Ronit Porat | Hunting In Time

"You know because people don’t walk past it in an exhibition, because people are attracted by a page in a magazine or stop browsing a book. Neither technical perfection nor striking subject matter are decisive; what matters is the power of the image, the expression – the secret of the moment captured."

Marianne Breslauer 1

The murder of a clockmaker, just like other acts of murder, perhaps even slightly more so, could be understood as a moment of historical synchronization. Like the slap of a clapperboard at the beginning of a movie scene, meant to synchronize multiple cameras and sound recorders, a murder synchronizes multiple narratives and experiences. In one act, histories that otherwise follow their own rhythm, moving at different speeds, curling in different directions, or drifting and sliding sideways along different trajectories, are bound by a single, singular reference point. That single eruptive moment would later be investigated, litigated, filed, acted upon, and debated so intensely as to produce mountains of words, documents, reports, and processes involving multiple witnesses, experts, and dozens of legal professionals. Everything that led to the event – thoughts, processes, and relationships that would otherwise only temporarily remain in the memory of some participants before fading away – will acquire new meaning and become causes, correlations, and contributing factors. Moments whose meaning is clouded by doubt and ambiguity become facts; unstable social relations become contexts, mitigating or aggravating circumstances. And, perhaps needless to say, everything that unfolds outwards from that point will have impacted the lives of everyone involved. The moment of a murder is a refracting lens that pulls in multiple pasts and forms them into futures.

Everybody in the clock business, or horology – particularly those concerned with the historical technology of analogue apparatuses – knows how important synchronization is. First, one has to define a reference point – perhaps an incorrect one, but one that everybody agrees to recognize: a radio signal synchs the clocks in early 21th-century Europe, as did the clock towers on the mayoral houses in previous decades or the bells on churches before that. 2 In public broadcasts, it is the state that gives the signal that links all timepieces. And this state, at the time the story unfolds – the killing of the clockmaker Fritz Ulbrich in Berlin on the night of 28/29 October 1930 – was on the verge of the self-destruction that would drown it and the rest of Europe and beyond in blood. The beauty of the artwork that this essay comes to complement – a trilogy of exhibitions by Ronit Porat that unpacks this murder in multiple ways – acts, I believe, as a moment of historical synchronization. And so, inspired by her explorations, this essay is formed like a bundle of contemporaneous stories brought together, knotted and synchronized by the murder.

In his book, Alain Corbin beautifully attempts to reconstruct the changed “auditory landscape” in rural communities when, shortly after the French Revolution, bells were destroyed or removed from churches. Clocks now displayed on municipal buildings, he argues, not only silenced the countryside but also introduced new orders of time.

The Murder

Lieschen Neumann was only 16 years old when she, along with her boyfriend and his friend, was accused of having plotted the murder of the clockmaker Fritz Ulbrich in Berlin’s Wedding neighborhood on the night of 28/29 October 1930. For about a year, Neumann had been a model for the clockmaker, who had set up a photographic studio in the back of his shop where he seduced young women to model for him – first clothed, then naked, and later in more pornographic poses. Neumann also was sexually intimate with him while she was in a relationship with her boyfriend, one of the accused. One night, the three youths decided to rob the clockmaker, but – as the plan went awry – ended up killing him.

The murder trial lasted six days in January 1931. Neumann was four months pregnant. Her boyfriend, Richard Stolpe, was convicted of murder and given the death penalty. The friend, Erich Benzinger, received six years and three months in prison. Neumann was sentenced to eight years and two months in prison. From there, their stories fade. Three generations later, the artist Ronit Porat would revisit the murder, curiously questioning the evidence and the protagonists that were entangled in the murder case and the historical and social forces that had brought them together. Porat studies media archives, photographs, and historical documents. She subjects these images to new photographic processes, technological experimentation, and further scrutiny, rearranging their narrative chronology and logic. Rather than aiming to solve the puzzle, her work draws us into a past which, though fragmented and interrupted, has not ceased to haunt us.

Today, it seems astonishing how much media coverage the murder trial of the clockmaker received at the time. It was covered not only in Berlin and throughout Germany, but also internationally by journalists, culture critics, social reformers and lawmakers in daily newspapers, feuilletons, police magazines, and academic literature. 3 The spectacular reception of the murder case also inspired early critique of modern media – photography, radio, music, film, and potentially also architecture – and its harmful influence on society. Reflecting on the Lieschen Neumann trial, Siegfried Kracauer was convinced that the three young people had “stumbled into the crime without any genuinely personal motivation”; he empathized with the milieu of the unemployed, which by 1930 included about five million people in Germany. 4 He wrote: “For Lieschen Neumann and her unemployed comrades, the insecurity of society in regard to all critical matters has become their doom. 5 To the critic, the murder was a pathology of a society in a “state of confusion” in which the ethical foundations were being shaken, social hierarchies were disappearing and the “suppression of binding social obligations is ... intensified by the neutrality of important public expressions of opinions.

