It is when they study eugenics that historians most often consider how ideas of heredity and degeneration affected the state regulation of sexualities. Yet in Weimar-era Germany, the belief that degeneration existed and had intractable, hereditary causes shaped laws on sexuality in ways that had nothing to do with concerns about the fitness of future generations. Eugenics was just one set of policy proposals in a wide field of schemes to improve society by put-ting to use supposedly solid knowledge of heredity, biology, and the inability of certain people to change. What is striking about the cases at hand—male homosexuality and female prostitution—is that in the course of two national efforts to modernize German law, middle class activists invoked knowledge about degeneration in order to produce sexual liberation. They succeeded, and freed the sex lives of large numbers of Germans from police oversight. This liberation came at a price for a small group of working class and poor female and male prostitutes. Since the Weimar Republic’s founding, people have identified it with the radical remaking of sexual norms. In the 1920s, Germans understood their coun-try to be in the throes of what the Kölnische Zeitung called “sexual revolution.”1 Some celebrated how “in these times…people have become more tolerant;”2 others wailed that Germany had been rendered “notorious among civilized nations.”3 The widespread perception that war and the coming of democracy had radicalized sex inspired bitter political battles about how the state ought to react to sexual revolution. Sexual politics were a key part of Weimar-era politics.4 This article examines two of the central battles of these sexual politics. One resulted in a law that decriminalized and deregulated female prostitution. The

Degeneration, Sexual Freedom, and the Politics of the Weimar Republic,

1918–1933

Ideas about hereditary degeneration animated two powerful movements for sexual liberation during the Weimar Republic. One reform won the decriminalization of female prostitution. The other nearly won the repeal of Germany’s sodomy law. Activists for these reforms argued that the state could extend greater sexual freedom to most Germans if it curtailed the excesses of supposedly degenerate men and women. The Weimar Republic offered greater sexual autonomy to many of its citizens, at the expense of a small minority of people who were defined as degenerate.

Laurie MarhoeferSyracuse University

530 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

other almost generated the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law against male-male sex. Conservatives of various stripes opposed both reforms. Backing both re-forms was a shifting, moderate-left coalition of politicians, experts, and activists including women’s groups, the German Social Democrats (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands), and the homosexual emancipation movement. Reformers sought to expand what they understood to be sexual freedom. They argued that this expansion of freedom was possible because the state would simultaneously tighten controls on a small group of supposedly degenerate male and female prostitutes, whom reformers argued would abuse the new freedom. Although some scholars have hailed both movements for reform as establishing greater toleration of sexual diversity, this was in fact a shift from one way of regulating sexualities—legislation—to a supposedly more modern, but no less interven-tionist one—differentiated welfare. Ideas about the hereditary roots of certain behaviors fueled eugenics, but they also animated a wider set of plans to improve society, including the le-gal reforms described here. Francis Galton, who coined “eugenics” in 1883, described it as the scientific means by which humans could direct their own evolution.5 During the Weimar years, self-professed eugenicists promoted programs intended to improve the “quality” of the population over time, such as marriage fitness tests and sterilization.6 But ideas about intractable hereditary conditions had saliency beyond such programs. Concepts of hereditary degeneration date to the psychiatry of the mid-nine-teenth century and Bénédict-Augustin Morel’s theory of degeneration, or the hereditary transmission of abnormalities initially caused by environment, and their progressive exacerbation, or “decay,” over time. Versions of this notion proved enduring in European science and popular culture.7 Although German psychiatry moved away from degeneration theory in the Weimar years, ideas about degeneration still circulated in public discourses—often lumped in with notions of the heredity causes of mild intellectual disability and personality disorders that were more current in academic psychiatry.8 Psychiatry held that hereditary factors caused abnormalities of personality and forms of intellectual disability. The abnormalities did not rise to the level of mental illness, but could supposedly produce antisocial behavior, including, to varying extents, sexual disorder and crime. They were initially termed “psychopathic inferiorities,” most often shortened to “inferiorities” (psychopathische Minderwertigkeiten or Minderwertigkeiten). Psychiatrists of the 1920s preferred “psychopathy” and “psychopath” for these borderline abnormalities rather than “inferiorities,” but both sets of terms appeared outside of psychiatric discourse. “Feebleminded” (Schwachsinn) was an additional term used both by psychiatrists and those outside of psychiatry to designate a supposedly relatively mild intellectual disability that consisted of an impaired moral sense.9

531Laurie Marhoefer

All of this amounted to widespread knowledge about how antisocial behav-iors could have hereditary and organic causes, causes that in some cases would supposedly prove impossible to eliminate via therapeutic methods. However, most psychiatrists held that although biological dispositions helped to cause abnormal behaviors, environmental causes mattered, too.10 Sexologists fre-quently emphasized how environment triggered latent inherited dispositions, for example towards prostitution, which would otherwise remain dormant.11 Yet many players in public policy debates saw less nuance on these issues. They often voiced the view that a person’s disposition toward antisocial behavior was in many cases partly organic, and that for a minority, perhaps a tiny minority, this made reform impossible. This vision of a small group of people who could not change because they had inherited (or in some cases, acquired) an indelible organic inclination towards sexual disorder or crime shaped plans for the welfare state.12 These reforms were not, strictly speaking, eugenics; rather, they drew on knowledge of heredity and biology to amend social ills in the here-and-now by establishing differentiated welfare. People could receive more humane treatment, treatment that accorded with the insurmountable limits on their abilities. Resources could be more wisely spent. Education professionals and criminologists put forward proposals of this kind.13 So did reformers of laws on sexuality. Although there is a rich literature on politics and sexuality under the Re-public, working divisions within it have obscured the importance of ideas about heredity and degeneration. Groundbreaking studies have made it clear that female prostitution,14 male homosexuality,15 and male prostitution16 were crucial political issues, but they consider them separately and therefore do not address how the political fates of female prostitutes, gay men, and male prostitutes were profoundly linked.17 Studies that consider eugenics focus on male-female sex.18 Female prostitution and male homosexuality did figure in eugenic schemes. Although female prostitution was often assumed to be a non-reproductive sex act, eugenicists did claim that a hereditary condition (“feeblemindedness”) caused it and that therefore its female practitioners ought to be prevented from having children, either by sterilization or institutionalization.19 Nineteenth century psychiatry linked degeneration and homosexuality, but twentieth-century sexology disputed this; calls for eugenic controls on homosexuality in this period were exceedingly rare.20 What had more significance for female prostitutes and gay men was a discourse of degeneration wider than eugenics strictly defined. My aim is not to reopen the discussion of how “moderate” or “left” Wei-mar-era eugenics related to Nazism. Historians have shown that Weimar-era eugenics encompassed a range of views held by a strikingly diverse group of people—including Catholics and Social Democrats.21 1933 was a profound break point for most of the pro-eugenics factions in Germany.22 Radical rightwing

