Building Connections with Excellence
No diferente
de los demás
Una novela
No diferente de los demás
Una novela
de
Markus Vinzent
El ciclo de Anika · Libro dos
Para ser honesto, hay que saber.
Para ser valiente, hay que comprender.
Para ser justo, no hay que olvidar.
- Ernst Toller
Chapter 1: Explorations
Alone in Berlin
Anika stared at the advertisement.
What I did not yet know then, she told herself, became clearer to me towards the end: Dr Tamar Serach, the woman whose traces I was following through the Berlin archives, had risked her life—with a single newspaper advertisement.
11 October 1926.
Tamar had been forced to wait until that Monday morning, and waiting had not come easily.
Then, out of nowhere, came firm footsteps. Not the little tapping steps of the woman in the neighbouring flat, nor the dragging feet of the elderly tenant upstairs; nor did they resemble the cautious creeping of the inquisitive concierge. The flap above the letter slot was already lifting when an envelope, grey like the one that had brought The Companion the week before, slid through.
More impetuously than usual, she reached for the packet. She did not dare open the door to see whether her neighbour had been watching the postman and therefore drew the bundle into the flat more slowly than she would have liked. Before it had even reached the table, she had torn it open lengthwise and stared, flushed and apprehensive, at several envelopes protruding from the wrapper.
The first was an even darker grey than the packet from which she had drawn it. No sender.
Eagerly, she slit it open along the edge with a sharp knife, glanced at the abbreviated return address and pulled out a short letter.
She began to read:
Dear Madam,
Your advertisement leaves no room for doubt. I know women like you.
Discretion goes without saying. I set the tone—my girlfriends are accustomed to that. Meetings at my place only.
If you mean what you write, you know what to do.
E.
Dr Serach lowered the note. Was that the kind of response her advertisement invited?
No, she thought. This was not how she had imagined the future. She was not looking for a prostitute. She did not want merely to cross from one camp into another.
Unsettled, she took from the locked drawer of her desk the text of the advertisement she had submitted three days earlier:
Even in Berlin one can be lonely. Young, full-figured woman in her thirties therefore seeks, by this means, the company of a working, dominant female friend. Replies to Box 1419, publishers.
Tamar read what she had typed once more, quietly to herself. Proud that she had overcome her hesitation, trembling at what she might have set in motion and what might now lie ahead. She had wondered whether this gamble would produce any response at all.
Now the first results lay before her.
She did not dare open the next letter.
She pushed the first reply aside, then the wrapper containing the others. Sat down at the kitchen table, reached for her cup of tea, picked up her fountain pen again and returned to the letter she had interrupted when the postman pushed the anonymous packet through the slot in her door. She had known immediately that these must be the first responses to her advertisement in The Companion. Perhaps the new issue containing the advertisement itself had been enclosed as well.
The unfinished letter lay before her, but she could no longer concentrate on its lines. Instead her eyes wandered to the edge of the table, to that inconspicuous bearer of messages from the future.
Keys?
She wondered which doors they might fit: low doors, narrow ones, elegant, shabby, blind, even disreputable ones? Her thoughts strayed into the future, resisting the urge to open those different doors yet poking through them all the same, into the corridors beyond, towards the walls; searching out their colours, feeling the surfaces of the wallpaper, growing curious about the pictures hanging there, testing whether they were originals or prints, comparing the faded with the luminous, measuring the distance to the next door. Suddenly she caught the scent of cedarwood. Musk mingled with it, then lemongrass. The next door—the elegant one—surprised her with the mustiness she had last endured in her grandmother’s bedroom.
Would it not be safer, she wondered, to cancel the subscription and buy each new issue from a kiosk in Schöneberg instead? But she feared that doing so would expose her still more to discovery and denunciation.
Too dangerous in her position.
Feeling a little lost, yet increasingly excited, she returned to the letter she had been writing, unable to shake off the images and smells. First she reread its opening:
Dear Tate,
Although nothing is official yet, my superior informed me at our annual review that, in recognition of my conscientious work, I am to be promoted as one of the first women to the rank of Polizeirätin in Berlin and Prussia. They are merely awaiting written ministerial approval; the placet has already been given orally. As before, I am to supervise matters concerning juvenile crime, public morality, and the welfare of women and girls, but a further area is now to be added: the regulation of those affected by §175. I think you and Mame may once again be proud of this next step in my life.
It was here that she had broken off, feverishly rushing to the door and throwing herself upon the unknown.
Her own impetuousness had frightened her.
She did not recognise it in herself.
Nor did she want to permit it.
