certain investigations were to be undertaken. If these investigations confirmed his suppositions he promised to remove Andreas’ male organs and transplant into him ovaries from a young woman, which would, as the work of the Steinach school had shown, activate the rudimentary ovaries lying dormant in Andreas’ abdomen.
Wegener traveled to Berlin to be diagnosed definitively by Hirschfeld. His first visit to the clinic was not auspicious. “ ‘Why have I been sent here?’ he wondered. ‘What do I have to do here?’ He felt intensely uncomfortable. In this large room a group of abnormal persons seemed to be holding a meeting—women who appeared to be dressed up as men, and men of whom one could scarcely believe that they were men. The manner in which they were conversing disgusted him; their movements, their voices, the way in which they were attired, produced a feeling of nausea.”
Wegener’s meeting with Hirschfeld (called “Hardenfeld” in the book) was even more disturbing. “By means of a thousand penetrating questions, this man explored the patient’s emotional life for hours. He had to submit to an inquisition of the most ruthless kind. The shame of shamelessness is something that actually exists, he thought, during those hours, and clung to this definition, which he had once found in some philosophical work, in an effort to banish the feeling he had of standing there as if in the pillory. His emotional life was undergoing an ordeal which resembled running the gantlet. And when this torture came at last to an end, the inquisitor dismissed him with the words: I shall expect you tomorrow morning at the same time.’”
With his status as a sexual intermediary validated by Hirschfeld, Wegener was castrated, his testicles removed—probably by Hirschfeld’s colleague Felix Abraham (called “Dr. Arns” in the book). “The first operation, which only represents a beginning, has been successful beyond all expectations. Andreas had ceased to exist, they said. His germ glands—oh, mystic words—have been removed. What has still to happen will take place in Dresden under the hands of Professor Kreutz. The doctors talked about hormones; I behaved as if I knew what they meant. Now I have looked up this word in the dictionary and find that it refers to the secretions of internal organs which are important for vital processes. But I am no wiser than I was before. Must one equip oneself then, with wisdom and knowledge in order to understand a miracle?”
The “miracle” of sex reassignment continued in Dresden a few months later, when “Kreutz” removed Wegener’s penis, opened his abdomen, and found the rudimentary ovaries that provided physical confirmation of the patient’s intermediary status. In keeping with Steinach’s theories, the doctor then implanted healthy ovarian tissue from a young woman into Wegener, tissue that was rejected, requiring further surgery. Nonetheless, Lili Elbe had successfully ousted Einar Wegener, a coup for which she apparently felt both relief and guilt. “I feel like a bridge- builder. But it is a strange bridge that I am building,” Wegener (now Lili Elbe) writes. “I stand on one of the banks, which is the present day. There I have driven in the first pile. And I must build it clear across the other bank, which often I cannot see at all and sometimes only vaguely, and now and then in a dream. And then I often do not know whether the other bank is the past or the future. Frequently the question plagues me: Have I had only a past, or have I had no past at all? Or have I only a future without a past?” These were questions that would echo in the lives of later generations of transsexual people who crossed the bridge that Lili helped construct.
According to Hoyer, when Wegener’s surgeon in Dresden opened his patient’s abdomen he discovered “withered” ovaries. Einar/Lili was, in medical terms, a true hermaphrodite, possessing both testicular and ovarian tissue; this explained Wegener’s feminine mannerisms, slight build, and small breasts, and also the genital “underdevelop-ment” noted by Norman Haire in the introduction to
A “womanly woman,” Elbe wanted to become both a wife and a mother. “All that I desire is nothing less than the last fulfilment of a real woman; to be protected from life by the sterner being, the husband,” she wrote to a friend in August 1931. “You must sympathize with me in my desire for maternity, to have a child, for I want nothing more ardently than to demonstrate that Andreas has been completely obliterated in me—is dead. Through a child I should be able to convince myself in the most unequivocal manner that I have been a woman from the very beginning. Whether this wish can be fulfilled or not, the fact that I can openly acknowledge this desire from the fullness of a pure woman’s heart is an infinite happiness for me. The fact that I may experience this happiness justifies everything that has happened to me here in Dresden.”
