The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Berlin's LGBTQ+ Movement with Dr. Robert Beachy

Discover the courageous origins and transformative journey of queer rights as we trace the historical tapestry of Berlin's LGBTQ+ community with the guidance of Dr. Robert Beachy, author of "Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity." This episode promises to unravel the complex evolution of queer identity, from the pioneering efforts of 19th-century activists like Karl-Einrich Ulrichs to the vibrant and liberal Weimar Republic, through the devastating oppression of the Nazi regime, and into Berlin's resurgence as a queer capital in modern times.

Embark with us on a poignant narrative as we reflect on the tragic yet inspirational tale of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and his indomitable spirit in the face of adversity — a spirit that ignited a movement and altered perceptions of sexuality and gender. We delve into the groundbreaking work of Magnus Hirschfeld and his contemporaries, their profound impact on shaping the understanding of sexual identity, and the cultural and scientific strides that have informed our modern discourse on LGBTQ+ rights.

As we walk the streets of Berlin, we are reminded not only of the city's golden age of gay culture and the shadows of persecution but also of the significance of activism and the vital role it plays in ensuring the rights and freedoms we hold dear. Berlin's history serves not only as a lesson but as a clarion call for continued vigilance in the pursuit of equality. Join us in this exploration of a city that has become an emblem of diversity and acceptance, and the imperative to honor and protect the legacy of those who fought for the rights we cherish today.

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Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity - Robert Beachy

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Transcript

Dr. Beachy: 0:00

And it was certainly never a priority for somebody like Adolf Hitler. You know, the simple fact that somebody like A S could become so powerful and play such a prominent role, at least for a short time in the very beginning, sort of suggests that this, at least at the very beginning, was an open question. So it really is very, very complicated, I think. Now, of course, you know the Nazis immediately targeted especially their political opponents, and that also included, of course, gay rights activists who were left wing and who maybe had affiliations with the German Communist Party or the German Social Democratic Party or maybe who were just simply liberals, but again, you know, for sort of right wing queers, and that sounds maybe like something that we we shouldn't say or can't say, but they really did exist. For them it wasn't, it wasn't clear.

Shawn: 1:01

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig. Berlin has played a pivotal role in the evolution of gay rights and gay history since the 19th century, serving as a significant epicenter in the queer narrative. The foundations of the gay rights movement in the 19th century were significantly influenced by Karl-Einrich Ulrichs, a pioneer in advocating for the rights of homosexual individuals. Ulrichs, active in Germany but outside of Berlin, was the first person to publicly come out as a homosexual. In the 1860s, his series of pamphlets, research into the Mystery of Male-Male Love, proposed the revolutionary idea that homosexuality was an innate natural characteristic and identity. Ulrichs early work laid the groundwork for future movements and was instrumental in shaping the discourse around homosexuality, paving the way for later activists such as Magnus Hirschfeld, a key figure in gay rights history, who emerged in late 19th century Berlin. Hirschfeld, often referred to as the Einstein of sex, founded the world's first gay rights organization, the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, in 1897. This organization campaigned against Paragraph 175, a law criminalizing homosexual acts, continuing the struggle initiated by Ulrichs. The 1920s marked a vibrant era for gay culture in Berlin. The city's liberal atmosphere and flourishing artistic scene fostered a thriving gay community with numerous gay bars and clubs and publications. However, this openness was met with severe suppression during the Nazi regime, which rudely targeted the gay community. Post World War II, berlin remained a focal point for gay rights. West Berlin, in particular, became a hub for the gay liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s, contrasting with the oppressive atmosphere in East Berlin. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a significant milestone, leading to the reunification of Berlin's gay communities. The 1990s and early 2000s marked a resurgence of Berlin's status as a gay capital. The election of an openly gay mayor in 2001 symbolized the city's progressive stance and further solidified Berlin's reputation as a center for gay rights and culture. This rich history has contributed to Berlin's current standing as one of the most queer-friendly cities in the world, hosting one of the largest Pride events in Europe and home to monuments like the Memorial to Homosexuals persecuted under Nazi. Today I'm talking to Dr Robert Beachy, a preeminent scholar and historian of the evolution of queer rights in Berlin. In his book Gay Berlin Birthplace of a Modern Identity, winner of numerous awards, including the Randy Schiltz Award for Best Nonfiction in LGBTQ Literature, beachy meticulously traces the origins of the modern gay rights movement to Berlin, highlighting the significant contributions of numerous figures like Karl Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld. He examines the role of scientific and medical studies in shaping public perceptions of homosexuality, particularly how these studies contributed to a growing tolerance and understanding of homosexual identities in Berlin. The book paints a vivid picture of gay Berlin from the 1800s through the Weimar Republic, a time when the city was renowned for its liberal attitudes and vibrant gay subculture. Beachy also addresses the dark community, detailing how the freedoms and progress made in earlier decades were violently repressed, culminating in the tragic destruction of the nascent gay rights movement. In our conversation today, we talk about all of this and more, including how this history influenced our thinking about queerness as an identity, as well as how this history has culminated in a vibrant and inclusive present day Berlin.