She dipped her fountain pen into the inkwell before her. Let the nib drip. Then, once she felt able to trust the stroke of the pen again, she continued:
All the effort I put into studying law and economics, and the drudgery of my doctoral dissertation, have paid off—but without your suggestion that I write my dissertation on police administration and public morality, the possibility of such a promotion would scarcely have arisen. Tate, you are not only a lawyer and publisher, but something of a prophet as well, someone who knows the temper of international politics and the Berlin administration inside out.
A sheynem dank. Give my love to Mame,
Your Tamar
She read the letter through once more. It was only a few lines, yet her parents would not be disappointed. Still, she knew they worried that she continued to have no relationship with a man and therefore offered no prospect of marriage or children; indeed, her new professional position would probably only deepen their uncertainty.
It was surely one of the great disappointments she had caused them thus far.
Images from her twenties returned to her. During those years her parents had several times invited to the house a young Jewish businessman who had built a flourishing concern importing fruit through Königsberg and Berlin. In her father’s judgement he embodied the obvious future: reliable, educated, from a good family—a man who seemed suited to Tamar and could offer her financial security if she devoted herself to building a family rather than pursuing a career.
Tamar had not rejected his courtship, but neither had she accepted it.
Had not wanted to accept it.
When the successful young man eventually began to speak of an engagement, she told him calmly, though firmly, that she wanted to work first, perhaps enter social welfare, but in any case did not intend immediately to become a wife and mother. He would have to understand that; and if he was set on having a family, he would be better advised to find someone else.
His disappointment was considerable, though apparently not insurmountable. Only a few weeks later she heard through the wider family that another young lady had been found who was prepared to serve the young entrepreneur.
Her parents could make little sense of her decision.
To reject such an auspicious step in life, one they themselves had prepared.
Without even consulting them.
She hoped that the lines of her letter might suggest to her father why she wanted to live—and did live—as she did. In a letter to her sister Lea, she complained of how painful it was that their mother had shown no interest in “the questions” raised by her dissertation, while her father had confined himself to commenting on legal niceties and correcting typographical errors, and that with both of them she had “all the more reason to remain silent about the other matter.”
She ended by generalising:
“It is sad—the sad fate of two generations.”
Lea evidently knew of her sister’s inclination.
Already Tamar was worrying about how she would explain matters to her parents if her advertisement received a reply. Better not to ask that question now, she thought. Still less to answer it. First the official business. The other: later.
Her life seemed to have taken two giant strides in one.
Although she found it difficult to turn her attention back to police work, she took up a report on which she was required to give her opinion:
Application to the Police President for permission to wear women’s clothing—renewed request.
In March 1922 one of your officers informed me orally that, on grounds of public order, I would not be granted permission to wear women’s clothing and that action might even be taken against me should I be found dressed as a woman. I wish, however, to bring to your attention what occurred in our district this past weekend.
In the morning, a corpulent female figure was found hanging from the emblem above a dance hall. Upon examination, the figure proved to be a man dressed in women’s clothing … The doctors are of the opinion that the stranger committed suicide in a fit of mental derangement—mental derangement? Could this death not have been prevented by the police? I therefore renew the request and application I made several years ago and kindly ask for a favourable reply.
What was she to advise the Police President? As a matter of law, she could see no grounds for prohibiting the wearing of clothing associated with the other sex. Since the Imperial Penal Code of 1871, §175 had applied only to “unnatural fornication” between men; women were included only in the provision concerning intercourse “between humans and animals.”
From legal practice Dr Serach knew only of convictions involving sexual acts between men resembling intercourse. She referred to the well-known case of the performer Ernst Mittenstedt. He had appeared in court in women’s clothes to conduct his defence, and the criminal police had known of his habit without intervening. Indeed, the former head of Berlin’s homosexual division, Dr Behrend, had pointed out that wearing the clothing of the other sex was not prohibited by law. In doing so, he supported the term introduced by Dr Magnus Hirschfeld for the practice, transvestism: Hirschfeld insisted that it was neither a matter of amusement nor an expression of homosexuality, but that people dressed in the manner that corresponded to them, even when they felt themselves to inhabit the wrong body.
In her opinion she also cited the Berlin decree on the “Treatment of So-Called ‘Transvestites’.” Issued in 1922, it instructed police officers not to arrest such persons without cause. She quoted: “Leaving male prostitution aside, transvestism is in general of no criminal significance. The opinion still widespread among the public that persons in disguise are criminals in disguise—pickpockets, spies, traffickers in women, and the like—is without foundation.”
Nor, she continued, should such people simply be described as homosexual. If they were stopped by the police, their details could be recorded, but they should be issued with a Transvestitenschein, certifying that “everything lay within respectable bounds.”