However, medical science then (as now) had no means of fulfilling Elbe’s wish to be a mother, though her physician apparently tried to do what he could. Elbe underwent a final surgery, most likely a vagino-plasty (surgical creation of a vagina). She speaks of “effecting a natural outlet from the womb” in her letters. This final surgery was “an abyss of suffering,” Elbe writes. She was confined to bed for months afterward, without the recovery that had accompanied her previous surgeries. By early September, she intuited that she was dying. In a letter to her sister, she wrote, “Now I know that death is near.” Lili Elbe died in Dresden on September 12, 1931, of an apparent heart attack. “Paralysis of the heart put an end to her short young woman’s life which was so excruciating and yet so wonderful,” writes Hoyer. She was buried in a cemetery on the grounds of the hospital. A medical pioneer, whose transformation was covered in the Danish and German press in 1931, Lili Elbe was largely forgotten as war swept over the continent.
Magnus Hirschfeld suffered a similar fate. As a homosexual, a Jew, and a spokesman for progressive causes, he found his position becoming increasingly difficult in Germany as fascist ideology claimed more adherents. His lectures were disrupted by hecklers, and stink bombs were thrown at the audience by agitators during some of his talks. He was threatened with bodily harm if he continued to give public lectures, but he ignored the threats and continued to speak. As early as 1920, he was assaulted and injured so severely after leaving a lecture that his death was reported in a number of newspapers, both in Germany and abroad. After it was revealed that he was not dead, merely injured, an editorial writer at a Dresden newspaper wrote: “Weeds never die. The well-known Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld has been hurt enough to be put on the death list. We hear now that he is in fact recovering from his wounds. We have no hesitation in saying that we regret that this shameless and horrible poisoner of our people has not found his well-deserved end.” On October 31,1928, the official paper of the Nazi party featured a headline denouncing “Homosexuals as Speakers in Boys’ Schools. Magnus Hirschfeld, the fighter for the abolition of Paragraph 175, is allowed to speak in German high schools. The Destruction of Youth! German Mothers, Women Workers! Do You Want to Hand Your Children Over to Homosexuals?”
On May 3, 1933, a few months after Hitler assumed power in Germany, the Institute for Sexual Science, in Berlin, was vandalized and looted by a mob of Nazi “students.” Three days later, the institute’s archives—thousands of books, photographs, questionnaires, and other memorabilia accumulated by Hirschfeld during thirty years of research—were publicly burned in Berlin’s Opera Square. Photographs of the book burning show the mob marching to the square with a bust of Hirschfeld held high. The bust was rescued from the flames by a friend, who sent it to Hirschfeld, then living in Paris, where he witnessed the destruction of his institute on a newsreel in a movie theater. Friends had managed to salvage a few mementos from the wreckage, but the Institute for Sexual Science was essentially obliterated. Some have argued that the institute’s files contained sensitive personal information about members of the Nazi leadership, and while that might well have been true, it is also indisputable that the liberal acceptance of homosexuality and gender variance was anathema to social conservatives. The Institute for Sexual Science was an icon of Weimar culture— and a symbol of all that the National Socialists and their silent allies in the German population found weak and decadent in that culture.
The fight waged by Hirschfeld and his allies produced greater tolerance for homosexuality and gender variance during the period of liberalism in Germany between the wars, but it also nourished a violent countermovement that viewed the liberal approach as morally bankrupt. The Nazis, like most social conservatives, insisted on firm boundaries between the sexes and compulsory heterosexuality Hirschfeld’s theory of sexual intermediaries and his advocacy of gay and gender-variant individuals were perceived as an assault on the natural order and a violation (akin to rape) of German society. For that reason, all memory of his work was erased. Sexology as Hirschfeld conceived it—as a science that would liberate rather than imprison desire and identity—had been dealt a blow from which it would take decades to recover. Hirschfeld himself died in exile in France in