Two years before Hitler came to power, in the midst of a global economic crisis, hyperinflation, repeated stock market crashes, and mass unemployment, Kracauer was very aware of the rise of fake news, mass propaganda, and the potential exploitation of media for right-wing ideologies: “Dominating the radio and ruling over the fake variety of juxtapositions in many big newspapers, neutrality expands to every area it possibly can to inspire the impression of plenitude – a neutrality that is the precise opposite of wisdom and attests to nothing more than the absence of any guiding principles. The lack of substantiative consensus necessarily endangers the suffering masses the most. 7 In his view, the spectacular coverage of the trial lacked a more consequential inquiry into the circumstances that had led to the murder.

Preceding the Murder

In January 1930, Yva – one of Weimar Berlin’s most sought-after fashion and celebrity photographers – was commissioned by the popular magazine UHU to illustrate a poem by Erich Kästner, titled “Lieschen Neumann will Karriere machen. Das Scheindasein vor der Kamera” (Lieschen Neumann Wants to Pursue a Career: The Illusive Existence in Front of the Camera). Yva’s work ranged from commercial fashion photography to experimental photography and montage works that explored filmic narratives through multiple exposures and movement. In her photography, she explored “seeing through the camera”, carefully composing the scene in which her models would sit and capturing the materiality of the fabrics and furs of their attire.

Yva belonged to a new generation of women photographers internationally – from the photography students at the Bauhaus such as Ré Soupault 8 and Marianne Brandt 9 to Germaine Krull and Madame d’Ora in Vienna and later Paris, to Marianne Breslauer 10 a favourite of Porat. These women were keen to explore the technology and liberating potential of the medium. During the 1920s, women photographers were committed to exploring fields previously reserved for men. They also helped nude photography break through the narrow scope of sexist obsession. In her posters for theatre revues and dances, such as Revue, Revue: Inez G., Lewis Brody (1926), Charleston (1926/27), and G. Sisters (1926), Yva used a method similar to what Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy described as fotoplastik.

By combining associative elements of a situation with close-ups and long shots in double or multiple exposures, she was able not only to capture movement in space and the rhythm of a dance, but also to convey the seductiveness of revealing dresses, legs, high-heeled shoes, stockings, hair, wigs and feathered hats. Yva mastered the techniques of multiple exposures, fractured views, repetitive sequences of images and distortions. She also used these techniques to depict psychological themes related to alcohol and drug abuse, crime, sexual fantasies, dreams and fears of doppelgänger. 11

In 1930-31 some of these photographs of highly dramatized and surreal scenes of horror in the experience of alcohol, burglary, and murder were published in Das Kriminal-Magazin to illustrate crime novels or reports of crimes.

Sadly, Yva’s archive was destroyed in 1943 when the warehouse in Hamburg harbor, to which Yva had sent her belongings in preparation for an unsuccessful last-minute attempt to emigrate to New York in 1940, was destroyed in an aerial bombardment. We are thus forced to reconstruct Yva's wide-ranging oeuvre by searching through her contemporary publications. Interestingly, she seems to have broken more explicitly with sexual norms and gender identities in her later work for entertainment magazines. Her photographs of Sisters (1930) and illustrations such as the one for Paul Leppin’s short text “Kisses” (1931) in the magazine Das Leben 12 present fascinating compositions of contrasts across the diagonal dynamic of the image as well as remarkably sensual scenes between women.

In collaboration with the new editor-in-chief of UHU magazine, Friedrich Kroner, Yva developed longer photo essays. 13 She decorated and composed the scenes of her shots with enormous enthusiasm. They seemed as vivid as film stills. Her photo essays, which seem to have supplanted the need for text and wording, employed a technique that also resonates in Porat's work. The narration, or hanging of photographs of different sizes, as cut-outs, enlargements and full-page views to allow for multiple associations and narrative hinges, exemplifies both artists’ “seeing through the camera”.

It was Kroner who commissioned her to illustrate the Kästner poem. For her photo essay, Yva invited the model and actress Beatrice Garga, who had had a famous role in Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis (1927). The photographer often worked with actors and actresses from the UFA film studios in Berlin, many of whom had found their way into the movies through her. Using a narrative technique similar to the documentary portraits of urban life over the course of one day, such as Walter Ruttmann’s Symphony of a Great City (1927) and Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Yva placed her model in various settings and moods. Starting in the morning, Garga is portrayed in front of her boudoir.