What, Dr Serach wondered, was wrong with such a practice? If one could dress up at Carnival, why not on other days?
Did the police not themselves make use of cross-dressing? She cited cases in which officers disguised themselves as women in order to catch in flagranti offenders who, late in the evening or at night, lay in wait in Berlin parks for elderly women, intending to attack them and steal their handbags and purses.
It would never have occurred to Tamar herself to wear men’s clothes as her sister Lea did. All day long she was compelled to present herself formally at the office. A dark, severely cut, close-fitting suit, buttoned high, without jewellery—a uniform without being a uniform, revealing less of who she was than preventing others from deciding what she might be.
Not masculine. A woman: yes. Seductive: no. Police.
Still disappointed by the first response to her advertisement, she hardly dared pick up the remaining envelopes and open them. Then a longing for the unknown came over her, one she could no longer contain.
She wanted to detach the one key that fitted from the ring.
She reached for the next grey lot, dug another offer from its envelope and counted those that remained.
Two—three—four—five.
There was still hope, although she feared it would diminish with every number.
Dear Madam,
I have read your advertisement and believe myself suitable, as I am employed and reliable. I should be pleased to learn further particulars.
Yours respectfully,
M. K.
At first reading, the lines did not strike her unfavourably. “Employed,” “reliable”—those words appealed to her. Yet somehow they sounded smooth, almost flat.
She did not want a mirror of her working life. She was looking for resistance. What lay before her seemed devoid of tension—and uneducated besides.
Dear Unknown Lady,
the word “dominant” made me hesitate—and for that very reason made me write.
Perhaps we do not mean the same thing.
Perhaps we do.
F.
She placed this letter on top. F.’s willingness to reveal her uncertainty impressed her. So did the fact that she had picked up on “dominant,” a word Dr Serach had deliberately placed in the advertisement.
Dear Madam,
I am not writing because I am accustomed to bearing responsibility—
including for what others surrender to me—
but because responsibility is the foundation of friendship.
If you reply, write only when.
C. W.
Dr Serach was confused. So many voices, several of them speaking directly to something in her.
From morning till night, in the office, with her colleagues, offenders and enforcement officers, she was required to take command, issue instructions, order detentions. Successfully, as the steep rise of her career demonstrated.
But when she closed the door behind her in the evening, she wanted to be able to let go, to hand the reins to someone she could trust.
For her, intimacy meant being entirely enveloped.
She put F.’s letter aside as well. Uncertainty and risk had never attracted her; she did not want the positions within a relationship left unresolved. She picked up C. W.’s letter again.
There was no pressure in it.
It promised nothing.
It offered a willingness to take responsibility.
Dr Serach arranged the letters as she ordinarily arranged files, according to rank.
C. W. she placed first. With her fountain pen she wrote, though not without twice setting the nib down and lifting it again over each initial:
Dear C. W.,
How about Friday, 15 October.
She had deliberately decided against a question mark. And against an exclamation mark. She wanted to leave only one thing open—Where?
Her pen stopped.
The first place that came to mind was Café Josty on Potsdamer Platz. There they would sit among a crowd of other guests: businessmen, shoppers, travellers. She had often been there alone, yet even two women sitting together at a table might attract attention. They would be seen, perhaps even noticed. Nor could they simply disappear.
Halfway between T. S. and C. W.
She rejected the idea because she did not want a tentative first encounter, no game of power and posture. With the advertisement she had already leaned far out of the window of her flat and of the habits of her life. But she wanted to leave her zone of safety, to expose herself to someone who might appear more self-assured than she herself would feel.
And she wanted them to sit closer together, perhaps even somewhat more intimately than they could at Josty. She added:
Friday, 15 October, 5 p.m.
Café Vaterland, Potsdamer Platz. Side room.
She did not sign with her full name.
T.
Only after she had folded the letter and slipped it into the envelope did she notice that her hand was no longer trembling. Not from courage. But because she had made a decision that bound her. Whatever the cost.
The Attack
Dr Serach folded her reply to C. W. She placed it beside the advertisement and ran her fingertips over the faint impression the fountain-pen nib had left in the paper. She followed the sweeps of her handwriting, which towards the end had grown increasingly light, then more noticeably restrained.
Was that a moan, a sigh, or merely an exhalation?
She wavered between pride and the sense of having overcome herself. What would she have given at that moment to know what she had set in motion. Once more she traced the lines of her handwriting and recoiled slightly at the weight with which she had planted the final full stop after the T.
