A tailor who made special clothes for transgender people wishes her clients happy holidays in an ad. A guidebook features dozens of cafes, clubs and bars where lesbians could meet. In personals in the back of a gay magazine, men search for love, sex and companionship.
These items are all on display in “To Be Seen: Queer Lives 1900-1950,” an exhibition at the Munich Documentation Center for the History of National Socialism that runs through May 21, 2023. The five-part show explores different dimensions of the robust lives queer people in Germany carved out for themselves in the beginning of the 20th century, positioning them as pioneers who challenged existing social structures. The final section focuses on life under the Nazis and the years that followed.
“We have to focus on the diversity that existed before 1933, because otherwise, we’re repeating the narrative of exclusion, of persecution,” said Mirjam Zadoff, the director of the Documentation Center museum, referring to the year Hitler and his National Socialists came to power.
In the first section of the show, short films tell the stories of gay and transgender individuals from the early 20th century who “tried to be themselves and to fight for themselves and their rights,” said Karolina Kühn, the exhibition’s curatorial director. One film focuses on Anita Augspurg, an activist who fought for women’s suffrage and improved working conditions for prostitutes, and against Germany’s involvement in World War I and II; another is about Claire Waldoff, a popular cabaret singer in Weimar Republic-era Berlin who was known for bawdy songs with titles like “Oh God, How Dumb Are Men?” and lived openly as a lesbian.
“It was important to us to show how many queer, trans, nonbinary people existed already during the 1920s in Germany,” said Philipp Gufler, a member of the Forum Queer Archive of Munich, who was an artistic adviser for the exhibition.
He noted that, though lesbians, gay men and transgender people often remained siloed during that period, with their own bars, clubs and publications, there were intersections as well. For example, he said, in the personal ads of Die Freundin, a popular lesbian magazine that was published from 1924 to 1933, some people wrote things like, “I’m a woman but I see myself more as a male, and I’m looking for a woman to accept this.”