Shawn: 4:52

If you liked this episode, or any episode, please give it a like on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email deepdivewithshawn . Let's do deep dive, dr Beachy. Thanks for being here. How are you? I'm good, I'm good. How are you doing? I'm well, thank you. So I recently read Gay Berlin and I think it's fantastic. You know, I had some sense of very specific period of time in Germany Berlin, related to like Christopher Isherwood and his writing, and then Cabaret and Cabaret Life, but I had no idea until I read your book how much of queer history and culture comes from Germany, so I'm glad to have you here to dig into this and help me and listeners understand this. I don't know if we should call it a phenomenon and how it influenced the global queer rights movement and maybe how it still does so thanks.

Dr. Beachy: 5:53

Sure, Thank you for the kind remark too. I appreciate that.

Shawn: 5:57

So I want to start with a question that might, in end, sum up our entire conversation, but I think it has to be asked, and that is why was Berlin such an important player in the evolution of queer identity, queer rights, queer history?

Dr. Beachy: 6:09

Right, that's sort of the $60,000 question.

Shawn: 6:12

Yes, yeah it's the whole bag.

Dr. Beachy: 6:14

Right, it's the whole. Yeah, it's everything, and I Don't know if I can answer that in a few sentences or even a paragraph. I wrote a book trying to answer that question and I'm not sure I managed to, but I guess I would say a couple of things.

Dr. Beachy: 6:28

Berlin around 1900 was maybe the most dynamic City in the world, which maybe comes as a surprise because it's not a huge city today, but it was by the standards of the fantasy act 1900, and it was also a city that had grown rapidly, you know, in the span of about 40 or 50 years, and and so it was a place where there was this tremendous urbanization and also dislocation. I think that contributed and I'd also credit a certain sort of Intellectualism of German culture. I mean, there was, there was a willingness to ask certain kinds of questions and sort of explore what we would maybe describe today as the social sciences or maybe psychology, psychiatry. So you know, it's a combination of a Openness to, you know, studying certain kinds of questions, asking certain sorts of questions, and that, combined with the presence of a subculture that was Really really growing and expanding, and by that I mean, you know, a group of people who, you know, really began to identify themselves, as you know, sexual minorities, I guess.

Shawn: 7:41

So there's something that, well, there's a handful of things that struck me as it relates to you know, I guess, the late 1800s, mid late 1800s in Berlin that you, that you were writing about. Our history is as good as you know Our ability to find things and tell the story about them right. A few things jumped out to me and I'm interested in getting your thoughts on if you think that this is a fair characterization that, outside of larger social factors and movements and changes in society that are arguably always Pushing progress forward, outside of that, there really are like a handful of people, there are a couple of people that you identify in the book as being integral and that almost fell. I walked away from the book feeling like if those people hadn't existed, the movement itself in Berlin Might not have for lack of a better word blossomed. One of these is related to the police.

Shawn: 8:35

You also make an interesting and intriguing argument, or I don't know if it's an argument.

