Universal Fetishism? Emancipation and Race in Magnus Hirschfeld's 1930 Sexological Visual Atlas

“B i l d e r s o l l e n B i l d e n . ” With this succinctly worded statement that “images should educate,” the influential German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935) opened the visual volume, or Bilderteil, of a five-volume book series entitled Geschlechtskunde (Sex studies, 1926–30).1 This nine-hundred-page volume is an intriguing recapitulation of the thirty years of sexological and emancipatory experience presented in the Geschlechtskunde series.2 In line with other late nineteenthand early twentieth-century scientific atlases, which functioned as crucial tools in the organization of individual research objects into visual compendia virtually mapping the territory of a discipline, the volume offers a truly kaleidoscopic abundance of pictures.3 More than fourteen hundred images depict a great variety of subjects, ranging from sixteenth-century etchings of Adam and Eve to microphotographs of gonadic tissue, images showing phenomena such as exotic phallus statues, bodily deformations, medieval chastity belts, stillborn babies, syphilitic infections, skeletons, and even sex-changing chickens (see fig. 1). The sole common denominator of these images is that they are all in one way or another related to Hirschfeld’s lifelong research into the varieties of human sexuality.