Reframing Sexuality
Magnus Hirschfeld’s exposition of ‘universal’ fetishism
in his 1930 Bilderteil zur Geschlechtskunde
Research Master Thesis in Historical Studies Supervised by Dr. G.A. Mak
and Dr. T.J.V. Vermeulen Wouter Egelmeers s3007081 wouter.egelmeers@zoho.com Radboud University 15th of January 2016
Acknowledgements
There are many people in my life who have contributed to this thesis, both directly and indirectly. First of all, I would like to thank my parents for their unconditional support and their trust in me. My family is very important to me, so I was glad to find that there were always family members interested in hearing about my research. It proved a great help to be ‘forced’ to explain the subject of my thesis to sympathetic non-‐experts.
Of course, my friends have also played a major role in my life. For the past months, my thesis has also played a considerable role in theirs, as I increasingly plagued them with the problems and uncertainties that came up while I was writing it. They have dealt with it admirably. I would like to thank Christoph van den Belt, especially, for his comments on this thesis and for the numerous coffees, lunches, and dinners we shared. Most of all, I thank him for being a friend who always knows how to incite me. Joost Snaterse and Fons Meijer also provided comments on chapters of this thesis, as well as stimulating conversation during coffee breaks. Anouk van den Brink and Juul van Ewijk commented on some of my finished chapters as well, and provided valuable support.
During my internship in the archive of the Schwules Museum in Berlin, I was inspired by the determination and persistence of its staff. I thank my supervisor, Head of Archive and Library Dr. Jens Dobler, for his archival enthusiasm, and for providing me with the opportunity to obtain my very own copy of the work that is the subject of this thesis.
For carrying out a search in the archive of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte, I thank Nils Seethaler. Further, I am indebted to Dr. Rainer Herrn for pointing out some valuable literature in an early stage of my research. For his advise concerning the layout of this thesis as well as image analysis, I thank my second supervisor Dr. Tim Vermeulen.
But most of all, I would like to thank Dr. Geertje Mak, who was my Research Master’s tutor for over two years and who functioned as my first thesis supervisor. I am grateful for how she inspired my interest to work in the field of gender and body history, and for how she knows exactly how to spark the ideas that contributed greatly to this research.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements 2
Introduction. ‘Bilder sollen bilden’ 5
The role of images in science 7
Hirschfeld 11
Reception: the question of eugenics and race 13 Historiography: Hirschfeld and visual material 15
Historiography: conclusions 21
Research question 23
Chapter 1. Hirschfeld’s Bilderteil: An exposition of the universal and biological nature of
sexuality 27
Introduction 27
Sexology ‘für alle’: the goals of the Bilderteil 28 ‘Die Neuregelung sexueller Anschauungen und Einrichtungen’: sexology’s scientific
promise 30
Walk-‐through: from the gamete to birth control 32 Walk-‐through: from the inner secretions to sexological marriage guidance 34 Hirschfeld as a collector of sexuality 38 Image collecting and the role of images in sexology 41 Biology and visuality: how biology was made visible 42 Universality and visuality: how biology was made universal 44
Conclusion 46
Chapter 2. ‘Sexuelle Fetische und Symbole’: Reframing images 49
Introduction 49
Tracing travelling images 51
Image 1125: anthropological origins 54 Image 1125 in Holländer’s Sittengeschichte and in Hirschfeld’s Bilderteil 57 Image 1126: anthropological origins 62 Image 1126 in von Reitzenstein’s Das Weib bei den Naturvölkern and Hirschfeld’s
Bilderteil 64
Steatopygia and corsets: images 1125 and 1126 in the fetishism chapter 66
Conclusion 68
Chapter 3. ‘Das gleiche Lied, das gleiche Leid’: Picturing universality 71
Introduction 71
Hirschfeld on fetishism: degeneration and evolution 73
Deconstruction 76
Deconstruction: the ‘Ureinwohner der Urwälder’ and us 78 ‘Sexuelle Fetische und Symbole’: the Bilderteil’s fetishism chapter 81 The Bilderteil: a sexological ‘Übungsatlas’ 82 Deconstructing the visual narrative 85 Photographs vs. drawings: the medial level 89 Hirschfeld as a centre of vision 93
Conclusion 94
Conclusion. ‘Den Text in den Hintergrund gedrängt’? 97
Bibliography 100
Introduction
‘Bilder sollen bilden’
During my second year as an undergraduate history student, my interest in the relation between images of the body, gender, and sexuality was ignited by a course called ‘Extreme Makeover: Lichaamstransformaties, cultuur & het ideale zelf (v/m)’, which centred on gender, identity, and practices concerning the body and its representations. As a historian-‐ to-‐be, I was of course mainly interested in the historical aspects of the inextricable correlation between images of bodies and the ‘realities’ they engender. When I started my Research Master’s programme, I decided to engage with the history of homosexuality as well, and during a semester of studying in Berlin, the capitol of deviant sexual identities both today as well as during the fin-‐de-‐siècle, I encountered the work of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-‐1935).1 This activist for the rights of sexual minorities greatly intrigued me. He considered sexuality to be humanity’s greatest drive (‘das gewaltigste Leit-‐ und Leidmotiv der Menschheit’), and he believed that through scientific reasoning, the burdensome life of sexual deviants could be alleviated. This is why he chose per scientiam ad
