Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

thumb|Members of the [[German Student Union, organized by the Nazi Party, parade in front of the institute ().]]

The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft () was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute for Sexual Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology, or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was the first sexology research center in the world.

The Institute was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld, who since 1897 had run the world's first homosexual organization Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee), which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance at the start of the first homosexual movement that would flourish in interwar Weimar culture. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld built a unique library at the institute on gender, same-sex love and eroticism.

The institute's founding purpose was to create "scientific research on the entirety of sexual life" and educate German society on its findings. It pioneered research and treatment for various matters regarding gender and sexuality, including gay, transgender, and intersex topics. In addition, it offered various other services to the general public: this included treatment for alcoholism, gynecological examinations, marital and sex counseling, treatment for venereal diseases, and access to contraceptive treatment. It offered education on many of these matters to both health professionals and laypersons.

After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.

Origins and purpose

thumb|Vita homosexualis, a 1902 collection of August Fleischmann's popular pamphlets on [[third gender and against Paragraph 175, confiscated by Nazis on 6 May 1933]]

The Institute of Sex Research was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld and his collaborators Arthur Kronfeld, a once famous psychotherapist and later professor at the Charité, and Friedrich Wertheim, a dermatologist. Hirschfeld gave a speech on 1 July 1919, when the institute was inaugurated. The building, located in the Tiergarten district, was purchased by Hirschfeld from the government of the Free State of Prussia following World War I. A neighboring building was purchased in 1921, adding more overall space to the institute.

As well as being a research library and housing a large archive, the institute also included medical, psychological, and ethnological divisions, and a marriage and sex counseling office. Other fixtures at the institute included a museum for sexual artifacts, medical exam rooms, and a lecture hall. Poorer visitors also received medical treatment for free. According to Hirschfeld, about 1,250 lectures had been held in the first year.

In addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women's emancipation. Inscribed on the building was the phrase per scientiam ad justitiam (translated as "through science to justice"). This was also the personal motto of Hirschfeld as well as the slogan of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.

Organization

The institute was financed by the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Foundation, a charity which itself was funded by private donations.

Friedrich Hauptstein – administrative director
Kurt Hiller – lawyer
Max Hodann – sex educator
– anthropologist
Hans Kreiselmaier – gynecologist
Arthur Kronfeld – psychiatrist, psychologist

Ewald Lausch – medical assistant
Ludwig Levy-Lenz – gynecologist
Eugen Littaur – otolaryngologist
Franz Prange – endocrinologist
– ethnologist
Adelheid Rennhack – housekeeper
Arthur Röser – librarian
Bernard Schapiro – dermatologist, andrologist
Arthur Weil – neuroendocrinologist, neuropathologist
Friedrich Wertheim – dermatologist

Some others worked for the institute in various domestic affairs. Some of the people who worked at the institute simultaneously lived there, including Hirschfeld and Giese. During his address there, he stated that "A sexual impulse based on science is the only sound system of ethics."

One particular fixture at the institute which aided its popularity was its museum of sexual subjects. This was built with both education and entertainment in mind. There were ethnographic displays about different sexual norms across different cultures internationally. It included exhibits about sexual fetishism and sadomasochism. A collection of phallic artifacts from around the world was also exhibited. Additionally, there were presentations regarding the diversity of human sexual orientation, particularly with regards to homosexuality. Upon visiting the institute, Dora Russell reflected that it was "where the results of researches into various sex problems and perversions could be seen in records and photographs."

The neighboring property purchased in 1922 by the institute had an opening ceremony on 5 March 1922, after which it became a place for the institute's staff to interact with the public in an educational capacity. Lectures and question-and-answer sessions were held there to inform laypersons on topics of sexuality. The public especially tended to ask questions regarding contraception.

Sexual and reproductive health

One focus of the institute's research and services was sexual and reproductive health. A subdivision of the institute called the Eugenics Department for Mother and Child offered marital counseling services, and the Center of Sexual Counseling for Married Couples provided access to contraception. It was especially a goal of the institute to make contraceptive services accessible to the poor and working-class of Germany. This was despite a prohibition on advertising birth control in the Weimar Republic's constitution. Following looser regulation on advertising contraceptive methods, the institute published an educational pamphlet on the matter in 1928 which ultimately reached a distribution of about 100,000 copies by 1932. Hirschfeld and Hodann developed pioneering strategies for sex counseling services that would inspire later practices.

Transsexuality and transvestism

thumb|right|upright|Herbert W. (left) was a transgender friend of Magnus Hirschfeld, and lived for two years in Berlin under his chosen name. This photo is from Hirschfeld's Sexual Intermediates (1922).

Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transsexual in the 1923 essay Die Intersexuelle Konstitution. Other descriptions "in the modern medical sense" also appeared in earlier German medical literature, such as Johann Baptist Friedreich's 1829–1830 work. Various endocrinologic and surgical services were offered, including an early modern sex reassignment surgery in 1931. Testosterone had never been synthesized until 1935 (after the institute closed), so masculinizing hormone therapy was never available at the institute.

Ludwig Levy-Lenz, the institute's primary surgeon for transsexual patients, also implemented an early form of facial feminization surgery and facial masculinization surgery. Additionally, hair removal treatments using the institute's X-ray facility were developed, though this caused some side effects such as skin burns. Professor of history Robert M. Beachy stated that, "Although experimental and, ultimately, dangerous, these sex-reassignment procedures were developed largely in response to the ardent requests of patients." Levy-Lenz commented, "[N]ever have I operated upon more grateful patients."

Hirschfeld worked with Berlin's police department to curtail the arrest of cross-dressers and transgender people, through the creation of transvestite passes. These were issued on behalf of the institute to those who had a personal desire to wear clothing associated with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth. Different from the Others, a film co-written by Hirschfeld that advocated greater tolerance for homosexuals, was screened at the institute in 1920 to audiences of statesmen. It also received a screening at the institute before a Soviet delegation in 1923, who responded with "amazement" that the film had been considered scandalous enough to censor. once tested whether or not transplanting the testicles from a heterosexual man to a homosexual man would cure homosexuality. This method of "curing" homosexuality more often than not grew necrotized and resulted in the testicles having to be castrated. The practice was abandoned by 1924. Hirschfeld, who initially supported some of these experiments, questioned whether such practices were medically ethical, and was concerned with the potential they could have for reducing the diversity of natural human phenomena. The experiments were in fact intended to demonstrate the biological basis of homosexuality in the influence of sex hormones. However, he sometimes also advocated strategic sex assignment at birth, on a scientific basis. As a consequence, many fled Germany (including, for instance, Erika Mann). In March 1933 Kurt Hiller, a lawyer affiliated with the institute, was sent to a concentration camp, where he was tortured, though he later fled Germany and survived the war.</blockquote>

On 6 May 1933, while Hirschfeld was in Ascona, Switzerland, the made an organised attack on the Institute of Sex Research. Another estimate says that about 25,000 books were destroyed.

thumb|Burnt remains of a book-burning target, ([[Marquis de Sade and his times). Part of the Jean-Nickolaus Tretter Collection.]]

This included artistic works, rare medical and anthropological documents, and charts concerning cases of intersexuality which were prepared for the International Medical Congress, among other things. A collection of works about sexuality, in any one place, similar to the one stored at the institute was not compiled until the founding of the Kinsey Institute in 1947. According to the Munich Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism, "100 book burnings were recorded in seventy cities" between March and October 1933. The events were widely noted abroad. Many commentators referenced German writer Heinrich Heine's prediction a century earlier that "where one burns books, one will soon burn people." In Nazi leadership, there were some doubts about the symbolism of burning books, which had caused accusations that Nazi Germany had descended into "cultural barbarism".

right|upright|thumb|Memorial to [[Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute for Sex Research, Berlin Tiergarten, 2005]]

On 28 June 1934, Hitler conducted a purge of gay men in the ranks of the SA wing of the Nazis, which involved murdering them in the Night of the Long Knives. This was then followed by stricter laws on homosexuality and the round-up of gay men. The address lists seized from the Institute are believed to have aided Hitler in these actions. Many tens of thousands of arrestees found themselves, ultimately, in slave-labour or death camps. That included some of the institute's staff, such as August Bessunger. Karl Giese committed suicide in 1938 when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia; his heir, lawyer Karl Fein, was murdered in 1942 during deportation. Arthur Kronfeld and Felix Abraham also committed suicide. However, the institute's buildings were a bombed-out ruin by 1944, and were demolished sometime in the mid-1950s. Hirschfeld tried to reestablish his institute in Paris as the Institut Français des Sciences Sexologiques, but dissolved it in 1934 after it failed to gain traction. He moved to Nice, and died in France in 1935. He was buried at the Cimetière orthodoxe de Caucade.

Li Shiu Tong lived in Switzerland and the United States until 1956, but as far as is known, he did not attempt to continue Hirschfeld's work. Some remaining materials from the institute's library were later collected by W. Dorr Legg and ONE, Inc. in the United States in the 1950s.

On the ground of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was built the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. A bar with the name Magnus Hirschfeld Bar and a garden is named Lili Elbe garden.

Later developments

In 1973, a new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was opened at the University of Frankfurt am Main (director: Volkmar Sigusch), and 1996 at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

References

Notes

Bibliography

External links

"Institute for Sexual Science (1919–1933)" Online exhibition of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society – warning, complex JavaScript and pop-up windows.
Documentation in the Archive for Sexology, Berlin
When Books Burn – University of Arizona multimedia exhibit.