532 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

eugenics and racial hygiene ideologies, including the Nazi variety, took no major part in the two legal reforms at issue. Historians have concluded, rightly, that ideas about degeneration and support for eugenics within the homosexual emancipation movement did not pave the way for Nazi programs.23 But the ways in which notions of degeneration promoted homosexual liberation before 1933 have gone unnumbered. If, as Robert Beachy has argued, German activists and scientists invented male homosexual identity, they used the working class male prostitute as this identity’s constitutive outside.24 Examining what sort of sexual liberation ideas about heredity and degeneration offered to gay men and female prostitutes will contribute to a fuller account of what went on in the Weimar “laboratory” when politics and sexuality were on the table. 25

The Movement to Deregulate Female Prostitution In 1927, the Reichstag passed a law that made it perfectly legal for women to sell sex in Germany without police oversight. The Law to Fight Venereal Dis-ease (Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtkrankheiten) also inaugurated an ambitious national battle against venereal disease. Controversial in its day, the VD Law is still controversial among historians. Many have stressed the law’s repressive provisions, among them the mandate that men and women refrain from sex likely to spread venereal disease.26 According to Annette Timm, by recognizing the significance of individual choices for population and nation the law established sexual duties for citizens and encroached on intimacy.27 In contrast, Julia Roos acclaims the law as a victory for feminists and for female prostitutes that created sexual rights.28

The debate persists because all of these interpretations are accurate: the law offered sexual freedom precisely because it intervened. Indeed, the broader struggle of the Republic’s historians to understand the period’s sexually eman-cipatory trends alongside its apparently repressive trends can, I submit, be viewed from a third position: this progressive, modern state liberated because it managed. When the VD Law passed, its advocates hailed it as a feminist law that would bring sexual freedom to women and men.29 They were correct: the law did establish a form of sexual freedom. This depended, however, on replacing an older system of police-managed prostitution with a new system of management in which welfare paved the way to ethical sexual behavior, in part by defining a small minority of female prostitutes as biologically degenerate. The old system that the VD Law abolished was Regulation (Reglementierung or Kontrolle), a sexist, potentially brutal institution of police-supervised female prostitution. Many German and European states and municipalities had es-tablished systems of supervised prostitution in the nineteenth century. They operated on the logic that prostitution would take place whether illegal or not, and that the state ought to do what it could to protect public health from venereal diseases spread by sex workers. Women who sold sex had to register

533Laurie Marhoefer

with police. A woman could be forced to register simply if police suspected that she was a prostitute. Once registered, women had to follow a litany of rules, in some cities live in designated brothels, and undergo regular medical exams for signs of venereal disease.30 If an exam showed a venereal infection, a woman could be forced into treatments that were only moderately effective and potentially dangerous.31 Feminists denounced Regulation’s sexist double standard. The male clients of prostitutes were not subject to police supervi-sion or medical exams. Activist doctors joined the opposition, arguing that the system actually did nothing to protect public health.32

The women’s movement’s battle against Regulation has a complex history and I will not attempt a full account of it here.33 Rather, I wish to draw attention to something that other histories of Regulation have perhaps underemphasized: the system that feminists and women’s groups created to replace it. This was “welfare for the morally endangered” (Gefährdetenfürsorge), a bureaucracy of special welfare offices (Pflegeämter) run by trained female social workers and tasked with reforming prostitutes.34

Private religious women’s groups began welfare for “morally endangered” women and girls in the nineteenth century; soon, secular feminists joined the effort.35 Before 1927, advocates of secular welfare struggled to establish welfare offices for the morally endangered on a city-by-city basis as religious organi-zations expanded their services for prostitutes. In the early 1920s, Hamburg’s welfare office for the morally endangered was one of Germany’s largest secular offices. Founded in 1919 and funded by the city, in 1922 it had a staff of 10: a female director, a female deputy director, five female social workers, one female nurse, and two office workers. Even before the passage of the VD Law, Hamburg’s office had assumed much of the official work of handling female prostitution.36 The 1927 VD Law established the welfare offices for the mor-ally endangered (together with health departments) as the Republic’s primary response to venereal disease. Although the abolition of Regulation gained support from several factions of the women’s movement as well as from female politicians across the politi-cal spectrum, two groups spearheaded the struggle.37 One consisted of secular feminists and advocates of state-funded welfare. The most prominent was Anna Pappritz, who was inspired by Josephine Butler’s battle against state-regulated prostitution in England to help to found the German branch of the Abolition-ist Federation (Abolitionistischen Föderation).38 Organized Christians advocating religious, private welfare services comprised the other group. One of their most vocal representatives was Agnes Neuhaus of the Catholic Welfare League for Girls, Women, and Children (Katholischen Fürsorgeverein für Mädchen, Frauen und Kinder), a long-serving Reichstag delegate for the Catholic Center Party.39 Neuhaus favored private, religious charity; Pappritz favored state-run welfare. Yet, they both supported the 1927 VD Law.40

534 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

“Welfare for the morally endangered” was a feminist project. This was true in two respects. It followed a feminist understanding of prostitution: female prostitutes were the victims of a sexist society, driven into their line of work by employment and pay discrimination against women, the lack of safe housing for single women, and the lack of effective religious moral education for youth.41 In addition, it served the goals of expanding educational and professional oppor-tunities for middle-class women. Female advocates used maternalist discourse to claim that women were best suited to help fellow women leave prostitution; they would do this by harnessing what Neuhaus called their “maternal feeling.”42

By 1927 the social work profession in Germany was overwhelmingly female, having been pioneered in the nineteenth century by the women’s movement.43 Putting the enterprise of “rescuing” prostitutes and potential prostitutes “into the hands of women,” as Neuhaus put it, would mean more social work jobs, more demand for professional training for middle-class women, and more authority for them to direct welfare offices.44 Making prostitution a problem for welfare, not the police, entailed constructing a feminist welfare state, or, at least, a feminist enclave within the welfare state. The VD Law is not typically counted among the Republic’s major welfare reforms, but it ought to be. Its advocates called it welfare.45 The VD Law took the primary responsibility for dealing with female pros-titutes away from the police and gave it to these welfare offices and to health departments. As its name suggests, the law was primarily an effort to fight the epidemic of venereal disease for which experts blamed the First World War.46 It shut police-supervised brothels, expanded the government’s authority to find and treat people who had venereal disease, and subsidized medical care. The law had many critics, from liberals who feared it infringed on individual rights to religious activists who claimed it promoted prostitution. Perhaps its most surprising critics—and also those who had the most difficulty drawing attention to their cause—were registered prostitutes. Some registered prostitutes, among the very women whom feminists claimed that the VD Law would help, proved to be its dedicated opponents. I am not in a position to say what the majority of registered prostitutes thought of the reform (no polling was done). Nor can I say what unregistered prostitutes—women who sold sex in violation of Regulation—made of it (they tried hard to keep out of the public eye). But 24 registered prostitutes in Berlin wrote that their work served important social functions, and that Regulation prevented the spread of venereal disease and ought to be retained.47 In Hamburg 153 women petitioned their city government in vain to keep the police-supervised brothels where they lived and worked open.48 Eight women who lived and worked in regulated brothels in Bremen petitioned to stop the city from closing them. Local feminist leaders dismissed their petition as a ploy by desperate women incapable of rejoining “respectable society.” The city closed its brothels.49

