We like our stories to have beginnings, middles, ends. History gives us none of these. It provides instead repetition, variations on a theme, and something we might call entanglement.
--Brandy Schillace
Most readers here, I'm sure, have at least heard the name of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935) -- a pioneer in the study of sex, gender and sexualities, who advocated for legal freedom of sexual and gender expression, and whose Institute for Sexual Science (Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) became instrumental in facilitating the earliest gender-affirming surgeries.
You may also seen historical photos of Nazis tearing apart the Institute's headquarters in Berlin. Storm troopers stacked most of its 100,000-volume research library on scaffolding and put it to the torch. The scene conjures archetypes: the Inquisitorial auto-da-fe; north-European witch burnings; the Library of Alexandria set afire by rioting monks; suttee; the Wicker Man. And it presaged worse.
Such an ending could make us turn away in sickness of heart, not to mention anxiety over our own future.
The tragedy was, however, not, in fact, The End.
Schillace shows there is much more to the story. The slow, winding currents of scientific insight that did not ultimately fail. The seeding of minds and hearts that elsewhere remained open, unconventional and fearless. The courage, engagement, patience, times of elation, unbending determination. And in spite of it all, survivals.
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The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story, by Brandy Schillace. W W. Norton and Co., 2025
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Dr. Brandy Schillace (she/her) is both a terrific writer and a careful scholar. In under 300 pages of text she's compressed a rich and interlocking set of narratives: history of ideas, personal biographies, scientific navigations, economic tides, public attitudes, media milestones, the subterraneous life of LGBTQ culture, legal wrangling, and politics -- so much politics -- national, professional, organizational, personal, dragging-in all the banality of human nature.
With all this to unite, Schillace's writing is sharp and reads with ease. As well, a glossary, timeline, and thumbnail biographies buttress the storytelling, along with thorough footnotes, bibliography, and a better-than-typical index.
The title word "intermediaries" carries a double sense. It translates the German noun Zwischenstufen, meaning literally "intermediate forms" and was used by Hirschfeld over a period, to describe what we today would call LGBTQ individuals; more on that label later. Simultaneously, Hirschfeld and his co-operators were themselves "intermediaries" in the sense of "go-betweens, mediators" -- public interpreters and advocates of LGBTQ people and their lives.
There's so much to meditate on, and no possible way to summarize. Instead, I'd like to tease out a handful of threads from Schillace's tapestry for inspection and discussion.
Further, I want to make this piece a two-parter: tonight, highlighting points that, to me, were both surprising and encouraging; next month, taking up the more challenging theme of "variations, repetitions, and...entanglement."
Here is one hank of thread.
The lacemaker
While president Lyndon Johnson was shipping off U.S. troops to South Vietnam, and Russia's Luna 10 spacecraft circled the moon, a 74-year-old spinster passed away in the obscure Bavarian village of Allersburg. The date was April 26, 1966.
Dora Rudolfine Richter had been a lacemaker by trade. A pleasant, cheerful woman, as former acquaintances recalled her; slightly eccentric, with a pet pigeon traveling in her handbag; well-liked.
Much of her past no doubt remained curtained.
Because Dora was a trans woman.
Baptized Rudolf Richter in 1892, Dora had struggled early with a powerful sense of having the wrong sort of body and being assigned the wrong sort of gender role. As a young adult she left home and began to live as a woman -- part-time at first, later completely.
Joy and loss chequered her independent life. In presenting herself as a typical woman, she succeeded. She even managed physical love affairs while hiding her difference. At intervals she moved from place to place. Like many another gay or gender-nonconforming person, she was blackmailed. Like many another woman, she suffered sexual assaults. Only once, she confessed to a priest. More than once, she fell in love; but a marriage proposal put her to flight.
In desperation, Dora found her way to Hirschfeld's institute in 1921. She soon was granted the first of several surgeries that would culminate in a vaginoplasty -- still experimental, and fully successful in her case. Meanwhile she also became a resident employee.
Thanks to Hirschfeld's labors, Dora got legal permission to dress as a woman. But ironically, the "last vestige of [Dora's] assigned gender fell away," Schillace writes, only after the Institute's destruction. She had been able to visit Hirschfeld -- now in exile -- and return to Berlin as a flower-seller. And somehow the wheels of bureaucracy, grinding on, delivered to her there an official notice of permission to change her name and gender.
Soon after, Dora decamped to her own hometown, where she still had family, and which at that time belonged Czechoslovakia.
A few years later, Hitler acquired Dora's hometown together with the rest of German-speaking Bohemia; Dora lived on unnoticed and unmolested. But the end of World War II again brought dislocation: a re-formed Czechoslovakia expelled its German-speakers, including Dora. So she arrived in Allersberg as a refugee -- and stayed on, in peace, an inconspicuous figure in the community, for twenty years more.
