Schwules Museum

Start with the doorway. Lützowstraße is a working street, not a showpiece. Traffic hums past, a bicycle bell rings, and the facade in front of you looks almost ordinary. Then you step inside, and the quiet changes. There is the soft scuff of shoes on the floor, the low murmur of visitors reading wall texts, and the faint papery smell that every archive carries. You are standing in one of the oldest museums in the world devoted to queer life and history.

The name needs a short explanation. In German, the word schwul means gay, and it is usually used for gay men. When the museum began, that was its main focus. Over the decades its scope widened. Today the exhibitions and collections cover lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex and queer lives. The founders kept the original name. It works as a record of where the institution started, and of how far its mission has grown since.

The museum was founded in Berlin in 1985. It came out of a small circle of activists and historians. Part of the spark was an exhibition in the city in the mid-1980s about homosexual women and men in Berlin's past. Huge numbers of people came to see it. That response showed the organisers a simple thing. People wanted this history, and no official institution was collecting it. So they decided to build one themselves, with very little money and a great deal of volunteer work.

For its first decades, the museum lived in Kreuzberg, in rooms off a courtyard on Mehringdamm. Many longtime Berliners still remember climbing those stairs. In 2013 it moved here, to Lützowstraße, close to the edge of Schöneberg. The new building gave the collections far more space. It also brought the museum near a neighbourhood with deep roots in queer Berlin. That closeness is not an accident. Geography matters for a museum like this one.

To understand why, picture Berlin about a century ago. In the 1920s, the city had dozens of bars, dance halls and clubs for gay men and lesbians. Many of them clustered around Nollendorfplatz and the streets of Schöneberg, just a short walk from where you are now. Magazines for gay and lesbian readers were sold openly. Writers and artists from across Europe came to see this freedom for themselves. For a short time, Berlin was one of the most open cities on earth.

One name stands at the centre of that era. Magnus Hirschfeld was a doctor and campaigner. In 1919 he opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. It was a place for research, medical advice and public education about sexuality and gender. It is remembered today as a pioneering centre for trans people in particular. Hirschfeld also campaigned for decades against Paragraph 175. That was the section of the German criminal code that made sex between men a crime.

Then came 1933. Within months of taking power, the Nazis attacked Hirschfeld's institute. Its library and papers were seized, and many were thrown onto the book burnings that spring. The bars closed. Under Nazi rule, thousands of men were convicted under Paragraph 175, and many were sent to concentration camps. There, they were marked with a pink triangle on their uniforms. When you walk through the museum, remember this loss. So much of the record was destroyed on purpose.

Here is a fact that surprises many visitors. The harsh Nazi version of Paragraph 175 did not vanish in 1945. West Germany kept it in force for years after the war. Men were still prosecuted under it into the postwar decades. The law was only fully removed from German criminal law in 1994. That long shadow is one reason this museum exists. Its founders lived through that period themselves. For them, the past was not distant.

The second surprise sits mostly out of sight. The exhibitions you walk through are only a small part of the museum. Behind them lies one of the largest archives of its kind anywhere. It holds books, periodicals, letters, photographs, posters, films, artworks and personal papers. Much of it was given by ordinary people. Some came from attics and shoeboxes. Some came from the estates of people who died during the AIDS crisis. Researchers from many countries come here to study it.

That human source shapes the feel of the place. These are rarely grand objects behind thick glass. You might see a handwritten flyer for a party, a faded membership card, a protest banner, a snapshot of friends on a balcony. Each one survived because someone chose to keep it, often when keeping it was risky. Take your time with the small things. The labels often tell you whose hands these objects passed through.

The exhibitions here change regularly, so what you see today may differ from what a friend saw last year. Some shows look at history. Others present contemporary artists, photographers or activists. Some are thoughtful and quiet. Others are loud, funny and openly provocative. The museum has also been willing to question itself. In recent years it has worked to make space for voices that older queer histories often left out, including women, trans people and people of colour.

It helps to think of this museum as a meeting point, not just a building. Talks, readings, film evenings and guided tours take place here. Local groups use it. Visitors arrive from all over the world, sometimes from countries where their own lives are still illegal. For some, a visit is a piece of research. For others, it is something more personal. You may notice people lingering in front of one image for a long time. Give them room.

When you leave, pause on the pavement for a moment. Look along Lützowstraße and listen to the city moving around you. Then think about the short walk south toward Nollendorfplatz, where the bars of the 1920s once stood, and where a memorial at the station now remembers the men persecuted under the Nazis. The history in these rooms did not happen somewhere else. It happened on streets like this one... and the people in these photographs walked them too.