justitiam, ‘through science to justice’, as his parole.2 I decided to engage with the pictures of human bodies that he showed in his popular scientific work, as I wanted to know how exactly they were connected to the sexual identities that came into existence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
In the Humboldt University library, where I studied, I encountered a work by Hirschfeld containing numerous images of human bodies, all related to gender and sexuality: his 1930
Bilderteil, the fourth volume of his Geschlechtskunde compendium. Its sheer size turned out
to be as dazzling as its scope. It contains over 1,400 images (and only very little text), and the diversity of the subjects that it depicts is enormous. A half title page bearing the statement ‘Bilder sollen bilden’ and a one-‐page introduction are followed by a range of images stretching from sixteenth-‐century etchings of Adam and Eve to microscopic images of
1 For Berlin as the place where homosexuality was ‘invented’, see: Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin. Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York 2014) passim.
2 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde. Auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet I, Die körperseelischen Grundlagen (Stuttgart 1926) xi.
gonadic tissues, photographs of women and men with horrible bodily deviations, stillborn babies, phallus statues from non-‐European cultures, medieval chastity belts, anatomic drawings of skeletons, photographs of syphilitic infections, and hermaphrodite chicken.3 I asked myself what to make of this collection. What did Hirschfeld want these pictures to effect?
Even though Hirschfeld states in the short introduction to the work that he only wanted the images to be a ‘companion’ to the textual volumes of the series and did not want his readers to simply glance through the visual pages instead of reading the text, the book does present its reader with a certain narrative. It is made up of sexual images circulating in different societal and scientific contexts, such as private collections, anthropology, freak shows, (art) history, and journalism.4 As shall be demonstrated, previous scholarship on the relation between sexology and visuality has mainly analysed images of Europeans in Hirschfeld’s work, but the great variety of images in the Bilderteil also pictures historical, social, and cultural aspects of sexuality, thus showing far ‘more’ than just the individual Western bodies previously studied. At the same time, it also ‘zooms in’ on the biological aspects of deviant sexualities by showing anatomic drawings as well as parts of sexually deviant bodies on a microscopic scale.
In his publications, Hirschfeld supposed that sexual behaviours and identities that were considered ‘abnormal’ by many of his contemporaries were in fact both natural (biologically originating from the body) and universal (occurring in all cultures).5 Possibly, the biological images in the Bilderteil served as a demonstration of this naturalness, while images centring on the social aspects of sexuality were meant as an exhibition of the universality of certain sexual practices. Many of the images from the latter category, dealing with the ‘universality’ of sexual behaviours, derive from the discipline of anthropology. In recent decades, a broad range of research has recorded the influence of sexology on the construction of modernity and its co-‐constituting Others, but there has been little to no inquiry into the question of
3 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde. Auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet IV, Bilderteil (Stuttgart 1930) 1.
4 Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde IV, 1.
5 In a later work, for instance, he argues that ‘so gleichartig auf der ganzen Erde die biologischen
und pathologischen Grundlagen auf dem Geschlechtsgebiet sind, so verschiedenartig sind die soziologischen Auswirkungen, Lösungen und Beurteilungen dieses Naturtriebes’. In other words, while sociological behaviours are highly heterogeneous, they are nevertheless caused by universal biological and pathological factors. Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (Brugg 1933) vi. Italics in original.
how these identities have been constructed through historical intersections of ethnographic and sexological practice.6 Especially Hirschfeld’s chapter on ‘Sexuelle Fetische und Symbole’ provides an intriguing case to see how Hirschfeld juxtaposed European and non-‐European sexual Others and urged his readers to compare the images with each Other. What did Hirschfeld try to achieve through this pairing of images of Western and non-‐Western individuals, stemming from greatly differing discourses? And how do these images relate to each Other? Do they really create a sense of similarity between ‘us’ and ‘them’ in sexual matters?
