Magnus Hirschfeld

Magnus Hirschfeld (14 May 1868 – 14 May 1935) was a German physician, sexologist, and LGBTQ advocate whose German citizenship was revoked in 1933 by the Nazi government.

Hirschfeld was educated in philosophy, philology, and medicine. An outspoken advocate for sexual minorities, he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and the World League for Sexual Reform. During the 1920s he based his practice in Berlin-Charlottenburg. His Committee carried out "the first advocacy for homosexual and transgender rights".

Hirschfeld is regarded as one of the most influential 20th-century sexologists. He was targeted by early fascists, and later by the Nazis, for being Jewish and gay. He was beaten by activists in 1920, and in 1933 his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was looted and its books burned by Nazis. He was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.

Early life

Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in Pomerania (since 1945 in Poland), to an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the son of highly regarded physician and Senior Medical Officer Hermann Hirschfeld. As a youth he attended , which at the time was a Protestant school. In 1887–1888, he studied comparative linguistics in Breslau, but decided to transfer to University of Strasbourg (then named the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität) to study medicine and natural sciences in 1889. He left the University of Strasbourg for the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin in 1890, where he continued his studies for a year before transferring to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1891. Hirschfeld left Munich later that same year to complete his state mandated military service in Heidelberg, continuing his medical studies at Heidelberg University in his spare time.

In 1896, he moved his practice to Berlin-Charlottenburg to pursue this passion and soon published his first work on the subject of homosexuality under the pseudonym Th. Ramien entitled, Sappho und Socrates: Wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Sappho and Socrates: How does one explain the love of men and women to persons of their own gender?). In addition to his book on homosexuality, Hirschfeld wrote a book on transvestism in 1910 known as Die Transvestiten: Eine Untersuchung über den Erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress).

In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr (1850–1905), the lawyer Eduard Oberg (1858–1917), and the writer Franz Joseph von Bülow (1861–1915). The group aimed to undertake research to defend the rights of homosexuals and to repeal Paragraph 175, the section of the German penal code that, since 1871, had criminalized homosexuality. They argued that the law encouraged blackmail. The motto of the committee, "Justice through science", reflected Hirschfeld's belief that a better scientific understanding of homosexuality would eliminate social hostility toward homosexuals.

Within the group, some of the members rejected Hirschfeld's theory of sexual intermediaries, which conceptualized all traits of sex, gender, and sexual orientation on a spectrum which ranged from masculine to feminine. Under Hirschfeld's leadership, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee gathered 6000 signatures from prominent Germans on a petition to overturn Paragraph 175. Signatories included Albert Einstein, Hermann Hesse, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, August Bebel, Max Brod, Karl Kautsky, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauptmann, Martin Buber, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Eduard Bernstein, and even Emile Zola and Leo Tolstoy. The bill was brought before the in 1898, but was supported only by a minority from the Social Democratic Party of Germany. August Bebel, a friend of Hirschfeld from his university days, agreed to sponsor the attempt to repeal Paragraph 175.

Hirschfeld considered what would, in a later era, be described as "outing": forcing out of the closet some of the prominent and secretly homosexual lawmakers who had remained silent on the bill. He arranged for the bill to be reintroduced and, in the 1920s, it made some progress until the takeover of the Nazi Party ended all hope for any such reform. As part of his efforts to counter popular prejudice, Hirschfeld spoke out about the taboo subject of suicide and was the first to present statistical evidence that homosexuals were more likely to commit suicide or attempt suicide than heterosexuals. Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide. Collating his results, Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point. He used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for homosexuals.

A figure frequently mentioned by Hirschfeld to illustrate the "hell experienced by homosexuals" was Oscar Wilde, who was a well-known author in Germany, and whose trials in 1895 had been extensively covered by the German press. Hirschfeld visited Cambridge University in 1905 to meet Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, who had changed his surname to avoid being associated with his father. Hirschfeld noted "the name Wilde" has, since his trial, sounded like "an indecent word, which causes homosexuals to blush with shame, women to avert their eyes, and normal men to be outraged". During his visit to Britain, Hirschfeld was invited to a secret ceremony in the English countryside where a "group of beautiful, young, male students" from Cambridge gathered together wearing Wilde's prison number, C33, as a way of symbolically linking his fate to theirs, to read out aloud Wilde's poem "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Hirschfeld found the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" to be "" (shaken to the core of one's being, i.e. something that is emotionally devastating), going on to write that the poem reading was "the most earth-shattering outcry that has ever been voiced by a downtrodden soul about its own torture and that of humanity". By the end of the reading of "The Ballad of Reading Gaol", Hirshfeld felt "quiet joy" as he was convinced that, despite the way that Wilde's life had been ruined, something good would eventually come of it.

