The experiences in therapy of one of Hirschfeld’s young patients allow us to consider more closely the application of adaptation theory. As a teenager, Hanns G. lived at the institute for a month in the summer of 1930. The son of a medical doctor who was familiar with Hirschfeld’s research, Hanns G. was sent to Berlin for treatment for his manifest homosexuality. As Hanns G. recounted years later, Hirschfeld explained his approach as an attempt to “steel” the youth against all that might threaten him and give him an “awareness of life” to prevent “thoughts of suicide,” one of the greatest dangers to young homosexuals. Hanns G. claimed that the putative objective was a “cure.” But Hirschfeld’s adaptation therapy aimed instead to help the youth accept his sexual orientation and learn how to live with it.
For an entire month, Hanns G. boarded at the institute, where he had formal therapy sessions with Hirschfeld as often as four times a week. An initial orientation consisted of a full sexual history and the careful completion of Hirschfeld’s lengthy questionnaire. But adaptation therapy also involved participation in the institute’s daily rhythms. Hanns G. met other affluent patients—English men, and some Germans—and also observed the tours of the museum and the erotica collection given by Karl Giese. Afternoon teas were attended by most of the staff, resident patients, and outside friends, including flamboyant cross-dressers who appeared in full drag. Many evenings involved excursions to Berlin’s homosexual clubs and bars, where Hanns G. formed his first impressions of the city’s vibrant nightlife. A favorite locale was a small pub, Bei Elli, in Skalitzer Straße in the working-class neighborhood of Kreuzberg. Here Hanns G. met young male prostitutes and cross-dressers, as well as blue-collar homosexuals. Hanns G. also attended large costume balls held at the institute, which attracted prominent and open homosexuals.64
· · ·
The Institute for Sexual Science did not limit its services, however, to “sexual intermediaries.” In 1919 the Center of Sexual Counseling for Married Couples began welcoming scores of heterosexual women, sometimes accompanied by their husbands or partners, who had pressing questions about sexuality and, most often, about birth control. This was arguably a courageous move, since the Weimar constitution banned advertising for birth control. Although condoms, pessaries, and certain chemical douches were available with a doctor’s prescription, the cost for both a medical exam and a contraceptive device was prohibitive for working- and lower-middle-class persons. Therefore the institute sought to make information available to the working poor, whose knowledge and access was the most limited.
Hirschfeld’s involvement in feminist and women’s health care causes dated to the early twentieth century. He had joined forces with left-wing feminist Helene Stöcker in 1905, when she founded the League for the Protection of Mothers (Bund für Mutterschutz), an organization promoting a wide range of feminist causes, including suffrage and popular access to birth control. Though heterosexual, Stöcker supported homosexual emancipation and the legal reform movement of the SHC; she eventually served as the first woman on its board of directors. When Reichstag lawmakers drafted a new anti-sodomy statute in 1909 that would have additionally criminalized lesbian sexuality, Stöcker and Hirschfeld worked together to defeat the proposed legislation. Stöcker also founded the International Union for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform in 1911.65 The two activists were thus positioned to spearhead the sex reform movement of the Weimar Republic.
The demographic impact of the First World War was profound, exacerbating tensions between progressive sex reformers and the conservative nationalists who opposed their program, ostensibly for pronatalist reasons. No fewer than 2 million German soldiers had been killed in action, and the new Weimar Republic shed an additional 6.5 million German nationals through the territorial losses dictated by the Versailles Treaty. There were nearly 1 million additional civilian deaths caused by the so-called “hunger blockade” in the last year of the war and the Spanish influenza that swept the world in 1918. Thus Germany’s population declined by more than 9 million. A marked “marriage boom” followed the war, but birthrates continued to decline, a trend established around 1900. In 1924 the city of Berlin was reputed to have the lowest birthrate in the entire world.
Despite the pronatalist emphasis of political and religious conservatives, however, Weimar sex reformers were clearly in the ascendancy. For one, the Social Democratic government of the Weimar Republic, which ushered in women’s suffrage, was broadly supportive of most feminist causes. Women also enjoyed the backing of the newly formed Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany), or KPD, which modeled its own policy objectives on those adopted by the Soviet Union. The Russian influence was not insignificant: progressives everywhere, and not just communists, admired the Soviet introduction of no-fault divorce, decriminalization of abortion, easy access to birth control, and elimination of anti-sodomy laws. With the vote, women in Germany not only gained electoral leverage but also participated in the political process by joining special interest groups and even running for public office. Women also entered the professions in ever-greater numbers, especially medicine and education.
Progressive sex reformers such as Hirschfeld and Stöcker hoped to distinguish sexual expression from procreation and allow women (and men) greater erotic fulfillment. It was their objective, as well, that the same right of sexual expression might be established for homosexual men and lesbians. Broadly understood, the philosophical program of the progressive reform movement was “sex positive,” and its ambitious goal was to enhance human relationships and improve the quality of life for a new generation. These aims were generally supported, moreover, by Weimar’s popular culture as well as the left-wing political leaders of the new republic.
