He was a pioneer of gay and trans medicine. Then the Nazis took power.

Washington Post

19-06-2025

The Nazis called him 'the most repulsive of all Jewish monsters.' One savvy American publicist called him 'The Einstein of Sex.' He was world-famous for his claims that every human being mixes feminine and masculine traits; that all forms of sexual desire and gender identification are natural; and that race is a social construct. He was Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer of gay and trans medicine in Germany in the first decades of the 20th century, and two new books resurrect his life and work, arguing that he has been largely, and wrongly, forgotten.
Hirschfeld, or Magnus, as journalist Daniel Brook familiarly refers to him in his jaunty new biography, 'The Einstein of Sex,' was a crucial figure in the history of queer rights, and one of the most important voices in helping to establish the permissive, sexually fluid culture of Weimar Berlin. He was born into a society of strict norms and prohibitions. Prussia in the 19th century understood sexuality in starkly binary terms, and anything that wasn't 'normalsexuell' was against the law, as outlined in a notorious statute known as Paragraph 175.
Hirschfeld, whose father was a prosperous doctor, was in some sense destined for medicine. He recognized his own homosexuality early in life, and that awareness propelled his conviction that homosexuality was innate and, as such, could not be cured and should not be punished.
Yet even after he received his medical degree, he identified more with the journalists and writers in his milieu than with his fellow doctors. He would put all his talents to good use: At his Institute for Sexual Science, founded in 1919, he treated patients who did not conform to strict German notions of sexuality; he created and sold early sex hormones, and even provided surgical options for those wishing to transition. Hirschfeld believed that masculine and feminine traits can mix together in countless ways in a single person (he estimated more than 43 million possible varieties). He fought, for a while with some success, for the recognition of this fact.
It was his writing for a wider public that brought him renown. He caused waves as early as 1896, anonymously publishing a pamphlet, 'Sappho and Socrates,' that disputed the notion that homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma. (Sigmund Freud's 'Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality' espoused this theory of trauma's influence; Hirschfeld and Freud regarded each other as opponents.) By the time Hirschfeld published 'Berlin's Third Sex' — a term he was ambivalent about — in 1904, he was writing under his own name and offered readers a detailed tour of his adopted city. If one wanted a true picture of Berlin, he argued, 'one could scarcely ignore the impact of homosexuality, which has fundamentally influenced both the shading of this picture in detail and the character of the whole.'
As Hirschfeld's fame grew, so did his vulnerability. He was attacked by right-wing soldiers in 1920, stoned on the street and injured so badly — his skull was fractured — that the New York Times reported him dead.
But gradually, he and his colleagues at the Institute for Sexual Science did make change. Brook vividly depicts the way in which the city of Berlin itself — then experiencing explosive growth, and less tied to tradition than other Northern European capitals — provided a conducive blueprint for the kind of sexual freedoms that flourished in the wake of World War I. When Christopher Isherwood, then a young unknown, came to Berlin from England, he did so because 'Berlin meant boys.' Fittingly, he roomed in an annex attached to Hirschfeld's institute.
Brook succeeds in bringing his subject to fresh life, including a description of Hirschfeld's world travels in 1930, which he undertook to lecture and research. Embarking on that trip, Hirschfeld might have suspected that he would never live in Germany again. The shadow of Nazism had already fallen when he left. By the time he got back to Europe, his native country was under the thrall of Adolf Hitler, whose movement despised everything Hirschfeld stood for. With his young Chinese lover, Tao Li, in tow, Hirschfeld ultimately settled in France for the final few years of his life.
Where Brook traces the story through the more traditional form of biography, and engagingly so, Brandy Schillace takes a different tack in 'The Intermediaries,' widening and deepening the social context of Hirschfeld's life and work. Schillace, a medical historian, braids Hirschfeld's work with the scientific and political backdrop against which he operated.
Schillace's writing about the new field of what would be called endocrinology is especially vibrant. In 1849, the German scientist Arnold Adolph Berthold became interested in rooster testicles. In his lab, he removed some of them entirely; in other birds, he unhooked the glands from the fibers connecting them to the nervous system and relocated them to the roosters' stomachs. In the castrated roosters, no secondary sexual characteristics developed. But for those whose testes had simply been moved, the glands reimplanted, and the birds displayed all the usual signs of sexual development.
Berthold concluded that the powerful glands did not need the animal's nervous system to function; they seemed to emit blood-borne 'messengers' that continued to work with or without the input of the brain. These messengers would, a few decades later, be named hormones. Berthold's work laid the foundation for a story about what is 'biological,' and therefore 'natural,' in the body. And in Germany, 'natural' meant 'good.' If the mind/brain had nothing to do with the secretions that controlled sexual development, then sexuality was simply a biological fact: innate, natural and good.
Schillace's book can have an academic density that is usefully, powerfully dispersed when she invokes one of Hirschfeld's most consequential patients, Dora Richter. Born in 1892 and assigned male, the future Dora — or Dorchen, as Hirschfeld would affectionately call her — grew up in an isolated mountain village far from cosmopolitan Berlin. From the time she was small, she wanted to wear the same dresses as her sisters. Where Daniel Brook offers a snapshot of Dora in 'The Einstein of Sex,' Schillace uses her case as one strand stretching almost the full length of her narrative, following Dora through years of disguise and heartbreak, rejection and abuse.
Dora's efforts to live as a woman left her vulnerable to unspeakable violence and extortion. She fell in love again and again, with varying results. She identified as a woman who loved men, not as a homosexual. This alone made her case a revelation for Hirschfeld, by the time he met her. In 1931, at the Institute for Sexual Science, Dora became the world's first patient to receive gender-affirming surgery. She lived another 35 years with the body she had always wanted, and had government paperwork certifying her preferred name and gender.
As for Hirschfeld, the final years of his life were marked by exile and defeat. In 1933, he sat in a Paris movie theater and watched a newsreel showing a bust of his own head being marched into a Nazi bonfire (being bronze, it did not burn). Stormtroopers had seized tens of thousands of files from his institute, amassed over a lifetime of research, all destined for the flames. Some of those files contained intimate details of Nazi Party members who were decidedly not normalsexuell themselves.
His life's work destroyed, Hirschfeld never managed to finish his magnum opus, a tract on race and sexuality around the world, based on his extensive travels. He died on his 67th birthday. A century later, it is an astounding tragedy that his life's great battles remain all too modern.
Casey Schwartz, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of 'Attention: A Love Story.'
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin
By Daniel Brook.
W.W. Norton. 303 pp. $32.99
A Weimar Story
By Brandy Schillace.
W.W. Norton. 340 pp. $31.99