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Daniel Brook, "The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin" (W. W. Norton & Co, 2025)
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- [00:01]
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Daniel Brook
hi
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Podcast Host
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- [01:09]
Daniel Brook
I was groomed to become one of
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Deep Acharya
his wives this week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her.
- [01:22]
Daniel Brook
I want to see action and I am demanding action.
- [01:25]
Deep Acharya
Do not just talk the talk, you need to start walking the walk now. It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now.
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Daniel Brook
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Deep Acharya
welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Deep Acharya, and today we are joined by Daniel Brooke, an accomplished journalist whose work has appeared in Harper's and the New York Times Magazine. He's also the author of the acclaimed A History of Future Cities. To discuss his fascinating new biography, The Einstein of Dr. Maunus Hirschfield, Visionary of Weimar Berlin, published by W.W. norton more than a century ago. Dr. Manus Hirschfeld, dubbed the the Einstein of Sex, grew famous for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he has been largely forgotten. Journalist Daniel Brooks retraces Hirschfeld's rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the greatest visionaries of the 20th century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles were rigid, Hirschfield taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients towards self acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin's cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world's queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books. Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia and the Middle east to. To research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late in life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirfield spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism. Daniel, thanks so much for agreeing to have a conversation with me. Welcome to the show.
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Daniel Brook
Thank you so much for having me deep. I'm really heartened that the book resonated with you.
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Deep Acharya
Thank you. So the first thing that I wanted to talk to you about is if you could tell our audience a little bit about yourself and how you arrived at this idea of writing a biography on Hirschfield.
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Daniel Brook
Sure. I'm a journalist by trade. I've always been interested in urban affairs, urban planning, urban history. All of my books have dealt in some respect with. With some kind of urban history, usually of a dynamic, fast growing cities. Those are kind of my favorite as places to. To research. And I sort of came to Hirschfeld through race, which is unusual. He. To the extent he's known, he's known as a queer rights activist, and that's first and foremost what he was. But at the end of his life, he publishes posthumously a book called Racism, which is a takedown of Nazi race. The theory argues that actually everybody is ethnically mixed and that hard and fast races are a social construct, not a biological reality. And I just happened upon that very circuitously. I was in the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum and sort of an aside on one of the plaques just mentioned that the word racism did not exist until the 20th century. And that was sort of a light bulb moment for me because I just completed a book called the Accident of A Story of Race in Reconstruction, which is about mixed race civil rights activists in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina, during Reconstruction. And I realized, you know, having read, you know, hundreds, if not thousands of newspaper magazine articles from the 1800s that, you know, now that you mention it, yes, I never encountered the word racism in any of them. It's usually bigotry or prejudice or white supremacy, never racism. So then I get on my phone and I'm looking up where the word racism comes from. And in the English language, it's generally attributed to Magnus Hirschfeld, who writes this book. It's published in English, because it can't be published in German called racism in 1938. And I thought I had heard of Hirschfeld before, and in fact, I had encountered him in the Berlin Jewish Museum a decade and a half earlier. And, you know, he's most famous for coining the word. Not a word we would use today, transvestite, but he does the first sympathetic study of trans patients. Once I realized that the same mind had kind of pioneered trans identity and social construction of race, I was kind of hooked, and I should say, kind of in the background of all of this, personally, my niece was transitioning during this period. So that was. That added a certain. My niece, to whom the book is dedicated, was transitioning in that period, and that made it sort of personal for me.
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Deep Acharya
That's a really interesting journey. Daniel, I want to talk about how your book centers on this man who was once a global celebrity, like you put it, as an intellectual impresario of the Weimar era who gave interviews from Seattle to Shanghai, yet whose legacy was so thoroughly purged that he became like a ghost in modern history. We often see the grainy newsreel footage of the 1933 Nazi book burnings at Aupernplatz, but we aren't always told that the primary target was actually Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science. So to set the stage for our audience, who was Manus Hirschfeld, according to you, and why was his theory of sexual relativity so dangerous that that the Nazis paraded his bust on a pike before torching his life's work?
