognita will resemble a research traveler who sojourns in foreign territory to study from the ground up.

  —MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914)

  When Magnus Hirschfeld welcomed a few a
cquaintances to his Berlin apartment in May 1897, he had grand designs, bolstered by the energy of youthful optimism. The young medical doctor had just turned twenty-nine the day before, on the fourteenth, and was now embarking on a brash plan to establish the world’s first homosexual rights organization. Hirschfeld’s guests included the publisher Max Spohr, the journalist and editor Adolf Glaser, the railroad official Eduard Oberg, and the Prussian officer and colonial administrator Franz Josef von Bülow. Hirschfeld also invited Berlin police commissioner Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, known within the homosexual community as the official who had first tolerated gay bars and costume balls. Though Hüllessem likely did not attend, Hirschfeld’s invitation indicated the close cooperation that Berlin’s homosexual rights activists would enjoy with the police. Oberg and Bülow never played significant roles in the fledgling organization, yet both were able to make generous contributions. Adolf Glaser was a prominent personality who also gave tours of Berlin’s homosexual nightlife (sometimes together with Hüllessem). Based in Leipzig, Max Spohr had established his own publishing niche with avant-garde works on the occult and homeopathic medicine. Happily married with children, Spohr recognized the popular interest in sexual minorities—after publishing his first work on the subject in 1893—and functioned as Hirschfeld’s muse.1

  Hirschfeld embodied a new approach to political and social reform. What he proposed was the coupling of media-savvy activism with modern medical scholarship to ameliorate the plight of German homosexuals. The new organization that Hirschfeld founded that day in his Charlottenburg apartment was christened the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee), and the group adopted the motto “Per scientiam ad justitiam” (“Through science to justice”). As the motto suggested, Hirschfeld and his fellow members expected that scientific research (together with public education) would effect a dramatic cultural reassessment of homosexuality within Germany, leading eventually to acceptance and legal reform.2

  The proposed research objectives of the SHC also provided a pretext for those who might otherwise have resisted associating themselves with such an organization. Hirschfeld was single himself and remained so, although he never publicly admitted his homosexuality. (He entered a relationship with a life partner, Karl Giese, soon after 1918.) The son of a Jewish medical doctor, Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in the Prussian spa resort of Kolberg on the southern coast of the Baltic (now the Polish town of Kołobrzeg). One of seven children, Hirschfeld, like his two brothers, studied medicine, matriculating first in Breslau, then Strasbourg, Munich, Heidelberg, and finally Berlin, where he completed his medical degree in 1892. After his studies he traveled in the United States and western Europe before opening a practice in Magdeburg, which he moved to the elite neighborhood of Charlottenburg on the western edge of Berlin in 1896.

  Hirschfeld’s direct motivation for founding the SHC was the suicide of a homosexual patient, recounted in his first sexological publication on the topic, Sappho und Sokrates: Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Sappho and Socrates: How do we understand the love of men and women to persons of their own sex?), which he published with Spohr under the pseudonym “Th. Ramien” in 1896. Hirschfeld described the fate of a young military officer who, when pressured by his family to marry, killed himself instead (on the very eve of his wedding). The young man entrusted Hirschfeld with a farewell letter explaining that Paragraph 175, the anti-sodomy statute, would follow him throughout life, always threatening disgrace. For Hirschfeld, the young man’s suicide was a jarring epiphany, revealing the legal and social discrimination experienced by homosexuals. The pamphlet was also an opportunity to offer a theory of homosexual orientation, which Hirschfeld explained as the inborn mental and physical condition of a small minority. Like someone suffering from a harelip or cleft palate, Hirschfeld argued, homosexuals had a congenital defect and deserved to be tolerated, even accepted and embraced.

  Although Hirschfeld developed his theories significantly throughout his career, Sappho und Sokrates expressed the fundamental view that he embraced and consistently promoted: sexual orientation was biological. Under his own name, Hirschfeld released a second work with Spohr, Der urnische Mensch (The uranian person), in 1903, which reiterated his view that homosexuality was congenital. While Richard von Krafft-Ebing and the Berlin psychiatrist Albert Moll had come to share Hirschfeld’s position—or at least accepted that some homosexuals had an inborn condition—others, including two of Hirschfeld’s most ardent naysayers, the Berlin sexologist Dr. Iwan Bloch and the professor of medicine Albert Eulenburg, continued to argue that a homosexual orientation was “caused” by seduction or even poor parenting. Hirschfeld argued from his by-now-extensive clinical experience that most of his homosexual patients not only exhibited characteristics of the typical “uranian Person” but also had experienced a typical “uranian childhood.” Within a short time Hirschfeld managed to convert both doctors to his view, a significant accomplishment that early on helped to establish his reputation. It was Hirschfeld’s familiarity with such a large number of homosexual men and women and with Berlin’s same-sex club scene—he provided both Bloch and Eulenburg with tours—that appears ultimately to have won them over.3