This thesis, thus, aims to shed light on the broader question of how images of human bodies function in science and in popularisations of scientific theories, by concerning itself with one chapter of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Bilderteil. This introduction offers an oversight of the historiography on the role of imagery in science in general, a short discussion of recent historical research on Hirschfeld’s work in general, as well as of research relating to Hirschfeld’s use of visual material. It is concluded with a description of this project’s research question and its delineations, and an outline of the chapters of this thesis.
The role of images in science
Most researchers engaging with the history and philosophy of science acknowledge the fact that images play a significant role in the formation of knowledge. In many cases, science consists of ‘making things visible’ that were invisible before: when scientists want to understand a phenomenon, they broaden their own physical perception by using specific instruments to create a picture of something that was previously invisible to the naked eye.7 Examples of this procedure are numerous and diverse, ranging from contemporary experiments on nano tubes that become visible in super microscopes to late-‐nineteenth century photographical experiments proving the existence of sound waves.8 Furthermore,
6 Hadley Z. Renkin, ‘Biopolitical mythologies. Róheim, Freud, (homo)phobia, and the sexual science
of Eastern European Otherness’, Sexualities (published online before print 27 February 2015) 1-‐22, accessed through http://sex.sagepub.com/content/early/2015/02/27/1363460714550908.abstract on 25-‐03-‐2015.
7 Peter Geimer, ‘Einleitung’, in Idem ed., Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit. Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie (Frankfurt am Main 2002) 7-‐25; 13-‐14.
8 On the visualisation of nano tubes, see: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York
2010) 393-‐397. On Ernst Mach’s visual experiments on sound waves, see: Christoph Hoffmann and Peter Berz, ‘Mach/Sachers Versuch. Anordnung, Durchführung’, in: Idem ed., Über Schall. Ernst Machs und Peter Salchers Geschoßfotografien (Göttingen 2001) 17-‐35.
images play a significant role in the establishment of new disciplines and especially in the communication between the people inside of these scientific networks. In order to do justice to the importance of visualisations for the formation of such arrangements of scientific fields and scientific communities, scholars of science have suggested the term ‘Viskurs’ (or, in English, ‘viscourse’), a ‘visual’ version of the ‘textual’ discourse.9
According to the French philosopher and sociologist of science Bruno Latour, science is essentially a constant discussion of people trying to convince each other of the accuracy of their claims about reality. When scientists create information during their studies, these pieces of information have to be presentable all at once to those they want to convince. Visuality plays an important role in this process, as the end result of scientific research, according to Latour, always exists of the construction of objects that are ‘mobile but also
immutable, presentable, readable and combinable with one another.’10 These immutable mobiles – photographs, tables, diagrams, plates, texts, silhouettes – can then be integrated as figures in the text of the articles these scientists write, thus helping to present and create ‘harder facts’ which are thought to further the scientific quest for truth and understanding.11 Historians have traditionally not paid much attention to visual material, in many cases simply using images as illustrations for their textbooks without problematising them. However, when the visual turn emerged in the humanities during the 1990s, images started to receive increasing critical attention.12 Following theorists like Latour, especially historians of science and technology, but also art and cultural historians realised that images form, change, organise, and even produce knowledge.13 Over the past twenty years, then, a broad historiography on the historical importance of imagery for especially the natural sciences, medicine, and technology – but also for the social sciences – has come into being. Lamentably, the role of visualisations in the popularisation of science has received less
9 Karin Knorr Cetina, ‘"Viskurse" der Physik. Konsensbildung und visuelle Darstellung’, in Bettina
Heintz and Jörg Huber eds., Mit dem Auge denken. Strategien der Sichtbarmachung in wissenschaftlichen und virtuellen Welten (Zürich 2001) 304-‐320.
10 Bruno Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition. Thinking with eyes and hands’, Knowledge and Society. Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6 (1986) 1-‐40; 7. Italics in original.
11 Latour, ‘Visualization and cognition’, 18.
12 Gerhard Paul, ‘Die aktuelle Historische Bildforschung in Deutschland. Themen – Methoden –
Probleme – Perspektiven’, in: Jens Jäger and Martin Knauer ed., Bilder als historische Quellen? Dimension der Debatten um historische Bildforschung (München 2009) 125-‐147; 130.
13 Martina Heßler, ‘Bilder zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. Neue Herausforderungen für die
attention than the function of images in the sciences themselves.14 As images generally give the impression of being easier accessible than text, they are often employed in the dissemination of scientific theories to the general public. Unfortunately, according to the editors of the only monograph on images in science popularisation, there still is a substantial lack of research relating to this subject.15 Similarly, the role of imagery in popularisations of the social sciences has been a subject to which little priority has been given, even though images have been eagerly used by early social scientists.
