#queer activist
Kurt Hiller, lawyer, philosopher, author, poet, leftist, queer activist
Kurt Hiller, one of the “left intellectuals” of Weimar Germany, was one of the strongest leaders of the German homosexual rights movement— from 1908, when he joined the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.Perhaps the most influential work of Hiller’s literary activism was his Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety. (Copenhagen 1928) in which he rejected the understanding of homosexuality as something contrary to nature, and contested traditional conceptions of same-sex love. The speech was delivered in his stead by Magnus Hirschfeld, the President of the Sexual Reform Congress and the foremost figure in the early homosexual rights movement.
Kurt Hiller, a socialist, pacifist, homosexual, Jew was on the Nazi’s detention list and ended up spending time in Oranienburg and other concentration camps. He was released in April 1934. Having nearly died from mistreatment, he managed to escape rearrest to live in exile in Prague.
He was a prolific writer until his death in 1972, in Hamburg. In 2000, Kurt Hiller Park located in Berlin-Schöneberg was dedicated honoring Hiller as the “co-founder of the gay civil rights movement.”
Photo [above]: A published collection of essays in 1922 against §Paragraph 175.
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