Adolf Brand

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Adolf Brand
First edition of Der Eigen , one of the first periodically published homosexual magazines, published by Adolf Brand in 1896

Adolf Brand (* 14. November 1874 in Berlin , † 2. February 1945 ) was an early gay activist and founder of the world's first regularly published gay magazine The Own ( 1896 - 1932 ).

In 1899/1900 Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's influential anthology of homoerotic literature Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in world literature in his publishing house, which also published Der Eigen .

In 1903 Brand, together with Benedict Friedlaender and Wilhelm Jansen, founded the Community of Owners (GdE), whose ideals were homosexual love for virile men and boyfriends based on the Greek model, and whose members were also close to Gustav Wyneken's idea of educational eros. They firmly rejected medical theories about homosexuality such as Magnus Hirschfeld's theory of sexual intermediates (see third gender ). Only for the abolition of paragraph 175 did the GdE fight together with Hirschfeld's scientific and humanitarian committee in the 1920s , but in vain.

The community of one's own was also practically active. There were camping and trekking events, some of which were also practiced naked . In this respect, the GdE groupings of the youth movement were similar to the Wandervogel . One of the co-founders of the GdE, Wilhelm Jansen , was one of the main financiers and leaders of the Wandervogel movement.

Book volume 1906 edition of "The Own"

Brand was an advocate for outing famous gay men long before the term was coined. When, in the course of the Harden-Eulenburg affair in 1907, he claimed that Reich Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow had a homosexual relationship in order to persuade him to abolish §175, v. Bülow was sued for defamation and sentenced to 18 months in prison for failing to produce evidence. Brand also tried an outing of many other personalities in public and cultural life. He made the case of the playwright and headmaster Carl Friedrich Müller-Palleske known, who had fled to Switzerland to avoid prosecution in the Kingdom of Bavaria.

Brand also had to serve various other prison sentences, e.g. B. because he hit a member of parliament with whom he had a disagreement with a dog leash, and because of various text and image publications that were offensive in the eyes of the prosecutors.

During the First World War, Brand scaled back his activities in the GdE and served in the army for two years. He married the nurse Elise Behrendt, who accepted his homosexual disposition.

From 1933 on, Brand gave up homosexual activism after he was exposed to constant attacks by the Nazis and after the confiscation of many of his books and documents he was unable to continue to publish the magazine Der Eigen , which also meant financial ruin for him personally.

Brand died in an Allied air raid.

literature

  • Reprint. "Your own. A sheet for male culture". A cross-section through the world's first gay magazine. With a contribution by Friedrich Kröhnke. Edited and with an afterword by Joachim S. Hohmann, Foerster Verlag, Frankfurt / Main and Berlin 1981.

Web links

Commons : Adolf Brand  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had already published Uranus - magazine for the interests of Uranism in 1870 , of which only one issue appeared. (Kennedy, Hubert, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality , In: 'Science and Homosexualities', ed. Vernon Rosario (pp. 26–45). New York: Routledge, 1997.)
  2. ↑ http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0900/t220900.htm
  3. ↑ Mills, Richard. 1980. A Man of Youth: Wilhelm Jansen and the German Wandervogel Movement . In: 'Gay Sunshine', 44/45
  4. ↑ Adolf Brand: “A volatile school director.” In: Extrapost des Eigenen 1911, p. 110.
personal data
SURNAME Brand, Adolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Editor of the world's first gay magazine
DATE OF BIRTH November 14, 1874
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 1945
Place of death Berlin