Her hair cut into a bob, she is wearing only a short silk negligée and is smiling as if singing a cheerful melody, expecting a happy day. In another photograph, she is dressed in a fine coat with sleeves and a collar of fur, about to leave the house. This is followed by scenes in which she plays golf in a sporty skirt, a pullover, a short scarf, and a beret that cheekily reveals the curls of her hair. A few more shots fashion her first in a British riding outfit, posing with a horse, then breezily in an aeroplane and as the confident driver of a car (probably Yva’s car) – always smiling charmingly.

Yet halfway through the series, the mood seems to have become one of loneliness and trouble. Rather than driving any of the fancy vehicles she was using earlier in the day, Garga is shown waiting for the tram in a busy street in Berlin. Stunningly captured in the reflection of a showcase, she is seen window-shopping, unable to afford any of the delights she was just advertising. The last image shows her back in her boudoir, sobbing.

Kästner’s poem captions the images in simple rhymes (Yva rhymes with diva), intending to warn all the Lieschen Neumanns of Berlin of the false promises and pretences of show business and the world of fashion. For the readers, the author’s patronizing undertone might not have trumped the desirability of the world of fashion and film – especially in a magazine that was building its success on reflecting and promoting the cultural trends and lure of mass culture. Kästner’s words could certainly not dampen the liberating air that surrounded women trying to break out of their milieu, explore their potential in new professions, experiment with modern media or discover their identity in a society that in many ways had become increasingly tolerant and reform-minded. Beatrice Garga also managed a livelihood as a well-known model and actress. Yva, born Else Neuländer in a Jewish family with nine siblings, started a successful career as a photographer with her own photo studio. 14

Kästner’s moralizing was in tune with those critics – many of them writing in feuilletons or offering their prose to the very same magazines they criticized – who cautioned against the ever-expanding culture of mass entertainment. Rather than exposing the social conflicts and the disintegration of society, Kracauer argued in a feuilleton essay that the “cult of distraction” via the mass media only masked the disintegration of society. “Rather, they [movie theatres] should free their offerings of all trappings that deprive film of its rights and must aim radically towards a kind of distraction which exposes disintegration instead of masking it. It could be done in Berlin, home of the masses who so easily allow themselves to be stupefied only because they are so close to the truth." 15

Readers of the article in UHU magazine, which had a print run of over 200,000 copies a month, might have memorized some of the catchy rhymes from Kästner’s poem, or were perhaps still amused by the garden-variety name Lieschen Neumann, when the media storm surrounding a real Lieschen Neumann from Berlin erupted just a few months later. Somewhat uncannily, the readers might have felt familiar with her when she became known as a suspect in a sensationalized murder trial.

The Book

Shortly after the murder trial, a book titled Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor was published by the Institut für Sexualforschung in Wien (Institute for Sexual Research in Vienna). 16 It was part of a publishing initiative by the Verlag für Kulturforschung, which was headquartered in Vienna, Berlin, and Leipzig. Very little is known about this publishing house. Too short was its existence before the national socialist regime closed it.

The book – its cover designed in modernist graphics and typography that could have come out of a Herbert Bayer design workshop at the Bauhaus – contained photographic material from the estate of the murdered clockmaker and images by the photojournalist Ernst Vespermann, who had documented the crime scene in Drontheimer Strasse. Prior to publication, the book was heavily censored: first by authorities in Germany, then in two further rounds by the publishers themselves. Most copies still circulating in antiquarian bookshops have several pages cut out. Despite the censorship, the book was still suspected of contravening laws prohibiting the distribution of obscene photographs. Nevertheless, it turned out to be a bestseller. Even though official bookshops and libraries would not sell it, it was successfully traded under the counter among specialized circles of friends and the initiated.

The publication was part of the burgeoning fields of studying, solving, and writing about crime and criminals, which explained the media’s interest in the murder trial, but its authors certainly had more academic and politically reform-minded ambitions with this book. On the one hand, it was part of an emancipatory project to educate a section of the public about the psychology of criminals and to further society’s understanding of the criminal mind. On the other, it was meant to contribute to public education about gender identity and sexual psychology.

One of the authors, Dr. Erich Wulffen, as a former state prosecutor and current head of department at the Saxon Ministry of Justice, was to lend authority and respectability to the publication. According to Birgit Lang, Wulffen can be considered as the first legal expert on sex offences in Wilhelmine Germany and a broker of knowledge between specialist discourse and the wider public in modern society. 17

She gives him special credit for shaping two new case modalities, the expert case and the case story: “Wulffen’s expert case studies relied on his privileged position and expertise to communicate new academic insights to the reading public. Wulffen’s case stories were conceived as creative works of fiction with the purpose of illustrating certain criminal psychological insights gained in his academic work.” 18 He was also a prolific writer of creative fiction on criminal psychology and legal reform.