535Laurie Marhoefer

These prostitutes were at odds with their female defenders. According to its feminist architects, the sexual freedom that the VD Law offered female prostitutes was the freedom from prostitution, not the freedom to do prostitu-tion. Advocates of the new welfare hoped to “eradicate”50 female prostitution. They dismissed the claims made by some prostitutes that they had chosen their profession for sound reasons, and preferred to keep their jobs and homes in brothels. Louise Schroeder, Reichstag delegate for the Social Democrats, told the parliament, “prostitution simply does not belong in our society anymore.”51 Schroeder was herself the director of Altona’s office for welfare for the morally endangered.52

Many prostitutes must have welcomed the help finding other jobs that the welfare offices provided. In one year, the home for women and girls run by Hamburg’s office helped 470 women find other employment.53 But some women, perhaps a minority, were reluctant to find other jobs. Their reasons for recalcitrance varied. The registered, brothel-dwelling prostitutes who fought to save Regulation likely feared losing both their jobs and homes at once, especially since many were supporting children.54 Younger women who ran away from home and who were later picked up by the police may have feared being sent back to their parents.55 Additional motives could have included resentment at the interference in liberty or the paternalism of feminists, and fear of being sent to closed welfare institutions.56 Most crucially for the issue at hand, some women believed, despite prevailing moral norms, that prostitution was their best employment option. Some work-ing class women preferred prostitution to the extended hours and measly pay of domestic service.57 There are signs of some women’s resistance to attempts to “rescue” them throughout the women’s movement’s literature on “welfare for the morally endangered.” From 1921 to 1922, 43 women ran away from the Hamburg home; dozens of others were sent to closed welfare institutions.58

Proponents of “welfare for the morally endangered” identified these resisters not as a diverse group with diverse motives, but as women ruled by biological degeneration. They were, welfare advocates claimed, women with a biological disposition to do prostitution: the “feebleminded” (Schwachsinn). Since the nineteenth century, Europeans had believed that hereditary defects drove women into prostitution. During the Weimar Republic, experts often linked female prostitution to the borderline personality disorder “feeblemindedness,” a form of “moral insanity” in which a woman’s intellectual functioning might be basically normal while the portion of her brain that made moral judgments was impaired, leading to sexually disordered behavior.59 A version of this view is apparent in the writings of feminists who fought for the 1927 deregulation of prostitution, especially when they considered the prostitutes who resisted their “rescue” attempts. Like most German psychiatrists and sexologists, these feminists rejected Cesare Lombroso’s theory that inborn inclination was the

536 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

singular cause of prostitution.60 Rather they argued that both inborn and environmental factors mattered, but that in some cases, inborn propensity overwhelmed the sway of environment.61 Most women who had fallen into prostitution due to their feeblemindedness could reform; a small minority, however, could not. Feminists envisioned long-term confinement for these “incorrigible” pros-titutes. Katherina Scheven of the Abolitionist Federation explained that a high percentage of young female prostitutes were ”feeblemindeds” (Schwachsinnige) or “psychopaths.” Although better environmental influences could reform many of these women, some would fall right back into prostitution unless confined “in special institutions, like physical cripples, the blind, etc.” where they could at least “do useful work in exchange for their support by the state.” She wrote, “such individuals are born to be institutionalized (Anstaltsmenschen).”62 Both Scheven and Pappritz cite a study done by a female doctor in a welfare home for girls (Fürsorge-Erziehungsheim) that found a high percentage of “feeble-mindeds” and “psychopaths,” which the study’s author blamed on “hereditary burdens” (erbliche Belastung) and degeneration related especially to parental alcoholism.63 Pappritz wrote, “These unlucky, hereditarily burdened women need a completely different treatment than do the normal ones…We therefore need a preventative detention law (Verwahrungsgesetz) and a reform of the process of institutionalization (Entmündigungsverfahren), so that we can place these sick elements in suitable homes or work colonies for long periods, for their wellbeing and for the protection of the public.”64 Preventative detention (Verwahrung or Bewahrung) was a familiar concept in Weimar-era welfare politics. It was to be a powerful legal tool for making welfare compulsory, a new process for placing people, against their will if necessary, into welfare institutions so that they could be educated and reformed.65 Moderate left welfare advocates like Pappritz called for replacing the old workhouses (which had their own compulsory detention provisions) with a new kind of institution. Here, the “asocial” would be confined by preventative detention and tended by social workers for long periods (some proposed life-long confinement).66 No preventative detention law passed during the Republic. This was due in large part to disagreements about financing. The German Communist Party (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) was the only major faction that opposed preventative detention on principle.67 Nevertheless, in the Weimar years vari-ous local authorities used existing procedures for declaring adults mentally incapable (Entmündigung) to confine them.68 Advocates of the VD Law saw a preventative detention law as a companion reform, a necessary component of a wider scheme to eradicate female prostitu-tion and to establish sexual freedom as they defined it. Indeed, Neuhaus was preventative detention’s foremost champion.69 Pappritz wrote of preventative detention as intrinsically connected to the sexual freedom established by the

537Laurie Marhoefer

VD Law. She praised the VD Law for bringing “freedom” to all women. This “freedom” did not, she wrote, mean “libertine” behavior. Rather, it meant rec-ognizing that, “sexual morality cannot be upheld through policing and criminal punishment, but only…through the development of the ethical sensibilities of both sexes.”70 To Pappritz, sexual freedom meant doing away with policing as a way to uphold moral norms and introducing education and ethics as a way to uphold them.71 Because she placed education at the center of her vision of freedom, Pappritz had to confront the quandary posed by women whom she believed could not be educated. She and her allies had understood for decades that some women who worked as prostitutes would resist their welfare and educational programs and keep working as prostitutes.72 These women, they believed, had a form of hereditary personality disorder—a mild mental ill-ness or disability—that made them incapable of ethical sexual behavior. The scheme could work—morality could indeed be upheld through education rather than policing—but only so long as preventative detention made it possible to institutionalize the small number of resistant women. Therefore, in the same article in which she described the “freedom” established by the VD Law, Pap-pritz affirmed her commitment to a preventative detention law to be used on “asocial elements.” The VD Law’s effect on the lives of women who sold sex was mixed. The law certainly improved work conditions for many prostitutes by reducing police interference with their work. Some prostitutes used the law to advocate on their own behalf.73 New welfare services helped others leave prostitution altogether. But some women did not experience a great difference before and after 1927. For them, prostitution was a long-term, primary occupation. Many were registered as prostitutes under Regulation. The new law limited the police’s prerogative to interfere with these women. But social workers, health department officials, and doctors were all newly empowered to interfere with them, and all of these people had the goal of ending prostitution completely, a goal the police had never espoused and one that these prostitutes did not share. After the law went into effect, one prostitute told the sexologist and homosexual emancipation activist Magnus Hirschfeld: “Whether the police are called morals police or health police, to us it’s the same, they are the same ‘bullies’ as before, and also with the doctors that we must go to, nothing has changed…”74 The feminist project of helping women leave prostitution as expressed by Pappritz, a project made government policy by the 1927 law, was humanitarian. It proceeded from a vision of a democratic welfare state. It depended on using knowledge of heredity to form social policy that would, its advocates hoped, bring a form of sexual freedom to the majority of Germans.

