Justifier of homosexuals
Anthony Blond
MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD: A PIONEER IN SEXOLOGY by Charlotte Wolff
Quartet, £25 The married man who seduces the governess of his children remains free, as free as the countess who has a liaison with her maid. But Oscar Wilde, this genius of a writer who loves Lord Alfred Douglas with a passionate love, has been put into prison in Wand- sworth.
From Sappho and Socrates by Magnus
Hirschfeld.
In this pamphlet Hirschfeld establishes himself as the proponent and liberator of homosexuals. A German Jew, of which tribe Chaim Weizmann once said, `Ah yes, all the charm of the Germans and the modesty of the Jews' — Hirschfeld was actually a lovely fellow, as great in his day as Freud, with whom he quarrelled, and who could be quite nasty. (In fact Hirs- chfeld helped out Freud in a little matter of plagiarism and they admired each other at first but at a hint of criticism Freud attacked his former colleague with his customary ferocity as 'flabby, unappetising, incapable of learning anything' and Char- lotte Wolff attributes Hirschfeld's relative neglect — he is not in my Enc. Brit. — to the unforgiving Freud lobby).
Hirschfeld was triumphant in explaining and justfying homosexuals to the world, to themselves and to each other. The son of a much loved doctor whose statue in the spa of Koberg, Pomerania, was destroyed by the Nazis, Hirschfeld, who was loaded with talent and connections, had originally set up as a 'hydrotherapise (nature curer). He shot to fame and nailed his flag to the masthead of homosexuality by publishing the story of one of his patients, (at the latter's request), an officer 'forced to en- dure the tortures of a double life', who had shot himself through the head on the eve of his marriage. This true story hit a turn-of- the-century nerve and made Hirschfeld. He became an instant guru on a subject from which Krafft-Ebing had just raised the taboo but on which no one had spoken with such eloquence and understanding. He became, when in his thirties, a great campaigning humanitarian physician who could fill a lecture hall anywhere in the world, and enjoyed international 'cher maitre' status as the president and founder of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin and the World League for Sexual Reform, till the day he died. There were some hiccups — literal, because Magnus liked his magnums — and metaphorical on the way to fame, and, since he became an international bestselling author, a slice of fortune. Books about sexual anomalies and perversions don't sell too much anymore. The pioneers in sexology like Hirschfeld and Krafft-Ebing, who uncovered our sex- ual fantasies with such boyish enthusiasm, might be shaken by the ease with which they are, sometimes wearily, realised in the flesh and on video. Children talk casually about their parents being 'kinky', 'into leather' or 'bondage' without acknowledg- ing — how could they? — the anguish of their discovery in the clinics of Vienna and Berlin of the 1900s. Hirschfeld would have made a stout but slightly startled witness for the defence in the Trial of Oz — 'The Schoolkids' Issue'.
Obviously the greatest hiccup in Hirs- chfeld's career was the rise of Nazism to which philosophy, if one can so call it, the Institute of Sexual Science and all it stood for was anathema. Between the 6 and 10 May 1933 it was duly 'raped' with the complicity of two employees subverted by the Nazis. Hirschfeld was told about this horror by his lover and pupil Karl Giese in exile in Switzerland when he went to Ascona to join other exiles like Emil Ludwig. The news broke his German heart and two years later almost to the day another German writer, Hermann Kesten, records:
He passed by, supported by two colourful young men . . . he swayed a little . . . he told me how much he liked my books, and that he had wanted to tell me so for a long time. Then he turned round the corner to go home. At the entrance he fell down — dead.
Dr Charlotte Wolff, an old lady of, one senses, superior hauteur, has interviewed many of Hirschfeld's contemporaries con- cerned, like herself, about 'the neglect and rejection of his achievements, his theories in particular' and her most interesting informant is undoubtedly 'Dr L. E.'. The Nazis appreciated Hirschfeld privately, but denounced him publicly. The years before they came to power Rohm was sent as a patient and one of his friends told Dr L. E. that Rudolf Hess was a homosexual, well known in the clubs as `Schwarze Maria'. The same man said of Adolf Hitler, 'He is the most perverted of all of us. He is like a very soft woman, but now he makes great propaganda in heroic morale.'
Supposing the Party had, in the early days, sent their coprophile, monorchic, charismatic leader, an addict of patent medicines to the gentle, natural-healing, homosexual Jew. could Hirschfeld have `helped Hitler'? Could that iron will, which sublimated his repressions and darkened Germany, have been softened by psychology?
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