Gay Berlin Read online

  This is not surprising, perhaps, since the word was a German invention. Moreover, it demonstrates how German-language publications emanating from Berlin and Leipzig popularized the term among German speakers. The application of new labels and the frequency (or infrequency) of their usage is certainly one form of evidence for measuring the growth of an incipient identity.

  Chapter 1 of this book examines the life and career of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895), a German activist described by some as the world’s first open homosexual. Ulrichs began an extremely public if solitary campaign in the early 1860s to overturn the Prussian anti-sodomy statute. In the process he examined and theorized his own sexual constitution in a set of published pamphlets, arguing that his erotic attraction to men was inborn. Coining the word Urning to describe this identity, Ulrichs claimed that men with his sexual instincts had the soul of a woman trapped in the body of a man. Although Ulrichs ultimately failed to effect legal reform, his campaign sparked the interest of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who pioneered the study of sexuality (and homosexuality) and helped to launch the discipline of sexology. Though difficult, the relationship between Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing exemplified the “feedback loop” that connected the “homosexual street” and medical professionals, a circuit of subjective self-avowal and medical study that fashioned a new sexual identity.26

  Chapter 2 considers Berlin’s homosexual subcultures and their relationship to the police. Under the leadership of an innovative commissioner, the Department of Homosexuals and Blackmailers, a special taskforce of the Berlin police department, found creative methods for enforcing the German anti-sodomy statute, Paragraph 175. Since only specific sexual acts and not homosexual association were formally criminalized, Berlin police monitored, observed, and ultimately permitted the operation of same-sex venues and entertainments. The very existence of the law inspired sexual blackmail, however, so the Berlin police targeted male prostitutes and attempted increasingly to provide support to blackmail victims. This passive enforcement of Paragraph 175 had an equal if not greater significance in the way it gave visibility and definition to what had formerly been a shadowy, indistinct group of sexual minorities. By tolerating erotic same-sex sociability, the Berlin police permitted same-sex-loving men and women to congregate and forge a community. Access to this community was facilitated in turn for medical professionals, literary figures, and journalists who described and broadcast this incipient identity. In short, Berlin’s policing strategies played a critical role in the creation of a homosexual milieu and identity, which became an established feature of prewar Berlin.

  Chapter 3 examines the 1897 founding of the world’s first homosexual rights organization in Berlin, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC). Under the leadership of pioneering sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the SHC combined innovative methodologies to study human sexuality with full-throated advocacy for legal reform. Through the publication of scientific research—as well as popular literature on homosexuality—the organization hoped to educate and enlighten the German public. This activism ultimately popularized many of the SHC’s own theories about homosexuality and sexual orientation.

  Chapter 4 considers the role of a major sexual scandal beginning in 1907, which placed the court of German Emperor William II under the cloud of suspected “perversion.” As it eventually became clear, some of the Kaiser’s closest friends and courtiers were homosexual (or bisexual). This had long been known or at least suspected among elite political observers and was eventually exploited by an influential, muckraking journalist, Maximilian Harden, who made targets of specific political operatives. In the extended libel and perjury trials that followed Harden’s accusations, Magnus Hirschfeld and other prominent sexologists provided expert testimony on homosexuality. Although the scandal incited a powerful and destructive backlash—at least for homosexual rights activists—it also made homosexuality, in Germany if nowhere else, a household word.

  Chapter 5 considers how competing paradigms of male-male eroticism were popularized before, during, and after the First World War. Inspired by so-called “masculinist” dissidents from Hirschfeld’s SHC, Hans Blüher elaborated a German-nationalist and anti-Semitic theory of the homoerotic Männerbund, based in part on his own adolescent experience in Berlin’s fledgling youth movement. In the 1920s, Blüher’s notion of the Männerbund became a pervasive pop-sociological theory and cultural trope for explaining all-male sociability, including adolescent as well as adult clubs and associations, political parties, and militia groups. For some anti-Semites and nationalists, Blüher’s Männerbund offered a right-wing alternative to Hirschfeld’s explanation of homosexuality, which was presumed to be “effete” and “Jewish.”

