Kurt Hiller

Born in Berlin to a Jewish tie manufacturer’s family, he was the great-nephew of the Social Democratic Reichstag deputy Paul Singer. He took a law doctorate at Heidelberg in 1907 with part of a work on the right over oneself, which argued that criminal law should respect self-determination. From 1908, when Hirschfeld approached him, he worked for twenty-five years in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. A pioneer of literary Expressionism, he co-founded the Neue Club in 1909 and edited the first Expressionist anthology, Der Kondor, in 1912. In the November Revolution he chaired the Political Council of Intellectual Workers, advocating a “logocracy” in which an intellectual elite would share power with parliament. In 1919 he co-founded the League of War Resisters, and on the left wing of the German Peace Society he argued that pacifism should look to the Soviet Union despite his criticism of its Leninism. In 1926 he formed the Group of Revolutionary Pacifists, calling for capitalism to be overcome; he voiced admiration for Mussolini, yet in 1928, disappointed with the SPD, urged voters to back the KPD. When Hirschfeld resigned in 1929 Hiller became second chairman of the committee.

In 1933 he was held and badly abused in Spandau fortress, the Columbia-Haus, Brandenburg prison and Oranienburg concentration camp; released in 1934, he fled to Prague and was stripped of his citizenship in 1935. In London from 1938 he founded the Freedom League of German Socialists. Returning to Hamburg in 1955, he failed to refound the committee in 1962 and in the early 1960s again petitioned against Paragraph 175. He acknowledged his own homosexuality only in an autobiography written in his eighties. He died in Hamburg in 1972.