You're Dead to Me - LGBTQ Life in Weimar Germany (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

Greg Jenner is joined in 20th-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.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.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

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Spend less time on ads and more time with BBC podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead To Me, the Radio 4 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 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 Leibniz Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung, or ZZF, in Potsdam. You'll remember them from our episode on Prussian King,

Frederick the Great, it's the equally great Dr. Bodi Ashton. Welcome back Bodi, or should I say, Wilkommen. 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. And in Comedy Corner she's a comedian, actor, singer and screenwriter. She has won the Next Ups biggest award in comedy. Her show Is It a Bird was nominated at both Edinburgh and Melbourne

Comedy Festivals. You've seen her on QI, Late Night Lyset, the Russell Howard hour. 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. Do you like history? Please say yes. This is a lot of it, isn't there? I like most of it. Most of it I am quite ignorant about. What do you know about Weimar Germany? Do you know the name? I know the name having just heard it from you. Obviously. 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 a place, sorry. It's a place 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 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 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. But besides the chaotic economics and the complicated politics why was Weimar Berlin such a focal point in LGBTQ history? Jordan do you know when the Weimar Republic was founded?

Jordan McAvoy 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. Will Barron Good, working through the problem. Bodhi? Bodhi 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. Jordan McAvoy Ah, that old chestnut.11 and when this happens and that's a little thing called the First World War. Ah, that old chestnut. Yeah, you know, easily forgotten little thing.

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. And the other thing is that the German economy is collapsing. And on the 9th of November, the Kaiser, the Emperor, Wilhelm II, or Kaiser Bill, he's compelled to abdicate. 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 what do we have now? Well, we have some 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. Typical. 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 and is like, no, no, no, I'm here first. I'm Spartacus League.

Exactly. I'm 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 reason that Weimar was selected here as sort of the namesake is because this is where the new constitution was negotiated. 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. Okay, that 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 basically the first thing that happens after it's founded is that

there's the Paris Peace Conference, which leads to the Treaty. 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. And this is really, really unpopular, but Germany doesn't have a choice at this stage. Will Barron 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? 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. Yeah. 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. 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.

That is the sort of economic reality of what Vineimar Germany is founded into. 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 proper inflation, really inflated. Proper inflation, yeah. Massive balloon. 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. In 1922, Germany misses a reparations payment. I know that feeling. Yeah, like if you ever miss 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. But the French and Belgian troops come in, they occupy the Ruhr, which is the main industrial area of Germany. 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. And this also means that you've got loads of political instability at the same time. 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. Will Barron 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 no Nazis here. So Nazi violence. It's not a bad policy. No, it's a good policy. 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. He ends the passive resistance, 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. Emphasis on social welfare. You've got emphasis on rights, what we would

now talk about as human rights. We've got 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 this is really a time of 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, what's a new woman? What does that mean?

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. 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-copf, 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 bob.

Oh, okay. So 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 start asking men out. Oh wow. Something that was… That bumble. Yeah. Other platforms I imagine are available, the dating apps.

I want to ask you a question Jordan. Have you ever heard of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld? 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 mean he's a very, very big figure, Bodhi. Not entirely unproblematic. So I think we have to put him in context, but really important in terms of his influence. So who is Dr. Hirschfeld? Well, Magnus Hirschfeld is a Jewish man.

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 to fit in in those gaps in your understanding of like the lineage of that. That's so cool. Yeah, 1897 is, yeah, it's a long time.

Yeah. 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, 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. Do you know what's happening in the Institute, Jordan? Jordan McClendon So far it doesn't sound problematic.

I'm worried that it's going to go into like more 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 were they quite militant about the science of it all? 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. Right, that's the word I was looking for, thank you. 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. Like 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, other gender affirmation surgeries that are done particularly by a surgeon named Ludwig Levy-Lenz. His institution does provide

support for heterosexuals through marital counselling, through birth control, through 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. That's where I was worried this was creeping in. Yeah, yeah. I mean, anyone in the early 1920s is a good chance. If they're in that field, a lot of them were.

What happens next in terms of the organisation, 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. Early on in the Republic, there is a mass movement of queer liberation that focuses again mostly on gay men 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 organisation, 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. These friendship leagues, Bodhi, are they successful? The friendship leagues are in some ways successful and in other ways are a very difficult arena because there is debate in the beginning

about whether or not assimilationism is actually a good idea. What's the assimilationism? Basically, are queer people just the same as everyone else, you know? 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 quite unquote normal.

So difficult to go out of your way to show that you're not a threat. Yeah, right? Proving in some space. I'm fine. I'm not going to 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.

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 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 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 20s and 30s was, as he puts it, boxing and homosexualism. Well we've finally reached the moment we've all been waiting for. Welcome to Cabaret, old chums, or as I believe it goes, willkommen, 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, roaring, 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. Bodie, I mean, 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. 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 it. 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. 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's also a prominent lesbian bar called the Violetta, which had 400 members by 1926.

So the Violetta is the kind of the great lesbian bar and it's run by a fascinating person. Lotta Harme? Lottie Harme? What's her name? Lotta. So short for Charlotte? Charlotte. 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 trans masculine people. Trans sex 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.

Will Barron Does that suggest therefore that the government is targeting trans people and therefore there needs to be a pushback? Will Barron 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 this- Some do though. Some. That happens. 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. 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.

Let's talk about magazines. 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. 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 Ratseweit 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 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. We gave up on the title with 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. You also have in transvestites, for instance, trans writers who debate what it means to be trans. One of the trans writers, Toni Frecker, advocates for the use of different terminology. So instead of using transvestite, maybe we should use the term trans sensible. Oh, that doesn't describe me at all. Trans sensible. That's great.

Would you rather be what? Trans reckless abandon? What's your... I quite like the biscuit thing that we've got going on. This biscuit is different from the others would be my debut film. The magazines also help people find one another. So not just find themselves, but find other people. Girlfriend and Garçon regularly advertise meetings for like-minded women in smaller cities. 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. That'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.

We have crackdowns. Is there censorship? So in 1926, there's a law that passes, which is called the law to protect youth from trashy and filthy publications. And what 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.

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. 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 Bodhi. 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 cliche 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. And 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. Will Barron Oh, Dr Bodie. God, that was gorgeous. 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. Angus Really glad to hear it. I'd just like to say a

huge thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the brilliant Dr Bodie Ashton from ZZF Podstam. Thank you Bodie. 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 a 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. I'm Greg Foot and my podcast, Slice Bread from BBC Radio 4 is back to separate more science fact from marketing fiction. We've gone from worrisome science and we've turned it sciency. Each week, I investigate one of your suggested

wonder products, something that's promising to make you happier, healthier, or greener. The cost is almost 200 pounds. It's out of my range, I'm afraid. The new series of sliced bread including our 100th episode where we'll be investigating the products promising to help slow the effects of aging. We can hopefully slow down the aging process and hopefully make people live healthier for longer. Sliced bread with me Greg

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