Despite the hundred years between us, as I sat in Berlin before these replies to the advertisement, reading at the same time Tamar’s personal account of that moment, I could feel something of its weight. All the more because I knew what her step, her decision to enter through that door, would come to mean for her, for C. W.—and for me today:
20 January 2025, Washington, D.C.
Protecting Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.
I read those lines several times, although a few months earlier I had sworn that I would no longer expose myself to political literature of this kind, or indeed to the constant drizzle of propaganda at all. But in the light of Tamar’s story it forced itself upon me, and I knew there was no shielding myself from it.
Especially since my reading of Tamar was writing itself into my present.
By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America … it is hereby ordered …
Two sexes. Immutable. As though there had never been a Tamar, a Hirschfeld, or all the others. As though no one had ever considered that people might live differently from the way states require them to.
I slipped the sheet into a book by Jakob Rosenhain lying on the table before me. The struggle over bodies and sex was older than this government. Much older.
My evening dress hung before me. Inviting me. It nestled softly against my skin as I slipped it over my body. I had the sensation of gliding along another person’s skin.
Valery had sent me an invitation, typically English, on silk paper:
To Anika from Valery.
She knew how to shape language and letters. To prepare for my date with her, I applied my make-up to complement the colours of the satin dress that fell all the way to my feet. The mirror revealed that the fabric opened at the thigh.
As I stepped out of the bathroom, my eyes fell involuntarily on the black lines of the white sheet that had occupied me earlier, the political scribbling that struck me as cheap propaganda, far from being a red rag to me, more like the shabby scrap of a claim to power already in decline.
Why, I wondered as I checked my lipstick, does a man whose power has rubbed itself against women’s bodies want to protect me from people who live beyond the binary distinction between male and female, women born in male bodies who nevertheless—like me—feel themselves to be women? How can such a man speak of “protecting women” when he condemns my attraction to women as well? Where does he derive his “biological facts” from?
I shook my head, took the sheet of paper and decided to ask Valery what, from her English perspective, she made of these developments in the United States. Would she still make her planned conference trip to Chicago in this political climate?
I knew the biography of Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, who as early as the beginning of the twentieth century had written extensively about the biological predisposition to homosexuality and had already fought claims of the kind made in the American pamphlet. In the story of his life I had encountered the beginnings of the campaign against §175 in Germany and against the perhaps still harsher §129 in Austria, which included women.
I placed the text inside the Hirschfeld book and put both into my bag—more than enough material for our conversation after the theatre, I thought.
As in Hirschfeld’s time, so in America now. The apparatus: files, diagnoses, terminology.
At that moment I felt humiliated. For myself and for people of generations past. And yet there had been the Hirschfelds, the Rosenhains, the Hartungs, who had courageously stood up for trans people and those who lived between categories. Society had not been black and white, shaped solely by conservatives and radicals or, on the other side, by the Left, with the bourgeoisie somewhere in between, as the world had been presented to me at home.
In my survey of the relevant publications of the 1920s, I encountered a different past—a wave, particularly in Germany but also in France and England, that revolted against Biedermeier respectability and the artificiality of prevailing ideas of the human being. Leading figures refused to conceal their bodies as society demanded, understanding them instead as vessels for the healing powers of sun and wind, as part of the rhythm of nature. An enthusiasm for the natural challenged moral prescriptions, drove young people and adults into the open air, created youth movements devoted to sport and to the national consciousness associated with it.
Yet racist ideas were bound up with these movements as well.
That surprised and troubled me.
It did not explain how such ideas could have intoxicated my father, but they allowed me to glimpse how the youth movement had led him towards a national enthusiasm that eventually made him part of the Movement. None of this history had been revealed to me by him or by my mother during my childhood and youth. Existing in the shadows, that attitude had perhaps silently infected my brothers as well, strengthening them in the way they approached me, in what they did. Racism always fastens upon bodies. Male bodies—and still more upon female ones.
Everyone knows such a body. You touch it, become addicted to it, strike it, do with it whatever you please, and then want to triumph over it as well, to file it away in a drawer and keep it there.
Precisely because the body possesses greater symbolic force than marching columns, than the flags lining their route, than their anthems.
Racist books are often books about bodies, picture books too. Homophobic racism turns them into albums of visual riddles. The size of cigarette-card albums. Germany Awakens—a portrait of the body.
Himmler declared homosexual men a plague and a threat to the “strength of the Volk.” Women, by contrast, were fuel intended to keep that national strength burning. From 1942 onwards, in around ten of the major concentration camps, he established brothels not for the SS but for male prisoners required to serve in privileged supervisory roles: a perverse combination—victims made victims of victims, and for victims.
Images of women displaying “insufficient feminine charms,” Himmler maintained, drove the “male state” towards homosexuality.