538 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

The Vote to Repeal the Sodomy LawIn the 1929 debate about Germany’s sodomy law, concepts of hereditary men-tal illness, mental disability, and degeneration functioned in strikingly similar ways to produce sexual liberation for a majority, while heralding new detention measures for a minority. Just before the global depression hit Germany, the Reichstag came close to striking the law against male homosexual sex or “sod-omy” (widernatürliche Unzucht), Paragraph 175. This happened in the context of a years-long effort by a Reichstag committee to rewrite Germany’s penal code. In a contentious vote, the penal code reform committee cut Paragraph 175 from the new criminal code. The vote failed to become law before democ-racy collapsed. But in 1929, the national press reacted as if Paragraph 175 had effectively fallen. (The headlines ranged from “A Cultural Step Forward”75 to “A Victory for the Corruptors of the Volk.”76) Historians have interpreted the 1929 vote as a sign of the Republic’s toleration of sexual diversity.77 The new penal code would have decriminalized sex between men, with exceptions. The day after the penal code reform committee voted to strike Paragraph 175, it approved a replacement law, Paragraph 297, which provided criminal penal-ties for male-male sex in three instances: if one party was under 21 years old and the other was not, if one party used a position of influence to pressure the other, or if the relationship was commercial. What is most interesting (and often overlooked) about this reform is how controversial it was among the men who had lobbied for decades for the repeal of Paragraph 175, the leaders of Germany’s homosexual emancipation movement. Some activists greeted the vote as homosexual liberation. Others charged that it was but an illusion of liberation, and perhaps a dangerous one at that. The break was serious enough that the oldest and most politically connected orga-nization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, hereafter WhK) nearly disintegrated in part because of disagreement over this vote.78 Magnus Hirschfeld, the world-famous sexologist and Germany’s foremost spokesman against Paragraph 175, resigned as president of the WhK, an organization he had co-founded and had led for 32 years. With Hirschfeld gone, a younger generation of WhK leaders including Kurt Hiller and Richard Linsert warned that the penal code reform committee’s vote “amount[s] to one step forward and two steps backward.”79 The step forward was the repeal of the blanket criminalization of male-male sex. The two steps backward were the higher age of consent (21) for men than for women, and the criminalization of male prostitution. Existing law ignored male prostitution; under the new law, a conviction could bring up to five years in prison.80 (For Hirschfeld, Linsert, and Hiller, the issue was deeply personal: all three privately had affairs with men, although they made no public statements about their sexuality in this period.81) Hiller went so far as to call the repeal of Paragraph 175 illusionary: “The decriminalization of sex between men is a pressing necessity for a free

539Laurie Marhoefer

society, but a law like this is useless. It seems to bring decriminalization, but by criminalizing male prostitution (and by setting the “age of protection” at 21 years—what ridiculousness!) it makes decriminalization an illusion.”82 Although many activists greeted the vote as the victory for which they had long struggled, the man arguably most responsible for striking Paragraph 175 agreed with Hiller.83 He was Wilhelm Kahl, an 80-year-old law professor and the penal code reform committee’s long-serving chairman.84 Kahl cast the decisive vote against the sodomy law.85 In the Reichstag, he represented the right-liberal German People’s Party (Deutsche Volkspartei), a moderate party that did not support homosexual emancipation. And Kahl made it clear that he did not support homosexual emancipation as such, writing that striking the law was “in no way a recognition of homosexuality as a morally allowable or justifiable act.”86 He wrote that the new law’s provisions against “seduction,” and male prostitution comprised “a considerable extension and sharpening of [Paragraph 175].”87 Sounding like an unlikely ally of the WhK, Kahl avowed that “homosexuality, under all circumstances, whether there’s a disposition to it or not, is an exercise of the sex drive that goes against nature.” 88 Rather than an endorsement of homosexuality, Kahl portrayed his vote to strike Paragraph 175 as part of a practical approach to reforming Germany’s criminal code. He called Paragraph 175 a “failed” law, for three reasons. One was a liberal argument: homosexual sex injured no third party, and “adult people have free use of their own bodies.”89 A second argument was practical: Paragraph 175 was rarely enforced, and anyway an ineffective way to stop male homosexuality.90 But Kahl’s most forceful argument was that Paragraph 175 caused evils more dire than simple homosexuality: propaganda and blackmail. A better law was needed to stop these “actual dangers to state and society.”91 By “homosexual propaganda,” Kahl and others meant the media blitz coming out of homosexual emancipation organizations, which, they argued, actually spread homosexuality. The media would stop, they argued, if they removed its reason for existing: Paragraph 175.92 Blackmail was the other evil side effect of Paragraph 175 that Kahl felt warranted its replacement. Here, Kahl had the universal support of homo-sexual emancipation activists. They would have welcomed anything the Ger-man government could do to prevent men who had sex with men from being blackmailed. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, blackmail was the scourge of middle class and wealthy men who had sex with men, none of whom were in a position to make their sexuality public. Often blackmail took the form of men threatening to report their sex partners to the police for violat-ing Paragraph 175, unless the partners paid. Blackmail posed a greater threat to most homosexual men than did Paragraph 175 by itself. Nearly all wealthy homosexuals had been blackmailed, according to Hirschfeld.93 Some victims of blackmail took their own lives, and Kahl felt for them.94 If Paragraph 175

