page_title: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft
section_title: Origins and purpose
hierarchical_section_title: Institut für Sexualwissenschaft / Origins and purpose
caption_attribution_description: English: Hedwig W. (left), accompanied by a butch friend. Hedwig was a friend of Magnus Hirshfeld, and lived for two years in Berlin under the name Herbert.
context_page_description: The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was an early private sexology research institute in Germany from 1919 to 1933. The name is variously translated as Institute of Sex Research, Institute of Sexology, Institute for Sexology or Institute for the Science of Sexuality. The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Tiergarten, Berlin. It was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. Since 1897 he had run the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee, which campaigned on progressive and rational grounds for LGBT rights and tolerance. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld built a unique library on same-sex love and eroticism.
  The Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute. After the Nazis gained control of Germany in the 1930s, the institute and its libraries were destroyed as part of a Nazi government censorship program by youth brigades, who burned its books and documents in the street.
context_section_description: The Institute of Sex Research was opened in 1919 by Magnus Hirschfeld and his collaborator Arthur Kronfeld, a once famous psychotherapist and later professor at the Charité. As well as being a research library and housing a large archive, the Institute also included medical, psychological, and ethnological divisions, and a marriage and sex counseling office. The Institute was visited by around 20,000 people each year, and conducted around 1,800 consultations. Poorer visitors were treated for free. In addition, the institute advocated sex education, contraception, the treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, and women's emancipation.
  The Institute became a point of scientific and research interest for many scientists of sexuality, as well as scientific, political and social reformers in Germany and Europe, particularly from socialist, liberal and social-democratic circles. In 1923 the Institute was visited by Nikolai Semashko, Commissar for Health in the Soviet Union. This was followed by numerous visits and research trips by health officials, political, sexual and social reformers, and scientific researchers from the Soviet Union interested in the work of Hirschfeld. In 1926 a delegation from the institute, led by Hirschfeld, reciprocated with a research visit to Moscow. In 1929 Hirschfeld presided over the third international congress of the World League for Sexual Reform at Wigmore Hall.
caption: Herbert W. (left) was a transgender friend of Magnus Hirschfeld, and lived for two years in Berlin under his chosen name. This photo is from Hirschfeld's Sexual Intermediates (1922).
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