70 Facts About Magnus Hirschfeld

1.

Magnus Hirschfeld was targeted by Nazis for being Jewish and gay; he was beaten by activists in 1920, and in 1933 his was sacked and had its books burned by Nazis.

2.

Magnus Hirschfeld was forced into exile in France, where he died in 1935.

3.

Magnus Hirschfeld was born in Kolberg in Pomerania, in an Ashkenazi Jewish family, the son of highly regarded physician and Senior Medical Officer Hermann Magnus Hirschfeld.

4.

Magnus Hirschfeld became interested in gay rights because many of his gay patients took their own lives.

5.

Magnus Hirschfeld was struck by the number of his gay patients who had, and often found himself trying to give his patients a reason to live.

6.

Magnus Hirschfeld found a balance between practicing medicine and writing about his findings.

7.

In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee with the publisher Max Spohr, the lawyer Eduard Oberg, and the writer Franz Joseph von Bulow.

8.

Magnus Hirschfeld considered what would, in a later era, be described as "outing": forcing out of the closet some of the prominent and secretly homosexual lawmakers who had remained silent on the bill.

9.

Magnus Hirschfeld arranged for the bill to be reintroduced and, in the 1920s, it made some progress until the takeover of the Nazi Party ended all hope for any such reform.

10.

Magnus Hirschfeld prepared questionnaires that gay men could answer anonymously about homosexuality and suicide.

11.

Collating his results, Magnus Hirschfeld estimated that 3 out of every 100 gays committed suicide every year, that a quarter of gays had attempted suicide at some point in their lives and that the other three-quarters had had suicidal thoughts at some point.

12.

Magnus Hirschfeld used his evidence to argue that, under current social conditions in Germany, life was literally unbearable for homosexuals.

13.

Magnus Hirschfeld visited Cambridge University in 1905 to meet Wilde's son, Vyvyan Holland, who had changed his surname to avoid being associated with his father.

14.

Magnus Hirschfeld noted "the name Wilde" has, since his trial, sounded like "an indecent word, which causes homosexuals to blush with shame, women to avert their eyes, and normal men to be outraged".

15.

In 1905, Magnus Hirschfeld joined the, the feminist organization founded by Helene Stocker.

16.

Magnus Hirschfeld campaigned for the decriminalisation of abortion, and against policies that banned female teachers and civil servants from marrying or having children.

17.

The man, a former soldier and a veteran of what Magnus Hirschfeld called the in German Southwest Africa appeared to be suffering from what would now be considered post-traumatic stress disorder, saying that he had done terrible things in Southwest Africa, and could no longer live with himself.

18.

Magnus Hirschfeld argued there was no evidence that the Khoekoe women had abnormally large labia, whose supposed existence had fascinated so many Western anthropologists at the time, and that, other than being Black, the bodies of Khoekoe women were no different from German women.

19.

Magnus Hirschfeld wrote: "The differences appear minimal compared to what is shared" between Khoekoe and German women.

20.

Magnus Hirschfeld testified that he believed there was nothing wrong with Moltke.

21.

Magnus Hirschfeld overturned the verdict under the grounds that homosexuals "have the morals of dogs", and insisted that this verdict could not be allowed to stand.

22.

At the second trial, Magnus Hirschfeld again testified as an expert witness, but this time, he was much less certain than he had been at the first trial about Moltke's homosexuality.

23.

Magnus Hirschfeld had been threatened by the Prussian government with having his medical license revoked if he testified as an expert witness again along the same lines that he had at the first trial, and possibly prosecuted for violating Paragraph 175.

24.

The conclusion drawn by the German government was the opposite of the one that Magnus Hirschfeld wanted; the fact that prominent men like General von Moltke and Eulenburg were gay did not lead the government to repeal Paragraph 175 as Magnus Hirschfeld had hoped and, instead, the government decided that Paragraph 175 was being enforced with insufficient vigor, leading to a crackdown on homosexuals that was unprecedented and would not be exceeded until the Nazi era.

