Echoes of Queer Landscapes: On Lili Elbe and the Institute for Sexual Science

Something about the geographical placement of Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) grants it a profound, even magical attraction.[1] For hundreds of years, this area was a site of leisurely cross-class encounter, residence, and study; in Weimar-era Berlin it was home, among other ventures, to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Science) from its founding in 1919 until its violent closure in 1933. Paradoxically, no physical trace of this history remains, or so it would seem. Following Allied bombings in 1943, the neighbourhood known as In den Zelten was heavily damaged. The name In den Zelten (‘in the tents’) dates back to the mid-eighteenth century, when Huguenot descendants established seasonal refreshment tents along the edge of the Tiergarten, long before the area developed into a bustling entertainment and residential district in the nineteenth century. In Cold War Berlin, amidst its wreckage, a joint venture between the US and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) saw all lots appropriated, the site razed to the ground, and the Kongresshalle—today HKW—built in its place with a radically different planning logic. Constructing this intended beacon of free expression and democracy ironically required the bulldozing of an urban fabric centuries old, effectively burying its history. In contrast to the now undone Palast der Republik, whose own populist architecture replaced the partial ruins of the Berliner Stadtschloss, the Kongresshalle remains standing. In what society would In den Zelten re-emerge?

Despite its evisceration, destruction, erasure, and replacement, some visual reminders of the former Institute for Sexual Science exist there today. Yet, because the FRG retained the Nazi-revised version of Paragraph 175 criminalizing sex between men, official forms of remembrance remained marginal well into the 1990s. The Bundestag abolished Paragraph 175 in early 1994, and since July of that year, a memorial stele to Dr Magnus Hirschfeld,[2] founder of the Institute, stands just beyond HKW’s Forough Farrokhzad Garden. Across the river Spree, whose north shore bears Hirschfeld’s name since 2008, stands the 2017 Monument for the First Homosexual Emancipation Movement, of which he was a main figure.[3] Other noteworthy monuments stand elsewhere.[4] Since 2015, the bar at HKW has borne the name Magnus Hirschfeld Bar[5] while the eastern garden became the Lili Elbe Garden[6] in 2023, due in part to their geographic intersection with the plot where the Institute once stood. While welcome, these commemorative gestures are indelibly contemporary: they respond to a present-day site devoid of historical structures and spaces.

What, if anything, survives of the Institute’s environs that could serve as a spatiotemporal link between its time and ours? This is a question I have asked since 2022, when I first began to grapple with what the rupture caused by ascendant fascism, the Second World War, and postwar planning represents for its historical site. I spent time researching the Institute and its legacy, perusing archives and libraries, and studying literature and films on the subject. A quote from Hirschfeld’s inaugural speech on 1 July 1919 stuck with me: ‘The old Tiergarten trees surrounding this house stand as its symbol. How much human passion and heartache has, through the centuries, passed by these venerable oaks and lindens ... It is into this soil that we plant our institute today as a young tree.’[7] I imagined its roots spreading out and mingling with vegetal and fungal neighbours in the expansive Tiergarten park, surviving there, underground, in the long shadow of fascism. So much from that time has been lost, but some publications and archival materials related to the Institute still exist. Because much of the literature revolves around the man Hirschfeld, I was grateful for the invitation to engage with the namesake of the Lili Elbe Garden, whose short time as a patient in Berlin was nonetheless important. It was while reading about Lili with a heightened attention to landscape that I found an answer to my question, so my text begins with her story.

Lili’s Life Story

Lili Elbe, born 28 December 1882, in Vejle, Denmark,[8] was a successful landscape painter and one of the first publicly known European trans women. She made an important journey to Berlin in early March 1930, where Hirschfeld interviewed her at the Institute for Sexual Science, a centre that served sexual minorities, advocated for sexual diversity, and was a social gathering space for what we might today call ‘queer communities’ in Weimar Germany. At the Institute, Lili received confirmation for gender affirming care and went on to have four operations, one elsewhere in Berlin and three in Dresden, before her premature death in September 1931. Lili’s time in Berlin was brief but consequential, because it marked the initiation of her medical gender transition. In her autobiography, Lili describes taking a walk through the Tiergarten on the cusp of spring on the planned day of her first surgery. Sparked by her observations in this vibrant, landscape-style park, she pauses to contemplate questions about her future life, including her art making. After this transition, she would make a radical break from painting, but not without glimmers of a possible return to creative expression.

