Book Destruction from the Medieval to the Contemporary

G. Partington, A. Smyth, G. Partington, A. Smyth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137367662
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This rich and varied collection of essays by scholars and interviews with artists approaches the fraught topic of book destructionfrom a new angle, setting out an alternative history of the cutting, burning, pulping, defacing and tearing of books from the medieval period to our own age.

Part I

Burning

1

Burning Sexual Subjects: Books, Homophobia and the Nazi Destruction of the Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin

Heike Bauer

The Nazi book burnings are one of the defining moments both in the modern history of the book and twentieth-century history more broadly. Historians of Nazism have paid considerable attention to their role in the escalation of Nazi terror and its Anglo-American reception.¹ Other critiques of violence and hatred have similarly turned to the events of 1933 to ask what it is, to borrow the words of Rebecca Knuth, ‘about texts and libraries that puts them in the line of fire during social conflict?’² Knuth answers her own question by pointing to the crucial role of books in collective identity formation and its sustenance. ‘As the voice and memory of the targeted group’, she argues, ‘books and libraries are central to culture and identity [and] vital in sustaining a group’s uniqueness’.³ For Knuth and many other critics, books are the material correlative of an established cultural identity, and book burnings constitute the attempt to eradicate it. This line of investigation, which has productively examined the symbolism of burning books – including the fact that it has a limited function as an act of censorship – tends to focus on the losses incurred in the act of destruction. In contrast, I want to turn attention to the remains: the documents and objects which survived the Nazi attack on books in the raid on Magnus Hirschfeld’s (1868–1935) Institute of Sexual Science in Berlin.

The Institute’s library was the first point of attack in the series of events that have become known as the Nazi book burnings. As a centre of medico-scientific sexological research, it contributed to the production of a modern understanding of sexuality, while the Institute’s public activities and political campaigning for the decriminalisation of homosexuality shaped an unusually affirmative space for queer culture in Berlin. There is some critical consensus that the Institute’s association, via its founder, with both homosexuality and Jewishness, explains why it was the first place to be raided in the Nazi attack against books.⁴ Yet while historians of sexuality have rightly pointed out that the upsurge of violence against books was propelled by homophobia as well as anti-Semitism,⁵ many broader histories of the book burnings tend to dismiss the importance of homophobia as an analytical category.⁶ By examining the remnants that remained undestroyed in the events of May 1933, this chapter turns fresh attention to the homophobic underpinnings of the Nazi attack against Hirschfeld’s Institute and its reception. It shows how the materiality of the books and papers under attack influenced how they were handled, and considers why and how some objects –notably a collection of questionnaires and a bronze statue – survived the events. The chapter argues that while an examination of the symbolism of the book burnings tells us something about the psychic structures that made these hateful acts appear necessary for the Nazi claim on power, the remnants that survived these events reveal how homophobia shaped the book burnings and their reception.

Books and bodies at the Institute of Sexual Science

Hirschfeld established the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin in July 1919 with the aim of building a space for ‘research, teaching, healing, and refuge’ that could ‘free the individual from physical ailments, psychological afflictions, and social deprivation’.⁷ The Institute was housed in the imposing former home of the German ambassador to France, which had been bought by Hirschfeld during the reshuffling of political power and property in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. Around the same time, Hirschfeld also set up the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Foundation, a charitable organisation that would – together with donations from anonymous private supporters and Hirschfeld himself – provide the necessary funding for the Institute’s many activities. The Institute became most famous for Hirschfeld’s work on homosexuality and cross-dressing – he coined the term ‘transvestism’ in 1910.⁸ However, it supported a much wider range of activities including sex and marriage counselling services, the provision of sexual health clinics, advice on contraception and the development of medical, anthropological and psychological research on all aspects of gender and sexuality.⁹ In addition, it provided office space for feminist activists, sex reform journals and organisations such as the influential World League for Sexual Reform, which had been co-founded by Hirschfeld in 1921.¹⁰ Life at the Institute was characterised by the blurring of boundaries between professional and private space as it offered living accommodation for a number of people who worked there. Hirschfeld himself occupied rooms on the second floor with his partner Karl Giese; other rooms were rented out to permanent and temporary staff and visitors, some of whom, most famously perhaps the American writer Christopher Isherwood and the English anthropologist Francis Turville-Petre, lived at the Institute for prolonged periods of time.¹¹

