Abstract
Scholars of German queer and trans history have long been fascinated with the looting of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Science by a group of Nazi students and the subsequent destruction of the institute's library in the infamous book burnings on 10 May 1933. Taking place just three months after Hitler came into power, these events are often represented as the turning point from the relative sexual freedoms of the Weimar Republic to the violent attacks against and persecution of homosexuals and transvestites under the Nazi regime. However, contrary to popular belief – and its accompanying melancholic attachment – not all the contents of Hirschfeld's personal archive and the Institute's collection of books, magazines, patient questionnaires, and ethnological objects were lost to the flames.
Rather than understanding the book burnings as an end point of the Institute's history, in The Scattered Library, Hans P. Soetaert provides a meticulously researched account of how the surviving remnants of Hirschfeld's library were dispersed across France, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Canada, and the USA. Focusing on the three years leading up to Hirschfeld's death in 1935 and the fate of his estate in the years that followed, the author traces the complex history of the library’s fragmentation. In 18 heavily footnoted chapters, followed by an extensive appendix, the book offers, on the one hand, an investigative report on the history of the Institute's material in France and Czechoslovakia, how it traversed borders, was kept in mysterious storerooms, hidden and smuggled across countries, confiscated by authorities, auctioned-off and repurchased, until finally some of the material was rediscovered in an old paper container. On the other hand, the book delivers the first extensive biography of the Institute's archivist and Hirschfeld's life companion Karl Giese (1898–1938) and the Jewish lawyer and gay activist Karl Fein (1894–1942). Both played a key role in the afterlife of the Institute's materials, as Soetaert illustrates by shedding light on their decisions, their motives and the repercussions of their actions, which were always shaped in response to the expansion of Nazi power.
The first eight chapters trace Hirschfeld's and Giese's exile journeys following Hirschfeld's return from his world tour. Here, Soetaert gives a detailed account of the proceedings of the 1932 World League for Sexual Reform conference in Brno, which Hirschfeld and Giese both attended and where they first met Karl Fein. After recounting the lootings of the Institute in May 1933, adding new insights that challenge established narratives around the book burnings by not only arguing against the myth of a completely destroyed library, but also the conception of Nazism as an infallible machine, the book gives a detailed account of Hirschfeld's unsuccessful attempts to rebuild the Institute and continue his life's work in France, before he passed away on his sixty-seventh birthday. Giese briefly joined Hirschfeld in Paris but was arrested in a bathhouse raid and expelled from France in 1934, whereupon he decided to settle in Brno, leveraging connections he had previously established with local gay activists, doctors, and sexologists in another failed attempt to rebuild the Institute.
The second half of the volume is dedicated to the events in Czechoslovakia after the settlement of Hirschfeld's estate. Here, the more intriguing materials of the book surface as Soetaert situates his historical subjects in the context of the ever-escalating antisemitic climate of the late 1930s as the Nazis gradually moved closer and eventually annexed Czechoslovakia, expanding their reign of terror in the occupied territory. Initially focused on Giese, the book then turns to Karl Fein who was named both Giese's and by extension Hirschfeld's heir in Giese's suicide note in March 1938. Soetaert carefully reconstructs how Fein navigated this inheritance as he got caught up in the Nazis’ net leading to his death in the Łódź ghetto in 1942. Based on over ten years of research into Fein's network of gay and Jewish friends, a group around the gay periodical Kamarád, the Jewish hospital in Brno, a moving company, and a scrap trader, in the last three chapters the author offers convincing speculations on what Fein might have done with the remaining materials of Hirschfeld's institute before his deportation, whom he might have entrusted with safeguarding them, and how they eventually ended up being discarded in 1942.
The book's strength clearly lies in assembling overlooked sources, in keeping with its aim to provide future researchers with an abundance of leads to follow. However, while impressive in its scope, this exhaustive approach driven by the author's investigative impulse occasionally blurs the essential with the superfluous and could have benefited from stronger editing to streamline the text's length.
Critical gaps include the omission of Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives (2017) and Laurie Marhoefer's Racism and the Making of Gay Rights (2022), leading to an outdated portrayal of Li Shiu Tong and a missed chance to interrogate Hirschfeld's more complex racial and colonial legacies. Unfortunately, this uncritical adoption of Hirschfeld's attitudes at times shines through the text. Despite these flaws, The Scattered Library significantly expands our understanding of Hirschfeld's legacy, underscoring the importance of looking beyond Germany in histories of sexuality and, ultimately, also beyond Hirschfeld – even if the last point sits uneasily with the book's own framing.