Christopher and His Kind (3 page)

TWO

The building which was now occupied by the Hirschfeld Institute had belonged, at the turn of the century, to the famous violinist Joseph Joachim; its public rooms still had an atmosphere which Christopher somehow associated with Joachim's hero, Brahms. Their furniture was classic, pillared, garlanded, their marble massive, their curtains solemnly sculpted, their engravings grave. Lunch was a meal of decorum and gracious smiles, presided over by a sweetly dignified lady with silver hair: a living guarantee that sex, in this sanctuary, was being treated with seriousness. How could it not be? Over the entrance to the Institute was an inscription in Latin which meant: Sacred to Love and to Sorrow.

Dr. Hirschfeld seldom ate with them. He was represented by Karl Giese, his secretary and long-time lover. Also present were the doctors of the staff and the patients or guests, whichever you chose to call them, hiding their individual problems behind silence or polite table chatter, according to their temperaments. I remember the shock with which Christopher first realized that one of the apparently female guests was a man. He had pictured transvestites as loud, screaming, willfully unnatural creatures. This one seemed as quietly natural as an animal and his disguise was accepted by everyone else as a matter of course. Christopher had been telling himself that he had rejected respectability and that he now regarded it with amused contempt. But the Hirschfeld kind of respectability disturbed his latent puritanism. During those early days, he found lunch at the Institute a bit uncanny.

Christopher giggled nervously when Karl Giese and Francis took him through the Institute's museum. Here were whips and chains and torture instruments designed for the practitioners of pleasure-pain; high-heeled, intricately decorated boots for the fetishists; lacy female undies which had been worn by ferociously masculine Prussian officers beneath their uniforms. Here were the lower halves of trouser legs with elastic bands to hold them in position between knee and ankle. In these and nothing else but an overcoat and a pair of shoes, you could walk the streets and seem fully clothed, giving a camera-quick exposure whenever a suitable viewer appeared.

Here were fantasy pictures, drawn and painted by Hirschfeld's patients. Scenes from the court of a priapic king who sprawled on a throne with his own phallus for a scepter and watched the grotesque matings of his courtiers. Strange sad bedroom scenes in which the faces of the copulators expressed only dismay and agony. And here was a gallery of photographs, ranging in subject matter from the sexual organs of quasi-hermaphrodites to famous homosexual couples—Wilde with Alfred Douglas, Whitman with Peter Doyle, Ludwig of Bavaria with Kainz, Edward Carpenter with George Merrill.

Christopher giggled because he was embarrassed. He was embarrassed because, at last, he was being brought face to face with his tribe. Up to now, he had behaved as though the tribe didn't exist and homosexuality were a private way of life discovered by himself and a few friends. He had always known, of course, that this wasn't true. But now he was forced to admit kinship with these freakish fellow tribesmen and their distasteful customs. And he didn't like it. His first reaction was to blame the Institute. He said to himself: How can they take this stuff so
seriously?

Then, one afternoon, André Gide paid them a visit. He was taken on a tour of the premises personally conducted by Hirschfeld. Live exhibits were introduced, with such comments as: “Intergrade. Third Division.” One of these was a young man who opened his shirt with a modest smile to display two perfectly formed female breasts. Gide looked on, making a minimum of polite comment, judiciously fingering his chin. He was in full costume as the Great French Novelist, complete with cape. No doubt he thought Hirschfeld's performance hopelessly crude and un-French. Christopher's Gallophobia flared up. Sneering, culture-conceited frog! Suddenly he loved Hirschfeld—at whom he himself had been sneering, a moment before—the silly solemn old professor with his doggy mustache, thick peering spectacles, and clumsy German-Jewish boots … Nevertheless, they were all three of them on the same side, whether Christopher liked it or not. And later he would learn to honor them both, as heroic leaders of his tribe.

