Abstract
Set in Germany's turbulent interwar years of the Weimar Republic's alternating progressivism and reaction, this bracing history weaves together three related plots. In one, the pioneering physician Magnus Hirschfeld (who was gay and Jewish) establishes Berlin's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the first major research facility for gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments. In another, the Institut patient Dora (named Rudolf at birth) Richter referred to herself as a hermaphrodite but struggled as she aimed to transition. Meanwhile, a failed Austrian artist named Adolf Hitler galvanized larger and larger crowds of avid sympathizers to strengthen Germany by blaming all “non-German” people, especially Jews and homosexuals but also women and racial minorities, for the humiliating loss of the “stolen” World War. As Brandy Schillace, the historian and editor of Medical Humanities, intertwines these stories, her erudite research and lively writing bring forth the correspondent threats of state-sponsored sexual repression and emerging fascism.
Baked into this history's narrative is an awareness of the thin line between human authenticity and national politics, an eerily familiar portrait of the rise of autocracy. With their rejection of democracy, embrace of conservative religiosity and hatred of “foreigners,” and especially imbued with pseudo-Darwinian theories of “race hygiene” (Rassenhygiene), Hitler's supporters carried out the Nazi Party's (NSDAP) brutal mandate in both spirit and fact. The impact of this “Third Reich” on research and medicine was generally disastrous, but remarkably, Magnus Hirschfeld's fight for sexual emancipation persevered. Since 1928, the Institut had hosted the World League for Sexual Reform (WLSR), Hirschfeld's international organization to promote social change by eliminating all forms of gender discrimination and liberalizing sex laws including abortion, contraception, and homosexuality. The Institut placed itself within a Berlin elite, bringing together contemporary sexologists with avantgarde cinéastes and writers like Christopher Isherwood and publishing the “Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries.” And even with the Reich hovering menacingly at its doors, still the WLSR welcomed hundreds of delegates from every continent to its inaugural conference where attendees agreed to a “rational attitude toward sexually abnormal people and especially with regard to homosexuals both men and women.” (p. 218)
Dora Richter experienced no such rationality in her life as an intermediary. She fled her abusive father, was blackmailed by a rapist and then raped again by an elderly uncle, was refused a passport, yet dressed with flair and died as an elderly woman who enjoyed Berlin's expansive parks. Still, as Schillace emphasizes, she did “die as a woman, through and through” (p.259). Dora had first visited Hirschfeld's Institut in 1923, and though she didn’t meet the man himself, she felt uplifted by its front door motto, “Amori et dolori sacrum” (“sacredness of love and pain”) and carried that inspiration for the rest of life. Her initial physical exam designated her as a “homosexual transvestite,” an identifier which Hirschfeld placed in a “natural” third category of sex yet one of ten intermediary subgroups. Dora remained at the Institut for surgeries over the next decade, “on the journey to become herself.” (p. 187)
In 1933, ten years after Dora first crossed the Institut's threshold, Nazi Stormtroopers and German students stood ogling over Hirschfeld's patient photographs and plundering his collection. Ostensibly, this was a mission to “cleanse” the library of anything “un-German,” anything Jewish, female, homosexual or trans. Hirschfeld's very image was burned. Masculinist nationalism had already equated homosexuals with Jews, pathological and undeserving of life. By the late 1930s, as the idea of “curative education” for “perverts” aligned ever more stridently with eugenicist Nazi rhetoric, so too its proponents expedited the feral racial hygiene laws’ impact on the lives – and deaths – of the trans-supportive community. Euthanasia achieved a grim goal, the fulfillment of Nazi zeal for racial and gender purification.
Schillace's gift for deep research evokes the particulars of her subjects’ life, namely Dora Richter's struggles to conceal her identity as a trans person and her arrival in Magnus Hirschfeld's pioneering Institut für Sexualwissenschaft where the wishes of gender non-conforming people were openly respected. Sensitive to both the micro and the macro aspects of history, Schillace allows us to follow Dora as she navigates a Germany democracy on the brink of collapse, and where constitutional governance and civil liberties are suspended under Adolf Hitler's dictatorship. With its uncanny forecast of parallel oppression occurring in the United States today, “The Intermediaries” is a categorically important book. As Sigmund Freud wrote vigilantly in 1917, “In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty. In melancholia it is the ego itself.” Niemals vergessen.
