The Einstein of Sex: Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, Visionary of Weimar Berlin

By Daniel Brook 

"A well-informed life of a scientist worth remembering."—Kirkus Reviews

"Jaunty… Brook succeeds in bringing his subject to fresh life, including a description of Hirschfeld’s world travels in 1930, which he undertook to lecture and research."—Casey Schwartz, Washington Post

"You’ve probably never heard of Magnus Hirschfeld—and this is an injustice to a truly great man. Daniel Brook’s excellent biography. . . resurrects Dr. Hirschfeld’s status as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, whose insights into human nature can illuminate our turbulent times."—Deborah Mason, BookPage

An illuminating portrait of a lost thinker, German-Jewish sexologist and activist Magnus Hirschfeld.

More than a century ago, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, dubbed the “Einstein of Sex,” grew famous (and infamous) for his liberating theory of sexual relativity. Today, he’s been largely forgotten.

Journalist Daniel Brook retraces Hirschfeld’s rollicking life and reinvigorates his legacy, recovering one of the great visionaries of the twentieth century. In an era when gay sex was a crime and gender roles rigid, Hirschfeld taught that each of us is their own unique mixture of masculinity and femininity. Through his public advocacy for gay rights and his private counseling of patients toward self-acceptance, he became the intellectual impresario of Berlin’s cabaret scene and helped turn his hometown into the world’s queer capital. But he also enraged the Nazis, who ransacked his Institute for Sexual Science and burned his books

Driven from his homeland, Hirschfeld traveled to America, Asia, and the Middle East to research sexuality on a global scale. Through his harrowing lived experience of antisemitic persecution and a pivotal late-in-life interracial romance, he came to see that race, like gender, was a human invention. Hirschfeld spent his final years in exile trying to warn the world of the genocidal dangers of racism.

Rich in passion and intellect, The Einstein of Sex at last brings together this unsung icon’s work on sexuality, gender, and race and recovers the visionary who first saw beyond the binaries. A century after his groundbreaking work—as the fights for personal freedom and societal acceptance rage on—Hirschfeld’s gift for thinking beyond the confines of his world has much to teach us.

Hardcover
320 pages
W. W. Norton, 2025
6.4 x 9.4 inches
ISBN 9781324007241
Biography, German History