She lived as herself. She survived it all. Survived. Survived!
The scientific humanist
Young Magnus Hirschfeld never meant to become a crusader.
Yes, he was gay. And quiet about it.
"[M]y true inclination," Hirschfeld wrote, 15 years into his medical practice, "has always been....to spend my life in the society of journalists, writers, poets, and artists."
He also owned, however, a set of attributes not often found together in one person: a zest for knowledge; extraversion; an interest in both science and the arts; outstabdubg talent as a speaker; inherent empathy; openness to change; and as it turned out, a gift for organization.
Born in 1868, Hirschfeld trained in Berlin as a doctor. He finished his studies in 1892, coincidentally the year of Dora Richter's birth. He soon gained his licence to practice and also visited America, where a brother lived -- as a journalist, reporting on the 1893 World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. He also lectured in three American cities on "natural" living.
Little is known of Hirschfeld's early years in medical practice after returning to Germany. Events, however, soon focused him.
Among them: in 1895, a young patient of Hirschfeld's committed suicide on the eve of his wedding. He left an agonized letter to Hirschfeld explaining that, as a man who loved men, he could neither go through with the marriage nor see any escape from his situation but death. He asked Hirschfeld to tell his story.
Hirschfeld did so, in a small publication titled Sappho and Socrates, where he explained that homosexuality is inborn, therefore not a choice, not subject to free will, nor a moral fault.
He was far from the first in Germany to take up the cause of what today we would call gay rights. Even before Hirschfeld's birth, before Germany even unified, jurist Karl Ulrichs had advocated against the new nation adopting from Austria's penal code a blanket prohibition against male homosexual behavior. In fact, he outed himself to do so. His arguments failed. The prohibition -- Paragraph 175 -- became the law of the land and a sort of seawall, against which wave after wave of follow-up agitation over decades could make little headway.
In 1897, however, Paragraph 175 served as a unifier. In opposition to it, Hirschfeld collected a group of activists and like-minded individuals to form the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. The SHC circulated a petition calling for Paragraph 175 to be abolished, which gained support from many prestigious names.
In time alliances would fracture: over contradictory ideas about homosexuality, over festering disagreements over strategy, over jousting egos.
Meanwhile, however, public opinion -- at least among some of the educated -- proved far more amenable to persuasion than the law.
The SHC would eventually also form the nucleus of Hirschberg's institute, created with a triple mission: research, education, and health services to what today we would call the LGBTQ community.
The first world war was a watershed. Succeeding it came a new birth of freedom. A conservative, imperial monarchy ended, and at the moment if its dissolution, it was Magnus Hirschfeld whom the Social Democratic party chose to address a crowd assembled at the Brandenburg Gate.
A new birth of freedom. Even women received the right to vote. But at the same time, the seeds of disaster: the loss of a generation's young men; onerous, indeed impossible, war reparations owed; lingering hostilities -- which would "come for" Hirschfeld, and too many others, in far too short a span.
The Institute for Sexual Science acquired its headquarters building in 1919. Its activities came to be supported by both a nonprofit foundation and the sale of hormonal supplements (believed at the time to lend support to general vitality).
Hirschfeld's research, outreach, and networking, both before and after that milestone, were tireless. Thousands upon thousands of pages of surveys, case notes and photographs. Books, articles, films. He hosted visitors, collaborated, lectured abroad.
With deepening experience his understanding further developed.
Endocrinology and cytology played one part. Experimental science was going through an initial process of identifying hormones and their functions. In 1905 an American woman, Nettie Stevens, first identified the sex-determining role of X and Y chromosomes (in mealworms!) The very first, experimental, gender-affirming surgeries came along in 1920-21.
Hirschfield's conceptual system also evolved.
He never receded from his fundamental tenet, that differences in sexuality and gender expression represent "natural variations." He at first imagined these variations as arranged on a single, linear spectrum (and employed for them the term "transvestites").
Later Hirschfeld conceived these variations as arrayed in a sort of matrix, where any combination of physical, psychological, and expressive sex-and-gender characteristics might be possible.
He still, however, thought of typical male/masculine and female/feminine characteristics as opposite and extreme poles; therefore, the natural variations found in real life to him represented in-between states: intermediate. Zwischenstufen. Intermediaries.
At the Institute, a massive photo display illustrated this concept.
Some activists and thinkers objected strongly to Hirschfeld's paradigm as it failed to do away with the stigma of "abnormality" -- point contributing to chronic tension.