Shawn: 8:39

You make an observation that the police played in maybe unintended role as an organization In advancing queer rights, and it kind of makes sense I'm gonna do broad strokes here which is the police had a much more maybe Coercive role in people's lives than we might think of police today, and this in turn led to the ability of Berlin to modernize and then subsequently, as a result of that modernization, it attracted and this kind of makes sense right it attracted a whole bunch of people. But you know, some of those folks were queer folks, they were homosexual, so this led to a growing population of growing like homosexual metropolis. The question here is can you explain this Dynamic? And it's? There's two things here. One is I'm talking about the police generally, but then there are a handful of individuals that Almost they come off as almost single-handedly moving forward the queer rights movement, and I wonder if that's fair to you and if you could maybe explain for the listeners, like who these folks are and what role they played, and if you think in their absence Berlin would become what it did.

Dr. Beachy: 9:41

Right. Well, maybe I should start with the question of the police, and I mean, first of all, there were queer subcultures in every big city. So you know Berlin wasn't unique in that regard and you know there might have been more queer people in London or Paris, I think they were both at least as large and maybe a little larger in 1900 than Berlin was. But for one thing, there was a law. There was an anti-gay law in Germany, there wasn't one in France, there was one in England, of course, and it was a pretty explicit law, I mean. So it wasn't about being immoral or public indecency, it was very, it was very specific. It criminalized, you know, specific sexual acts and these were spelled out. Ultimately, and the police were responsible for enforcing this law. And In the course of attempting to enforce this law, you know, they sort of discovered that it was basically unenforceable. So they came up with strategies for, I guess, policing this growing community and in the process they started keeping lists. They had pink lists of people who were suspected of being Homosexual men also, I guess, sort of teenage, young adult, male prostitutes and also cross-dressers, and they played a pretty central part in Constructing this identity. I mean, they they sort of helped define what the community was, and they did this in part just, you know, through the business of actually policing. It's not that they were necessarily engaged in any kind of Sophisticated classification, but you know the simple, the simple process of identifying who people were and figuring out where they socialized, the, the bars that they went to, the different kinds of events that they held. This played a really big role and this, this is. This was something that this is. This was something different from what I think was happening in other major cities. In other major cities, especially, where the same sex sexual acts were Criminalized, the police were simply trying to catch people and then, you know, bringing them to quote unquote, justice, you know, but I think, I think the police in Berlin Were somehow just a lot more engaged in the community and and they were also engaged by the community. So the community also reached out to them and asked almost for their support and in in this specific instance, they, they were concerned about the threat of blackmail, and so the police viewed blackmail, the, the blackmailing of respectable, closeted men, as a greater threat to some sort of public good than actual sort of homosexuality. And and the, the people who are targeted then were these Adolescent and and young adult male prostitutes, and so. So there was actually a kind of cooperation that that was taking place already by the 1890s and this, this really continued through the period of the Weimar Republic into the early 1930s. So the police really did play a really big role and in many ways it was constructive, at least in terms of Helping to sort of shape the contours and and and define this community, I guess.

Dr. Beachy: 13:20

So you asked about individuals, and Quite a few actually, who played, you know, really important roles. I guess one of the real pioneers Was somebody who actually didn't have a really close connection to Berlin, a man named Carl Heinrich Ulrichs. He is sometimes described as the first sort of public homosexual. He coined a term that isn't used anymore, earning to describe men who are attracted to other men, but he sort of went on a campaign starting in the 1860s. He was he was basically a former lawyer and bureaucrat who had lost his position because because of his homosexuality, and he started publishing pamphlets. He developed a whole theory, almost a kind of anthropology, of queerness, and he didn't have a tremendous impact during his lifetime, but he became soon after his death by the late 1890s, a sort of hero for a lot of gay rights activists in Berlin. He was one of the first to really talk very explicitly about gayness, maybe queerness even, as a very specific identity with its own characteristics, something separate from just someone who engages in perverse quote unquote perverse sexual acts. And so he's one of these individuals.

