First homosexual movement
The first homosexual movement thrived in Germany from the late nineteenth century until 1933. The movement began in Germany because of a confluence of factors, including the criminalization of sex between men and the country's relatively lax censorship. German writers in the mid-nineteenth century coined the word homosexual and criticized its criminalization. In 1897, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, whose aim was to use science to improve public tolerance of homosexuality and repeal Paragraph 175. During the German Empire, the movement was restricted to the wealthy elite, but it greatly expanded in the aftermath of World War I and the German Revolution.
Reduced censorship and the growth of homosexual subcultures in German cities helped the movement to flourish during the Weimar Republic. The first publicly sold, mass-market periodicals intended for a gay, lesbian, or transvestite readership appeared after 1919, although they faced censorship lawsuits and bans on public sale after the 1926. The first mass organizations for homosexuals, the German Friendship Society and the League for Human Rights, were founded in the aftermath of the war. These organizations emphasized human rights and respectability politics, and they excluded prostitutes and effeminate homosexual men, who were considered harmful to the movement's public image. The homosexual movement had limited success with the general public, in part because many Germans believed that homosexuality could be spread as a communicable disease.
The movement began to wane in 1929 with the Great Depression, an increasingly hostile political climate, and the failure of the movement's main goal, the repeal of Paragraph 175. It effectively ended within a few months of the Nazi takeover in early 1933, and the relative tolerance of the Weimar era was followed by the most severe persecution of homosexual men in history. The Weimar Republic has held enduring interest as a brief interlude in which gay men, lesbians, and transvestites took advantage of unprecedented freedoms, leaving a strong influence on later LGBTQ movements.
Background
Homosexuals have faced persecution throughout German history. The 1532 Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, the first penal code of the Holy Roman Empire, called for the execution of homosexuals by burning at the stake. It is unclear how much laws against homosexuality were enforced prior to the modern era. In some parts of Germany, homosexuality was decriminalized or punishment lessened from death to imprisonment as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. After the unification of Germany in 1871, Prussian law was adopted by the German Empire, including Paragraph 175 that criminalized sex between men. The law was difficult to enforce because it required proof that the accused had participated in penetrative sex with another man, although case law was inconsistent about exactly which acts were illegal.Some authors influenced by Enlightenment ideas began to criticize the criminalization of consensual sexual conduct. In the 1830s, the Swiss writer Heinrich Hössli was one of the first to voice this sentiment. German-language writer Karl Maria Kertbeny coined the word homosexual in 1869 and anonymously published pamphlets advocating against the criminalization of homosexuality. By the 1880s, homosexual was in broad circulation. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a lawyer, began to publicly defend homosexuals under his own name in the 1860s and 1870s. In 1867, he attempted to argue for the decriminalization of homosexuality at a conference of the in Munich, but was shouted down. Ulrichs argued that homosexuality is inborn and Urnings were a kind of hermaphrodite, who developed from a rare variation in sexual development leaving them with the body of one sex but the soul of the other. Both Ulrichs and Hössli argued that homosexuals were a fixed minority comparable to an ethnic group—especially the Jews—and consequently deserving of legal protection. In contrast, Kertbeny was skeptical that homosexuality was innate, and instead argued for decriminalization based on liberal principles.
The second half of the nineteenth century saw scientific research into homosexuality. Around 1850, French psychiatrist Claude-François Michéa and German physician Johann Ludwig Casper independently suggested that homosexuality was caused by a physical difference from heterosexuals; the exact nature of this purported physical difference became a sought-after target of medical research. At the same time, many psychiatrists believed that homosexuality was a product of environmental factors such as bad habits or seduction. Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing was one of the most influential advocates of the theory that various maladies, including homosexuality, could be blamed on the degeneracy of modern life; he was also a friend of Ulrichs and, by the end of his life, came to the conclusion that homosexuality should not be criminalized and that it was not a disease or degeneration. By the late nineteenth century, the most influential works in psychiatry considered homosexual orientation an innate disease and disagreed with its criminalization. At the same time, a widespread belief among Germans that homosexuality could be spread as a communicable disease fueled the arguments of opponents of homosexual emancipation in interwar Germany and limited the potential of the first homosexual movement.
