Magnus Busted

The tinny sound of a newsreel plays in the background and the darkness is pressing you into the brightness of the screen. I can imagine, as I'm sure you can, sitting in a dark theater waiting for the movie to begin, watching the preview flash on the screen. It is something that most of us today have experienced. The thrill of the upcoming attractions and ads flitting across the screen in bright colors and well-timed music. I'm sure that it couldn't have been that different in a darkened theater in Paris 1933 as Magnus Hirchfeld sat there before the film he was intending to see. 

You see Magnus was a bit of an eccentric fellow to say the least. Never having shied away from controversy, he had made quite the name for himself in 1920’s Berlin. Having created, produced, and even starred in the first motion picture to show a same-sex couple in 1919; “Anders als die Andern, literally 'Other than the Others”, He tried to highlight something that was not very well known at the time. That LGBTQ people are not alone and have never been so. 

Having struggled with his own sexuality all his life, he was plagued by all the self harm and suicide he saw in his life and how it correlated to feelings of shame and erasure in society at large.

At medical school, he was traumatized by a demonstration on ‘sexual degeneracy’, where a gay man — who had been unjustly imprisoned in a mental asylum for 30 years — was brought before the class naked and showed off “like a prized specimen of animal”. Hirschfeld noted that day he was the only student revolted by such mistreatment. All the others, even his best friend, viewed it as normal and justified by the superior views of dehumanization.

Another known incident that deeply affected Magnus' life, happened after he had completed his training as a doctor and started an office in Berlin in 1893. One night a deeply disturbed military officer stopped him on the street pleading Hirschfeld for a sexuality consultation right then and there. Magnus did not take the man's distress seriously and told him to come in the morning. There was no morning for that officer. The darkness that overtook the soldier's life had been the direct effect of his sexuality and Magnus never forgot about that youth and his pain. Hirschfeld’s terrible guilt and remorse motivated him to advocate for equal rights loudly and strongly. 

He returned to Germany and established a medical practice in Berlin, where he would become actively involved in the scientific study of sexuality—in particular, homosexuality—and advocacy efforts on behalf of all sexual and gendered minorities.

Hirschfeld maintained that sexual orientation was innate and not a deliberate choice, and he believed that scientific understanding of sexuality would promote tolerance of sexual minorities. His sexology research was guided by empiricism and activism.

But he was also a very carefree soul and jovial spirit. Magnus was a fan of the arts. He was a man who reveled in the world of the actors and performers. And above all the arts for him, was cinema. In fact, He loved dragging his lover or any multitude of friends to showings when the wind took his fancy. He reveled in the costumed caricatures that reflected all the good and bad of society. The drama and the comedy of daily interactions entwined on celluloid. He loved, as he once said, “the gaiety of it all.” 

In his professional life, He was a leading force in founding the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin 1897, to campaign for social recognition of gay, bisexual and transgender men and women, and to fight against their legal persecution.

He became an ardent and very vocal activist for gender and sexuality information expansion and human rights. With other very talented and dedicated individuals he was able to start his new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute of Sexual Research), which opened on 6 July 1919. The institute was a refuge for queer people at the time and also specialized in the treatment of venereal diseases, marriage and sexual counselling, as well as unheard of support services for homosexual and trans-identifying people. The institute became a center of the international homosexual movement and was committed to social recognition and direct change.

Through his institute he and a team of dedicated individuals started gathering stories and data from across his patients at first, but then across all of Europe. He became obsessed with finding deep histories proving the existence of other genders and sexualities at the time. “If we have always existed, how can you say I am unnatural?”

Having found numerous artifacts and writings that peered into the deepest and earliest memories, he compiled it all into a resource of scientific study of gender and sexuality that was open to all who sought the knowledge.

Because of his wide base of knowledge he was also a fervent defender of feminism, body autonomy, human rights, and Democratic socialism.

But today was different. Magnus had been away from his home for years now. With rising fascism under 1930s Germany, he had been a very prominent and vocal figure to target. Fearing for the safety of himself and everyone still under his care, he fled Germany in 1930 under a “world tour” moniker.

When asked later by a colleague why he was so sad to travel, Magnus had sighed heavily and responded, “there was no future for people like myself in Germany, and I fear for our future.”

