She cut a fine figure walking down the street, announced by a hint of perfume and the gentle jangling of bangles. But Hans Hannah was anxious: After the Nazis seized power, they destroyed the publishing house, and the magazine was largely forgotten. As a result, most accounts today name fifties America as the birthplace of trans periodicals. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Germany was closely associated with homosexuality.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, more than a thousand works on homosexuality were published in German. Researchers from England to Japan cited German sexologists as experts and often published their own works in Germany before their home countries. The Weimar Republic, the zenith of modernism, witnessed new social liberalization and experimentation. And alongside reinventing traditional forms of artistic expression, Germans began interrogating gender roles and sexual identities.
By , over fifty thousand gay men and lesbians lived there, and countless more visited, looking for friendship, love, and sex. By , some hundred gay bars in Berlin catered to diverse groups: Associations offered opportunities for socializing and political organization. Crucially, relaxed rules of censorship allowed for the publication of dozens of pulpy gay novels, queer periodicals, and even personal ads. The experience was different for trans people.
German speakers were in the middle of developing a critical vocabulary to describe the expansion of recognized identities. It described both cross-dressers and transgender people. According to contemporary self-reports, some transvestites considered themselves homosexual, but most did not. Many wore clothes traditionally associated with the opposite sex only on special occasions. Others lived fully as a gender different from their sex at birth.
A majority seemed interested in passing and adhering to expectations of respectability, while a minority sought to challenge the normative order. Gender affirmation surgeries were available—the first such operation was conducted in by, no surprise, a German doctor—but uncommon.