Wulffen prefaces the book with a series of international case studies linking robbery homicides to sexual impulses. It is a gruesome read about young women who had been tricked into sexual intimacy and were desperate to defend themselves or get revenge through murder. Others were involved in same-sex and queer relationships; in their extreme desperation, all had to resort to murder or suicide in some way. In his position, Wulffen had privileged access to court records, crime scene documentation, and expert knowledge. In that capacity he also reported on the Lieschen Neumann trial, adding a biographical and psychological analysis of each of the perpetrators. It is not known whether he had any role in the trial, but his observations suggest that he travelled from Dresden to Berlin to attend at least a few sessions of the trial.

Although it acknowledged the social context of the perpetrators and the circumstances of poverty in which they’d grown up during the war and post-war years, which had undeniably had psychological effects, his account attested to Lieschen Neumann and her friends’ cold-bloodedness and very limited intelligence, describing them as mentally deficient psychopaths. For more detailed insight into the case, Wulffen respectfully refers to the expertise of his co-author, Dr. Felix Abraham.

Abraham was the head of sexual forensics at the Institute for Sexology in Berlin founded by Magnus Hirschfeld, a pioneer of the gay liberation movement. 19 Abraham was invited to the trial as an expert witness to give an account of the clockmaker and of what he would diagnose as the latter’s “passion for photography” and “pathological hyper-eroticism”. 20 The trial revealed that the clockmaker had taken over 1,500 photographs of some 150 to 160 young women, many of them nude or in obscene poses. Abraham’s report acknowledged the photographer’s care and passion in storing and handling his collection, which in his opinion attested to his erotic nature rather than to the commercial interests of his trade. To Abraham, Ulbrich’s manic collection of photographs was an ideal example of so-called Erotophotomanie, a term that seems to be his own, but which he explained at length, drawing upon historical references and his own experience with patients to demonstrate a link between the sex drive and compulsive behaviour, particularly the acts of erotic writing, drawing, and photography, or collecting of photographs.

To do research for his report, Abraham investigated independently of the police. He analyzed and captioned Ulbrich’s photographs with detailed descriptions and the names of some of the models he could find. Abraham visited the crime scene, interrogated neighbours, the postman, a pub owner, the clockmaker’s ex-girlfriend and about a dozen models, the majority of whom described Ulbrich’s kindness and professionalism or largely denied having seen anything suspicious. Abraham was ambiguous in regarding the models in the clockmaker’s back room as victims of a crime committed by the photographer. Rather, he used his account to reflect on the legal and commercial framework within which obscene and pornographic images were being distributed in Berlin. With much insight and critique, he presented his further research on various traders, photographers and establishments that would have bought and sold photographs such as Ulbrich’s on the black market. 21 He was particularly concerned with photographic collections that were entering the market after the death of their creators or collectors. Only in the rarest of cases, he argued, did the heirs of such collections command such reverence and self-discipline as to destroy the sad legacy or hand it over to a dedicated research centre. 22

The Death of the Collector

Now a short excursus to Vienna. Around 1928, Madame d’Ora took a photograph of the actress and operetta star Elsie Altmann-Loos. This photograph of Elsie tossing her head back with her loose hair flying high up, her breast revealed by the parting of a modernist fabric wrapped loosely around her shoulders, would become iconic for feminist emancipation. Its reception was, however, to collide with an infamous trial of her ex-husband in which Elsie became involved around the same time. Elsie Altmann published her story shortly before her death in 1984, in her book Mein Leben mit Adolf Loos. Altmann was the second wife of the famed Viennese architect Adolf Loos, whom she had divorced in 1924, but she still testified on his behalf, as he was accused of seducing minors.

Although the story of the crime committed by the architect represented an enormous media sensation in Vienna at the time, from which Loos was able to flee to Paris, the architect’s post-war biographers rather played down its details or even ignored it entirely. His architecture and writings were widely circulated and discussed at universities and in books on the theory and history of architecture. It took another generation of researchers, architects, and historians to revisit the architect’s biography and address the crime committed. Elsewhere I’ve argued that after the death of an author, that person’s “second life” enters an ambiguous terrain of contested ownership that has its impact on the material evidence of the first life, and that it is the “third life” of an artist or architect that allows archives to open and to reveal their secrets. 23

When Elsie Altmann wrote her story in Buenos Aires in the late 1970s, she had given up hope of ever returning to Vienna, but was still claiming to be the heiress to the work of Adolf Loos, a notion that the Viennese institutions, archives, and publishers that held works and published writings of his were eager to contest. Nobody at the time seemed able to acknowledge the circumstances of her departure from Vienna and the reason why she had never returned. They also seemed to be oblivious to the fact that Loos’s third wife, Claire Beck-Loos, was murdered in the Holocaust along with her mother and family.

