© 2019 by Peter Kratz. Jede Verwendung der Texte und der Abbildungen unterliegt dem Urheberrecht.
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Address to the ALMS Conference
"Queering Memory" 2019 in Berlin: Then and Today It may be hard to believe but it's true Germany, then and today: Magnus Hirschfeld wasn't that bright victim of the National-Socialist persecution but also a persecutor himself who fought against the reproduction of so called "disabled" persons thinking of them as genetically harmful to a strong German people. As "disabled" he defined a wide range of people, "every seventh" he wrote 1930 in his main work "Geschlechtskunde", and also of course homosexuals who shouldn't have children because their genes - he supposed - were "degenerating", as he wrote down several times in his books and articles. Why is such a soundrel honored here? So, take a minute of
remembering the hundreds of thousands of victims of the eugenic
"science", who had been terrorized, killed or forced to be sterilized
on behalf of Hirschfeld and his friends and colleagues when you take
your coffee at the "Hirschfeld Bar" in your congress center today. If
Hirschfeld, who himself never came
out openly as being gay, had won the history, then no queers would be
alive today. That's the paradox.
Today, "queers" are the hostages to today's Hirschfeld fans, e.g. the
right-wing German health minister Jens Spahn, openly gay himself, who
is a fan of Hirschfeld as well as of eugenic selection, and is just
preparing laws for a new grip on your body, to oust, again, the bodies
of the people for a higher purpose. Hirschfeld had a lot of
deep and long term connections
to racists and even Nazis. His long-term friend George Sylvester Viereck,
a German-American extreme right-wing publicist and Nazi agitator (well
known and still hated in the US up to the present) who Hirschfeld met
and exchanged letters with very often, influenced Hirschfeld's work and
thinking for decades, as we could show
after having analysed the relationship between Hirschfeld and Viereck,
based on letters of both that we found in German and American archives.
We also analysed Hirschfeld's USA trip in 1930/31 that was orgnized by
Viereck to promote his and Hirschfeld's ideas of creating a
"super man" and "super race"."Sexual selection"
should lead to this "super race" as Hirschfeld wrote it down in the
preface of his book about his world journey then ("Weltreise eines
Sexualforschers"). "sexual selection" was the quintessence of his
world trip as sexologist. The true goal of his "sexology" was the
"sexual selection" of the "strong" and extermination of those who he
defined as unworthy to live and reproduce themselves. Hirschfeld and
his co-eugenicists are directly co-responsible for the Nazi-crimes
against non-compliant people who you call nowadays "queer". It was Viereck who
invented the title "Einstein
of Sex" for Hirschfeld to promote his tour to American
eugenicist societies which already had established eugenic laws in
several US states in the 1920s. These laws restricted the freedom of
marriage, as Hirschfeld himself demanded it in Germany. Love Who You Like was not the
principle of his work but the dictum Only
the strong are allowed to reproduce. "America First!" and
"Alt Right" Our (still ongoing)
research on Hirschfeld's American trip 1930/31 shows a lot of parallels
to today's American right-wing politics. His friend Viereck who
organized the whole trip and the echoes in the media, after Hirschfeld
has asked him to do so, was a well known representative of the "America
First!" movement of those days which promoted a strong white and mainly
by people of German descent ruled USA. Viereck's newspaper "New York
American" had the flag of the "America First!"-movement in it's head
line. The eugenic laws of several US states in this time mostly also
had a racist intent against migrants from Latin America and Asia. For
example, in some states it was forbidden to Asian immigrants to marry
"white" Americans then.These laws were the result of the intense
propaganda of assiciations of American eugenicists to whom
Viereck passed around his friend Hirschfeld on this trip. It is
still object to further research of the BIFFF... whom all Hirschfeld
met in several states that he traveled. Articles of Viereck were
published in newspapers from coast to coast about Hirschfeld's speeches
that still have to be evaluated. Being friends with a
later Auschwitz denier It is cclear by now that
Hirschfeld met a lot of right-wing publicists and propagandists of
extreme right "white pride" and "white primacy" groups, e.g. Harry E.
Barnes, who after the Second Word War became an Auschwitz denier. Viereck himself was a
well known agitator for the German war aims in the First World War and
propagated the ideas of first the Kaiser Wilhelm II and since the 1920s
also of Adolf Hitler in America. In 1923 (!) he published his interview
with Hitler and presented him as the coming leader of Germany. He was
proud that it was him who published the first interview with Hitler in
English language and re-published it in 1932. Consequently, Viereck
became one of the main promoters of Nazi-Germany from 1933 on in the US
and, in World War II, ended up in a US prison because of spying for
Nazi-Germany. Dispite this, Hirschfeld wrote him in October 1933,
that it was "too bad" that he didn't meet Viereck during his summer
trip 1933 in Europe and asked Viereck to send him his articles that he
had written about that trip. Hirschfeld, still, found him to be his
nearest and longest friend. As Hirschfeld's letters to Viereck that we found in archives show: all this was well known by Hirschfeld who wrote to Viereck in October 1933 (!): "Doubtless, the unification process that is now being put through Germany is in some respects that which we too have long wished for." BIFFF... has published the wordings of these letters, also in English translation, on our website.