25.

In 1914, Magnus Hirschfeld was swept up by the national enthusiasm for the, as the sense of national solidarity was known where almost all Germans rallied to the Fatherland.

26.

Magnus Hirschfeld accused Britain of starting the war in 1914 "out of envy at the development and size of the German Empire".

27.

Magnus Hirschfeld expressed the opinion that nobody wanted to take responsibility for the war because its horrors were "superhuman in size".

28.

Magnus Hirschfeld declared that "it is not enough that the war ends with peace; it must end with reconciliation".

29.

In 1920, Magnus Hirschfeld was badly beaten by a group of activists who attacked him on the street; he was initially declared dead when the police arrived.

30.

Magnus Hirschfeld co-wrote and acted in the 1919 film, in which Conrad Veidt played one of the first homosexual characters ever written for cinema.

31.

Magnus Hirschfeld's career is destroyed and he is driven to suicide.

32.

In May 1919, when the film premiered in Berlin, the First World War was still a very fresh memory and German conservatives, who already hated Magnus Hirschfeld, seized upon his Francophile speech in the film praising France for legalizing homosexuality in 1792 as evidence that gay rights were "un-German".

33.

Under the more liberal atmosphere of the newly founded Weimar Republic, Magnus Hirschfeld purchased a villa not far from the building in Berlin for his new, which opened on 6 July 1919.

34.

Magnus Hirschfeld himself lived at the Institution on the second floor with his partner, Karl Giese, together with his sister Recha Tobias.

35.

Giese and Magnus Hirschfeld were a well-known couple in the gay scene in Berlin where Magnus Hirschfeld was popularly known as.

36.

Magnus Hirschfeld had coined the term transvestite in 1910 to describe what today would be called transgender people, and the institution became a haven for transgender people, where Magnus Hirschfeld offered them shelter from abuse, performed surgeries, and gave otherwise unemployable transgender people jobs, albeit of a menial type, mostly as "maids".

37.

The Institute and Magnus Hirschfeld's work are depicted in Rosa von Praunheim's feature film.

38.

Under the rule of Chancellor Heinrich Bruning and his successor, Franz von Papen, the state became increasingly hostile toward gay rights campaigners such as Magnus Hirschfeld, who began to spend more time abroad.

39.

Quite apart from the increased homophobia, Magnus Hirschfeld became involved in a bitter debate within the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, as the repeal bill championed by Muller made homosexual prostitution illegal, which badly divided the committee.

40.

Magnus Hirschfeld had always argued that "what is natural cannot be immoral" and, since homosexuality was in his view natural, it should be legal.

41.

In 1930, Magnus Hirschfeld predicted that there would be no future for people like himself in Germany, and he would have to move abroad.

42.

Magnus Hirschfeld realized that most Americans did not want to hear about his theory of homosexuality as natural.

43.

Aware of a strong xenophobic tendency in the United States, where foreigners seen as troublemakers were unwelcome, Magnus Hirschfeld tailored his message to American tastes.

44.

Magnus Hirschfeld added, he had seen signs that American men were now starting to develop their "romantic sides" as European men had long since done, and he had come to the United States to teach American men how to love their women properly.

45.

When Viereck objected that the US was in the middle of the Great Depression, Magnus Hirschfeld replied he was certain that United States would soon recover, thanks to the relentless drive of American men.

46.

At times, Magnus Hirschfeld returned to his European message, when he planned to deliver a talk at the bohemian Dill Pickle Club in Chicago on "homosexuality with beautiful revealing pictures", which was banned by the city as indecent.

47.

In San Francisco, Magnus Hirschfeld visited San Quentin prison to meet Thomas Mooney, whose belief in his innocence he proclaimed to the press afterward, and asked for his release.

48.

