The Einstein of Sex
Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
An illuminating portrait of a lost thinker, German-Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld.
More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the “Einstein of Sex,” grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he’s been largely forgotten.
Journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld’s rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin’s cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world’s queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books
Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.
Rich in passion and intellect, The Einstein of Sex at last brings together this unsung icon’s work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond the binaries. A century after his groundbreaking work—as the fights for personal freedom and societal acceptance rage on—Hirschfeld’s gift for thinking beyond the confines of his world has much to teach us
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This vital biography from journalist Brook (The Accident of Color) shines a light on forward-thinking German physician Magnus Hirschfeld, who was born in 1868. As a gay Jewish boy in Kolberg, Prussia, Hirschfeld grew up amid a rising tide of bigotry; Germany criminalized homosexuality in 1871 and Christian conservative groups petitioned to repeal the country's religious freedom law in 1880. After earning his medical degree in 1892, Hirschfeld moved to Chicago and immersed himself in the city's queer scene. His experiences there informed the theories he published after returning to Germany two years later. He argued that homosexuality was an innate quality and that gender existed on a spectrum, claiming that there are millions of ways in which masculinity and femininity might present in individuals. By the 1930s, such heterodox thinking, as well as his Jewish ancestry, put him in the crosshairs of Nazis who burned his books and ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science. Exiled to France in 1932, Hirschfeld died of natural causes three years later. Brook's elegant elucidation of Hirschfeld's theories proves that there's nothing new about the idea that gender and sexuality exist on a spectrum, and the chilling account of the persecution Hirschfeld faced shows the disturbing ways in which authoritarian leaders stigmatize queerness. This will stick with readers long after they finish the last page. Photos.
