Original July 2008. Revised to include information from Rainer Herrn, Raimund Wolfert - and Clara at Lili-Elbe-Bibliothek in particular for her discovery of Dora's documents in the Czech archives.
- - - - - - - - - -
Rudolph Richter, the second of six children of a musician-farmer and his
lace-maker wife, was born and raised in Seifen
(now Ryžovna in
Czechia) (map),
a village of some 600 persons in Bohemia close to the German border, which was
then part of Austria-Hungary. Germans
referred to the high-altitude region on both sides of the border as Erzgebirge.
Dora, as she would become, once attempted to tourniquet her penis. She
expressed a strong dislike of male clothing, and was permitted to live as
female. She showed a preference for girls' clothes, girls' games and girls'
company, as well as a deep aversion to everything rough, coarse and crude that
was considered typical of boys. Her
favourite occupations were typically feminine tasks such as cooking, cleaning
and other household chores. Richter was brought up as and remained a Catholic.
After an apprenticeship as a baker, Richter moved to a city-
probably the nearby Bohemian spa town of Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary) in 1909, and
was able to dress as female in his spare time.
Later he was in a travelling theatre and moved to Leipzig in Germany and
worked checking tickets in a cinema, and then in a chocolate factory. Then she was able to find work as a woman –
as a waitress. She was successful in sexual
contacts with men who in some cases did not realise her non-standard anatomy.
Called for military service, Rudolph was twice suspended because
of his "feminism" – wearing female clothing. By 1916 as the war dragged on, the
authorities became more desperate and standards were lowered. Richter he was
now "found fit" "after some reservations" and was then
drafted after all. But only two weeks later he was discharged “home” because of
a severe fainting spell, and returned to Leipzig.
After the war, Richter returned to Seifen in the newly
independent Czechoslovakia. A friend, who
hoped that Dora could also be "helped by an operation", told her of
the 1922 Steinach film, a popular version of the scientific film Steinachs-Forscbungen.
The film briefly featured images of trans women and mentioned the
possibility of a change of sex and named the Institut
für Sexualwissenschaft, at In den Zelten 9A-10 in
the Tiergarten area of Berlin. She registered there and in May 1923 was
assessed at the Institut, where surgeon Heinrich Stabel suggested that
she could be castrated [orchidectomy] by year’s end. This was done. Stabel was of the opinion that he always succeeded
in:
“dissuading the patients
concerned from their urgent desire for penile amputation, by insistent and
serious references to the dangerous possible consequences. So far it has always
turned out that after castration the patients always felt such a great relief
and liberation of their condition that in time the desire for amputation of the
penis disappeared completely”.
He reported to Werner Holz that this was the situation with
Dora also – although her life would be otherwise.
Having no other source of income, she worked as a maid at the Institut
für Sexualwissenschaft. Magnus
Hirschfeld gave her the affectionate name of Dorchen, and arranged for her to gain
a Transvestitenschein.
Werner Holz, at
the time an assistant physician at the Oberlin district hospital in Nowawes
near Potsdam, had come to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
to write what is probably the first dissertation on a trans topic. It is mainly an individual case study and
biography of one person, Dorchen, whom he refers to as “Rudolph R”. His primary focus is on her desire for
castration, and it is also the first major work to use Hirschfeld’s terms
“extreme” and “total” transvestites.
Holz uses male pronouns for Dorchen throughout.
“From that moment [when as a
child he became aware of the difference between male and female sexual organs]
he had acquired a direct hatred of his genitals until the present day. [...]
Since then, all his thoughts and efforts had been directed towards freeing
himself from those genitals he hated so much, which did not at all want to fit
his mental constitution. At the age of 13, he had once made warts disappear by
cutting them off with a thread. He therefore had the idea of freeing himself
from his genitals in the same way by tying them off with a strong thread. Since
this intention failed, he is said to have been quite depressed and then several
times seriously thought of cutting off his genitals with a razor. Only the fear
of bleeding to death is said to have prevented him at the last moment from
cutting off his genitals. Even today he would give anything if he could be
freed from his genitals by an operation. He had also come to Berlin for this
purpose.” (Holz 1924, p 8)
"In our patient, the mental feminism is so pronounced that in conversation with him, one completely forgets that he is a man.” (Holz p 27)
 |
| Dorchen working as a waitress |
In April 1925 Richter applied to the Czechoslovakian consulate in Berlin for two passports, one as Dora for her stay in Germany, and a second in her male name for visits home to the family. A copy of the Institut's report, describing her as intersex and that she had a Transvestitenschein,was attached. The request was passed to the Ministry of the Interior in Prague. They took six months to reply, and then declined the request in that Dora had not changed her legal name,
Hirschfeld had initially been opposed to surgical changes, but the castrations for Dorchen and others had gone well – in particular threats of suicide had declined.