  A third Hirschfeld publication from 1910, Die Transvestiten (The Transvestites), was the source of yet another German neologism. Hirschfeld coined the term based on his experience of Berlin cross-dressers, including professional actors and especially male and female impersonators. Hirschfeld not only contributed a new word for an otherwise unnamed phenomenon but also was the first to argue that cross-dressing had no direct relationship to sexual orientation: the “transvestites” Hirschfeld featured in his study were heterosexual. Hirschfeld’s Transvestites also provided the earliest full account of his theory of “sexual intermediacy” (sexuelle Zwischenstufenlehre). This convoluted expression was sometimes explained as a “third-sex” theory. However, this simplification was (and is) misleading. With the publication of Die Transvestiten, Hirschfeld no longer asserted that there was a discrete “third gender” comprising homosexual men and women, but claimed instead that human sexuality could be mapped on an intricate spectrum from “absolute woman” to “absolute man,” reflecting a set of four central criteria. Of course, the “absolutes” were ideal types and existed nowhere in reality. The four criteria that Hirschfeld identified included genitalia, other physical characteristics, sex drive, and emotional characteristics; these four variables, he believed, explained the enormous range of sexual minorities—physical hermaphrodites (individuals with ambiguous genitalia), homosexuals, bisexuals, asexuals, cross-dressers (transvestites), effeminate men who loved masculine women, the reverse, and so on. Admittedly, Hirschfeld’s specific assessment of any one of these criteria—except perhaps genitalia—was extremely subjective and more a reflection of his own views and culture, dictating what “men” and “women” should be. All the same, the schema, as Hirschfeld worked it out, allowed for no fewer than 43 million distinct combinations. In short, Hirschfeld endorsed an infinite range of orientations and a wild diversity of human sexuality. What undergirded his analysis was the central belief that sexual expression was also somehow congenital. This biological determinism animated both the scholarship and the activism of the SHC.4

  From its inception the SHC pursued direct political action, scientific research, and popular education, usually all at the same time. What supported these activities was the print production of Max Spohr and his Leipzig publishing house. Spohr had released his first work on homosexuality, Die Enterbten des Liebesglückes oder das dritte Geschlecht (Those dispossessed of love or the third sex) by Otto de Joux (Otto Podjukl) in 1893. In 1896 Spohr published Hirschfeld’s Sappho und Sokrates, and a second work by de Joux, Die hellenische Liebe in der Gegenwart (Hellenic love in the present day), which proposed the idea of an organization that would promote the rights of homosexuals. This inspired Spohr to introduce Hirschfeld and de Joux. Hi
rschfeld was the one to take up the idea, however, and pursued it with Spohr’s support. In 1898 Hirschfeld edited and Spohr republished all twelve pamphlets authored by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who had died in Italy a few years earlier, in complete obscurity. (These had been released originally between 1864 and 1879.) A year later Spohr issued the first volume of Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for sexual intermediaries), a scientific journal of sexology devoted largely to the study of homosexuality. The very first of its kind, Jahrbuch received positive critical reviews from the German medical establishment, and appeared in twenty-three editions, surviving to the Great Inflation of 1923. Some issues of the journal exceeded one thousand pages, in editions of five hundred or more, which were provided to SHC members at a reduced rate or sold to institutional subscribers and in bookstores.5

  It was not only Spohr’s academic publications but also the popular SHC “propaganda” that allowed Hirschfeld to combine scholarship with homosexual rights advocacy. This commitment to public agitation was so great, in fact, that by 1903 the SHC had elected a “Propaganda Commission,” responsible solely for popular education. At least since Ulrichs’s lonely campaign in the 1860s and ’70s, the dispelling of false stereotypes about homosexuality had become a central objective. When the Prussian minister of the interior adopted the anti-sodomy statute as Paragraph 175 in 1871—against the recommendations of Rudolf Virchow and the Prussian medical commission—he justified his decision as a necessary measure to preserve the “popular feeling of the nation.” Krafft-Ebing decried this conservatism in 1894: “If it were possible to popularize the findings of medical science,” he opined, “Paragraph [175] could no longer be maintained.”6