The atmosphere in Berlin began to change dramatically in 1933. Hirschfeld, himself a gay Jewish man, coined the words ‘transvestite’ and ‘transsexual’, and worked with local police to limit arrests of cross-dressing people. The Institut had a museum that encouraged schools to visit, and also campaigned for better sex education, contraception, and women’s rights. Germany, and Berlin in particular, also had a flourishing academic community who did not necessarily view homosexuality as the ‘deviance’ that others in Europe did a notable figure in interwar Berlin life was Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, a sexologist who founded the Institut für Sexualwissenshaft (an Institute for Sexual Science) on Tiergartenstrasse. Magnus Hirschfeld, centre, with two cross-dressing people, taken outside the Institut. This was partly due to Police chiefs (such as Berlin Police Commissioner Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem in the 1880s) prioritising other crimes over enforcing Paragraph 175. However, Germany, in urban areas anyway, was a far more permissive society than others in Europe in the late 19 th and early 20 th century. There was legislation against (male) homosexual acts in Germany prior to the Nazi party being formed at all: Paragraph 175 was made law shortly after Germany became unified in 1871. The most famous of these symbols and imagery is the yellow star that Jews were forced to wear.
This applied both to those they deemed ‘other’ otherwise known as ‘useless mouths’ and in those they deemed acceptable. They have been used to express and influence emotions not just in their creators but those around the creators: nostalgia, pride, love and identity (as well as to sell things).Īs well as using symbols to inspire belonging (the swastika) and fear (the death’s head skull or Totenkopf worn by the SS), the Nazi regime effectively used imagery to evoke feelings of ‘otherness’ in the populations under their control.
Symbolism and imagery have always been at the forefront of human expression: from cave paintings to heraldry to modern logos. But another symbol, forced on gay men persecuted by the Nazis, has since been reclaimed by the very community the Nazis sought to oppress: the pink triangle. When we think of symbols the Nazi regime forced people to wear, we think of the yellow star of David enforced on Jews.