“Are we to treat human nature as the early Victorian lady treated telegrams?”: British and German sexual science, investigations of nature, and the fight against censorship, ca. 1890–1940

Abstract

Histories of sexology often examine moments of censorship in which sexological knowledge was repressed, banned or destroyed. Familiar examples include the Bedborough trial, which resulted in the censorship of John Addington Symonds’s and Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) in England,3 or the ban of the German film Anders als die Andern (1919), co-written by and starring Magnus Hirschfeld.4 The violent destruction of Hirschfeld’s Berlin Institute of Sexology by the Nazis in 1933 has come to be seen as a defining moment of erasure not only within histories of sexology, but queer and trans histories more widely.5 To be sure, concerns about publishing and disseminating sexological research and the dangers of censorship are everywhere in the archival records, and these famous cases are not isolated incidents. There can be no doubt that the threat and reality of censorship restricted the production and circulation of sexological knowledge in fundamental ways.6 At the same time, as we argue in this article, scientists and others producing and circulating sex research in early twentieth-century Britain and Germany were not uniformly opposed to the censorship of sexual knowledge. On the contrary, many sex researchers conceded that who had access to sexual knowledge, where and when needed careful regulation. This view was informed by an understanding of human nature and the sexual instinct as changeable and open to influence. Indeed, the foundational idea of sexology – that scientific knowledge of human sexuality was of vital importance, and that sexual science should guide the organization of sexual life – hinged on the assumption that human nature and the sexual instinct needed to be governed and controlled through scientific knowledge.