Christopher and His Kind Read Online Free Page A

of the Reichstag. To be sometimes treated with official respect, sometimes threatened with death; to be alternately praised and lampooned by the press; to be helped by those who would later lose their nerve and betray him—such was his nobly insecure position.
    The Institute was by no means exclusively concerned with homosexuality. It gave advice to couples about to marry, based on research into their hereditary backgrounds. It offered psychiatric treatment for impotence and other psychological problems. It had a clinic which dealt with a variety of cases, including venereal disease. And it studied sex in every manifestation.
    However, the existence of the Institute did enable Hirschfeld to carry on his campaign against Paragraph 175 much more effectively than before. It was a visible guarantee of his scientific respectability which reassured the timid and the conservative. It was a place of education for the public, its lawmakers, and its police. Hirschfeld could invite them to the sex museum and guide them through a succession of reactions—from incredulous disgust to understanding of the need for penal reform. Meanwhile, the Institute’s legal department advised men who were accused of sex crimes and represented them in court. Hirschfeld had won the right to give them asylum until their cases were heard. Some of the people Christopher met at lunch belonged to this category.
    (I have a memory of Christopher looking down from a room in the Institute and watching two obvious plainclothes detectives lurk under the trees which grow along the edge of the park. They hope that one of their wanted victims will be tempted to venture out of Hirschfeld’s sanctuary for a sniff of fresh air. Then, according to the rules of the police game, he can be grabbed and carried off to prison.)
    The year Christopher arrived at the Institute, Hirschfeld and his allies seemed about to win a victory. Earlier in 1929, the Reichstag Committee had finished drafting a penal-reform bill. According to this bill, consensual sex acts between adult males would no longer be crimes. The vote which decided this point had been close and it had only been won through the support of the Communists. The bill had been presented to the Reichstag and seemed likely to be passed into law. Then, in October, came the U.S. Stock Market crash, causing a period of panic and indecision in Europe which was unfavorable to reform of any kind. The Reichstag postponed discussion of the bill indefinitely.
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    Christopher’s room, like the two rooms occupied by Francis, was just inside the front door of the apartment. You and your visitors could come and go at any hour without ever running into the landlady; no doubt, she tactfully used a rear exit. She lived far away at the back, somewhere, within a clearing in a Black Forest of furniture. If sex-connected sounds did reach her now and then, she never complained. Perhaps she even approved of them, on principle. After all, she was Hirschfeld’s sister.
    Francis’s rooms had a view of the park. Christopher’s room looked down into an interior courtyard; that was why it was dark and cheap. On one wall of this courtyard, Hirschfeld had caused to be printed in Gothic lettering a stanza by Goethe:
    Seele des Menschen,
    Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!
    Schicksal des Menschen,
    Wie gleichst du dem Wind!
    Spirit of Man, how like thou art to water! Fate of Man, how like thou art to wind! Never before in his life had Christopher had a room with a view of a poem. In his present state of mind, he much preferred his view to Francis’s view of the Tiergarten trees. Just as changes in the light make trees look different, so Christopher’s varying moods made the poem speak in different tones of voice: joyful, cynical, tragic. But always, whatever his mood, it reminded him: You are in Germany. The featureless walls of the courtyard, the neutral puddles of rain water on its floor, the patch