All for Love

The Structure of Our Collection

In the museum thesaurus, you would search in vain for other words related to sexual orientation. Neither “lesbian,” “gay,” “queer,” nor “transsexual” have entries. Even “heterosexuality” does not appear as a keyword, though it is silently established as the norm, ultimately erasing all sexual diversity. Sexual identity and orientation are not indexed, and consequently, external users also cannot search our collection using these categories.

Of course, the thesaurus can be expanded, and new keywords can be added as needed. However, the current keyword catalog reflects the fact that very few documents, photographs, or objects were received from (openly or known) gay, lesbian, or transgender people. Since their numbers were so few, a keyword to distinguish them seemed unnecessary.

That comes as no surprise, if you think about the provenance of our collection: its core consists of hundreds of family collections left to us by donors. These bundles of papers, which sometimes span several generations, are generally focused around a married couple, around whom particularly comprehensive materials have been preserved. Further documents and photographs relate to their children, the parents of the husband and wife, and further family members. But a heterosexual family lies at the center, with the result that gay and lesbian people, for example, are hardly represented.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the donors are generally the children or grandchildren of the couple. Gay and lesbian people often had no children of their own, so their estate was not passed down to the following generation. When gay and lesbian people do appear in our family collections, as an unmarried uncle or aunt, for example, they are almost never a focus of attention, but rather a fringe figure, just as in their day they were part of a fringe group. More detailed biographical information is almost never available, not least because sexual orientation was simply a taboo in many families.

About Herbert Landau from the Collection of Paul Hugo Meyer

The extensive collection on Paul Hugo Meyer, which I inventoried in 2012, also contains a few documents about his uncle Herbert Landau (1895–1967).

The letters that have been preserved do not make it clear that he was gay, but in 2003, the donor compiled a photo album with portraits of family members and supplemented them with brief biographies. Hubert Landau’s read:

“As an artist, a homosexual, and a Jew, Hubert recognized the danger presented by Hitler long before other members of the family did.”

Born in Berlin, he left for the United States in 1935, where he remained into the 1950s:

“He left New York in 1954 after being falsely suspected of a roommate’s murder. He moved to England, spending the remainder of his life with his loving sister Dudie, much to her husband’s dismay.”

Unfortunately, we received no further original documents about his life.

The Doctor and Sexologist Felix Abraham

A year later I inventoried the collection of the Marx and Abraham families, which had been donated to us in 2013. In this case, in the course of sifting through thousands of items, I also unexpectedly stumbled upon a few documents and photographs on the doctor and sexologist Felix Abraham (1901–1937).

Beginning in 1929, he was employed at the Berlin Institute for Sexology (Berliner Institut für Sexualwissenschaft). I was particularly stuck by a photo showing Felix Abraham at the Institute with a woman.

Since we know that he carried out sex reassignment surgeries for transsexual people, I assume that the woman is a trans woman and a patient of his. Felix Abraham took his own life while exiled in Italy in 1937, and the collection provides no insight into his own sexual orientation.

Searching for Traces in the Archive

The fact that only these and a few other examples are known to me of LGBTIQ* people in our museum collections does not mean that they were the only ones; some were surely never outed in their lifetimes or afterward, to use a modern phrase. The reason for this—not only in the Nazi era—was criminalization and pathologizing, as well as social ostracization. That means that the documents passed on to us are mostly silent on the subject of sexual orientation and gender identity. Personal self-accounts such as diaries or letters, which might have provided insights into (secret) thoughts and feelings or experiences, are mostly lacking.

As an employee at the archive and a gay man, I like to keep an eye out for identifying queer people, though I know that my “gaydar” is very subjective and I may be wrong. And I certainly can’t tell how people may have defined themselves. Often, I am looking at documents and photographs from new collections in which the sexual orientation and gender identity of those in question is unclear.