540 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

were repealed, Hirschfeld, Kahl, and others argued, blackmailers would lose their power over their victims. Members of the penal code reform committee claimed to be fighting blackmail by fighting male prostitution. As one committee member said, “The worst source of danger from male prostitution is blackmail...”95 Some male prostitutes did blackmail their clients.96 However, the link between prostitution and blackmail envisioned by the penal code reform committee went well beyond the facts of such cases.97 It involved biology and degeneration, and resonates with the 1927 VD Law. Basically, the idea was that blackmailers and male prostitutes tended to be the same men: young, jobless, urban degenerates. Young unemployed men in cities drew increasing public concern in the Republic’s final years. They were supposedly sources of crime and political radicalism.98 Blackmail was already illegal, but new, heavy prison sentences for male prostitution provided by the replacement law, Paragraph 297, were another way to get at these men, who were supposedly not, by any means, homosexual. Throughout the debate on Paragraph 175, members of the penal code reform committee argued that two kinds of men had sex with other men: homosexuals who were driven by innate “abnormal” desire, and criminals who were “heterosexually inclined [but] simply making a business of using the pitiable abnormal dispositions of others for commercial purposes.”99 Who were these unscrupulous heterosexuals who, in the words of another parliamentarian, “exploit homosexuality” in order to avoid “honest work”?100 A government prosecutor explained that the disgusting nature of the sex that male homosexuals desired forced them into the hands of degenerate criminal types: “In the vast majority of [blackmail] cases the active partner [in the sex act] is a respectable person with a sick [sexual] orientation, while the passive one is often inferior (minderwertig), acting less out of inclination then out of calculation...”101 (A psychiatrist might have swapped the word “inferior,” which psychiatry had recently deemed pejorative, with the more neutral “psychopathic personality.”102) The politicians likely drew this distinction from sexology, where it was well established. Hirschfeld held that young, homeless, wandering men often took up prostitution and crime, not only out of destitution, but because of a hereditary condition. He wrote that in places “where the poorest sectors of the population meet,” night shelters for the homeless (Nachtasyle), welfare-education institu-tions (Fürsorgeerziehung), and jail, men spread the word about easy money to be made with prostitution and blackmail.103 These young men “easily become acquainted with the close relationship of male prostitution to crime—namely robbery and blackmail—whereby they fall into the temptation to sell themselves and at the same time to pursue a secondary, criminal purpose—an enticement which naturally appeals particularly to individuals with degenerate (entartet) and criminal dispositions.”104 These men are the counterparts of the “feebleminded”

541Laurie Marhoefer

women whom the advocates of the 1927 VD Law believed inexorably slid into prostitution. These men were not homosexual: according to Hirschfeld, “the number of male prostitutes with a homosexual orientation is small compared to the heterosexual ones.”105 But like “feebleminded” women, these men suffered from a form of degeneration that stunted their sexual propriety. Degeneracy, or hereditary mental illness, or disability motivated both female and male prostitutes, but gender mattered. The men in question became dangerous criminals. Those who called for a protective custody law did so for the same reasons that members of the penal code reform committee voted to reform Paragraph 175: to combat the threat that “hereditarily burdened” people supposedly posed to a society that was moving toward greater legal toleration of individual sexual autonomy. Judging just by numbers of votes, the main thrust of the reform of Paragraph 175 was this crackdown, not the decriminalization of sodomy. There was far more support among committee members for the new law on male prostitution than there was for the decriminalization of male-male sex. The repeal of Paragraph 175 passed by just two votes. The next day, only three members of the Communist Party voted against the new law on male prostitution, denouncing it as an effective recriminalization of sodomy.106 One observer of the vote on Paragraph 175 wondered at how a decriminalization of male homosexual sex could, for Kahl (and for others), “fit perfectly together” with a measure against male prostitution so harsh that it was more an “outburst of fury” than a piece of legislation.107 The answer lies in the perception of male prostitutes as dangerous degenerates or borderline personality disorder cases. This raised fundamental and polarizing questions for the WhK: Did it have an obligation to defend male prostitutes? Or was the reform mitigated, but nevertheless laudable, progress toward homosexual emancipation? The vote precipitated a leadership struggle within the WhK that ended with Hirschfeld’s resignation.108 Though the WhK is often cited as the first gay rights organiza-tion in history,109 its near-demise in 1929 has been largely forgotten.110 On the surface, the fight was about a difference over tactics.111 But there were ideological rifts within the WhK about the reform of Paragraph 175. In 1929 Hirschfeld was unique among Germany’s most prominent living sexologists in his unequivocal defense of homosexuality and other forms of “abnormal” sexuality. He claimed that science proved that they were non-pathological, biological variations, and that since “what is natural cannot be immoral,” male homosexuality ought to be decriminalized.112 Hirschfeld opposed criminalizing male prostitution. His position was very close to the feminist position on female prostitution, which he also supported. He argued for welfare that would include eugenic schemes to address the “degeneration and hereditary burdening” that caused prostitution.113 By Hirschfeld’s logic,

542 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

the question of whether male prostitution ought to be legal had nothing to do with the question of whether male homosexual sex ought to be legal. Science made them separate questions. Male prostitutes acted due to one biological condition (degeneration) and male homosexuals acted due to another (homo-sexuality). From this perspective, the 1929 reform of the sodomy law does not seem like one step forward and two steps backward. It seems like progress for male homosexuals and an unrelated threat to male prostitutes, perhaps a neces-sary trade-off. After all, many members of the penal code reform committee justified their votes with the argument that it was only by repealing Paragraph 175 that they could effectively fight male prostitution. In light of this, Hirschfeld’s resignation immediately after the vote in the penal reform committee seems to be about more than just tactics. Hiller and Linsert had different sexual politics, emphasizing rights and economics, not biology.114 Hiller made the question of male prostitution’s legality insepa-rable from that of male homosexuality’s legality. He held that adherence to the principle of an individual’s right to control his own body would liberate homosexuals, and that therefore their struggle and that of male prostitutes were the same. The penal code reform committee’s replacement of Paragraph 175 with Paragraph 297 did decriminalize male-male sex. But Paragraph 297 violated the principle of the individual’s control of his body by cracking down on male prostitution. This was, therefore, no solid victory for the homosexual emancipation movement, but rather an “illusion” of victory.115 With Hirschfeld gone, the WhK began to openly question whether science was indeed the force that would liberate homosexuals, or whether other kinds of arguments might be more effective.116

Degeneration and Sexual Liberation: The Two Reforms Side-by-SideThe 1927 law on venereal disease and the 1929 attempted reform of the sodomy law used concepts of degeneration and hereditary mental illness and disability to define some female and male prostitutes as dangerous. Both anticipated preventative detention as a way to manage these dangers. In both reforms, the state’s growing toleration of a larger group of former sexual outsiders (many female prostitutes, many male homosexuals) was predicated on its increasing interest in containing the danger posed by a small, economically disadvantaged and stigmatized group (some “incorrigible” female prostitutes, male prostitutes). Some of the people whom these reforms were supposed to liberate objected to them. Although ideas about the heredity of certain conditions are not themselves eugenics, they were consistent enough with eugenic paradigms that advocates for this kind of sexual freedom at times felt compelled to make their case in eugenic terms. Thus Hirschfeld put forward the idea that homosexuals actually had eugenic utility, because they were born into families suffering from degen-eration and acted like sponges, absorbing the degeneration into themselves but

543Laurie Marhoefer

having no children, like “the asexual blossoms of plants.”117 These sexual politics shaped and were shaped by the interwar welfare state. It was welfare that reformers hoped would sexually liberate most Germans in the case of female prostitution. The welfare state’s role in the vote to reform Paragraph 175 is less clear; this reform actually sought to extend criminality, not welfare services, to male prostitutes. Yet, by defining male prostitutes as incorrigibles, the penal code reform committee reflected both a late-Weimar faith in criminal biology and a broader trend in German criminal justice reform dating to the nineteenth century, whereby the rise of social work and the justice system’s growing sensitivity to the wider context of crime mitigated sentences and provided rehabilitation for many people while prescribing longer sentences for some, upon whom rehabilitation efforts were thought to be wasted.118 In-definite welfare incarceration was to be instrumental in administering welfare to female prostitutes; it was also proposed for a restricted circle of incorrigible children and adults, certain criminals and delinquents.119 Historians are increasingly drawing attention to how Weimar-era thinkers linked sexuality and citizenship, showing that this conceptual nexus spanned subsequent periods, and exploring the perhaps related weighty significance of sex in German politics.120 The cases at hand show how even in the famously liberated atmosphere of left-moderate Weimar-era sex activism, sexual identity and sexual freedom came into being by demarking their limits. It remains to be seen how sexual citizenship depended on these kinds of exclusions and limits; many of the activists examined here invoked concepts of citizenship. The sexual freedom that they sought existed only because it excluded those people defined as incapable of refraining from certain kinds of sex.