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Daniel Brook
I think it should be said he was disappeared purposefully. And initially I kind of thought, well, the Nazis disappeared and they burned his books and they destroyed his legacy and they destroyed his institute. In fact, the Nazis couldn't stop talking about Magnus Hirschfeld. He actually dies of natural causes in exile, and they're still railing against Hirschfeld years after he's passed away. And my, my. The argument in the book is that his theories are almost like a kryptonite to fascism. Fascism is built upon these supposedly scientific, hierarchical categories. There are men and there are women. Men are superior. There are whites and people of color. Whites are superior. There are Aryans and there are Semites. Aryans are superior. And Hirschfeld's argument, again and again, beginning actually with sexual orientation, where he sees, instead of a gay, straight binary, or even a gay, straight, bisexual trinary, if you will, he sees a full panorama, I should say, 60 years before Kinsey swipes his research and repopularizes it. Then he moves into gender with this book Titransisteten, which means the Transvestites, a sympathetic study of trans individuals, where he argues that gender, all the permutations of gender in any individual accumulate to over 43 million possibilities, one of which is completely male and one of which is completely female and everyone else is some mixture of masculinity and femininity. And then finally with race, where he's arguing the Nazis. And also I should say he takes on the American Jim Crow system as well in this, that any system whereby some government entity or dictator or party tries to sort people into an either or racial binary is constructed by the party or the demagogue doing the sorting, not by human beings. Human beings, he says, are just as like no two leaves on a tree are exactly alike. No two human beings are exactly alike. And he actually speculates in the book Racism that one day he says there'll be a blood test that will expose everybody's background. He says, you know, the anti Semites in Germany are not going to be gratified by the results because they're going to all find out, you know, they're X percent Jewish themselves. Of course, as we know, it wasn't a blood test, it was this cheek swab. And now we've all seen these very voluminous sort of maps of where all of our ancestors come from, including you know, my own, you know, has dotted lines around the countries that my forebears actually immigrated to the United States from. And then otherwise it has honestly just this line of blobs literally going from Ireland to Bangladesh for, you know, every, everyone who's made, made up who I am today.
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Deep Acharya
So let's go back to his formative years. Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Kolberg, Prussia. So this was the era of blood and iron and an intense over performance of masculinity symbolized by the picklehobber, those spiked military helmets that you humorously describe as having a dildo on the head. So in chapter one you describe a childhood session or a lesson regarding his maid, Madame Moustache. So how did growing up in this hyper masculine Prussian Jewish milieu where science and liberalism were kind of the family religion, led him to question the ironclad laws of gender.
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, so he's growing up in honestly one of probably one of the most rigid gender wise societies ever created, I mean even by the standards of Europe in that era. And I came across a map when I went to Kolberg's history museum. It's now I should say Kolberg was given to Poland after The war. It's now called Kwabzag, Poland. It's not even part of Germany. And they showed it's a beach town on the Baltic Sea. And the map of the beach actually has a. It's marked Damen bad for one section, Herren Bad for one section, and Familienbad for another section, meaning that the men have. There's a men's beach, there's a women's beach, and there's a family beach. So, like, unmarried men and women are not even allowed to sit on the beach together, despite the, you know, farcically full coverage swimwear of the era. So he's growing up in this society that has this very rigid gender straightjacket. And he somehow able to see beyond it. Undoubtedly part of that is he's growing up as a queer kid. His public presentation is actually quite conventionally masculine. Part of the intrigue of writing his biography is trying to kind of splice up, you know, how much of that is a kind of straight passing, purposeful Persona, or is it. Or how much of that is kind of his innate masculinity expressing itself. But he's moving through this society where there's this rigid straitjacket that he's never gonna fit into. And by moving from self acceptance of himself, to then sharing the self acceptance with his patients, to finally becoming a public queer rights activist and advocate, which is a big step for him, I think he's actually not that excited about being in the public eye in that respect. And I think had been trying to convince himself that by providing private psychotherapy to queer patients and guiding them towards self acceptance that that was really all that was necessary. Then one of his patients famously commits suicide and sends him a suicide note that says, you know, this private psychotherapy is not. It's not adequate. Like, we need to change society.
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Deep Acharya
So let's talk about his remarkable trip to America in 1893 to cover the Chicago World's Fair. The fair featured the White City, this neoclassical monument to European American supremacy, while the midway ploissant relegated the rest of the world to these ethnological villages that were essentially like human zoos. So you note that this trip was really like a laboratory for him. How did seeing America's one drop rule for race and the red tie code of the queer underworld in Chicag, I'm wondering, shape his eventual belief that race and sex are inseparable?
