Who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Many of us look back on that time and imagine scenes from Bob Fosse’s Cabaret: maybe the delicate and almost alien beauty of Michael York, or the green-fingernailed and short-bobbed Liza Minnelli embodying the divinely decadent Sally Bowles, a cabaret singer living through the rise of the Nazis in a sleazy, glittery, ambisexual Berlin of nightclubs and fallen aristocrats and cheap flop-houses. The film was a smash, and the vision of Weimar Berlin it helped to cement in the popular imagination was not limited to the United States.
In divided Cold War Berlin, the museum guard and archivist Wolfgang Theis, also active in the Tunte or ‘sissy’ movement of effeminate radical gays, would dress in drag as Sally Bowles as he and other gays organized to create a museum archiving German queer life before, during, and after Weimar, one that still stands today. Theis was part of a movement of post-war radicals who transformed West German society. Post-war West Germany began as a deeply conservative place, governed by Konrad Adenauer’s Christian Democrats, who maintained frosty relationships with the Communist East and who depicted the Nazi era as a period of excess brought on by socialist spending and personal immorality.
In this way Weimar Berlin, for growing gay liberation movements in both Germany and around the world, came to embody a rich set of cultural anxieties, hopes, dreams, fears, usable and abusable pasts. Imagine, then, 1970s and 1980s progressive activists’ delight at rediscovering the career and prominence of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld: a sexologist who had participated in the 1919 revolution, run for the duration of the Weimar Republic a progressive centre for sexual research and homosexual and pro-trans advocacy, and advocated against racism. Not only that; he was Jewish, and because of his Jewishness had been a particular target of right-wing and Nazi activists. Hirschfeld became the national hero of the new movement for gay liberation, and institutions organizing around the history of Weimar understood him as the protagonist of a movement towards science and justice.
There were, however, darker figures lurking in the background of Weimar-era gay history. Hirschfeld was not, at the time, the movement’s undisputed leader: there were multiple strands of the homosexual emancipation movement, with conflicting goals and ideas, vastly different political affiliations and understandings, and shared blind spots. The alternatingly fascist and left-expressionist ‘masculinist’ movement emphasized a culture and heroic model of hypermasculine homosexuality; it was culturally nationalist, anti-feminist and often anti- Semitic. These were the Weimar gays most influenced by figures like Frederick the Great.
Trashy right-wing books – and even asides in well-respected texts like The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, in which the journalist William Shirer lets loose an astonishing tirade about several homosexual Nazis we will discuss in this chapter as ‘notorious homosexual perverts’ who ‘quarreled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their particular jealousies, can’ – have made it difficult to talk about associations between homosexuality and European fascism without giving credence to the conspiracy theories of bigots.1 Nevertheless, as we will discuss in this chapter, one very senior Nazi was in fact homo sexual, and his homosexuality became a heated subject of political debate. We will discuss the activist and publisher Friedrich Radszuweit, whose commercial empire formed the only Weimar-era mass gay movement – indeed, the first such movement in the world – but whose late-in-life determination to remain apolitical led him to seek rapprochement with the coming fascist threat. Even Hirschfeld’s own Scientific- Humanitarian Committee went through rifts and splits, with new scholarship reassessing the view of Hirschfeld as a hero fighting repression and instead understanding him as embodying a social consensus on sexuality in the Weimar-era combining progress for some with exclusion for others. Having given a speech that helped announce the social democratic German Revolution of 1918–19 – a revolution of compromise and contradiction, in which social democrats who had supported the war now claimed to herald its end and used far-right militias to murder Communists, and in which those far-right militias would never accept the legitimacy of democratic governance – Hirschfeld himself embodied many of the contradictions of the Weimar state.
The Weimar Republic was an unhappy compromise borne of a country humiliated in military defeat; that it lasted as long as it did points to a degree of strength. In retrospect it has been all too tempting for scholars to describe a doomed dance on the lip of the volcano; typically these analyses are accompanied by banal sentences about how the republic was opposed by antidemocratic forces on the right and left, as though Rosa Luxemburg’s ghost shared responsibility with Hitler and Hindenburg for the collapse of democracy, the invasion of Poland, and the mass murder of Jews, Sinti/Roma, political prisoners, the disabled, homosexuals, and others. Especially given how many of those political prisoners were themselves Communists, this historical analysis is perverse and wilfully ignorant. Instead, we should understand the republic as being buffeted by political and economic forces that were difficult, if not impossible, to control.
The 1918 revolution brought to power Social Democrats whose support for the just-lost First World War had discredited them among portions of their base. Additionally, they were hindered from governing by the near-unified opposition of centre-right parties, many of which preferred increasingly formalized cooperation with the far right to political rapprochement with the centre-left. Until 1929, this system functioned with Social Democrats, consistently the largest party, mostly agreeing to support centrist politicians to be the chancellor; the pressure of the economic crash of 1929 and the centre-right’s decision to enable the Nazis instead of standing with the democratic parties of the left, as we will see, helped bring the whole system down.
