By Heike Bauer

"Influential sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld founded Berlin's Institute of Sexual Sciences in 1919 as a home and workplace to study homosexual rights activism and support transgender people. It was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. This episode in history prompted Heike Bauer to ask, Is violence an intrinsic part of modern queer culture? The Hirschfeld Archives answers this critical question by examining the violence that shaped queer existence in the first part of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld himself escaped the Nazis, and many of his papers and publications survived. Bauer examines his accounts of same-sex life from published and unpublished writings, as well as books, articles, diaries, films, photographs, and other visual materials, to scrutinize how violence--including persecution, death, and suicide--shaped the development of homosexual rights and political activism. The Hirschfeld Archives brings these fragments of queer experience together to reveal many unknown and interesting accounts of LGBTQ life in the early twentieth century, but also to illuminate the fact that homosexual rights politics were haunted from the beginning by racism, colonial brutality, and gender violence". This work examines how death, suicide, and violence shaped modern queer culture, arguing that negative experiences, as much as affirmative subculture formation, influenced the emergence of a collective sense of same-sex identity. Bauer looks for this history of violence in the work and reception of the influential sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), and through Hirschfeld's work examines the form and collective impact of anti-queer violence in the first half of the twentieth century. Hirschfeld's archive (his library at the Institute for Sexual Sciences in Berlin) was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, so the archive of Bauer's title is one that she's built from over a hundred published and unpublished books, articles, films, and photographs.

Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017.