*   *   *

When Hirschfeld founded the Institute in 1919, he was just over fifty years old and notorious all over Western Europe as a leading expert on homosexuality. Thousands of members of the Third Sex, as he called it, looked up to him as their champion because, throughout his adult life, he had been campaigning for revision of Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code. This paragraph dealt with the punishment of homosexual acts between men. (By not including lesbian acts, it expressed a basic contempt for women which has been shared by the lawmakers of many other nations.)

When young, Hirschfeld had been a middle-of-the-road socialist. Now he was being drawn into alliance with the Communists. This was because the Soviet government, when it came into power in 1917, had declared that all forms of sexual intercourse between consenting individuals are a private matter, outside the law. The German Communist Party, of course, took the same stand. The emerging Nazi Party, on the other hand, was announcing that it would stamp out homosexuality because “Germany must be virile if we are to fight for survival.” Hitler denounced homosexuals, leftists, and Jews as traitors who had undermined Germany's will to resist and caused the military defeat of 1918.

Hirschfeld was a representative of all three groups. While lecturing in Munich in 1920, he was beaten up by Nazi-inspired members of his audience. Characteristically, he returned to Munich next year and got beaten up again; this time his skull was fractured and he was left for dead. But 1922 found him still unliquidated and in combat. He was even allowed to present the grievances of the Third Sex in a speech to some members of the Reichstag. To be sometimes treated with official respect, sometimes threatened with death; to be alternately praised and lampooned by the press; to be helped by those who would later lose their nerve and betray him—such was his nobly insecure position.

The Institute was by no means exclusively concerned with homosexuality. It gave advice to couples about to marry, based on research into their hereditary backgrounds. It offered psychiatric treatment for impotence and other psychological problems. It had a clinic which dealt with a variety of cases, including venereal disease. And it studied sex in every manifestation.

However, the existence of the Institute did enable Hirschfeld to carry on his campaign against Paragraph 175 much more effectively than before. It was a visible guarantee of his scientific respectability which reassured the timid and the conservative. It was a place of education for the public, its lawmakers, and its police. Hirschfeld could invite them to the sex museum and guide them through a succession of reactions—from incredulous disgust to understanding of the need for penal reform. Meanwhile, the Institute's legal department advised men who were accused of sex crimes and represented them in court. Hirschfeld had won the right to give them asylum until their cases were heard. Some of the people Christopher met at lunch belonged to this category.

(I have a memory of Christopher looking down from a room in the Institute and watching two obvious plainclothes detectives lurk under the trees which grow along the edge of the park. They hope that one of their wanted victims will be tempted to venture out of Hirschfeld's sanctuary for a sniff of fresh air. Then, according to the rules of the police game, he can be grabbed and carried off to prison.)

The year Christopher arrived at the Institute, Hirschfeld and his allies seemed about to win a victory. Earlier in 1929, the Reichstag Committee had finished drafting a penal-reform bill. According to this bill, consensual sex acts between adult males would no longer be crimes. The vote which decided this point had been close and it had only been won through the support of the Communists. The bill had been presented to the Reichstag and seemed likely to be passed into law. Then, in October, came the U.S. Stock Market crash, causing a period of panic and indecision in Europe which was unfavorable to reform of any kind. The Reichstag postponed discussion of the bill indefinitely.

*   *   *

Christopher's room, like the two rooms occupied by Francis, was just inside the front door of the apartment. You and your visitors could come and go at any hour without ever running into the landlady; no doubt, she tactfully used a rear exit. She lived far away at the back, somewhere, within a clearing in a Black Forest of furniture. If sex-connected sounds did reach her now and then, she never complained. Perhaps she even approved of them, on principle. After all, she was Hirschfeld's sister.

Francis's rooms had a view of the park. Christopher's room looked down into an interior courtyard; that was why it was dark and cheap. On one wall of this courtyard, Hirschfeld had caused to be printed in Gothic lettering a stanza by Goethe:

Seele des Menschen,

Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!

Schicksal des Menschen,

Wie gleichst du dem Wind!

