Karl Giese

Born to a working-class family in Wedding, Berlin, he met Hirschfeld at a lecture while a student and appeared as a schoolboy in the 1919 film Different from the Others. He became Hirschfeld’s collaborator and lover, lived with him and ran the archive of the Institute for Sexual Science, giving lectures and staging exhibitions. In 1932 he went to meet Hirschfeld, who would not return from his world tour, and found that he had taken a young medical student from Shanghai as a second partner; the three then lived together. After the institute’s library was burned in 1933 he tried in Brno, Czechoslovakia, to buy back what remained and wrote for the sex reform magazine Nový hlas. Expelled from France in 1934, he spent a year in Vienna. Hirschfeld left him the books and objects rescued from the institute on condition that they serve sexology alone, but Giese never obtained the inheritance. He took his own life in Brno in March 1938, after the annexation of Austria; his heir, the lawyer Karel Fein, was murdered by the Nazis in 1942, and the legacy vanished.