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, so I should say we have because of. He's kind of a studiously private person. He actually only keeps a diary that we know of when he's doing his later world tour. But we, we kind of have, we have a very clear understanding of sort of where he is at each point in his life. We know he gets his medical degree in Germany and then essentially runs away with the circus. He goes, his, his brother has, one of his brothers has emigrated to Chicago and he like goes to Chicago and becomes a stringer for German newspapers. And the story of that and covers the World's Fair, which is kind of the story of, of that era. At the book ending, the, you know, that's the beginning of his professional life, right? He's in his 20s. And then, and then we have this, the bookend at the end is. This is the book Racism, right? And we know, I mean in the book Racism, it's clearly informed by not only opposition to Nazi race theory, but opposition to American race theory and the one drop rule and the Jim Crow system. So in the book, I argue that this early trip to Chicago is really in some ways his first exposure certainly to a non European racial system. And it's almost certain that he, I think because the, the national pavilions were alphabetized in English. Haiti and Germany were next to each other and the Haitian pavilion was run by Frederick Douglass. And actually it is in a period where Frederick Douglass is trying to highlight racial hybridity both in himself, in that his father is white, which is something he publishes repeatedly until actually the final version of his biography, he kind of gives up and stops writing about that because he feels like America, the one drop rule, is really insurmountable. But Hirschfeld is exposed to that. And then it's also his first overseas experience as a young queer man. And the queer life in Chicago is very well documented from that era. Wearing a red tie downtown is a way to signal that you're interested in other men. And sort of there's kind of a pickup scene that comes out of that. There are bars and of course there's sex work and, and, and all including trans sex work and, and interracial sex work and all of that. So my, essentially as the biographer, it's like we know he's in this kind of hotbed of, of this sort of stew of race and, and sex. And then his later work elucidates these theories. So this trying to link how, how his life's experiences transmute into this, into the work. I should say, yes, that race is sex and sex is race is like, I mean, Frederick Douglass is very clear about this in the earlier versions of his biography where he's like, I Look like this because my father was a European. Was of European descent, and my mother was of African descent. And that's why I can have this really amazing hairstyle that no one else can achieve, where it's like, parted in this courtly European part, but it has this huge African Afro volume and all. All of that. So, yeah, I mean, Hirschfeld begins to realize, like, the Americans don't want to talk about sex. Interracial sex. That's obvious. That was from anyone walking around this country can see, was rampant. And that's why that's part of the work that the one drop rule is doing.
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Deep Acharya
So let's talk about when Hirschfeld returns to Germany, he starts his medical practice. He's transformed from a private therapist into a public radical by the tragic suicide that we talked about. And at this time, paragraph 175 of the German criminal code made consensual gay sex a felony. And in chapter three, you detail the Hirschfeld scale he developed to counter this law. Could you explain the mechanics of his scale, the A and B system? It seems he was trying to use the Herr Doctor professor authority of the era to mathematically prove that diversity was natural.
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, we should say. Yeah. So paragraph 175 is a law in the books in Germany for actually over. It ends up over a century that makes it a crime punishable by imprisonment. I mean, under the Nazis, punishable by far worse things for a man to have sex with a man. It becomes the great cause of Magnus Hirschfeld's life to overturn it. It's actually passed when Magnus Hirschfeld is a youth. It should be said that everywhere the French Revolution was exported by. At gunpoint via Napoleon, you know, decriminalized sex acts between adults. That was part of the French Revolution's liberalism, was that consensual sex acts between adults are not criminal. And then there's this backsliding that he's. That. That he's experiencing. Sorry, the second part of your question was.
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Deep Acharya
Yeah. Could you explain the mechanics of this system that he.