Lili’s story begins with the life of Einar.[9] In her own accounting of her life until after the first surgery in Dresden, she describes the person who would become Lili Elbe as Einar Wegener, the name assigned at birth. She describes two beings dwelling in one body, one male and one female.[10] As such this essay follows the cue given by Lili, and treats these figurations as separate entities.

At age 19, Einar began studies at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. There, he met Gerda Gottlieb, a fellow student of painting, and the two married in 1904, with Gerda taking his surname. Einar developed into an acclaimed landscape painter, with Gerda receiving more limited success.[11] Later it came out that Einar was modelling as a woman for Gerda’s paintings, and the scandal this provoked compelled the couple to leave the Danish capital. In 1912, they traveled to Italy and France before settling in Paris, where they moved in bohemian circles outside the bourgeois culture to which they were accustomed. By the 1920s, Einar’s person was increasingly living and identifying as Lili.

Einar gave credit to Gerda for bringing Lili into existence. But when it comes to the name ‘Lili’, Danish actress Anna Larssen is credited, who was having a portrait done by Gerda and named Lili after discovering her made-up by Gerda as a model replacement.[12] Lili would eventually ‘gain the upper hand’ over Einar.[13] Early on, he remembers in the narrative, ‘Lili and I continued to live our double life, and no one, neither the “initiated” nor myself, saw in this anything else than a pleasant kind of distraction and entertainment, a kind of artists’ caprice, neither more nor less.’[14] Yet Lili’s existence would become more urgent, leading to changes in Einar’s physical form. He experienced enough spiritual pain to seriously contemplate ending his life, rather than live a double existence. In spring 1929, Einar’s overall wellbeing significantly deteriorated, and a chance meeting with Dr Kurt Warnekros resulted in an invitation to the Municipal Women’s Clinic in Dresden, where he was director, for treatment.[15] In accordance with existing rules, Einar, aged 47, would first undergo an orchiectomy in Berlin to gain permission to enter the clinic as a female patient.[16]

Queer Inheritance

Ahead of surgery, Einar contemplates what will become of his art making, and whether he will pass this on to Lili. Aboard a train to Berlin, Einar adds to his speculative obituary: ‘Two subjects he preferred above all else: Paris … and landscapes under lowering skies … It was especially in pictures of the latter kind, these strong, very masculinely conceived storm pictures, that [he] found an outlet for his talent.’[17] Einar associated landscape painting with masculinity, likely because he and his peers in this academic genre were mostly if not all men. Despite challenging the rigid dichotomies of sex in the early twentieth century, Lili's narrative still reproduces a stark contrast between the roles of men and women. Einar visits the Institute for Sexual Science upon his arrival in Berlin, where Dr Hirschfeld conducts a psychological evaluation. In the waiting room, Einar encounters trans men and women and feels ‘disgusted’.[18] This reaction may have stemmed, at least in part, from being compared to Dora Richter at the clinic. Richter was a maid at the clinic and therefore someone of lower social standing, who would go on to receive similar treatments to Einar.[19] Leah Tigers has examined this confrontation in depth and argued that class, not only advancements in science and the dissemination of modern narrative approaches, is crucial for understanding trans subjectivity in the 1910s and 20s.[20] For example, Toni Ebel,[21] a working class woman who was also trans and a painter, and an important fixture at the Institute, has received comparatively less public attention.