And Magnus would never leave this theater the same. The newsreels contained a smattering of world relations and rising tensions, but this particular section had caught Magnus eye. He was very interested, because only a few years earlier he had been standing In that very spot. Emblazoned on the 20 ft (6.1 m) screen in stark black and white was the news footage of his Institute. People with him said he got very quiet and just held the hands of people on either side of him. 

On 6 May 1933, the Deutsche Studentenschaft made an organized attack on the Institute of Sex Research. A few days later, the Institute's library and archives were publicly hauled out and burned in the streets of the Opernplatz. Around 20,000 books and journals, and 5,000 images, were destroyed.

Tears slid down his face as stills of destroyed rooms and books and paperwork were stood over by laughing students who had arranged the scene with propaganda approved precision. Showing not the healthy and healing work and education and reform, but instead the “smut and degradation of our entire culture”. 

Scenes flashed again and there were said to be audible gasps from his entire group as the fires raged on the 20 ft (6.1 m) screen. And books were tossed with rabid cultish fervor. A bronzed head that was very familiar, having been stolen only days previously from that Institute was thrown on the fire. A bronze bust of Magnus himself.

“They are erasing us completely. Like they've previously done before, and they will continue to do so now. Until we are eradicated like a virulent disease.” Magnus Hirchfield, letters from exile.

Heinrich Himmler's plans for the homosexuals of Germany: “These people will obviously be publicly degraded and dismissed and handed over to the court.  After…they will be…taken into a concentration camp and in the camp they will be shot while escaping. No one will be allowed to leave”.

Magnus died only a couple of years later, never knowing the worst of the war or the final outcome. He was terrified on his deathbed of all those who he could not help. Those in jails and under such intense oppression. He never knew the worst of the holocaust and what that truly meant for all the prisoners being held there. 

I know. I know this isn't a happy story. There are rarely those happy ending stories in the LGBTQ community. Our history is littered with some of the darkest and most tragic of tales. There is even a stereotype dedicated to LGBTQ tragedy with a biased lesson of “this is what happens to those people”, But if you look closely, you can see the brighter shades of this story.

Because despite their best efforts, The story did not end there. While today we may not know immediately of Magnus and his work or the work of so many untold hundreds with him, we do know of their efforts . Because of their tireless work against oppressive forces and the recognition of standing together, they were able to save a large amount of media, files, and knowledge.

The unsung heroes that stood in the path of those with anger and violence ready, to keep innocent people safe. The litigators that unwaveringly fought for refugee rights and then, when traditional methods failed, through back channels they spirited out transgender individuals to relative safety of allied land. 

Even all those works he had gathered through the years… 650 years worth of gender and sexual history still survive in part due to his vigilance and understanding that our history had to be known and preserved. 

And those works have inspired new searchers of truth and knowledge. Chroniclers of deeper histories that bring to light even more than Magnus could have ever dreamed. Bringing into focus a reality that we have never had a society without LGBTQ people among us.

That fire which burned so bright on that hopeless Berlin night, a fire designed to destroy and erase everything it touched, did eventually die out. Leaving in its wake, unimaginable destruction and loss. The husks of charred paper ash and litter filled the square, and a group of men were tasked to help clean it up. Through those mounds of lost knowledge and cover-up a young street cleaner struck something hard in the pile with his shovel. He pulled it from the ashes.

A large bust that was more than a little broken and battered but it was still there and recognizable. The furrowed brow set deeply over spectacled eyes peered out from the eternal bronzed face. It sat on his mantle for the entirety of the war. The young man said the eyes haunted him and dared him to be a better person. He said it reminded him to never blindly follow again. 

After the war, the street cleaner donated it to the Berlin museum of Arts. Glad to be rid of it and put it back where it was meant to be seen.

Despite their best efforts and hottest fires, Magnus' bust still stares out at us today. A very grim and serious reminder of very real fires designed to burn our lives from existence. It sits as a reminder that we can never be erased… No matter the fires we face… no matter what they try… we can Only ever be silenced for a while. Because those voices reach out to us from the past and give us the strength to continue on. Because of the passion of Magnus and his desire that no one ever feel so alone again, we now know that we live in a reality that we have never had a society without LGBTQ people among us.

And Together we are strong.