Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement by Elena Mancini (review)

One of Elena Mancini’s justifications for this concise new study is that Magnus Hirschfeld has been “neglected, underrated, and dismissed” (xii). Given the attention devoted to him in print and film in recent decades, this is a surprising claim—and an unnecessary one: there is certainly room for another introduction to the life and times of this remarkable man for a new generation of students, and her book is a welcome addition to the literature. A second motivation is to emphasize Hirschfeld’s panhumanistic approach to the emancipation of marginalized groups rather than the more limited emphasis Mancini detects in the contributions of her predecessors. A third, much more controversial reason is to revitalize and reinterpret his ethic for the present: “I believe that we are at a time in which reconstructing Hirschfeld’s unique liberal, humanistic, cosmopolitan vantage point is needed” (xvii).

Amidst the biographical detail she provides, Mancini has little to say about Hirschfeld’s sexual awakening and his own homosexual life until his later years, presumably because of lack of evidence. But she gives a compelling account of his life’s work, embedding it in contemporary intellectual currents and German sexual politics through successive regimes from the 1890s to the 1930s. She sees him as a classic liberal who anchored his claims in the authority and objectivity of reason and science in the face of moralizing dogma concerning sexuality, gender, and race. Through his copious writings, his anthropological and ethnographic studies of sexual practices in Berlin, Asia, and Africa, his founding of a series of organizations and institutions dedicated to sexual reform, and his experimentation with varied biological, endocrinological, and psychological approaches to sexual difference, he succeeded in transforming the discourse on homosexuality and legitimating intersexed identities. If some of his theories—notably the “third sex” view of homosexuality—were later discounted, Mancini correctly argues that this does not diminish or devalue his enormous impact. Although the Nazis destroyed his Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin in 1933 and he died in exile in Nice in 1935, his writings were rediscovered in the 1960s, and his legacy was picked up by lesbian and gay campaigners in the 1970s.

There is, then, much of value in this volume as a readable introduction to the man and his oeuvre. But Mancini’s way of dividing up her chapters between theme and chronology, subject and context—always tricky choices for any biographer—leads to choppy prose on occasion and a good deal of repetition and redundancy. Something also went seriously awry during the editing process: the text is replete with grammatical and spelling errors, typos, misspelled names, incorrect dates, and misplaced, incorrect, or absent accents.

More problematic is Mancini’s present-mindedness, indicating a curious tension in her argument. On the one hand, she is determined to rescue Hirschfeld from vaguely defined and unnamed Foucauldian and postmodernist LGBT activists and queer theorists who allegedly attack him for his reliance on science—an oppressive articulation of power—and for positing restrictive categories of sexual identity. Here she is targeting a straw man so far as historians are concerned, since her encouragement for us to take the historical view and look at Hirschfeld’s use of science and appreciate its emancipatory potential within the context of the time is unlikely to generate dissent. On the other hand, she attempts to recruit him to score political points in current debates, which comes perilously close to wrenching him out of the context that she rightly insists upon. She takes particular aim at queer theory. In a strongly worded epilogue, she accuses queer theorists of expressing their opposition to society’s dominant practices in unintelligible prose and in a fashion that deliberately alienates mainstream majorities. They swap, she claims, “the pursuit of democratic rights that are accorded by democratic institutions for the questionable and fleeting satisfaction of...