If Brand’s tormenting of Hirschfeld and the SHC was a common thread that linked the pre- and postwar periods, Friedrich Radszuweit (1876–1932) was the figure who transcended both men—and their organizations—and truly came to emblematize the flowering of homosexual culture and rights activism in the Weimar Republic. Although a near contemporary of Brand, Radszuweit was more typical of the younger generation that came up (and out) through the 1920s. Though his family background remains murky, Radszuweit was an entrepreneur and businessman and had established a Berlin sweatshop for women’s ready-to-wear clothing along with a boutique by about 1901. Nowhere in the prewar period was his name connected with homosexual periodicals or organizations.23
Only in 1919 did Radszuweit appear on “the scene” as a fledgling “co-publisher” of Die Freundschaft and as chair of one of the Berlin Friendship Associations, the Union of Friends and Girlfriends. By 1922, many of the local Friendship Associations used the name Bund für Menschenrecht, or Human Rights League. Finally, on February 7, 1923, the executive board of the national German Friendship Association, whose governing members included Hans Kahnert (founder of the original Berlin Friendship Association) as well as Radszuweit, adopted the title Human Rights League (HRL). The decision was ratified by the delegates to the annual national convention in Leipzig a month later. With the official name change, the convention affirmed its commitment to the struggle for legal reform, within the framework of the Action Committee, envisioning a division of labor that would leave “artistic propaganda” to the CoS and political lobbying to the SHC. Radszuweit was elected chairman of the national HRL, and his new journal, Blätter für Menschenrecht (Paper for human rights), became the official national organ.24
This was an important achievement for Radszuweit, and as chairman of the national HRL and publisher of its official journal, he was now positioned to build and consolidate a veritable empire. In this role he integrated his growing publishing concern with rights activism—based on club membership—coupled with the sponsorship of social and cultural events. As soon as Radszuweit attained leadership of the HRL, he worked to distinguish the organization, describing the old Friendship Associations and Die Freundschaft as little more than purveyors of “dance-hall culture.” If Hirschfeld had leveraged sexology for the cause of homosexual rights and created a seamless continuum from science to activism, Radszuweit now created a near identity between the Weimar “movement” and profit. For Radszuweit, the pursuit of “human rights” went hand in glove with commercial enterprise.25
Within Berlin, the HRL sponsored no fewer than five distinct organizations—several of which had been established as Friendship Associations—including the Christian society, a club or “lodge” modeled on the rituals of Freemasonry, the Theater of Eros, a small business association of tavern and shop owners, and a Damengruppe, or women’s club. The phenomenal growth of the HRL helped to create a reliable national market: according to the statistics published in Blätter, there were nationally some 100,000 members organized in more than fifty local clubs by the end of 1924; this number dropped precipitously, but then climbed again to 65,000 by 1927.26 In the absence of internal HRL records, the accuracy of these figures is impossible to determine. But certainly the ranks of the HRL exceeded almost exponentially those of the SHC or the CoS.
Radszuweit’s entrepreneurial savvy was clear from the outset, and his business depended on his publishing interests. He urged members to ignore other periodicals and subscribe exclusively to Blätter, whose appeal and circulation he worked assiduously to increase.27 Appearing fortnightly, the journal published fiction, poetry, and historical profiles of famous homosexuals. It also included an entertainment page with puzzles and word games. The journal quickly developed regular features and sections, including “Auf sapphistischen Pfaden” (On Sapphic paths) for lesbians and periodic reports on science and sexology. In 1924 Radszuweit added a literary supplement, “Die Insel der Einsamen” (Island of the lonely), which he eventually spun off as an independent magazine. That same year Radszuweit began publishing Die Freundin (The girlfriend), which targeted both lesbians and transvestites. The journal was surprisingly successful, publishing nude or semi-nude photography, romance stories, poetry, and personal ads (unlike Blätter), which were considered less vulnerable to censorship when “soliciting” lesbian as opposed to male homosexual or heterosexual contacts. Published monthly at first, Die Freundin began to appear weekly by 1927, and like Blätter it survived until March 1933. Radszuweit introduced yet another title, Das Freundschaftsblatt, in 1925, with which he hoped to compete directly with Die Freundschaft. The new journal was glossier than Blätter with lighter fare and higher production values. It appeared monthly and likewise survived until March 1933.
