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2nd part. The third sex. 1930 or from the Happy Twenties to extermination
In 1860, on the eve of Germany's unity,
a penal code for all German states is in preparation.
It contains, in its paragraph 175, a penalty for unnatural acts between men.
A hungarian doctor writes in protest to the Prussian Secretary for justice.
He creates for this matter a new word to refer to this particular class of citizens.
Homosexual.
A new category is born.
Sure, there were sodomites.
But the medieval law against them were no longer used,
in France, since 1789, in the UK since 1836,
in Germany since the start of the 19th century.
At the end of the 19th century, with German paragraph 175,
with the amendment Labouchere in the UK in 1885,
with the creation of the word homosexual, a new era has begun.
Wilde's trial in 1885 mark the realization
of the existence of these new perverts.
Lord Douglas' lover lose his freedom
as a result of this new categorization.
At the same time in Germany, where social-democracy protests against by Wilde's trial,
some scientists start to express themselves as member of this new minority.
Some artists too, as Elisar von Kupffer, painter and writer.
Kupfer perceives male androgyny to be the final form of love between men.
The writer [?], who published as soon as 1868
a defense of homosexuality entitled "*** nature of male uranism",
and who will try, until the turn of the century, to impose the word uranist.
The start of the 20th century is filled with sensational trials,
all across Europe, and mark the birth of homosexuality.
Press, and caricatures discuss the Wilde scandal,
the Fersen scandal in Paris, and above all, the series of German scandals.
Close to the Kaiser, the Moltke-Eulenburg scandal,
compromising all of the German army in this new vice.
Subject to jokes and rumors,
homosexuality resonates with this laboratory of modern society that Germany is.
Between the great trials in Berlin, in 1900 and 1907,
modern homosexuality takes its shape through the press innuendos.
Repression and liberation movements are born at the same time.
Hirschfeld's committee, through a poll conducted in 1903 on more than 6000 people,
evaluates 2.5% of German population to be homosexual.
This committee managed twice to get the Reichstag
to discuss the suppression of paragraph 175, in 1905 and 1907.
But the scandals Molke and Eulenburg, and the unrest of the press, play against them.
During this trial, Hirschfeld is heard as a medical expert
and establish the homosexuality of several officers.
But the new homosexual movement is active in other ways.
A lot of youth organisations are created in Germany at the start of the 20th century.
Like the Wandervogel, the Migratory Birds,
created in 1896 and taking part in hiking, camping, with a strict gender separation.
A writer of this time, Hans Blüher, later to be a Nazi,
a drawer like [Fidus?], socialist and nudist at first, later to be an eulogist of Hitler Youth,
describe this "German youth movement as an *** phenomenon",
as is entitled a best-seller of Blüher.
After the 1907 trials, the Wandervogel leadership, worried about their way of life,
creates a new organisation, the Jung-Wandervogel,
insisting on the pederast relationship.
Anarchists, as Gustav Wyneken,
insist on a Jugendkultur, a culture specifically for the youth
against the prevailing puritanism.
In 1913, the Jung-Wandervogel got together on Mount Meißner.
In the after-war, camps of young unemployed, as Brecht's famous Kuhle Wampe,
and youth hostel developed a wild homosexuality.
Young people on the fringe of society, obsessed with getting back to Nature,
admiring the Indian Winnetou's adventures
organize parallel societies inside Weimar's Republic's chaos.
They wear earings, showing an odd mix of hyper-virility and homosexual sensuality.
The first Von Papen government, creates work camps for this youngsters,
allowing in later time Nazi control over youth.
In Germany, the homosexual movement is related to all other social movements :
the hygienist movement of the Naturheilbewegung and the Lebensreform, feminist movement, theosophy and artistic innovations.
It is in Berlin, that American homosexual writer Isherwood
sets his Christopher and His Kind to describe the golden age of homosexuality.
Hirschfeld, and his humanitarian committee, participated to the revolution against the Kaiser.
And the doctor himself spoke, the day of the abdication, at the big meeting of revolutionary forces.
In 1919, he obtains the lowering of sentences against homosexuals in paragraph 175.
Other homosexual associations are created in Berlin,
such as the German association for friendship,
that holds a weekly ball, and has a homosexual community center and a monthly magazine.
But Hirschfeld movement, despite schisms, is still the main German organisation.
Hirschfeld was born in 1868.
He's a physician, son of physicians.
In the after-war, he's close to social-democracy,
which he sided with in 1912,
by calling in the press for people of the third sex to vote for their leftist allies.
From 1899 to 1923, he publishes the yearbook of inter-*** difference, the Jahrbuch,
enormous sum of scientific, legal and anthropological research concerned with *** differences.
He publishes in 1914 "Male and female homosexuality".
But his movement reaches his peak in the twenties.
The literature he publishes after 1919 comes from
a state-funded institute based in Berlin, the *** Sciences Institute.
With a laboratory, a conference center, libraries, this Institute enables him to gather huge archives,
and to publish in 1928 "*** pathology",
and the five books of "*** science" in 1930.
Admittedly, hirschfeldian theory of the third sex,
since Freund - who did participate to Hirschfeld's Jahrbuch - has been outdated by psychoanalysis.