Ernst Röhm was born in Munich in 1887 and raised by Protestants in the predominantly Catholic region of Bavaria. A thick-necked man, he injured his nose in the First World War, giving him a pugnacious look. ‘It was always my heartfelt desire to be a soldier,’ he wrote in the foreword to his 1928 memoirs.2 For his bravery he was awarded an Iron Cross in June of 1916. The German Revolution of 1918–19 changed everything: for a military man like Röhm, imbued in the authoritarian culture of the protestant Junkers who ran the German military, the sudden influence of socialists, Jews, and other unworthy specimens represented a complete upset of the proper social order. ‘In February 1919 in Germany it was not easy to be a Nationalist,’ he would write in his memoirs, saying that only one Bavarian newspaper ‘had a manly approach’.3
Notable here is the collation of ‘nationalist’ with ‘manly’. In a pamphlet written in 1919, he decried the socialist Bavarian leader Kurt Eisner as ‘a foreigner’ and described him and other revolutionary leaders as having ‘contempt’ for their country.4 Along with many other members of the military class, Röhm joined a Freikorps militia in the years after the revolution. Early in the Weimar years, these militias were employed by the Social Democratic president of Germany, Friedrich Ebert, to overturn the Communist government in Munich in 1919, and to murder the Spartacist activists Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.5
These paramilitaries would eventually agglomerate and transform into the Sturmabteilung, or SA; and then, after conservatives and centrists enabled a Nazi assumption of power, they were superseded by the SS. Röhm joined the German Workers’ Party (which would become the Nazi Party) before Hitler, and helped devise one of the Nazis’ most dangerous political strategies. Despite their complete acquiescence to and service of the German capitalist class (who helped the Nazis gain power and were richly rewarded with fat, state-funded military contracts, a labour force banned from free association and organization, and eventually forced slave labour), the Nazis adopted a rhetorical strategy focused on the working class. They weren’t socialists, but they pretended to be: claiming to represent the ‘true’ interests of German workers against the evil influence of foreign intellectuals and urban elites.6 As a military officer and a paramilitary organizer, Röhm could provide both masses of ex-servicemen and the protection of local authorities in Bavaria. Both would prove crucial to the Nazi rise to power.7
In November of 1923, Röhm played a key role in the Beer Hall Putsch, the failed Nazi coup. At that time the leader of the Reich-skriegsflagge militia, he rented and occupied a central Munich beer hall near the beer hall where Hitler staged his attempt to take power. At Hitler’s command, he marched a force to the headquarters of the war ministry, which they then occupied for sixteen hours, at which time shots were exchanged, fourteen Nazis and four police officers died, and the putsch came to an end. Röhm and Hitler, along with nine others, were tried for treason the next February. Despite being found guilty, Röhm’s sentence was suspended; Hitler served only nine months, and was treated well enough in prison that he was able to dictate his memoirs while serving his sentence.
Only two months after the trial, Röhm was elected to the German parliament as a deputy for the National Socialist Freedom Party, a Nazi front organization formed after the first party was banned. In the following election that December, he lost his seat. He gave only one speech, focusing his time on developing the Frontbann, a paramilitary organization rivalling the SA. The Freikorps militias were rapidly turning into more coherent stormtrooper forces. In 1925, chafing at what he felt to be overly rule-oriented and moralistic leadership from Hitler, he resigned his party post and moved to Bolivia for two years.
By the mid-1920s, Röhm was describing himself in personal letters as ‘same-sex orientated’.8 He was not the only stormtrooper to be so inclined. Historian Laurie Marhoefer examines one remarkable essay that ran in the academic journal of Hirschfeld’s gay rights organization, the ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’, claiming to represent the viewpoint of an anonymous gay Nazi. Such a thing might seem a contradiction in terms, given the Nazis’ vicious homophobia. And yet, as Marhoefer writes, the anonymous stormtrooper ‘hated homosexuality’, which to him meant ‘male femininity, Marxism, and Judaism. Yet in his worldview, there were multiple queer subjectivities.’9 Public homosexuality and crossdressing were out; ‘masculine, discreet, manly Eros’ was on the other hand ‘wholly compatible’ with a Nazi racial consciousness.10 (Remember that when writing your Grindr profile!) This eroticism was not only something that could be reconciled with his fascism; as Marhoefer argues, it was ‘the foundation of it … Anonymous wrote that the hand of a Nazi militia man “can strike a blow but also caress” … From the barracks where discreet, manly caresses took place under cover of night, in the morning militia men marched forth to beat anti-fascists to death.’ There was, as the historian Andrew Wackerfuss has argued, a powerful collective association between male sexual and male military power.11 Stormtrooper bands exploited this association by promising and delivering homoerotic and homosocial experiences to their members (collective life, collective battle, collective showers, and so on) even as they violently denounced and murdered queer-identifying people.12
Both Marhoefer’s and Wackerfuss’s arguments are part of a broader scholarly reassessment of the sexual politics of the Weimar Republic. Departing from a historiography emphasizing the radicality of homosexual emancipation and other sexual freedom movements – think of the plot of the film Cabaret itself – Marhoefer instead describes a broad ‘Weimar consensus’ on sexual freedom of ‘a particular type … that liberated a majority of people while curtailing a disorderly minority’.13 As we will see later, that minority included (as it does today) sex workers and other marginalized people. Rather than being brave outcast voices, activists like Hirschfeld existed at the centre of society and used their influence to fight for a particular vision of sexual liberation.
