“Reexamining Weimar Germany via the Politics of Prostitution” — a review of Julia Roos’s Weimar through the Lens of Gender.
On Magnus Hirschfeld: “This article considers the two major biographies of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, MD (1868—1935), an early campaigner for ‘gay rights’ avant la lettre. Like him, his first biographer Charlotte Wolff (1897—1986) was a Jewish doctor who lived and worked in Weimar Republic Berlin and fled Germany when the Nazi regime came to power.”
A German lesbian film from 1931: “I’m going to be talking about Mädchen in Uniform (1931). It’s not the first girl-on-girl kiss of cinema (Marlene Dietrich snagged that one in Morocco in 1930) and it’s not the first time the idea of a real life lesbian had been portrayed (see aforementioned Pandora’s Box, 1929) But it WAS the first time something this lesbian graced the silver screen. … It’s nearly impossible to get a good print of the film anyway because when the Nazis came to power, they banned the film and attempted to burn all existing copies.”
Berlin’s Lesbische frauen — on a 1920′s guide to Berlin’s lesbian clubs: “Equally chic, but definitely more late-night was Le Garconne on Kalkreuthstrasse, owned by Susi Wanowski, the former wife of a Berlin Chief of Police but now the lover and manager of Wiemar-era wild-child, Anita Berber.”
Some info about Berber in a clip from Berlin — Metropolis of Vice:
“Fascism and the Female Form: Performance Art in the Third Reich” by Terri J. Gordon, from a collection called Sexuality and German Fascism.
“The Man Who Started the Sexual Revolution”: “Twenty years later, his curia-like Vienna Psychoanalytical Society was attracting a new generation of followers after the war, among them an impecunious student from the provinces, Wilhelm Reich.”
“Sixty Years of Beate Uhse”: “In the early days of her company, the target groups of this entrepreneurial woman celebrated as the “orgasm muse,” “sexpert” and “love slave of the nation” were not hedonists or the sexually adventurous, but women rebuilding Germany from the rubble of the war.”
“Sexual science and self-narrative: epistemology and narrative technologies of the self between Krafft-Ebing and Freud” : “Starting from the psychiatric problematization … of the concept and the object called ‘sexuality’ in the second half of the 19th century, it attempts to show a series of continuities and discontinuities between this kind of reasoning and the birth of psychoanalysis in the first years of the 20th century.”
"Procuress" by Otto Dix (1923)
A note about the Freud-Spielrein-Jung film, A Dangerous Method: “In many ways, the film is a well-made hybrid of ideas movie, masterly costume drama, and, frankly with Knightley onboard and some spanking sex, a touch of S&M soap.”
“Verfolgt takes place in present-day Hamburg and tells a story about fairly ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. It shows their discovery of sadomasochism – gritty, awkward, human, unpretentious, and ardent.”
“Nothing in theatre elevates the identity of actor over character more completely than nudity. Yet as a performance or spectacle, nudity remains a form of masking, insofar as it amplifies the desire to discover, to expose something hidden by clothing.”
The Museum of Sex posted some old erotic art by Franz von Bayros, and here are some amazing erotic bookplates by the same artist.