Thanks to: The Jackman Humanities Institute of the University of Toronto and its 2008–2009 fellows, especially Mareike Neuhaus, the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University, Belinda Davis, Stephanie Clare, Jessica Anderson Hughes, Allison Miller, and the anonymous reader for GSR.1 “Eros vor Gericht,” Kölnische Zeitung, April 23, 1924.2 Ruth Roellig, Berlins lesbische Frauen [1928] in Adele Meyer, ed. Lila Nächte: Die Da-menklubs im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Edition Lit.Europe, 1994), 13. 3 Katherina Scheven, “Die Sozialen und Wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Prostitution,” in Einführung in das Studium der Prostitutionsgrage, ed. Anna Pappritz (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1919), 164. 4 Julia Roos, Weimar through the Lens of Gender: Prostitution Reform, Women’s Emancipa-tion, and German Democracy, 1919–1933 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010); Annette Timm, The Politics of Fertility in Twentieth-Century Berlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 5 Francis Galton, Inquiries Into Human Faculty and its Development (New York: AMS Press, 1973 [1908]), 17 ff1; 220. 6 Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik. Eugenische Sozialtechnologien in Debatten und

544 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

Politik der deutschen Sozialdemokratie 1890–1933 (Bonn: Verlag J. H. W. Dietz, 1995).7 Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal: A History of German Criminology, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 46–49. Heinz Schott and Rainer Tölle, Geschichte der Psychiatrie: Krankheitslehren, Irrwege, Behandlungsformen (München: Verlag C.H. Beck, 2006), 99–107. See these works for a much fuller account of psychiatry and criminology.8 Wetzell, 48–49; 149; 175. 9 Ibid., 144–53; 174–75; Schott and Tölle, 364–67; Henry Herbert Goddard, Die Familie Kallikak: Eine Studie über die Vererbung des Schwachsinns, trans. Karl Wilker (Langensalza: Beyer, 1914).10 Wetzell, 125–78; Schott and Tölle, 364–67.11 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde “Einblicke und Ausblicke” (Stuttgart: Julius Pütt-mann, 1930), 369–74; Iwan Bloch, Die Prostitution (Erster Band) (Berlin: Louis Marcus, 1912), 37. 12 Wetzell makes it clear that under the Republic the discipline of criminology never concluded that indelible organic factors caused criminality to the exclusion of envi-ronmental factors. 13 Edward Ross Dickinson, Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Fed-eral Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 197–98; 207; Wetzell, 140; Warren Rosenblum, Beyond the Prison Gates: Punishment and Welfare in Germany, 1850–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008), 220. 14 Gisela Bock, “Keine Arbeitskräfte in diesem Sinne,” in “Wir Sind Frauen wie Andere Auch!”: Prostituierte und ihre Kämpf, ed. Pieke Biermann (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980) 70–106; Michaela Freund-Widder, Frauen unter Kontrolle: Prostitution und ihre Staatliche Bekämpfung in Hamburg vom Ende des Kaiserreichs bis zu den Anfängen der Bundesrepublik (Münster: Lit Verlag, 2003); Roos; Victoria Harris, Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 15 Hans-Georg Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: Eine Politische Geschichte (München: Beck, 1989); James Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany (Salem: Ayer, 1993); Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten 2 (2000); Stefan Micheler, Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder der “Anderen”. Männer begehrende Männer in der Weimarer Republik und der NS-Zeit (Konstanz: UVK, 2005); James Kollenbroich, Our Hour Has Come: The Homosexual Rights Movement in the Weimar Republic (Germany: VDM, 2007); Glenn Ramsey, “The Rites of Artgenossen: Contesting Homosexual Political Culture in Weimar Germany,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17 (2008): 85–109; Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). 16 Martin Lücke, Männlichkeit in Unordnung. Homosexualität und männliche Prostitution in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt: Campus, 2008). 17 Queer theory promotes ways of seeing relations between non-normative sexualities. David Eng, Judith Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?” Social Text 23 (2005). 18 Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Timm. 19 Goddard; Gisela Bock, Zwangsterilisation im Nationalsozialismus: Studien zur Rassen-politik und Frauenpolitik (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1986). 20 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis. With Especial Reference to the Antipa-

545Laurie Marhoefer

thic Sexual Instinct [12th German edition], trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Stein and Day, 1965), 221–30; Iwan Bloch, The Sexual Life of Our Time, trans. M. Eden Paul (NY: Falstaff Press, 1937 [1907]) 455–66; 489–92; Albert Moll, Behandlung der Homosexualität: biochemisch oder psychisch? (Bonn: A Marcus & E. Weber, 1921), 22; Alexander Zinn, Die soziale Konstruktion des homosexuellen Nationalsozialisten. Zur Genese und Etablierung eines Stereotyps (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1987), 77–78. See also: Robert Beachy, “The German Invention of Homosexuality,” Journal of Modern History 82, 801–38. 21 Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik; Ingrid Richter, Katholizismus und Eugenik in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich. Zwischen Sittlichkeitsreform und Rassenhygiene (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001).22 Grossmann; Michael Schwartz, “Review of Richter, Ingrid, Katholizismus und Eugenik in der Weimarer Republik und im Dritten Reich: Zwischen Sittlichkeitsreform und Rassenhygi-ene,” H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews (2005): 1–5. http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=16567 (accessed March 3, 2010). 23 See Andreas Seeck, ed. Durch Wissenschaft zur Gerechtigkeit? Textsammlung zur kritischen Rezeption des Schaffens von Magnus Hirschfeld (Münster: Lit, 2003). 24 Beachy. 25 Peter Fritzsche, “Did Weimar Fail?,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 631. 26 Bock, “Keine Arbeitskräfte...”; Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics Between National Unification and Nazism 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); David Crew, Germans on Welfare: From Weimar to Hitler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 122–23; Harris. 27 Timm, 35–79; 327–31. 28 Roos, 8.29 Anna Pappritz, “Das Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten vom Standpunkt der Frau,” Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten Band 25 Nr. 11/12 (1927) 133. 30 On Regulation’s various aspects, see Roos; Freund-Widder. 31 Birgit Adam, Die Strafe der Venus: Eine Kulturgeschichte der Geschlechtskrankheiten (Pößneck: Orbis Verlag, 2001) 107–11; 148–94. 32 Leo von Zumbusch, “die Gesundheitlichen Gefahren der Prostitution und die Ver-breitung der Geschlechtskrankheiten,” in Einführung, Pappritz ed., 107–33. 33 Roos; Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Anne Summers, “Introduction: the International Abolitionist Federation,” Women’s History Review 17 (2008): 149–52. 34 Anna Pappritz, Handbuch der Amtlichen Gefährdetenfürsorge (München: Verlag von J.F. Bergmann, 1924. Compare Roos and Harris. 35 Rosenblum. 36 Pappritz, Handbuch, 71–73. 37 On the breadth of support for abolitionism among female politicians, see Roos, 35–42. 38 Margit Göttert, “‘Mir sind die frauenrechtslerischen Ideen direkt eingeboren.’ Anna Pappritz (1861–1939)” Ariadne 28: 50–55. 39 Reichstagshandbuch 1924 (3. Wahlperiode) (Berlin: Bureau des Reichstags, 1925), 318.40 On the politics of public versus private welfare, see Crew; Yong-Sun Hong, Welfare, Modernity, and the Weimar State, 1919–1933 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,