Feminism

In 1905, Hirschfeld joined the ('League for the Protection of Mothers'), the feminist organization founded by Helene Stöcker. He campaigned for the decriminalisation of abortion, and against policies that banned female teachers and civil servants from marrying or having children. Both Hirschfeld and Stöcker believed that there was a close connection between the causes of gay rights and women's rights, and Stöcker was much involved in the campaign to repeal Paragraph 175 while Hirschfeld campaigned for the repeal of Paragraph 218, which had banned abortion. From 1909 to 1912, Stöcker, Hirschfeld, Hedwig Dohm, and others successfully campaigned against an extension to Paragraph 175 which would have criminalised female homosexuality.

In 1906, Hirschfeld was asked as a doctor to examine a prisoner in Neumünster to see if he was suffering from "severe nervous disturbances caused by a combination of malaria, blackwater fever, and congenital sexual anomaly". The man, a former soldier and a veteran of what Hirschfeld called the ('Herero revolt') in German South West Africa (modern Namibia) appeared to be suffering from what would now be considered post-traumatic stress disorder, saying that he had done terrible things in Southwest Africa, and could no longer live with himself. In 1904, the Herero and Nama peoples who had been steadily pushed off their land to make way for German settlers, had revolted, causing Kaiser Wilhelm II to dispatch General Lothar von Trotha to wage a "war of annihilation" to exterminate the Herero and Nama in what has since become known as the Herero and Nama genocide. The genocide came to widespread attention when the SPD leader August Bebel criticized the government on the floor of the , saying the government did not have the right to exterminate the Herero just because they were Black. Hirschfeld did not mention his diagnosis of the prisoner, nor he did mention in detail the source of the prisoner's guilt about his actions in Southwest Africa; the German scholar Heike Bauer criticized him for his seeming unwillingness to see the connection between the Herero genocide and the prisoner's guilt, which had caused him to engage in a petty crime wave.

Hirschfeld's position, that homosexuality was normal and natural, made him a highly controversial figure at the time, involving him in vigorous debates with other academics, who regarded homosexuality as unnatural and wrong. One of Hirschfeld's leading critics was Austrian Baron Christian von Ehrenfels, who advocated radical changes to society and sexuality to combat the supposed "Yellow Peril", and saw Hirschfeld's theories as a challenge to his view of sexuality. Ehrenfels argued that there were a few "biologically degenerate" homosexuals who lured otherwise "healthy boys" into their lifestyle, making homosexuality into both a choice and a wrong one at that time.

African anthropology

thumb|Poster advertising Sarah Baartman

At the same time, Hirschfeld became involved in a debate with a number of anthropologists about the supposed existence of the ('Hottentot apron'), namely the belief that the Khoekoe (known to Westerners as Hottentots) women of southern Africa had abnormally enlarged labia, which made them inclined toward lesbianism. Hirschfeld argued there was no evidence that the Khoekoe women had abnormally large labia, whose supposed existence had fascinated so many Western anthropologists at the time, and that, other than being Black, the bodies of Khoekoe women were no different from German women. One Khoekoe woman, Sarah Baartman, the "Hottentot Venus", did have relatively large buttocks and labia, compared to Northern European women, and had been exhibited at a freak show in Europe in the early 19th century, which was the origin of this belief about the Khoekhoe women. Hirschfeld wrote: "The differences appear minimal compared to what is shared" between Khoekoe and German women.

Hirschfeld argued that, if same-sex relationships were common among Khoekoe women, and if the bodies of Khoekoe women were essentially the same as Western women, then Western women must have the same tendencies. Hirschfeld's theories about a spectrum of sexuality existing in all of the world's cultures implicitly undercut the binary theories about the differences between various races that was the basis of the claim of white supremacy. However, Bauer wrote that Hirschfeld's theories about the universality of homosexuality paid little attention to cultural contexts, and criticized him for his remarks that Hausa women in Nigeria were well known for their lesbian tendencies and would have been executed for their sapphic acts before British rule, as assuming that imperialism was always good for the colonized.