Dr. Beachy: 14:48

Another is Magnus Hirschfeld, and that's probably a name that's much more familiar, but he was the founder of the first real gay rights organization in Berlin. He was a German Jewish doctor and he spent his whole life as a sort of social scientist studying homosexuality and more generally studying human sexuality. He was gay himself but was never open and or at least not formally out. So he played a tremendous role in the late 1890s and then into the early 1930s. He died in France in 1935. And there's kind of a whole group then that by the early 1900s was a group of different people with sometimes very, very different agendas and different views, but they were in their own ways all engaged in this question of human sexuality, sexual identity, the presence of sexual minorities, maybe gender minorities.

Shawn: 15:52

So you bring up identity, and I'm glad you do, because that's a nice segue to the, I guess, both related to Ulrich's and Hirschfeld's work that I'm interested in talking to you about. But before I even get there, I guess I wanna ask, because I was what's the right word? Riveted by Ulrich's story, and I think it's fair to say he was ahead of his time, right, and maybe it was due to circumstance. His purpose in life was not to be, in retrospect, a gay icon, right, but circumstance kind of led him down that path and then he just kind of leaned full bore into it. And while we don't use a lot of the same language, and I think we might think that some of the characterizations of identity which I wanna turn to in a minute, maybe arcane or archaic, I think they were groundbreaking in a way. But I walked away from this book, I'm sure, if I felt like his life was celebratory, if it was tragic. How do you view him?

Dr. Beachy: 16:53

I guess it's hard not to say tragic. I suppose I mean the campaign that he launched, starting in the 1860s, was to reform the Prussian anti-gay law and then prevent that Prussian anti-gay law from being imposed on the rest of Germany with unification in 1871. And of course he failed or he wasn't able to prevent that from happening. So this law was sort of imposed on the other territories of this new German empire and there hadn't been a law actually in certain parts of Southern Germany. So in some ways from a legal standpoint things actually got worse and he finally just left Germany. He left Germany in the late 1870s and just moved to Italy where he spent the rest of his life. And that was a not uncommon move for somebody in his position. I mean to go to Italy. Italy was sort of a mecca almost for a lot of disgraced individuals or people who were just trying to escape what they considered a certain kind of sexual repression, I guess. And then he pretty much gave up on the campaign altogether and just sort of followed other interests until the end of his life. So I guess in a lot of ways I describe his story as a tragic one. He died without any attention or fanfare. It was only within a few years of his death that Hirschfeld actually went to the bother of collecting the 12 pamphlets that he authored in the 1860s and 70s and then republishing them, and that sort of really helped to sort of popularize his writings or at least make them available to a much wider public.

Dr. Beachy: 18:42

I guess along the way one of the things we can say is he also influenced a really really important Austrian psychiatrist and sexologist who was responsible for one of the most, I guess, important sort of psychiatric works on homosexuality in the last decades of the 19th century. His name was Croft Epping. He published one textbook that was then republished multiple times, even after his death. In the early 19th, early 20th century. Ulrichs had a correspondence with Croft Epping and Croft Epping actually sort of credited Ulrichs for sparking his own interest in this question of sexual minorities and homosexuality, and Croft Epping was then ultimately considered a relatively progressive sexologist in terms of his own view of homosexuality and he also ended up supporting decriminalization. So he to a certain extent ended up signing on to Ulrichs larger campaign of reforming or maybe completely eliminating this law. So it's not as if Ulrichs didn't have certain influences even during his lifetime, but ultimately I guess. Certainly from his own perspective he failed, and in that regard he's kind of a tragic figure.

Shawn: 20:09

You mentioned that Ulrichs was let's just call him a founding father of the concept of homosexuality as an identity, and I found that a fascinating read and you're kind of deconstruction of that and explanation of that primarily because and this is on me, but I'm going to assume this is true of some listeners as well which is it makes me wonder how homosexuality was viewed prior, because homosexuality we have evidence that it's existed, it's been around since the dawn of time, but I don't know that we spend a lot of time thinking about what homosexuality looked like prior to us having this conceptualization as an identity, and so I'm wondering if you had given thought to, prior to Ulrichs and then, the structure that was built from the work that he did, tying and linking homosexuality to an identity, what it was then and I guess ultimately also how it created a trajectory for the I'm calling queer rights, but homosexual rights movement.