  Chapter 6 considers the founding and activities of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science in 1918. The first establishment of its kind, the institute promoted the sexological studies of the prewar SHC, while expanding that organization’s purview to promote not only legal reform for sexual minorities but also progressive education about “straight” sexuality, including marriage, birth control, and abortion. The institute also pioneered theories of transsexuality, applying Hirschfeld’s “adaptation” therapy for sexual minorities and performing some of the world’s first sex-reassignment surgeries.

  Chapter 7 explores the sexualized culture of Weimar Berlin in the 1920s and early ’30s by considering the city’s male prostitution and sex tourism. Even before the arrival of the Auden-Isherwood circle in the late 1920s, Berlin had developed a reputation for its hedonistic nightlife and party culture. The relatively open homosexuality of the German capital was purveyed by an extensive homosexual club culture based on same-sex bars, entertainments, and other forms of sociability. This club life was also supported by a broad cultural establishment that included not only gay-themed film, theater, and pulp fiction, along with dozens of periodicals, sold openly at newspaper kiosks, but also popular cultural figures who imbued Weimar culture more or less discreetly with a “queer” sensibility. This spectacle, along with male prostitution, promoted a sexual tourism consisting of curiosity seekers and voyeurs as well as homosexuals who indulged their sexual appetites.

  The eighth and final chapter considers more narrowly the political strategies, activism, and infighting of Berlin’s three major homosexual rights organizations. The oldest of these, Hirschfeld’s SHC—under the institutional umbrella of the Institute for Sexual Science—continued to pursue its prewar agenda of legal reform, allied, as before, with the left-wing Social Democratic Party. Under the erratic leadership of Adolf Brand, the literary organization the Community of the Special (CoS) joined initially with the SHC, but then veered toward an anti-Semitism that slandered Hirschfeld as a Jewish outsider, before finally adopting an unaffiliated stance. A new outfit, the Human Rights League (HRL), which quickly became the largest homosexual organization, steered a centrist course, flirting at times with the fascist parties of the radical right. Although collectively these groups nearly overturned the anti-sodomy statute in 1930, the parliamentary stasis that led to the downfall of the republic in 1933 impeded a final Reichstag vote that might have reformed or eliminated the law. With the electoral successes of the Nazi or National Socialist German Workers’ Party beginning in 1930, and Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933, the fate of the world’s first homosexual rights activism and open, urban culture was sealed.

  • CHAPTER ONE •

  The German Invention of Homosexuality

  When considering the questions “What is natural?” and “What is unnatural?” it is paramount to apply a standard that is not foreign to one’s own nature.

  KARL ULRICHS, “Vindex: Social and Legal Studies on Man-Manly Love,” 1864

  On a bright Thursday morning in late August 1867, the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a former member of the civil service in the kingdom of Hanover, approached the Odeon concert hall in Munich. Since the beginning of the week, the Association of German Jurists had been assembling in this
magnificent neoclassical structure to present papers and discuss the legal issues of the day. The professional group included lawyers, officials, bureaucrats, and legal academics from the thirty-nine states and cities of the former German Confederation, a loose association created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This imposing body of Ulrichs’s colleagues made up the government establishment of the nascent German Empire. Dressed formally even in the midst of summer, they had first met in 1860 to facilitate great tasks of statecraft. As ardent nationalists, they hoped to promote German legal unification, even before the emergence of a nation-state.1 Although the jurists’ political program would have important consequences for the incipient German state, Ulrichs’s appearance at the Odeon marked a revolution all its own. He was preparing to address his professional colleagues on an unmentionable subject, same-sex love, and to protest the various German anti-sodomy laws that criminalized it.2