Eulenburg affair

Hirschfeld played a prominent role in the Harden–Eulenburg affair of 1906–09, which became the most widely publicized sex scandal in Imperial Germany. During the libel trial in 1907, when General Kuno von Moltke sued the journalist Maximilian Harden, after the latter had run an article accusing Moltke of having a homosexual relationship with the politically powerful Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, who was the Kaiser's best friend, Hirschfeld testified for Harden. In his role as an expert witness, Hirschfeld testified that Moltke was gay and, thus, what Harden had written was true. Hirschfeld – who wanted to make homosexuality legal in Germany – believed that proving Army officers like Moltke were gay would help his case for legalization. He also testified that he believed there was nothing wrong with Moltke. Hirschfeld's testimony caused outrage all over Germany. The Vossische Zeitung newspaper condemned Hirschfeld in an editorial as "a freak who acted for freaks in the name of pseudoscience". Elbe spoke with remarkable openness for the period of her sexual desires and her frustration with a husband who was only interested in having sex with Eulenburg. Elbe's testimony was marked by moments of low comedy when it emerged that she had taken to attacking Moltke with a frying pan in vain attempts to make him have sex with her. The fact that General von Moltke was unable to defend himself from his wife's attacks was taken as proof that he was deficient in his masculinity, which many saw as confirming his homosexuality. At the time, the subject of female sexuality was taboo, and Elbe's testimony was controversial, with many saying that Elbe must be mentally ill because of her willingness to acknowledge her sexuality. Letters to the newspapers at the time, from both men and women, overwhelmingly condemned Elbe for her "disgusting" testimony concerning her sexuality. Hirschfeld testified that Moltke and Eulenburg had an "intimate" friendship that was homoerotic in nature but not sexual, as he had testified at the first trial. Various leaders, most notably the radical anti-Semitic journalist Theodor Fritsch, used the Eulenburg affair as a chance to "settle the accounts" with the Jews. As a gay Jew, Hirschfeld was relentlessly vilified by the newspapers. Outside Hirschfeld's house in Berlin, posters were affixed by activists, which read "Dr. Hirschfeld A Public Danger: The Jews are Our Undoing!". The conclusion drawn by the German government was the opposite of the one that Hirschfeld wanted; the fact that prominent men like General von Moltke and Eulenburg were gay did not lead the government to repeal Paragraph 175 as Hirschfeld had hoped and, instead, the government decided that Paragraph 175 was being enforced with insufficient vigor, leading to a crackdown on homosexuals that was unprecedented and would not be exceeded until the Nazi era. Initially pro-war, Hirschfeld started to turn against the war in 1915, moving toward a pacifist position. In his 1915 pamphlet, ('Why do other nations hate us?'), Hirschfeld answered his own question by arguing that it was the greatness of Germany that excited envy from other nations, especially Great Britain, and so had supposedly caused them to come together to destroy the . Hirschfeld accused Britain of starting the war in 1914 "out of envy at the development and size of the German Empire". was characterized by a chauvinist and ultra-nationalist tone, together with a crass Anglophobia that has often embarrassed Hirschfeld's modern admirers such as Charlotte Wolff, who called the pamphlet a "perversion of the values which Hirschfeld had always stood for".

As a Jewish homosexual, Hirschfeld was acutely aware that many Germans did not consider him to be a "proper" German, or even a German at all; so, he reasoned that taking an ultra-patriotic stance might break down prejudices by showing that German Jews or homosexuals could also be good, patriotic Germans, rallying to the cry of the Fatherland. By 1916, Hirschfeld was writing pacifist pamphlets, calling for an immediate end to the war.

At this time, Hirschfeld and the Institute for Sexual Sciences issued a number of transvestite passes to trans people in order to prevent them from being harassed by the police.

Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film (Different From the Others), in which Conrad Veidt played one of the first homosexual characters ever written for cinema. The film had a specific gay rights law reform agenda; after Veidt's character is blackmailed by a male prostitute, he eventually comes out rather than continuing to make the blackmail payments. His career is destroyed and he is driven to suicide. Hirschfeld played himself in , where the title cards have him say: "The persecution of homosexuals belongs to the same sad chapter of history in which the persecutions of witches and heretics is inscribed... Only with the French Revolution did a complete change come about. Everywhere where the was introduced, the laws against homosexuals were repealed, for they were considered a violation of the rights of the individual... In Germany, however, despite more than fifty years of scientific research, legal discrimination against homosexuals continues unabated... May justice soon prevail over injustice in this area, science conquer superstition, love achieve victory over hatred!"

In May 1919, when the film premiered in Berlin, the First World War was still a very fresh memory and German conservatives, who already hated Hirschfeld, seized upon his Francophile speech in the film praising France for legalizing homosexuality in 1792 as evidence that gay rights were "un-German". At the end of the film, when the protagonist Paul Körner commits suicide, his lover Kurt is planning on killing himself, when Hirschfeld appears to tell him: "If you want to honor the memory of your dead friend, you must not take your own life, but instead preserve it to change the prejudices whose victim – one of the countless many – this dead man was. That is the task of the living I assign you. Just as Zola struggled on behalf of a man who innocently languished in prison, what matters now is to restore honor and justice to the many thousands before us, with us, and after us. Through knowledge to justice!" The reference to Émile Zola's role in the Dreyfus affair was intended to draw a parallel between homophobia and anti-Semitism, while Hirschfeld's repeated use of the word "us" was an implied admission of his own homosexuality. The anti-suicide message of reflected Hirschfeld's interest in the subject of the high suicide rate among homosexuals, and was intended to give hope to gay audiences. The film ends with Hirschfeld opening a copy of the penal code of the and striking out Paragraph 175 with a giant X.

Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

thumb|left|Memorial plaque in [[Tiergarten (Berlin)|Berlin-Tiergarten]]

Under the more liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld purchased a villa not far from the building in Berlin for his new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft ('Institute of Sexual Research'), which opened on 6 July 1919. In Germany, the government made laws, but the governments enforced the laws, meaning it was up to the governments to enforce Paragraph 175. Until the November Revolution of 1918, Prussia had a three-class voting system that effectively disenfranchised most ordinary people, and allowed the to dominate Prussia. After the November Revolution, universal suffrage came to Prussia, which became a stronghold of the Social Democrats. The SPD believed in repealing Paragraph 175, and the Social Democratic Prussian government headed by Otto Braun ordered the Prussian police not to enforce Paragraph 175, making Prussia into a haven for homosexuals all over Germany. The Institute housed Hirschfeld's immense archives and library on sexuality and provided educational services and medical consultations; the clinical staff included psychiatrists Felix Abraham and Arthur Kronfeld, gynecologist Ludwig Levy-Lenz, dermatologist and endocrinologist Bernard Schapiro, and dermatologist Friedrich Wertheim. The institute also housed the Museum of Sex, an educational resource for the public, which is reported to have been visited by school classes. Hirschfeld himself lived at the Institution on the second floor with his partner, Karl Giese, together with his sister Recha Tobias (1857–1942).

Giese and Hirschfeld were a well-known couple in the gay scene in Berlin where Hirschfeld was popularly known as . ('aunt') was a German slang expression for a gay man but did not mean, as some claim, that Hirschfeld himself cross-dressed. People from around Europe and beyond came to the institute to gain a clearer understanding of their sexuality. Christopher Isherwood writes about his and W. H. Auden's visit in his book Christopher and His Kind; they were calling on Francis Turville-Petre, a friend of Isherwood's who was an active member of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. Other celebrated visitors included German novelist and playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, German artist Christian Schad, French writers René Crevel and André Gide, Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, and American poet Elsa Gidlow. The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft remained open, but under Papen's rule, the police began to harass people associated with it. On 30 January 1933, President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Less than four months after the Nazis took power, Hirschfeld's Institute was sacked. On the morning of 6 May, a group of university students belonging to the National Socialist German Students' League stormed the institution, shouting "" ('Burn Hirschfeld!') and began to beat up its staff and smash up the premises. In the afternoon, the SA came to the institute, carrying out a more systematic attack, removing all volumes from the library and storing them for a book-burning event which was to be held four days later. In the evening, the Berlin Police arrived at the institution and announced that it was closed forever. His citizenship was later revoked by the Nazi government. While he was there, he worked on a book that recounted his experiences and observations while he was on his world tour and it was published in 1933 as (Brugg, Switzerland: Bözberg-Verlag, 1933). It was published in an English translation in the United States under the title Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist (New York City: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935) and in England under the title Women East and West: Impressions of a Sex Expert (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1935). Hirschfeld stayed near Germany, hoping that he would be able to return to Berlin if the country's political situation improved. With the Nazi regime's unequivocal rise to power coinciding with the completion of his work on his tour book, he decided to go into exile in France. On his 65th birthday, 14 May 1933, Hirschfeld arrived in Paris, where he lived in a luxury apartment building on 24 Avenue Charles Floquet, facing the Champ de Mars. Throughout his stay in France, he continued researching, writing, campaigning and working to establish a French successor to his lost institute in Berlin.

