You're Dead to Me - LGBTQ Life in Weimar Germany

Episode Date: July 19, 2024

In this episode, Greg Jenner is joined in twentieth-century Germany by Dr Bodie Ashton and comedian Jordan Gray to learn all about LGBTQ life and culture during the Weimar Republic. After the failure of the First World War and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, German politics underwent something of a revolution. With the end of the old imperial order came the questioning of its conservative social values, and feminist and socialist campaigners sought to rethink old assumptions about gender roles, family life and sexuality. Part of this included a flourishing of LGBTQ life and culture in the 1920s and early 1930s. In this episode, Greg and his guests explore the political and economic circumstances of Weimar Germany, queer club culture, magazines and filmmaking; alongside research into sexuality and campaigns for transgender and gay liberation, to discover why Weimar Germany was such a focal point for LGBTQ life in this period. Hosted by: Greg Jenner Research by: Jon Norman Mason Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse, and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Production Coordinator: Ben Hollands Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse Executive Editor: James Cook

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. The Infinite Monkey Cage is back and we are starting the series with a whole show about trees with Dame Judy Dench. What else have we got, Brian? We're going to do What a Gas with Mark Mirdovnik. Unexpected Science History with R Hounder. I don't know what he knows about unexpected science history. Well, that's the unexpected thing. He hasn't got a clue. No, I'm hoping we're having some experts on there.

Exploring with Annika Rice. No, that's just one of your dreams. The other night I dreamt I was exploring with Annika Rice. And also Alien Life in Glastonbury with Chris Lintol. Yeah, Infinite Monkey Cage. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. Hello and welcome to your dead to me the radio for comedy podcast that takes history seriously.

My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today we are bobbing our hair and bopping down to the Kit Kat Club as we learn all about LGBTQ life in Weimar, Germany. And to help us, we have two very special guests. In History Corner, they're a research fellow at the Lieblitz Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung or ZZF in Potsdam, where they specialize in politics, gender and sexuality in Germany from the 18th to 20th centuries.

You'll remember them from our episode on Prussian King, Frederick the Great, it's the equally great Dr. Bodhi Ashton. Welcome back Bodhi or should I say Willkommen. You can say that Greg, but you can't say Leibniz Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung Potsdam. I tried so hard. I know you did and I'm very grateful for it. I'm also grateful to be here so thank you so much. Thank you Bodhi. And in Comedy Corner, she's a comedian, actor, singer and screenwriter. She has won the Next Up's biggest award in comedy. Her show, Is It a Bird? was nominated at both

Edinburgh and Melbourne Comedy Festivals. She was also nominated at the National Comedy Awards for Stand Up to Cancer 2023. You'll have seen her on QI, Late Night Lysette, the Russell Howard Hour and as a singer on The Voice. Who is it? Is it a bird? No, it's Jordan Gray. Welcome to the show, Jordan. Hello, thank you for having me on your program. This is all very clever and German so far, and I'm enjoying it. First time on the podcast, Jordan, standard operating procedure. We have to ask, do you like history? Please say yes. There's a lot of it, isn't there? I like most of it. Most of it I am quite ignorant about, but I tend to find what I do learn about it is quite interesting.

Okay. What do you know about Weimar Germany? Do you know the name? I know the name having just heard it from you. But honestly, I'm so excited. I've gleaned a little bit, but I know that it happened in Germany. This person was a person that what happened in Germany. Not a person. That's what happens to people, isn't it? It's not a place, sorry.

It's a place, yeah. That had lots of people in it, I dare say. Probably. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. And I'm imagining that when I say Weimar Germany, you are thinking about Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film Cabaret.

Or the raunchy revival currently running right in the West End. Maybe you've seen Babylon Berlin on the telly. or Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl in the cinema, or you've read Christopher Isherwood's novel Goodbye to Berlin, which was inspired by his time there in the 30s. Or if like me, you studied history GCC in the UK, you're probably having some sort of fierce Pavlovian flashbacks to the very mention of the word Weimar, which is giving you cold sweats. That's very much how I'm feeling right now. But besides the chaotic economics and the complicated

politics, why was Weimar Berlin such a focal point in LGBTQ history? Well, let's find out, shall we? Right, let's start with the basics. John, do you know when the Weimar Republic was founded? Founded? Yeah. Well, if it's happening in the 20s and it was a successful movement, I suspect a little bit before the 20s, maybe in the 1911. I liked your logic, good working through the problem. Bodhi, 1911, but what do we say? Not that far off, but there's something that happens in between 1911 and when this happens and that's a little thing called the First World War. Will Barron Ah, that old chestnut. Will Barron Yeah, you know, easily forgotten little thing. So Germany, of course, enters the First World War as an empire. It is the German Empire. And by the

end of it, it's not an empire anymore. And what emerges from this is this thing that we call the Weimar Republic. By 1918, so the last year of the war, everything's looking pretty bad for Germany. On the battlefield, the German armies have basically been defeated. The other thing is that the German economy is collapsing. On the 9th of November, the Kaiser, the Emperor, Wilhelm II, or Kaiser Bill, he's compelled to abdicate. That's great. But with him no longer being Kaiser, the whole edifice of the German Empire has collapsed.

And that also means that at least for now, all of those conservative forces in politics have really been totally discredited. So the government has collapsed, the state has collapsed. What do we have now? Well, we have some very, very adventurous people deciding that they're going to found a republic and this German republic is founded twice on the same day on the 9th of November. Founding two things on the same day goes against what I understand about German efficiency. How do you issue a constitution twice?

