“The Einstein Of Sex”: The Story Of Magnus Hirschfeld, The Real-Life Figure In The ‘Transparent’ Season 2 Flashbacks

The season premiere of Transparent starts out at one might expect for the series, with all members of the Pfefferman clan going at each other and their loved ones in a very public place. Whether it’s breaking up your own wedding, spilling the beans on your girlfriend’s pregnancy, or nearly coming to blows with your estranged sister, the premiere offers what we’d expect from Jill Soloway’s singular universe.

Well, until about 20 minutes in, when we get our first flashback. Season 1 had plenty of them, focusing on Maura’s (Jeffrey Tambor) early explorations of her gender, and the breakup of her marriage while she and Shelly’s (Judith Light) children were young. This time, however, we go all the way back to Berlin in early 1933, to an ecstatic cabaret of gender nonconformists swaying to the beat. An old man with a bushy mustache stands out in the crowd. Wait…is that Bradley Whitford?

Soloway returns to this time period throughout the season, much as she did to the early 1990s in season 1. But where those flashbacks served almost like an origin story to Mort’s transition to Maura, season 2’s dalliance in the heady, pre-apocalyptic days of the Weimar Republic’s demise seeks to place the Pfeffermans in a grander political context. You see, those scenes aren’t completely a fictionalized take on the libertine Eden of pre-Hitler Berlin–they’re also set in a real place, the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sex Research), and feature its revolutionary founder, Magnus Hirschfeld (portrayed in the show by Whitford).

Dubbed “The Einstein of Sex” in his heyday, Hirschfeld predated even Alfred Kinsey in his progressive and scientific interest in human gender and sexuality. He made his name with the 1896 publication of Sappho and Socrates, one of the earliest scientific disquisitions on homosexuality in the modern world. Hirschfeld continually advocated for the public repeal of laws that outlawed homosexuality, and strived to make gay men and women accepted as part of mainstream European society, including the founding of the World League for Sexual Reform, the first global gay rights organization, in the 1920s. He also supported the legalization of abortion and other women’s rights. (As a Jew and an openly gay man, Hirschfeld knew a few things about being stigmatized for who you are.)

Hirschfeld was most famous for founding the Institut in 1919. As the Weimar Republic ushered in a newfound sense of sexual progressivism amid economic chaos, Hirschfeld used the Institut as a research library, museum, laboratory, hospital, and community center for the LGBTQ community. The Institut became an intellectual hotbed, hosting the likes of Christopher Isherwood, Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Gide, and W.H. Auden. The very first sex reassignment surgeries were performed in the Institut’s medical ward in 1930 and ’31. (Artist Lili Elbe was an early patient. Her own biopic, The Danish Girl, will likely earn Eddie Redmayne another Oscar nomination.)

Hirschfeld’s presence in Transparent serves to give the Pfeffermans’ own sexual journeys a locus for their pain. At one point, Ali (Gaby Hoffmann) describes the phenomenon of “inherited trauma,” and the flashbacks to her grandmother Rose (Emily Robinson, who played young Ali in season 1) and great-aunt Gittel, born Gershon (played by transgender artist/model Hari Nef), give credence to the idea. Rose and Gittel also demonstrate the playfulness of exploration that Maura and her children revel in, decades into the future and thousands of miles away. (Rose and Gittel also demonstrate that the family’s fierce sibling bonds cross the generations.) The trauma, however, is ever-present. Rose and Gittel’s mother Yetta (Michaela Watkins) lashes out with confusion and ignorance about Gittel, and Hirschfeld is there to explain not only Gittel’s transition, but also the inherently rational philosophy of the Institut: The world must see that LGBTQ individuals are natural, normal, and just as deserving of respect and humanity as anyone else.

Hirschfeld’s pansexual paradise cannot continue, of course. The show depicts the real-life events of May 6th, 1933, when the Nazis stormed the Institut and ransacked its contents. The library and archives were burned a few days later, and the progress of the 1920s officially ground to a halt. While Hirschfeld is present at the attack in the show, he was actually in Paris on a speaking tour when the Institut was destroyed. He never returned to Germany, and died of a heart attack two years later at the age of 67.

Yetta manages to secure visas for herself, Rose and Gittel to get out of Germany, but Gittel stays behind, loyal to everything Hirschfeld has built. Her fate was sealed, and Rose carried that trauma for the rest of her life. The story of Gittel and Rose is no longer the stuff of television, but rather a thinly fictional example of the LGBTQ community’s (not-so-) hidden legacy. Here’s to hoping that Maura and Rose will rediscover their bond, and deepen it through the memory of Gittel, in season 3.