It’s possible, even likely, that when W.W. Norton & Company decided to publish two fine new books about Magnus Hirschfeld –Daniel Brook’s “The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin” and Brandy Schillace’s “The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story”– it timed publication to recognize the 90th death anniversary of the founder and chief researcher of Berlin’s ground-breaking Institute for Sexual Science. Then it happened that pub. date eerily coincided more closely with the night in 1933 that Hitler’s goons raided the good doctor’s Institute for Sexual Science and burned it down.
What perhaps none of the parties could have foreseen was that these new books would appear as Americans stare bug-eyed through the windshield as an autocratic orange monster looms in the headlights. Both books chart the advancing horror of national socialism, with its sinister obsession with traditional sexual roles and racial purity. The Nazis’ suppression of all the pollutants of this purity is a central “character,” if not the essential one.
The books are not groundbreaking in the sense of giving first exposure to this particular compelling chapter in pre-Stonewall LGBTQ history. Gay readers with little more than a passing interest in queer history will likely have heard of Hirschfeld and his Institute. Perhaps they know that Hirschfeld coined the word homosexuality (Homosexualität, of course) or at least is credited as having done so.
The full story is complex and endlessly fascinating and will probably never be told all in one place, although the literature to date is as impressive as it is serious. While telling the known stories anew (and some new ones), these two immensely readable books offer galleries of new pictures to further fill out the picture.
The “born-that-way” theorist
A gay Jew, Hirschfeld was on the radar of fascists before Hitler and in the Nazis’ crosshairs. Because the innovative institute he founded focused –in a highly serious, scientific way, if also with “heart”– on the “other” sexualities, with heavy concentrations on male homosexuality and transsexuality. The “purity”-seeking Nazis had no time for it, except to raid and burn it.
To date, most of the writing about Hirschfeld and his Institute has, rightly, focused on his achievements and less about Hirschfeld the person. The doctor himself acknowledged the moniker “the Einstein of sex” –insofar as it showed that both scientists studied relativity.
For Hirschfeld it was sexual relativity. Over time he posited a male-female continuum with no fixed gender points; the place an individual drops anchor, on some sexuality or other or none, is indeed their individual slot on that continuum. By the end of his career, he assigned this sexual relativity to its own place in the larger, encompassing continuum of all life on Earth. His was a cosmology that had read its Darwin.
Booth is solid on the facts but unafraid to be engaging in his tone describing the subject he really loves, which I found refreshing. His chapters and their titles stake out the territory in new ways, and Hirschfeld the man comes to the fore, winningly.
Booth walks the reader through Hirschfeld’s own coming out, a late-life interracial love (Hirschfeld saw race on a continuum too), even his presence at the world’s first gender-affirming surgery, which took place at the Institute. By the time we see the Nazis’ volcano of burning books –Hirschfeld’s– it presages his forced exile from Germany and the effective end of a vital avenue of research.
Trans stories and rights
In “The Intermediaries,” Schillace, a historian and writer of fiction as well as non-fiction, tells the story of the Institute’s famously groundbreaking work on transexualism and its public discontents. She tells that part of the story through the voice of Dora Richter, a patient at the Institute in a tireless pursuit of her true identity as a woman.
Schillace’s “Weimar Story” is initially an examination of Germany during the rise of Hitler, before Hitler, though the Cabaret culture she depicts is soon enough shorn of snappy tunes. The author’s chief accomplishment here is the tracing of connections between sex research and the nascent queer rights movement. Although it’s obviously deeply researched, the book is told with a fiction writer’s feeling for character, event, and that thing we used to call meaning.
In these two books, history comes alive with the full-blooded character of Hirschfeld and the quests not only of the scientists but of the people they championed. Both are written with the compassion of authors who feel deeply for the human yearnings and courageous actions of people for whom the work was urgent, deeply personal, and explicitly in the hope of present –and future– deepened understanding and acceptance of othersexuality.
Daniel Brook, “The Einstein of Sex: Dr.Magnus Hirschfeld Visionary of Weimar Berlin,” 300 pp., $32.99, W.W. Norton & Co., https://www.wwnorton.com
Brandy Schillace, “The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story” 325 pp., $31.99, W.W. Norton & Co., https://www.wwnorton.com