No one could have accused Dr Tamar Serach, whom we shall soon come to know more closely, of lacking feminine charms, even though she was searching for a female partner. And yet women like her did not come under scrutiny to the same degree as homosexual men—though women were never safe.
Least of all when they combined Jewishness and homosexuality within themselves: to the National Socialists, they were the devil’s witches.
Nothing would do here but hammer and blows. History has another name for it. Macbeth crept into my senses, under my skin. Witches live on, longer than those whose lives they sketch out. Those who proclaim a thousand-year reign often survive only a few years, kill themselves or end on the gallows. Whoever makes himself the man, raises himself up as Führer, crawls into hiding, passes sentence upon himself or, like Nicolae Ceaușescu or Muammar al-Gaddafi, is shot.
No prophet can help here: whoever makes himself king for ever has no queen at his side, unless she holds the dagger in her left hand or the serpent in her sheath.
This was no theoretical lesson, nor one confined to Shakespeare’s stage. The Nazi movement should have known it from its own realities, as I would soon learn from the documents.
In recent years I had immersed myself in the history of National Socialism, beginning with my Cambridge doctorate on the émigré artist Hulda Mannheimer, now some considerable time behind me. After the loss of my long-term male partner and my equally long-standing female companion, I had more recently come together with Valery as my partner and critical reader, herself an art historian like me. And the time since our paths had crossed again had allowed me to live through those losses and turn once more to the older subject. For I had never been able to put the Nazi period behind me. It was too deeply woven into me. It was also a constant subject of discussion with Valery, even though at times she wished I could simply switch off from my work.
Easy to say.
For me it was not work. It was a descent into my own past, into the dark experiences I had endured with my two brothers within the family and, after my parents’ deaths, into the disturbing discovery that my father had himself been entangled in the history of National Socialism I was studying.
No, it was not work. It was an attempt to learn how to live with that past. Valery knew that too. And she was trying to carry its weight with me, to make it lighter.
I could have taken the Hirschfeld out of my bag, put on my coat and simply left. I did not. That time was too close to me. Burned into my skin. No tattoo required.
Through Hulda I had come across the Jewish Children’s Hospital in Berlin, where she had received her first public commission. After several years of research, I had studied the history of this Jewish institution, as I got to know Dr. Bernstein, the assistant of this hospital, the only such institution to survive the Nazi period and the Second World War. It was while working on the hospital that I encountered the police councillor Martha Mosse and her colleague Tamar Serach.
Serach would not let me go. More was known about Mosse, whereas information about Serach’s life and work was difficult to find and often had to be inferred from parallels with Mosse. Yet Tamar, as I discovered, formed a bridge to my earlier work and drew together the different subjects that had occupied me. And she would lead me still deeper into my own history, as I was to discover.
By then I was accustomed to archival work. Since the beginning of my academic career I had worked on the history of the period between the two world wars, particularly on women artists, writers and sculptors, and later on media and institutions. What could be read from the files and papers—and what I believed I could see between the lines—began in 1925.
Serach was thirty-three at the time. She came from a well-known Berlin family of lawyers, yet not even her cousin, the son of a famous publisher who emigrated to America and became a distinguished historian there, mentions her in his autobiography.
She seemed to be a nameless member of the family.
Only after lengthy research in the Berlin State Archive did I find administrative and personnel files relating to Tamar Serach: material on her appointment and promotion, disciplinary proceedings and her dismissal; and in the archive of the Academy of Arts, personal documents from the period before she was driven out of the police service. Then, in the archive of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York, I came across the typed “Recollections” that helped me further. Later I found additional material, including collections of a more personal nature, copies of letters and entries. From these I tried to reconstruct the course of her life and what she had experienced.
One of the earliest pieces of evidence led me, like the conquistadors of the early sixteenth century, to El Dorado—though not to the legendary land of gold in South America.
There, according to Colombian legend, the body of the new ruler was covered in gold dust when he assumed power. The ruler then travelled on a golden raft, laden with objects of gold and precious stones, to the centre of a mountain lake. The gold was cast into the water and the ruler plunged into the lake after it, the gold washing from his body and sinking with the rest of the treasure into the depths.
Here, for Berliners—and not only Berlin men—El Dorado lay much closer.
Likewise enveloped in powder, fabric and tulle, it actually existed, tangible in the heart of the Reich capital: in Charlottenburg, at the corner of Kantstraße and Bleibtreustraße. In 1924 it opened as a dance hall on the upper floor of an older café. By 1926 the Eldorado had moved to the corner of Martin-Luther-Straße and Augsburger Straße and, under the same name, invited men and women, homosexuals, transvestites and heterosexuals—above all the better classes—to performances by male and female dancers.