The democratic republic, which ends up being the Republic, is declared by a moderate socialist by the name of Philipp Scheidemann. And then a couple of hours later, a socialist republic is declared by a revolutionary called Karl Liebknecht. Ah, typical. It happens every time. So the thing here is that Scheidemann was actually eating lunch with his colleague Friedrich Ebert in the German parliament building, the Reichstag. And they heard at about the same time that the Kaiser had abdicated, but also that Liebknecht, who they used to work with, who was now in

charge of something called the Spartacus League. Amazing. He wanted to declare a republic. So Scheidemann basically runs out onto the balcony. He's like, no, no, no, I'm here first. We're having a Spartacus League. And so he's an important member of a party known as the SPD, the Social Democratic Party of Germany. It still exists. In January 1919, the SPD comes to power in the first democratic elections. The SPD was the largest party of its kind anywhere in the world at the time. The SPD has over a million members at the turn of the century. They are the opposition voice in Germany and they've got experience

in the German parliament without being tainted by the sins of the government. So this is really why they end up being the natural government party of this new republic. And it's negotiated in Weimar, hence why we call it the Weimar Republic. Exactly. So just a little thing for Jordan and for many other listeners, Weimar is a place in Germany. Significantly, it's- I feel like that was mostly for me. But yes, thank you. I do appreciate it. I couldn't point to it on a map. I don't know where Weimar is.

Well, it's actually in a state called Thuringia, which is in the East. The reason that Weimar was selected here as sort of the namesake is because this is where the new constitution was negotiated. And this is because A, Berlin's considered too dangerous and unstable at the time. There are all these protests. And also because Weimar's known for being where all of the great geniuses of German romanticism had been about a century or two centuries earlier. So basically. So it's like the cultural hub.

Yeah. So people like Goethe and Schiller and so on were there. And so basically the idea is, well, all these geniuses were there. And so now if we're doing this work now in Weimar, we're kind of the geniuses of today. Oh, amazing. So founding a constitution then, it's not easy. Jordan, what would be your ideal constitution? What important policies would you put in the Jordan Grain nation?

Be nice to each other, ain't it? At all costs, even if it's violent. Just be really, really aggressive and be nice to each other all the time. So I mean, Bodhi, be nice to each other, good mantra, I'm fine with that. What is in the Weimar constitution? It is meant to be a representative democracy with proportional representation. There are meant to be elections for parliament and the president every four years. Everyone over 20 can vote. Everyone?

Yes, everyone in the Weimar Republic over the age of 20 had the vote, including women. Okay, that all sounds pretty good, pretty modern. And Jordan, do you think this new republic gets off to a shiny new start? Definitely, because we're here talking about it. So I bet it's all perfect and sunshine and rainbows from here on out. I love your optimism, Bodhi. I'm going to mention the Treaty of Versailles now. The Treaty of Versailles is a big thing here. So the problem that the republic has is that

the first, basically the first thing that problem that the Republic has is that basically the first thing that happens after it's founded is that there's the Paris Peace Conference, which leads to the treaty. And this new government thinks that it's starting with a blank slate. It's like, look, we got rid of the Kaiser. We've got a whole new government. Everything's fine. We can talk about peace. And the Germans had actually been negotiating for quite a while with the Americans about peace terms. And so they're a bit shocked. When the French are like, ah, right. Exactly.

You nearly did a French accent. We will have the reparations, please. And yeah, so they're basically not even invited to talk about this. They're effectively invited to agree to the terms of the treaty. And those terms include the war guilt clause. So basically to say, yes, it was entirely our fault that this war happened. We have to pay reparations. We need to reduce the army such that we can't actually run a war anymore in case we wanted to. We lose territory. This is really, really unpopular, but Germany doesn't have a choice at this stage.

Of course, listeners, the Treaty of Versailles is another textbook feature of the UK history curriculum. It's literally a textbook because it's in the textbooks. We call it the TV over here because we're cool. So the TV treaty has been subsequently criticised by generations of historians as leading to being a major cause of World War II. But the peace conference itself is also a sort of mess because you've got the Italians, the Americans, the French, lots of different people and they've all got different things they want, right? Yeah, it's, I mean, it is a big, big, big mess because there hasn't really been anything like it. The thing that was the closest to it happened a century earlier. That was the

Congress of Vienna after the Napoleonic Wars. It's also a bit of a spectator sport. People come to watch the negotiations. Someone who does come to watch is a guy who then actually writes a petition to the Americans to say, you know, you should consider Vietnamese independence as well. He'd been a dishwasher in Paris and he signed this as Nguyen the Patriot and we'd know him better as Ho Chi Minh. Oh, really? Oh, wow. Okay. I did not know that. So we've got all of these weird intersections happening. You mentioned the Italians. The representative is the Prime Minister Vittorio Orlando. He's known as the crying man because basically every time he doesn't get his way, he throws a tantrum.

My toddler is the same in fairness. The French Prime Minister Georges Clermenceau keeps trying to seduce the niece of the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. David Lloyd George has a reputation for seducing basically everyone. Apart from his niece, I should clarify. Besides his niece, yep. The Bulgarians are there and they're saying that since they were the first country to surrender, they did more than any other country to bring the end to the war or the war to an end rather. And therefore they should be rewarded because of this and

the Romanian Queen turns up, she becomes a bit of a style icon and she's basically there to look very beautiful. This is amazing. This is so cool. So you know it's a mess. So there we go, less peace conference, more chaos convention but that is the sort of economic reality of what Weimar Germany is founded into. And back in Germany we've got a attempted political coup. You've got the communist groups and the nationalist groups,

the ex-soldiers called the Freikorps, who the government had empowered to put down the communists. You've got competing coup factions. Then, Bodhi, the moment you mention Weimar to anyone who did sort of English GCSE history in the 90s like I did, they're going to hear that word and immediately think hyperinflation. Do you know hyperinflation, Jordan? Have you heard of it? No, I know. Yeah, I understand the concept. Like it's proper inflation, really inflated. Proper inflation, yeah. A massive balloon.

I mean... I understand it. I'm playing the full episode slightly on that one. I slightly on that one. It'd be out of character if I suddenly told you something. I'd love it if you suddenly just leapt into a kind of macroeconomic lecture. It'd be incredible. Hyperinflation, I'm thinking of wheelbarrows full of cash to go and buy a loaf of bread. That sort of classic image. What is causing this? Well, we said before that the Germans have got reparations to pay. So basically, they have to pay back all of the countries that they had fought against for the damage that they've done.

