The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture

Sexuality Studies

by Heike Bauer

Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin’s Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century.

Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence—including persecution, death and suicide—shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism.

The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence.

Genres: History, LGBT, Queer, Nonfiction, Germany, Research, German Literature

230 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2017

Reviews

[Sara G · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now, this is a good book on Hirschfeld. It focuses on the important parts and it treats him with nuance and understanding, while also critiquing the shortcomings of his work.

[Wendy Rouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heike Bauer explores the significance of Magnus Hirschfeld and his work in the early twentieth century on behalf of the homosexual community in Berlin and around the world. Through his work with the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, now widely considered the first LGBT rights organization, Hirschfeld advocated for full and equal rights of homosexuals and an end to homophobia. Bauer's work however complicates the simple triumphant and progressive retelling of the LGBT past to consider how Hirschfeld's own experiences and the collective queer experience with death, suicide and violence shaped modern queer history.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh. Like most things in this AMST / neoFoucaultian turn it tries to do far too much. Too committed to making a political statement today at the expense investigating the (im)possibility of engaging his patients 'on their own terms' (& the logics embedded in that framing). Sex between Body and Mind by Katie Sutton is much better on this topic

[V A]

“Hirschfeld points out that such self-inflicted deaths are relatively common among female and male urnings, arguing that these < couples who kill themselves together… prefer togetherness in death to loneliness in life, unity in dying to a socially and legally enforced separation in life.>”

[graceful · Rating 3 out of 5]

now this was GOOD.

[Wendy Rouse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heike Bauer explores the significance of Magnus Hirschfeld and his work in the early twentieth century on behalf of the homosexual community in Berlin and around the world. Through his work with the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, now widely considered the first LGBT rights organization, Hirschfeld advocated for full and equal rights of homosexuals and an end to homophobia. Bauer's work however complicates the simple triumphant and progressive retelling of the LGBT past to consider how Hirschfeld's own experiences and the collective queer experience with death, suicide and violence shaped modern queer history.