From the beginning of the nineteenth century onwards, for instance, anthropologists increasingly relied on photography and professionalised their use of the technique, designing procedures to measure bodies through systematically produced photographs.16 Similarly, physicians no longer let their gaze be guided by what they thought about illness, but oriented themselves increasingly on what they could actually see on the bodies they examined, striving to make abnormalities and illnesses visible in their totality.17 Especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, they were helped in obtaining this goal by the development of new techniques that increased the range of bodily aspects that could be made visible.18 The results of the anthropological as well as medical examinations were elaborately recorded and in many cases the photographs were archived, as photography was thought to be able to function as an externalised memory and a growing visual archive that could provide physicians with a constantly increasing number of new details.19
14 Heßler, ‘Bilder zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft’, 287.
15 Bernd Hüppauf and Peter Weingart, ‘Wissenschaftsbilder – Bilder der Wissenschaft’, in: Idem ed., Frosch und Frankenstein. Bilder als Medium der Popularisierung der Wissenschaft (Bielefeld 2009) 11-‐ 43; 21-‐22.
16 Michael Hagner, ‘Mikro-‐Anthropologie und Fotografie. Gustav Fritschs Haarspaltereien und die
Klassifizierung der Rassen’ in: Geimer, Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit, 252-‐284; 255. On anthropology and photography, see Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories. Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford 2001).
17 Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic. An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York 1975)
114-‐115, 164-‐166.
18 Stronger microscopes and improved histological techniques made it possible to zoom in to the
cellular level, while chloroform, increasingly used from the 1880s on, enabled doctors to make visible the anatomical-‐pathological ‘truth’ of the body while the patient was still alive. Geertje Mak,
Doubting sex. Inscriptions, bodies and selves in nineteenth-‐century hermaphrodite case histories (Manchester 2012) 147-‐152.
19 Kathrin Peters, Rätselbilder des Geschlechts. Körperwissen und Medialität um 1900 (Zürich 2010)
37-‐38. The historian Allan Sekula has used photographical practices relating to the bodies of criminals to show how the camera was integrated into a sophisticated complex of investigating methods, in which both the file cabinet and the production of an archival system proved more important than the
The photographs and other images from this visual archive were subsequently published by scientists in order to convince their peers, and in many cases the general public as well, of the truthfulness of their assertions. Thus, images travelled from their original discourse to the public domain, where they could assume new meanings. As the German historians Sybilla Nikolow and Lars Bluma point out, they can then unite differing interests and make these communicable. Nikolow and Bluma therefore call for historians to shed light on this process by analysing the transformations that scientific images undergo on their way from their original discourse to their function as a piece of evidence in the public sphere.20 One scholar who has applied this ‘biographical’ approach to images of human individuals is the American historical anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards, who focuses on the materiality of images and the networks through which they travelled.21 As we shall see later on, the German cultural historian and art historian Kathrin Peters engaged with images of sexual Others in Hirschfeld’s work in a similar way.
Two other scholars who engaged with the relation between science and visuality whose work has been highly influential are the American historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison. They have convincingly argued that the emergence of the scientific ideal of objectivity during the nineteenth century was closely linked to the visualisation techniques that scientists used. Based on an analysis of scientific atlases, they show how the eighteenth-‐ century ideal of truth-‐to-‐nature – scientists cooperating with artists who created engravings, etchings and lithographs of idealised and perfected specimen of a specific species – was replaced by a new ideal during the nineteenth century. Scientists now increasingly strove to obtain ‘objective’ images that were created without mediation by the scientist or an artist. This ideal of ‘mechanical objectivity’ reached its peak near the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when scientists increasingly aimed at organising the individual objects of their research – birds, fossils, snow crystals, bacteria, human bodies,
camera or the photographs themselves. Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive, October 39 (1986) 3-‐64.
20 Sybilla Nikolow and Lars Bluma, ‘Die Zirkulation der Bilder zwischen Wissenschaft und
Öffentlichkeit. Ein historiographischer Essay’, in: Hüppauf and Weingart, Frosch und Frankenstein, 45-‐ 78; 47.