One of these particular visions was an understanding of masculinist homosexuality that Claudia Bruns argues was a reaction to sexology’s description of the homosexual as a ‘feminized’ and therefore also (not least because many sexologists were Jewish) ‘Semitic’ man.14 Reacting against the idea that the homosexual was weak, ‘sick … socially useless’, these men sought to portray a revolutionary white- Aryan racial homoerotic and hypermascu-line bond as the source of purifying political and artistic power.15 Robert Deam Tobin writes that, with some exceptions, ‘most of the masculinists exhibited these anti- Semitic and misogynist inclinations’, understanding their heroic cultural model of hyper-masculine sexuality in opposition to Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld’s ‘sexual steps in-between’.16 Not all gay masculinists were Nazis: the movement unfolded across a strange spectrum from fascism to a kind of left-expressionist anarchy. Some masculinist figures, like the occultist painter and amateur philosopher Elisar von Kupffer, depicted their male-male utopia as populated by soft-bodied androgynes lounging in trees, a far cry from the kind of hard and impenetrable masculine body politic imagined both by fascism and by the nineteenth-century national liberal-ism from which it developed.
This worldview was linked to left-expressionism, an anti-liberal cultural movement arising from a young intelligentsia’s disappointment and disillusionment with the corrupt elites of early twentieth-century Europe. Angered by those elites’ betrayal of liberal ideas for economic advancement and their submission to feudal power, expressionists advocated for and created art that presented extreme and subjective emotional states, viewing themselves as part of a geistig (or spiritual) elite that would enact cultural transformation. In this Nietzschean vision, the will of the artist, unconstrained by old codes of law or morality, was a necessary disruptive force.
In any case, the majority of the Nazi Party never got on board with anything close to any of the various forms of masculinist political eros circulating in the Weimar Republic. Röhm, at least, may have seen himself as superior to his hetero clansmen; he was once, perhaps apocryphally, quoted as saying, ‘When they stand in the fields and bend down at their work so that you can see their behinds, that’s what he likes, especially when they’ve got big round ones. That’s Hitler’s sex life.’17 As for Röhm’s own sex life and his understanding of it, and his reconciliation of that sex life with his fascist politics, clues come in his attack, in his memoirs, on the ‘literary people’ who ‘never served in the field’ and could thus battle for ‘false morality’ far from the battlefield.18 Here he was describing the bourgeois Nazi theorists who, then as now, dream of the battlefield from the safety of their stylish offices.
While Röhm does not specifically mention sexuality here, much of the rhetoric is, as his biographer Eleanor Hancock points out, familiar to anyone who knows much about the homosexual discourses of the time. ‘An immoral man who achieves something is far more acceptable to me than a “morally upright” fellow who accomplishes nothing,’ he wrote. ‘Suicides of the best people speak only too eloquently here.’ Note the reference to morality and suicide, a common fate for men who had sex with men and were then blackmailed – common enough that such a story was the plot of Different from the Others, the first film about homosexuality to depict it in a neutral-to-positive light, featuring a cameo appearance by Magnus Hirschfeld. Röhm’s decrying of a ‘social order which replaces healthy recognition of natural processes and understanding with hypocrisy, lies, deceit, prudery, and misplaced indignation’ fits in nicely with the rhetoric of at least a certain kind of born-this-way tolerance politics regarding homosexuality. ‘If the state thinks it can regulate human instincts or divert them along other channels by force of law’, he went on, ‘that seems to me so amateurish and inappropriate that it does not surprise me to find that the lawmakers of this state are also the defenders of the social order.’19 This is strikingly similar to the rhetoric of the homosexual masculinists.
Correspondence between Röhm and the masculinist theorist Dr Karl-Günther Heimsoth confirms that Röhm intended these passages to support the reform of Paragraph 175 and the legalization of homosexuality.20 ‘I pride myself on being homosexual’, Röhm wrote in these letters, ‘but first really “discovered” this in 1924 … I am absolutely not unhappy about my inclination, even though it has brought considerable difficulties from time to time.’ Before then, he reported sex with women and men; since then, he wrote, ‘all women’ had become ‘an abomination to me, particularly those who pursue me with their love … On the other hand, I cling to my mother and sister with all my heart.’21 Eleanor Hancock describes these letters as evidence that Röhm had transformed his same-sex activities into a political sexuality. To paraphrase Foucault, his acts had become an identity; he had become a member, in his own view, of a species. Perhaps even more surprisingly, he named himself in the letters as a member of an organization called the League for Human Rights, a mass-movement homosexual rights organization run by a certain Friedrich Radszuweit.
Radszuweit was born in Königsberg, Germany, in 1876. After moving to Berlin in 1901, marrying Johanna Schneider and opening a women’s clothing shop (the more things change …), he became active in a movement called the Friendship League.22 While both Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee and masculinist publications like Der Eigene had existed before the 1918–19 revolution and the First World War, these movements were tiny and vanguardist. The Friendship League and its successors, peaking at nearly fifty thousand members, were the first mass-movement organizations towards homosexual emancipation.
