The Posthumous World Journeys of a Sexologist: Analyzing the Transnational Historiographic Embrace of Magnus Hirschfeld

Over the past 40 years, one figure has come to signify the dynamism and disruptive potential of early C20th German sexology and sex reform activism: Magnus Hirschfeld.  The recovery of Hirschfeld’s legacy began in the later 1970s, with the pioneering work of James D. Steakley into Germany’s radical sexual past, and continued into the 1980s, as Hirschfeld’s thought and politics were recovered and celebrated by the likes of German sexologist Erwin Haeberle, German-British sexologist (and Hirschfeld associate) Charlotte Wolff, and the Magnus Hirschfeld Society of independent scholars and activists in West Berlin. Historical interest has since increased remarkably and beyond the boundaries of the English- and German-speaking worlds: “Worldcat” now reveals scholarship on Hirschfeld conducted in French, Polish, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Korean, Afrikaans, and Japanese.  Moreover, some of Hirschfeld’s original texts have been recently translated into French, Japanese and Chinese languages.  A French novel about the “patients of Dr. Hirschfeld” was even published in 2012.  

What accounts for such widespread and singular interest in Hirschfeld as an historical figure?  What kinds of desiderata does it reveal about politics and about the past?  How has this near exclusive preoccupation with Hirschfeld as the symbol of German sexology and sex reform shaped--and arguably warped--our understanding of the full complexity of these historical phenomena in the early C20th?  Indeed, what does the appropriation and celebration of Hirschfeld suggest about the politics of memory, one that intriguingly transcends narrow national confines?  These questions lay at the heart of this paper, which not only traces the rise of Hirschfeld scholarship around the world during the postwar period, but also interrogates how and why he has become the object of such consistent yet disperse attention; how he is remembered (and misremembered); and how postwar historiography has shaped our understanding of Germany’s sexual past.