  Ulrichs had celebrated his birthday the day before, and now, at the age of forty-two, he hoped to deliver a speech for which he arguably had spent most of his adulthood preparing. As a university student, he had recognized that he was attracted to other men. This sexual peculiarity and rumors of his intimate affairs had forced him to resign the only professional position he had ever held, as a government official. Finally, in an act of enormous courage, he disclosed his secret to his closest kin. Raised in a pious Christian family whose extended members included numerous Lutheran clergy, Ulrichs struggled for years with heart and intellect to make sense of his seemingly unacceptable feelings. Were they unnatural? Had he somehow caused them himself, through actions of his own? He examined carefully his own motivations and desires; he scoured legal and scientific publications on the topic. Following the tradition of the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Ulrichs countered prevailing beliefs and developed a theory of his own selfhood—though defined in sexual, not spiritual, terms—forming the conviction that he must face down an established authority and counter centuries of prejudice. To that end, since 1864, Ulrichs had published pamphlets under a pseudonym, arguing his case that sexual deviance was an endowment of nature and must be respected.3

  But on that morning in August, crossing Munich’s imposing Odeonsplatz, framed by government and cultural buildings, past the grand loggia of the Field Marshals’ Hall and the baroque spires and dome of the Theatine Church, Ulrichs felt his heart palpitate almost audibly as he neared the Odeon hall. As he would later recount, an inner voice whispered, “There is still time to keep silent. Simply waive your request to speak, and then your heart can stop pounding.” But Ulrichs also remembered those “comrades” who were anticipating his protest—“Was I to answer their trust in me with cowardice?”—and he recalled a desperate acquaintance who had committed suicide to escape criminal prosecution for sodomy and the public humiliation that would have followed. “With breast beating,” Ulrichs entered the building, mounted the speaker’s platform, and began reading his text to more than five hundred professional colleagues. “Gentlemen,” he intoned, “my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law” to abolish the persecution of an innocent class of persons. “It is at the same time,” Ulrichs continued, “a question of damming a continuing flood of suicides.” The victims, he said, were those sexually drawn to members of their own sex.4

  Expressions of outrage and scattered cries of “Stop!” began echoing through the chamber. Alarmed by the voluble hostility, Ulrichs offered to surrender the floor, but others in the audience urged him to continue, and he again took heart. This “class of persons,” he went on to say, suffered legal persecution only because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual.” Raucous shouts now emanated from the audience; Ulrichs heard hooting, catcalls, and cries of “Crucify!” from groups on his left and directly in front. On his right stood those who were not prepared for the content of his address and out of curiosity demanded that he finish. But the cacophony overwhelmed Ulrichs and forced him to descend from the podium without finishing his speech, while the assembly chairman attempted to reestablish order. The Association of Jurists refused to press Ulrichs’s agenda after the meeting concluded. Within five years member states of the new German Empire had adopted a full penal code in which the punitive Prussian law making a crime of sodomy prevailed over the more liberal law codes of the other German states. But standing at the podium in Munich, Ulrichs had started something important with the first public coming-out in modern history.5

  Just how much courage did this take? By August 1867 Ulrichs had already forfeited his career and exposed himself to potential rejection by family members. He had little left to lose and later described his appearance before the jurists at the Odeon as the proudest moment of his life. Freed now to go on making a public case for his cause, he continued publishing pamphlets after 1867, but under his own name, not a pseudonym. And although he failed to avert the imposition of an anti-sodomy law throughout the newly unified German nation after 1871, his writings and actions helped inspire the world’s first movement for homosexual rights, launched a generation later in Berlin, in 1897.6

