Robert Beachy | Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity / 2014

city with no virgins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Beachy Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)

 

The remarkable history that Robert Beachy details in his 2014 book, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity is the result, in large part, of the existence of just a few individuals who so influenced the lives of their fellow citizens of the Weimar Republic, that Germany, and Berlin in particular, was able to sustain a nearly open society for gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual individuals that would not be available to these outsider communities in other countries for more than a half-century later.

 

    The fact that these radical shifts in sexual politics and cultural inclusion were utterly destroyed in 1933, with the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist party and government, makes these social advances even more significant and poignant because of their fleetingness. Certainly one would not wish to compare the Nazi attempts to exterminate an entire population of individuals on the basis of religion (which Hitler and his associates misperceived as an issue of “race”), but within the context of the abolishment of freedoms for thousands of homosexuals, the Hitler-ordered 1933 destruction of the Berlin shrine to gay sexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, serves almost as a symbol as painfully potent for many gays as the burning of synagogues and other places of worship. That a few of the homosexual groups and the leaders behind them might also have contributed to some of the anti-Semitic ideology and organizational structures upon which the Nationalist Socialist Party would pattern their own methods to grab power merely reiterates the complexity of the sexual politics and its effects on the society of its day, and makes it even more important to study texts such as Beachy’s in order to better comprehend how intertwined was German culture, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in the seventy-year period from the 1860s to the 1930s.

     No short review or essay, accordingly, can truly summarize the vast network of interconnections between these various aspects of German social and private life. And not even Beachy, who argues that the Berlin experiments with sexuality helped to define our social-political-sexual attitudes toward homosexuality today, convincingly shows us precisely how what I will call the Berlin experiment later affected political-sexual shifts in French, British, and American thinking.. But what Beachy does make apparent is that certainly in any evaluation of “advanced” sexual thinking, for better or worse, Berlin got there first.

    Beachy suggests that modern attitudes toward homosexuality reach back to the open advocating of sexuality by an obscure German lawyer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who as early as 1867 courageously attempted to introduce the idea to the Association of German Jurists meeting in Munich that became the basis of pro-homosexual arguments for generations, namely that same-sex attraction was an inborn quality, not a learned response or an illness with which one could inflicted; and accordingly, argued Ulrichs, the Jurists should work to repeal the current penal law (the Prussian law that later was adopted by the new German Empire, making sodomy a crime). Beachy summarizes Ulrichs’ position as being not simply courageous, but, since he based his ideas upon his own personal experiences and explanations of his same-sex desires, was a call for a radical redefinition of sexuality itself:

 

             The truly remarkable aspect of Ulrichs’ brave initiative was the important

             contribution he made to the redefinition—indeed the invention—of sex-

             uality (and homosexuality) in nineteenth-century Europe.

 

As opposed to the view of traditional medical science, which explained sodomy as a willful perversion and the product of masturbation and sexual excess, a condition that supposedly arose from “oversexed predators who had simply grown bored with women,” Ulrichs was advocating—along with only a few others—that such desires were not only inborn but were a natural sexual yearning (which he called Urning) among a minority of the population. In short, Ulrichs posited the notion that same-sex desire represented the emotions of a group separate from and yet equal to the general population, a third sex. Moreover, not only did this former local official argue his views in public, but he wrote numerous pamphlets arguing his case. From his first pamphlet, “Vincex: Social and Legal Studies on Man-Manly Love,” to his fifth such work, “Ara Spei” (“Refuge of Hope”) Ulrichs attempted to see the issues surrounding same-sex love from every perspective possible, positioning himself, as Beachy puts it, as “the defender, indeed emancipator, of all Urnings who suffered under the prejudice and persecution of a Dioning majority.”

    While Ulrichs personally had little effect on changes in the law, he had an enormous impact on German thinking by stimulating debates through his publications, which found audiences not only in Saxony, Baden, and the western Rhine provinces, but in Italy, France, the Low Countries, and England. Newspapers and journals carried notices of his publications, and the press of several cities attacked his viewpoints. More importantly, early sexologists such as the Austrian Richard von Krafft-Ebing were quoted in, and, in return, read Ulrich’s works. In short, “by publishing his experiences and theories of same-sex love, Ulrichs offered himself as both subject and muse for medical doctors who studied the subject,” opening up an entire new field of consideration.

     Despite Ulrichs’ odd-sounding designation for same-sex love, “urning,” (named for the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite Urania, created from the god Uranus’s testicles), he was also indirectly responsible for the invention of the German word Honosexualität (homosexuality), a term coined by the journalist Karl Kertbeny, who, in response to the legal review brought about under Ulrichs’ impetus, used the term in his own pamphlets sold by booksellers in Leipzig and Berlin, arguing that “homosexuality” was an inborn condition, which, accordingly, made the anti-sodomy stature a violation of fundamental civic and constitutional rights. Kertbeny, rejected Ulrich’s notions of the urning desire as being related to psychological hermaphroditism, but was encouraged by Ulrichs’ writings (and had corresponded with him) to peruse his own commentary.

     Ultimately a series of brutal attacks in a Berlin park worked against legal reform. But writings such as those published by Ulrichs had an enormous impact through its effects on doctors and scientists and, in particular, upon the attitudes of Berlin police commissioners such as Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem and those that followed him. By the late 19th and early 20th century the quickly expanding city of Berlin was already home to numerous gay bars located in small neighborhoods throughout the city. Parks and streets such as Tiergarten Park, Unter den Linden, and the Passage were already established same-sex pick-up areas. And increasingly in the militarist Prussian city, many soldiers were actively homosexual or bisexual, willing to prostitute themselves to gay clients in order to supplement their incomes. Although the police occasionally raided bars such as Seeger’s Restaurant, a raid which Beachy details, most of the gay activity occurred under Meerscheidt-Hüllesssem’s tolerant eye and even, occasionally, as in the case of the numerous grand homosexual costume balls celebrated throughout the city, often with him in attendance.