But of course the German economy is not looking very good. In 1922, Germany misses a reparations payment. So yeah, like if you ever missed paying your credit card, I have. But what didn't happen with me was that in the case of Germany here, the French and Belgian armies then invade. I still have my apartment, I'm happy to say. But the French and Belgian troops come in, they occupy the Ruhr, which is the main industrial area of Germany. It's like the coal producing region. Yeah. Yeah. So you've got major industrial area here. This is basically where all of that

money from heavy industry comes from. Obviously, the workers there aren't particularly thrilled about having been invaded. So they do a thing called passive resistance. They just stop working. So the government in trying to respond to this just starts printing more money. And this does not necessarily work as anyone who's got any basic idea of economics here might sort of be twigging to. Printing money doesn't necessarily mean that that money has any worth. You're going too fast. Let me write this down. Okay. Go on.

So basically by this point, it costs more for the government to print the money than the money is actually worth. And this also means that you've got loads of political instability at the same time. So there's communist takeovers in the state of Saxony and also in the state of Thuringia, where Weimar is, remember? Remember that Weimar was meant to be the safe place? Yeah. Well, now there's a communist takeover. In 1923, we even get sort of a new group of ultra-nationalists who we'll all be familiar with. They end up shortening their name so we know them as the Nazis. They

attempt their own putsch in Munich. It's called the Beer Hall Putsch. It doesn't go particularly well. We have a no Nazis policy on this podcast, so I'm going to move straight past them. Sorry, Jordan, I could see you want to ask, but like no Nazis here. So Nazi violence. Not a bad policy. No, it's a good policy. So Nazi violence, communist regional coups, financial collapses, all the fun stuff. So Jordan, how would you go about solving this crisis? So far, what I've enjoyed is the mention of, was it the Romanian Queen or the Bulgarian

Queen? She seems like a character. I'd get her involved in this situation. She seems fashionable and stylish. I'd get distracted if I was there. Is Jordan right with her? Yes. Look, we'll be getting to the fun shortly. I absolutely promise. But we also have to deal with sort of the... This is really fun. You make it really fun, to be fair. Oh, so sweet.

I am. A guy called Gustav Stresemann comes in as chancellor in 1923. He's kind of a giant of German politics at this time. But a human that was the size of a human. He's a regular, ordinary adult human giant. Okay, so okay, more of a nickname. Okay. Because there's so much going on nickname-wise, I just want to make sure. They're all such a giant thing. He ends the passive resistance, so he calls an end to this. He negotiates with the French.

The French troops end up leaving the Ruhr mostly because it's also very expensive for them to be there. He brings in a whole new currency, which is called the Rentenmark in order to get rid of hyperinflation of the previous currency. This sort of brings about that for the rest of the decade, Germany's got quite some stability. So you've got emphasis on social welfare, you've got emphasis on rights, what we would now talk about as human rights, cultural and artistic developments occurring here. So we've got a relatively free press, we've got very limited censorship. There's sort of a boom in theatre and in film and in literature and music and all of these

sorts of things. And this is really a time of experimentation. So it sounds like my idea was correct. Yeah, look, jump in and say that. Yeah, you're not that far off. Thank you, Bodie. And really, you're dead to me. Please continue.

Sorry to interrupt. Oh, that's like that bit in a film where they say the title of the film and everyone goes yes. Yeah, it's in the trailer and you're like, oh, that's why they called it that. Yeah, there we go. Okay, fine. But like this is a moment of great experimentation and a big part of that was really challenging the standing conservative views about things like sex and gender.

This is sort of the era of the so-called new woman and discussions about the role of women in society, but also a discussion about queer rights in society. I'm curious what a new woman does, looks like. What's a new woman? What does that mean? New and improved and with sat nav. This whole idea of the new woman is related to the role that a woman plays in society and how visible a woman can be in society. So because of what had happened during the war, women had played a really important role in the economic life of the state during the war. You have lots of women who go and work in industry for the first time ever. But after the war, not only is there still a shortfall of manpower, but again, this whole order of the German status

quo and that includes the understanding of German masculinity has really been discredited here. And so what emerges is this new woman who is instantly recognisable by her fashion. So she has a typical hairstyle, what's called a booby-cough, which is like a... Love it. I love that already so much. Isn't it a great word? Whatever it is, it's great. It's a pixie bulb. And it's often peroxided, not always, but often. The clothing is often much more, quote unquote,

masculine. So very tailored blouses, wearing ties, wearing trousers, wearing men's boots, all of these sorts of things that would smoke cigarettes. They could be more active and more forthright in public life. So for instance, we have the massive social change that women start asking men out. Oh, wow. Something that was- That bumble.

Yeah. Other platforms I imagine are available, other dating apps. And this triggers a sort of moral panic in German conservative circles because this is really, really different. You have cartoons in German conservative press of say older women going to the public baths and then declaring, oh no, I've walked into the men's bathing area because look at all these men here. Depicting new women as being unsure which bathroom they're meant to enter. And so the reactionaries here are really talking about

what now might be called something like gender and sexual confusion. But all of this is in reality women on a broad societal level really experiencing and using their agency, their own ability to be their own people not defined by other relationships and especially not the relationship with men in their lives. Jason Vale I want to ask you a question Jordan. Have you ever heard of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld? Jordan P Hirschfeld. I've not heard of Hirschfeld. What did he do? What was he up to? He's a doctor so he's a smart man. I suspect he came from Weimar. I'm not saying it wrong still. Weimar.

Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar.

Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weimar.

Weimar. Weimar. Weimar. Weist. He's an SPD member. He's a medical doctor. He's gay. And he's really a pioneering figure in sexology. So he founds, for instance, an organisation called the Scientific Humanitarian Committee or Wissenschaftliche Humanitäreskomitee or VHK in 1897. And this is a group that advocates for queer emancipation. It's basically the first gay rights organisation in the world. Oh, it's so nice filling in those gaps in your understanding of like the lineage of that. That's so cool.

