Politics, War, and Activism

If Hirschfeld’s science sought to explode the outdated dichotomy of male and female and liberate the homosexual from the stigma of pathology, his politics endeavored to broaden the laws to encompass same-sex love and other forms of human affection that extended beyond the surly confines of the heterosexual horizon of experience. Although his political orientation had always clearly been left-wing and greatly sympathized with the Social Democrats, he officially joined the Social Democratic party in 1923—a golden time for the party with Chancellor Stresemann at the helm and Great Coalition of the left-wing parties. This seemingly late decision can be attributed to how political developments played to his organizational strategy. Hirschfeld understood that the course of political reform was essential to any notion of improved social conditions for homosexuals, he was more apt at adopting strategies that lent themselves to forging broad alliances and an early and unambiguous identification with the SPD may have in his view at least signaled a potential foreclosing of collaborative opportunities with divergent parties that were however similarly reform-oriented. In this context, it is also worth noting that Hirschfeld never displayed any explicit ambitions for political office, and was described by a number of his contemporaries as having retained the outer semblances of his bourgeois upbringing.