- Born
- 17 August 1885Berlin, Germany
- Died
- 1 October 1972Hamburg, Germany · aged 87
Kurt Hiller
A combative writer and lawyer who fought Paragraph 175 for sixty years – through the Weimar Republic, a concentration camp and exile.
Kurt Hiller grew up in a Jewish family in Berlin and studied law. Before the First World War he was a central figure of literary Expressionism in Berlin. He was a passionate pacifist and political essayist.
From 1908 he was active in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee of Magnus Hirschfeld, the world’s first gay rights organisation, and later became its deputy chairman. In his book “§ 175: Die Schmach des Jahrhunderts!” (Paragraph 175: The Disgrace of the Century, 1922) he attacked the German law against sex between men with sharp arguments.
In 1933 the Nazis arrested him. He was imprisoned in the Oranienburg concentration camp and brutally mistreated. After his release in 1934 he fled to Prague and then to London, where he lived in exile for twenty years.
In 1955 he returned to Germany and settled in Hamburg. He tried to revive the gay rights movement and continued to fight against Paragraph 175, which the Federal Republic kept in its Nazi version until 1969. He died in Hamburg in 1972, aged 87.