  The truly remarkable aspect of Ulrichs’s brave initiative was the important contribution he made to the redefinition—indeed the invention—of sexuality (and homosexuality) in nineteenth-century Europe. Traditional medical “science” explained “sodomy” as a willful perversion and the product of masturbation or sexual excess. “Sodomites” were understood to be oversexed predators who had simply grown bored with women. The established science of sexual “perversion” viewed same-sex erotic activity as that which it seemed to be and nothing more, an isolated genital act. It was possible to imagine, in fact, that almost anyone might succumb to the crime of sodomy, either through seduction or by willful decision, but ultimately as a result of moral weakness. Sexual desire was considered a fluid and malleable drive that might easily be warped and perverted. Only in the 1850s did the first medical doctor, a German in Berlin named Johann Ludwig Casper, question this received wisdom and argue that some “sodomites” had an innate, biological attraction to the same sex. By 1900 a progressive school of German psychiatry had formed around the belief that same-sex attraction might be congenital, and somehow an integral feature of a small sexual minority. It became possible now to imagine that certain individuals were attracted innately to their own and not the opposite sex. Indeed, German speakers—both self-identified same-sex-loving men and medical doctors—invented a new language of sexual orientation and identity that displaced the older understanding of perversion and moral failure. Invented terms such as Urning (Ulrichs’s own coinage) or “homosexual” first entered the German lexicon and later other European languages as well. Ulrichs’s pamphlet propaganda played a critical role in this development: his theories of an inborn Urning sexuality and character coupled with his outspoken activism helped not only to influence the incipient sciences of sexuality but also to mobilize an imagined community of homosexuals. Concretely, Ulrichs spearheaded a conceptual revolution that transformed erotic, same-sex love from an idea of deviant acts into a full-blown sexual orientation with its own distinct quality and character.

  Ulrichs was an improbable innovator, and certainly an unlikely activist for the civil rights of a sexual minority. Born in 1825 in Aurich, a typical small-town German community located in East Friesland, which became part of the kingdom of Hanover in 1815, the young Ulrichs was sheltered from the cultural and intellectual life of nineteenth-century Europe. His father was a district engineering official and civil servant, and his mother’s clan included numerous Lutheran pastors. From infancy, Ulrichs’s conservative family trained him for academic study and a professional career, either as a bureaucrat or a clergyman. This early preparation endowed him with a restless intelligence, however, and the independence to follow his own calling.7

  Ulrichs’s family must be seen as elite—despite its small-town origins—and typical of a wider German class of educated professionals, Bildungsbürgertum
, a group that enjoyed significant social prominence throughout the German territories. What anchored their elite status was education: most attended Gymnasium, the Latin high school that prepared its graduates for university study. Talent was a necessary but rarely sufficient qualification for Gymnasium. Germany’s educated elite shared a class background of social and cultural—if not financial—capital, provided by families that could prepare sons for rigorous training and the connections to navigate social and government networks. Higher education was the credential that guaranteed a civil service career as jurist, teacher, cleric, or official in any one of Germany’s city, state, or church bureaucracies.8 Many such families boasted a long string of church or state officials, often stretching back generations. The Ulrichs family was no exception.

  As his parents’ only surviving son—an older brother died in infancy in 1824—Ulrichs enjoyed the attention and encouragement that prepared him well for academic study. He later described this as a happy childhood: “From loving motherly care, I received in part my first education and in part a whole series of other intellectual impressions and influences.”9 Ulrichs’s mother also imparted the conservative piety of traditional Lutheranism, teaching her son devotional exercises, scripture, and prayers. After the death of his father in 1835, Ulrichs and his family moved to live near his maternal grandfather and a married sister in the Hanoverian town of Burgdorf, where he was confirmed in the Lutheran Church by his grandfather on Easter Sunday in 1839, a religious and social milestone marking a new stage of his life. Young Karl then attended Gymnasium, first in Detmold, home of his mother’s brother (likewise a Lutheran pastor), and then in nearby Celle. The close structure of Ulrichs’s family—infused with conservative Protestant religiosity, loving attention, and careful social control—served the boy well. At nineteen he completed his Gymnasium exams with excellent results in Latin and Greek, the subjects required for university entrance.10