Seeing commercial opportunity, Radszuweit split the Friendship League in 1923 and named his section the League for Human Rights. Through this League, he produced magazines for gay men, lesbians, and trans women that claimed high circulation numbers and were sold at newsstands. Unlike the masculinist magazines, which typically featured mystic cultists writing about Spirits and Eros, or Hirschfeld’s doctors droning on about scientific facts, his magazines contained frank, person-to-person discussion of sexuality and gender.23
One such magazine was called Das dritte Geschlecht (The Third Sex). Magnus Hirschfeld himself was, as the historian Susan Stryker argues, ‘a pioneering advocate for transgender people’ who worked with the police to develop certificates that trans people could use to avoid arrest for wearing clothing ‘incorrect’ for their sex. He also hired trans people to work at his Institute for Sexual Science, although often in menial roles.24 But in Hirschfeld’s scientific publications, trans people were spoken for and about: mostly described by cisgender male doctors, evaluated and photographed like scientific specimens. On at least some of the pages of The Third Sex, trans people regularly wrote about their own trans lives. Alongside scientific articles, short fiction and essays about daily life, by and for trans people, filled its pages. Various entities catering to trans people – parties and associations, and businesses including bars and restaurants – advertised in its pages. The magazine was available on newsstands and had a high subscriber base. Radszuweit’s magazines focusing on lesbian-identifying women were similarly written at least in part by the people whom they were about.25
Despite this potentially revolutionary aspect of Radszuweit’s organization and publishing empire, many of his magazines were still filled with reprinted and shared content, mostly written by men. In between advertisements for lesbian bars and books and personal ads for lonely ladies, one such article appeared in January of 1931 and inaugurated a much darker political stance on Radszuweit’s part.
The reasons why Radszuweit took such a turn after 1929 are best explained by the historian Laurie Marhoefer in their argument about the ‘Weimar Consensus’ on the regulation of sexuality. Again, the thesis is this: rather than understanding the Nazi rise to power as a mass public backlash against a permissive society gone mad, there was instead a broad consensus about sexuality in Weimar political life shared by a coalition of sexologists and politicians from left to centre, one which believed that ‘the state’s relationship to sexuality ought to be scientific and rational. In a new and democratic era, religious morality ought not to have a major influence on law and public policy.’26 Opposition to this consensus came from a coalition of conservative women’s movements, some moderate politicians, and right-wing conservatives and nationalists. The result of the battle between these factions was, in the functioning democracy of pre-1929 Weimar, ‘one of compromise … resulting in sexual liberation for some at the expense of others’.27
In 1925, a coalition of conservative parties attempted to add harsh prison sentences for male sex workers, as well as increasing penalties against abortion. The 1928 elections, however, brought in a Social Democratic prime minister for the first time in many years. By the fall of 1929, just before the crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, a Reichstag committee voted to repeal Paragraph 175, as part of a broader project to reform the penal code.28 The committee decided to replace it with a new provision, Paragraph 297, which stated that sex between two men was permitted, so long as both were over twenty-one, no one was pressured or influenced, and no money changed hands. Hirschfeld was ready to accept this compromise, which would have been among the most far-reaching reforms to date of sodomy laws in any country with such laws.
While he would have preferred a law setting homosexual sex on equal legal footing to heterosexual sex, he did often describe male sex workers as possessing ‘innate degeneration’ and described a ‘close relationship of male prostitution to crime’; drawing parallels between ‘degenerate’ male and ‘feebleminded’ female sex workers, Hirschfeld understood male sex workers as heterosexuals, outside his coalition of the homosexually inclined, and as blackmailers.29 This makes sense, given the connection in the mind of many middle-and upper-class homosexual men between sex work and blackmail, even if it is doubtful that it was true.
Given the illegality of same-sex contact, working-class men who engaged in sex work often blackmailed middle- and upper-class clients. For the latter group of men, the proposed legal change would have done a world of good: protecting them from prosecution for anything that wouldn’t have made the sex workers equally liable. In addition, the proposed legal change would have drawn a line between more and less respectable iterations of homosexual sex.
This was bitterly opposed by two of Hirschfeld’s colleagues in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Kurt Hiller and Richard Linsert. Both committed Communists (Hirschfeld was not a member of a political party but generally aligned himself with the Social Democrats), they also both had intimate histories of entanglement with sex work. Hiller, who like Hirschfeld was Jewish, was a regular patron of sex workers, understanding his love for men as best expressed in sexless bonds of devotion and his animal instincts as best expressed with male sex workers.30 In a 1928 speech to the World League for Sexual Reform, he denounced the Communist critic Henri Barbusse, who had inaugurated a trend in Communist thinking that regarded homosexuality as a kind of bourgeois decadence and implied links between homosexuality and Fascism.31
Linsert, on the other hand, had begun his activist career in the Munich branch of the Friendship League before Radszuweit had taken over; dedicated to mass action, he was an enthusiastic member of the German Communist Party. Since the mid- 1920s he had been engaged in campaigns to prevent the further criminalization of sex work between men, going even further than contemporary socialist feminist critics to argue for the legalization of sex work even as he advocated for increased welfare programs and social supports to ensure that no one was forced into sex work.32 Linsert and Hiller’s pro–sex work stance was unusual in the movement and became the foundation of a fast, chaste friendship.
