Magnus Hirschfeld in Paris, July 1933

 An article on the front page of La Volanté, 20 Juillet 1933.

Translation

Anti-Semitism Against Science.

Professor Magnus Hirschfeld whose work on sexuality is famous, is in exile in Paris

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and 180 of his works, 40 thousand volumes that he had collected, have been burned in Berlin by the Nazis.

He has been our guest for a month, staying at the Hotel d'Orsay, with his countless filing cards and a young Japanese secretary, Tao-Li, who follows him like his shadow.

A strange man, this exile from Hitler's regime, Magnus Hirschfeld: a Don Quixote of sexuality, who travelled the globe for 40 years, from Europe to China, studying the problem of sexual perversion, in Man and in animals-- even insects--to defend and treat a mystery of nature. A really great mystery, when a huge, bearded guy has an irresistible urge to put on a dress and make tapestries.

In his museum of sexuality in Berlin he saw 40,000 cases, strange cases mixing buffoonery and drama, a museum where garter belts and bras serve as men's outfitting.

I should say his former museum. For it's all gone. His 14,000 volume collection on the subject, his own 180 papers, a collection that would astonish Freud, Malthus and the Marquis de Sade-- all burned.

Tao-Li showed me in. The professor was wearing a white shirt. His dreamy blue eyes focussed on me rather severely. I was a little embarrassed. Would he take me for case no. 40,001? Thank God, his scowling expression, darkened by his gray moustache, like a Indian sculpture, lightened up. "Forty years ago," he said, "when I was a young doctor, one of my patients, an officer, killed himself on the night before his wedding. I learned the real reason for his despair only after he died. I was interested. I wrote a pamphlet under a pseudonym. The day after it was published, my bookstore was swamped with requests-- an unexpected bookseller's success. That's how I got started.

At the professor's invitation, I interviewed him. "It isn't true", he said, "that Germany has a monopoly on inverts. But there, they are legally controlled and they attract attention, while in France, the Napoleonic Code does not interfere with the private affairs of individuals. Here, cases like that of Oscar Wilde or Prince Eulenburg would go completely unnoticed."

But what about all those 'special' clubs in Berlin? "That's just it. The police watch them carefully; the problem is kept in one place where it's easy to control. According to the statistics, there are one million inverts in Germany. In Berlin alone there are 20,000 female domestic arrangements  and thousands of men in dresses and silk stockings."

His answer was vague: Several countries offered to take him, including America, China and Egypt, but he would rather stay in  Europe: "I feel more at home, especially in France, where I always find a warm welcome, and two scientists who initiated me are here, Brown-Sequard and Charcot."

It was time to leave. I was starting to feel a little insecure about my own sexuality, escpecially after Tao-Li, who was himself well versed in the subject, showed me some of the profesor's books with photos of strange patients. One of them was cutting women's hair, another only liked white gloves, a third killed himself because he couldn't get permission to dress as a woman!

On the way back, I could not get out of my mind everything that this good man had revealed to me. I began to freak out passers-by with an abnormal exprssion. At the Place de la Concorde a big car passed driven by a Japanese. Riding in back, with his hair flying in the wind, was Professor Magnus Hirschfeld.

Yvonne NOVIA 

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Of course Tao-Li was Chinse, not Japanese.

It was good to see this on the front page of La Volanté.   I have not found any English languages papers that paid the same attention to Hirschfeld in Paris.