Radszuweit’s publications were widely circulated and therefore enormously lucrative. Purveyed from public newsstands and kiosks—alongside the titles with which he competed—they were highly visible and easily available. Even Franz Biberkopf, the hapless protagonist in Alfred Döblin’s expressionist 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz, peddled lesbian and homosexual journals while unemployed.28 Radszuweit reported selling more than fifty thousand copies of single issues of Blätter and Freundschaftsblatt, though circulation figures are impossible to determine with any certainty. Of course, Radszuweit’s newsstand profits were augmented greatly by advertising revenue. Beginning with the first issue of Die Freundschaft in 1919, the homosexual press was supported by dozens of bars, clubs, and dance venues, which placed copious advertisements in every issue. Soon small businesses and professionals announced their services as well, including doctors, dentists, lawyers, private detectives, stationers, haberdashers, barbers, and interior designers.
Like any conquering imperialist, Radszuweit left victims in his wake. Initially a casualty himself, Radszuweit was forced from the editorial board of Die Freundschaft in 1922. He outmaneuvered his rivals, however, with the renaming—and effective rebranding—of the Friendship Association as the Human Rights League; this represented a veritable coup and gave him his greatest opportunity. Winning the chairmanship of the national HRL allowed him to establish Blätter für Menschenrecht as the official organ, displacing Die Freundschaft, which had served as the unofficial journal of the old Friendship Associations. One of the losers in this shake-up was Max Danielsen (1885–after 1928), a governing director of the SHC, who coedited Die Freundschaft and also held a position on the board of the old German Friendship Association. Once Radszuweit gained control, Danielsen was forced to move on. In 1924 he attempted to reestablish the German Friendship Association and its local affiliates—together with others who resented Radszuweit’s growing imperium—as a counterweight to the HRL. The effort failed, and Danielsen founded a new homosexual journal, Die Fanfare, with his colleague Curt Neuburger. This title survived only two years, and in 1928 Danielsen founded Neue Freundschaft, which was promptly censored and banned, due to a denunciation made by Radszuweit.29
In a not dissimilar fashion, Radszuweit effectively “colonized” Berlin’s homosexual theater. Begun as an informal reading group in 1919, the Theater of Eros first rehearsed in a workroom at Hirschfeld’s institute. This was a short-lived solution, and the fledgling troupe was forced to move periodically thereafter. Not until July 1921 was the company finally able to produce its first play, a stage adaption of the “Uranian” novel Die Infamen (The infamous), published by Fritz Geron Pernauhm in 1906. Performances in the Stadttheater in the north Berlin working-class district of Moabit were consistently sold out and became notorious for the passionate kissing of the two male protagonists. The journal Die Freundschaft provided both publicity and positive reviews.
In 1923 difficult finances forced the Theater of Eros to seek additional support. By this point the troupe had already produced seventeen different homosexual-themed stage plays in at least seven venues. By folding the company into the HRL, Radszuweit rescued the troupe and also provided the publicity and support of his burgeoning media empire. After he attem
pted to exercise artistic control, however, the actors broke away and struck out on their own. While Radszuweit appropriated the name and founded his own Theater of Eros, the original organization was too impecunious to continue its work.30
Radszuweit also managed to monopolize the legal reform advocacy of the Action Committee. Although the CoS under Brand’s direction had exited the “coalition” voluntarily in 1923, the SHC bristled at Radszuweit’s domination and felt compelled to leave in 1925, marking the end of any collaborative work among the three organizations. Radszuweit followed the tactics of the SHC in his campaign for legal reform, appealing to elected officials and working to inform the public.