A few days after the evaluation, on a bright March day, Einar strolls along Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden, arriving at Pariser Platz with a framed view of the neoclassical Brandenburg Gate bathed in sunlight. He is on his way to the Institute to be photographed before moving on to his scheduled first operation. The narrative continues, ‘The painter awoke in him. He went into Tiergarten. Sunshine and budding vegetation everywhere. And the dead leaves were glistening like bronze.’[22] Einar’s hours spent painting were ‘the only real and genuine joys of his life.’[23] He speaks about them as his property, joys that belonged to him alone, and he doubts that he could share them with or receive them from anyone else. Einar asks himself, ‘Could he transmit this property, this wealth? … Can one transmit joy? The joy of painting? For him … these joys had gone beyond recall.’ Mapping heteronormative notions of lineage and inheritance onto Lili, he wonders if she would feel any desire to paint, whether he would ‘be able to bequeath her as a heritage this joy, this blissful feeling of creative capacity’.[24] It is amid the varied tactile and tangible scenes of human-made nature and urban infrastructure in the Tiergarten, a park that simulates landscape, that Einar finds language for medical gender transition, itself made possible by recent advancements in modern science. Next, Einar is photographed at the Institute, receives the first operation elsewhere in Berlin, and departs for Dresden accompanied by Gerda.

After two surgeries in Dresden, and once Gerda has departed, Lili writes to her from the Women's Clinic, ‘The bright red blossoms of the magnolia tree—you know it—give off a heavy scent. I am overjoyed! […] It is my Garden of Eden.’[25] Later she writes, ‘I am now allowed to breakfast in the garden under my magnolia tree. Life is so wonderful! To be able to stay here always! It would be too lovely!’[26] This garden might be where Lili was happiest in her lifetime. Yet, confirming Einar’s apprehension, she does not regard this landscape as a painter—Lili seeing the view from the train to Dresden had once caused a tremor to pass through her, as she felt she was seeing through Einar’s eyes[27]—but rather as a young spirit with unquenchable curiosity. That brief happiness is short-lived: her life story goes public,[28] she leaves art making behind and hopes for motherhood instead,[29] and after the fourth operation in June 1931 she never recovers, dying on 13 September 1931,[30] still calling those fourteen months ‘a whole and happy human life’.[31]

Einar’s reflections on Lili’s figurative inheritance are illuminated by Jack Halberstam’s arguments eight decades later in the context of queer theory against memorialization, which ‘has a tendency to tidy up disorderly histories’.[32] For Halberstam, ‘forgetting becomes a way of resisting the heroic and grand logics of recall and unleashes new forms of memory that relate more to spectrality than to hard evidence, to lost genealogies than to inheritance, to erasure than to inscription.’’[33] Whether Lili’s insistence that she cannot recall Einar’s experiences are read as literal or symbolic,[34] the question of what carries over remains relevant to discussions of ‘queer time’.[35] Einar, who uses the terminology of heteronormative time and class to relate to Lili as next of kin, ultimately cannot ‘bequeath’ her his desire to paint, but she does ‘inherit’ an appreciation of nature; in this sense, she ‘forgets’ what Einar knew. Yet something of his way of seeing carries over, less as an inheritance than as a ‘lost genealogy’. However, the posthumously published narrative of Lili’s life also performs recall, offering memory as evidence and inscribing one version of events as historical fact, variations among the narrative’s editions notwithstanding. Thus Lili’s story sits firmly in the elusive archive of queer history, both as a narrative that troubles gender and as one of the few early European examples of queer memorialization.

Site Speculation

With Lili’s story in tow, I return to the question of what remains of the Institute and the ‘venerable oaks and lindens’ of the Tiergarten—this exuberant park filled with living witnesses to human life in all its diversity—to link us to the site’s Weimar past. What have Berlin’s queer communities inherited, or not, of this bustling neighbourhood and its vibrant social life? On 6 May 1933, Nazis raided the Institute while Hirschfeld was in exile, destroying this ‘young tree’ just shy of 14 years. The fascists burned Hirschfeld’s library and archive, likely along with Lili’s medical records, on Opernplatz. Allied firebombing probably destroyed her remaining medical records later in Dresden. The architecture of the former Institute in Berlin was bombed in 1943, and by the bitterly cold winter of 1948–49, marked by the Soviet blockade of West Berlin, most of the Tiergarten’s trees had been felled for fuel.[36] It seemed the Institute and its legacy had been lost and forgotten. While the US-German Kongresshalle took shape in the decade that followed, a new, more restrictive standard of trans healthcare was nascent in California, and it would go on to become a globally influential paradigm, including in Germany.[37] Neither the Institute’s history nor contemporary developments in sexology found a home in the Kongresshalle that emerged on its former grounds.

