Institute for Sexual Science (1919-1933)

 Institute for Sexual Science >   
    short informations
short informations
     
deutsch  français

Rooms of the WhK in the Institute for Sexual Science, 1919-1933

In 1919, after the founding of the Weimar Republic, Magnus Hirschfeld realized his dream of opening an Institute for Sexual Science. It served scholarly, practical, educational and political ends. The founding of the Institute was the first, and until after the Second World War, last, attempt at the academic institutionalization of sexual science. The Institute's staff combined sexual science and sexual politics with a scientific method of argumentation, a strategy which, despite a plethora of actions and alliances, was to prove unsuccessful when it came to the decriminalization of same-sex sexual activities. As early as the mid-1920s the founding generation of sexologists increasingly shifted their activities away from research and towards sexual reform campaigning. This general tendency points to the stagnation of the project of establishing sexual science before the National Socialist seizure of power. The Institute was vandalized, looted and shut down on 6 May 1933, its staff driven into exile and parts of the extensive library symbolically burnt on Berlin's Opernplatz. The lay and professional associations for sexual science and sexual reform either ceased operations altogether or conformed to National Socialist gender ideology.
Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft 


Online-Exhibition:
>>Institut for Sexual Science (1919-1933) deutsch español


Documents:
Excerpts from Hirschfeld's will 
Charter of the Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation 

Pages about the Institut:
Gedenkstele 
Exhibition:
"The First Institute for Sexual Science (1919-1933)" 
Links:
Magnus Hirschfeld  (Biographische Daten )
Prof.Arthur Kronfeld  (Mitbegründer des Instituts)

Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V. - Home (without frame) - Sitemap - updating: 10.10.2005