Radszuweit disliked the sexual “ideologies” of both Brand and Hirschfeld, and elaborated an ideological position in the “homosexuality debate” that positioned the HRL somewhere between the two. Like Hirschfeld, the HRL stressed the innate biological nature of homosexuality, as well as its manifestation across time and space, and among all social classes, representing the entire political spectrum from left to right. But by depicting homosexuals as law abiding, and fundamentally middle class, this seemingly ecumenical inclusion ultimately excluded a great many. Radszuweit rejected all stereotypes that depicted homosexuals as disruptive, subcultural, criminal, or effeminate. Prostitutes and their johns, as well as cross-dressers and effeminates, had no place in Radszuweit’s vision of homosexual bourgeois respectability. In this connection, Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediacy was the subject of particular censure.31
But Radszuweit directed his most vehement criticism at Brand and the CoS. Articles published in Blätter attacked claims that age-differentiated same-sex relationships were ever appropriate. The notion of “pederasty,” as Brand theorized, was based on a naive understanding of adult male sexuality and invited the sexual and emotional abuse of boys and adolescents. Radszuweit was particularly opposed to the claim that human beings shared a fundamental bisexuality, which undermined not only the experience and identity of most homosexuals but also the moral and pragmatic arguments for legal reform. Fundamentally, he thought, homosexual desire was an innate condition that posed no moral or social threat to German society. At the same time, the demand for homosexual emancipation required an explicit commitment to the protection of underage males (and females).32
What is revealed in Radszuweit’s condemnation of Brand—and his less aggressive criticisms of Hirschfeld—is a belief that homosexuality needed to be presented in the most acceptable light, tamed or domesticated, to find acceptance among a heterosexual majority. This did not signal retreat from the struggle against slander or discrimination. But it did reflect Radszuweit’s regard for bourgeois respectability, an attitude conditioned, no doubt, by his own background as a businessman. This is illustrated well by one of the more memorable campaigns of the HRL, namely the public protest of a theater production in the Berlin Komische Oper in July 1927. The theater piece, Streng Verboten (Strictly forbidden), included a scene set in the HRL clubhouse Klub der Freunde, which caricatured gay men as swishy and effeminate. In response, a group of HRL members attended and disrupted the performance with jeering. The slander of depicting middle-class homosexuals as less than masculine merited a forceful response, in Radszuweit’s estimation, even if it created a public disruption. The protest was savvy indeed. The “Demonstration of Homosexuals” received positive reports in Berlin’s liberal press, and the offensive depictions of homosexual men were removed from subsequent performances.33
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While the three organizations—Hirschfeld’s SHC, Brand’s CoS, and Radszuweit’s HRL—remained mutually hostile after 1925, issuing insult and accusation, each continued to pursue legal reform. The HRL remained the most active, compiling petitions and appealing to the Ministry of Justice. At one point Radszuweit even appears to have considered running for federal office. In the pages of Freundschaftsblatt in 1926 Radszuweit proposed a Berlin-based “pan-homosexual” rights party, intended to include nationalists, libertarians, socialists, and communists, as well as lesbians and transvestites. The project was never realized—no parliamentary candidates were fielded—but it suggested the possibility of creating a cohesive movement among these widely divergent political factions based on the common interest of political reform.34
What Radszuweit understood better—or at least considered more astutely—than the others was the tremendous political diversity of the larger homosexual community. In 1926 he conducted an opinion poll among 50,000 members of the national HRL: the results of his analysis, based on some 38,000 responses, were published in January 1927. More than 31,000 respondents claimed to have some formal political affiliation. Among these, 16,000 belonged to the Socialist and Communist Parties. Roughly 3,000 belonged to the Catholic Center Party, and the rest—some 12,000—were members of the völkisch right wing (meaning both ultranationalist and anti-Semitic); the parties represented in this category included the German Nationalist Party, the German People’s Party, and the Nazi Party. What this somewhat sobering statistic indicated was that fully 30 percent of the respondents with party affiliations were extreme-right nationalists.35 Although Radszuweit joined and remained a member of the SPD—never expressing the kind of anti-Semitic rhetoric that Brand periodically discharged—he was also pragmatic enough to build a mass organization that attracted members representing proportionately the entire political spectrum.36
This strikingly large minority of self-identified right-wing homosexuals reveals how the First World War helped to catalyze strains of masculinist ideology. Some of the demoralized German troops that formed the Freikorps after returning from the front at the end of 1918 also joined the Friendship Associations and then the HRL, able finally to explore the homosocial friendship and same-sex eroticism they had discovered in the trenches. While the new liberal climate of the Weimar Republic permitted a more open homosexual culture, the psychological and sociological speculations of Benedict Friedlaender, Adolf Brand, and especially Hans Blüher helped these men to make sense of their feelings.