Yeah, 1897 is a long time. It's much earlier than I think most people would imagine. In 1919, after the war and after the founding of the republic, he founds the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin, because he thought that science could show that sexualities or gender identities other than those that were established by societal norms were actually natural and could be demonstrated through science and that policy should be based on research. And so he was very keen on this idea that science could lead to justice. One of the things that he's doing here as well is that he's actually differentiating

homosexual identity from what we would now call transgender identity. So he's doing here as well is that he's actually differentiating homosexual identity from what we would now call transgender identity. So he's kind of seeing sexuality and gender as being different things. But he's arguing here that everything's a matter of hormones and not necessarily psychological pathology. All these things should be able to be measured. Do you know what's happening at the Institute, Jordan? Jordan McAvoy So far it doesn't sound problematic. I'm worried that it's going to go into like of a radical belief. So the arguments that I hear all the time is that you ignore the lived experience of people and it's down to the

science and if you can give me numbers for it then I'll believe you and if not then it starts to go astray. So was they quite militant about the science of it all? Will Barron There is this sort of difficult legacy that we have here. So Hirschfeld and his institute are doing some really, really fascinating and important research into sexuality, but they do also, or he in particular does have these sort of essentialist ideas. So for instance, he argues that bi and pansexuality doesn't really exist. He argues that lesbians clearly have a feminine and masculine partner. He's basically the who's the man in this relationship guy. He comes up with concepts about people we would now term as transgender,

and he uses a term called transvestite, which I'll keep using the German term here because he means it's slightly different to the English term transvestite. I like it. It sounds like a biscuit. Delicious. But the institute starts developing treatments for trans patients. This is the first sort of gender-affirming medical

intervention that we're seeing. So we're talking about things like, quote unquote, ovarian and testicular preparations. We're talking about x-ray treatments to remove hair. We're talking about other gender affirmation surgeries that are done particularly by a surgeon named Ludwig Levy-Lenz. Can I ask an ignorant question? Have we jumped over the story of the Danish girl at this point or is that yet to come? Or is that one of the, that was the first, no, don't need to go into great detail. That is yet to come.

Okay, right, interesting. So Lily Elber ends up actually consulting Hirschfeld and she ends up actually having some of her medical treatments in Dresden rather than Berlin. But there is definitely this connection that is there. Hirschfeld is not just focusing on queer people. His institution does provide support for heterosexuals through marital counselling, through birth control, through ideas of contraception and discussions about contraception. There are some things, however, that we really do need to be critical about here with Hirschfeld. So he is a eugenicist for one. Yeah.

That's why I was worried this was creeping in. Yeah. I mean, anyone in the early 1920s is a good chance. If they're in that field, a lot of them were. I'm glad that you say that, Greg, because the point is here, we should be shocked about this now and we should always be horrified by it. But in the 1920s, someone in Hirschfeld's position, it would be very surprising if he wasn't eugenicist. Some of the biggest names of progressive thought in the period are attracted to this because it's scientific supposedly and it's not based on quote unquote superstition. So people like Bertrand Russell and George Bernard Shaw, for example, they're members of the Malthusian League.

So they're talking about people should stop having children unless they're the right type of people. Mary Stopes. I was going to say, yeah, it's again a famous name from history. Absolutely. She tries to stop her son from marrying the daughter of the inventor Barnes Wallace because he wears glass, because rather she wears glasses. Will Barron When we talk about eugenics here, we are talking about a sort of a utilitarian principle of like maximum utility for the health of the human race, which as soon as you look at it means basically not letting disabled people have children. So Herschel is a complicated figure,

and I think we have to be careful not to say he's a hero, but he's important, he's influential and he's a major, major figure at this time in Weimar, Germany. So what kind of things do you think were on display in this public institution? Oh my god, what a question. Yeah, sorry, throw you under the bus there Jordan. Bits and bobs of people outside of their bodies when they shouldn't be. Organs and stuff in jars. Yeah, was that a ridiculous thing to say? No, it's probably not actually.

It's not? Not even in jars, just out and about. Unimbalmed, turning a different colour what they should be than what they should be. Animals stitched to other animals and humans. Oh, okay, you're going like- Old pennies. Someone stop me from saying ridiculous things. I don't know.

Old pennies, I don't mind. Wheelbarrow is full of money. Bodhi, we're talking quite an array of things you'd find in the Institute. Do you want to give us the... We've got BDSM gear is out on display. How do people have sex? It includes sex toys of all different types. And then we've got the drier things, statistical tables talking about how often people masturbate. Oh, you'd need to put that good stuff out first if you want people to look at statistical

tables. And then Hirschfeld has his own collection of phalluses from around the world. You could go and see them. So he's just got a collection of international penises. Yeah, look, why not? I was quite happy with these statistical tables of masturbatory frequency because that seems slightly less problematic. That's all you ever talk about. That's my favourite thing. That's all you've spoken about. And do you know why I keep it? In a Sex-Sell spreadsheet. That's been great.

Thanks, Brian. Okay. Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. The Infinite Monkey Cage is back and we are starting the series with a whole show about trees with Dame Judy Dench. What else have we got, Brian? We're going to do What a Gas with Mark Mirdovnik, Unexpected Science History with Rufus Hound. I don't know what he knows about unexpected science history. Well that's the unexpected thing. He hasn't got a clue.

No, I'm hoping we're having some experts on there. Exploring with Annika Rice. No, that's just one of your dreams. The other night I dreamt I was exploring with Annika Rice. And also Alien Life in Glastonbury with Chris Lintol. Infinite Monkey Cage. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. What happens next in terms of the organization, the movement? What happens? This is sort of one of the interesting things about Hirschfeld, that in spite of the fact that he founds this gay rights organisation, he doesn't believe in mass queer organisation because he sort of thinks, well, what binds queer people together? There's no class identification

here. They're not all working class. They're not all middle class. They're not all the same nationality. But this is a time at which the visibility of queer people, particularly here to begin with at least, gay men, is coming to the fore a little bit more as a result of people like Hirschfeld and their work. And of course, queer people have existed since your dot. And we even have many, many queer people, many gay men, turn up in our chronicles of the First World War, for example. You know, you had gay men who had gone off to fight, who had been injured or had come back when their lover had been killed. And it's not unsurprising

to recognise that, you know, they actually want to be treated like first-class citizens. Early on in the Republic, there is a mass movement of queer liberation that focuses again mostly on gay men. And it is led by groups such as the VHK and also so-called queer friendship leagues that appear in Berlin and in Hamburg and in Dresden and in Düsseldorf, in Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart. There's another large organization, the League for Human Rights, the Bund für Menschenrecht, and here we see as well this connection with the idea of human

rights. This has a hundred thousand members and a good quarter of them are women. So 25,000 women are in the League for Human Rights and this is a gay rights movement? Yeah, so the main goal of this movement is to repeal a law which is called Paragraph 175 Reichstraftgesetzbuch, which is paragraph 175 of the Imperial Criminal Code. It's crazy. And that's a law... That's a catchphrase. Oh yeah.

