The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [33]
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?” Der Stürmer, another anti-Semitic paper, called Hirschfeld “an apostle of lewdness.” Hirschfeld prudently decamped from Germany late in 1930, mere months after meeting Einar Wegener, to embark on an around-the-world lecture tour.
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