Nonetheless, there have been major efforts to recover the legacy of the Institute, and artistic research has visualized its former neighbourhood using archival resources. Since 1982, the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft, founded by members of the gay and lesbian movement in West Berlin, has researched the history of the Institute, sexual science, and the sexual reform movement, all while maintaining an extensive archive.[38] Their work has supported a flourishing of research into the history of the Institute in recent decades. Still, when visiting  HKW today, there are little to no cues to invoke a sense of what it felt like to be in the former neighbourhood. As part of the Wohnungsfrage (Housing Question) project at HKW in 2015, Maria Eichhorn researched the site's previous land ownership structures and made its historic plots visible through white lines on the pavement at their geographically correct boundaries. Accompanying this installation, Eichhorn produced a publication consisting of folded A2 sheets housed in an L-folder that combines texts, drawings, and archival documents exposing the complicated and, at worst, unethical practice of land acquisition carried out to prepare the site for the Kongresshalle, which involved the sale of property appropriated from former Jewish owners—including Hirschfeld.[39] Eichhorn’s installation approached the site as an archive, temporarily reintroducing a sense of continuity through a Dogville-like minimalism that engaged the viewer’s active imagination.

Yet, I recently discovered, hiding in plain sight all this time are two living oak trees—survivors planted in the nineteenth century—just next to HKW. Hirschfeld’s and Lili’s shared appreciation of trees, those great witnesses of time, inspired me to approach the landscape of HKW with an attention to its woody non-human inhabitants, and that is how I came to ‘find’ them. These two trees, the only survivors of a once thriving corner of the park that is now regenerated, are between 140 and 160 years old.[40] Incidentally, these are the only two prewar trees that stand in the immediate vicinity of the former Institute, meaning there is a good chance they witnessed both Hirschfeld’s inauguration speech and Lili’s brief presence. After the Tiergarten’s decimation in the late 1940s, only four trees remained near the Kongresshalle and its grounds by 1958: one Aesculus hippocastanum (common horse chestnut) tree, now deceased, which stood southwest of the reflecting pool, and three Quercus robur (English oak) trees clustered near what we now call the Lili Elbe Garden, of which two remain today.[41] The tallest of the two surviving oaks stands in a planted area to the east of this partially paved garden, which is edged by a waist-high wall that lends an enclosed character;[42] container buildings installed circa 1990 as supplemental offices for HKW further enclose it,[43] but they still allow a view of the tree from the garden. The second surviving oak spent a time on a landscaped island in the Kongresshalle parking lot and now stands encircled by pavement in the redesigned, post-Wende government district. The two surviving oaks are visible in the aerial composite view that accompanies this essay, in the bottom right corner of the frame. Under their layers of bark, in the rings of these trees, exist recordings of the extensive ‘human passion and heartache’ they witnessed.

Halberstam’s theory of queer time—with its attendant forgetting and near-opposite, memorialization—helps me to understand the present-day site of the former Institute in various ways, including through its memorials, Eichhorn’s work, and my own artistic research. Memorials to Hirschfeld built since the 1990s, the first a humble, quasi-anthropomorphic stele and the second an odd assemblage of grey plaques and brightly coloured oversized calla lilies, have perhaps necessarily glossed over some of the Institute’s thornier aspects, like its embrace of then-fashionable eugenics and its sometimes questionable ethnographic stances,[44] to deliver primarily information that situates it within a historiography of heteronormative time. Their function is both pedagogical—to stake a historical claim to space in a redacted landscape—and commemorative, serving as anchors for memory culture. In Eichhorn’s work, the Institute is not the sole protagonist, and its critical memorialization takes place in the text rather than in space. Eichhorn’s installation, rather than presenting viewers with an elaborate reconstruction of In den Zelten, exploited gaps and fissures in the site-as-archive to make them visible through life-size linguistic gestures: lines on paper in the archive became lines on the earth in the present. This act of geo-graphy (literally: earth-writing) gave tangibility to absence in a poetic way, while turning erasure into evidence.