While in France, Hirschfeld finished a book that he had been writing during his world tour, (Racism). It was published posthumously in English in 1938. Hirschfeld wrote that the purpose of the book was to explore "the racial theory which underlines the doctrine of racial war", saying that he himself was "numbered among the many thousands who have fallen victim to the practical realization of this theory." Unlike many who saw the ideology of the Nazi regime as an aberration and a retrogression from modernity, Hirschfeld insisted that it had deep roots, going back to the German Enlightenment in the 18th century, and it was a part of modernity rather than an aberration from it. He added that, in the 19th century, an ideology that divided all of humanity into biologically different races – white, black, yellow, brown, and red – as devised by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach – served as a way of turning prejudices into a "universal truth", apparently validated by science. In turn, Hirschfeld held the view that this pseudoscientific way of dividing humanity was the basis of Western thinking about modernity, with whites being praised as the "civilized" race in contrast to the other races, which were dismissed for their "barbarism"; such thinking was used to justify white supremacy. In this way, he argued that the racism of the National Socialist regime was only an extreme variant of prejudices that were held throughout the Western world, and the differences between Nazi ideology and the racism that was practiced in other nations were differences in degree rather than differences in kind. Hirschfeld argued against this way of seeing the world, writing "if it were practical, we should certainly do well to eradicate the use of the word 'race' as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned; or if we do use it in this way, to put it into quote marks to show it is questionable".

The last of Hirschfeld's books to be published during his lifetime, [The Human Spirit and Love: Sexological Psychology] (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), was published in French in late April 1935; it was his only book that was never published in a German-language edition. In the book's preface, he described his hopes for his new life in France:

<blockquote>In search of sanctuary, I have found my way to that country, the nobility of whose traditions, and whose ever-present charm, have already been as balm to my soul. I shall be glad and grateful if I can spend some few years of peace and repose in France and Paris, and still more grateful to be enabled to repay the hospitality accorded to me, by making available those abundant stores of knowledge acquired throughout my career.</blockquote>

Death

thumb|Gloria Mansions I, 63 Promenade des Anglais, Nice, in 2010, where Magnus Hirschfeld died on 14 May 1935

On his 67th birthday, 14 May 1935, Hirschfeld died of a heart attack in the garden of the apartment complex where he lived at the Gloria Mansions I building at 63 Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

thumb|Hirschfeld's grave at [[Russian Orthodox Cemetery, Nice|Caucade Cemetery in Nice with the inscription ('through science to justice')]]

On 14 May 2010, to mark the 75th anniversary of Hirschfeld's death, a French national organization, the (MDH), in partnership with the new LGBT Community Center of Nice (), organized a formal delegation to the cemetery. Speakers recalled Hirschfeld's life and work and laid a large bouquet of pink flowers on his tomb; the ribbon on the bouquet was inscribed "" ('To the pioneer of our causes. The MDH and the LGBT Center').

Legacy

According to Shtetl, Hirschfeld's "radical ideas changed the way Germans thought about sexuality." American Henry Gerber, attached to the Allied Army of Occupation following World War I, became impressed by Hirschfeld and absorbed many of the doctor's ideas. Upon his return to the United States, Gerber was inspired to form the short-lived Chicago-based Society for Human Rights in 1924, the first known gay rights organization in the nation. In turn, a partner of one of the former members of the Society communicated the existence of the society to Los Angeles resident Harry Hay in 1929; Hay would go on to help establish the Mattachine Society in 1950, the first national homosexual rights organization to operate for many years in the United States. In 1979, the National LGBT Federation established the Hirschfeld Centre, Ireland's second gay and lesbian community centre. Although badly damaged by a 1987 fire, the centre continued to house the Gay Community News magazine until 1997.