When the 1929 legal reform proposals rolled around, they were supported by a broad range of parties, including the Social Democrats and the chairman of the penal code reform committee, the elderly moderate jurist Wilhelm Kahl.33 Kahl couched his support in starkly homophobic terms, arguing that homosexuality should remain both morally and legally condemned but that the legal reform enabled a focus on homosexual prostitution, which was its worst manifestation. Laurie Marhoefer understands this coalition as reflecting ‘a growing consensus in public policy … that certain types of immorality were tolerable so long as they remained under the public eye’.34
This reformist attitude understood public policy as something that addressed the health of society as a whole, and appeared in Hirschfeld’s own work as well (as well as that of other Progressive Era reformers across Europe and the United States). It also often went hand in hand with eugenics. Approximately five weeks after the revised law passed committee, the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee voted to endorse a proposal by Linsert and Hiller regarding the change in the law, a proposal for the Committee to oppose the change. Referring to the proposal as ‘one step forward and two steps backward’, the Committee noted that the majority of arrests under Paragraph 175 were related to sex work. At this same meeting, Hirschfeld resigned as the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s leader, although he remained the leader of the Institute for Sexual Science. It was widely understood (by Radszuweit, among others) that Hirschfeld had been forced to resign due to a conflict about expert testimony in front of the penal reform committee.35 Hirschfeld had, at least, been friendlier to the proposed reform, seeing it as a potential step in the right direction.
All of this ended with the 1930 elections, when the previously marginal Nazis increased their seats from 12 to 107, coming in second behind the Social Democrats and rendering the country even more difficult to govern. In this climate of collapsing democracy, Radszuweit turned far-right. In an article, he wrote, ‘We do not believe that even the National Socialists will proceed so rigorously against homosexuals as they announced before the September 1930 elections. Anyone who constantly reads the National Socialist newspapers, especially the “Völkischer Beobachter”, will sometimes find some very reasonable articles on homosexuality. These newspapers generally do not condemn homosexuals as social pariahs, but on the whole only want to go after those Jews [das Judentum] (especially Dr Magnus Hirschfeld) who wish to, in an ugly way … drag people’s sex lives into the public.’36 Willing to collaborate with and reproduce anti-Semitic attacks on Hirschfeld, Radszuweit had crossed a dangerous political Rubicon.
In the article, Radszuweit argued that even right-wing parties could be trusted to come around on the homosexual question:
We do not want to argue here and to justify what morality and so-called custom are, we only want to make the point that everything can be changed over the course of time. Moral concepts are different today than they were a hundred years ago. This is even acknowledged by right-wing circles … the vast majority of homosexual men of Germany do not intend to publicly display their relations, and would never have thought of creating a homosexual movement if the legislators were not so irrational … The homosexual men of Germany are of the opinion that one should not talk about these things at all, and that no one is concerned with the way in which two men, by their free will, and by mutual consent, have sexual intercourse in their secret chamber.37
This is rhetoric that should be familiar to anyone who has engaged with the mainstream respectability politics of gay rights movements. While a more developed analysis of sexuality (like the one we are proposing in this book) reveals otherwise, this line has always been popular for several reasons. It binds white queers to whiteness and (especially) male queers to maleness. And it feels safe: even if proponents of this rhetoric would rather not be governed by people they fear hate them, they think that declaring themselves non-threatening to far-right forces (or even allying with them) will somehow make them safer. The reality, of course, is that this position fails. Most importantly, it fails in solidarity with the marginalized, and it even fails at keeping its proponents safe.
But Radszuweit continued: later that year, in an article in his Freundschaftsblatt newsletter so approving of the Nazis it inspired the mainstream centrist paper Die Welt to cover it under the headline ‘The Third Gender Welcomes the Third Reich’, Radszuweit claimed that the presence of homosexuals such as Röhm proved Nazi leaders were not personally homophobic, and that Hitler fit into a line of great manly leaders, many of whom were homosexual.38 The article, structured as an open letter, praised ‘Herr Hitler’s’ focus on ‘political issues’ rather than ‘sexual questions’, offering to ‘inform’ him in a ‘non-partisan’ way about ‘the prevalence of homosexuality’.39
It presented a list of ‘reasonable’ requests, including equalizing the age of consent for homo- and heterosexual sex, allowing same-sex sexual contact in private between consenting adults, and strengthening laws against prostitution and intergenerational sex. In defences of the article published in later issues of Die Freundin, Radszuweit acknowledged that the ‘Hitler camp’ created anti-homosexual ‘propaganda’, but argued that the names of homosexuals in the Nazi Party should be kept secret and that their presence meant the party, if it assumed power, would not seriously prosecute what we might now call ‘heteronormative homosexuals’.40 Radszuweit, as the publisher of widely circulated newsletters of a genuinely mass-movement organization, had the opportunity to mobilize his not-insignificant forces against the rise of fascism, and refused. Instead, he chose to collaborate with anti-Semitic rhetoric, denounce the most outrageous fascist statements in mild terms, and hope for accommodations and concessions once the Nazis took power.