    One might add that Berlin was also growing more and more tolerant with regard to all sexual activity in the years leading up to World War I, the same Berlin which so enticed the American painter Marsden Hartley. Even before that, moreover, figures in the 1890s such as Magnus Hirschfeld were beginning to establish the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC), which, through its several publications, would work to redefine misconceived notions of same-sex homosexuality, to promulgate new theories of sexuality, to protect same-sex activities in within the city, and, to continue to protest and work toward abolition of Paragraph 175, the anti-sodomy clause of the legal code. By the end of the war, the SHC had become such an important organization, made up of a wide-range of individuals—including heterosexual celebrities of government and the elite as well as homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered individuals—that its impact cannot be compared with any such organization today. With the establishment of his Institute for Sexual Science, Hirschfeld combined services by medical doctors, a large sexual library, and dormitories for homeless youths and others, as well as providing surgery for some individuals seeking transgender transformations—and a wide range of educational activities that might be the envy of any lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender organization of today. 

     Savvy in his abilities to organize and publicize these activities, Hirschfeld also had great influence over many in the medical establishment, and helped to sway numerous institutions and even large elements of general public that homosexuality was inborn and harmless as a social activity. His own views about the development of homosexuality, relating it to a feminine inversion which occurred in birth, however, also created powerful enemies among those of the gay community who disagreed. Particularly, Adolf Brand, who himself published a homosexual journal of literature and erotic art, argued against Hirschfeld and, often, his SHC organization. Brand, who considered himself bisexual, believed that homosexuality was a masculine phenomenon that emanated from virile males (including the great historical homosexual figures of literature such as Achilles and Hannibal); he also argued for man-boy relationships, living in pederast relationships with young boys while continuing to reside with a wife. Although Brand would at times support Hirschfeld’s activities, more often he worked against him, particularly since he saw Hirschfeld (a converted Jew) through the lens of his increasingly anti-Semitic attitudes.

 

    The rise of the Wandervogel Movement, a youth movement encouraging both young boys and girls to join in groups tutored by a strong individual (who male students often described as “Führer” or leader) engaged in scouting-like (hiking, camping and other activities), further complicated the situation, particularly since one of the central figures in this movement, Hans Blüher, took the role of Führer, like Brand, in the direction of what he described as a healthy man-boy bond which often included sexual activity. The initiation ceremony ended with a salute and shout of “Heil!”

   Others, particularly many of the German homosexual militarists joined in other Mänerbünde associations, masculinist gatherings that included homosexual friendships. One such military grouping, involving The Liebenberg Roundtable (Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, Kuno von Moltke and others closely associated with Emperor William I) resulted in a scandal that ultimately swept up both Hirschfeld and Brand in secondary roles as testifiers and plaintiffs.

 

    Oddly, what all of the conflicts reveal, however, is just how open homosexuality had become in post-World War I Germany. By the 1920s Berlin had become a tourist destination for anyone who might seek a free sexual atmosphere. Over a hundred gay bars, catering to both transvestites and those seeing rough trade; dozens of gay magazines and journals; numerous works of fiction and films centered upon gay life or implying it; and dozens of gay ball celebrations; and a proliferation of drugs all helped to turn bay Berlin, along with its heterosexual counterparts, into an international attraction for figures as various as the afore-mentioned Hartley, Christopher Isherwood, Djuna Barnes, Klaus Mann, Robert McAlmon, Philip Johnson, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Alan Bush, John Lehmann, Grant Wood, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht, and thousands of other poets, artists, filmmakers, architects, musicians, dancers, actors, and others involved in the arts. Some returned home shocked or, at least, taken aback by what they had seen; many others stayed.

      By the late 1920s and the first years of the new decade, despite the radical economic disasters that Germans had faced, younger figures such as Friedrich Radszuwelt, as Beachy puts it, “came to emblematize the flowering of homosexual culture and rising activism in the Weimar Republic,” organizing more centrist and financially supportive coalitions that would challenge Hirschfeld’s gender definitions of homosexuality (to be fair, as his theory progressed, Hirschfeld himself recognized hundreds of sexualities within a broad spectrum of outsider sexual activity), which, along with the SHC, would surely have affected the desired change in the penal code had it not been for the rise of Hitler and his Nationalist Socialist Party.

     With the events of July 2, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives—when a group of Hitler’s Stormtroopers murdered the second most powerful Nazi, Ernst Röhm as he was sexually consorting with some hundreds of his brown-shirt associates (it is estimated that around eighty-five SA leaders and Röhm’s friends were slaughtered in the incident)—nearly all the homosexual leaders perceived they could not survive in the new order.  Hircshfeld had already escaped to Italy where he was to remain for the rest of his life. Radszuweit had already died in 1932 of a heart attack. Brand was forced to stop publishing and was harassed, but remained free because he was married and was not Jewish. Brand had already predicted that when the Nazi Party came to power, all homosexuals will be “strung up in the gallows,” being, as Beachy laments, “completely unaware of his own complicity in this development.”

     If Berlin had been the birthplace of modern identity, with the Nazi outlawing all homosexual activity, a large swath of Germany sexual history would seemingly disappear from memory. Today, he observes, Berliners and other Germans colloquially describe their annual gay pride parades as CSD (Christopher Street Day).

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XX, No. 1 (Spring 2015).