In 1982, a group of German researchers and activists founded the Magnus Hirschfeld Society in West Berlin, in anticipation of the approaching 50th anniversary of the destruction of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. Ten years later, the society established a Berlin-based center for research on the history of sexology. Since the late 20th century, researchers associated with the Magnus Hirschfeld Society have succeeded in tracking down previously dispersed and lost records and artifacts of Hirschfeld's life and work. They have brought together many of these materials at the society's archives in Berlin. At an exhibition at the in Berlin from 7 December 2011 to 31 March 2012, the society publicly displayed a selection of these collections for the first time.

thumb|[[Spree (river)|Spree promenade Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer in Berlin-Tiergarten]]

thumb|Memorial with English text at the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer

The German Society for Social-Scientific Sexuality Research established the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal in 1990. The Society awards the Medal in two categories, contributions to sexual research and contributions to sexual reform. The Hirschfeld Eddy Foundation, established in Germany in 2007, is named for Hirschfeld and lesbian activist FannyAnn Eddy. In May 2008, the promenade between Moltke Bridge and the Chancellor's Garden got renamed Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer. On this promenade, there is a Memorial plaque with a description in English. In August 2011, after 30 years of advocacy by the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and other associations and individuals, the Federal Cabinet of Germany granted 10 million euros to establish the Magnus Hirschfeld National Foundation (), a foundation to support research and education about the life and work of Magnus Hirschfeld, the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, German LGBT culture and community, and ways to counteract prejudice against LGBT people; the Federal Ministry of Justice was expected to contribute an additional 5 million euros, bringing the initial endowment of the foundation to a total of 15 million euros.

File:Tomb of Magnus Hirschfeld, Caucade Cemetery (Nice, France).jpg|Hirschfeld's tomb in the Caucade Cemetery in Nice, France, photographed the day before the 75th anniversary of his death

File:Magnus Hirschfeld.jpg|Bust of Magnus Hirschfeld in the Schwules Museum, Berlin

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Portrayals in popular culture

Hirschfeld has been portrayed in a number of works of popular culture both during his lifetime and subsequently. Following is a sampling of genres and titles:

Caricature

Hirschfeld was a frequent target of caricatures in the popular press during his lifetime. Historian James Steakley reproduces several examples in his German-language book (Hamburg: MännerschwarmSkript, 2004). Additional examples appear in the French-language book (Paris: E. Bernard, [1908]) by .

Film and television

thumb|upright|Filmposter for Hirschfeld's [[Gesetze der Liebe, 1927]]

Different from the Others (Germany, 1919); directed by Richard Oswald; cowritten by Oswald and Magnus Hirschfeld. Hirschfeld appears in a cameo playing himself. Karl Giese, the young man who subsequently became Hirschfeld's lover, also had a part in the film.
(France, 1979); directed by Lionel Soukaz; cowritten by Soukaz and Guy Hocquenghem; released in the United States under the title The Homosexual Century. An experimental film portraying 100 years of homosexual history in four episodes, one of which focuses on Hirschfeld and his work. French gay writer Pierre Hahn played the role of Hirschfeld.
Desire: Sexuality in Germany, 1910–1945 (United Kingdom, 1989); directed by Stuart Marshall. A feature-length documentary tracing the emergence of the homosexual subculture and the homosexual emancipation movement in pre-World War II Germanyand their destruction by the Nazi regime. According to film historian Robin Wood, Marshall "treats the burning of Hirschfeld's library and the closing of his Institute of Sexual Science as the film's... central moment...."
A segment on Hirschfeld appears in episode 19 of Real Sex, first shown on HBO on 7 February 1998.
The Einstein of Sex (Germany, 1999); directed by Rosa von Praunheim. A fictional biopic inspired by Hirschfeld's life and work.
Paragraph 175 (US, 2000); directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. A feature-length documentary on the persecution of homosexuals during the Nazi regime. The first part of the film provides a brief overview of the history of the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany from the late 19th century through the early 1930s, with Hirschfeld and his work prominently featured.
Arno Schmidt (1970). (Frankfurt-am-Main: S. Fischer Verlag). Hirschfeld is quoted often in this novel about sexuality.
Nicolas Verdan (2011). (Orbe, Switzerland: Bernard Campiche). A French-language spy thriller inspired by the sacking of Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science by the Nazis.
Milo Todd (2025). The Lilac People. The protagonist is a trans man who works as Hirschfeld's assistant, who barely escapes the burning of the Institut and lives in hiding on a farm through World War II. After the war, the US Army becomes the villain, jailing all gay and trans people liberated from Dachau, as a younger trans man escapes the Americans and finds the trans farmer. The novel takes the reader through many of the places and events before and after the war.

