Institut für Sexualwissenschaft

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 Nazi book burnings in Berlin included the archives of the Institute.

The Institute was a non-profit foundation situated in Berlin's Tiergarten. It was headed by Magnus Hirschfeld. Since 1897 he had run the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee ("Scientific-Humanitarian Committee"), which campaigned on conservative and rational grounds for gay rights and tolerance. The Committee published the long-running journal Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. Hirschfeld was also a researcher; he collected questionnaires from 10,000 people, informing his book Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes ("The Homosexuality of Man and Woman", 1914). He built a unique library on same-sex love and eroticism.

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.

The Institute of Sex Research was opened in 1919 by 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, and was a pioneer worldwide in the call for civil rights and social acceptance for homosexual and transgender people.

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