Book Burning Memorial
‘In the center of Bebelplatz, a glass window showing rows and rows of empty bookshelves. The memorial commemorates the night in 1933 when 20,000 “anti-German” books were burned here under the instigation of Goebbels. There’s a plaque nearby that says something like “Where they burn books, they will also burn humans in the end.” ’
Interesting but rarely mentioned: most of the content burned that night came from the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (institute for the science of sex) headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. The institute and Hirshfeld himself were some of the first to openly campaign for the right to have sex with someone of the same gender, the right to transition if you did not identify with your birth sex and for the general acceptance of queer people. The team had already performed the first SRS operations in Germany and in addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women’s emancipation.
Photographs of the night of the book burning are plastered across history books world wide, but the queer movement that was destroyed that night often goes unmentioned.reblogging again for that^
They basically burned the Alexandria library of sex research including the most advanced research on gender at the time anywhere.
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From the wikipedia page:
Magnus Hirschfeld coined the term transsexualism, identifying the clinical category which his colleague Harry Benjamin would later develop in the United States. Transgender people were on the staff of the Institute, as well as being among the clients there. Various endocrinologic and surgical services were offered, including the first modern sex reassignment surgeries in the 1930s. Hirschfeld also worked with Berlin’s police department to curtail the arrest of cross-dressed individuals, including those suspected of wearing certain clothing in connection with sex work, through the creation of «transvestite passes» issued on behalf of the Institute to those who had a personal desire to wear clothing associated with a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth.
I wonder where we’d be on trans rights if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed their work.
Not everything was lost. When much of the staff of the Institute fled the country in 1933, they settles in any places that were considered relatively progressive at the time. Places like Paris (where a vibrant transgender community with access to hormone therapy formed in the fifties), Casablanca (where surgery for trans women became available in large numbers for the first time) and New York (where Harry Benjamin, directly inspired by Hirshfeld, did much of his ground breaking work).
Did Hirshfeld’s team directly create these movements? That would be too simple and there hasn’t been enough research on transgender history to know the legacy of each staffmember. Some probably moved on to safer kinds of work. But they did carry a spark of potential. Not everything the nazis tried to destroy way lost. Some of it survived, flourished and created new possibilities.
QueerAnarchism 