The intermediaries A Weimar story

Medical historian Shillace (Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher) offers an evocative study of Weimar Germany's Institute for Sexual Sciences, the first scientific institution to treat homosexuality and transgender identity as innate, and famously the first institution targeted by the Nazis for book burning. Aiming to "understand why the Institute became such a target for hatred"--since such insight will "tell us everything about the present moment"--Shillace traces the Institute's origins back to the turn of the 20th century, when, even as innovative sexologists like the Institute's later founder Magnus Hirschfeld were pioneering a scientifically inquisitive attitude toward sexuality and gender, a still relatively newly formed Germany, motivated by fervent nationalism, began to scapegoat gay men in government for the nascent state's hardships. Hirschfeld himself testified at the 1907 trial of one such official; public "panic" about sexology exploded following the affair, swirling together with antisemitism as Jewish sexologists like Hirschfeld were accused of undermining the nation's "masculinity." Shillace traces this twisty political thread to the notorious 1933 book burning at the Institute, with a focus on the era's disastrous, repeated ceding of ground to Nazi "masculinism"--including efforts by gay men to distance themselves from trans people. The author also relays what she uncovered about Dora Richter, the first person to receive gender-affirming surgery at the Institute, whose story, while moving, can distract with its more sentimental tone ("She went about both day and night as a sweet young maid"). Still, this is an incisive, timely study of Weimar politics. (May)

The fight to affirm gender. Drawing on abundant primary sources, medical historian Schillace, editor of the journalMedical Humanities, vividly depicts the maelstrom of race, politics, and scientific discovery that shaped attitudes about gender identity from 1890 to 1933 in Weimar, Germany. For homosexuals and nonbinary individuals, the period was fraught. Rapid industrial growth, immigration, and a growing women's movement incited male panic about effeminate men and same-sex attraction. Closeted homosexuals, outed in scandalous exposure in the press, lost powerful positions. Central to her well-populated history is gay Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), whom Hitler called "the most dangerous Jew in Germany." In 1897, he established the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose mission targeted the overthrow of Paragraph 175, an oppressive law that made homosexuality a crime. From his medical practice, Hirschfeld concluded that "discrete, tidy genders didn't exist." Instead, he posited a continuum of gender identities: nonbinary, trans, and queer individuals whom he called "intermediaries." His Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, was a safe place where they could get counseling, hormonal treatment, and even surgery, including for patients who had tried, with dire results, to remove their own breasts or penises. Dora Richter, born Rudolf, was the first patient to undergo complete gender-affirming surgeries. Schillace recounts advances in endocrinology, beginning with the discovery of sex hormones and genes in 1905; the rise of eugenics, which fed Nazism; and the advent of Freudian psychotherapy. The history is appended with a glossary of pertinent terms in English and German, such as the now outdated "inversion" and "hermaphrodite"; capsule biographies of the large cast of characters; and a timeline of major scientific and political events. Hysteria about gender identity, Schillace warns, has never abated; the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights continues. A richly detailed, prodigiously researched history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.