Altmann left Vienna in 1933, shortly after the death of the architect, for a concert tour in Argentina, and monitored the increasing anti-Semitic sentiment and eventually the Anschluss of Austria to Hitler’s Germany in 1938 from afar. Unable to return, Elsie could not complete the formal paperwork to accept the inheritance. In her book she recounts Loos’s own handling of documents he had “inherited” from his friend, which were supposed to be burned but which, rather than bringing him fame, provided important evidence in that lawsuit against him for seducing minors in his apartment in Bösendorfer Strasse 3 in Vienna. According to Altmann, in the same apartment (designed by Loos) in which they’d lived together until their divorce, investigators found a box of 2,271 stereoscopic photographs that included pornographic images and that seriously incriminated the defendant in his trial (not to mention the Viennese newspapers that discussed this box in detail). 24

Altmann recalls that she had always urged Loos to destroy the box, but Loos had refused to do so as the box had once belonged to one of his first clients, the physiologist and scientist Theodor Beer, for whom the architect redesigned Villa Karma in 1904. 25 Shortly after the renovation was completed, Beer had been put on trial after his wife reported to the police that he had taken indecent photographs of young women and men.

It is possible that Beer did not take those photographs himself. Stereoscopic photographs were purchased from specialised shops and viewed through optical devices such as the so-called Guckkasten or peep box. The scientist and optical entrepreneur August Furmann famously ran one of the largest kaiserpanoramas in Berlin in the shopping and amusement gallery Kaisergalerie Unter den Linden. Surrounded by other attractions of oddities, absurdities, and obscenities, the kaiserpanorama offered educational tours to visitors who, depending on the theme, could view an urban or nature scene anywhere in the world as an illusory three-dimensional image for about 20 seconds. 26 To adults, it also offered erotic peep shows. The strange and seductive world evoked in the architecture of the Kaisergalerie in Berlin with its kaiserpanorama and under-the-counter trade of erotic and prohibited objects was described by many novelists and writers from Franz Kafka to Walter Benjamin to Siegfried Kracauer. 27 We can assume that the book of the 1,500 photographs by the clockmaker was also sold in one of the bookshops that traded in the Kaisergalerie. Three-dimensional photography was apparently used for scientific work, entertainment, and porn. Adolf Loos was among the witnesses in the trial of Beer. But the physiologist, sentenced to several months in prison and unable to cope with the publicity surrounding him, committed suicide soon afterwards.

Beer had entrusted Loos with the box of stereoscopic photographs, requesting that he burn its contents. But Loos could not bring himself to do so, neither at the time of its owner’s death in 1919 nor in 1925, when he himself, in a moment of frustration, asked his friends and colleagues to burn all his own drawings. Of course, one may have other motivations when not burning a box of pornography, but it might also have had to do with his love for his friend Beer.

The Archive

Abraham was keen to collect archives such as Beer’s or the clockmaker’s for the Institute for Sexology that Magnus Hirschfeld founded in Berlin in 1919. 28 Devoted to the study of homosexuality, transvestism, and eroticism, the institute offered psychological support, sex counseling, and clinical surgery, and was also a safe place where queer and transgender people could meet and occasionally live. At the center of the institute was a library open to both scientific and lay visitors from around the world, among them artists, filmmakers, doctors, scientists, and campaigners. Walter Benjamin and Erika Mann were among its famous residents.

On 6 May 1933, the institute was raided by a Nazi student group, which publicly burned the library. One of the first sites of book burnings, Hirschfeld’s institute was attacked because it embodied the national socialists’ hatred of all modern human sciences, modern art, criticism, enlightenment, ethnic tolerance, and social and sexual reform. The attack was also strongly motivated by anti-Semitism. 29

The Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, a regular visitor to the institute, suspected that the institute was one of the first targets of book burning because some prominent Nazis had been among its clients and were keen to make sure that their names remained undisclosed. 30 When his institute was destroyed, Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour. Unable to return to Germany, it became his exile. It had started out, however, as an extremely popular lecture tour. In the United States, he became known as “the Einstein of sex”. In Palestine in 1932, he gave numerous lectures in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa, and Kibbutz Beit Alfa. The tour met with such success that the facilities of the movie theatre in Tel Aviv, the gymnasium of the Italian school in Jerusalem and the auditorium of the Technical College in Haifa proved too small for the large audiences. 31

