Kurt Hiller

Kurt Hiller (17 August 1885, Berlin – 1 October 1972, Hamburg) was a German essayist, lawyer, and expressionist poet. He was also a political (namely pacifist) journalist.

Biography Hiller came from a middle-class Jewish background. A communist, he was deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, despising the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which made him quite unpopular with Marxists.

Hiller was educated at the University of Berlin around 1900 where he met other left-wing and homosexual activists, like sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, left-wing activist Georg Simmel (who was his doctoral advisor), and his life-long friend, gay author Hugo Marcus.

At the start of the 20th century, Berlin had a prominent homosexual scene, home to many gay bars and clubs, and was generally less sexually conservative than other places. Because of this, gay rights activists, including Hiller came to Berlin to practice their activism and form groups like Hirschfeld's Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, of which Hiller was a member. Despite being more safe than elsewhere, homosexual activists in Berlin usually did not out themselves as homosexual and fronted their championing of gay rights as a general humanitarian effort rather than a personal one. At the start of his career as an activist, however, Hiller described himself as "gay" and In a 1905 Scientific-Humanitarian Committee meeting, he proposed a mass self-outing of a thousand homosexuals, as he thought it would help their cause. The proposal was denied.

He is remembered, too, for his book §175: Schmach des Jahrhunderts (Paragraph 175: Outrage of the Century) published in 1922. He later left Prague for London in 1938. In 1955, he returned to West Germany, shortly after which he tried and failed to reestablish the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. In the 1960s, he began formulating another attempt to petition against Paragraph 175, but did not complete it. He lived and wrote in Hamburg until his death in 1972.

As a renowned and prominent gay activist from the beginning of the century to his death he was connected with many other activists of the first homosexual movement such as Magnus Hirschfeld, Eva Siewert and many more.

Works

The following have been translated into English:

§ 175. Outrage of the Century. Translated by M. Lombardi-Nash (1922; Jacksonville, FL: Urania Manuscripts, 2026).