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Daniel Brook
Oh, yeah. So, yeah. So he. In. In he. His patient takes his own life and sends him a suicide note saying we need to take a public stand for queer rights. And to overturn paragraph 175 and Hirschfeld turns out, first, under a pseudonym, a pamphlet called Sappho and Socrates or what explains the love of people for their own sex. And it creates, in addition to arguing that sexual attraction is inborn and certain people are born as gay men and certain people are born as lesbians. It. It presents this chart, this kind of pyramid chart with A and B, where, where each person can kind of rank their own attraction to their own sex and to the opposite sex. It's kind of like a formula in a sense, for like a universal bisexuality, but with, with gradients, I should say, you know, your attraction to your own sex or the opposite sex could be zero. So it's not, it's not universal, but it does create this continuum of gender. And, you know, I think by putting it as you said, the hair doctor professor. He's not a professor, actually. He's pointedly not. Possibly because of anti Semitic persecution and the rules of who, you know, people with Jewish background and how high they could rise in the academy in Germany in that era. But it is this, you know, I am a man of science. This is all scientific. I even have a chart. And again and again, Hirschfeld has these complex factorial equations and charts and graphs. And it often feels like you're applying these kind of hard science concepts to social science and even to almost the humanities in a way that might, to us in our era might seem a little bit odd. But I think in his year was kind of a savvy political move to establish his authority. And I should say in the second edition of Sappho and Socrates, which comes out two years later, it's not under a pseudonym. He, you know, comes out of the closet, as it were, as the author, instead of being by this pseudonymous Berlin physician, it's by Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Berlin physician.
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Deep Acharya
So in chapter five, the big data that you name, you describe a really audacious move. For 1903, Hirschfeld sent out thousands of anonymous postcards to tech students and metal workers to survey their sex lives. So he targeted manly professions, if I say so, specifically to debunk the myth that homosexuality was an upper class condition. So what, according to you, did these surveys reveal about the actual percentage of sexual intermediaries in the population? And how did the resulting obscenity trial actually help Hirschfeld's cause?
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, so he's, he's trying to quantify, you know, the percentage of queer people in society. I should say this is already slightly intentioned with his theories, which is like everyone's to some degree, or, you know, almost everyone's to some degree queer. But he, he, he wants to establish essentially that there are millions of people who are being oppressed by paragraph 175. So he wants to at least find out what percentage of, of German men are attracted to other men and are being persecuted potentially under this law that criminalizes such those sex lives. And he does, yeah, as you mentioned, he does pick these like stereotypically manly professions because he wants to, he doesn't want anyone challenging the data as, as skewed. And he's actually very kind of, I mean from our perspective, I think kind of refreshingly politically incorrect in when he's talking about the professions. I mean he picks metal workers and he'll say in another piece of writing like I'm not going to pick actors or florists or beauticians which you know then as that or Catholic priests we should say. Actually he does say that as well then as now kind of stereotypically gay male professions. And yeah, he does get this, this data back. You know it's under 10%. You know, it's a smallish number but then know when you multiply it by the population of Germany, it's over a million people and then globally it's tens of millions of people. And that's, that's kind of the, the takeaway from his survey and sorry, you had the second part of your question maybe.
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Deep Acharya
Oh no, that I was wondering how did this resulting obscenity trial actually help his cause? Like what was the response?
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, so he is accused of obscenity just by, for these, for the questions and the questions he had, he actually did have a more explicit questionnaire that he also gave out that you know, would ask patients if, if they had bestiality fantasies or like, you know, it got pretty sort of fetish y. But yeah, there was, there's a law against sending obscene materials through the mail and he's always initially dogged by a kind of religious right opposition, ultimately dogged by a full on fascist right opposition that doesn't want to put him on trial, they want to just extrajudicially execute him. But in this earlier more innocent era. Yeah there are, there's a, there are priests who are kind of religious establishment is trying to sort of quash this research and they, they do get him drawn up on, on charges of sending obscene materials through the mail. Um, but of course the trial, you know, there's no such thing as bad publicity. The trial gets a lot of coverage for, for him and his work and probably he ends up with a kind of token fine. Like he technically loses the case and he owes a pretty trivial amount of money. So I think in the end he comes out ahead.
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Deep Acharya
So moving into the Weimar period, Hirschfeld becomes synonymous with this uncleasable city of Berlin. And you described the Berliner Mission, the Berlin Mix where high end apartments and laborer barracks existed in the same building, creating this very unique urban anonymity. Talk to us about anti Magnesia that you mentioned. Rumor had it Hirschfeld himself went out in drag to research the scene. So how did this idea of this, Berlin's urbanity, this fugitive city of five story meets Kasserna, allow for the birth of the western world's first modern trans community?
