“Many Went and Risked Their Lives…and Should Those Who Come Back Once Again Be Persecuted?” The First World War and the Transformation of German Homosexual Emancipation

The First World War devastated Germany. Yet for tens of thousands of men affiliated with the homosexual emancipation movement, the war also opened up the possibility of a different and better future. The “disaster” of war would usher in a “new age of…equality,” in the words of one activist. This paper draws on wartime letters written by gay men to Magnus Hirschfeld’s homosexual emancipation organization in order to examine the hopeful, even utopian meanings men attached to the war experience. These meanings, the paper argues, led to a new concept of homosexuals as a “sexual minority” analogous to a national minority, offering a new and lasting framework for homosexual politics. In important studies published over the past twenty years, historians have shown that World War I politicized Europeans and invited them to imagine the state in new ways. This was profoundly true of homosexual emancipationists, who claimed that because homosexuals had fought and died, a grateful nation ought to acknowledge their citizenship by repealing its sodomy law. They moreover increasingly demanded that just as the post-war international settlement recognized the rights of national minorities, European nations ought to recognize the rights of homosexuals as a “sexual minority.” This claim to minority status was put forward most prominently by the leftist, pacifist thinker Kurt Hiller, who encouraged his fellow male homosexuals to enter politics as if they comprised a minority analogous to a national minority, for example by forming an all-homosexual political party to represent them in the new Reichstag. To these activists, the First World War seemed to open the possibility of a better future, where the nation would recognize the citizenship of homosexual men, and where their rights, which, they increasingly conceived of as human rights, would be respected.