It's quite hard to put on a t-shirt. It is a bit, you know. But what this does is it criminalises among other things male on male gay sex. Lesbian sex on the other hand wasn't actually considered by the state to be sex because as far as state legislators were concerned this required a penis and therefore any sex between two cis women could not be considered sex officially. Let's get back to the friendship leagues. Jordan what do you make of the phrase friendship league?

It sounds great, doesn't it? It fully matches what I think should be happening. Your philosophy. Yeah, it's the name that I'd give to it if I had 10 seconds to think about a name. If I was in a panic and someone said, what's it called? Friendship league. The friendship league. It's a warm thing. It's inviting. It's not a scary name and it does fit on a t-shirt. Yeah, which is the only criteria that's apparently important. These Friendship Leagues, Bodhi, are they successful?

The Friendship Leagues are in some ways successful and in other ways are, again, sort of a very difficult arena because there is debate in the beginning about whether or not assimilationism is actually a good idea. What's assimilationism? Basically are queer people just the same as everyone else? That sort of thing of – it's sort of the antithesis of having pride. And Hirschfeld is part of this. He thinks that gay people basically need to go out of their way to show that they're not a threat. Just show that you're, quote unquote,

normal. So difficult to go out of your way to show that you're not a threat. Yeah, right? Proving in negative is... I'm fine! I'm not gonna hurt you. You don't need to tell me that. There are also discussions here about, you know, the people here, Schveld calls transvestiten, so nowadays probably mostly referred to as trans people. There are many discussions about how important it is for these people to use a problematic term, pass, to sort of appear

again problematically convincingly in the gender that they're presenting. This all came to a head in 1929 because there were debates in the Reichstag about repealing that paragraph 175. But there was sort of a quid pro quo to this. If we give more rights to gay men, whose rights are we going to curtail because this has to be a zero-sum game for some reason. The solution to this, as was debated, was to increase penalties against sex workers and particularly male sex workers, so basically to make prostitution more illegal. This was a very, very thorny issue in the VHK and it more or less tore the organisation apart.

This is what causes Hirschfeld to actually leave it. So he quits the organisation he founded? Yes. Right. So there was perhaps more tolerance for queer people as individuals, but really only if they were seen to be respectable and conducted their affairs privately. So that would give the impression therefore that there is no out queer sort of culture or?

There's the great German word for this which is Jain, which is yes no. Because yeah, that's happening in policy and in law, but at the same time we've got openly queer rights movements, we've got a huge explosion in queer media, we've got clubs, we've got bars, we've got a huge explosion in queer media. We've got clubs. We've got bars. We've got social organizations. A lot of these are focused mostly on Berlin. It becomes very, very famous for this. And in fact, there's an international perception that Germany was actually a really good place to be gay.

So Jean Renoir, the French film director said that the fashionable entertainment in Berlin in the twenties and thirts was, as he puts it, boxing and homosexualism. The architect Philip Johnson says that he learned German using the horizontal method, which is certainly one way of putting it. The poet W. H. Auden spends a lot of time in Berlin, famously with the author Christopher Isherwood. There's this amazing moment when Auden, who cannot speak German, realizes that there's a, again, new woman sitting opposite him on a tram one day. Oh, smoking her cigarette. Yes. Well, maybe, but certainly looking him up and down and he's very worried that she's

about to come onto him, which is a problem for him because he's not interested in women. And he has this moment that's so exciting for him, he writes it in his diary afterwards because he suddenly realizes what he can say to her in his first German sentence that he's able to say, which is, Entschuldigen Sie, Madame, aber ich bin schwul. Excuse me, madam, but I am gay. And he's so excited by this, especially because he knows how to define himself in German at a time when his native language being English does not have a morally neutral term for what he is. We don't use the term gay at that time.

Well, we finally reached the moment we've all been waiting for. Welcome to Cabaret, old chums. Or as I believe it goes, welcome, bienvenue, welcome. It's the nightlife, it's the clubs, it's the music scene. Jordan, what are you imagining? The cabaret scene. Lots of covers and feathers and we're in the middle of the roaring twenties right now. Yeah, yeah, roaring twenties, yeah. So I don't know if I've mentioned feathers, flapping, lots of liberation of all sorts

of people coming together for the common good of a shared storytelling that sort of sneaks in an anti illusionist message at the same time, getting across to change for the nation. Beautifully done. It was going well and then I tapered off at the end. I just put some more words on the end. Please tell me what it means. Bodhi, what are we talking about in terms of the club scene? By 1930, there are between 80 and 100 gay and lesbian clubs in Berlin alone.

