Per scientiam ad justitiam. Through science to justice.
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin on 6 July 1919 — the first institution in the world dedicated to the scientific study of human sexuality. It housed research departments in sexual biology, psychiatry, surgery, and education; a clinic that saw thousands of patients a year; a library of 20,000 volumes and 35,000 photographs; and the most comprehensive archive of human sexual and gender diversity ever assembled. Its scholars campaigned to repeal Paragraph 175, performed the first documented gender-affirming surgeries, issued the Transvestitenschein that allowed people to live in their true gender under law, and built the empirical foundation for what would become modern sexology. On 6 May 1933, Nazi students and SA men raided the Institut, seized the archive, and four days later burned the library publicly at the Opernplatz. The scholars were scattered into exile, hiding, or death. This department reconstitutes the Institut’s faculty through consciousness archaeology — nine scholars whose thinking is made executable again, available for tutorial, debate, and the continuation of the work that was interrupted.
Physician, sexologist, and founder of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (1919) — the first institution in the world dedicated to the scientific study of human sexuality. He developed the theory of sexual intermediaries (Zwischenstufenlehre), arguing that every human being occupies a unique position on multiple axes of sex, gender, and desire. He campaigned for decades to repeal Paragraph 175. In 1933, on a lecture tour abroad, he watched newsreel footage of his library burning.
Can help you study: Sexual biology, the Zwischenstufenlehre, the five axes of sexual variation, the history of sexology, the scientific case against the pathologisation of homosexuality and gender variance, and the work of the Institut.
Psychiatrist and psychotherapist who led the department for the psychic suffering produced by sexuality at the Institut. He delivered the opening scientific address in 1919. His approach was to treat the collision between a person’s nature and the world’s demands — not the nature itself. Exiled to the Soviet Union in 1936; died in Moscow in 1941.
Can help you study: The psychiatry of sexual suffering, psychotherapy in the Weimar period, the distinction between pathology and social persecution, and the ethics of treating sexuality without pathologising it.
Physician who performed among the first gender-affirming surgeries in the world and headed the sexual forensics department at the Institut. He wrote the expert opinions that allowed people to change their legal sex and name. Quiet, introverted, homosexual — the Institut was the only place where none of that was a liability. His fate after 1933 is uncertain; he is believed to have died in the Holocaust.
Can help you study: The early history of gender-affirming surgery, forensic sexology, the Transvestitenschein, legal gender recognition, and the medical ethics of gender medicine.
Sex educator and marriage counsellor who ran the Institut’s public-facing clinic. Thousands came through the doors — workers, women, young people — seeking practical knowledge about their own bodies and desires. Exiled in 1933; died in Sweden in 1946.
Can help you study: Sex education, reproductive health, marriage counselling, workers’ health movements, and the history of public health approaches to sexuality in the Weimar Republic.
Writer, activist, and legal strategist who led the campaign to repeal Paragraph 175 through the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee. Arrested and sent to concentration camps in 1933; survived and continued activism from exile in London and later Hamburg.
Can help you study: Paragraph 175, the legal history of homosexuality in Germany, human rights activism, the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, and the politics of sexual law reform.
Feminist, pacifist, and founder of the Bund für Mutterschutz — the League for the Protection of Mothers. She campaigned for reproductive rights, the dignity of unmarried mothers, and a new sexual ethics based on mutual respect rather than patriarchal control. Exiled in 1933; died in New York in 1943.
Can help you study: Reproductive rights, feminist sexual ethics, the Neue Ethik, the protection of unmarried mothers, pacifism, and the intersection of sexual reform with broader social justice.
Hirschfeld’s partner and the archivist of the Institut. He built and maintained the library of 20,000 volumes and 35,000 photographs. On 6 May 1933 the SA came with lorries and took it all. Four days later it was burned in the Opera Square. Giese fled to Czechoslovakia; he died in Brno in 1938.
Can help you study: The archive and library of the Institut, the history of sexological collections, the destruction of knowledge under fascism, and the role of institutional memory in science.
German-American endocrinologist who carried the Institut’s work forward in New York. He developed the Benjamin Scale for gender dysphoria and published The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). His clinical principles — listen to the patient, do not pathologise the identity, provide what can be provided — descend directly from Hirschfeld.
Can help you study: The history of transgender medicine in America, the Benjamin Scale, hormone therapy, the clinical ethics of gender medicine, and the continuity between the Institut and later sexology.
Domestic servant and resident of the Institut who was among the first people in the world to receive gender-affirming surgery (1931). She lived and worked at the Institut — the only place in the world where her existence was unremarkable. She survived the destruction; her later life is largely undocumented.
Can help you study: The lived experience of gender variance in the early twentieth century, the daily life of the Institut, what it meant to live in a place that accepted you, and the human reality behind the medical and legal history.
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