Magnus Hirschfeld had been invited to Japan by Keizo Dohi, a German-educated Japanese doctor who spoke fluent German and who worked at Magnus Hirschfeld's institute for a time in the 1920s.

49.

Magnus Hirschfeld become interested in the Kabuki theater, where the female characters are played by men.

50.

Magnus Hirschfeld noted that no one in Japan looked down on Kabuki actors who played female characters; on the contrary, they were popular figures with the public.

51.

Magnus Hirschfeld met a number of Japanese feminists, such as Shidzue Kato and Fusae Ichikawa, whom he praised for their efforts to give Japanese women the right to vote.

52.

Magnus Hirschfeld promised Tao that he would introduce him to German culture, saying he wanted to take him to a "Bavarian beer hall" to show him how German men drank.

53.

Magnus Hirschfeld's visit to the Palestine Mandate marked one of the few times when he publicly referred to his Jewishness saying, as a Jew, it was greatly moving to visit Jerusalem.

54.

In general, Magnus Hirschfeld was supportive of Zionism, but expressed concern about what he regarded as certain chauvinist tendencies in the Zionist movement and he deplored the adoption of Hebrew as the lingua franca saying, if only the Jews of Palestine spoke German rather than Hebrew, he would have stayed.

55.

In March 1932, Magnus Hirschfeld arrived in Athens, where he told journalists that, regardless of whether Hindenburg or Hitler won the presidential election that month, he probably would not return to Germany, as both men were equally homophobic.

56.

Less than four months after the Nazis took power, Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute was sacked.

57.

Magnus Hirschfeld stayed near Germany, hoping that he would be able to return to Berlin if the country's political situation improved.

58.

On his 65th birthday, 14 May 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld arrived in Paris, where he lived in a luxury apartment building on 24 Avenue Charles Floquet, facing the Champ de Mars.

59.

In 1934, Giese was involved in a dispute by a swimming pool that Magnus Hirschfeld called "trifling", but it led French authorities to expel him.

60.

Magnus Hirschfeld lived in a luxurious apartment building with a view of the sea across an enormous garden on the Promenade des Anglais.

61.

Unlike many who saw the ideology of the Nazi regime as an aberration and a retrogression from modernity, Magnus Hirschfeld insisted that it had deep roots, going back to the German Enlightenment in the 18th century, and it was a part of modernity rather than an aberration from it.

62.

In turn, Magnus Hirschfeld held the view that this pseudoscientific way of dividing humanity was the basis of Western thinking about modernity, with whites being praised as the "civilized" race in contrast to the other races, which were dismissed for their "barbarism"; such thinking was used to justify white supremacy.

63.

Magnus Hirschfeld argued against this way of seeing the world, writing "if it were practical, we should certainly do well to eradicate the use of the word 'race' as far as subdivisions of the human species are concerned; or if we do use it in this way, to put it into quote marks to show it is questionable".

64.

On his 67th birthday, 14 May 1935, Magnus Hirschfeld died of a heart attack in his apartment at the Gloria Mansions I building at 63 Promenade des Anglais in Nice.

65.

Magnus Hirschfeld's body was cremated, and the ashes interred in a simple tomb in the Caucade Cemetery in Nice.

66.

The upright headstone in gray granite is inset with a bronze bas-relief portrait of Magnus Hirschfeld in profile by German sculptor and decorative artist Arnold Zadikow, who like Magnus Hirschfeld was a native of the town of Kolberg.

67.

Since the late 20th century, researchers associated with the Magnus Hirschfeld Society have succeeded in tracking down previously dispersed and lost records and artifacts of Hirschfeld's life and work.

68.

Magnus Hirschfeld has been portrayed in a number of works of popular culture both during his lifetime and subsequently.

69.

Magnus Hirschfeld was a frequent target of caricatures in the popular press during his lifetime.

70.

Magnus Hirschfeld's works are listed in the following bibliography, which is extensive but not comprehensive:.