The historiography of the institute and the global dissemination and influence of Hirschfeld’s and his collaborators’ ideas are still to be written, especially as the sudden end to the institute and the persecution of its members left so many painful and irretrievable gaps. Very little is also known of Felix Abraham, a key figure at Hirschfeld’s institute who was an expert in work involving sexual hormone therapies and transvestites. The relationship between Abraham and Wulffen is also a desideratum for future research. Preserved in Wulffen’s archive is a short note bearing greetings from Hirschfeld, which suggests that Wulffen was closely connected to the work of the institute and the ideas of Hirschfeld and Abraham. Certainly, Abraham’s report in the 1931 publication Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor could still be studied in more detail to help understand his life and work. Persecuted and unable to practise his profession, he committed suicide in Florence in 1937. 32

In her book The Hirschfeld Archives, Heike Bauer studies the worldwide dissemination of the institute’s surviving documents and ideas while critically scrutinising the conflation of colonial, racist, and discriminatory theories in Hirschfeld’s work which also marginalized women and overstated racist ideas about the health of a nation. 33

Her fascinatingly detailed research goes far beyond this, but through it she acknowledges the silence and gaps in writing and research on queer history. She argues in favour of a theory of slowness that apprehends historical experience as something simultaneously formed and fragmented: “Slowness refers to the lingering impact of past traumas that continue to shape, and sometimes haunt, queer lives across time.” 34 The study of chronopolitics, the politics of time, which assumes a connection between political power and specific regimes and concepts of time, tasks us with exploring anew the intersections of subjectivity, emotional life, and the public spheres of law, science, and society.

Body Clocks

Beer devoted much of his time at the Zoological Station in Naples to studying the eyes of birds, fish, and reptiles and became part of an international network of zoologists studying animals, embryology, reproduction, and biodiversity. The institute was founded by Anton Dohrn, a German zoologist of the late 19th century who was fascinated by Charles Darwin’s 1859 theory of evolution and Ernst Haeckel’s studies of marine organisms and helped to establish independent scientific institutions for zoological research. Although interrupted by the conflict of the First World War, the exchange among academics worldwide who were invited to do research at the institute lasted until the early 1930s. Here many scientists and researchers could conduct innovative experiments in the fields of reproduction, transplantation, and sexual behavior, both on animals and humans. The unique history of this institute also ended when researchers stopped arriving, as under the national socialist propaganda in Europe they were discredited and forced out of their laboratories and research institutions.

Humans share with animals, plants, and even microbes a “body clock” that regulates biological activities, such as sleeping, waking, and reproduction. When Albert Einstein introduced his theory of relativity in the early 1920s, he questioned the concept of absolute time and, with it, the mechanical Newtonian universe, which regulated the movements of celestial objects like those of workers in a modernist factory as if they were governed by a single timekeeping device. Working beyond the neat synchronization of Newtonian clockwork physics and railway timetables, Einstein’s concept of time became relative to observers and their motion. Synchronisation lost its absolute reference point. Such hyper-synchronization is one in which different movements at different speeds and rhythms have their own chronological reference.

This concept is manifested in the work of researchers such as Beer, or later Eugen Steinach, who studied the reproductive cycles of mammals, which in 1930 led to the discovery of sex hormones as an internally regulating clock. The Austrian physiologist Steinach became known in the early 20th century for his pioneering work in endocrinology, which led to the discovery of sex hormones and their effect on mammals. He experimented with guinea pigs and rats to study the revivifying effect of hormone treatments, which touched off another scientific innovation and controversy, namely the claim that his procedures could “rejuvenate” not only animals but men as well, though to a lesser degree. 35

Later, his Steinach Rejuvenation Procedure promised it could rejuvenate men by increasing their production of sex hormones. While this procedure was later discredited, Steinach’s work on female sex hormones and on ovarian extracts led to the development of the first standardized injectable oestrogen.

In autumn 1926, Steinach was the “star speaker” at the First International Congress of Sexual Research in Berlin, organized by, among others, Magnus Hirschfeld and Felix Abraham, with whom he jointly developed transgender surgery. 36 Although no documents can be evidenced here, it is possible that it was through the connection between Hirschfeld’s institute and Steinach, who in 1931 was still the director of the Biological Institute at the Academy of Sciences in Vienna, that publications by the Institute for Sexual Research, such as the book Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor, could be produced and circulated.

Rejuvenation is also a concept of interfering with time. Just minutes after the two friends of Lieschen Neumann entered the clockmaker’s shop to carry out their robbery – a scene that Yva would have captured in her photographs of scenes of horror and fear – dozens of automated clocks sounded midnight and a new date appeared on calendars. The sound startled the intruders so much that they almost abandoned their plan (one of the friends suddenly needed to use the toilet). For a moment, the clocks were out of tune with their plan to synchronize. Instead of only robbing the clockmaker, they now decided to kill him.