546 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

1998). Unfortunately space constraints do not permit a detailed examination of the complicated collaboration between Neuhaus and Pappritz. 41 Katherina Scheven, “Die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Prostituti-on,” in Einführung ed. Pappritz, 139–72; Verhandlungen des Reichstags. Stenographische Berichte 1924 (3. Wahlperiode) Band 391 (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1927), 8677, 8700, 8702, 8707.42 Verhandlungen der verfassunggebenden Deutschen Nationalversammlung. Stenographische Berichte Band 326 (Berlin: Norddeutschen Buchdruckerei und Verlags-Anstalt, 1920), 1576. On maternalism and welfare, see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York: Routledge, 1993).43 Christoph Sachße, “Social Mothers: The Bourgeois Women’s Movement and Ger-man Welfare-State Formation, 1880–1929” in Mothers of a New World eds. Koven and Michel, 136–58; Marion Kaplan, The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Jüdischer Frauenbund, 1904–1938 (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979) 73–75.44 Verhandlungen des Reichstags Band 391, 8707.45 Neuhaus and other representatives of Catholic charity services differed from Pappritz and company on whether the state or private groups ought to administer welfare, but they were ameliorated by guarantees of the place of private services under the new law. See GStAPK R 4901/549, 246–59.46 Paul Mulzer, “Zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten im Felde und in der Heimat,” Dermatologische Zeitschrift special printing (Berlin, Verlag von S. Karger, 1918) reprint from Band XXV, Heft 4; Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis trans. Judith Braddock and Brian Pike (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990) 176–210. 47 Petition of 8 June 1927, GStAPK I. HA Rep. 76 VIII B Nr. 3813. 48 Freund-Widder, 35–38. 49 Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, “The Bremen Morality Scandal,” in When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, ed. Atina Grossmann, Renate Bridenthal, Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984) 99. See also Roos, who shows that once the law passed, female prostitutes used it to self-advocate (pp. 84–95).50 Verhandlungen des Reichstags Band 391, 8702. 51 Ibid.52 Reichstagshandbuch 1924 (3. Wahlperiode) (Berlin: Bureau des Reichstags, 1925), 355. 53 Pappritz, Handbuch, 74. 54 “Die Schließung der Bordelle,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, November, 1925, in Bundesarchiv Lichtefelde R 1501/113735, 114. “Wie sie zur Prostitution kamen. 35 Lebensfragmente bordellierte Mädchen,” Leipziger Volkszeitung, July 28, 1928. Elga Kern, the source of this article, also published a book in which seven of 35 female prostitutes expressed support for abolition (25 gave no opinion; three were opposed.) Although prostitutes’ views certainly varied, given activism by registered prostitutes against brothel closings Kern’s findings do not seem to indicate a groundswell of abolitionist sentiment among prostitutes. Compare Roos, 92. 55 Pappritz, Handbuch der amtlichen Gefährdetenfürsorge, 74. 56 On closed welfare homes for young people, see Dickinson, Politics.

547Laurie Marhoefer

57 Roos, 75.58 Pappritz, Handbuch, 73; 75. 59 Schott and Tölle, 364–65. 60 On Lombroso’s reception in Germany, see Wetzell, 40-59. 61 Clara Thorbecke, “Die Verwahrlosung der weiblichen Jugend,” in Einführung, ed. Pappritz, 183–84. 62 Scheven, “Die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Prostitution,” 160. On Scheven, see Kerstin Wolff, “Herrenmoral: Anna Pappritz and Abolitionism in Germany,” Women’s History Review 17 (2008): 225–37. 63 Scheven, “Die sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Grundlagen der Prostitution,” 159–60; Pappritz, Handbuch, 8–9. 64 Ibid., 9. Roos notes this theme in abolitionists’ views, but does not present it as central. Roos, 130–31. 65 Germany’s preventative detention law has a long history. First proposed around 1900, preventative detention finally became law in the Federal Republic in 1961 and was struck down as unconstitutional six years later. Matthais Willig, Das Bewahrungsgesetz (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 2003). 66 Wolfgang Ayass, Das Arbeitshaus Breitenau. Bettler, Landstreicher, Prostituierte, Zuhälter, und Fürsorgeempfänger in der Korrektions- und Landesarmenanstalt Breitenau (1874–1949) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiniger, 1987), 245–47. 67 Willig; Dickinson, Politics; Richter. 68 Ayass; Crew. 69 Richter, 177; Ayass, 248–49; Dickinson, Politics, 198; Willig, 286–91; Verhandlungen des Reichstages, Bd. 391, 8707.70 Pappritz, “Das Reichsgesetz zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten vom Standpunkt der Frau,” 133. 71 On ideas of ethics, sexuality, and social reform that probably influenced Pappritz, see Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 72 Evidence suggests that this is what many women did. Conservatives charged that after the law’s passage, the numbers of female prostitutes remained the same or rose. 73 Marthe Schulze to the Ministry of the Interior, GStAPK Rep. 77 II Titel 435 Nr. 6, 239–40. 74 Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde “Einblicke und Ausblicke”, 349.75 Berliner Tageblatt, October 17,1929.76 Deutsche Zeitung, October 17, 1929.77 James Steakley, “The Emergency of a Gay and Lesbian Political Cultural in Germany,” in We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook of Gay and Lesbian Politics, eds. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan, (New York: Routledge, 1997) 133–34. Wayne R. Dynes, “Magnus Hirschfeld,” in Gay and Lesbian Biography ed. Michael J. Tuyrkus (Detroit: St. James Press, 1997), 228. James Kollenbroich, Our Hour Has Come: The Homosexual Rights Movement in the Weimar Republic (Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2007). Although he does not discuss degeneration, Lücke shares my skepticism (p. 142). 78 On other organizations, see Ramsey, “Rights of Artgenossen”; Steakley, Homosexual Emancipation Movement; Marita Keilson-Lauritz, Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte: Literatur und Literaturkritik in den Anfängen der Schwulenbewegung (Berlin: Rosa Winkel, 1997).