Dr. Beachy: 21:07

Right. Well, I think before there was an identity that we could really describe or talk about or speak of, there was a focus maybe on specific sexual acts. So there were sometimes individuals who were guilty of committing these sexual acts or engaging in these sexual acts, but they were maybe described as perverted or they were described as sinners, maybe even as criminal in a certain way, because they were violating a law.

Dr. Beachy: 21:43

But there wasn't any sense that these sexual acts defined them or conferred any sort of identity. And there were forensic medical doctors in Germany, for example, who studied these so-called perverts, and there were different kinds of studies of quote unquote sodomy that went back at least to the Enlightenment, to the 18th century, but very often they would sort of describe these individuals as maybe older men who had simply had too much sex with women and had grown tired of women and had turned to these unnatural sexual acts just for the sake of, maybe, variety or out of some perverse impulse. And so the idea of really really defining somebody's personhood in terms of same-sex attraction, that's what we're talking about when we talk about the invention of identity in the second half of the 19th century, of homosexual identity. I mean, that's my argument, and I think most people at this point would also agree that that really is something that emerges only in the second half of the 19th century.

Dr. Beachy: 22:59

And I think it's also fair that this German language, social science, along with the different sorts of activism represented by Ulrich and later Hirschfeld, are really, really responsible for creating this idea that there's something inherent, there's something maybe inborn, there's something fixed, there's something hardwired, that is really a kind of identity giving essence. That is very different from the idea that someone is simply perverse or sinful or willfully engaging in something that they probably know they shouldn't do, or maybe something that they've maybe grown addicted to, but instead there's some sort of small minority of people who are just sort of born differently, and then it gets into a question of what is the cause, and that continues to be debated. I mean, the very construct of identity is now debated, of course, hotly. But the larger point is, this notion of an identity is really being sort of concocted, constructed, sort of dreamed up, invented sometime in the second half of the 19th century or the 1800s.

Shawn: 24:22

I think, at the same time, something else that can be attributed to Ulrich as well, and then it informed other researchers and, I would think, primarily pretty clearly in Hirschfeld's work, and that is the linkage between sexuality and gender, that an expression of attributes of gender on a spectrum that we're manifesting in bodies that didn't necessarily match that gender and that spectrum was sexuality, and I think Hirschfeld dabbled in that quite a bit in his work and I think we've moved away from that, or at least we have a much clearer sense, I think, today of the distinction between sexuality and gender, while there is still obviously you know, if this were a Venn diagram there's clearly some overlap there and there's definitely certain communities within the queer community where that's a larger issue than for others.

Shawn: 25:09

Right, yeah, I spend a lot of time thinking about trajectory, what happened then, creating almost like a path, dependence to the evolution of rights over time, and where we are today. And I wonder if you've ever given any thought to this linkage between sexuality and gender in, let's call it, early days, informed, the research that was done on sexuality and how that influenced them, the trajectory and where we are today, I guess, as it relates to how we think about sexuality and gender and the linkage between the two and how we even think, I guess, by extension, as a result, rights as it relates to that for people.

Dr. Beachy: 25:46

Yeah, Well, in this German context it's actually surprisingly sophisticated, especially Hirschfeld, and I think this is something he never gets quite enough credit for. But you're absolutely right that there's a kind of association of male homosexuality with a feminacy and, you know, lesbianism with, I don't know, sort of a kind of masculine characteristic. You know that's pervasive, that's everywhere in the late 19th and into the 20th century. But Hirschfeld himself actually was maybe the first to actually decouple gender from sexuality and he did this. He wrote a book, he coined the term, or at least he was the first to use the word transvestite, you know in writing and a publication. He wrote a book called the Transvestites and published it in German in 1910. And he argued, so you know we don't use that word anymore.

