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Berlin Was A Liberal Hotbed of Homosexuality and A Mecca For Cross Dressers and Transsexuals Where The First Male

Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and gender experimentation in the early 20th century. The Institute of Sexual Science founded the field of transgender studies and performed the first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery. An uninhibited gay subculture flourished with clubs, magazines, and medical support until the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s suppressed this liberal environment.

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Luc Hotaling
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190 views15 pages

Berlin Was A Liberal Hotbed of Homosexuality and A Mecca For Cross Dressers and Transsexuals Where The First Male

Berlin was a liberal hotbed of homosexuality and gender experimentation in the early 20th century. The Institute of Sexual Science founded the field of transgender studies and performed the first male-to-female sex reassignment surgery. An uninhibited gay subculture flourished with clubs, magazines, and medical support until the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s suppressed this liberal environment.

Uploaded by

Luc Hotaling
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Berlin was a liberal hotbed of

homosexuality and a mecca for cross


dressers and transsexuals where the
first male-to-female surgery was
performed - until the Nazis came to
power, new book reveals
 An uninhibited urban gay sexual scene flourished in
Berlin, Germany in the wake of World War One
 The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded at the
Institute of Sexual Science where the first male-to-female
surgery was performed
 German scientists concluded that same-sex love was
a natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the
perversion of a ‘normal’ sexual tendency
 There were 30 separate homosexual periodicals
 Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for
large sizes and singles searching for gay love could place
ads
By CAROLINE HOWE FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 07:56 EST, 25 November 2014 | UPDATED: 08:24 EST, 25 November 2014 

Think Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray in Carberet. Think West Hollywood,
Greenwich Village and Provincetown and the Castro, known as hotbeds
of homosexuality.

But they are nothing like the uninhibited urban gay sexual scene and vast
homosexual subculture that flourished in Berliin under Germany's Weimar
Republic.

Sexual experimentation between the same sexes and medical advances


of helping genders ‘trapped within the wrong body’ in Germany more than
one hundred years ago shaped our understanding of gay identity today.
The city's liberal years - before the rise of Hitler - are detailed in a new
book, Gay Berlin. 

The science of ‘transsexuality’ was founded in Berlin at the Institute of


Sexual Science where the first male-to-female surgery was performed.
The words ‘homosexual’ or ‘transvestite’ were German innovations. 


Police mugshots of Berlin prostitute Johann Scheff, arrested in July 1932. Youths dressed in
women's clothing who successfully passed for women, descended on department stores en
masse stealing large quantities of merchandise.
+8

The cover of Die Intel, December 1930, advertising a serialized installment of Men for Sale
(Manner zu verkaufen). German gay magazines also offered gay and lesbian friendly services
to the gay subculture including medical doctors specializing in 'sexual disturbances', detective
agencies offering to investigate blackmail threats, as well as dressmakers and restaurants
+8

Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey starred in the film version of Carbaret in 1972

Male prostitution, homosexual bars and nightclubs, cabarets populated by


gay men, lesbians and transsexuals flourished in a wild, incomparable
sexual subculture that was exciting yet dangerous.

It was in Berlin where scientists concluded that ‘same sex love was a
natural, inborn characteristic and not merely the perversion of a ‘normal’
sexual tendency’, author and scholar Robert Beachy writes in his
compelling book, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity by Knopf
Publishers.
The Weimar Republic emerged out of the wreckage of Germany's war.
The Kaiser was gone, the 1919 Versailles Treaty saw the abolition of the
German Empire and the loss of significant amounts of its territory. 

It was a troubled and tortured time for Germany, but Berlin, the old
imperial capital became its most liberal city. 

High living, a vibrant urban life and relaxed social attitudes, along with the
influx of American money defined the Golden Twenties in Berlin that was
the most creative period in German history.

Writers, poets, artists from London, France, the United States arrived in
the German city to witness and experience the wild erotic sexual freedom
along with curiosity seekers, voyeurs, and homosexuals.

Western Europeans, Scandinavians and Russians all came to indulge


their sexual appetites in the hedonistic nightlife and party culture of the
German capital – or they came to witness the ‘luridly licentious Berlin’,
spiking their own voyeuristic impulses.

‘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’.
+8
Transvestite prostitutes sitting on the laps of gay men in the popular Berlin gay bar
Marienkasin
+8

Hansi Sturm, was the winner of the Miss Eldorado transvestite pageant in 1926

There were twenty-five to thirty separate homosexual German-language


periodicals that were appearing in Berlin, weekly or monthly.

There were no other journals published anywhere else in the world until
after 1945.

Openly nudist and homosexual titles were displayed in the kiosks.

Same-sex bars, clubs and cafes advertised as well as the professional


services of doctors, dentists, lawyers, stationers…all with the implied
‘friends patronize friends’.

In those magazines, anyone facing blackmail found private detectives to


track down extortion threats.