But it still was the first body of coherent medical theories on homosexuality.
In 1920, there are three main German homosexual movements.
Hirschfeld committee, the German association for friendship,
but also the association that Adolf Brand, an old friend of Hirschfeld, created before the war,
the "Confederation of specials", which is leaning towards anarchy and aestheticism
and the and rejects the scientific and humanitarian way.
Brand says : "We're not trying to get people's pity,
by giving scientific proofs of our so-called abnormality."
This obsession with measure, with a quantitative ground for difference,
how couldn't we recognize in it the first attempt to classify degeneracies,
that would thrive under Nazi Germany.
Doctor Hirschfeld was also conducting research with his own hands,
as is proven in this picture, where he reveals the hidden *** of a hermaphrodite sex.
We can see here the baron Von Rechenberg, leader of the humanitarian committee, as man and as a transvestite.
By creating homosexuals as a race, Hirschfeld opened a terribly bloody path.
Obviously, when he looks, in his patients' bodies, for
physiological grounds for difference, Hirschfeld's goal is to save them from criminal liability,
free them from legal repression, make them irresponsible of their destiny.
Paradoxically, this first great defender of his fellow homosexuals,
may have given his first victims to Nazi eugenics.
The thousands of pictures in the intersexual differences yearbook
are very similar to the monstrous collections of extermination camp physicians.
History's irony is such that, by trying to make public the material proofs
of physical differences between homosexuals and normal people,
the first homosexual mass movement paved the ground for its own extermination.
Between the wars, the homosexual movement became an international reality.
Artistic and cultural circles are created around intellectual figures.
The poet Stefan George gathers around him a court of admirers.
He celebrate in a poem cycle his love for a sixteen years old boy, Maximin.
He organizes Roman costume party of which we still have some pictures today.
Hirschfeld welcomes these artists in his photographic pantheon,
as inspiring illustrations of inter-sexuality.
American poet Whitman, eulogist of a sensual liberty between young men,
appears in hirschfeldian publications next to André Gide.
In 1911 in Amsterdam, in 1912 in London,
in 1914 in Vienna, Hirschfeld's committee founds local sections.
Between 1920 and 1930, the German homosexual movement is at its peak.
The league for homosexual reform has 130 000 members all over the world.
In Germany, more than 25 homosexual newspapers are regularly published,
as the Der Eigene, the Special, owned by Brand, a true media group with three weekly.
And the Insel, the Island, with wand ads for rendezvous, and addresses of meeting places.
There is a homosexual theatre in Berlin, the Eros Theatre,
four lesbian publications, a BDSM magazine.
Even in France, the country the less affected, the Urania movement is founded, with its then famous motto :
"Uranians of the world, unite."
In 1919, Hirschfeld has Oswald shot the first homosexual militant film,
Entitled : "Not like the others". It's a murky blackmail story.
Starring actor Conrad Veidt, and Hirschfeld, playing its own role.
The first Nazi attacks against the homosexual movement happened during the projection of this film.
Hurt in 1920 in Munich, left for dead in 1921,
shot at in Vienna in 1923, Hirschfeld looks for communist support against Nazi
At this time, the great Soviet encyclopedia refers to him in glowing terms.
And Batkis, USSR official sexologist, participates to the league of reform.
But, an odd exchange of victims will happen between communists and Nazis.
As Nazis claimed : "Suppress the Jews, for marxism to disappear",
Soviet propaganda echoed this terrible word of Gorki :
"Suppress the homosexuals, for fascists to disappear."
My nightmare began 47 years ago, May 6th, 1933.
I worked as a secretary for the intersexual research institute in Berlin.
This morning, I arrived for work at nine, like every other day for the two previous years.
There had been this call in Nazi newspapers the day before.
The students of the gymnastics academy were starting the cultural cleansing by Hirschfeld's institute.
But we were used to almost daily insults and threats.
It was a matter of pride for everyone at the institute to let this day be as any other.
I remember bringing pictures in Hirschfeld's office for the next intersexual Jahrbuch.
I started at the institute as a switchboard operator.
Then, I was part of a lesbian organisation.
Despite my youth, I came to be the particular secretary of the scientific and humanitarian committee.
The doctor was in his fifties but seemed younger.
He had his secrets to stay young.
He was the sweetest, most charming man in the world,
kind and smiling with downstairs staff, concerned only by one thing :
reach social justice through scientific research.
I remember it vividly.
[?] is, in greek, my motto.
Hr would often repeat that, whenever he had read some attack in the newspapers.
But first of all, they were scientists.
Every intellectual field was present at the institute.
They had primitive people specialists, as well as venereal illness experts.
We were experimenting on rats.
Because male rats become intersexual when isolated from females.
I had brought them two guinea pigs. It pains me to think about that.
Because we were soon to be guinea pigs ourselves.
They took some time to examine them,
before seeing the first patients.
Hirschfeld's consultations were well appreciated.
They were free.
He felt rewarded enough with the research material that his patients brought.
All kinds came to see us.
Mothers with their child, because they had an intersexual inclination.