21 See: Elizabeth Edwards, ‘Objects of Affect. Photography beyond the Image’, The Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (2012) 221-‐234.
and flowers, for instance – into systematic visual compendia without anyone interfering in the production of the images.22
When deficiencies in the creating of mechanical objectivity became evident, during the early twentieth century, a strategy of ‘trained judgement’ – interventions by scientists to highlight what they thought was most relevant in their images – was added to the ideal of mechanically produced images.23 Daston and Galison’s framework was mostly designed in reference to the natural sciences, but the theory also seems applicable to disciplines engaging with human subjects such as anthropology, ethnography, and sexology. Hirschfeld’s Bilderteil itself is clearly a representative of the strategy of trained judgement: ‘auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung’, he assembled and reorganised a great variety of immutable mobiles from various sources and arranged them to form an extensive visual narrative. In the short textual parts of the book, he explained what to ‘see’ in the images, while he also edited the images themselves as well as he devised their order and thus the meanings they acquire in relation to each other. In their new frame, the images thus come to mean new things – but they are still largely the same images. By following Nikolow and Bluma’s plea for analyses of the transformations of the meanings of scientific images in various discourses, one can shed light on how exactly these reorganisations create new effects. Arguably, Edwards’ ‘biographical’ approach to historical images provides a useful starting point.
Hirschfeld
As we have seen, imagery is not only used in science to make particular observations visible to fellow scientists, but also for the popularisation of scientific theories to a general public. In the discipline of sexology, which came into existence during the nineteenth century and especially flourished in Germany during the decades following 1900, the exchanging of photographs and other images of interesting ‘cases’ of for instance hermaphroditism or ‘bearded ladies’ in printed media or in academic slide shows was common practice.24 This thesis concerns itself with the work of probably the best known German sexologist of the
22 Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 42-‐43, 120-‐121. 23 Ibidem, 311-‐317.
early twentieth century, Magnus Hirschfeld, for whom visual material both played an important role in devising his theories and in their popularisation.
In 1868, Hirschfeld was born into a Jewish family in Kolberg (present-‐day Kołobrzeg in Poland). He graduated in the discipline of Medicine at the University of Berlin in 1892.25 Four years later he published his first sexological treatise on homosexuality, Sappho und Sokrates, in which he argued that homosexual desire arises ‘irgendwie aus der menschlichen Natur selbst’.26 This belief in the biological cause of homosexuality would remain a part of his scientific and emancipatory work until the end of his career in the 1930s. Today, Magnus Hirschfeld is mostly known for the so-‐called Zwischenstufentheorieor ‘theory of sexual intermediates’, which he devised over the years following the publication of Sappho und
Sokrates.27 It works from the assumption that every human individual is essentially made up of a mixture between male and female character traits. In his eyes, the Vollmann and
Vollweib or ‘complete’ man and woman were thus merely theoretical possibilities at the
outer end of the spectre of sexual intermediaries.28 So, the Zwischenstufentheorie provided a scientific foundation for the assertion that homosexuality as well as other sexual ‘deviations’ were natural and in-‐born and should therefore not be criminalised.
However, Hirschfeld did not only focus on sexual intermediaries. In his final sexological work, Geschlechtskunde, he states that there can be discerned three periods in his scientific activity: a time in which he mostly researched ‘zwischengeschlechtliche(…) Varianten und gewisse(…) Störungen der Geschlechtsentwicklung’ – including the Zwischenstufen – which resulted in the publication of Die Transvestiten (1910) and Die Homosexualität des Mannes
und des Weibes (1914), a second period in which he mainly focussed on the entire area of
25 For further biographical details, see: Manfred Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld. Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen (Hamburg 2001); Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld. Deutscher – Jude – Weltbürger (Teetz 2005). For an English-‐language biography, see: Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld. A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (London and New York 1986).
26 Th. Ramien [Magnus Hirschfeld], Sappho und Sokrates oder wie erklärt sich die Liebe der Männer
und Frauen zu Personen des eigenen Geschlechts? (Leipzig 1896).
27 The term ‘Zwischenstufentheorie’ was not coined by Hirschfeld himself. Instead, he opposed it,
as he thought his ‘System der sexuellen Zwischenstufen’ was not a theory, but mainly an
‘Einordnungsprinzip’ or organising principle. Nevertheless, the term is commonly used to refer to the principle, and will therefore be applied in this thesis as well. Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde I, 548. See: Rainer Herrn ‘Magnus Hirschfelds Geschlechterkosmos. Die Zwischenstufentheorie im Kontext hegemonialer Männlichkeit’ in: Ulrike Brunotte and Rainer Herrn, Männlichkeiten und Moderne. Geschlecht in den Wissenskulturen um 1900 (Bielefeld 2008) 173-‐196; 178.