Cross-dressers found dressmakers who tailored for large sizes.

There were the single ads placed by individuals forever in search of love.

The American modernist artist, poet and essayist Marsden Hartley, a


habitué of 1920s Berlin, ‘attended large transvestite balls and patronized
homosexual bars frequented by male hustlers.

He later recalled, ‘Life in Berlin then was at the height of heights – that is
to the highest pitch of sophistication and abandon. None of us had seen
anything quite like the spectacle’. 

Acclaimed American Architect Philip Johnson often considered the dean


of American architects, ‘availed himself of Berlin’s male prostitution’.

‘Paris was never that hospitable’, Johnson said. He became fluent in


German later saying, ‘I learned it the best way, using "the horizontal
method".'
+8

Transvestites having drinks in the Eldorado club that was not hidden away but celebrated in
the golden age of the gay bar and club scene in Weimar Berlin. It was a hot spot for high
society and partying until dawn was the norm

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in March


1919, the first such facility in the world to offer medical and psychological
counseling on sexual issues to heterosexual men and women,
homosexuals, cross-dressers and intersex individuals also known as
hermaphrodites or individuals caught between male and female.

‘The institute represented the first attempt to establish "sexology", or


sexual science, as a topic of legitimate academic study and research.

‘Nowhere else in the world was there so much as a university department


or chair devoted to the subject, much less an entire institute,' writes
author Robert Beachy.
The Institute also emphasized public education and had a museum of
sexuality, the Hirschfeld Museum, with not only wall charts and
photographs but also cases filled with phalluses and fetishes from around
the globe.

Photographs of homosexuals dressed in huge hats, earrings and makeup


adored the walls as well as women in men’s clothing and top hats.

When Dr William Robinson, a New York physician and prominent activist


for birth control, visited the institute in 1925, he stated: ‘It is an institution
absolutely unique in the whole world…which I hoped to establish in the
United States but which I felt would not thrive on account of our prudish,
hypocritical attitude to all questions of sex.’

It was at this institute that Hirschfeld and his colleagues pioneered some
of the first sex-reassignment surgeries as well as primitive hormone
treatments

Dr Hirschfeld studied cross-dressing, men and women who wore the


clothing of the opposite sex. 

Previously interpreted as a symptom of homosexuality by psychiatrists


and sexologists, and associated with prostitution and criminal activity,
Hirschfeld believed cross-dressers were often heterosexual.
+8

Picture postcard of the gay club Silhouette, popular in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Always
under a blue haze of cigarette and cigar smoke, film stars, cabaret artists and wealthy nobility
were regulars including a young Marlene Dietrich alongside princes, counts and barons.

+8

Nazi officials sort through 'un-German' and 'perverted' materials in the debris of the Institute for
Social Science, that was ransacked on May 6, 1933, for a book burning event they staged four
days later.

Male and female impersonators drew huge crowds at cabarets, circuses


and variety theatres – as well as providing entertainment at the big
transvestite balls and homosexual clubs, but they faced the possibility of
being arrested by the police and harassed.
Dr Hirschfeld helped reform the practices of the Berlin police and
convinced them to issue ‘transvestite passes’ so that performers could
work without fear of harassment although there was no law prohibiting
public cross-dressing.

But dressing like the opposite sex sometimes inspired the desire for a
physical metamorphosis.

So the doctor performed one of the first (primitive) male-to-female sex-


reassignment surgeries on a twenty-three year old officer who had fought
in World War I.

From childhood on, he felt he was trapped in the wrong body and only
went into the military to demonstrate his masculinity. But that didn’t
subdue his feminine feelings and when the war was over, he felt suicidal.

Hirschfeld’s colleague, Dr. Arthur Kronfeld removed the man’s testicles


and the effect was quite successful leading to a ‘psychic relaxation and a
permanent feeling of harmony and balance’.

His facial hair disappeared and now he passed for a woman.

He visited a Dresden gynecologist, Dr. Richard Muhsam, who made a


‘vagina-like structure’ and tucked his member up in there in what was the
first attempt to construct a vagina for a man.
+8

Five months later, the former officer was back and reported having
erections.

He also had fallen in love with a woman, abandoned his cross-dressing


and was now masculine.

The doctor successfully undid the surgery and restored his masculinity.

Afternoon teas and large costume balls were held at the Institute as
another venue for flamboyant cross-dressers. The balls attracted young
male prostitutes along with the cross-dressers and prominent, open
homosexuals.

Hirschfeld wanted homosexual men and lesbians to experience greater


erotic fulfillment that wasn’t connected to procreation. 

With the Great Depression of 1929, and the crash of the American stock
market, the Golden Age was slipping away to a Hitler-led government by
spring 1930, the Nazis were on the rise with the new Reichstag election.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler completed his march to power - and with fury the
Nazis pursued Hirschfeld as a symbol of all they hated – as Jew,
homosexual and sexologist.

The party in Berlin was over. 

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