In his research into sexual attraction he would soon settle on the notion of a continuum - decades before Alfred Kinsey - noting that to be positioned at either extreme, heterosexual or homosexual, was the exception rather than the rule. The “third sex” was a label of convenience at a time when Hirschfeld’s studies were still blurring distinctions between gender and sexuality, conflating them with physiological characteristics. To be fair, it didn’t exactly come out of nowhere it wasn’t even the first Hirschfeld text to address the “third sex” - at the dawn of the new century he had issued a pamphlet for a broad readership entitled “What People Should Know about the Third Sex”. Today, few works emerge from the archives with the urgency of Hirschfeld’s Berlins Drittes Geschlecht (Berlin’s Third Sex). The resulting 1904 volume was by some distance the most successful of the Metropolis Documents. And when Ostwald sought to depict the lives of sexual outlaws in the German capital, he turned to Magnus Hirschfeld. Three quarters of the titles were about Berlin (with brief digressions to Hamburg, Vienna, and St Petersburg).
But it was the alien customs of modern, urban life that the Metropolis Documents mapped, with a particular focus on the disadvantaged and marginalised - prostitutes, bohemians, single mothers, gamblers, spiritualists, alcoholics, and criminals - as well as civil servants, teachers, seamstresses, musicians, actors, athletes, and bankers. Viewed together, the Metropolis Documents resemble a compendious study of a distant colony, especially in the row of imposing cloth-bound thematic convolutes which collated five volumes each. Beginning in 1904 with Ostwald’s own Dunkle Winkel in Berlin (Dark Corners in Berlin), a study of vagrants, and ending four years later with the shiny nouveau riche revels of Edmund Edel’s Neu-Berlin, the fifty-one editions fed the voracious curiosity of the Bildungsbürgertum - the educated middle class. Hans Ostwald, an ambitious writer a few years younger than Hirschfeld, sought to chart the furthest reaches of the modern city, and the result was one of the most expansive accounts of urban experience ever undertaken - the Großstadt-Dokumente (Metropolis Documents). In Hirschfeld’s day, the chief of Berlin’s police, Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, eschewed open confrontation with the city’s sizeable sexual minority and instead maintained a policy of containment and observation - a key factor in the development of a confident, diverse subculture.īut Berlin’s rapid expansion had rendered the city a stranger to itself. It had supported a gay underground since at least the time of Frederick the Great, when Austrian author Johann Friedel indignantly reported on the city’s male brothels in his 1782 Briefe über die Galanterien von Berlin (Letters on the Libertinage of Berlin). To both settled Berliners and newcomers the city offered not just material opportunity, but the promise of transformation, or revelation - the prospect of sympathetic company in which to bare one’s true self.
It had experienced phenomenal growth, multiplying twentyfold in a century in global comparison, only London, New York, and Paris were larger. Unique among German urban centres, the capital entered the twentieth century as a metropolis. Hirschfeld’s laboratory was queer Berlin - its beats, balls, and bars. It also included a study of blackmailers, an article outing the nineteenth-century poet Platen, and a petition signed by hundreds of distinguished figures calling for the repeal of the German Criminal Code’s notorious Paragraph 175, which banned “unnatural fornication” between men. The first issue opened with an article by Hirschfeld himself, appended with a reader survey (“Were your parents or grandparents blood relations?”, “Can you point to a reason for your abnormal feelings?”, “Are your ears large, protruding, small, delicate?”). Academic in tone, it forthrightly claimed homosexuality to be in-born, tracked the development of a corresponding homosexual identity through the long stream of history, and mapped its contemporary forms.
The Committee’s charter called for public enlightenment, and its first major product was the 1899 Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediaries), which appeared in annual editions for a quarter of a century and totalled more than 11,000 pages.