that Humboldt University host a permanent homosexuality research group;
That one sounded framiliar. Prior to WW2, Berlin nurtured LGBT liberation. In the west this was erased and written over. I have long wondered about USSR, especially GDR and East Berlin. I find no answers in any of this. Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the “new left” was severed from the “old”? In the 1980s, it was well within living memory.
But the idea of Humboldt University being the a location of academia relating to LGBTQ people was originated at least as far back as the 1930s. Here is a page from HU (Wayback machine, archived in 2005) describing: Berlin and its Sexological Heritage.
Not a perfect source, just the one I was able to dig up. The story it recounts is basically accurate but far from comprehensive.
But the reason it sounded framiliar to me is that HU did eventually give institutional support to LGBT academia. I would be curious about the continuities that likely exist between what you said and that coming into being.
First of all, thank you for the replies and interest! Second, sorry for the late reply, I didn’t have time to give it the attention it deserved until recently.
Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the “new left” was severed from the “old”?
Unfortunately the vast majority of my knowledge of queer history lies in the “Hirschfeld era”, for lack of a better phrase. Pretty much everything I know about the GDR queer experience comes from States of Liberation, which is the only major English language source on the subject I am aware of, but I haven’t dug into this in a while. There seems to be a fair bit more literature on the subject in German, but I unfortunately cannot read German, let alone at an academic level. The only mentions of Hirschfeld Huneke makes in the book outside of his brief historical context of pre-war Germany is to two groups in the FRG, the “Magnus Hirschfeld Centre in Hamburg” and the “Magnus Hirschfeld Society.” Hirschfeld’s work would’ve certainly been in living memory, but only relatively recently (as in the past few decades) has there been a great deal of scholarship on his work as parts of his archive are found in various estates. Heike Bauer’s The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture talks a bit about that. The caveat being that I can only speak from an English-reader’s perspective. All this to say that I do not know the answer as to whether queer GDR citizens were looking back towards Hirschfeld specifically. He certainly would’ve made a good figure to turn back to especially for the GDR as the Insitute for Sexual Science was documented to at times allow Comintern members to reside there. States of Liberation is on Anna’s Archive if you want to take a look yourself, but a Ctrl+F through it only brings up those couple of instances where Hirschfeld is mentioned aside from his activity pre-war.
That one sounded framiliar. Prior to WW2, Berlin nurtured LGBT liberation. In the west this was erased and written over. I have long wondered about USSR, especially GDR and East Berlin. I find no answers in any of this. Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the “new left” was severed from the “old”? In the 1980s, it was well within living memory.
But the idea of Humboldt University being the a location of academia relating to LGBTQ people was originated at least as far back as the 1930s. Here is a page from HU (Wayback machine, archived in 2005) describing: Berlin and its Sexological Heritage.
Not a perfect source, just the one I was able to dig up. The story it recounts is basically accurate but far from comprehensive.
But the reason it sounded framiliar to me is that HU did eventually give institutional support to LGBT academia. I would be curious about the continuities that likely exist between what you said and that coming into being.
First of all, thank you for the replies and interest! Second, sorry for the late reply, I didn’t have time to give it the attention it deserved until recently.
Unfortunately the vast majority of my knowledge of queer history lies in the “Hirschfeld era”, for lack of a better phrase. Pretty much everything I know about the GDR queer experience comes from States of Liberation, which is the only major English language source on the subject I am aware of, but I haven’t dug into this in a while. There seems to be a fair bit more literature on the subject in German, but I unfortunately cannot read German, let alone at an academic level. The only mentions of Hirschfeld Huneke makes in the book outside of his brief historical context of pre-war Germany is to two groups in the FRG, the “Magnus Hirschfeld Centre in Hamburg” and the “Magnus Hirschfeld Society.” Hirschfeld’s work would’ve certainly been in living memory, but only relatively recently (as in the past few decades) has there been a great deal of scholarship on his work as parts of his archive are found in various estates. Heike Bauer’s The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture talks a bit about that. The caveat being that I can only speak from an English-reader’s perspective. All this to say that I do not know the answer as to whether queer GDR citizens were looking back towards Hirschfeld specifically. He certainly would’ve made a good figure to turn back to especially for the GDR as the Insitute for Sexual Science was documented to at times allow Comintern members to reside there. States of Liberation is on Anna’s Archive if you want to take a look yourself, but a Ctrl+F through it only brings up those couple of instances where Hirschfeld is mentioned aside from his activity pre-war.