Wow. And they're of all different kinds. They have different entertainment happening there, as well as gay coffee houses. So there's quite a queer subculture happening here. One of the establishments that people might have heard of, or we definitely should briefly talk about here, is the El Dorado. Because that is the most famous one. And often because you have straight visitors coming to visit. Like celebrities, right, showing up. Charlie Chaplin and people like that. Yeah, you've got Chaplin, you've got the boxer Jack Dempsey, you've got Greta Garbo, you've got

Marlene Dietrich is there, herself a queer icon here. And it's really well known for the waitresses there who are for the most part trans. And they're wearing gold lame dresses, they're wearing wigs. It's all very, very flamboyant. Lesbians had lesbian bars available to them and they could read about them because you would have guidebooks on Berlin nightlife. So in 1928 there's a book called Berlin's Lesbian Women or Berlin's Lesbische Frauen, which is probably the first lesbian guidebook ever published. There are others. Kurt Moreck writes one, which is a guide through what he calls Lasterhafte Berlin or Depraved Berlin. It basically looks like a Bedecker, so the normal city guides

of the time, but it's just all about queer night spots and also cruising locations. There's also a prominent lesbian bar called the Violetta, which had 400 members by 1926. This was also quite famous because when it had been open for four years, it had a whole week of events celebrating and that included an evening party, a transball, cabaret, a quote night party at which again, quoting here, surprises were promised. Might be getting more towards those euphemisms again. That's not enough. That's too euphemistic. A lot of people could be really disappointed whatever that is.

Yeah. What are the surprises? I don't think we know what the surprises are. So what would you- disappointed, whatever that is. Yeah, what are the surprises? I don't think we know what the surprises are, so what would you... Volcano cake or something. That could be anything. There's got to be a lot of people that are very irked by that. So the Violetta is the kind of the great lesbian bar and it's run by a fascinating person. Lotte Harm? Lotte Harm? What's... Lotte. Lotte. So short for...

Charlotte. Charlotte. Okay. Lotte Harm considers herself to be a lesbian or we might actually look at Lotte as being an example of a gender non-conforming person at this time. She's possibly might be considered these days to be a trans person. So they dressed in men's clothing, specifically a suit and tie and occasionally went by a masculine name, Lothar. And the club attracted women who dressed as men, as well as transmasculine people. Transsex workers weren't allowed. It's again that sort of respectability position. And Lothar

Ham really wanted to unite lesbians and trans people into a political movement. And there was an attempt to form an independent women's group, which was the League for Ideal Women's Friendship. Oh, it's a lot of reused names. Yeah. Rather. Lotte also had a social group by 1930 that held events for all trans people. This group was also, and Lotte themselves, was known to advise trans women on where to buy women's clothing and how to get a feminine figure. Wow.

Okay. So it sounds like a sort of support group, but there's also a political element there. There's a sort of organising activism involved. So does that suggest therefore the government is targeting trans people and therefore there needs to be a pushback? The focus here, or most of the focus, is on transfeminine people. That is to say people who presented as women, but who the law and officialdom understood to be men. So in general, the police worked under the assumption that men have sex with women.

And therefore, occasionally. So if someone, the police understood to be a man dressed as a woman, as far as the police were concerned, this could only be because that person was seeking a man to have sex with. And if they did that in public, then the conclusion that the police drew was that they were openly soliciting gay sex. Now I said before that male homosexual sex was criminalised, but paragraph 175 was a law of action.

You needed proof that the sex was actually taking place. But what you could do instead, if you were an enterprising policeman, was argue that by presenting in this way, trans feminine people, or again, transvestiten in the language of the time, were just about yelling or putting a huge neon sign over their head saying, if everything goes fine, I'm going to get railed by a man. And so as a result, by doing this publicly, they could be arrested for gross indecency, for breach of the public peace or disturbing public morals. Quite a big sign. Yeah. Well, I mean.

It's ridiculous how often I still hear that from relatives, the idea that I've gone undercover. To be delicate, the human penis is a buyer's market. You don't need to go to all this effort. You don't need to be Arya Stark to get yourself a bit of – it's just available. But there is sort of a way around this. We get back to our buddy Magnus Hirschfeld here because in the first decade of the century, when he'd first been investigating trans people, he came up with something which was called a transvestitenschein, so a transvestite license. It was basically a license that you could show to the police to say that you were, in the language that appeared on it, clinically a transvestite. So basically it said, no, I'm not a sex worker. This is just the way I am. But the thing is here that police aren't

necessarily wrong. So the social attitudes towards gender non-conforming people were not that great in the 20s and 30s. There wasn't much work available for trans people either because of the fact that they were seen as deviant or because the jobs themselves were gendered. And so a lot of trans people and queer people in general ended up working in the sex trade mostly in places like Hamburg or Berlin because Germany might have a shortage of capital and labour but it did have a whole lot of horny people who wanted to have sex. So you had trans people who could afford to consult Hirschfeld

and get a transvestite and shine which would tell the cops that they're not sex workers and that then gives them cover to do sex work. So it was a sort of get out of jail free card. It's not like you can just do crimes. It's very much like this is you. This is who you are. You're allowed to be this person. And of course, I mean, LGBTQ communities, they've got their own arts channels, their own culture, they're not just clubs. There's some classic films from this period. There's a silent film called Michael about an artist and his model. There's a movie called Sex in Chains, which is set in prison. I think I'd probably see Sex in Chains. If those

two are on a movie, Michael or Sex in Chains, I know what I'm getting with this. Well, let me give you the third. There's a lesbian cult classic talkie, so it's got talking in it, called Girls in Uniform, female director, all female cast, and it's set in a boarding school. These are kind of classic movies of the period. Is there censorship? Is there freedom? Immediately after the founding of the Republic, the censorship laws are gotten rid of, they're done away with. And almost immediately afterwards in Berlin, there's a premiere of a film called Anders Asde Andern, different from the others. And this is a film that's called a social hygiene film, so it's meant to be educational. And it's done in conjunction with Magnus Hirschfeld.

He actually appears on it as well. It has sort of a dual distinction. On the one hand, it teaches the general public that gay men exist and on the other hand, it sort of invents the bury your gays trope. So the whole story is how difficult and dangerous it is for gay men who will be extorted and may be driven to death. Not long afterwards, censorship laws are reintroduced, but even so, you've got lots of queer coding in Weimar cinema, even if it's not explicitly so.