Podcasts

Season 4 episode 2 of the podcast Making Gay History is about Hirschfeld, as is a Special Episode in Season 5 of the Bad Gays Podcast.

Works

thumb|upright|, 1901

thumb|upright|, 1914

Hirschfeld's works are listed in the following bibliography, which is extensive but not comprehensive:

Steakley, James D. The Writings of Magnus Hirschfeld: A Bibliography. Toronto: Canadian Gay Archives, 1985.

The following have been translated into English:

The Objective Diagnosis of Homosexuality. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1899; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2023).
Urnish People: Causes and Nature of Uranism. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1903; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2022).
What Unites and Divides the Human Race? Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1919; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2020).
Why Do Nations Hate Us? A Reflection on the Psychology of War. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1915; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2020).
Memoir: Celebrating 25 Years of the First LGBT Organization (1897–1923). Translation of Von Einst bis Jetzt by M. Lombardi-Nash (1923; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2019).
Paragraph 175 of the Imperial Penal Code Book: The Homosexual Question Judged by Contemporaries. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1898; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2020).
My Trial for Obscenity. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash. (1904; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2021).
Annual Reports of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (1900–1903): The World's First Successful LGBT Organization. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1901–1903; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2021).
Annual Reports of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (1904–1905): The World's First Successful LGBT Organization. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1905; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2022).
Annual Reports of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (1906–1908): The World's First Successful LGBT Organization. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1908; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2022).
Sappho and Socrates: How Does One Explain the Love of Men and Women to Persons of Their Own Sex? Translated by Michael Lombardi-Nash. (1896; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2019).
Transvestites: The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1910; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991).
With Max Tilke, The Erotic Drive to Cross-Dress: Illustrated Part: Supplement to Transvestites. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash (1912; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts 2022).
The Homosexuality of Men and Women. Translated by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash. 2nd ed. (1920; Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000).
The Sexual History of the World War (1930), New York City, Panurge Press, 1934; significantly abridged translation and adaptation of the original German edition: Sittengeschichte des Weltkrieges, 2 vols., Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft, Schneider & Co., Leipzig & Vienna, 1930. The plates from the German edition are not included in the Panurge Press translation, but a small sampling appear in a separately issued portfolio, Illustrated Supplement to The Sexual History of the World War, New York City, Panurge Press, n.d.
Men and Women: The World Journey of a Sexologist (1933); translated by O. P. Green (New York City: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1935).
Sex in Human Relationships, London, John Lane The Bodley Head, 1935; translated from the French volume (Paris: Gallimard, 1935) by John Rodker.
Racism (1938), translated by Eden and Cedar Paul. This denunciation of racial discrimination was not influential at the time, although it seems prophetic in retrospect.

Autobiographical

Hirschfeld, Magnus. . Schriftenreihe der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft Nr. 1. Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1986. (Reprint of a series of articles by Hirschfeld originally published in , 1920–21.)
M.H. [Magnus Hirschfeld], "Hirschfeld, Magnus (Autobiographical Sketch)", in Victor Robinson (ed.), , New York City: Dingwall-Rock, 1936, pp. 317–321.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. ; introduced and annotated by Ralf Dose. Berlin: Hentrich und Hentrich Verlag, 2013. (Critical edition of the only surviving volume of Hirschfeld's personal journal.)

References

External links

Biography on the web site of the Bundesstiftung Magnus Hirschfeld (Magnus Hirschfeld National Foundation), Berlin
Magnus Hirschfeld – Leben und Werk Biographical information on the web site of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft (Magnus Hirschfeld Society), Berlin
Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft: Online Exhibit on the Institute for Sexual Science
Magnus Hirschfeld at Holocaust Encyclopedia