Another term, "hermaphrodite," Hirschfeld used to describe not only visibly intersex persons, but those we today would call trans. In Hirschfeld's terms, these persons' intersexuality was just as real as the physically visible type, but located in the brain. On this basis, he found, a medical diagnosis of "hermaphrodite" could license a person to "cross dress" -- a practice otherwise subject to legal sanction.
Hirschfeld also deserves credit for supporting women's rights. By 1905 he was lending support to a feminist organization, the League for the Protection of Mothers and Sexual Reform. Later he campaigned for birth control and abortion, and as well, to keep Paragraph 175 from being extended to lesbians.
In this, Hirschfeld differered from another school of gay rights activism at the time, which valorized masculinity above all else and denigrated women.
The sexual-reassignment surgeries that he helped to pioneer, like Dora Richter's, are of course famous.
Equally important was the creation of "adaptation therapy," which simply meant assisting gay people to understand and accept their orientation, and teaching them -- if needed -- the strategies and tactics to navigate within society, including "customs of the country" within the gay subculture.
The Institute was a hub for so much: scientific exchange, education, controversy, networking, health care, public relations, counseling, and also social connectivity. The virtual renaissance era would last for nearly 14 years.
The Americans
Just two short years after the "war to end all wars" -- coincidentally in the same year Dora Richter found her way to the Institute -- German activists put together in Berlin a meeting they titled the First International Conference for Sexual Reform.
They hoped publicity around such an unprecedented, visible, prestigious multinational gathering would help push legislators of the new republic to overturn the notorious Section 175.
It did not.
But participants did gather from seven other European nations, and from Japan. Hirschfeld's institute hosted.
A second conference, seven years later in Stockholm, was already far more comprehensive, 11 countries represented including the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. It addressed more topics and included far more women, the conference chair among them. Women's sexual health and women's rights had joined the chat. Publicity blossomed.
The Stockholm event served also to create a new World League for Sexual Reform, whose central office, to start with, would be at the Institute.
Among its organizers was an American physician, Harry Benjamin.
Benjamin had already toured the Institute sometime in the 1920s. He'd become the "premier endocrinologist" in the U.S., Schillace reports. At the third international conference in 1930 he didn't appear. Instead, he invited Hirschfeld to visit America and address a public meeting in New York.
It seemed a timely opportunity. Hirschfeld, stessed and ailing, needed a breather. He went. He gave a public speech on an uncontroversial topic, marriage counseling. Behind closed doors, however, he spoke with physicians about his work with "intermediaries."
That single public speech then somehow became a tour, on which he spoke at 48 stops across the U.S. Newspaper stories followed. An invitation to Japan next came his way. From Tokyo he traveled to Shanghai and on to India.
By the time he was ready again for Berlin, Hirschfeld's long-term partner, Karl Giese, had to warn him away. The Nazis were in the ascendent; and Hirschfeld, both as an activist and a Jew, had been named their Public Enemy No. 1.
So he perched in Czechoslovakia, at a series of health spas. There Dora and others were able to visit. And from there he made plans to rescue some part of his life's work, for he saw the denoument coming. Some of the archives indeed were smuggled out.
By the time the the Institute burned, Hirschfeld had already moved to the French Riviera with Giese and a second partner, Li Shiu Tong (informally, Tao Li), who had traveled with him since Shanghai. There he passed away from a stroke, age 67.
The World League for Sexual Reform, which had burgeoned through 1932, also perished.
But in the United States, around the same time, a biology professor at Indiana University was just starting to interest himself in human sexual behavior. He would go on to establish the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research, producing statistics and engaging in some controversial experimentation.
Kinsey connected with Harry Benjamin in referring a transgender patient to him; Benjamin in turn facilitated gender affirmation surgery for trans woman and World War II veteran Christine Jorgenson, who became a celebrity. Benjamin also, in 1952, published a bestselling book, The Transsexual Phenomenon, which helped the process of bringing people like Dora Richter back into public visibility.
Some of Hirschfield's original papers now reside too in the United States...in the safekeeping of the Kinsey Institute.
Christine Jorgenson in 1954. Wikipedia.
The LGBTQIA+ Literature series runs here on Daily Kos the last Sunday of each month, 7:30 p.m.
Part 2 will post at 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 28, which I intend to include more about resonances between that period and our own. Continuing to respect that things are rough right now, I'll continue to emphasize what we might usefully learn. I strongly recomnend the book itself to those who have the bandwidth.
For next year:
Always in search of volunteer writers and suggestions for further books to cover!
Meanwhile, I'm also experimentally trying to post something more newsy on other Sundays.
If you are getting something out of these posts, I hope you may leave a comment, however brief! This helps a attract other readers and keep the post visible longer. :-)
Hope you enjoyed Thursday's holiday and will have a good week coming up!