Organized activism in the German Empire
The homosexual movement in Imperial Germany was numerically tiny but it had a high profile and powerful allies. Homosexuality among men was the subject of especially wide-ranging debate involving not just parliamentary and political discussions but also medical and sexological research. According to historian Edward Ross Dickinson, the homosexual movement was extremely radical because of the deep-seated prejudice against homosexuality among educated Germans, so that challenging Paragraph 175 "potentially called every other sexual taboo into question". By 1900 the homosexual scene in Berlin was increasing in size and visibility, which may have played a role in softening public attitudes towards homosexuality. The homosexual movement was one of many social and political movements that emerged around 1900 in Germany because of the expansion of the right to vote, urbanization, the rise of mass media, and other social changes. In his book Gay Berlin, historian Robert Beachy argues that a confluence of factors, including the criminalization of homosexuality, relatively loose censorship compared to other European countries, and the influence of psychiatry meant that Germany was the place where a sense of homosexual identity was developed since the mid-nineteenth century, and ultimately catalyzed the first homosexual movement.Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee
The German-Jewish sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld was the most important spokesperson for homosexual rights in the early twentieth century, although he never publicly acknowledged his homosexuality. A trained physician, he became involved in activism after the death of one of his homosexual patients by suicide. Hirschfeld hoped that science could improve public tolerance for homosexuality and lead to legal reform. In an 1893 pamphlet, he argued that sexuality could "neither be acquired through environmental factors or suggestions, nor extinguished through medical treatment or psychological conditioning", which in his view made criminalizing it legally and morally untenable. Hirschfeld initially borrowed heavily from Ulrichs's arguments. Later, he developed the theory of sexual intermediaries, positing that there are no true men or women but rather every person has a combination of masculine and feminine characteristics.In 1897, Hirschfeld founded the world's first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, with Max Spohr,, and Franz Joseph von Bülow. Initially the founders contributed their own money; later, they were supported by a few wealthy donors. The committee wanted to present a petition against Paragraph 175 to the Reichstag in 1898 with as many signatures as possible and in the longer term to use research in sexology to advocate for the repeal of Paragraph 175 and increase societal tolerance for homosexuals. The WhK's petition had more than 900 signatures by 1898, but found little support in parliament. By 1914, the petition had accumulated the signatures of more than 3,000 doctors, 750 university professors, and thousands of other Germans, including Krafft-Ebing, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and prominent Social Democratic politicians. None of the WhK's petitions were successful. The WhK argued that homosexuality was natural and found in all human cultures, supporting its arguments by comparison with countries where homosexuality was not illegal, scholarly works on homosexuality in ancient Greece, and ethnographies of non-Western cultures.
In 1899, the WhK began to publish the journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. It also published booklets intended for a popular audience, such as Was soll das Volk vom dritten Geschlecht wissen?, which had at least 50,000 copies printed by 1911. Many of these booklets were distributed free of charge; Hirschfeld claimed to have distributed 100,000 booklets by 1914. In 1911, amateur ethnographer Ferdinand Karsch-Haack published Das gleichgeschlechtliche Leben der Naturvölker in which he collected all known examples of same-sex desire and gender nonconformity in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas to prove that homosexuality was innate and natural.
Hirschfeld was able to persuade some psychiatrists to soften their opinion on homosexuality by introducing them to the homosexual scene in Berlin. He was also able to secure the acquittal or mitigation of the sentence of prosecuted homosexuals with his expert witness testimony. In 1909, he persuaded the Berlin authorities to accept transvestite passes allowing people to cross-dress without fear of police harassment or arrest. Hirschfeld also spent much time fundraising for the WhK and setting up its organizational structure, including branches in other German cities. The WhK included women, some of whom identified as homosexual, and sponsored research into female homosexuality, although its main focus continued to be abolishing Paragraph 175.