Lili Elbe

Lili Elbe, 1930

Lili Elbe (born December 28, 1882 in Vejle , Denmark as Einar Mogens Andreas Wegener ; † September 12, 1931 in Dresden , Germany ) was a Danish painter and transgender pioneer. She underwent 1930/31 as probably one of the first intersexual a gender reassignment surgery . However, the information on Lili's intersexuality is based on speculation.

Life

The writer Niels Hoyer writes in his book A Man Changes His Sex: A Life Confession that Lili Elbe was born with both male and female organs.

Gerda Wegener : Lili Elbe, ca.1928

She grew up as Einar Wegener and studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen . It was there that Lili Elbe and her fellow student Gerda Gottlieb met and married in 1904. Elbe specialized in landscape and architectural painting, while Gottlieb opted for illustration and fashion graphics. In order to expand their sphere of activity, they moved to Paris in 1912 , where Gerda was also able to live out her lesbian orientation and Lili could live out her female identity more freely.

Around 1913 it became known that the model for Gerda's fashionable figurines was a phenotypic man who called himself Lili Elbe. Only the closest friends knew that Lili Elbe was identical to Einar Wegener; Gerda Wegener introduced Lili to strangers as her husband's sister. In 1930 Lili Elbe decided to finally make the physical adjustment to the perceived gender . In February 1930 she followed Kurt Warnekros' instructions and went to Berlin. The sex reassignment operations were carried out by Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexology in Berlin . The first operation took place in a practice in Berlin. Then Elbe went to the Dresden women's clinic. On May 26, 1930, Kurt Warnekros performed a second operation.

As a result of the sex reassignment operations, the marriage was annulled by the Danish king; Elbe received papers in its new name.

A few months after the fourth operation in 1931 there were complications , probably due to transplant rejection , from which Lili Elbe died. She was buried in the Trinity cemetery in Dresden-Johannstadt in the IIC field.

reminder

New tombstone 2016

Lili Elbe's grave, which was leveled in the 1960s, was restored in 2016. The new tombstone was funded by Focus Features , the production company for The Danish Girl .

Life report Fra mand til kvinde

Lili Elbe's life story Fra mand til kvinde (From man to woman) first appeared in Danish in 1931, the German translation was published in Dresden in 1932 and then an English translation of the German version in London in 1933 . In 1953 a second unabridged edition was published in New York; the most recent edition in English so far is from 2004. The book by Niels Hoyer (d. i. Ernst Harthern ) was published in German in 1954 by the Tauchnitz-Verlag under the title Wandlung - a life confession .

reception

For Jan Morris , the book she discovered in a bookstore in Ludlow was "the first confirmation that there were other people in the world who were in exactly the same position as me."

In 2000 David Ebershoff wrote a novel about Lili Elbe and Gerda Wegener (in the book as American painter Greta Waud) with the title The Danish Girl (original title The Danish Girl ). It has been translated into a dozen languages ​​and has been an international bestseller.

The film adaptation of the same name by Tom Hooper premiered on September 5, 2015 at the Venice International Film Festival . Eddie Redmayne plays Lili and Alicia Vikander plays Gerda. At the 2016 Academy Awards , Redmayne was nominated for the role for Best Actor , and Vikander was named Best Supporting Actress.

In November 2013, the Lili Elbe Archive was founded in Berlin as an “independent place for the transmission of one's own history of non-normative sexes”; worn by an association of the same name.

Fonts

• Fra mand til kvinde , 1931
• A person changes his gender: a life confession, edited from papers left behind by Niels Hoyer . Translated from the Danish original Fra Mand til Kvinde by Ernst Harthern-Jacobson. DNB entry Reissner, Dresden 1932
• Man into woman: the first sex change, a portrait of Lili Elbe: the true and remarkable transformation of the painter Einar Wegener / edited by Niels Hoyer , translated from the German by HJ Stenning. 1933
• Man into woman: An authentic record of a change of sex; The true story of the Danish painter Einar Wegener (Andreas Sparre) / [Lili Elbe] , edited by Niels Hoyer, from the German version A man changes his gender into English translated by HJ Stenning. Popular Library, New York 1953 (2nd unabridged edition)
• Change - a life confession , edited by Niels Hoyer, Tauchnitz Stuttgart 1954.
• Man into woman: the first sex change, a portrait of Lili Elbe: the true and remarkable transformation of the painter Einar Wegener . Blue Boat Books, London 2004, ISBN 978-0-9547072-0-0 .

Belletristic representation

• David Ebershoff (2000): The Danish Girl , Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 2000, German: The Danish Girl , Goldmann, Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-442-30843-9 .

literature

• Susanne Kailitz (2012): The Experiment. In 1930 the Dresden gynecologist Kurt Warnekros carried out one of the world's first sex reassignments. Now this is the material for a feature film - with Nicole Kidman . In: Die Zeit , January 12, 2012.
• Sabine Meyer (2010): With the doll's pram into normative femininity. Lili Elbe and the journalistic staging of transsexuality in Denmark . In: Northern Europe Forum . 20 (2010: 1-2), pp. 33-61.
• Rainer Herrn (2005): Patterns of the sex. Transvestism and Transsexuality in Early Sexology . Psychosozial Verlag, Gießen (Lahn) 2005, ISBN 3-89806-463-8 , page 204 ff.
• Harald Neckelmann : The story of Lili Elbe. A person changes his gender. Bebra Verlag, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-89809-163-3

Web links

Commons : Lili Elbe  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography of Lili Elbe at the Federal Magnus Hirschfeld Foundation
• Gerda Wegener - a photo album ( Memento from October 5, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (in English)
• Article about Gerda Wegener and Lili Elbe in the New York Times (in English)
• Einar Wegener on artnet
• Review of the English version of Lili Elbe's autobiography , oiiaustralia.com , April 17, 2009 (in English)
• Lili Elbe (Einar Wegener) 1882–1931 , danmarkshistorien.dk (in Danish)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Meyer, Sabine (2015), "How Lili became a real girl" - Lili Elbe: On the construction of gender and identity between medialization, regulation and subjectivation, p. 15, pp. 312-313.
2. ↑ Jodi Kaufmann: Transfiguration: a narrative analysis of male ‐ to ‐ female transsexual . In: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education . tape 20 , no. 1 , January 1, 2007, ISSN  0951-8398 , p. 1–13 , doi : 10.1080 / 09518390600923768 .
3. ↑ A person changes his gender: A life confession, edited from papers left behind by Niels Hoyer . Translated from the Danish original Fra Mand til Kvinde by Ernst Harthern-Jacobson. Reissner, Dresden 1932, p. 15.
4. ↑ Meredith Worthen: Lili Elbe. In: biography.com. Retrieved September 11, 2021 (American English). 
5. ↑ Meredith Worthen: Lili Elbe. Retrieved September 12, 2021 (American English). 
6. ^ For criticism of this version see: Susanne Kailitz: Das Experiment. In: The time . January 12, 2012. Retrieved July 26, 2012.
7. ↑ Last honor for the "Danish Girl". Retrieved September 12, 2021 (German). 
8. ↑ Kay Haufe: Hollywood saves Lili Elbe's grave . In: Saxon newspaper . April 22, 2016 ( online [accessed April 26, 2016]). online ( Memento from June 21, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
9. ↑ Niels Hoyer: Change . Tauchnitz, Stuttgart 1954, p. 253 .
10. ↑ Jan Morris: Conundrum. Report of my gender reassignment. Munich 1975. p. 58.
11. ↑ lili-elbe-archive.org: Self-image , accessed on August 8, 2020