"In the beginning I was
strongly opposed to these methods, which I judged to be very dangerous to
health and, on the other hand, considered unnecessary" (Hirschfeld,
1933:6)
However Werner Holz, Felix
Abraham and Heinrich Stabel gave positive reports and Hirschfeld changed
his mind.
“But the more I got to know of
these individuals, the more I realised that some of them were ready to commit
suicide in the event that their desires for the transformation of their sexual
identities were not satisfied. So I told myself that in view of this I must
give up my hesitation.” (ibid.).
Arthur
Kronfeld, psychoanalyst, co-founder of the Institut, left in
1926. He was the major advocate of
‘curing’ queer people through psychoanalysis.
Such conversion therapy ceased with his departure.
In 1926 the Hamburg doctor, Otto Kankeleit, gave a paper on
self-damage and self mutilation at the Internationalen Kongress für
Sexualforschung, which was then organised by Albert Moll. Kankeleit included photographs, and reported
on ‘transvestites’ including cases which he had learned about at Hirschfeld’s Institut. One of these was Dorchen referred to as
“Rudolf Ri”.
“His sexual attitude was passive
female to the point of bondage. He turned to Dr Magnus-Hirschfeld to have his
testicles removed, as otherwise he would have to do it himself.”
In January 1928, Toni
Ebel’s wife Olga died, and Toni met Charlotte
Charlaque. They both came to the Institut,
were employed and given room and board and 24 Reichsmarks a month. They met Dorchen and the three became
friends.
In spring 1930, the nascent Lili
Elbe (actually Lili Elvenes) was sent by her doctor, Kurt
Warnekros, to Magnus Hirschfeld for a second opinion. In the waiting room, Elevenes encountered
trans women, and it is highly likely that they included Toni Ebel and Dörchen
- Charlotte Charlaque was working as the receptionist. All three had had a first operation by this
date. Lili did not relate to them: “The manner in which they were conversing
disgusted him; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were
attired, produced a feeling of nausea.” In
addition, Ellen
Bækgaard, a Danish dentist who stayed at the Institut, said later
that Elbe expressed discomfort at being classed with Dorchen Richter.
 |
| Dochen, Magnus and one other |
In 1931 at the latest, Dora Richter moved to the Kempinski restaurant at Kurfürstendamm 27 as a kitchen maid. This was the year that her father died,
Dorchen was offered vaginoplasty that year, and so was one
of the first persons to have a sex-change completion. The surgeons were
Hirschfeld’s colleagues, Ludwig
Levy-Lenz who did the penectomy and Erwin
Gohrbandt, the director of the Urbank Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg who did
a vaginoplasty a few months later. Felix Abraham wrote up two cases as
"Genitalumwandlung
an zwei männlichen Transvestiten" in the Zeitschriflfiir Sexualwissenschaft
in 1931, naming the two cases as "Rudolph (Dora) R." and "Arno
(Toni) E.".
Pierre
Najac, a young French doctor who had spent an internship year at the Berlin
Institute for Sexual Science, also wrote a report on Dorchen and Toni Ebel,
which was published in 1931.
An
anonymous article "Operative Umwandlung von Männern in Frauen
gelungen" („Operative transformation of men into women successful")
appeared in the medical journal, Die Geburtenregelung in 1933 and
discussed the operations on Dorchen, Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque.
 |
| Toni, Charlotte & Dorchen in Mysterium des Geschlechts |
In April 1933 the film was shown in Vienna cinemas for two
weeks before it was banned. In Germany, it was not even shown in public, as it
was banned by the censors.
Also that year, Magnus Hirschfeld, in exile in Paris,
commented to Voila magazine:
“Dorchen, as ex-Rudolf now called
himself, feels completely like a woman. He is very happy and works in a woman's
profession, having modified his marital status. Dorchen shows no symptoms of
mental disturbance, she is hard-working and intelligent.”(p6)
Norman
Haire, the London sexologist and associate of Magnus Hirschfeld wrote an
introduction to the 1933 English version of the Lili Elbe autobiography. Therein he wrote:
“In Berlin in 1923, I saw, at the
clinic of a colleague, an individual who was apparently male, but who felt
himself to be a female just as Andreas did. This patient, too, had his male
organs removed at his own request, and was given injections of ovarian extract.