Working men, artists, and even, this morning as others, aristocrats.
This lady, for example, was the wive of the president of a court.
I think they were interested in her as a medical phenomena first, because she was almost made like man.
The doctor was very polite with women.
He knew how to kindly question them.
I was in charge of the files, and another secretary was taking notes of the doctors' comments.
They had a tireless curiosity.
Whether it be an important lady or a freak,
a shameful husband or a street ***,
he would keep the same calm and ask about his life, his habits.
He was looking for intersexuality before looking at the genitals.
Never impatient, even when people were hesitant to answer, ready to wait for their good-will.
He could guess hidden things about *** life before being told,
but would wait for the subject to be addresses, not to embarrass.
At this time, the doctor was closing in on a big discovery.
He had started to think that we're more or less masculine or feminine,
according to how much of a particular chemical substance was present in the body.
A few years ago, I realized that he had guessed what we now call hormones.
But he wasn't a chemist, he was first interested in natural features
that people would hide as shameful.
He was convinced that the only thing that made so many people unhappy was this social shame,
because they were made in a different way, and had been forced to hide for centuries.
He was first a great humanitarian, an Einstein of the sex,
as the New-York Times would call him.
He started as an alcoholism specialist,
and he couldn't stand drunkards, he wouldn't allow a drop of alcohol in the institute.
But when he came to *** deformities,
he had made hypocrisy hist worst enemy.
He liked youngsters very much, because he thought
that they wouldn't know the obscurantism that existed when he himself was a child.
They would remind him how difficult it had been for him to make his family accept his natural tastes.
As an optimism, he thought that they would live freedom,
through the scientific knowledge that was refused to previous generations.
Poor dear man, he never knew how wrong he was.
He advised them to play sports, to let go with their natural inclinations.
He would attribute them a number in the intersexual scale.
This morning, they were examining a high school student.
I had left them alone, as usual, to take care of my files.
It is then that the others arrived.
I barely had time to run upstairs and warn them, but it was already too late.
Nazis students had broken through the door,
shouting they wanted to clean the country of its Marxist obscenities.
Being Jewish, the doctor was hated for two reasons.
This was one of the first official punitive actions.
I remember how they threw me to the ground when entering.
The doctors were extremely surprised. They thought the police was going to come or something.
They couldn't understand what was happening.
Hirschfeld even kept smiling, despite the guns.
They took away the doctor and his friends.
Outside, the weather was gorgeous, and a mob had gathered to boo him.
He, benefactor of mankind.
Then they started vandalizing the institute,
breaking instruments, tearing down the records,
destroying thirty years of collective words in a matter of minutes.
They burned more than 10 000 books this day,
after having symbolically destroyed the doctor's bust.
And the crowd was clapping shamefully.
It was the cultural extermination that forecasted the physical extermination.
The very next day, nothing was left of fifty years of efforts towards reform,
as if the committee, the local associations, the worldwide organisations, conferences, newspapers, movies
had been but a dream.
I was myself sent to the Oranienburg camp, with doctor [Villard ?]
Hirschfeld took refuge in France, where he was stripped from German nationality.
He died in 1935 in Nice, where he was still trying to rebuilt his institute.
This catastrophe was as violent as a storm.
We had been threatened by Nazis for ten years,
but we couldn't have guessed what they would do after 1934.
Despite all this, life went on in Berlin till the end.
As roundups had already started, there still were parties and balls, people thinking these were but alarmist rumors.
After the war, when American liberated my camp, I tried to find my former friends.
All had disappeared, as the Jews.
But no one cared about them.
I was being laughed at in the organisations that were looking for missing persons.
No one was asking for these people,
not even their families, who where too ashamed for that.
And the survivors wouldn't testify.
Out of fear, they're still hiding today.
We were foolhardy, we danced till the end and were harshly punished,
for, presumably, never will we be done justice.
The pink triangle bearers will never receive reparations.
They died for nothing.
How many of them were they ? I looked at official statistics :
5 to 10 000 each year from 1934 to 1941,
plus those that were directly send in camps by the Gestapo.
Plus, starting in 1941, when they stopped to abide by the law,
castrations and summary executions.
500 000, 1 million, I don't know.
No one will ever know. Among these dancers, these laughing transvestites, none of them might have survived.
All pink triangle bearers were put in death camps.
It was Himmler's decision. The Gestapo's second division
was exclusively meant to take care of us.
Doctor [Noidek ?], the only other survivor I met, told me that at Sachsenhausen,
where they were more than 300 pink triangles in June 42, they were only 50 of them left two months later.
Berlin's parties were far away.
When I think of theirs experiments on burning by phosphorus bombs,
of [?] held in Ravensbrück,
of the massive male hormone injections that happened in Buchenwald...
Then, I do think of you.
Of us, foolhardy, dancing on the volcano till the end.
So nowadays, when people are surprised, where I now live,
that I never want to go to any party or club,
I think of these last balls in Berlin, as some trains had already left for Buchenwald.
And I tell myself that tomorrow, this joy of living, this safety may be swept away in a snap.
Because after all, we were so strong at this time, but the only defence we had was to forget.