Hirschfeld did not at all
condemn the persecution of non-compliants by the Nazis, but in 1933 and
1934, he demanded to wait and see
whether the National-Socialist eugenic policies would or would not
fulfill the promise that he himself (and Viereck) believed in: to
raise a new race of the strong, and to eliminate the weak. Very openly,
Hirschfeld wrote this in several articles in these years of the
beginning Nazi trerror. He only criticized - indeed - that also Jews
became victims of this terror. But for those who he had defined as
"degenerated" or "degenerating" in his previous books he expressed no
mercy. Also in these articles, Hirschfeld praised the Italian fascists'
leader Benito Mussolini (as his friend Viereck had done before)
because of his idea of the Mediterranean "race of emperors" and gave to
tha Nazis a good advice instead of condemning: "If a serious endeavour
is to be made to breed a race of Nietzschean supermen and superwomen,
the {Nazi-German] Race Office should be promptly transformed into
Marriage Advisory Boards, guided by hygienic and eugenic principles." Superior and inferior were the catagories that Hirschfeld and Viereck were thinking and writing in. And infact, Hirschfeld thought that homosexuals would get imbecile children because of their supposed inferior hereditary dispositions. His "sexology" was on breeding, not on sexual joy. Again: Why is this soundrel honored here today? The eugenic
politician Hirschfeld The leading idea of his
work was a eugenic barrier in sexual behaviour,
not liberation. But he thought that a bit more sexual liberation could
help to reach his aim: a race of the strong. If the homosexuals, for
example, were "liberated", they would stop poisoning the national
gene pool by spreading there dispositions which Hirschfeld judged as
inferior: "A homosexual who gets married condemns a sound woman to
sterility or to giving birth to imbecile children. You can object also
to the marriage of homosexual women, and it is in the interest of racial care to
stop such marriages", wrote Hirschfeld. His Institute for Sex Research
(that infact was not much more than a doctor's shop) mainly was engaged in eugenic and
matrimonial consulting. The catagories of superior and inferior human
beings were the leading source of his questionaries that he had
invented and used in his "Institute" in Berlin to decide if a couple
should be allowed to marry or not. Some questions were openly racist.
As Hirschfeld was a great enemy of drinking alcohol or using other
drugs (he was a complete sourpuss, indeed!) couples who used any of that were
mentally pressed not
to marry and not to have children. His questionaries devaluated anyone
who was only a little bit of kind of "queer". Out of his "Institute"
that became more and more a center of eugenics and Rassenhygiene, Hirschfeld efforted
a lot to establish laws for restricted marriage in Germany. Theorists
of the Nazi racism as Otmar von Verschuer and Eugen Fischer of the
notorious and later criminal "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology"
gave speeches in Hirschfelds Institute, or even members of the Nazi
party worked there as employees. In that regard, the closing of the
Institute by the Nazis was a "shop accident" of the eugenicists. Today
it is known the the Institute was not
"destroyed" by the Nazis but that they took most of the
collections concerning sexology (especially the big library) for there
own continuing eugenic purposes. In his programmatic
article "Über Sexualwissenschaft" (On Sexology) in 1908 (!)
Hirschfeld related his concept of sexuality to the idea and purpose of
"perfecting mankind" and explaint: "One shrinks from marrying a
disabled dwarf or someone who's father is at the penitentiary or the
madhouse. And one does so rhightly, because only if we marry the
healthiest, well-shaped, most intelligent and well-mannered ones we
will help to enoble the race." Also at the end of his
life, Hirschfeld took position against "undesirables ... affected with
hereditarily transmissible
bodily or mental deseases or defects", as he wrote in the 1930s, and he
saw the Nazis' eugenics policies as "an interesting experiment ... but
it will be a long while before the results can be judged on their
merits." Whether the Nazis' eugenic law of 1933 (that was mainly a copy
of a law proposal that Hirschfeld and his eugenicists colleagues had
worked on and that was discussed in the late 1920s in the Prussian land
parliament, but denied because of ethical objections) would be "for the
wellbeing of the German people", wrote Hirschfeld, "only the future
will tell." Hirschfeld agreed with
the Nazis that it was necessary to avoid the birth of "disabled"
persons, but he did not (of course) agree that to be of Jewish descent
was a taint to be exterminated. In his oppinion the taint only was to
be an alcoholic, a prostitute, a homosexual, a hermaphrodite, and of
course to be a carrier of what he (and the society he lived in, the
upper class of imperial Germany that still dominated the consciousness
in the early 30s) defined as a "transmittable desease": shapes of human
life that were not useful for industry and the military. And Hirschfeld
agreed with the Nazis that unwelcome shapes of human life should be
avoided by biological means, by "sexual selection", by setting limits
to sexuality instead of liberating it. A lot of this he wrote down once
again in his last book, "Racism", that was written after the Nazi law
against the "disabled", and that came out posthumously and in English
translation in London in 1939. A hall in the
Institute named after a Nazi mastermind It was not only Nietzsche's (and Viereck's) concept of the
super man and super race that fascinated Hirschfeld, but also the
social-darwinism of Ernst Haeckel, a precursor of the Nazis, honorary
president of the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (where Hirschfeld
also was engaged) and honoured by the Nazis as the "pioneer of
biological policy". Hirschfeld honoured his idol Haeckel by naming a
hall in his Institute for Sex Research as "Ernst Haeckel Saal" (Haeckel
Hall) where eugenic advice lectures were given by Hirschfeld and later
also by Nazi theorists as Fischer and Verschuer. In real, this
"Institute" became a breeding center for parts of the later Nazi
crimes. Hirschfeld helped to set the basics, but while he was
persecuted by the Nazis as a Jew (who he never wanted to be),
colleagues like Fischer and Verschuer worked their way up in the Nazi
state: Verschuer became assistant of the Auschwitz physician Josef
Mengele. There is no political virginity in German sexology! June 2019 |
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