One evening Dr Tamar Serach was sent there by her police department to investigate a case of theft. She was also to look into complaints that had been made against the establishment.
They came from the Gemeinschaft der Andern, an association of “respectable homosexuals” who protested vigorously against “being placed on the same footing as the kind of people who frequent this establishment.” Dr Serach’s responsibilities also included supervision of offences falling under §175 and therefore the question of whether any such offences were being committed at this place of entertainment.
In her preliminary investigations Dr Serach had come across the file of the complainant, Ernst Julius Röhm. As early as 1924 he had been seen in various Berlin nightclubs, among them the Kleist-Kasino, the Silhouette, the Internationale Diele and the Eldorado itself. He was said to have had homosexual relations with other men in steam baths, though this had never been conclusively proved against him.
But in 1925 he himself had created an official record of another kind—the case Dr Serach was now required to pursue.
Röhm had reported a male prostitute named Hermann Siegesmund for theft. According to Röhm, the young man had been in his hotel room and stolen his left-luggage ticket in order to take possession of his suitcase.
To get to the bottom of the matter, Dr Serach visited the various establishments, made enquiries and questioned proprietors and patrons, as well as the man Röhm had accused. At the Eldorado she immediately struck lucky and was able to take a statement from Siegesmund.
Siegesmund stated that Röhm had invited him to his room on the day in question and had wanted him to stay the night. But when Röhm wanted more than the amorous attentions for which he was supposed to pay him, and tried to pressure him into homosexual intercourse, things had become too dangerous for him. Siegesmund had managed to wrench himself free from Röhm, the powerfully built former soldier, before any such act took place.
Dr Serach placed the case on file but did not pursue the attempted theft any further. Nor did she consider §175 to have been violated.
Only the press laughed at the affair:
If Berlin by night you roam,
keep a careful eye on what you own!
The police pass quietly by:
they see—and turn a blind eye.
The SA used the “Röhm affair” to track down homosexual men across the Reich on a large scale, persecute them, break up “homosexual cliques” and declare them “enemies of the state.”
For the moment, the maximum penalty under §175 was still limited to five years. In the 1930s it would be increased to as much as ten years’ imprisonment with hard labour, while prosecution would no longer be confined to anal intercourse but extend to any form of “indecency,” with around 8,000 men convicted each year.
But for now, in Berlin, Dr Serach still had a say in how the law was interpreted.
In Hartung’s Service
13 October 1926.
Reply to C. W. in hand, addressed to the offices of The Companion, she went to the main post office at the Alex and bought a stamp. Without hesitation, she posted the letter. Then she entered Police Headquarters to consult the schedule for the day and the week. A colleague greeted her in the corridor.
“Congratulations, Frau Polizeirätin!”
“Oh,” she replied, “is it official already?”
“We were allowed to sign a congratulatory card for you this morning.”
For the first time Dr Serach was embarrassed, something that rarely happened to her. She thanked him and walked straight into her office. Her colleagues rose from their chairs, applauded and congratulated her. And there, indeed, on her desk, above her appointment diary and files, stood a large congratulatory card. Beside it rested a small envelope bearing the sender’s name:
The Prussian Minister of the Interior. Personal.
“Oh, from the Minister himself?”
Her colleagues smiled. She opened the envelope carefully, while the men gathered around her urged her to read the letter aloud.
Fräulein Dr Tamar Serach Berlin Police Headquarters
Dear Fräulein Dr Serach,
Many thanks for your congratulations on my appointment. I am doubly pleased because I have now been able to secure for you something to which, in my opinion, you have long been entitled. My warmest congratulations on your promotion and appointment as Polizeirätin.
With the highest esteem and kind regards,
Yours most devotedly,
Grzesinski
She was not a woman for speeches. She briefly thanked the approving faces around her and pointed instead to the exceptional nature of what had happened.
“I accept my promotion to Polizeirätin on behalf of the many women serving in the police. With this promotion, Prussia has taken an important step. It is less a recognition of me personally than a recognition of women. For women are pillars of this country not only in their traditional roles; they sustain it in other areas of society as well. This promotion is an affirmation that women have a future in Prussia—and Prussia a future with women.”
Her colleagues applauded her, the only woman in her department apart from Dr Martha Mosse. Dr Mosse, too, congratulated her colleague and was delighted that, now that there were two of them serving as Polizeirätinnen, their department occupied a special position within the Berlin and Prussian police and that together they had formed a spearhead for women.
It was even more than that: an act of female self-assertion within a domain hitherto ruled by men.