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Daniel Brook
Yeah, so I mean Berlin, unlike London and Paris and of course Rome and Athens, you know, Berlin is, is not, does not have particularly deep roots. Berlin is much more like, is actually a lot more like Chicago than it is like London or Paris. Even though it's much closer to London and Paris. It's an industrial boom town where the population explodes very dramatically in the late 1800s and it becomes this kind of city of strangers where most people are transplants. And then for urbanistic reasons, actually because it predates the commercialization of the elevator to this day it's just filled with these five story walk up apartments. And you know, through the logic of capitalism, the, you know, the one, the apartment at the, on the fifth floor is less expensive than the apartment on the second floor because who wants to walk five flights of stairs every time they realize they're out of milk or bread? And you get this. And then they're also the very deep lots, they have like multiple courtyards behind courtyards, behind courtyards. Again, you know, more prestigious to be on the front and more convenient to be in the front than to be deep in the back. So it creates the city of strangers and kind of classes and ethnic groups sort of all jumbled together. Creates a certain type of social media that you know, invites people to. It lowers the risk for any kind of behavior society would look down upon or term deviant. Right? Because you know, your, your, your neighbors won't know, your family won't know. And that creates the, the capacity to, you know, to build the world's, the modern world's first queer mecca where you have clubs and, and nightlife and, and honestly like there's like lesbian chess clubs and sports clubs and all kinds of social life oriented around gender, non conformity or queerness. And that's, I argue, as many have argued, that it's this unique sort of social situation that allows Berlin to develop this way. Hirschfeld himself, I think part of what makes him such an appealing character is that he's at once this scientist, sort of sober scientist writing these sometimes quite, quite dry academics, scientific material, at other times writing this very engaging journalistic material, including a Book called Berlin's Third Sex that's now widely available in English through the University of Toronto Press. Highly recommended as well. And then he's a participant. The rumors. There are eyewitness accounts, actually. Dr. Harry Benjamin, who's from Germany but practices in the United States and is a queer trans. A doctor for, for trans individuals during the 20th century here in the US talks about Hirschfeld being in his tanti magnesia, which means ant. Ant magnesia, you know, the feminine version of Magnus. Get up and out in, in the clubs. And I'm pretty upfront about, you know, as a journalist you learn very early all the best rumors come from the least reliable sources. So it's sort of hard to pin down. But there's no doubt that Hirschfeld was out and about in the scene. And to what extent he's a participant, that part's debatable. But he's definitely in the clubs, he's interviewing the drag performers. He goes to this gay men's weightlifting club in Berlin and writes about it in Berlin's Third Sex.
- [28:57]
Deep Acharya
Yeah, so I found, I found one of the most mind boggling sections of your book to be in chapter seven. Somebody's very detailed. Hirschfeld's computation of 43 million genders. So long before our current discourse, he was using this factorial equation that we already talked about to show how the perfect man or woman was really a very statistical impossibility. And he also highlight his work with Karl Baer, who wrote the first trans memoir, Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years. And so I'm wondering, how did Hirschfeld move the conversation from, let's say, perversion to sexual intermediates using this mathematical lens?
- [29:38]
Daniel Brook
Yeah, so the, I guess the work the equation is doing is, is showing that, you know, everyone is, it's is just, we're all just at different points on this balance, on this, in this kind of mix of masculinity and femininity. And therefore one ought not be prejudiced against or should accept those at other, at more extreme ends of the spectrum or at more, you know, or at more. Or more towards the middle of the spectrum, I guess you could say. So I think that's the work that's being done. He's also very, I think, very of our time in that he is encouraging his patients to write and even publish their trans narratives. Right. Their, the story of how they became aware of their trans identity and then the steps they, they took towards acceptance and transition. And there already there's this kind of cornucopia of narratives. So the the book Dit Transvestite and the Transvestites has 17 trans narratives of 17 patients, one of whom was assigned female at birth, 16 of whom were assigned male at birth. Which I guess probably shows you the kind of, in its own way, the gender prejudice of the era, even in this kind of sexually liberatory gender as a construct and a continuum structure. But some of them are very conventional or sort of the archetypal, I guess we would say. The archetypal. I was, I, I was born a boy and I always wanted to play with the dolls and my dad kept telling me I had to play with the toy soldiers and I wanted to play with my sister's dolls and I wanted to wear my, my mom's makeup and all of that. And then some of them are, you know, are honestly even hard to sort of categorize in, in, in today's terminology. There's one individual who says penetrate a woman while dressed in women's clothing. I mean, certainly we would put that under queer, but I don't know that we, I don't, I don't know how else we would categorize it. You know, it's not really trans exactly. And it's not even really homosexual. It's just, you know, like. And I think by, by giving all of these case studies, I think Herschel wants us to sort of throw up our hands and be like, okay, you know, everyone, people are like snowflakes. Everyone's a little different. And if everyone's a little different, then I'm a little different. And if I'm a little different, then I'm going to accept everyone else as being a little different too.
