You’ve probably never heard of Magnus Hirschfeld—and this is an injustice to a truly great man. Daniel Brook’s excellent biography, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin, resurrects Dr. Hirschfeld’s status as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, whose insights into human nature can illuminate our turbulent times.
Hirschfeld was born in 1868 in Prussia, the youngest son in a family of cultured, highly educated, assimilated German Jews. After graduating from medical school, Hirschfeld eventually became the preeminent sexologist of his time. Having realized from an early age that he was gay, Hirschfeld believed that homosexuality was neither criminal nor an illness, but inborn. To prove his theory, he was the first to use quantitative evidence to establish that a significant percentage of men are homosexual. Further investigations revealed that gender is not binary: In his calculations (which took into account genitalia, secondary sexual characteristics, sexual behavior and emotional characteristics), gender was a continuum of over 43,000,000 possible permutations of identity.
At his Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, Hirschfeld presented his theories and research in exhibitions available to the public alongside his extensive library of sexual research. People traveled to the institute to access gender-affirming counseling and medical care; activists and legislators gathered there to strategize policy reform. His identity as a gay, Jewish man, as well as his refusal to slot people into neat categories, put Hirschfield in direct opposition to the fascism of the rising Nazi party. In 1933, Nazi soldiers destroyed the institute and burned its library. Forced into exile, Hirschfeld traveled to the U.S., Asia and Africa, which led him to a remarkable observation for his time. He realized that just as each person is a unique sexual being, we are each the unique product of millennia of immigration, war, trade and intermarriage. Neither sex nor race is binary. Sexual and racial categories were instruments of repression that justified colonization, enslavement and even extermination.
Brook, a journalist and author of books on racism, income disparity and urbanization, does an excellent job explaining Hirschfeld’s intellectual achievements. But the soul of The Einstein of Sex comes from Brook’s focus on Hirschfeld’s humanity. Hirschfeld was a man of huge appetites—sexual, cultural, intellectual, social, even dietary—and Brook is clear that Hirschfeld’s scholarship resonates so powerfully today because it is supported by not only his research, but also the generosity of his soul and his exuberance for life.