A Trans Hirschfeld Renaissance w/ Leah Tigers, Dean Erdmann, Maxi Wallenhorst and Raimund Wolfert

The conversation between historian and essayist Leah Tigers, artist Dean Erdmann, and historian Raimund Wolfert, moderated by author Maxi Wallenhorst and curator Christopher Weickenmeier, engages the recent proliferation of historical, literary, and artistic practices concerning the Institute for Sexual Science. Founded by Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933, the institute was the first of its kind, a focus point of sexual politics and queer sociality in the Weimar Republic. In the spirit of an “idiolectic trans history” outlined by Leah Tigers, the conversation probes the necessity for idiosyncratic as well as formalized approaches to the archive.

No prior registration is required.

The event can also be attended online via the following Zoom-Link (Meeting ID: 970 5450 0183) and with the passcode “magnus”. https://leuphana.zoom.us/j/97054500183?pwd=b3ZlQ29SSmFEU2x6aVNmZkVQWnZSdz09

dean erdmann is an interdisciplinary artist working moving and still images, sculpture and installation, often using pre-existing archives or creating archives. Their work often considers the politics of place, class and the body.

Leah Tigers is a community trans historian based out of Brooklyn, New York. Her previous writings feature trans asylum and prison experience in New York, queer migration to the western United States or California, where she lived for 6 years, and of course trans experiences in the Weimar Republic, which began partly as a personal interest in her German ancestry. She has also previously published narrative nonfiction in the history of science, which continues to stimulate much of her curiosity about the transgender subject in psychiatry and sexology. Many of her essays can be found at her personal website, www.trickymothernature.com. Currently she teaches Women’s Studies at Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey and is working with several friends to start up a transgender literary review.

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer living in Berlin. Next to dance dramaturgy, translation and art writing Maxi works on dissociative poetics in capitalism. Recently, essays appeared in e-flux journal and in Elif Saydam’s Two Cents (Mousse, 2022). In progress: A transvestite romance set in a half-allegorical 20s Berlin.

Raimund Wolfert, born 1963, studied Scandinavian studies, linguistics and library science in Bonn, Oslo (Norway) and Berlin. Degree: Magister Artium. Wolfert lives as a lecturer in adult education and freelance author in Berlin. He is a staff member of the Magnus Hirschfeld Society and editor of the journal “Mitteilungen der Magnus Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft”. Recent publications include „Gegen Einsamkeit und ‚Einsiedelei‘. Die Geschichte der Internationalen Homophilen Welt-Organisation“ (2009), „Nirgendwo daheim. Das bewegte Leben des Bruno Vogel“ (2012), „Die Goldbergs. Zwischen Friedenstempel, Lunapark und Haus der Modeindustrie“ (2015), „Homosexuellenpolitik in der jungen Bundesrepublik. Kurt Hiller, Hans Giese und das Ffter Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee“ (2015), „Botho Laserstein. Anwalt und Publizist für ein neues Sexualstrafrecht“ (2020) and „Charlotte Charlaque. Transfrau, Laienschauspielerin, ‚Königin der Brooklyn Heights Promenade‘“ (2021).