- [32:18]
Deep Acharya
In 1919, he opens this institute for sexual science in a former diplomat's mansion. And you say how, it's, how it wasn't really a clinic. It was a museum with a wall of sexual transitions and a world class collection of fetishes. So it had from dildos to a collection of boots donated by a fetishist. What was it like for a tourist to walk through these halls? And how did the institute's marriage bureau try to bring sex education to the so called normal masses?
- [32:49]
Daniel Brook
Yeah, so I mean, he, he builds this institute in the middle of Berlin and it's, it's a, it's a clinic, a psychological clinic. It's a surgical clinic where gender affirming surgery, some of the world's first gender affirming surgeries are performed. It's kind of a think tank, sort of like policy shop, where they try to figure out how to know, overturn paragraph 175 or organized for legal decriminalization of abortion. And then it's also a museum. It's invariably just called the Hirschfeld Museum. That's not what its name was. It was the institute, this, the galleries at the Institute for Sexual Science. But it's generally called the Hirschfeld Museum. And it has these kind of salacious exhibits like, you know, Japanese dildos or, or rope bondage materials or what have you. And that kind of, that's, that's what lures the tourists through the door. It becomes like the must do tourists. The must do thing, you know, you do in Berlin as a tourist is you go to the sex museum because it's something that you're not going to find at home. It also solves the problem of like in the city of nightlife, what do you do all day? And you know, it brings people in and then they're kind of, you know, these salacious exhibits bring them in, but then they're, they're inculcated with Hirschfeld's ideas. Like there's, there's work by gender non conforming artists that tries to explain that like gender is a continuum and you know, people's sex and gender can, can be disparate and, and, and also, you know, convince you that paragraph 175 should be overturned and abortion should be decriminalized and birth control should be permitted. And then they also do. There's also a lecture hall in the institute where they do these public programs, including like marriage counseling, where they're doing often very like rudimentary sex ed. You can ask questions. You can also submit these anonymous cards they have. There were over 10,000 anonymous cards sent. And they, you know, the questions can be as innocent as like, how can you have sex without making a baby? So they're doing like, they're sort of providing this sex education that the. Honestly, I'm sure Hirschfeld and the staff probably think the schools should be providing, but maybe aren't for the masses.
- [35:01]
Deep Acharya
So Hirschfeld also pioneered the use of mass media, co writing the world's first pro gay feature film. Different from the others in 1919. It starred Conrad White and featured a cameo by Hirschfeld himself giving a lecture on the screen. And you described these screenings where conservative groups released mice and threw stink bombs in the, the. So I'm wondering how did this film and the ensuing like, censorship battle turn him into a household name and a target for the rising Nazi movement?