The tragic irony was that so many self-aware homosexuals were affiliated with political groups that fundamentally rejected them and their cause. The official party responses elicited by Adolf Brand in 1928 on the question of legal reform are especially revealing. The German Communist Party was the most steadfast in its support of legal reform, due largely to the fact that the Russian communists had eliminated all anti-homosexual laws and refused to reintroduce them into the first Soviet legal codes. In 1928, KPD leaders responded to Brand as follows: “The Communist Party has taken every appropriate opportunity to stand up for the abolition of Paragraph 175. We remind you only of the most recent discussion on the laws to prevent venereal disease, as well as the committee discussion concerning the reform of criminal law. It goes without saying that we will continue to lead the fiercest battle for the elimination of this paragraph in the future.”37
This support, however, was often ambivalent. On the one hand, Paragraph 175 represented the suppression of sexual freedom, based on religious teachings. At the same time, orthodox Marxism had always viewed homosexuality as a symptom of bourgeois decadence. In the end, the KPD consistently supported the repeal of Paragraph 175, but rarely discussed the issue of homosexuality. For example, in 1924 party representatives in the Reichstag proposed the decriminalization of homosexual practices for individuals over the age of fourteen. The Reichstag was dissolved soon after this, however, and the proposal never came to a vote; the KPD never raised the issue again.38
The bourgeois, left-liberal German Democratic Party also supported the repeal of Paragraph 175 in order to protect individual rights. In response to Brand’s solicitation, party leaders wrote, “As can be expected, we are in agreement with the repeal of 175. Even though no decision on this issue has been submitted because our faction in the Reichstag has not yet had the opportunity to take up this question, it is correct to presume that our party representatives will be sufficiently aware to know that it is wron
g to suppress a small minority with legal punishments as long as they are not engaging in dangerous behavior.”39
The National Socialists returned the longest response to Brand’s query. They opposed any changes to Paragraph 175, since homosexuality, they argued, diminished the virility of German culture and led to national emasculation. Assuming that any man would indulge homosexual impulses, the Nazis supported the law to enforce the nationalist responsibility to procreate.
Suprema lex salus populi! Public good before self interest! It is not necessary that you and I live, but it is necessary that the German people endure. And the Volk can only do so if it is willing to fight. Thus living means fighting. And it can only fight if it includes people capable of marriage. It can only support these people if it practices discipline, and above all sexual discipline. Free love and licentiousness are obscene. For that reason, we reject this [legal reform], as we reject everything damaging to our people.40
The rhetoric of Aryan pro-natalism became the consistent touchstone of Nazi sexual ideology. And it motivated the introduction of a more draconian anti-sodomy law in 1935 after the National Socialists came to power. Yet the many homosexual men who embraced the Nazi cause misapprehended the centrality of Nazi racialist doctrine and how homosexuality appeared to threaten it. Viewing Nazis as the literal embodiment of the homoerotic Männerbund, many were blinded by the homoeroticism of the masculinist ideologues.
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