LGBTQ History: Gay Berlin
In the 1920s, the scene flourished in Berlin and the city established itself, though with interruptions, as a gay capital. Even though the city was struggling with financial woes after the First World War, a vibrant scene developed, mainly in the district of Schöneberg and Kreuzberg. The number of bars, clubs, groups and cabarets on offer at the time remains unsurpassed. There were more than 100 venues for homosexuals at the time. These included the famous Eldorado, the ladies’ dance hall Zur Manuela and the large balls put on by the various homosexual associations.
There were twenty-five to thirty separate homosexual German-language magazines 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.
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.
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.
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.
Male and female impersonators drew huge crowds at cabarets, circuses and variety theaters – 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.
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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