Dr. Beachy: 26:49

So you know, most sexologists pretty much all sexologists you know considered cross-dressers to be homosexual men or, you know, lesbian women. I mean so either men wearing women's clothing and being homosexual, or you know women wearing men's clothing and being lesbians. And he argued that actually cross-dressing was something distinct from sexual orientation, and he made this argument already in about 1910. And he claimed that cross-dressing, for a lot of the people he studied and sort of gave you know short biographies of in this work, were actually more, maybe a little bit more, like fetishists. I mean, they and a lot of them were actually a lot of the male cross-dressers that he studied were actually heterosexual. And you know the same, for some of the female cross-dressers he studied, they were heterosexual. One of the larger points then that he made was that this idea that sexual orientation is somehow closely linked to gender identity is just completely wrong. He really developed that idea then too. Through the 1920s into the early 1930s he came up with this wild and crazy spectrum of different sorts of gender sexuality variants. He calculated that there were over 43 million. This covered everything that you could potentially imagine. So he in some ways was already developing almost a 21st century definition of queerness, and again, I think he very often doesn't get quite enough credit for that.

Dr. Beachy: 28:34

There's also another peculiar German feature in this story of the construction of identity or the invention of homosexuality, and that's the presence of another group of activists who were described as masculinists. They actually worked, at least for a brief period, together with Herschfeld, but then they fell out and they formed their own groups. They embraced the idea that homosexual men were actually a little bit like ancient Spartans. They were especially masculine and they also weren't exclusively homosexual, that they probably had wives and families and children, but then they would also have male lovers and their model was sort of an ancient Greek model. And this was also then something that had a pretty strong influence on different kinds of gay rights activism through the 20s into the early 30s, but also on the organization of different groups and different associations. So there was actually a lot going on. In some ways it all gets much more homogenized, maybe through the 30s, 40s and then after 1945.

Dr. Beachy: 29:46

The post-1945, post-war stereotypes about homosexuality, lesbianism, effeminacy, the butch woman I'm using air quotes here that actually is much less sophisticated and that was actually much more pervasive in the 50s and maybe into the 60s than it was before 1933, I guess. So I'm watching right now a show called Fellow Travelers. It's about the McCarthy era, at least in part, and I don't know that history as well as I wish I did. But there's a scene where one of the main characters, matt Boomer, who works for this, I think the State Department is being interrogated as somebody who might be considered homosexual or he's suspected, and they ask him to walk and they ask him to detect effeminacy in his gait. I mean it's just kind of wild and crazy, but it's so primitive, I mean it's just so incredibly crude and I don't really know to what extent the novel it's based on or the television show really captures the beliefs of the federal government in the United States in the 1950s. But that's a lot less sophisticated, I'd say, than what came before the 1930s.

Shawn: 31:06

I'm glad you did move the time frame up a little bit because I did want to talk to you about what I think is also the next project that you're working on and that is the relationship between Nazism and Nazis and the queer community, because it's really complicated and you lay this out in Gabor Lynn and it's also lingered post-war Nazi anti-gay law. From your perspective, can you help me understand how the community and here I'm talking the queer community was impacted by and also part of Nazi Germany and the Nazi Party, and then how the remnants of that kind of carried beyond the war and influenced the movement?

Dr. Beachy: 31:41

Yeah Well, I guess, in terms of the extent to which there were gay Nazis and there were, I mean, that's something that one really couldn't say very openly, maybe even 15 or 20 years ago. Right right, it's a little hard to deny now. Increasingly and that is also something I'm studying, at least in part right now, something as part of another book project there was this German sort of masculinist gay rights movement and it was also something that got a lot of attention, or at least it was something that was written about, and there was one particular sort of I'd almost call him an apostle of masculinism. His name was Hans Brueh. He was very much a proto-fascist, he wrote about the German youth movement and he was a member of one of the very first German youth movement organizations in the late 1890s and they were referred to as the Wanda Vogel or the Wandering Birds, sort of an outdoorsy group. They would go on hikes and he argued that this sort of male society he referred to it as the Menopold, the masculine sort of organization was actually sort of the original source of any kind of human society. It excluded women and it was also intrinsically sort of homoerotic and this was also, you know, very much tied up with this sort of masculinist gay rights movement that I was describing before, and you know, through the 1920s his publications were incredibly popular.