Methodological Postscript

History can be understood as a relation between objects and flows. Objects here include Ronit Porat’s reconstruction of a kaiserpanorama, but also institutions, sometimes architectural details and elements, sometimes different technologies and experiments that create a photographic image. The threads are the flows along which ideas, materials, migrants, sometimes refugees, travelled.

The method of microhistory comes to mind. Microhistory is a concept developed in the 1970s by the “Italian school,” to which Giovanni Levi and Carlo Ginzburg belonged. 37 These historians sought to depart from a history of kings and queens, presidents and prime ministers, the so-called “histoire événementielle” in which the important documents are official letters or transcripts of courts and summits. Microhistory was also set against the history of the longue durée that the Marxist historians of the Annales School – Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, and Fernand Braudel – developed in the interwar period. The history of the longue durée is the impersonal history of processes, of undercurrents, the history of capital, the history of trades, a history of large territories such as the Mediterranean.

Microhistory concentrates instead on a history of artisans, of outliers, of those not conforming to what was considered the norm, of those who left almost no trace. It is easy to understand why a murder in 1930 might not be remembered. This killing was to be drowned by the bloodshed of the years that followed. Yet Porat’s detective-yarn evidence board connects both different entities of time and a global web of references and connections. Invisible threads run through her installations, tying seemingly unrelated, disparate, bits of information together. Each bit of information is like a doorway to others that are assembled through ever more intricate evidentiary matrices that tie disparate places, people, and charts of evidence together.

Porat’s revisiting of a moment lost, giving it a “third life”, offers an unexpected, enormously rich exploration – a synchronization – of a set of simultaneous events in time, reconstructed and intersected in space. In the context of intersectional thinking: one never looks at a single issue alone. From the point of intersection, one begins to unpack, navigate, and travel outwards along those assembled nodes of knowledge.