But how did Röhm’s sexuality become the subject of public conversation? That it was being discussed through a very thin veil of secrecy in the pages of Radszuweit’s mass-market gay magazines is evidence that it was very much a part of gossip circles. Radszuweit did not ever reveal in one of his publications that Röhm was a member of the Friendship League, but Röhm’s indiscretions had begun to be a matter of more public record and interest. Eleanor Hancock suggests that Radszuweit’s arguments may even have been informed by conversation with Röhm; while we have not seen historical evidence of correspondence between Röhm and Radszuweit, we could potentially read the confidence with which Radszuweit thought he could speak directly to Hitler as part of an effort to use Röhm as a potential connection between the ‘third sex’ and the ‘Third Reich’. In any case, after Röhm’s return from Bolivia and his resumption of Nazi activity in 1930 to lead the united paramilitary force known as the SA, he was seen spending time at the Eldorado nightclub, one of those glittery Schöneberg drag bars frequented by Christopher Isherwood and the other famed anglophone chroniclers of Weimar Berlin’s queer undergrounds, and even felt so confident as to file a police report when a man he had slept with attempted blackmail.41
The Nazis were, at the time, a violently homophobic political party. Answering a questionnaire that the homosexual masculinist Adolf Brand put to various political parties in 1928, the Nazi response read, in part, ‘Anyone who even thinks of homosexual love is our enemy. We reject anything which emasculates our people and makes it a plaything for our enemies, for we know that life is a fight and it’s madness to think that men will ever embrace fraternally.’42 While Röhm had claimed in his letters to Karl-Gunther Heimsoth that his Nazi colleagues knew of his sexuality and tolerated it, this seems to have been a more complicated story. Laurie Marhoefer calls this attitude ‘self-delusion’, pointing out that in Goebbels’s diary of 1931, an entry read: ‘Severe attack on Röhm because of 175 [a reference to the anti-sodomy statute] … Is this supposed to be true?’43 His position in the party relied on Hitler’s support and trust – earned through effective management of the often unruly and conflicting SA paramilitaries – connections in the German army, and a loyalty confirmed in the 1923 putsch.
So certain leading Nazis – including Goebbels, in his diary – sharpened their knives when, in the spring of 1932, the Munich Post, a newspaper which backed the Social Democrats, began publishing splashy articles about Röhm’s sexual proclivities. While the Social Democrats had been among the primary supporters of the reform of Paragraph 175, including a famous 1898 speech by August Bebel in the Bundestag, they were also not above using homosexuality scandals to target their political opponents. The theory was that exposing the Nazi’s double standards – violently opposing reforms to the legal code supported by the Social Democrats while tolerating homosexuality in their highest echelons – would destroy the party’s image among socially conservative working-class voters, to whom the SPD targeted newspapers and leaflets claiming that Hitler himself was involved in homosexual affairs, and asking, ‘Are such people – they can hardly be called men – renewers of the Reich? Are they the revivers of our youth?’44
In May of 1932, Röhm’s deputy and rumoured lover Edmund Heines attacked and beat the Social Democratic writer Helmuth Klotz in the Reichstag canteen, accusing him of falsifying excerpts from Röhm’s letters that had been published in the Munich Post and in various SPD leaflets; after the police broke up the fight they were surrounded by a crowd of Nazi deputies who beat Klotz nearly to death.45 The ongoing session of Parliament was suspended. Clearly, senior Nazis were extremely worried about the rumours and their potential effect on upcoming elections. Hitler himself ignored the rumours. In March of 1932, before the Reichstag beatings but just as the scandal was breaking, Hitler had won 30 percent of the vote in the first round of the presidential election. In July’s parliamentary elections, after months of the scandal and propagandizing about it, the Nazis received just over 37 percent of the vote. Unlike previous gay sex scandals before the First World War, which had galvanized public opinion against the monarchy even as they both reified phobic attitudes about homosexuality and gave the evolving homosexual emancipation movement more public visibility, this scandal was unsuccessful.
In April of 1932, Friedrich Radszuweit died of tuberculosis. In the issue of Blätter für Menschenrecht that memorialized his death, his lover Martin, whom he adopted as his son so that he could inherit the organization and firm, remembered a survey Friedrich had conducted ‘in times of political peace’. He had sent 50,000 questionnaires about politics to his members, of which just over 37,000 were returned. The results showed that of the approximately 31,000 members who stated their affiliation with a political party, just over half belonged to parties of the (at least nominally) Marxist left, with the rest approximately evenly divided between the centre and the right. Nevertheless, Radszuweit used this survey to prove a different point: that homosexuality was essentially apolitical, the movement ‘based solely on the grounds of law and human understanding’.46 Friedrich had met Martin when he was a member of the Hitler Youth, battling Communists on the street. Perhaps Martin had been drawn into the Youth by the homoerotic masculine love described by the anonymous stormtrooper in his article in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’s newsletter.
In the November 1932 elections, the Nazis lost seats, this time receiving 33 percent of the vote. Nonetheless, on 19 November, nineteen leaders of industry and banking sent a letter to President Hindenburg urging him to name Hitler as chancellor. Conservatives thought Hitler and the Nazis could be tamed, centrists thought the German state too strong to be overwhelmed by the Nazis, whom they considered thuggish amateurs, albeit thuggish amateurs potentially useful when it came to putting down the Communist threat.
After the Reichstag Fire on 27 February 1933, elections took place that were neither free nor fair. Immediately afterwards, centrist and conservative parliamentarians signed the Enabling Act, making Hitler essentially a dictator by the end of March 1933. On 6 May 1933, members of the SA and the Hitler Youth stormed the library and archives of Hirschfeld’s Institute, brought the books and documents to a public square next to the State Opera in the centre of Berlin, and burned them.