Dr. Beachy: 33:24

He was never actually a Nazi himself, but his writings influenced a lot of people who were either Nazi fellow travelers or maybe in fact Nazis themselves, or simply right-wing nationalists. I should also say he was a vile anti-Semite and a disgusting misogynist. He was really in almost every regard a completely disgusting human being. I'm not overstating that, no, I'm not. His only redeeming feature is that he was actually never himself formally a Nazi, and he was in fact then also sort of ostracized by the mid 1930s. So he never played any sort of role in the Third World War, he never had any kind of position there. But this whole sort of culture of a kind of right-wing homoeroticism it's really impossible not to see this as something that to some extent influenced the rise of German fascism in the 20s and the early 30s.

Dr. Beachy: 34:30

Of course then one of the most powerful men, at least in the early stages of this sort of Nazi takeover of power, was Ernst Röhm, who was also somebody who was more or less openly homosexual. He was the leader of the SA, the largest Nazi paramilitary organization the Sturmabt title. Of course he was killed in the summer of 1934. But for the first year and a half that the Nazis were in power he was one of the most prominent and powerful Nazis. He was one of Hitler's closest friends.

Dr. Beachy: 35:08

It's impossible not to assume that despite homophobic Nazi rhetoric a lot of right-wing people assumed, or fairly guessed, that it was going to be okay to be gay in the Third Reich, which is kind of an incredible thing to say. Now this all changed really dramatically after Röhm was killed in the summer of 1934. And then there was a very aggressive campaign against gay men in particular and that led to all sorts of horrors and it also ended the gay rights movement. It also meant that there was no longer any kind of gay press. People went into hiding, people were incarcerated, fair number were sent to penitentiaries and ultimately concentration camps and people died, people were killed. So that really ended the gay rights movement and it was all over.

Dr. Beachy: 36:08

But at the very beginning it was a little complicated to sort of tease out what the rise of the Nazi Party meant for the queer community in Germany.

Dr. Beachy: 36:21

I think a few historians have argued that this persecution of the queer community was always a part of the Nazi plan, but there really isn't very good evidence for that, in fact, and it was certainly never a priority for somebody like Adolf Hitler. The simple fact that somebody like Ernst Röhm could become so powerful and play such a prominent role, at least for a short time in the very beginning, sort of suggests that this, at least at the very beginning, was an open question. So it really is very, very complicated, I think. Now, of course, the Nazis immediately targeted especially their political opponents, and that also included, of course, gay rights activists who were left-wing and who maybe had affiliations with the German Communist Party or the German Social Democratic Party or maybe who were just simply liberals, but again for sort of right-wing queers, and that sounds maybe like something that we shouldn't say or can't say, but they really did exist. For them it wasn't clear.

Shawn: 37:30

So Berlin is often at the top of lists of most gay-friendly cities in the world. So if we're going back to path dependence, how much do you attribute that to what was happening in the 1800s in Germany, and specifically in Berlin, or how much of this do you think is a happy accident?

Dr. Beachy: 37:48

That's a really good question and in some ways it's a happy accident. I like that formulation. I suppose in the 1960s, 1970s West Berlin was this weird sort of Western exclave in the middle of East Germany, and I mean the West German government, the Federal Republic, was actually promoting policies to get people to move to West Berlin because the population of West Berlin was in decline. I mean people didn't want to be there. So, for example, draft-aged West Germans could evade the draft or they wouldn't be drafted if they actually moved to Berlin for university. So West Berlin ended up attracting a lot of counterculture types and different sorts of artists and musicians and this also helped to support a queer community there.

