Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity

by Robert Beachy

Overview

Winner of Randy Shilts Award

In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307272102
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/18/2014
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Robert Beachy was trained as a German historian at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1998. He is presently associate professor of history at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

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• Chapter One •
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Excerpted from "Gay Berlin"
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Copyright © 2014 Robert Beachy.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Chapter 1 The German Invention of Homosexuality 3

Chapter 2 Policing Homosexuality in Berlin 42

Chapter 3 The First Homosexual Rights Movement and the Struggle to Shape Identity 85

Chapter 4 The Eulenburg Scandal and the Politics of Outing 120

Chapter 5 Hans Blüher, the Wandervogel Movement, and the Männerbund 140

Chapter 6 Weimar Sexual Reform and the Institute for Sexual Science 160

Chapter 7 Sex Tourism and Male Prostitution in Weimar Berlin 187

Chapter 8 Weimar Politics and the Struggle for Legal Reform 220

Epilogue 241

Acknowledgments 249

Notes 251

Sources and Bibliography 275

Index 297

Editorial Reviews

Under the Reich, homosexual men were subjected to persecution, deemed decadent misfits who could be "cured" only by harsh "education"…Robert Beachy's excellent and richly documented new book…merely touches on these horrors. Instead, he takes the reader to the other end of the spectrum of opinion—that homosexuality is and has always been a sexual orientation fixed from birth, that same-sex love is as normal as heterosexuality, a condition not amenable to treatment but rather an endowment of nature that should be respected as part of a person's identity. No less important, Beachy…locates the origins of this view of human sexuality in Germany in the mid-19th century, in a culture that also produced modern scientific sexological research. His book carefully evaluates the arguments of a number of individuals in this period who wrote about the subject and agitated for the abolition of the widespread legal discriminations of the time.

The New York Times Book Review - V. R. Berghahn

★ 09/29/2014
History professor Beachy’s purpose, “to historicize the invention of the homosexual and place this sexual identity firmly within the German milieu in which it appeared,” is achieved in this erudite work that traces the emergence of gay identity and sexual orientation to German—specifically Berlin—culture at the turn of the 20th century. Beachy relates the contributions of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, “arguably the first man in modern history to acknowledge openly his sexual attraction to other men”; Richard von Kraft-Ebbing, a leading sexologist in the late 19th century; and Karl Kertbeny, who is credited with coining the neologism Homosexualität (homosexuality) in the mid-19th century. Particular attention is paid to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, whose “true genius” was “combining almost seamlessly his science and activism.” Beachy also covers the activities of Berlin- based organizations such as the Scientific- Humanitarian Committee, the world’s first homosexual rights organization. This lucidly written narrative includes enough spice (accounts of scandals, secret identities, and crimes) to draw in a general readership. However, Beachy’s deeply researched, carefully structured book is foremost an impressive piece of scholarship. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2014-10-09
An elucidating, somewhat startling study of how early German tolerance and liberalism encouraged homosexual expression.Anti-sodomy laws were unevenly applied in the German confederation of states before imperial unification in 1871. In this singular, persuasive work, Beachy (Goucher Coll.; Soul of Commerce: Credit, Property, and Politics in Leipzig, 1750-1840, 2005, etc.) traces the legal and medical precedents to increased tolerance of same-sex love, especially in Berlin before 1933. Despite the recommendation by medical experts against the archaic anti-sodomy statue (they argued that "male-male sexual relations" were "no more injurious than other forms [of illicit sexuality]"), the law was upheld in the Prussian-led unification, largely due to a horrific assault in the Invalidenpark, which swayed public opinion. Nonetheless, a lawyer who had been advocating for same-sex rights through his writings, first anonymously and under threat of scandal, then by his real name, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, momentously addressed the Association of Jurists in Munich in 1867, protesting the anti-sodomy laws. Part of the stupendous reach of Ulrichs' writings on homosexuals was due to the lax censorship laws of the Leipzig publishers, "who dominated the German-language book trade." Ulrichs' work would later inspire Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld in the founding of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Berlin—what Beachy calls the first homosexual rights organization. Moreover, in Berlin, the police commissioner Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem took a rather laissez faire enforcement policy toward what came to be at century's end a proliferation of homosexual bars and drag costume balls ("homosexual" being a neologism coined by another German journalist and activist, Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1869). These events were often used for tours so that the city became a kind of "laboratory of sexuality." Beachy looks at the roles of blackmail and criminality, the rise of homoerotic youth groups in Weimar Germany and an accompanying anti-Semitic reaction. A brave new work of compelling research.

Kirkus Reviews

Winner of the 2015 Randy Shilts Award

“Excellent and richly documented. . . . Beachy’s work must [be] considered in the larger context of a shift in cultural studies. . . . Fascinating.” —V.R. Berghahn, The New York Times Book Review

“Beachy enlarges our understanding of how the international gay-rights movement eventually prospered, despite the setbacks that it experienced not only in Nazi Germany but also in mid-century America.” —The New Yorker

“A very good, serious, detailed, scholarly work of history by an excellent researcher who has clearly done his homework—and then some.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A superb work of historical reclamation–by far the best account we have of the formative years of homosexual identity and emancipation, it is brilliantly researched and beautifully written.” —Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, CUNY

From the Publisher

★ 10/15/2014
Beachy's (history, Goucher Coll.; The Soul of Commerce) splendid new book starts with a history of the early days of the 19th-century investigations into sexual diversity in the German capital. Following this are sections devoted to early movements for homosexual liberation and a scandal close to the monarchy of Wilhelm II, in which members of his staff were falsely labeled by the press as homosexual and subsequently banned from court. Beachy details the launch of Der Eigene, the world's first gay publication in 1896; the late-night same-sex costume balls that permeated Berlin in the early 1900s; and the frequent blackmailing of politicians and industrialists by those seeking to make a quick fortune. Among those mentioned is Friedrich Alfred Krupp, a prominent steel manufacturer who committed suicide after local newspapers named his alleged male companions. Other chapters are devoted to the various aspects of the important Weimar era (the city was the focal point for notables in the German Enlightenment) covering sexual tourism in Berlin, the struggles for legal reform, and the complex relationship between anti-Semitism and homosexual activism. The epilog reminds us of the bone-chilling Nazi era. VERDICT The book is accessibly written and will interest both academic and general readers interested in political science, gay rights, and German history. Highly recommended.—David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

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