Undoubtedly, out of the many good, bad, and ugly films directed by queer kraut agitpropagandist Rosa von Praunheim (Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts, Neurosia: 50 Years of Perversity), the debauched director’s pseudo-docudrama The Einstein of Sex: Life and Work of Dr. M. Hirschfeld (1999) aka Der Einstein des Sex—a work depicting the life and times of pioneering Jewish German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—is one of the Berlin-based filmmaker's most deathly serious yet aesthetically and cinematically flaccid works. Sort of like a lurid and lecherous Lifetime movie with a couple softcore sex scenes and semi-grotesque genital-mutilating surgery scenes, The Einstein of Sex is quite possibly the most absurd tribute to a ridiculous figure ever made, as von Praunheim’s sort of perverse poof tribute to a leftist Hebrew subversive who, while exceedingly gay in the extra-effeminate sort of way and dedicating his life to legalizing homosexuality in the Fatherland, had a rather banal sex life and seemed more interested in coldly examining the warped genitals of hermaphrodites and collecting ancient dildos, or at least one would assume after viewing this desperately debauched yet stupidly serious docudrama. Had National Socialist Germany won the Second World War, it is very doubtful that people would know the name Magnus Hirschfeld today for obvious reasons, but since the Occident has drastically degenerated into a gigantic Weimar Republic of sorts as a whole, he is now revered as a Sodomite God among certain curious circles like the so-called 'queer community' and has been described as “the first advocate for homosexual and transgender rights” due to his special affection for fags. Herr Hirschfeld also has a minor connection to cinema history in that he co-wrote and had a cameo in the silent flick Different From The Others (1919) aka Anders als die Andern, a work revered today for being one of the first films to feature a positive depiction of homosexuals and that would act as the basic plot inspiration for Victim (1961) starring Dirk Bogarde, which has the grand distinction of being the first film to feature the word “homosexual.” A seemingly senseless piece of scatological sentimentalism, mindless homo Heeb worship, and childish condemnation of fag-bashing National Socialists who had the audacity to destroy Hirschfeld’s sexual ‘research’ institute, burn his books, and force the good doctor into exile, The Einstein of Sex is just as innately idiotic in its message as the films of celluloid Shoah saint S. Spielberg, but what makes von Praunheim’s film different is that it is so amateurishly directed and curiously nonsensical in its construction that it is ultimately a work of accidental queersploitation. In fact, considering that it is essentially a work of fiction where von Praunheim totally invented events, incidents, and motivations regarding the life and work Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex is not much more reliable as a work of history regarding its subject then Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS (1975) is regarding the reality of Nazi concentration camps.
In Rosa von Praunheim’s mind, Magnus Hirschfeld developed his affinity for championing sexual perversion after his father, who was a respected physician, congratulated him as a prepubescent boy for drawing pictures of wild animals having sex. When Hirschfeld (played by Friedel von Wangenheim, who co-wrote the film, in what would be his first and last film role) came of age and went to school for medicine to become a physician, he was absolutely offended by the fact that his professor would describe a pederast as a degenerate, so he tells his friend that he wants to become a sort of Bolshevik of medicine and that together, “We can change everything. We can change this university. We can change the whole world.” Hirschfeld’s friend thinks he’s deranged so their friendship ends, but luckily he meets a disgraced Austrian aristocrat named Baron von Teschenberg (Gerd Lukas Storzer) who caused a scandal when he was caught giving a blowjob to a soldier and was disinherited by his family, so he becomes the doc’s loyal assistant. Meanwhile, Hirschfeld starts the Scientific Humanitarian Committee to defend the rights of homos, trannies, and other sexual misfits and drafts a petition to overturn Paragraph 175 to legalize homosexuality, ultimately managing to get over 5000 people to sign it, including Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Albert Einstein, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Gerhart Hauptmann and countless others, but the law is never overturned in the physician's lifetime. Hirschfeld also passively butts heads with masculine homosexual activist Adolf Brand (played by blond-haired German Jew Ben Becker) who has nothing but sheer and utter disdain for effeminate gays and glorifies the masculine homo-heroism of ancient Greeks, telling the Yiddish doc regarding his poof patients and overall efforts, “Those creatures are neither man nor woman, and you lump such wretched stepchildren of nature together with these blossoming, glorious boys. We don’t need a doctor who spends his time in brothels and privies examining the underpants of Jews with three anuses.” Of course, being a sodomite socialist Semite, Hirschfeld has a very different view on things and will do anything to deracinate and subvert traditional German society, as exemplified in his diagnosis of a pansy patient, “Congratulations. As you suspected, you are clearly same-sex inclined. I prescribe repeated visits to the Adonis Dance Club. There you’ll meet others like yourself. Fall in love, be happy. Stay away from public toilets, limit the amount of intercourse and avoid depraved people.” Despite devoting his life to Hirschfeld, Baron von Teschenberg is incapable of getting the doctor to have a sexual/romantic relationship with him, so after being blackmailed by a hustler, he decides to commit suicide.