Modestly, Dr Serach took her place behind the nameplate bearing her new rank, sorted her files and set off for her first appointment of the day.
She had her eye on Wilhelm Hartung’s publishing office in Berlin-Wilhelmshagen, as well as on the physician and widely read author Dr Jakob Rosenhain; afterwards she intended to visit Sylvia Enner, editor of Frauenfreundschaft, who was responsible for that and similar periodicals.
The Reich government was working on legislation “to protect young people from trashy and obscene literature.” In recent weeks the police in Hamburg had prohibited relevant periodicals such as The Island, Friendship, The Friend and The Companion from public street sale, while in Munich the Friend’s Journal had likewise disappeared from shop windows. Dr Serach had therefore been instructed to conduct a preliminary investigation for Berlin into whether measures should be taken in the capital and, if so, what form they should take.
On the tram towards the Alex and from there on the Stadtbahn to Wilhelmshagen, she read through the notes she had compiled on Wilhelm Hartung over the preceding days.
Hartung was in his early fifties and had been publishing the periodical The Others for years. In the police register Dr Serach found an entry from 1900 recording that Hartung had served twelve months in prison for having “symbolically” and “physically” assaulted a member of the Reichstag. In 1905 he had again been sentenced, this time to two months’ imprisonment for distributing obscene writings; and in 1907 to a further eighteen months after publicly alleging that Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow was engaged in a homosexual relationship. Dr Serach found still other disclosures and convictions of Hartung’s in the files.
What troubled her was that Hartung had been the founding chairman and president of the Gemeinschaft der Anderen (The Society of the Others) since 1903, an organisation that not only championed homosexual love between men and campaigned for the abolition of §175, but also advocated the continuation of the ancient Greek tradition of love between men and boys.
Why, Dr Serach wondered, was he concerned only with same-sex love between men and not between women as well? Why expose himself to accusations of violating the protection of minors? Why endanger both himself and this association?
Her only reassurance was that Hartung had attracted less public attention since marrying a nurse in 1920.
Hartung was critical of the medical findings of Dr Rosenhain, whose views agreed in almost every detail with those of Dr Hirschfeld. They regarded homosexuality as biologically innate. Dr Serach had underlined passages setting out this view and added in the margin:
“Recognised not only by Hirschfeld and Rosenhain; already in the nineteenth century by the French neurologist Claude François Michéa.”
According to Dr Rosenhain’s theory, there was no absolute division between male and female. Instead, like Hirschfeld, he proposed sexual intermediate stages, with something between the two that, as he put it, was not altogether aptly described as a middle, third sex, as in the title of one of Dr Hirschfeld’s books.
What impression would Hartung, Dr Rosenhain and Enner make on her?
Eventually she arrived at Hartung’s two-storey family villa in Bismarckstraße and was surprised by the respectable bourgeois property behind its iron fence, complete with a Greek portico and architrave.
Hartung did indeed strike her as different, peculiar, after his wife had opened the door to her—or perhaps not so much peculiar as eccentric. And he wore his eccentricity for all to see. With an expansive gesture, the moustached man, his hair worn like Nietzsche’s, invited her through the house and into the garden, where his publishing business and photographic studio occupied a rear building.
Behind a small desk, with a wall of the publisher’s books and periodicals behind him and photographic works covering the other walls, sat a young assistant whom Hartung introduced as Arthur Kleinow. His features were soft, his eyes deep-set, his ears close to his head, his hair sticking out in every direction. In contrast to his striking youthful beauty, he held a short pipe, which from time to time he put between his lips as though he had already been smoking one for years, if not—despite his youth—for decades. Whenever the pipe released them, yellow teeth showed through.
“My most faithful support,” Hartung added, while Kleinow gazed at him, visibly touched, “especially through all the difficult years the publishing house has already endured.”
“Frau Polizeirätin Dr Tamar Serach,” he introduced her to his assistant. “She has come to inspect our latest publications and examine our activities.”
Kleinow rolled his eyes, and Dr Serach wondered whether he was looking at her as a woman or as a police councillor. Slightly from below and at an angle, she thought.
She let the impression pass without comment.
“You certainly,” she said to Hartung, “have accumulated a fair number of entries in our files. But I have not come here today to intervene. The government has instructed us to conduct preliminary investigations. Not specifically into your publishing house and its publications, nor into your association, the Gemeinschaft der Anderen. Rather, we are preparing an advisory opinion for the legislature on how the protection of children and young people might in future be better regulated throughout the Reich, notwithstanding the continuing jurisdiction of the individual states.
