The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture by Heike Bauer (review)

To many, Magnus Hirschfeld is a heroic figure fully deserving of an exalted place in the pantheon of gay liberators. Nobody in imperial and Weimar Germany did more than he did to advance the claims of sexual and gender minorities, and his achievements have been celebrated in eyewitness accounts, biographies, documentaries, and films ever since. But Heike Bauer is not interested in what she regards as simplistic narratives of progress or of homosexual emancipation; the queer past, she claims, is very much more complicated than that. Nor is she satisfied with conventional biographies— even those that eschew hagiography, balance their subjects’ strengths against their weaknesses, and contextualize problematic thoughts and comments within prevailing discourses of the time. Her intriguing book focuses instead on the role of violence in and around the elaboration of queer culture in the early twentieth century, and, imaginatively, she weaves her discussion from fragments of the life and writings of Magnus Hirschfeld. But it is her critique of the man that is most attention-grabbing and that is at the heart of her analysis. She is no mere iconoclast—she is not averse to giving praise where she thinks it is due—yet she accuses him of pursuing “gay rights” too narrowly, oblivious to other kinds of racial and gendered injustice. Moreover, she asserts that the limits of empathy that he exemplified and that shaped the emergence of queer culture continue to haunt gay rights discourse and politics today. It is quite an indictment, but is it fair?

Bauer first takes Hirschfeld to task for his apparent blindness to the brutality of Wilhelmine Germany’s colonial exploitation. He only denounced racism toward the end of his life, when the rise of the Nazis was threatening him and his fellow Jews directly. This meant that the early struggle for homosexual rights was divorced from a broader fight for social equality and justice. Chapter 2 concentrates on the theme of persecution and death, especially suicide. A sense of queer existence, Bauer contends, both in Hirschfeld’s career and collectively, arose as much from self-violence and oppression as it did from liberationist political and cultural mobilization. The third chapter focuses variously on abuse, the treatment of sexual offenders, and other manifestations of physical violence as discussed in Hirschfeld’s lesser-known works. Bauer here discovers blind spots in Hirschfeld’s challenges to sexual and gender binarism and implicates his sexological practices in coerced surgical procedures. The fourth chapter turns to Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin, providing an opening for a discussion of topics as varied as domestic service, emerging queer and transgender spaces, and the politics of Nazi homophobia in the attack that pillaged and burned much of Hirschfeld’s archive in 1933. The fifth chapter travels with Hirschfeld in exile during his final years as he journeyed between North America, Asia, and the Middle East. Once again he is found wanting: he excludes certain gendered, racial, and ethnic voices from his narrative. His enthusiasm for Zionism, for example, fails to discuss the Jewish-settler impact on Arabs and Muslims in Palestine. And a brief coda to the book talks about Hirschfeld’s postwar legacy, though it doesn’t get much beyond Alfred Kinsey’s rather negative take on him in the 1950s.

This is a deeply researched, complex, and nuanced book full of fresh perspectives and arresting insights. But it is also problematic in three main respects. First, many of Bauer’s conclusions are scarcely novel; they even border on the banal. Just to give one example among many, the claim that “homosexual culture formed not just around political protest and affirmative cultural representations but also around injury, hurt, and death” (56) will surely not come as a surprise to any queer historian. Nor will her insistence that Hirschfeld shared many of the prejudices and blind spots of his contemporaries. Is there any saint out there who did...