‘psychological sexual illnesses’, leading to the publication of Sexualpathologie (three volumes, 1916-‐1920), while he broadened his view to incorporate ‘das ganze menschliche Geschlechts-‐ und Liebesleben’ during the final phase, characterised by the foundation of his
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1919 and culminating in the publication of his compendium
of thirty years of experience, called Geschlechtskunde (five volumes, 1926-‐1930).29
Reception: the question of eugenics and race
Hirschfeld’s work was largely forgotten after the elimination of the ‘un-‐German’ and ‘Jewish’ discipline of sexology by the national socialists in the 1930s.30 Hirschfeld had gone into exile in 1932 and his Institute had been ransacked by a national socialist mob, after which his books were burnt during the 1933 Bücherverbrennung. His work was rediscovered, however, in the 1980s, when the prospering second German gay movement started investigating the history of homosexuality and founded the historical Magnus-‐Hirschfeld-‐Gesellschaft to this end.31 Whereas Manfred Herzer, the author of the first German-‐language Hirschfeld biography, lamented ‘[eine] weitgehende Desinteresse an einer Auseinandersetzung mit Hirschfeld’ during the 1990s,32 the German historian of sexology Volkmar Sigusch has repeatedly declared a ‘Hirschfeld-‐renaissance’ after 1995, which according to him could be ascribed to the resonance of Hirschfeld’s theories with several ‘postmodern’ topoi:
Narrationen als antiepistemische Flüsse ohne Ufer, sexogenerische Buntschekigkeit als Widerpart des kulturellen Bigenus, Auflösung der alten Geschlechts-‐ und Sexualformen durch so viele “Zwischenstufen” wie es Menschen gibt, staatsexpertenunabhängige Selbsterfindung und Selbsthilfe – wenn nur nicht die Hormone und die Gene, die Kastrationen, Geschlechtsumwandlungen, Penisprothesen,
29 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde I, viii. The publications mentioned are: Magnus Hirschfeld, Die Transvestiten. Eine Untersuchung über den erotischen Verkleidungstrieb (Berlin 1910); Idem, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes (Berlin 1914); Idem, Sexualpathologie. Ein Lehrbuch für Ärzte und Studierende I-‐III (Bonn 1917, 1918, 1920), and; Idem, Geschlechtskunde I-‐V (Stuttgart 1926, 1928, 1930, 1930, 1930).
30 On the ‘jewishness’ of German sexology, see: Erwin J. Haeberle, ‘The Jewish Contribution to the
Development of Sexology’, The Journal of Sex Research 18 (1982) 305-‐323 as well as Christina von Braun, ‘Ist die Sexualwissenschaft eine jüdische Wissenschaft?’, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 14 (2001) 1-‐17.
31 Andreas Seeck, ‘Einführung’, in: Idem ed., Durch Wissenschaft zur Gerechtigkeit? Textsammlung zur kritischen Rezeption des Schaffens von Magnus Hirschfeld (Münster 2003) 7-‐23; 10-‐12.
stereotaktischen Hirneingriffe, extrakorporalen Züchtungen, das H-‐Y-‐Antigen, das Xq 28 und die Genchirurgie (…) wären.33
The second part of this quote brings us to an aspect of Hirschfeld’s work that has probably sparked most debate among the scholars engaging with his work: the question if his uncritical belief in the objectivity of the natural sciences did not go hand in hand with undercurrents that worked diagonally against his emancipatory goals. His biological explanation for homosexuality, for instance: when homosexuality is considered a biological trait, it can easily be regarded as a deviant anomaly that has to be eradicated, some have argued.34 A related aspect of Hirschfeld’s work that engendered discussion is his support for eugenics. Critics were quick to cite Hirschfeld’s pleads for the implementation of eugenic measures, as he wanted to steer away from ‘Degeneration’ and towards ‘Höherzüchtung’ of the human race. Others, however, argued that his attitude towards eugenics was not racist, that he emphasised voluntarity, and that he was simply ‘swimming with the eugenic current’ of his time.35
Paradoxically, Hirschfeld did vigorously oppose the idea that humanity exists of various biologically distinct ‘races’. In her discussion of the intersections between ‘race’ and sexuality in Hirschfeld’s work, the British literary scholar and gender theorist Heike Bauer argues that there is ‘a gap in existing scholarship on sexology when it comes to discussions of “race”: the fact that sexologist [sic] such as Hirschfeld themselves theorised “race”, and racism, as part of their emancipatory homosexual activism’.36 Indeed, Hirschfeld’s book
Racism (published posthumously in 1938) was the first scientific study explicitly centring on
the concept of racism.37 In it, Hirschfeld set out to show how racist theories were scientifically inaccurate, vehemently criticising the idea that somatic differences are related to personality. He did not deny that there are differences between the inhabitants of
33 Volkmar Sigusch, Geschichte der Sexualwissenschaft. (Frankfurt am Main and New York 2008)
210. See: Idem, ‘Albert Moll und Magnus Hirschfeld’, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung 8 (2005) 121-‐159.