Throughout The Einstein of Sex, Dr. Hirschfeld becomes involved in various forms of queer quackery, including transplanting ‘heterosexual testicles’ bought on the black market to homosexual men in the hopes of changing their sexual orientation. Of course, in Rosa von Praunheim’s mind such scientific stupidity is somewhat successful as demonstrated by a young colon-choker’s remarks after receiving hetero-testicles that, “My body now longs for a woman, but my soul still cries out for a man.” With the wraith of Wotan brewing in the collective unconscious of Deutschland, Hirschfeld is beaten by evil anti-Semites and has his work described as “Jewish Pig Asshole-Intellectualism” by a young man attending one of his lectures. Meanwhile, after untying a string wrapped around a tranny named Dorchen’s dick (Tima die Göttliche), he obtains a homo housewife of sorts in the form of said Transman, whose job is to clean and maintain his new Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research) building in Berlin. Although well past middle-aged, Hirschfeld finally fucks more than just antique toys and begins a sadomasochistic sexual relationship with a young follower named Karl Giese (Olaf Drauschke). To the sheer and utter heartbreak of kosher twink Giese, Hirschfeld leaves the Institute for Sexual Research and travels abroad, where he starts a sexual relationship with a young oriental twinkie. From the comfort of movie theaters, Hirschfeld watches newsreels of the National Socialist takeover, the destruction of his sex institute, and the burning of his books. In the end, Giese commits suicide, Dorchen disappears, the Institute for Sexual Research is destroyed, and Hirschfeld takes exile in Paris, France where he tries in vain to start a new sex institute and dies a rich and fat man.
While Hirschfeld’s cocksucking campaign died with the rise and rule of National Socialism in Germany from 1933-1945, the debauched doctor’s work ultimately paid-off in the long run as demonstrated by the simple fact that a film like The Einstein of Sex could be made in Germany, not to mention the fact that a good percentage of post-WWII filmmakers, including Rosa von Praunheim, but also Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Schroeter, Ulrike Ottinger, Monika Treut, Jochen Hick, Frank Ripploh and countless others, are/were homosexuals/lesbians. Not only was the anti-homo-sex provision Paragraph 175 abolished entirely in 1988 (where it was fully revoked in 1994 after the German reunification) in Germany and the legalization of gay prostitution, among other aberrant things, in the Fatherland since Hirschfeld's death, but the physician's ideas of a “third sex” and collective gay effeminacy have essentially become the norm in not only Germany/Europe, but also North America as well, where ‘gay’ has turned into a MTV-fabricated prepackaged pseudo-culture that revolves around such worthless garbage as Lady Gaga, Will & Grace, raunchy race-mixing, cultural Marxism, victim politics, and bourgeois gay marriage. As The Einstein of Sex one-dimensionally depicts, Adolf Brand—a Stirnerite anarchist who published the masculine homosexual periodical Der Eigene (“The Own”), which promoted völkisch artists like Fidus (Hugo Reinhold Karl Johann Höppener) and nationalist/proto-nazi writers like Hans Blüher, as well as the founder of the Wandervogel-like Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE), which promoted German unity and a sort of warrior creed of Sparta—promoted a form of gaydom that is virtually not existent today which valued and championed masculinity, heroism, and the resurrection of the Germanic Männerbund that totally rejected Hirschfeld's view of the gay male as a third sex, but even went so far as arguing that homosexual men were more masculine. Of course, Rosa von Praunheim portrays Adolf Brand in a negative light in The Einstein of Sex, depicting him as an abhorrent anti-Semitic megalomaniac, but in reality he represented a distinct culturally German view of homosexuality whereas Hirschfeld represented a leftist Jewish view that has gone on to dominate the Occident world as a result of Germany’s defeat during the Second World War. It is worth noting that Otto Weininger, an Austrian Jewish philosopher, who would go on to influence Ludwig Wittgenstein and Hans Blüher, argued in his once-highly influential work Geschlecht und Charakter (1903) aka Sex and Character that Jewishness and femininity are one in the same, thus making Hirschfeld’s view an alien creed that has subverted gay, as well as heterosexual, European culture and turned it into a putrid pile of poofer degeneracy. Of course, Weininger's theories do not seem that out of line when one looks at popular figures like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, Steven Spielberg, and Richard Simmons, and see that the Jewish race is severely lacking in testosterone.
Indeed, Hirschfeld was the ‘Einstein of Sex’ in that while today many German sexologists, like Adolf Brand, have been largely forgotten, the Hebraic physician has been sainted by Philo-Semitic sodomites and his ideas, like those of fellow perverted Judaic Freud, have entered and flourished in the mainstream of society, even if the name Magnus Hirschfeld is, quite thankfully, not exactly a household name. Undoubtedly, The Einstein of Sex is Rosa von Praunheim’s most Philo-Semitic and politically correct work to date as a piece of absurdly aesthetically repellant and conspicuously kitschy pseudo-docudrama with a nauseating sentimental score, shockingly wooden acting, and prosaic direction that is only marginally saved from total worthlessness as a cinematic by work by its handful of scenes of accidental comical relief involving Hirschfeld screwing his sex toy antiques, Nazi violence, and the when good gay doctor is attacked by the character Adolf Brand, who states such eloquent things as, “Love between men is love between heroes. Down with sissies, fairies, nellies and queens.” Undoubtedly, von Praunheim should stick to directing warped agitprop documentaries and aberrant-garde camp comedies as The Einstein of Sex feels like it was directed by an autistic psychopath trying in vain to mimic genuine human emotion. If I did not know better, I would have thought someone cut director Rosa von Praunheim's balls off just like Hirschfeld did to his patients as The Einstein of Sex lacks more testicular fortitude than a gang of Indian eunuchs.
-Ty E
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