Berlin’s reputation as a queer-friendly city reaches back nearly a century. During the 1920s, under the Weimar Republic, the city became a magnet for queer nightlife and a global center for early research, advocacy and community building around sexuality and gender.
The criminal code known as Paragraph 175, introduced in 1871 and enforced with varying intensity from 1872 through 1945, criminalized sexual acts between men. Its presence provoked decades of resistance from activists, physicians and writers and helped spur one of Europe’s earliest visible gay rights movements. East Germany removed the law in 1968; West Germany began reforms in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the provision was finally abolished in 1994.
A leading figure in the early movement was Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician and sex researcher who argued that sexual orientation and gender identity were natural variations rather than moral failings. In 1897 he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in Berlin, often cited as the world’s first organization dedicated to defending gay rights and challenging Paragraph 175. In 1919 Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, a combined research center, clinic and public education space. The institute gained international recognition for progressive work on sexuality and gender, offered counseling, kept extensive archives and questioned rigid male–female binaries.
In this atmosphere many artists and performers felt freer to be open about non-heterosexual identities. Berlin hosted clubs, publications and meeting places for gay, lesbian and gender-nonconforming people despite legal risks and social prejudice. Birgit Bosold, longtime board member at Berlin’s Schwules Museum, has described Weimar-era Berlin as among the most liberal cities of its time.
Neighborhoods such as Schöneberg were hubs for creatives and queer social life. The café Dorian Gray on Bülowstrasse was a noted lesbian venue, alternating mixed evenings and hosting live music, costume balls and readings until the Nazis closed it. One of the city’s most famous nightclubs, Eldorado, opened in 1924 in Charlottenburg and later moved; it became known for drag performances and a discreet social freedom that attracted artists and writers. Otto Dix painted scenes from that world, Marlene Dietrich is said to have performed there, and British author Christopher Isherwood drew on Berlin’s bohemian, queer life for The Berlin Stories.
The Nazi takeover in the early 1930s violently ended Weimar-era tolerance. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was raided on May 6, 1933; its library and archives were looted and many books and documents were burned during the Nazi book burnings on May 10, 1933. The regime tightened legislation and prosecuted gay men: at least 50,000 sentences under Paragraph 175 were issued, and an estimated 5,000–15,000 of those men were deported to concentration camps.
Although Nazi persecution brutally interrupted Berlin’s vibrant queer culture, the city later experienced a gradual revival and once again became a major center of queer life. Today visitors can find a commemorative plaque at the former site of Hirschfeld’s institute, and districts such as Schöneberg and the area around Nollendorfplatz remain important markers in Berlin’s continuing queer history.