HIRSCHFELD, MAGNUS

HIRSCHFELD, MAGNUS (1868–1935), medical scientist and sexual reformer. Born in Kolberg on the Baltic coast to a prominent and prosperous Jewish doctor, Hermann Hirschfeld, he attended schools in Breslau and Strasbourg and graduated as a doctor from the University of Munich. He practiced as a general practitioner in Magdeburg, from 1894 to 1896 when he moved to Charlottenburg, a suburb of Berlin. Like his father, specializing in public hygiene problems, he founded a workers' health insurance institution which was widely imitated. The trial of Oscar Wilde and the suicide of a patient on the eve of his marriage triggered Hirschfeld's lifelong devotion to sexual research in general and homosexuality in particular. In his first work, Sappho and Socrates (1896), he maintained that the homosexual urge, like the heterosexual, was the result of an "inborn goal-striving constitution" influenced biologically by "glands of internal secretion." Heartened by the response to his work, in 1897 he founded the Scientific-Humanistic Committee and gained immediate attention with a petition to the Reichstag for the repeal of Section 175 of the German Criminal Code dealing with homosexual offenses. The petition was signed by most of the prominent figures of his time including Martin Buber, Hermann Hesse, Max Brod, Albert Einstein, Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Arthur Schnitzler. In 1908, in collaboration with other leading sexual researchers, he founded the Journal of Sexual Science, and in 1909, his Yearbook for Sexual Intermediate Stages, which between 1909 and 1923 produced one of the richest collections of homosexual studies in the areas of history, literature, art, music, and psychology. In 1918, he launched his most ambitious project, the Institute for Sexual Science housed in the mansion of Prince Hatzfeld, the former German ambassador to France, which was a clinic, a free university with lectures and classes, and a research center housing 20,000 volumes and a collection of 35,000 photographs from all over the world. Its marriage consultation department was the first in Germany and widely copied elsewhere.   In 1933, he was invited to deliver a lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Nazis closed the Institute for Sexual Science when they came to power, and his books were publicly consigned to the flames, Hirschfeld moved to France and died in Nice. His other major works, all in German, are Berlin's Drittes Geshlecht (1904), Die Transvestiten (1910), Sexualpathologie (three volumes, 1917–1920, 1921–1928), Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes – (two volumes, 1920), Geschlechtskunde (1925–1930), Geschlecht und Verbrechen (1930), and Die Weltreise eines Sexualforschers (1933). Only a few of his works have been translated into English: Sex in Human Relationships (London, 1935) and Sexual Anomalies (New York, 1942, rev. ed. 1956). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Encyclopedia Sexualis (1936); A. Ellis and A. Abarbanel (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Sexual Behavior (1967), 373–383, 485–493, 956–966, 967–975; N. Garde, Jonathan to Gide: The Homosexual in History (1969); A. Young, in: Chutzpah: A Jewish Liberation Anthology (1977), 158–160; J. Lauritsen and D. Thorstad, The Early Homosexual Rights Movement, 1864–1935 (1974), 9–29, 41–43, 73–76. (Jack Nusan Porter)