Spirit of Man, how like thou art to water! Fate of Man, how like thou art to wind!
Never before in his life had Christopher had a room with a view of a poem. In his present state of mind, he much preferred his view to Francis's view of the Tiergarten trees. Just as changes in the light make trees look different, so Christopher's varying moods made the poem speak in different tones of voice: joyful, cynical, tragic. But always, whatever his mood, it reminded him: You are in Germany. The featureless walls of the courtyard, the neutral puddles of rain water on its floor, the patch of international sky above it—all were made utterly German by the presence of these German words.

Months later, when Christopher began giving English lessons, he would try to convey to his German pupils something of his own mystique about the German language. “A table doesn't
mean
‘ein Tisch'—when you're learning a new word, you must never say to yourself
it means.
That's altogether the wrong approach. What you must say to yourself is: Over there in England, they have a thing called a table. We may go to England and look at it and say, ‘That's our Tisch.' But it isn't. The resemblance is only on the surface. The two things are essentially different, because they've been thought about differently by two nations with different cultures. If you can grasp the fact that that thing in England isn't merely
called
a table, it really
is
a table, then you'll begin to understand what the English themselves are like. They are the sort of people who are compelled by their nature to think about that thing as a table; being what they are, they couldn't possibly call it anything else … Of course, if you cared to buy a table while you were in England and bring it back here, it would become
ein Tisch.
But not immediately. Germans would have to think about it as
ein Tisch
and call it
ein Tisch
for quite a long while, first.”

When Christopher talked like this, most of his pupils would smile, finding him charmingly whimsical and so English. Only a few decided that he was being metaphysical and therefore listened with respect. Having listened, they would question him and then argue, taking his statements with absolute literalness, until he became tired and tongue-tied.

How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language—all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe's stanza on the wall—was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and
ein Tisch
was that a table was the dining table in his mother's house and
ein Tisch
was
ein Tisch
in the Cosy Corner.

*   *   *

Christopher had made up his mind that as soon as he was settled in Berlin he would start revising his novel,
The Memorial.
He had finished the first draft of it about six months before this. Since then, he had scarcely looked at it.

So now, every morning, with his manuscript under his arm, he walked along In den Zelten and sat down in one of its cafés; indoors if the weather was cold or wet, out of doors in his overcoat if it was mild. He didn't come here merely because the room in his apartment was dark. To work in this public atmosphere seemed better suited to his new way of life. He wanted to be in constant contact with Germans and Germany throughout the day, not shut up alone.

With his manuscript in front of him, a tall glass of beer on his right, a cigarette burning in an ashtray on his left, he sipped and wrote, puffed and wrote. The beer, of course, was German: Schultheiss-Patzenhofer. The cigarette was a Turkish-grown brand especially popular in Berlin: Salem Aleikum. Bubi had introduced him to both, so the taste of the one and the smell of the other were magically charged. And how strange and delightful it was to be sitting here, with Turkish smoke tickling his nostrils and German beer faintly bitter on his tongue, writing a story in the English language about an English family in an English country house! It was most unlikely that any of the people here would be able to understand what he was writing. This gave him a soothing sense of privacy, which the noise of their talk couldn't seriously disturb; it was on a different wave length. With them around him, it was actually easier to concentrate than when he was by himself. He was alone and yet not alone. He could move in and out of their world at will. He was beginning to realize how completely at home one can be as a foreigner.

The beer, taken in tiny doses, put Christopher into a state of gradually increasing relaxation which he found he could safely prolong for about two and a half hours. All this while, his pencil moved over the paper with less and less inhibition, fewer and fewer pauses. But then, somewhere in the middle of the fourth glass, his attention lost its grip upon his theme. He wrote lines which made him grin to himself, knowing, as he did so, that they wouldn't seem so clever—maybe not clever at all—when he reread them later. He was getting a bit silly. He must stop. He picked up his papers, left the money for the waiter, and walked slowly home, thinking to himself: This is what freedom is. This is how I ought always to have lived.