, 38,
Hirschfeld was a pioneering sexologist based in Berlin during its Weimar period, while it was still mostly governed by Prussian officials. This period between WWI and the rise of the Nazi party provided Hirschfeld some small degree of respite from the German penal code, Paragraph 175 (introduced in 1871, only fully revoked in 1994), which criminalized all homosexual activity, yet was enforced with less rigor in the larger cities of the region, Berlin in particular.
The institute was founded in 1919 as an epicenter for the study of sex, sexuality, gender and the stratification of identity. It wasn't only a site of theoretical study, but for the practice of psychiatric and internal medicine, too, including the first male to female sex reassignment procedures. Just as significantly, it was an expansive social sphere and residence for the various subcultures it offered visibility to. At different times figures such as Walter Benjamin and Christopher Isherwood lived there.
On May 6, 1933 the Institute was ransacked in an organized attack by right wing students who were accompanied by a brass band to celebrate their explosion of violence. Hours later, Nazi stormtroopers came and pillaged over 20,000 of the compiled books, files, and texts that constituted the Institute's library. These were later destroyed publicly in a bonfire. The title of the erdmann's exhibit, 38, refers to a number of books that have been recovered in the decades since. It's a number that slowly continues to expand as volumes from private collections, and other locations that had been hidden or salvaged, resurface. The original books are housed by the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, an active space in Schoneberg that's run by a community of dedicated volunteers.
38, LOUCHE OPS BERLIN, 2024
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