- [35:35]
Daniel Brook
Yeah. So 1919. Yeah, just like very basic German history, right? Germany becomes a democracy for the first time in 1919. It's called the Weimar Republic. It's after their defeat in World War I. And in the initial years there is, you know, there's, there's, there's free speech, free press, really for the first time. Although it's actually remarkable, you should say, how much Herschel was able to publish before the Weimar Republic and get away with. And the, the new medium of film is exploding. And the first films are very, are, are really like just about the wonder of motion. The first film is, is shift change at a factory in France. It's just some workers walking out and some workers walking in. Other early films are like a hors developing or a train moving. But by World War I era, progressive film directors and producers are realizing that this can be a medium to sway public opinion. And Hirschfeld kind of gets in on the ground floor of this and actually does a series of films advocating for different reforms in the, in his sphere of, you know, human sexuality, like sort of decriminalization and social support for sex workers. He has a film called Prostitution. There's one about venereal disease and safe sex. And then there's this one, Anders Ossiandern, different from the others, which is a queer rights film. The screenplay is basically like a Romana clef version of his patient's suicide. So in the movie his actual patient was in the military. In the movie it's a concert violinist played by Conrad Veidt, who's outed and blackmailed and has all of his contracts, all his concerts get canceled and he takes pills to end his life. And then the final scene at the funeral, the younger generation is yelling at the older generation that his blood is on your hands because you allowed this terrible law to stay on the books. Paragraph 175. So yeah, so I mean, the idea is you will kind of go into the, you'll be the movie ticket buyer, you'll go in, maybe skeptical of queer rights, and you'll walk out and say, well, this is terrible. We, how can we. We're causing these black blackmail and suicide and all of these terrible social ills because of the silly law. And then. Sorry, the second part of your question was.
- [38:04]
Deep Acharya
Yeah, I was wondering how, how did, how did he become from like a household name to a target?
- [38:11]
Daniel Brook
Yeah, right. So there, okay, so there's an effort to ban the film. And then there is some backsliding on censorship and there begins to be this very complicated kind of state and city based censorship where each city and state in Germany gets to decide what can be shown in the theaters. And you do have fights about this, but again, no press is bad press. The movie stays in theaters in parts of Germany where it's allowed to be shown for a year. Everyone of course, wants to see it to make up their own mind. So again and again in Hirschfeld's life, really till the end when the Nazis are literally threatening his life and he has to leave the country. The controversy that's dogging his research and his work products are only generating more attention. And they're generally pretty good work products. I mean, if you read Verloten's third sex from 1904 were watched different from the others from 1919, which you can actually watch on Vimeo. Um, the Nazis tried to destroy every copy, but only destroyed most of. There's only. There are a few parts of the film that are completely lost, but there's enough of the film that you can kind of get it, get the sense of it. You can watch that yourself. Um, they're, they're pretty well made, you know, materials, and they're pretty convincing.
- [39:31]
Deep Acharya
So toward the end of his life, driven from Germany by the Hitler spook, Hirschfeld embarked on a global tour. And in Shanghai he made Li Xuetong, who became his partner and assistant. So this relationship seems to have provided the final piece of his grand unified theory of everyone. I'm wondering, how did his experiences in Asia and the Middle east lead him to coin the term anti racist and conclude that race was just as much a social construction as gender?
- [40:00]
Daniel Brook
Yeah, so we should say Herschel is actually in 1919, on the set of the difference from the others. He meets his first, a long term partner, Carl Giza, who, you know, in the American sense, they have an infraracial relationship. In the European sense, they have an interracial relationship in that Giza is Christian and Herschel's family is Jewish. Then he has a what in any, under any circ. Any racial system would be considered an interracial relationship. He enters into an interracial relationship with Li Xu Tong, who's a medical student from Hong Kong. Ethnic Chinese and Hirschfeld. They meet in Shanghai, where Hirschfeld is lecturing and Li Xiutong is enrolled in one of the med schools. And then they begin traveling the world together. And Hirschfeld can see how someone of East Asian physiognomy is treated even in, even in China. I mean literally in Shanghai there are clubs that are happy to take Hirschfeld, who's just literally off the boat, doesn't speak a word of Chinese never been to China before where he can be admitted at least you Tong, who's from a wealthy family in Hong Kong and speaks impeccable Mandarin, can't be admitted. And then they go to the Philippines which is a us A colony is probably the correct word for that era. And the border guards don't want to let Li Shu Tong in because of the US Chinese Exclusion Act. They said, well this man's Chinese and he's not permitted. So Hirschfeld is experiencing sort of through traveling the world, Liu Tong, he's experiencing a certain form of racism. He's also of course been driven from his homeland on these sensible racial grounds that he is not German because of his Jewish background and he never been German and can never be German, which is news to him because he's like very, he's almost, he's so German he created a scientific taxonomic taxonomy of sex kinks, the most German thing anyone could ever do. So, so yeah, he be, he, he's. And then he's also kind of wrapped up in, he's sort of enlisted into the anti colonial struggle in, in the Philippines against the us, in India against the British and is quite for that, for that era, remarkably open actually about his anti imperial views. He writes that, you know, we will one day view the holding of colonies the way we today view the holding of slaves. He's giving interviews in, in newspapers in, in China and India condemning, in China, you know, Shanghai being a quasi colonial city run by European powers and America and Japan at the time. Yeah, giving these anti imperial interviews and then he does ultimately, you know, he settles in France in exile and he, in his final work racism, sort of coins this term anti racist which is, which is a term that's kind of come back into use only and in recent years. And I think it's, I mean I imagine it's, it was coined for the same reason it was kind of recoined which is, it's like, it's a very sort of fundamentally clear way of stating what, you know, what, what the, what the position he's endorsing is.