548 German Studies Review 34/3 (2011)

79 Vorstandes des W.H.K., “Der §175 nicht gefallen!” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, December 1929/January 1930. 80 Ibid. 81 Kurt Hiller, Leben gegen die Zeit (Eros) (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973); Charlotte Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology (London: Quartet Books, 1986). 82 Kurt Hillter, “Gefängnis für männliche Prostituierte?” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaft-lich-humanitären Komitees, November 1929, 201. 83 “Der Paragraph 175 aufgehoben,” Frauen Liebe, Nr. 4, 1929; Friedrich Radszuweit, “Weihnachtsgedanken,” Die Freundin, December 17, 1930. 84 Reichstagshandbuch 1930 (5. Wahlperiode) (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1930), 384.85 Ernst Hauenstein, “Wilhelm Kahl,” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 33 April/August 1932, 382–87. Wilhelm Kahl, “§175 Ernstes aus dem Strafrechtsausschuss,” Vossische Zeitung, October 25, 1929. 86 Kahl, “§175 Ernstes aus dem Strafrechtsausschuss.”87 Ibid. 88 The WhK reprinted the debate: Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October, 1929. 89 Ibid. 90 Actually, conviction rates rose under the Republic. Edward Ross Dickinson, “Policing Sex in Germany, 1882–1982: A Preliminary Statistical Analysis,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16: 204–50. 91 Kahl, “§175 Ernstes aus dem Strafrechtsausschuss”; Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October, 1929. 92 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October, 1929. 93 Magnus Hirschfeld, The Homosexuality of Men and Women, trans. Michael A. Lom-bardi-Nash, (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000), 979–1006. 94 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October, 1929, 187. 95 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October, 1929, 218; Lücke. 96 For example: “In Erpresserhänden,” Berliner Stadtblatt, December 23, 1926.97 On this, compare Lücke.98 Elizabeth Harvey, Youth and the Welfare State in Weimar Germany (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 103; Pamela E. Swett, Neighbors and Enemies: The Culture of Radicalism in Berlin, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 117–19. 99 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October 1929, 218.100 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 24, September/October 1929, 211. 101 Köhler, “Staatsanwalt und §175,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, October 19, 1929.102 Wetzell, 144–47.103 Magnus Hirschfeld, “Die männliche Prostitution,” in §297.3 “Unzucht zwischen Män-nern”? Ein Beitrag zur Strafgesetzreform ed. Richard Linsert (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929), 19. 104 Ibid. 105 Hirschfeld, Homosexuality, 817.

549Laurie Marhoefer

106 Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 26 December1929/ Ja-nuary 1930, 222.107 Rudolf Olden, “Einmal hin, einmal her…,” Berliner Tageblatt, January 3, 1930. 108 “Die organisatorische Umstellung des WhK. e. V.” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 27, February/March 1930; “Organisatiorische Mitteilungen,” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 29 September 1930/February 1931; Ernst Hauenstein, “Wilhelm Kahl”; Friedemann Pfäfflin, “Die Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitären Komitees 1926–1933,” in Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-Humanitären Komitees, ed. Walter v. Murat (Hamburg: C. Bell Verlag, 1985), v–xxiii. 109 John C. Fout, “Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia,” in Forbidden History: the State, Society and the Regula-tion of Sexuality in Modern Europe, ed. John C. Fout (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 268.110 Dose and Wolff note Hirschfeld’s resignation over strategy, but do not see it as sig-nificant. Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: Deutscher—Jude—Weltbürger (Teetz: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2005), 62–63; Wolff, Magnus Hirschfeld, 227–28; 276. Hirschfeld’s handling of finances contributed to the break with Hiller and Linsert, but the financial situation came to a head only after the vote on Paragraph 175 threw their political differences into sharp relief. But compare Mancini. 111 For details on the tactical differences, see Pfäfflin, “Die Mitteilungen des Wissen-schaftlich-humanitären Komitees.” 112 Quoted in Manfred Herzer, Magnus Hirschfeld: Leben und Werk eines jüdischen, schwulen und sozialistischen Sexologen (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1992), 55.113 Hirschfeld, “Die männliche Prostitution,” 32. 114 Richard Linsert, “Einleitung,” in § 297.3 “Unzucht zwischen Männer”? Ein Beitrag zur Strafgesetzreform, ed. Richard Linsert (Berlin: Neuer Deutscher Verlag, 1929); Kurt Hiller, “Recht und sexuelle Minderheiten,” Das Tagebuch 47, 19 November, 1921, 1400–1; 1435, reprinted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 696–97. See also Ramsey, “Rites of Artgenossen,” 95–96.115 Kurt Hiller, “Gefängnis für männliche Prostituierte?,” Mitteilungen des Wissenschaft-lich-humanitären Komitees, No. 25, November 1929, 201. 116 “Zur “konstitutionellen Bedingtheit” der Homosexualität,” Mitteilungen des Wissen-schaftlich-humanitären Komitees, Nr. 26, December 1929/ January 1930. 117 Hirschfeld, Homosexuality, 450; Timm, 83; 88–89. 118 Wetzell, 120–24; 234. Rosenblum, 165–225.119 Willing, 288–94; Dickinson, Politics, 198–99.120 Timm; Jennifer Evans, “The Moral State: Men, Mining, and Masculinity in the Early GDR,” German History 23 (2005): 355–70; Dagmar Herzog, Sex After Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies

������������������������������������������������������������������up to one year of research support at the Freie Universität Berlin. It is open to scholars in all social science and humanities disciplines, including historians working on modern and contemporary German and European history. The program accepts applications from U.S. and Canadian nationals or permanent residents. Applicants for a dissertation fellowship must be full-time graduate students enrolled at a North American university who have completed all coursework required for the Ph.D. and must have achieved ABD (all but dissertation) status by the time the proposed research stay in Berlin begins. Also eligible are U.S. and Canadian Ph.D.s who have received their doctorates within the past two calendar years. Following a model usually reserved for senior researchers at institutes of advanced study, the Berlin Program is a residential program which combines research opportunities with intellectual and cultural interaction. An integral part of the program is a biweekly interdisciplinary colloquium guided by distinguished professors each semester where Fellows present their work. Moreover, the program colloquium seeks to address current German public debates, invites distinguished guests and arranges cultural excursions.The Berlin Program is based at, funded and administered by the Freie Universität Berlin, one of the nation’s leading research universities and one of nine winners in three categories of the Excellence Initiative, a national competition for excellence in higher education. Fellows will be enrolled at the Freie Universität Berlin, enjoying library privileges and access to all services.The program’s publicity and selection process is organized in cooperation with our North American partner, the German Studies Association (GSA).

Application Receipt Deadline: December 1For more information and an application form, please visit

www.fu-berlin.de/bprogram

Foto: Bernd Wannenmacher

Foto: David Ausserhofer

Request for Research Proposals