The Intermediaries
A Weimar Story
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction
A Kirkus Reviews and Boston Globe Best Book of the Year
The fascinating history of a daring team of sexologists who built the first trans clinic in the shadow of the Third Reich.
Set in interwar Germany, The Intermediaries tells the forgotten story of the Institute for Sexual Science, the world’s first center for homosexual and transgender rights. Headed by a gay Jewish man, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the institute aided in the first gender-affirming surgeries and hormone treatments, acting as a rebellious base of operations in the face of rising prejudice, nationalism, and Nazi propaganda.
An expert in medical history, Brandy Schillace tells the story of the Institute through the eyes of Dora Richter, an Institute patient whom we follow in her quest to transition and live as a woman. While the colorful but ultimately tragic arc of Weimar Berlin is well documented, The Intermediaries is the first book to assert the inseparable, interdependent relationship of sex science to both the queer rights movement and the permissive Weimar culture, tracking how political factions perverted that same science to suit their own ends.
This riveting book brings together forgotten scientific and surgical discoveries (including previously untranslated archival material from Berlin) with the politics and social history that galvanized the first stirrings of the trans rights movement. Through its unforgettable characters and immersive, urgent storytelling, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Medical historian Shillace (Mr. Humble and Dr. Butcher) offers an evocative study of Weimar Germany's Institute for Sexual Sciences, the first scientific institution to treat homosexuality and transgender identity as innate, and famously the first institution targeted by the Nazis for book burning. Aiming to "understand why the Institute became such a target for hatred"—since such insight will "tell us everything about the present moment"—Shillace traces the Institute's origins back to the turn of the 20th century, when, even as innovative sexologists like the Institute's later founder Magnus Hirschfeld were pioneering a scientifically inquisitive attitude toward sexuality and gender, a still relatively newly formed Germany, motivated by fervent nationalism, began to scapegoat gay men in government for the nascent state's hardships. Hirschfeld himself testified at the 1907 trial of one such official; public "panic" about sexology exploded following the affair, swirling together with antisemitism as Jewish sexologists like Hirschfeld were accused of undermining the nation's "masculinity." Shillace traces this twisty political thread to the notorious 1933 book burning at the Institute, with a focus on the era's disastrous, repeated ceding of ground to Nazi "masculinism"—including efforts by gay men to distance themselves from trans people. The author also relays what she uncovered about Dora Richter, the first person to receive gender-affirming surgery at the Institute, whose story, while moving, can distract with its more sentimental tone ("She went about both day and night as a sweet young maid"). Still, this is an incisive, timely study of Weimar politics.