In my own practice, I find particular resonance in the idea of spectrality, as opposed to hard evidence, despite my fascination with archives and attempts to pull together historical threads. When I think about time and space, particularly in relation to the temporally rich palimpsest of the HKW site, I prefer not to think in terms of the time line. Instead, I envision a space spiral—the site as a point in space through which time moves, as a spiral, not linear but cyclical, and history is not encoded on ledgers, but enacted in relation through ‘spiral retelling’, thinking with Édouard Glissant.[45] I want to approach the site through a quantum metaphor of superposition, where In den Zelten and HKW coexist simultaneously. Using 3D scanning and collage, I work with found spaces and materials, processing them through lens-based and computational imaging to render this space spiral or quantum overlap in visual compositions. I queer notions of history in relation to landscape and site—thinking how space and history can be otherwise, superimposed over time. With the Institute, Lili’s story, and the oaks as anchors, my research digs into the soil looking for information; it touches and listens to the trees, led more by a feeling of magnetic pull to the site than pure historical interest.

Lili spoke about her paintings as ‘echoes’ of irreducible aesthetic scenes witnessed with immense joy, of moments that by their very nature resist inheritance.[46] This aspect of her narrative fascinates me, as it poses a deeply philosophical question about art making, surprisingly, in terms of heteronormative bequest. Using that language, it seemingly grapples with the near universal terminal family lineage of queer subjects, while also offering a way to articulate what carries over to the ‘next generation’ of queer folks: echoes of other lives. In a way, my work is creating echoes too—echoes of queer landscapes. These echoes emanate from the archives. Without the continuously cared for spaces and materials I witnessed and captured, from HKW itself to an architectural model by Gerald Narr at the Schwules Museum, from architectural drawings at the Landesarchiv Berlin and Landesdenkmalamt to photographs at the Mitte Museum, this work could not exist—thus it is itself also an archive of care. Transmitting knowledge across generations takes different forms, and the archive, while imperfect, offers an opportunity to develop new narratives, to ask new questions.

Used as farmland in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War due to severe resource scarcity, Berliners slowly but surely started replanting the familiar Tiergarten.[47] From smaller early gestures to eventual large-scale campaigns, over decades the Tiergarten would cycle back to a denser version closer to its past self. Survivors stand among the younger trees. Returning to 1919, I contemplate another question: How many other ‘trees’ like the Institute were planted there? How many endeavours have grown together in shared soil, roots interlinked? Fascism saw this vibrant network of trees—literal and figurative—cut down to everyone’s detriment. If anything, the Tiergarten’s recovery shows that there is capacity for repair, and that cumulative acts of care can bear fruit. Maybe not in one generation, but over decades and centuries, as an investment in the future regardless of one's (non-)reproductive practices. The soil bears a great sense of loss, but also of hope—in the enduring return of queer life.

 

[1] The author thanks for their input and support: Dr Rainer Herrn; Elinor Hasselberg; Cleo Wächter; André Wunstorf, Landesarchiv Berlin; Sigrid Schulze, Mitte Museum; Dipl.-Ing. Bernd Krüger; Dr Leonie Glabau and Sophie Kleveman, Landesdenkmalamt Berlin; Adrienne Teicher; Lilium Redwine; Codrin Talaba; and last but not least, for their kind invitation to further develop this artistic research and for their enriching intellectual exchange, Prof Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Jill Winder, and Fiona Shipwright, HKW.

[2] Dr Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) is an important historical figure and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science (1919–1933). He is known for his theory of sexual intermediacy used to describe a range of sexual identities and orientations beyond the established binary, for his advocacy of the idea that homosexuality is an inborn characteristic and is unchangeable, and for his political activism for the civil rights of queer people. Hirschfeld was the first to distinguish between transgender (gender identity) and homosexuality (sexual orientation) as two separate and not inherently linked concerns. He was homosexual and Jewish. In English, see for example Robert Beachy, ‘Weimar Sexual Reform and the Institute for Sexual Science’, ch. 6 in Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 160–86; Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: A Life for Sexual Reform, trans. Edward H. Willis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014); and Elena Mancini, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). In German, refer to biographies by Manfred Herzer, Ralf Dose, and Rainer Herrn. The 1999 film The Einstein of Sex, dir. Rosa von Praunheim, follows Hirschfeld’s life.

