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6:30 PM-8:00 PM
Through Science to Justice: On the Legacy of Magnus Hirschfeld
Book Talks & Panel Discussion | Authors Daniel Brook & Brandy Schillace in conversation with Noah Isenberg
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Goethe-Institut New York, New York, NY
- Language In English
- Price Free
In 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science, the world's first sexology research center, in Berlin. The Institute led the way in studying and treating various aspects of gender and sexuality, including topics related to gay, transgender, and intersex individuals. Additionally, the Institute championed sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women's rights. By 1933, the institute was closed permanently, having been ransacked by the National Socialists, its library and archives burned. Hirschfeld had fled Germany in 1930—embarking on a global research tour that took him to the United States, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East—before settling in France, where he would die of heart attack on his 67th birthday.
In his new historical biography, The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin (W.W. Norton, 2025), journalist Daniel Brook has retraced Hirschfeld’s life and legacy. Hirschfeld publicly advocated for gay rights while privately counseling patients toward self-acceptance, helping turn Weimar Berlin into the world’s queer capital. The Einstein of Sex brings together this unsung icon’s work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond binary thinking.
In The Intermediaries: A Weimar Story (W.W. Norton, 2025), historian Brandy Schillace tells the story of the Institute for Sexual Science through the eyes of Dora Richter, a patient of the Institute whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. The Intermediaries charts the relationships between nascent sexual science, queer civil rights, and the fight against fascism. It tells riveting stories of LGBTQ pioneers—a surprising, long-suppressed history—and offers a cautionary tale in the face of today’s oppressive anti-trans legislation.
Copies of both books will be available for purchase and signing.
Panelists
Daniel Brook is a journalist whose writing has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, Nation, and New York Times Magazine, and he is the author of several books, including A History of Future Cities and The Accident of Color: A Story of Race in Reconstruction. A New York native and a Yale graduate, Brook lives in New Orleans. He researched The Einstein of Sex in Berlin on a Robert and Ina Caro Research/Travel Fellowship.
Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She lives in Ohio.
Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the university’s two study-away programs, UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City), where he’s based. Author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), his recent anthology Billy Wilder on Assignment (Princeton, 2021) was selected by Tom Stoppard as a TLS 2021 Book of the Year. He’s currently writing a cultural history of Some Like It Hot for Norton and a short interpretive biography of Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series.
Location
30 Irving Place
New York, NY 10003
USA