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The
German
homosexual emancipation movement emerged decades before the 1969
Stonewall Riots inspired the gay liberation movement in the United
States. It began with the formation of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee
in 1897, but was crushed under the boot of
Nazism in the early 1930s. |
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Magnus Hirschfeld
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Magnus Hirschfeld
(1868-1935) was the most prominent leader of Germany's
homosexual emancipation movement. He also deserves recognition as a
significant theorist of homosexuality. |
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Kurt
Hiller (1885-1972) was a German writer and activist who
contributed to several pacifist and intellectual movements, including
the fight to repeal Paragraph 175, which criminalized homosexuality. |
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Ferdinand
Karsch-Haack's (1853-1936) most significant contribution to the
sexual emancipation movement in Germany consisted of demonstrating the
occurrence of same-sex sexual activity throughout the animal kingdom,
among so-called primitive peoples, and in all non-Western cultures. |
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Károly Mariá Kertbeny
(1824-1882), an Austro-Hungarian man of letters, translator, and
journalist coined the word homosexual. In doing so, he made a
significant contribution to modern gay identity. |
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Nazism led to the destruction of Germany's homosexual
emancipation movement. As part of their agenda to preserve an "Aryan
master race," Nazis arrested more than 100,000 men on homosexual
charges and incarcerated between 5,000 and 15,000 gay men in
concentration camps. |
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Paragraph 175 was the German law prohibiting sex between men
that homosexual emancipationists unsuccessfully fought to overturn. The
law was strengthened by the Nazis to aid in their persecution of
homosexuals. |
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Anna
Ruling (1880-1953) was one of the first German women to
publicly acknowledge her lesbianism and also became the first known
lesbian activist in 1904. |
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The
"Third Sex" was a term used by both Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and
Magnus Hirschfeld to refer to homosexuals and was a relatively common
theme in nineteenth-century European literature. |
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 Karl
Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) was a nineteenth-century German
activist who was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and
the first homosexual to come out publicly. His work had a profound
impact on the homosexual emancipation movement, though he did not live
to see it. |
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"Uranian" and "Uranianism" were early terms denoting
homosexuality. The words were derived from "Urning," a term invented by
Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. |
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Bruno Vogel
(1898-1983) was a writer whose
experiences as a soldier during World War I and as a homosexual in a
society hostile to any open expression of same-sex love shaped his
political and aesthetic vision. Vogel was a co-founder the Leipzig
chapter of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. |
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Photo
Credits:
The images of Magnus Hirschfeld and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs
courtesy Archiv
für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin. |
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