The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story

Medical historian Shillace (Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher) offers an evocative study of Weimar Germany’s Institute for Sexual Sciences, the first scientific institution to treat homosexuality and transgender identity as innate, and famously the first institution targeted by the Nazis for book burning. Aiming to “understand why the Institute became such a target for hatred”—since such insight will “tell us everything about the present moment”—Shillace traces the Institute’s origins back to the turn of the 20th century, when, even as innovative sexologists like the Institute’s later founder Magnus Hirschfeld were pioneering a scientifically inquisitive attitude toward sexuality and gender, a still relatively newly formed Germany, motivated by fervent nationalism, began to scapegoat gay men in government for the nascent state’s hardships. Hirschfeld himself testified at the 1907 trial of one such official; public “panic” about sexology exploded following the affair, swirling together with antisemitism as Jewish sexologists like Hirschfeld were accused of undermining the nation’s “masculinity.” Shillace traces this twisty political thread to the notorious 1933 book burning at the Institute, with a focus on the era’s disastrous, repeated ceding of ground to Nazi “masculinism”—including efforts by gay men to distance themselves from trans people. The author also relays what she uncovered about Dora Richter, the first person to receive gender-affirming surgery at the Institute, whose story, while moving, can distract with its more sentimental tone (“She went about both day and night as a sweet young maid”). Still, this is an incisive, timely study of Weimar politics. (May)