“And that raises questions such as these: do your publications and activities contribute to the education of young people, or do they place their morals at risk? In other words—and this is the question that concerns us today—do such activities fall under §§175–184 of the Penal Code, particularly the provisions concerning criminal homosexual acts, public indecency and the distribution of obscene writings? Or can they be regarded as expressions of freedom of the press and freedom of opinion, and of artistic creation, under Article 118 of the Weimar Constitution?
“More than that: how would the law have to be changed so that your publications would not fall under any of these penal provisions where, according to present understanding, they manifestly pose no danger to young people?”
“Phew. That was quite a bundle of information. Give me a moment to think.” Hartung paused. “Have I understood you correctly? This isn’t about me, or about us here at the publishing house, but about whether—and, if so, how—the laws themselves ought to be changed?”
Dr Serach nodded.
“That’s a relief,” Hartung said, glancing at his assistant. “Show Frau Polizeirätin Dr Serach our latest issues!”
Kleinow reached into a drawer of his desk, rummaged out two or three magazines and placed them before the police councillor, covers face down.
“Our latest issues,” he said, somewhat sheepishly. “They’re really intended for men,” he cautioned her.
“I’m not squeamish. This material is my daily bread,” Dr Serach assured him.
She pulled up a chair and sat down before the desk. Hartung remained standing beside her, looking over her shoulder as she turned over the first magazine and examined its cover.
Figure Study 5, it was captioned.
She had noticed at once that the naked young man looking out at her, standing with his arms raised as he held a brick aloft, the effort casting his pectoral muscles into relief, was none other than the young man sitting opposite her.
“An aesthetically pleasing figure,” the police councillor commented without looking up at him.
“An artistic study,” Hartung replied.
Kleinow remained silent.
Dr Serach turned the page and came to the first article, headed:
“On the Business of the Moral Executioners: Remarks on So-Called Protection from Trash.”
She read:
"The so-called Law for the Protection of Young People from Trash, which arose from initiatives within the youth movement, had a limited purpose: to protect the young from genuinely trivial and inferior literature, in which there can be no question of artistic or intellectual substance, and to make room for serious writings of lasting value from the pens of recognised authors.
It was by no means intended to serve as an instrument of moral policing in the hands of ecclesiastical or political reaction, or to lend support to those dubious circles that operate in the shadows and have now begun to appropriate this law for themselves. In their hands it is being misused against enlightenment, intellectual freedom and social progress."
“The police need not agree with the position being put forward here, but it can hardly be denied that this is the expression of a clearly stated opinion. One might describe it as polemical in tone, but it seems to me indisputable that it constitutes a contribution to public debate.”
Hartung was eager to know whether the police councillor’s exonerating assessment would extend to his nude studies. But he did not dare draw her attention to them.
Dr Serach raised the subject herself.
“As for the photographs, I would place them in the category of art. The young man is indeed shown naked, including his genitals, but they are not depicted in a state of erection, and at most one might judge the musculature of his chest to be somewhat overemphasised. But who could possibly take offence at a man’s chest?”
Hartung’s expression brightened further.
“One thing I do find objectionable—not in the sense that it might be punishable, certainly not with regard to the proposed new legislation, but rather as a woman who has proved herself in public service, and speaking as such a woman—is your use of phrases such as ‘feeble, bloodless prettification and effeminate dishonesty in literature and art,’ followed by ‘deranged hysterical females’ and ‘disgusting rule by women.’ Does the strength of masculinity consist solely in the denigration of femininity?”
Dr Serach pointed to a passage in the magazine she was holding.
“Be glad that it is a woman with a doctorate in law who is conducting this preliminary investigation today. I know colleagues whose upbringing would lead them to judge rather less objectively. But, as I said, I am not here to put you on trial. Take my remarks as the well-meant advice of a woman for the future.”
Hartung was ordinarily nobody’s fool, but at that moment he had no idea what to say or how to say it. He cleared his throat, wondering whether it would be wiser to argue back or simply accept her judgement in silence.
Dr Serach forestalled him.
“You call for critical debate. I should like to see the same critical engagement applied to your own positions. But let me add something positive to my criticism. I noticed that you have spoken out in support of Theodor Lessing and against antisemitically coloured slanders. I give you considerable credit for that.”
Dr Serach did not wait for Hartung to formulate a reply to her objections.
“Send the next issue to me at the station—and I shall see whether, and how, you respond to my opinion.”
“You’re welcome to keep the latest issue and add it to your files.”
She slipped the magazine into her work bag and shook hands with Hartung and Kleinow.
“Keep within the law,” the police councillor said by way of farewell.
Hartung’s wife accompanied her through the house to the door.