It was in the context of having lost control of his own political organization, which in part owed to the radicals’ refusal to accept the ‘Weimar compromise’, as well as the sudden explosion in popularity of the National Socialists after the 1929 economic crash, that Hirschfeld decided to embark on his lecture tour of the United States. He began in New York, lecturing at the Labor Temple, having tea with Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and meeting with Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger.47 He then travelled west, meeting with doctors and researchers who had emigrated to the United States throughout the 1920s, including Harry Benjamin, a researcher and pioneering doctor who, like Hirschfeld, promoted a ‘scientific’ understanding of trans people and bodies and became by the 1950s the United States’ main medical authority on transsexuality.48 Benjamin had helped organize Hirschfeld’s US leg, and ended up collaborating with transgender people to create some of the first standards of medical care for trans people in the United States, methods influenced by Hirschfeld’s approach in 1930s Berlin but which had evolved from Hirschfeld’s concept of ‘sexual steps in between’ towards a concept of ‘gender dysphoria’ that required medical treatment. Some of Benjamin’s patients and collaborators considered this model and its attendant standards of care to be sympathetic and helpful in the context of phobic and discriminatory medical systems. They, as well as Hirschfeld’s model and standards of care, have also come under sustained criticism from transgender critics as racist, pathologizing, medicalizing, discriminatory, and limited in their scope.49
By March of 1931 Hirschfeld had reached San Francisco, where he enthusiastically met with the eugenicist Paul Popenoe. Popenoe was known as the founder of marriage counselling in the United States, a topic that Hirschfeld made the subject of many of his lectures; but he was also an advocate for the compulsory sterilization of mentally ill and disabled people, the editor of a journal focusing on eugenics and social hygiene, an advocate for the segregation of ‘waste humanity’ to concentration camps, and a firm believer in the racial inferiority of Black people. Hirschfeld himself had sometimes advocated for the sterilization and castration of homo- and transsexual people and enthusiastically corresponded with the Austrian doctor Eugen Steinach, who believed that implanting ‘heterosexual’ testicles could ‘cure’ male homosexuality.
After this meeting and these lectures, Hirschfeld decided, based both on his own desire to travel and on the political climate in Germany, to delay his return to Europe by travelling through Asia. He had long been fascinated by the sexual and gender practices of non-Western cultures, as well as being an enthusiastic proponent of international cooperation and exchange between researchers. Ethnological study had always been important to his research: sexual ethnology represented one of the main research departments at his Institute for Sexual Science.50
Like many other sexologists who were interested in non-white others, Hirschfeld’s fascination was doubled. Sometimes he wrote of the sex-gender systems of other places and cultures as a breath of fresh air, a radically different model of sexual and cultural life that could demonstrate the fragility and constructed nature of European understandings of sexual and cultural life. At other times, he participated in modern ethnographic discourse’s construction of the ‘primitive’ other as a kind of people beyond time, whose practices provided a view into Europeans’ own past.51
Upon his arrival in Shanghai, the sixty-three-year-old Hirschfeld found not only ‘exotic’ cultures to marvel at but also picked up a new student and lover, Li Shiu Tong. While Hirschfeld only stayed in Shanghai for a few days, when he left, Tong went with him, and remained by his side for the rest of his life. Together they travelled through Indonesia, where Hirschfeld was fascinated by phallic cults and ancient temples; they met with Jawaharlal Nehru in India and discussed decolonization. While Hirschfeld understood himself to be anti-racist (he would write a book about racism after the Nazis assumed power in Germany), his earlier silences on Germany’s colonial crimes and the racial assumptions baked into his work are deeply troubling. Heike Bauer analyses his late-life work on race as a belated response to his experiences with German colonialism: while Hirschfeld did not directly participate in colonial projects, she notes, his archives, funding, the conditions in which he practised, the responses to and uses of his work, and the ideas with which he was working were all profoundly shaped by the context of German colonialism.52
Back in Germany in late 1932, Hitler was busy consolidating power. There was significant disagreement within the Nazi movement about the future of National Socialist politics after conservatives had enabled their rise to power. Some – like Röhm and Goebbels – advocated for a ‘second revolution’ that would overturn the right-wing institutions like the army, the aristocracy, and finance that had enabled the Nazi rise to power and the destruction of labour and the Left.53 Others in the movement, Hitler included, understood the ‘socialism’ part of national socialism as having been a ruse: a marketing ploy to get the working class on board with what they understood to be a fundamentally reactionary political program.
Röhm described the 2 million stormtroopers (this was twenty times the number of troops in the official army) as ‘the incorruptible guarantors of the fulfillment of the German revolution’, and conservative Nazis as ‘Philistines’ who might themselves need to be opposed.54 Hitler, meanwhile, relied on economic advice from baronial industrialists like Gustav Krupp, Fritz Thyssen, and Kurt Schmitt, who was the director of Allianz, a major insurance firm.55
If Hitler understood the revolution as having been only about political power rather than economic transformation, and saw the stormtrooper armies as a brute force for achieving that mission, Röhm instead understood those armies, in ways that were often startlingly coherent with masculinist homosexual ideology, as a crucible of revolution, a ‘people’s army’ that could overcome the old hierarchies and enact a kind of permanent fascist revolution.56 While Hitler publicly made Röhm a member of the Cabinet as 1933 drew to a close, and praised him warmly in letters that were published in Nazi newspapers, behind the scenes he was reassuring German army leaders that their place was safe in the nation’s rigid hierarchies.