Footnotes

1. María Mercedes Valdivieso Rodrigo, cat. Marianne Breslauer: Fotografies 1927–1938 (Barcelona: Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, 2016), p. 8. ↑
2.  In his book, Alain Corbin beautifully attempts to reconstruct the changed “auditory landscape” in rural communities when, shortly after the French Revolution, bells were destroyed or removed from churches. Clocks now displayed on municipal buildings, he argues, not only silenced the countryside but also introduced new orders of time. See Alain Corbin, Village Bells: Sound & Meaning in the 19th-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). ↑
3.  On more historical context on the problem of media coverage and sensationalizing sex crime trials, see Heidi Sack, Moderne Jugend vor Gericht: Sensationsprozesse, "Sexualtragödien“ und die Krise der Jugend in der Weimarer Republik (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016), pp. 377-384. ↑
4.  A similar argument was made by the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing in his article “Nach dem Urteil”, in Prager Tagblatt, 6 February 1931. ↑
5.  Siegfried Kracauer, “Murder Trials and Society,” Die neue Rundschau 42 (March 1931), pp, 431–432; reprinted in A. Kaes, M. Jay, and E. Dimendberg (eds.), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, trans. Don Reneau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 740–41. ↑
6.  Ibid. ↑
7.  Ibid. ↑
8.  Elizabeth Otto, Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). See also Elizabeth Otto, “Queer Coded Bauhaus,” in Ines Weizman (ed.), Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019), pp. 86–88. ↑
9. Persephone Allen, “The Metallic Sphere as Mechanical Eye: Reflected Identities at the Bauhaus,” in Dust & Data, pp. 90–110. ↑
10. Kathrin Beer and Christina Feilchenfeldt in collaboration with Fotostiftung Schweiz (eds.), Marianne Breslauer: Photographs (Zoelmond: Parvenu, 2011). ↑
11. Marion Beckers and Elisabeth Moortgat, Yva: Photographies 1925–1938, Das Verborgene Museum, Berlin (Tübingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2001), pp. 48–52. ↑
12. Ibid., p. 78. ↑
13. Ibid., p. 90. ↑
14. In 1934, when Yva developed her elaborate photographic settings in her new studio on the top floors of Schlüterstrasse 45, she would have had what it takes to make a career, possibly even in film production. But in 1933, when the National Socialist Party took power and the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was passed, preventing Jews and political opponents of the Nazi regime from serving in official positions, Yva was forbidden to go about her work. She still managed to carry out some photographic work in her studio for private commissions, but in 1938 she was forced to close her studio. She worked as an X-ray assistant at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin until 1942, when the Gestapo arrested her and her husband and deported them to Majdanek, where they were murdered. In the late 1960s, Heinz Rewald, who had emigrated from Berlin to Colombia before Hitler’s rise to power, developed the building at 45 Schlüterstrasse into the Hotel Bogotá, which until 2013 regularly lodged photographers and artists and devoted exhibitions and photographic projects to the memory of Yva. ↑
15. Siegfried Kracauer and Thomas Y. Levin, “Cult of Distraction: On Berlin’s Picture Palaces,” New German Critique, no. 40 (1987): 91–96, https://doi.org/10.2307/488133. ↑
16. Erich Wulffen, Felix Abraham, and Institut für Sexualforschung Wien (eds.), Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor: Eine sexualpsychologische Untersuchung des den Mordprozess Lieschen Neumann charakterisierenden Milieus und seiner psychopathologischen Typen, as part of Dokumente zur Sexualforschung (Vienna, Berlin, and Leipzig: Verlag für Kulturforschung, 1931). ↑
17. Birgit Lang et al., "Erich Wulffen and the Case of the Criminal," in A History of the Case Study: Sexology, Psychoanalysis, Literature (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2017), pp. 119–155; http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1wn0sb8.8, p. 119. ↑
18. Ibid. ↑
19. Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld and the Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement, trans. Edward H. Willis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014). ↑
20. Felix Abraham, "Der Uhrmacher Ulbrich und sein Triebleben: Seine Photographierleidenschaft als krankhafter Hypererotismus," in Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor, pp. 61–75. ↑
21. Felix Abraham, "Die Groszstädtische Geheimindustrie unzüchtiger Bilder: Vom Winkelatelier Ulbrichs bis zum Fabriksbetrieb," in Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor, pp. 75–130. ↑
22. Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor, p. 76. ↑
23. The legal ownership of an author’s legacy is regulated by inheritance and copyright law. The 1914 Berne Convention defined the minimum duration for legal copyright protection as fifty years after the death of the author. But many countries have raised this to 75 years after the death of the author, somehow aligning the life of a copyright with the average duration of a person’s lifetime. This time is what we could call the “second life” of an artwork. When copyright protection expires, the work falls into the public domain; that is, the work effectively becomes public property and may be used freely. Interestingly, we are now entering an era of “modernism’s third life,” the period past the 75-year second life from the time of the death of these authors. So the work of those authors who died in the period prior to World War II entered their “third life” in the early 2000s. One could argue that it’s only in their third life that the works of art by early modernists can become truly modern. See Ines Weizman, “The Three Lives of Modern Architecture: Wills, Copyrights and Their Violations,” in Exhibiting Architecture: Place and Displacement, eds. Thordis Arrhenius et al. (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), pp. 183–96. ↑
24. Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 7 September 1928, excerpts printed in Elsie Altmann-Loos, Mein Leben mit Adolf Loos, ed. Adolf Opel (Berlin: Ullstein, 1986), pp. 284–89, 46–47. ↑
25. Altmann-Loos, Mein Leben mit Adolf Loos, pp. 46–47. ↑
26. Johann Friedrich Geist, Die Kaisergalerie: Biographie der Berliner Passage (Munich and New York: Prestel, 1997). ↑
27. Ibid. See also Walter Benjamin, “Kaiserpanorama,” in “Einbahnstraße,” in Gesammelte Schriften 4, pp. 94–101; Walter Benjamin, “Imperial Panorama,” in “One-Way Street,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings (London and New York: Verso Books, 2021), pp. 53–61. ↑
28. Fritz Ulbrichs lebender Marmor, p. 76. ↑
29. Erwin J. Haeberle, "The Jewish Contribution to the Development of Sexology," The Journal of Sex Research 18: 4 (Nov. 1982), pp. 305–323, here 306. ↑
30. Evgenii Bershtein, “Eisenstein’s Letter to Magnus Hirschfeld: Text and Context,” in The Flying Carpet: Studies on Eisenstein and Russian Cinema in Honor of Naum Kleiman, ed. Joan Neuberger and Antonio Somaini (Milan: Éditions Mimésis, 2017), pp. 75–86, here 77. ↑
31. Haeberle, “The Jewish Contribution to the Development of Sexology,” pp. 305–23; https://www.jstor.org/stable/3812164. ↑
32. Ralf Dose, “‘Es gab doch für ihn ein sogenanntes bürgerliches Leben schon sehr lange nicht mehr’. Dr. med. Felix Abraham – Fragmente eines Lebens,” Mitteilungen der Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft 54 (June 2016), pp. 9–23. ↑
33. Heike Bauer, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), p. 8 ↑
34. Ibid., p. 9. ↑
35. Harry Benjamin, "Eugen Steinach, 1861–1944: A Life of Research," The Scientific Monthly, 61: 6 (1945): 427–42, http://www.jstor.org/stable/18371, 435. ↑
36. Ibid. ↑
37. Carlo Ginzburg, "Microhistory: Two or Three Things that I Know about It," in Threads and Traces: True False Fictive, trans. Anne C. Tedeschi and John Tedeschi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 193–214. ↑