Queer Jewish Berlin: Gender, Desire, and Liberation in the Weimar Republic

When Franz Rosenzweig opened the original Lehrhaus in Frankfurt in 1920, a parallel revolution was already underway in Berlin. Jewish doctors, publishers, and anarchist philosophers were building the world's first institutions dedicated to what we now call LGBTQ+ rights—writing foundational texts on gender identity, filling newsstands with the world's first lesbian magazines, and theorizing forms of love and community that defied every convention of bourgeois life. Their work was as intellectually profound as anything produced at the Frankfurt Lehrhaus.

This three-session reading circle recovers that world. We'll read primary texts alongside contemporary scholarship to explore three distinct currents of radical queer Jewish thought in Weimar Germany.

Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), a gay Jewish physician, founded the world's first LGBTQ+ advocacy organization in 1897 and opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin in 1919: performing some of the world's first gender-affirming surgeries and issuing early identity documents to protect trans people. His concept of sexuelle Zwischenstufen (sexual intermediaries) anticipated modern ideas about nonbinary and genderqueer identity. We examine his writings and ask: what does it mean to argue for liberation through science?

Between 1924 and 1933, Berlin's newsstands carried the world's first lesbian magazines—publications that created community across a dispersed readership, debated the nature of lesbian identity, published queer fiction, and navigated an uneasy relationship with the male-dominated homosexual rights movement. We read from the magazines themselves and ask: how does a community build itself through media when it barely has a name?

Where Hirschfeld sought reform through science and parliamentary coalition-building, Friedlaender (1866–1908), a Jewish sexologist, economist, and anarchist, drew on Max Stirner and Nietzsche to imagine something more radical: a Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Queer) that rejected state law, medical categorization, and mainstream politics alike. We read his 1904 manifesto and ask what his debate on masculinity with Hirschfeld illuminates about contemporary tensions between assimilationist and transformative approaches to queer liberation.

All readings are provided in English translation. No prior knowledge of German, Weimar history, or Jewish studies is required.

Who this is for: Anyone curious about LGBTQ+ history, Jewish intellectual history, the Weimar Republic, or the deep roots of contemporary debates about gender identity and queer liberation.

What you'll leave with: Fluency with the foundational figures and texts of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement; a richer understanding of Weimar Jewish intellectual life; and new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between science, community, and liberation.