Universal Fetishism? Emancipation and Race in Magnus Hirschfeld's 1930 Sexological Visual Atlas

"Bilder sollen bilden." With this succinctly worded statement that "images should educate," the influential German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) opened the visual volume, or Bilderteil, of a five-volume book series entitled Geschlechtskunde (Sex studies, 1926–30).¹ This nine-hundred-page volume is an intriguing recapitulation of the thirty years of sexological and emancipatory experience presented in the Geschlechtskunde series.² In line with other late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scientific atlases, which functioned as crucial tools in the organization of individual research objects into visual compendia virtually mapping the territory of a discipline, the volume offers a truly kaleidoscopic abundance of pictures.³ More than fourteen hundred images depict a great variety of subjects, ranging from sixteenth-century etchings of Adam and Eve to microphotographs of gonadic tissue, images showing phenomena such as exotic phallus statues, bodily deformations, medieval chastity belts, stillborn babies, syphilitic infections, skeletons, and even sex-changing chickens (see fig. 1). The sole common denominator of these images is that they are all in one way or another related to Hirschfeld's lifelong research into the varieties of human sexuality.

Figure 1.

"Head of a rooster" (left) and "Head of a hen" (right), in Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde: Auf Grund dreißigjähriger Forschung und Erfahrung bearbeitet, vol. 4, Bilderteil (Stuttgart: Julius Püttmann, 1930). The images on the left show the head of a rooster before and after its castration and the implantation of female gonads. The images on the left show a hen before and after a similar operation with male gonads.

Hirschfeld was both a renowned sexologist and an influential activist for the rights of sexual minorities. Through scientific reasoning he hoped to be able to alleviate the burdens borne by homosexuals and others whose sexual identities contravened contemporary norms. He was committed to disseminating his sexological research in the hopes of changing public opinion and to persuade legislators to revoke discriminatory laws. In Bilderteil zur Geschlechtskunde his goal was to demonstrate that the subjects of his research—homosexuals, people then known as transvestites, intersex people, sadomasochists, and other categories then considered sexually deviant—had natural, biological causes and that they should therefore be accepted instead of repressed or discriminated against. Following his book's motto, "Bilder sollen bilden," he sought to provide readers from all levels of society with sexological education by inviting them to take part in his reasoning and to see for themselves what he meant.⁴ Even though the book's cost limited the target audience to consumers who could afford the work or could read it in public libraries, Hirschfeld aimed for it to be understandable to all readers and therefore chose to explain all specialist terminology.⁵

Previous scholarship has highlighted Hirschfeld's importance as one of the most prominent members of the German homosexual movement and has demonstrated his lasting influence on the construction of early homosexual and trans identities.⁶ During the last years of his career, Hirschfeld also began to write more explicitly on the concept of race. Although an interest in sexuality in other cultures had been at the heart of his project from the start, his stronger engagement with race was also related to the growing influence of anti-Semitic right-wing movements in Germany, whose racist ideologies had severe implications for Hirschfeld and other people of Jewish descent.⁷ In the second volume of Geschlechtskunde (1928) he strongly condemned racism, arguing that it was an invention of normative discourses and in no way related to actual biological traits.⁸ A few years later, he was forced to extend a lecture tour across America that he had started in 1930 into a world tour when the Nazis rose to power and prevented his return to Germany. Before he died in exile in 1935, he published a large number of "sexual-ethnographical" observations as an account of his travels.⁹ He also elaborated on his Geschlechtskunde argument against racism in his posthumously published book Racism, which was one of the first...