Laurie Marhoefer

Sex and the Weimar Republic shows how, in Weimar Germany, the citizen's right to sexual freedom came with a duty to keep sexuality private, non-commercial, and respectable.

German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis

Sex and the Weimar Republic

Georgina Gale

Science demonstrated that sexual anomalies such as homosexu- ality were rare, natural, "purely biological, not pathological," variations, similar to other naturally occurring and yet unusual conditions, such as colour blindness. 

"What is natural can- not be immoral," Hirschfeld wrote.l0 "When state and society, family and individual persist in their old prejudice against homosexual men and women, a prejudice that is based on ignorance, then an injustice is done, one that has only few parallels in human history."ll 

The Weimar Republic relaxed restric. ions on media about sexuality, which proved crucial for the fomation of mass political organizations of gay men, lesbians, and "ransvestites (Transvestiten), 19

Only through science, he believed, could homosexuals achieve liberation.

Steakley, Homosexual Emancipation, 73; Herzer, Hirschfeld, 29-30. 

This is reflected in some studies of the homosexual emancipa movement that deny much significance to the Weimar period.

Their struggle began in 1918-19, when war, revolution, and the Republic's founding seemed to commentators from across the political spectrum to have destabilized norms of gender and sexuality.

also the KPD at times, though they were also critical of some reforms

The coalition for reform included Hirschfeld and the WhK. It also included feminists and sex reformers. To them, including the guests at the opening of the Institute for Sexual Science, a new era of sexual norality and parliamentary democracy promised a better life and a more just society. In party politics, the German Social Democrats (the SPD) largely backed the reforms for which Hirschfeld and his allies fought. 

Opposing the reformers were people who defended a vision of sexuality drawn from Christianity. They valued heterosexual mariage and decried the creeping influence of what they called immorality which included homosexuality, prostitution, and supposedly obscene media, as well as extramarital heterosexual sex and the birth control and abortion practices that it entailed. They were wracked with anxiety that Germany would soon drown beneath a monsterous "flood" of "immorality.” Protestant historian and diehard monarchist Ulrich Stutz declared in 1920 that in Germany the "new Sodom and Gomorrah" had arisen by which, he said, he did not only mean Berlin but other big cities too such as "no-longer-holy Cologne." Among those who took this view were members of the conservative women's movement, moderate politicians in the Centre Party, Protestant morality activists, and right-wing conservatives, this last group often being linked to the German National Socialist Party (DNVP). The National Socialist German Workers Party or Nazi Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterbartei, NSDAP) took no part in the major battles of Weimar-era sexual politics because it did not enter the national political arena with any kind of force until the Great Depression hit Germany in the winter of 1929-30.

 Dem-onstrating the depth of support for the Institute in Social Democratic circles, a police official wrote that scientific research into "sexual life ... can only be welcomed" and defended the Institute's advocacy of the not uncommon opinion that homosexuality is not a vice, but rather an inborn predisposition.”

 Substantial portions of the major lesbian novel of the era, Anna Elisabet Weirauch's The Scorpion (Der Skorpion, published in three volumes between 1919 and 1931) are set in the countryside, and the book critiques the conservative, bour- geoisie notion that perversion resided exclusively in cities.

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