- [43:36]
Deep Acharya
Finally, Daniel, your book addresses this collaboration of silence that followed his death in 1935. So I'm wondering why did his, even his allies, let's say like Freud, participate in this like erasure? And as we face new book bans and gender panics today, what does the Einstein of sex have to say to our 21st century binaries?
- [43:59]
Daniel Brook
Yeah, I would say I call Freud as frenemy. I mean they have obviously very fundamental disagreements about queerness but they are, you know, they both are supporters of liberal society against its fascist opponents. So basically, yeah, as I said, the Nazis kind of kept his memory alive, if only because he was this perfect. He was this queer, Jewish intellectual scientist, social democrat. You know, like, he was all of the things that they were opposed to. Sex researcher. So they. They kept him alive. And it was really. It was really the 1950s, actually. The victors of the war, both the US and the Soviet Union, go into a kind of homophobic crouch in the 1950s. That. That is quite different from more liberated pasts. If you actually look, if you research, you know, queer life after the Russian Revolution, as with the French Revolution, they decriminalized consensual sex between adults. The United States had a pretty like, utre, in some places, quite accepted queer life in the pre war, in the between the wars period. If you read a book like Gay in New York, it's one of the touchstones of that really detailing of both social world and public world of queerness in that era. So they both go into this kind of homophobic crouch and he gets kind of written out of history, including by people who should be his allies. For example, Peter Gay, who's actually. Was born Peter Froehlich in Germany, is a German Jewish Holocaust refugee and teaches at Yale, Puts out a book in 1968 called Weimar Culture, which is like the, you know, which is the kind of touchstone work for, you know, educated, popular audience on that whole concept. Doesn't mention queerness or Hirschfeld, which is a little bit like writing a book about America in the 1960s that doesn't address race or Vietnam. Right. It's a pretty glaring emptiness. And it's not like there's no way that Peter Gay didn't know about Hirschfeld or understand how central queerness was in all its manifestations to Weimar culture. He thought, you know, if I'm going to defend Weimar culture to an American audience in this era, I'm going to have to disappear a lot of that material or not highlight that material. So then we come down, you know, to today where. And I would say as shocked as anyone else is about where we're at today, this is not the world I thought I was dropping this book into. Yeah. Where we do, we have, you know, an active attempt by the federal government in the United States and many state governments to strip rights from queer people and particular trans people. And in a way that is. Were some subset of this political movement, you know, like fully Nazi in that it is fully an attempt to tear down a stigmatized group as a way to tear down democracy itself. And that's why, I mean, Hirschfeld's time is now.
- [47:08]
Deep Acharya
I know. And throughout the entire book, I was thinking about Peter Gay's book on Weimar culture, and I was thinking of a particular place to bring that book into conversation with yours, because I really think that I couldn't come up with any reason where his silence is befitting not talking about queerness in Weimar culture at all in that book. So the book is the Einstein of sex, Dr. Milano, visionary of Weimar Berlin. It's a vital recovery for a man whose ideas were a century ahead of their time. Daniel, thank you very much for joining us and for being a part of the New Books Network.
- [47:46]
Daniel Brook
Thank you so much for having me. Diva. I'm excited to bring the book to new audiences.
- [47:49]
Deep Acharya
Thank you. So that was Daniel Brook on the New Books Network. You can find his book through Norton. I'm your host. And join us next time for more deep dives into the books that shape our world. Thank you very much.