In 1926 the institute began sponsoring public meetings every Monday evening to answer general questions about human sexuality. A box was placed outside the main villa, accessible to passersby, where anyone could deposit an anonymous question, which institute staff members would answer at the weekly meetings. The lion’s share of these questions concerned birth control. “What are the disadvantages for a man who more or less regularly uses coitus interruptus as a method of birth control?” one participant queried. “The practice is widely used in our province of Schleswig Holstein and is also well-known within my family.” Another asked, “Is it safe for a diabetic to carry a pregnancy to term—who decides?” The crucial role of anonymity is clear from many of the questions: “A girl, 26, has been having sex for about two years with a boy who is 25. For protection they use condoms. Since about six months ago the girl no longer experiences satisfaction during sexual intercourse, despite a good relationship with her friend.”66 We do not know with certainty what the responses were to these questions. But they help to illustrate the significant demand for expert information on family planning and birth control. According to Hirschfeld, more than fourteen thousand questions had been submitted by the early 1930s, and overwhelmingly they concerned contraception. With the liberalization of the law banning advertisements for contraception in 1927, public health campaigns for birth control were no longer threatened by legal sanction. The following year the institute published a short pamphlet on methods of contraception, of which some 100,000 copies were distributed by 1932.67
Like Stöcker, Hirschfeld hoped to harness the reputation of his own and other German sex reform campaigns to organize and direct an international program. In 1921 he convened in Berlin the first International Congress on Sexual Science, with more than three thousand participants, some of whom traveled from as far away as Tokyo, Peking, Moscow, and San Francisco. A second conference was held in 1928 in Copenhagen, where the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR) was formally organized. A third conference met in London in 1929, a fourth in Vienna in 1930, and a fifth in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1932.68 Subsequent meetings planned for Paris, Moscow, and the United States were canceled. The ultimate demise of the WLSR was attributed to Hirschfeld’s death in 1935 in Nice. As Atina Grossmann
has claimed, the institute, which also housed the WLSR offices, was the “world headquarters of the sex reform movement.”69
Hirschfeld’s leadership of the WLSR was part of a broad strategy for effecting the elimination of the anti-sodomy law. For Hirschfeld homosexuals would gain emancipation by following two paths simultaneously: the support of progressive science on human sexuality and the integration of the homosexual political activism with other sex reform movements. We can see how Hirschfeld pursued the latter objective early on by joining forces with Helene Stöcker before the First World War. He promoted the integration of homosexual rights activism and sex reform after 1918 through the activities of the institute. The first of these attempts was not the 1921 Berlin Congress of Sexual Science but rather the formation of a so-called Aktionskomitee, or action committee, which sought to bring together the three existing homosexual rights organizations (his own SHC, Adolf Brand’s Community of the Special, and a new organization that later adopted the title of League for Human Rights, Bund für Menschenrecht) to fight more effectively for the abolition of Paragraph 175.
An additional initiative came with the formation in 1925 of the Cartel for the Reform of the Sexual Penal Code (Kartell für Reform des Sexualstrafrechts)—a coalition, much respected in legal circles, of organizations calling for changes in German sex crimes legislation and, more generally, in all legal regulations of sexual life. The coalition’s participation in this campaign rested on Hirschfeld’s basic insight that isolated opposition to the anti-sodomy state was doomed to remain ineffective. The search for coalition partners was sparked by the publication of the official draft of a new German penal code in 1925.70
At the beginning of 1925 the coalition presented a counter-draft that contained, for the first time, the entire spectrum of proposed reforms (as far as they were relevant to criminal law), which were also formulated within the league. It is no exaggeration to call the coalition a national antecedent to the WLSR, a successful trial run for the combination of demands of the most diverse origins. It seemed logical to attempt this beyond the merely national level. On the one hand, propaganda about the developments in marriage and crime legislation in the Soviet Union was already ubiquitous among leftists in Germany and elsewhere. At the same time, efforts were under way in many western European countries to establish birth control as a fundamental right.
Hirschfeld’s effort to link homosexual emancipation with the broader national and international sex reform movements—though arguably a failure—illustrates the salient feature of his life’s work and career. Many commentators, admirers, and detractors alike have insisted on distinguishing Hirschfeld’s “science,” which some deemed quackery, from his political activism. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, who most certainly counted among Hirschfeld’s admirers, expressed this truism about Hirschfeld in his memoir. According to Levy-Lenz, “Kraft-Ebing [sic] was the father of modern sexual science—M. H. [Magnus Hirschfeld] its obstetrician. It was he who put life and breath into the science of sex of which so little was generally known, and which had hitherto been vegetating in obscurity and he did this by enabling the whole of suffering humanity to share in its achievements.”71
An encomium indeed, Levy-Lenz’s description reduces Hirschfeld to a practitioner, an activist, and perhaps an apostle, though certainly not an effective scientist or theorist—appellations reserved, apparently, for Krafft-Ebing, and perhaps others.