[3] ‘Denkmal in Berlin: Geschichte von Magnus Hirschfeld und der ersten homosexuellen Emanzipationsbewegung’, LSVD (Lesbian and Gay Federation of Berlin-Brandenburg), https://www.lsvd.de/de/ct/765-Denkmal-in-Berlin-Geschichte-von-Magnus-Hirschfeld-und-der-ersten-homosexuellen-Emanzipationsbewegung.

[4] See for example the 2008 Memorial to the Persecuted Homosexuals under National Socialism (located approximately 1 km southeast of HKW in the Tiergarten), the 1994 memorial column for Magnus Hirschfeld (located in Berlin-Charlottenburg), and the 1989 ‘Pink Triangle’ memorial plaque (embedded in the facade of the U-Bahn station Nollendorfplatz).

[5] ‘Magnus Hirschfeld and HKW’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, https://archiv.hkw.de/en/hkw/geschichte/ort_geschichte/magnus_hirschfeld.php. The embedded video, ‘Magnus Hirschfeld – Ein Jahrhundertreformer’, is highly recommended.

[6] ‘Resignifying HKW’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, https://www.hkw.de/en/the-house/the-building/resignifying-hkw.

[7] Hirschfeld quoted in Rainer Herrn, ‘Outside in – inside out: Topografie, Architektur und Funktionen des Instituts für Sexualwissenschaft zwischen Wahrnehmungen und Imaginationen’, in Metropolenzauber: Sexuelle Moderne und urbaner Wahn, eds. Gabriele Dietze and Dorothea Dornhof (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2014), 23–56, 40, author’s translation. The unedited original quote in German reads: ‘Ein Symbol dieses Hauses sind die alten Tiergartenbäume, die es umgeben. Wie viel Liebeslust und Liebesleid der Menschen ist durch die Jahrhunderte an diesen ehrwürdigen Eichen und Linden, beispielsweise an diesem zweihundert Jahre alten Efeubaum vorüberge-wandelt, der den Vorgarten des Gebäudes schmückt. In dieses Erdreich pflanzen wir heute dieses Institut als jungen Baum’ (Dietze and Dornhof, Metropolenzauber, 40).

[8] Lili Elbe registered her name in Denmark in November 1930 as Lili Ilse Elvenes. Following the narrative’s cue, this essay uses the name Lili Elbe throughout to refer to the historical person and the person depicted in the narrative.

[9] Lili is widely known thanks to her posthumously published autobiography Man into Woman: An Authentic Record of a Sex Change, a title she ‘reviled’—she preferred ‘How Lili Became a Real Girl’, in Danish, Hvorledes Lili blev til en rigtig Pige (Lili Elbe, Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition, eds. Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer [London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020], 10). This narrative of Lili’s life, scholars have noted, does not always line up with other historical sources (See Lili Elbe, Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition; Sabine Meyer, ‘Learning and Connecting with Lili Elbe’, Bloomsbury Literary Studies Blog, https://bloomsburyliterarystudiesblog.com/2020/11/learning-and-connecting-with-lili-elbe.html; Rainer Herrn and Annette F. Timm, ‘Elbe, Lili (1882–1931)’, in Global Encyclopedia of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) History, eds. Howard Chiang, et al. [Farmington Hills, MI: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2019], 500–502).

Lili was not the sole author of her own narrative: it was compiled by editor Ernst Harthern (under the pseudonym Niels Hoyer) from multiple sources, including Lili’s own writing (Elbe, Man Into Woman, 20). Furthermore, the contents of the Danish (1931), German (1932), and English (1933) editions of the book differ significantly from each other and from the original German typescript, with additions and changes made after Lili’s death (Elbe, Man into Woman, 3).