The Institute’s location in Berlin put it physically and symbolically at the centre of both the German homosexual liberation movement and the efforts to suppress homosexuality in the country. Hirschfeld was one of the leading figures in the campaign for the abolishment of Paragraph 175, the legal statute that criminalised ‘indecent acts’ between men.¹² It had been introduced throughout Germany less than half a century before the Institute was set up. Following the founding of the German Empire in 1871, the anti-homosexuality legislation of Prussia, the most powerful of the independent German states, was introduced throughout the new nation. Hirschfeld’s activism against this persecution of homosexuals, and his medical expertise on homosexuality, made him a well-known figure in the German and international press. The founding of the Institute further strengthened Hirschfeld’s international reputation, even as the Institute’s reform-oriented goals and ethnographic research methods cemented Hirschfeld’s professional fallout both with avowedly ‘apolitical’ sexologists such as Albert Moll and with Sigmund Freud’s growing psychoanalytic movement.¹³

Books were central to the Institute’s activities. By 1919, Hirschfeld had already published more than two dozen books, pamphlets and articles, which, while ranging from considerations of alcoholism to the psychology of war, mostly focused on aspects of same-sex sexuality.¹⁴ In 1914 he published his most comprehensive study, Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes [Homosexuality of Man and Woman], a tome of more than a thousand pages. Hirschfeld’s model of human sexuality was somatic, that is, he understood both sexual desires and the manifestation of gender to be encoded in the body.¹⁵ He coined the concept of ‘sexuelle Zwischenstufen’ – ‘sexual intermediaries’ – to describe his idea that there exist infinite natural variations in sexual desires and bodies. At the same time, however, he also acknowledged the significance of social context on sexual development, and argued that the existence of different sexual customs around the world is indicative of the ‘naturalness’ of variations in sexual behaviour.¹⁶

The written word alone did not suffice in Hirschfeld’s quest to record as many examples as possible of ‘sexual intermediaries’. Next to a large library of published and unpublished works, his collections at the Institute also included objects such as sex toys and, more famously, a large number of photographs. Many of Berlin’s cross-dressers and other ‘sexual deviants’ visited the Institute and had their picture taken there. These portraits were displayed alongside images of the Institute’s transgender and intersex patients.¹⁷ Images of same-sex couples who posed together for the camera were displayed alongside staged photographs of cross-dressed women and men and close-ups of naked body parts. Critics have rightly questioned the ethics of turning bodies into objects of scientific study in this way and exposing them to the gaze of expert and lay viewers, a criticism which seems borne out in particular by the Institute’s collection of close-ups of the genitals of transgender and intersex bodies.¹⁸ Yet the Institute’s photographic collection also testifies to a more affirmative relationship between such ‘scientific’ photography and Berlin’s sexual subcultures. It documents the existence of a rich and thriving queer subculture in and beyond early twentieth-century Berlin. This was enabled by the fact that Hirschfeld himself was a well-known figure in Berlin’s homosexual circles, which he frequented with his lover, and where he was also known under his cross-dressed name, ‘Tante Magnesia’. The Institute’s photographs contributed to the self-construction of this queer community even as many of the images clearly made use of a visual medical language that turned women and men into case studies.

A further function of the photographs was that they helped to transmit long and complex written texts to a wider audience. The images offered a kind of visual shorthand to Hirschfeld’s theorisation of ‘sexual intermediaries’, depicting at a glance phenomena which in their written exposition covered hundreds of pages of scientific writing. In contrast to the often forbidding size of his printed books, the photographs offered a more instantaneous access to Hirschfeld’s work, revealing the variety of expressions – both clothed and naked – of the human body. This material helped to disseminate Hirschfeld’s theories to a wider public. Some of the photographs were reproduced in Hirschfeld’s publications such as the popular study of Berlin’s sexual subcultures, Berlins Drittes Geschlecht [Berlin’s Third Sex] (1904).¹⁹ Many others were put together on large but portable display panels. Used both as research data and to illustrate Hirschfeld’s ideas, these panels with images of ‘sexual intermediaries’ were put on display at the Institute and also illustrated Hirschfeld’s public lectures. The panels mediated encounters between the Institute’s queer books and the wider public who were introduced via the photographs to people who were what Hirschfeld called ‘anders als die anderen’: different from the others.²⁰

Loose paper

Where Hirschfeld tried t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Burning
• Part II Mutilating
• Part III Doctoring
• Part IV Degrading
• Part V Deforming/Reshaping
• Select Bibliography
• Index