34 Seeck, Einführung, 15. 35 Ibidem, 12-‐14.
36 Heike Bauer, ‘“Race", Normativity and the History of Sexuality. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Racism and
Early Twentieth-‐Century Sexology’ 1-‐23; 8. (Working draft, obtained from
https://www.academia.edu/1543964/Race_normativity_and_the_history_of_sexuality_Magnus_Hirs chfelds_racism_and_early-‐twentieth-‐century_sexology on 12 august 2015. Final version published in Psychology and Sexuality 1 (2010) 239-‐249.) Also see: Renkin, ‘Biopolitical mythologies’, 5-‐6.
37 Ina Kerner, Differenzen und Macht. Zur Anatomie von Rassismus und Sexismus (Frankfurt am
different parts of the world, but explained them by pointing to social mimicry and environmental influences instead of biological difference.38 As Heike Bauer shows, Hirschfeld thus rejected the idea of a biological ‘racial type’, while at the same time holding on to the notion of an innate and universal ‘sexual type’.39
In the single other publication that engages with Hirschfeld and race, the German religious studies scholar J. Edgar Bauer contends that Western cultural memory has unjustly focused on Hirschfeld as leader of the homosexual emancipation movement while ignoring his contribution to the deconstruction of sexual and racial categories. In his eyes, Hirschfeld developed the first sexological ‘non-‐Eurocentric, anti-‐colonialist understanding and critique of Asian cultures from a sexological perspective’ in his travelogue Weltreise eines
Sexualforschers (1933), and also successfully deconstructed the closed scheme of racial
distribution in Racism.40 Contrary to Heike Bauer, who asserts that for Hirschfeld every individual was sexualised, while their racialisation was an invention of normative discourses, J. Edgar stresses that Hirschfeld contested both the fixed categorisations of ‘race’ and of sex, by theorizing them both in terms of universalised ‘intermediariness’. Just like all individuals were essentially ‘intersexual variants’, they were also ‘racial hybrids’ in Hirschfeld’s eyes.41 So, according to Heike Bauer, Hirschfeld contested the influence of race on the individual while affirming the influence of sex and sexuality, whereas J. Edgar Bauer argues that Hirschfeld deconstructed both the category of sex and the category of race. They do agree, however, that Hirschfeld was an important critic of racism and the category of race.
Historiography: Hirschfeld and visual material
Hirschfeld was a keen collector and implementer of visual material, probably having collected visual material right from the start of his scientific career onwards. In 1908, he reported that his archive contained ‘an tausend Photographien und Bilder sexueller
38 Magnus Hirschfeld, Racism (London 1938). Hirschfeld composed this work in France in 1933 and
1934. It is an edited and extended compilation of the twenty essays of his article series called Phantom Rasse. Ein Hirngespinst als Weltgefahr, published in the Prague periodical Wahrheit from 1934 to 1935. The book was only published in English, in a translation by Eden and Cedar Paul. Kerner, Differenzen und Macht, 97.
39 Heike Bauer, ‘“Race”, Normativity and the History of Sexuality’, 3.
40 J. Edgar Bauer, ‘Sexuality and its nuances. On Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexual ethnology and China’s
sapiential heritage’, Anthropological Notebooks 17 (2011) 5-‐27; 8-‐9. Also see: Hirschfeld, Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers.
Zwischenstufen’, while the collection of his Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in 1919 reportedly contained about 6.000 organised pictures, ‘die von der Ipsation bis zum Lustmord alle sexuellen Anomalien betreffen’.42 According to some sources, its collection had accumulated to a stunning 35.000 photographs short before the Institute was shut down by the national socialists in 1933.43 These images were used in numerous of Hirschfeld’s publications. He started using photography in his work from the early 1900s onwards, gradually extending its use until in 1930, towards the end of his career, this visual tradition in his work culminated in the publication of the Bilderteil of his Geschlechtskunde.44
Since the 2000s, several scholars have addressed the role of imagery in sexology, taking Hirschfeld’s work as a classical example while focussing on his use of photography, the most ‘scientific’ of all visualisation techniques. They mainly discuss how Hirschfeld used images of individual bodies to demonstrate his theory of sexual intermediates. The first who engaged with Hirschfeld’s use of imagery was the German art historian Katharina Sykora, who in a 2004 article centres her attention on images from Geschlechtsübergänge (1905), Die
Transvestiten (1912) and the so-‐called Zwischenstufenwand, which was shown in the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft from the early 1920s onwards.45 She theorises that in Hirschfeld’s use
42 Magnus Hirschfeld, ‘Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft’, Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 19
(1919) 54-‐55, quoted in Ralf Dose and Rainer Herrn, ‘Verloren 1933. Bibliothek und Archiv des Instituts für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin’ in: Regine Dehnel ed., Jüdischer Buchbesitz als Raubgut. Zweites hannoversches Symposium (Frankfurt am Main 2006) 37-‐51; 40-‐41. The word Ipsation means ‘masturbation’.