Recent book and film interpretations add further complications (David Ebershoff, The Danish Girl [New York: Viking, 2000] and Tom Hooper, dir., The Danish Girl [Los Angeles: Focus Features, 2015], film). The film portrays Lili Elbe as the first person who had sex reassignment surgery, and it also portrays Hirschfeld as the Berlin surgeon. There is strong evidence that both these claims are false. Notably, the actor who plays Lili Elbe, Eddie Redmayne, identifies as a cis man.

The editors of Man Into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition write, ‘The very variability of this narrative, its resistance to being pinned down to any one version, marks the narrative as “queer” as much as does its subject’ (Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer, ‘From Work to Tech: Digital Archives and Queer Narratives’, Modernism/Modernity (blog/forum), https://modernismmodernity.org/forums/posts/work-tech-queer-narratives).

[10] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 107. Much of the narrative deals with the inner relationship between these two identities. Einar and Lili speak about each other in the third person. Einar (named Andreas in the narrative) says, ‘[L]ike so many sick persons who do not know what is really the matter with them, I began to procure all kinds of scientific books dealing with sexual problems. Within a short time I acquired an expert knowledge in this department, and knew many things of which the layman hardly dreams. But gradually it became clear to me that nothing which related to normal men and women could throw any light on my mysterious case. / ‘So it came about that I formed an independent opinion, to the effect that I was both man and woman in one body, and that the woman in this body was in process of gaining the upper hand. Upon this assumption I explained the disturbances, both physical and psychic, from which I was suffering to an increasing extent’ (emphasis added).

[11] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 6. Einar won the Neuhausen prize in 1907, awarded by the Copenhagen Academy of Fine Arts, while Gerda’s style had a more modernist bent and was less acknowledged at the time.

[12] Elble, Man Into Woman, 87. For Gerda, Lili became a (sexual) playmate (Gespielin in the German version) and ‘toy’ (Elbe, Man Into Woman, 89). Lili’s personality and experience grew from that first ‘christening’ with Larssen into an entirely separate identity through Lili’s relationship with Gerda and her public life at parties. She received visitors at home and occasionally appeared in public, and during the couple’s stays in Beaugency, France in the 1920s, she took part in theatrical and performative events. While her femininity appears conventional in the narrative, Gerda’s paintings of Lili ‘smoking, drinking, playing cards, wearing heels, and reading erotic literature’ are modern (Elbe, Man Into Woman, 6). This alludes to a femininity that is necessarily more complex than the one presented in the narrative.

[13] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 83.

[14] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 103.

[15] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 7n39. Warnekros directed the Staatliche Frauenklinik in Dresden from 1925 to 1948.

[16] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 8. The editors write, ‘Dr. [Erwin] Gohrbandt performed an orchiectomy on Einar. At that time the glands were seen to determine a person’s sex so that once the testicles were removed the patient who entered the Women’s Clinic in Dresden was no longer considered male.’

[17] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 72. In the narrative, Einar Wegener is named Andreas Sparre; in this quote, ‘Andreas Sparre’ has been replaced with ‘he’ to improve flow.

[18] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 80.

[19] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 80.

[20] Leah Tigers, ‘On the Clinics and Bars of Weimar Berlin: The first half of an Essay about Transgender Women and Surgery’, Tricky Mother Nature, https://trickymothernature.com/insideout1.html.

[21] Toni Ebel (born 10 November 1881) received gender affirming operations at the Institute starting on 6 January 1929 (https://toni-ebel.de/perspektiven/). A number of her paintings are presented in the exhibition Queer Art in the GDR? Biographies Between Underground and Propaganda at nGbK Berlin, 28 March–28 June 2026, see: https://ngbk.de/en/programm/programm/queere-kunst-in-der-ddr. Like Dora ‘Dorchen’ Richter and Charlotte Charlaque, Ebel worked at the Institute as a Dienstmädchen (maid). This funded her room and board and her treatments. She also sold paintings to, among others, Hirschfeld. Ebel was a celebrated painter in the early GDR but has since mostly been forgotten (https://toni-ebel.de/). See also: https://magnus-hirschfeld.de/gedenken/personen/ebel-toni/.

[22] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 117.

[23] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 118.