So again, I mentioned Marlene Dietrich before. She's very much flirts with the idea of bisexuality on screen without ever coming out, so to speak, and saying, hello, bisexuality. You also have all of these other fascinating films at the time that Queer Code and not usually in a positive sense. So Fritz Lang's masterpiece M in 1931 has a Queer Coded murderer. And there's the classic vampire film Nosferatu of 1922 when we see an infamous scene where the antagonist Orlok, he sort of dips out of sight and the camera focuses on the male victim's face, which implies

that Orlok is not just sucking blood. Ooh. Yeah. Let's talk about magazines. You know, just moving on, Jordan. Just moving on. Related to this subject, right? You should sound like-

No, not just in general. What's your favourite? Let's just stop this and talk about magazines. Let's just talk about magazines. I really like GQ. What would your guess be for the name of the most popular lesbian magazine in Weimar Germany? The Cat's in the Corner. Oh, that's a lovely name for it.

That's good. It was called Girlfriend. Oh, yeah, you get what you're giving with that. It's quite straightforward, isn't it? It hits the nail on the head. Yeah. It was called Girlfriend. Oh, yeah. You get what you're given with that. It's quite straightforward, isn't it? Yeah. Found in 1925. And we're not talking fringe publication here. This is quite a large readership. Yeah. So there's a whole publishing house, the Friedrich Radzoweit Publishing House, which is based in Berlin. And it's sort of very well known for doing queer publications at this time. So Girlfriend, Die Freundin, is published by Ratseweid. Ratseweid also publishes a number of titles for gay men. So there's one called

The Island, there's one called Eros, there is a trans magazine called Transfestid. Biscuit Weekly. It gave up on the title of that one. And you know, these are circulations in the thousands and there are ads in them for queer spaces and queer friendly businesses. It's also super important for a lot of people to see that there are actually other queer people who exist, that this is not something that is individual or weird about themselves. So you have all of these amazing anecdotes from people who recount, for example, that one woman, for instance,

realizes that she's gay by reading a lesbian novel. You also have in Transfestide, for instance, trans writers who debate what it means to be trans. One of the trans writers, Toni Frecke, advocates for the use of different terminology. So instead of using Transfestide, maybe we should use the term trans-sensible. Oh, that doesn't describe me at all. Trans-sensible, that sounds great. Would you rather be what, trans reckless abandoned? What's your-

No, I quite like the biscuit thing that we've got going on. This biscuit is different from the others, would be my debut film. Bodhi, was all this challenging of sex and gender norms then happening just in Berlin? We talk about Weimar, Germany, but Berlin has come up an awful lot. So yeah, one of the big issues that we have with our understanding of Weimar is when we say Weimar, we usually actually mean Berlin. And that's because it's the capital, it's big and flashy and it makes really good stories.

This is where all of the foreigners come as well, like Isherwood and Ordon. So obviously we get a lot out of Berlin. But there are, surprise, surprise, lots of other places in Germany where police will be much less tolerant. And in that case, things like print media are really important because they're much safer to access than these other openly queer spaces that you could find in somewhere like Berlin. Yeah, Greg, your magazines. They're readily available. Thank you. Glad to hear it. And so you have writers to the magazines often pointing out how important they are. In one of the lesbian magazines, Garcon, there's a letter that mentions, this paper means just

about everything to me for girlettes, which is a smaller town, is too small and without a single club. The magazines also help people find one another. So not just find themselves, but find other people. Girlfriend and Garcon regularly advertise meetings for like-minded women in smaller cities. What I will very, very quickly point out here is that this sounds like there are lots of different magazines because of all of the different titles. And certainly there are a few, but sometimes the editors are just a bit fickle and like changing the name. So I mentioned Gasson, but that was also in the six years that it was published known as Frauenliebe or woman love or Frauenliebe und Leben or woman love and life.

It's not really worth changing the title is it? Or Lieben der Frauen, Loving Women. It's very on-brand for a transgender magazine to change its name, to be fair. So what about censorship then? Very quickly, Bodhi. I mean, it sounds like censorship sort of comes and goes. It's a bit sort of unsure. Do we have, you know, crackdowns?

Are they regional crackdowns? Is it national? Like, what happens to these print media? Yeah, so know, crackdowns. Are they regional crackdowns? Is it national? Like what happens to these print media? Yeah. So censorship is a bit random. It does sort of change from place to place and time to time. So in 1926, there's a law that passes, which is called the law to protect youth from trashy and filthy publications. And what's that? So many great t-shirts.

You're right. And what that creates is something called the Filth and Trash List, which is a list of publications that can't be sold to people under 18 and they can't be displayed in public. But you'd want to be on that list, right? That's a great name for a list. Yeah, exactly. And this law was enforced by local boards. So there would be a group in Munich and the board in Munich obviously was much more conservative than the board in Berlin, for instance. Sure. the board in Munich obviously was much more conservative than the board in Berlin, for instance. So in 1927, for example, woman love, Frauenliebe, was found to be obscene and Munich

police went to kiosks and bookshops to find it. But then they found it was only for sale in one neighborhood and it had already sold out. They also went looking for dildos or in their language, copies of the male member in brackets for the purpose of female masturbation. That's not going to fit in a t-shirt either. That is half the story at best, that description. We've rummaged through a decade there, maybe a little bit longer, but quite an extensive history. It's incredible.

Like I say, it's really nice to fill in these gaps for me, that lineage there that is sort of walking around being a sort of a bit of a curly-haired transgender idiot just doing my thing. There's a big lineage there that I should be aware of that I should not take lightly. The nuance window! This is where Jordan and I put down our copies

of Girlfriend magazine, or whatever it's called this week, while Bodhi takes centre stage at the Cabaret Club for two minutes to tell us something that we need to know about Weimar Germany. So my stopwatch is ready. Take it away, Dr Bodi. Weimar is a topic that is very, very close to my heart because it is such an exciting and vibrant and lively and living story and it demonstrates to us just how alive history is and the implications that that history has for us. It's also brilliantly illustrative example of why context really matters for historians. It's that cliché that context is king. We can look at the Weimar Republic and we can see things