When Röhm proposed to the Cabinet in February of 1934 that the SA be transformed into the core of a newly unified defence branch under his control, the officers – and the ailing Hindenburg – revolted. Tales of homosexuality began once again to swirl around Berlin. General Walter von Brauchitsch later testified that ‘German rearmament was too serious and difficult a business to permit the participation of speculators, drunkards, and homosexuals’.57 Hitler agreed in private meetings with military higher-ups to suppress Röhm, the permanent revolution, and the stormtroopers in exchange for being made head of state when Hindenburg died.
That June, Hitler made one more attempt to talk his old friend Röhm down from his position. As matters escalated and instability threatened to break out, Hitler came close to being removed from power by Hindenburg and the army. This was the final straw, and Hitler, on 30 June, declaring that there had been a seemingly fictitious plot against him and the state, declared war on his own ranks. The resulting purge, known as the Night of the Long Knives, lasted three days, during which the more loyal SS and Gestapo forces executed Röhm, other SA leaders, the more revolutionary Nazi Gregor Strasser, and several prominent conservatives. Röhm was dragged from his bed and taken to Stadelheim Prison. At one point, two days into the purge, he was handed a pistol and offered the chance to kill himself. ‘If I am to be killed’, he reportedly said, ‘let Adolf do it himself.’58 Two SA officers then stepped into his cell and fired at Röhm point-blank.
Betrayed by his former friend, Röhm’s life came to a bloody end. Röhm, Heines, and other leading SA members were publicly accused of moral degeneracy, homosexuality, and treasonous alliance with foreign powers. Suitably impressed, the army and other conservative forces relaxed their objections to the Nazi takeover. When Hindenburg died in August, Hitler was named president as well as Chancellor, and the Nazi takeover was complete.
Martin Radszuweit, Hitler Youth brawler and masculinist homosexual, did not live to see the betrayal of the elements of National Socialism with which he more likely identified himself. He died of unknown causes in 1933, not long after his old lover. A document from June of 1933, the final document in the file of the League for Human Rights at Berlin’s Schwules Museum, reads: ‘The liquidation has ended. Heil Hitler!’59
The League’s cautious refusal to take a stand on the crucial issues of its day, its kind words about Hitler, its collaboration with poisonous anti-Semitism, bought it exactly no protection when the Nazi regime set its murderous sights on LGBT people and institutions. Adolf Brand, leading intellectual light of the masculinist movement, managed to survive the Nazi rise to power. The war, however, he could not survive: he died in an Allied raid in April of 1945, less than a month before it came to an end. If some gay Nazis had tried to reconcile far-right politics and homosexuality, the Nazi movement in power proved to be the most murderously anti-queer state regime in recorded human history.
Hirschfeld, at the end of his world tour, settled in the south of France and sent for Karl Giese, his long-time secretary and archivist, who joined Hirschfeld and Li in a three-way relationship. When Hirschfeld died of a stroke in 1935, Giese and Li Shiu Tong were his heirs. Giese committed suicide before that decade was out, and Li returned to China during the war and dropped off the face of the Earth. Archivists and activists from the post- 1968 West German gay liberation movement, led by Hirschfeld scholar and biographer Ralf Dose, began searching for more information about Hirschfeld and his institute and library. They were told that everything was destroyed and burned – but kept searching.
In 1993, Adam Smith, who worked in the garbage room of his building in Vancouver, found there a few old leather suitcases: inside, a death mask from someone he’d never heard of named Magnus Hirschfeld, and some papers. He put the suitcases in his attic. Years later, Dose found a Usenet post by Smith and contacted him, and the mask and documents rejoined the historical record. Li had carried the suitcases with him back to Hong Kong and finally to Canada when his family moved there later in the twentieth century.60
So who are the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin? Were they the ambisexual performance freaks whose audacious and aggressive sexuality and playful confusion of gender norms triggered an entire society into fascism, as though the Nazis were an allergic reaction? Or were they people like Ernst Röhm, whose worship of masculine vitality might remind you of some Grindr profiles you’ve seen – maybe your own – and who followed that impulse towards lifting fascists to power? Were they people like Friedrich Radszuweit, cautious and apolitical men who decided to stand back and stand by while fascism gained steam? Were they people like Hirschfeld, complicated and ambivalent men with deep reservoirs of idealism, knowledge, and compassion who were limited by their blind spots, shaped by and shaping racist and eugenic discourses, and often willing to accept rights for some at the expense of others?
‘Hirschfeld is coming, Hirschfeld is coming,’ ran one wry cabaret song gently mocking the good doctor’s writings on sexuality. ‘Everyone runs away! He can find something hidden in everything.’61 Weimer Berlin is like that for queers: we can find something to celebrate and ally with, but maybe it’s better, in the longer term, to look for the things that are hidden, that cause discomfort and pain, the ghosts of a past that refuses to be past.