It is as remarkable as it is regrettable: the Institute for Sexology is hardly ever mentioned in a comprehensive overview of Weimar history.

A comprehensive study of this almost avant-garde institution, which made Berlin an outstanding place early on, where the subject of sexuality was dealt with in a comprehensive manner, has also been missing up to now.

Rainer Herr closes this gap with his history of the institute for sexology.

Fortunately, the result is not just an easy-to-read book about a forgotten institution, but a work of in-depth research that has been scrupulously worked from the sources.

One of his strengths is a view from different perspectives with scientific, cultural, social and legal historical vanishing points.

You can also learn a lot about the biographies of the actors involved.

The focus is on Magnus Hirschfeld, the founder and protagonist of the institute.

Through science to justice

The establishment of the Institute for Sexology in July 1919 was due to his personal and financial commitment.

Without the spirit of optimism at the end of the World War, this “child of the revolution” that Hirschfeld spoke of would not have been born.

Initially a private institution, it was only in 1924 that it achieved the status of a "state-approved and recognized non-profit public legal foundation", the Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation.

Hirschfeld, who was born in Kolberg in 1868, had been campaigning for the decriminalization of homosexuality since the turn of the century.

While some celebrated him for it, others covered him with a mixture of anti-homoerotic and anti-Semitic agitation.

Hirschfeld, who was homosexual himself without ever coming out, fought early on on two fronts: on the one hand on a reform-political front, on the other hand on an academic one.

Ideally, he wanted to combine the two.

His motto was: "per scientiam ad justitiam", through science to justice.

As head of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, he campaigned for the abolition of Section 175 of the Criminal Code, which criminalized male homosexual acts in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic.

Herr also describes in detail other reform initiatives – first by the “Action Committee”, later by the “Cartel for the Reform of Sexual Criminal Law” and the “World League for Sexual Reform”.

They were all closely associated with the Berlin Institute and Hirschfeld's name.

When his fellow journalist Kurt Hiller published the book "§ 175: the shame of the century!" in 1922, he could not yet know how right he was, as the criminal law paragraph from 1872 was only deleted in 1994.

An unmanageably large number of “intersexual variants”

In addition to his socio-political and judicial reform commitment, Hirschfeld tried his best to establish sexology as a discipline in its own right.

His institute gave expression to the success and failure of this concern: there was a separate place where sexology was specifically pursued.

However, it initially remained a foundation without official recognition, and the universities stubbornly resisted including this field of knowledge in their own canon of subjects.

Rainer Herr succeeds brilliantly not only in illuminating these broader contexts, but also in outlining Hirschfeld's contribution to sexology.

The "intermediate theory" is considered to be his most important achievement.

Hirschfeld was convinced that "full man" and "full woman" could only serve as ideal-typical benchmarks.

In between, however, there is an unmanageably large number of "intersexual variants" of "male-type women" and "female-type men".

Hirschfeld was a supporter of a somatic-hormone-related explanation for the development of the respective sexual types.