But this assessment fails to recognize Hirschfeld’s true genius of combining almost seamlessly his science and activism. Perhaps the motto of the SHC—“Per scientiam ad justiciam,” “Through science to justice”—best captures the essence of Hirschfeld’s philosophy. Moreover, the work of the Institute for Sexual Science emblematized his impulse to combine theory and practice: the practical effort to ameliorate the lot of sexual intermediaries while developing the first science of transsexuality, and the promotion of sexual freedom supported by the study of human sexuality. We discern this, too, in what might be described as Hirschfeld’s “strategic essentialism,” namely his commitment to biological determinism as an explanation for homosexuality. His basic conviction—that same-sex desire is an immutable characteristic—was expressed in his first pseudonymous publication on the topic, Sappho und Sokrates, published in 1896, and it melded science and politics throughout his career.
• CHAPTER SEVEN •
Sex Tourism and Male Prostitution in Weimar Berlin
In Berlin, everyone speaks to everyone else, even if not out loud. But everyone knows everything about everyone else at a glance. Rich and poor, professors and students, intellectuals and bartenders all share a common vulgarity. It all comes down to sex. It is a city with no virgins. Not even the kittens and puppies are virgins.
—STEPHEN SPENDER, The Temple: A Novel (1988)
How shallow my sophistication may be judged from my surprise, my positive disbelief, when a junior colleague who knew of my inclinations told me that there were places in Germany where boys offered their services for a modest sum. Male tarts? Were there really such things? Was it conceivable?
—T. C. WORSLEY, Flannelled Fool: A Slice of a Life in the Thirties (1967)
Berlin meant boys,” Christopher Isherwood famously claimed in his autobiographical Christopher and His Kind. “Wasn’t Berlin’s famous ‘decadence’ largely a commercial ‘line,’ ” Isherwood asked, “which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight-girl market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?” Isherwood’s somewhat cynical assessment belied a strong attachment, however, to the open homosexual culture of the German capital, at least as it thrived before the Nazi seizure of power. Invited by poet W. H. Auden, a sometime lover and lifelong friend, Isherwood arrived in Berlin in May 1929, and he lived there episodically until late spring 1933.1
Like Auden, Isherwood had many Berlin liaisons, which he pursued in public venues, undisturbed by the local police, or in his favorite locales such as the Kleist Diele or the Cosy Corner, both notorious for their boy prostitution. Berlin’s vibrant nightclub culture and cabarets, male prostitution, and indifferent officialdom were some of the elements of the homosexual scene that attracted Isherwood. With his writings, Isherwood made himself not only the foremost English-language chronicler of Weimar Berlin—particularly of the final years before the Nazi seizure of power—but also the city’s most famous sex tourist. Isherwood, Auden, and those who made up their circle of English poets, authors, and artists were far from alone. No later than 1920, the open sexual culture of Berlin had been well established, attracting Americans, western Europeans, Scandinavians, and Russians. Not all were “sex tourists” in the narrow sense of the term. Many simply observed and recorded the city’s seedier elements without looking for sexual contacts. Yet this voyeuristic impulse to witness and document was inspired by representations of a luridly licentious Berlin and must also be counted as sex tourism. The pervasive prostitution (both male and female), the public cross-dressing, and the easy access to bars and clubs that catered to homosexual men and lesbians were just a few of the features that supported Berlin’s sex industry. As Weimar-era cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer argued, modern travel, enabled by industrial technology, “granted access to the beyond,” and in Berlin’s case, the potential of a utopic sexual world that transcended traditional moralities.2
“Male prostitution” also requires qualification, since it subsumes much more than a straightforward commercial transaction for sexual services. Prostitution had always been a feature of almost any same-sex erotic subculture. As such, many same-sex relationships, whether fleeting or long term, involved an element of “prostitution.” It is important therefore to consider the broad spectrum of arrangements extending from material dependency to financial remuneration for specific sexual acts. The extremes along this spectrum ranged from committed loving relationships to the briefest of hookups in the Tiergarten Park. Like the prostitute who refuse
s to kiss her john—considering this an intimacy that should be shared only with a genuine lover—many of the boys and young men who sold themselves for subsistence or perhaps just pocket money experienced disgust or at best indifference when satisfying their patrons. These “prostitutes” differentiated sharply between the sexual services they provided and their personal preferences and love relationships. A large number—as many as a third, in fact—professed to be heterosexual.
Yet others enjoyed the sexual acts they engaged in for pay. For these, prostitution was a source of income when jobs were scarce or a lucrative alternative to more menial labor. Some pursued prostitution hoping to find genuine love, even forging long-term relationships with onetime johns. The men who paid for sex were no less ambivalent, hoping to find and perhaps rescue a youthful partner from the pool of hustlers. Certainly heterosexual prostitution included a similar range of “relationships.” But since same-sex erotic love remained nominally illicit, this dynamic among male prostitutes and their clients was that much more pronounced. In effect, the relationship between a street hustler and his john was no more illicit than that of a committed homosexual couple. Indeed, since male prostitution was never specifically criminalized and certain erotic same-sex acts were “illegal,” the lines dividing prostitution, opportunistic sex, companionship, and love would remain ambiguous and shifting.
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