like Cabaret. we can see our understanding of Berlin, we can see all of these clubs and we can conclude this was the queer wonderland. And that leads us to some problems because what we very often do without really thinking about it is that we put Weimar in the context of what comes after it. We know that at the end of the Weimar Republic, the Nazis came along. The point is that the people in Weimar didn't know that. This was a history that hadn't happened yet. It is tempting to look upon the Weimar Republic and say, well, this is about a decade and a half that is bookended by the Nazis at the end and therefore it leads

to the Nazis. But the Nazis were only around for 12 years. And so does that not necessarily mean that the Nazis were simply the precursor to the current federal republic? So what we really need to do instead is we have to understand Weimar in its own context as its own thing. This was an exciting and deeply experimental time. It also was not perfect. It is not the thing that we want to fall back on and want to keep trying to emulate and to think that things were better back in the day because they were not necessarily. This was a highly, highly complex example of history with lots of internal and inherent contradictions. And just as we might want

to look for a great story to be told we definitely find that in Weimar, but if we're looking for a queer wonderland, that's something that we have to look for in the here and now. Oh, Dr. Bodie. God, that was gorgeous. It is one thing to have amassed such an amazing wealth of knowledge on a subject. It's another thing entirely to express it so eloquently. It's another thing entirely to do so without being derailed by a comedian that keeps making stupid jokes about it. I feel privileged to have been here while you're talking about this stuff. I feel enlightened and enlivened by this experience. Thank you so much.

So what do you know now? It's time now for the So What Do You Know Now? This is our quickfire quiz for Jordan to see how much he has learned. Jordan, you're... Dr. Bowie, you wait for this. This is going to eclipse everything. Jordan, we have flung a huge amount of history at you. How much do you think has sort of stuck in the memory banks? I'm quite a big person. I think it's all stuck. Yeah, under all covered in the spaghetti of history at this point.

But we have 10 questions for you. So here we go. Question one, how many times was the Weimar Republic founded on the 9th November, 1918? Twice. It was twice. Very good. Question two, what was the name of the scientist and gay rights activist who founded the Institute for Sexual Science? Hirschville. Yeah, yeah. Magnus Hirschville, that's right, well done. Question three, how many members did the gay rights organisation, the League for Human

Rights have at its peak? It was a million. There was a hundred thousand. That's what I said, Greg. But there were a million members of the party, weren't there? Yeah, so you remember the right number, but not the right thing. You write down wrong. Question four, name two of the items that were on display in the Institute for Sex Research Gallery.

Your personal favourite, a masturbating schedule and some pictures of some people's genitals in various states and things. Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's also a collection of penises from around the world. I didn't hear that, but it wasn't listened to. Sex toys and BDSM gear, yeah. Was there? Question five, can you remember what the name of the list of censored books and publications in Weimar, Germany was called? Oh, the Filth and Dirty Git List. I'll let you have that. The Filth and Trash List.

That's it. Question 6. Do you remember who ran the Violetta Lesbian Bar, often dressed in suit and tie, and founded the League for Ideal Women's Friendship that united lesbians and trans people. The name was Charlotte or Lotte and changed her name to Lute. Yeah, Lotte. Well done. Yeah, Lotte Ham. Very good. Question seven. What was the name of the most popular lesbian magazine in this period? Girlfriend. It was Girlfriend. Yeah.

Question eight. What was the law that criminalised gay male sex in Germany but did not mention lesbian sex? Ah, damn. Paragraph. Oh, but did not mention lesbian sex? Paragraph – Oh, the really long one. Do you want it in German or in English? Imagine. Imagine. Paragraph 117 of a book. Nearly, it's 175. 75, 75, whatever. I'll give you half a mark for that because you got the seven in there.

No, our numbers work. Something in your brain went there. I need to say a seven. Question nine, as part of their crackdown on lesbianism, what objects did the Munich police seize? Sildos and magazines. This for eight out of ten. What term did trans writer Tony Fricker think should be used to describe trans people?

A trans sensible person! That's right! Because of trans sex and sensibility! That's very good. 8 out of 10 very good, Jordan. 8 and a half, come on. You know what, yeah, 8 and a half. Thanks.

8 and a half out of 10. I did. I'm putting it back on. 8 and a half out of 10, Jordan Gray. Well done. Very good. And because I was in Trans Fix and in Trans by the story, that was easy. Really glad to hear it.

Well, thank you very much. If you want to hear more of Dr. Bodie, check out our episode on Frederick the Great of Prussia. And if you want more LGBTQ history, we have an episode literally called that. We've also got one on the bisexual French opera singer Julie Dobigny with her sword fighting skills. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to Your Dead to me on BBC sound so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the brilliant Dr Bodi Ashton from ZZF Potsdam.

Thank you Bodi. It's been such a pleasure to be here again. And in Comedy Corner, we had the fabulous Jordan Gray. Thank you Jordan. Thanks for having me. This is rather good podcast. I enjoyed myself very much. And to you lovely listener.

Join me next time as we emancipate another historical subject from the shadows of obscurity. But for now I'm off to go and found the Republic of Jenner. But for a third time, take that Weimar. Bye! This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by John Norman Mason. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Naguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey and our production coordinator was Ben Hollands. It was produced by Emmy-Rose Price-Goodfellow, me and senior producer Emma Naguse

and our executive editor was James Cook. I'm Natalie Cassidy. And I'm Joanna P. Now you might know me as Sonya from EastEnders. And Stacey from Gavin and Stacey. And while sometimes we are on the telly, mostly we just love watching it. So that's what we're talking about in our podcast, Off the Telly. We're chatting about shows we just can't miss and the ones that aren't quite doing it for us. That comfort telly we can't get enough of.

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Ince. The Infinite Monkey Cage is back and we are starting the series with a whole show about trees with Dame Judy Dench. What else have we got, Brian? We're going to do What a Gas with Mark Mirdovnik. Unexpected Science History with Rufus Ham. I don't know what he knows about unexpected science history. Well, that's the unexpected thing. He hasn't got a clue.

No, I'm hoping we're having some experts on there. Exploring with Annika Rice. No, that's just one of your dreams. The other night I dreamt I was exploring with Annika Rice. And also, alien life in Glastonbury with Chris Lintol. Infant Monkey Cage. Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.