[24] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 118.

[25] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 158.

[26] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 159.

[27] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 137. ‘Lili’s eyes had become the eyes of a painter, and a tremor passed through her. “Those are not my eyes. They are Andreas’ [Einar’s] eyes. Is he not yet dead within me? Can he give me no peace, then?”’

[28] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 183.

[29] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 196.

[30] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 10.

[31] Elbe, Man Into Woman, 198.

[32] Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 15. Halberstam cites Toni Morison, Beloved (1987); Saidya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2008); and Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters (1996).

[33] Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 15.

[34] Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, 159. Lili writes to Gerda on 23 May 1930, ‘You must believe me when I say that I have forgotten Andreas [Einar] and everything connected with him. For me he is a dead person. If by chance a recollection arises in me, I see nothing but clouds, vague clouds.’

[35] Benjamin Busch, ‘AlgoRhythmanalysis in Quarantine’, Arts of the Working Class, 12 May 2020, https://artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/algorhythmanalysis. ‘For Jack Halberstam, there exists both straight time and queer time, the former reflecting the normative progression of heterosexual life in modern society (“the narrative coherence of adolescence – early adulthood – marriage – reproduction – child rearing – retirement – death”), the latter reflecting the experience of time for non-reproductive, queer subjects.’ See Freeman, Elizabeth, Jack Halberstam, et al., ‘Theorizing Queer Temporalities: A Roundtable Discussion’, in GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 13, no. 2–3 (2007): 177–195, and Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: NYU Press, 2005).

[36] Sonja Dümpelmann, ‘Burning Trees: Street Trees in Wartime and Early Cold War Berlin’, in Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), 125–57.

[37] Beans Velocci, ‘Standards of Care: Uncertainty and Risk in Harry Benjamin's Transsexual Classifications’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 8, no. 4 (1 November 2021): 462–480.

[38] Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft e.V., ‘Geschichte und Selbstverständnis’, https://magnus-hirschfeld.de/verein/ueber_uns/.

[39] Maria Eichhorn, In den Zelten 4 / 5 / 5A / 6 / 7 / 8 / 9 / 9A / 10, Kronprinzenufer 29 / 30, Beethovenstrasse 1 / 2 / 3 (1832 bis / to 1959) > John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 (seit / since 1959), Berlin (Berlin: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, 2015).

[40] Dipl.-Ing. Bernd Krüger, Außenanlagen der Berliner Kongreßhalle Haus der Kulturen der Welt: Pflegewerk (Berlin: Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, December 2006), Plan-Nr. HKW 12.06/P1.1.

[41] Krüger, Pflegewerk (2006), Plan-Nr. HKW 12.06/P1.1. For additional context: the grounds around today’s HKW were designed by the Kongresshalle’s architect Hugh Stubbins together with Hans Migge and execution planning was developed by Director of the Berlin Parks Authority Willy Alverdes with his colleague Anna-Lore Waschnek (Krüger, ‘Außenanlagen der ehemaligen Kongresshalle’, in Gartendenkmale in Berlin: Nachkriegszeit bis Ende der Sechziger Jahre (Berlin/Petersberg: be.bra verlag / Michael Imhof Verlag, 2019), 136).

[42] Krüger, Pflegewerk (2006), 24.

[43] Krüger, Pflegewerk (2006), 14.

[44] See Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017); Laurie Marhoefer, Racism and the Making of Gay Rights: A Sexologist, His Student, and the Empire of Queer Love (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022).

[45] Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997).

[46] Absorbing a view of the Venusbassin pond in the Tiergarten before his first surgery, ‘[Einar] blessed the fate which had made him a painter, a creature of utter simplicity who surrendered himself fully to the enjoyment of the moment. Not to lose this precious moment was the impulse which found release when he painted. He usually painted feverishly … Thus he had created his pictures, spellbound on the dead canvas with dead colours, until what he had divined with his eyes suddenly began to take on a life of its own. . . . Captured echoes, he had then usually confessed to himself. My pictures are only feeble echoes’ (Lili Elbe, Man into Woman, 117–118).

[47] Dümpelmann, Seeing Trees (2019), 131.