43 This number is based on the memoires of former Institute contributor Ludwig Levy-‐Lenz. Erwin J.
Haeberle, ‘The Jewish Contribution’, 315. See: Ludwig Levy-‐Lenz, Erinnerungen eines Sexual-‐Arztes (Baden-‐Baden 1954) 372-‐75.
44 In 1905, Hirschfeld published his first ‘photo book’ Geschlechtsübergänge, which was an
extended publication of a slide lecture he had held on a meeting of natural scientists in Breslau. Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge. Mischungen männlicher und weiblicher
Geschlechtscharaktere (Sexuelle Zwischenstufen) (Leipzig 1905). Important later publications in which he used imagery include Magnus Hirschfeld and Max Tilke, Der erotische Verkleidungstrieb (Die Transvestiten). Der illustrierte Teil (Berlin 1912) and Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde IV. The latter is both published as: Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde. Auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet IV, Bilderteil (Stuttgart 1930) and: Idem,
Sexualwissenschaftlicher Bilderatlas zur Geschlechtskunde. Auf Grund 30jähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet (Stuttgart [1930 or 1932]). This second publication is undated, and indications concerning its year of publication differ: some scholars use 1930, while the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek assumes it was published in 1932. Apart from their title pages, however, the two editions are identical.
45 For a reconstruction as well as an analysis of part of the Zwischenstufenwand, see Katharina
Sykora, ‘Umkleidekabinen des Geschlechts. Sexualmedizinische Fotografie im frühen 20. Jahrhundert’, Fotogeschichte. Beitrage zur Geschichte und Ästhetik der Fotografie 24 (2004) 15-‐30; 19-‐23.
of photography, a double ‘dramaturgy’ of ‘uncovering’ and ‘covering up’ can be discerned. Hirschfeld was on the one hand committed to the natural scientific urge to discover unknown natural phenomena – the ‘true sex’ of hermaphrodites and transvestites in the cases Sykora examines. On the other hand, he had strong humanitarian intentions, doing his best to improve the fate of these patients, which is why he covered up parts of their bodies again (out of privacy reasons, for example).46 According to Sykora, it was clear to Hirschfeld that the photographs he used fail in light of his case histories, which is why he devised the text as a kind of rhetorical ‘bridging’ that had to compensate for the Lückenhaftigkeit or ‘incompleteness’ of sexological photography.47
Two years after Sykora, the American cultural historian David James Prickett published a second article on Hirschfeld and visuality in an edited volume on German visual culture, in which he asserts that Hirschfeld was ‘a product of modernity who seizes upon the photograph as visual verisimilitude’. He concludes that the camera was a vital tool for Hirschfeld as a doctor, political activist, and aesthete. The photo, according to Prickett, provided Hirschfeld with visual proof of the existence of sexual intermediaries, while Hirschfeld’s medical degree, combined with his textual testimony, legitimized the visual testimony of the photographed patient. Like Sykora, Prickett thus focuses his attention on photographs of sexual intermediaries, while unlike Sykora – whose selection of sources includes several early publications by Hirschfeld – he limits the scope of his analysis to Hirschfeld’s first main visual work, the 1905 Geschlechtsübergänge.
The role of images in Hirschfeld’s work has also been addressed on several occasions by the German historian of medicine Rainer Herrn, who is affiliated with the Magnus-‐ Hirschfeld-‐Gesellschaft and has published extensively on Hirschfeld and on early twentieth century sexology. In a short 2007 article he traces an image of a young man that appears in Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtsübergänge to its probable origin in the field of homoerotic photography around 1900.48 As Herrn points out, the image travelled from this source to the discipline of sexology, and was made to seem more objective by changing its background to
46 Sykora, ‘Umkleidekabinen des Geschlechts, 15. 47 Ibidem, 20.
48 Rainer Herrn, ‘Metamorphotische Inszenierungen der sexualwissenschaftlichen Fotografie’, Mitteilungen der Magnus-‐Hirschfeld-‐Gesellschaft 37-‐38 (2007) 104-‐108. This article is the first in an intended column called ‘Bildergeschichten’ in the Hirschfeld Gesellschaft’s periodical. Herrn’s contribution proved to be the first as well as the last article in this column.