No operation was ever undertaken to determine whether ovaries were present in
his body or not. I saw him—or her—again in 1926, after the removal of the male
organs, and quite recently I received a report about the case. The individual
is very unhappy, and has not succeeded in becoming completely a woman.”
Not the nicest comment, but some have taken this as a
reference to Dorchen. (See the note p 59
of Caughie and Meyer).
6 May 1933 the Deutsche Studentenschaft made
an organised attack on the Institut, followed by the Sturmabteilung (SA). They destroyed many of the books and put an
end to the Institut.
When Toni Ebel and Charlotte Charlaque fled Germany, they
chose Karlsbad in Czechoslovakia,
partly because it was a hub of German speaking emigrants, but also because they
thought that was where Dorchen was from.
Charlotte, writing in 1955, said of Dorchen:
"Because she is an excellent cook, she
soon took over a small restaurant in the town of her birth” - meaning Karlsbad.
In February 1934, Richter applied for a legal name change “Due to congenital intersexuality – established at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft Berlin”, which was granted by the office of the president of Czechoslovakia in April 1934. At this time, her address was still listed in Berlin. From then on, her legal name was Dora Rudolfine Richter (in the Czech form: Dora Rudolfa Richterová). The approval letter asks the parish office to correct the baptismal entry – although that was not done at that time. Also corrected at this time was Dora's Heimatschein, the Czechoslovak homeland certificate that gives the right to reside in Czechoslovakia, to vote and, if necessary, to social welfare. The Heimatschein described Dora as a domestic servant and as unmarried.
Charlotte, writing in 1955, said of Dorchen:
"Because she is an excellent cook, she soon took over a small restaurant in the town of her birth” - meaning Karlsbad.
Dora's mother died in 1938.
By 1939 Dorchen was living in Seifen as documented in the German census of that year (which included Austria and the Sudetanland) but not in her parents’ house No 12. She is at No 61, previously the home of a master baker - presumably the baker who had trained her in the 1910s. She earned a living as a lace maker working at home.
The correction in the Seifen/Ryžovna records had not been done, but was finally recorded in January 1946 – perhaps Dorchen herself produced the approval letter from
Prague. There was an urgency for the
Germans in Bohemia, the Sudeten
Germans, to have their papers in order.
With the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans (whose location had been used as an excuse for the German annexation of Czechoslavakia in 1938), Dorchen moved to Allersberg, Bavaria in May 1946, where she lived until her death at the age of 74 on 26 April 1966. Her final years were spent in a seniors' care facility.
-----------------------------------
Dorchen was played by Tima
die Goettliche in Rosa Von Praunheim’s
movie about Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex, 1999, IMDB.
Several sources claim that Dorchen was medically castrated
in 1922 by Dr Erwin Gohrbandt at the Charité
Universitätsmedizin in Berlin.
This is not the account in Holz, 1924 – the earliest account, which
gives the surgeon as Heinrich Stabel.
Herrn says: “After Dorchen had been at the institute for
assessment since May 1923, waiting for the doctors' decision, Heinrich Stabel
held out the prospect of castration to her at the end of the year.” (p182).
However Pierre Najac provided
an exact date eight years later. According to this, the operation took place on
22 May 1923 (p184).
Richter was drafted, apparently, by the German army,
although technically at that time he was an Austrian citizen. After 1918 Richter
would of course be a Czechoslovak. The
EN.Wikipedia article simply declares Richter to have been German.
How did Dorchen get to Hirschfeld’s Institut? I have gone with the version in Holz, 1924
based on interviews with Dorchen. There
is an alternate account:
She worked as a waiter or a cook
in the fancy hotels in Berlin in the summer, and lived as a woman in the
off-season. The police arrested her several times for cross-dressing, and she
was sent to a male prison. Eventually a judge took pity on her and referred her
to Magnus Hirschfeld who helped her obtain an official permit to
dress in women’s clothes.
These two accounts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This other account was included in older
versions of the EN.Wikipedia article and other secondary sources. What is missing is a provenance, who first
said or wrote that. So I have not used
that version in the account above.
It is not conceivable that Dorchen having returned to Seifen
– a small village - at the end of the Great War could have seen the Steinach
film there. It must have been on a trip
to Berlin.
Should ‘Dorchen’ be spelt with an umlaut: ‘Dörchen’? EN.Wikipedia does so; DE.Wikipedia does not. Neither does Herrn nor Wolfert, so I have not
done so.
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