Dr. Beachy: 38:44

To some extent it is a happy accident and it has a lot to do with, maybe, the division of Berlin and the division of Germany and the Cold War and West Berlin's weird status right up until the fall of the wall in 1989. So by the 1980s West Berlin was really already a kind of queer mecca. It maybe didn't have the same sort of international reputation that it has now, but a lot of people were going to West Berlin. A lot of West Germans were going to West Berlin at least a lot of queer West Germans were going to West Berlin and it had already a very sort of crazy atmosphere, we might say, by the 1980s, and that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the history of the late 19th or early 20th century. So you're right, that is kind of a happy accident, I suppose.

Dr. Beachy: 39:33

On the other hand, there were already different sorts of groups by the early 80s that were working to recover this history and popularize it. I mean, one of the very first gay history museums, the Schwules Museum, was founded in Berlin. I forget the exact year, I think maybe 1983. And there was also another organization, the Magnes Hirschfeldgesellschaft, named for Magnes Hirschfeld, and it was an effort to recover the history of everything related to Magnes Hirschfeld and they put together a library and they started publishing a journal and that still exists all today. So there were these sort of history activists who were really engaged in recovering this history. So it's a little more than a happy accident, but I think that's not a completely misleading characterization.

Shawn: 40:29

Okay, final question Are you ready for it? I hope so. Okay, so something interesting. You've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately.

Dr. Beachy: 40:38

Oh, always reading books, always watching stuff. But I guess I live in Seoul and I have been going to lots of art museums and art exhibitions and I'm very interested. This is very much a side pursuit, but I'm very interested in modern Korean abstract art. There's an expression, dansequah, and one of the sort of major figures just died in the last maybe two months. His name was Paksau Bo. So I've gone to lots of small museums and also larger exhibitions and I also have started to go to an international art fair that just opened. It's held now every September and it started in 2022. And I've gone twice now and so I guess I'm pretty interested in modern art in Seoul, which sounds kind of obscure, but I think it's sort of gaining more and more visibility and I think there are probably lots of people who are watching it and maybe even collecting stuff now from other parts of the world. But yeah, I would just throw that out there.

Shawn: 41:50

So Are you collecting stuff?

Dr. Beachy: 41:52

No, not really. I can't say I have the money for it. So a lot of already way too expensive, Although I suppose if I focused on some unknown artists I might be able to sort of buy pieces. But no, I'm not actually collecting anything myself, so it's more just attending shows and going to museums.

Shawn: 42:14

It's a really fascinating city.

Dr. Beachy: 42:16

Yeah, it really is. I'm never bored here.

Shawn: 42:19

Dr Beachy, thanks for the conversation. I really enjoyed it.

Dr. Beachy: 42:21

Thank you I enjoyed talking to you. This was a lot of fun ["Th Worl ].

Shawn: 42:30

Understanding gay history in Berlin is crucial to understanding both world history and the current state of queer rights globally. Berlin's unique historical trajectory as a center for gay culture and rights reflects broader social, political and cultural shifts that have shaped modern attitudes towards queer communities worldwide. As Dr Beachy and I discussed, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, berlin emerged as a pioneering city for homosexual rights. Groundbreaking work in sexology and advocacy laid the foundations for modern understandings of sexuality and gender. In this period in Berlin's history illustrates how scientific and social advancements can contribute to a more inclusive and tolerant society, and the flourishing of Berlin's gay culture during the Weimar Republic, with its vibrant nightlife and publications, symbolizes a moment in history where alternative sexual identities were openly explored and celebrated. This era of relative freedom and acceptance was crucial in the evolution of a distinct gay identity serving as a beacon for queer movements worldwide.

Shawn: 43:36

The subsequent persecution under the Nazi regime serves as a stark reminder of the fragility of rights and freedoms. The rollback of the progress made in Berlin echoes through history, underlining the continuous struggle faced by queer communities worldwide. Today, as Berlin stands as a symbol of diversity and acceptance, its history offers valuable lessons. It shows the impact of activism, the importance of visibility in the fight for equality and the dangers of complacency. Understanding Berlin's gay history is therefore essential, not only to appreciate the strides made in queer rights, but also to recognize the ongoing challenges and the need for vigilance in protecting these hard-won freedoms. Alright, check back soon for another episode of Deep Dive Chat's wil Target.