Lotte Hahm

Hahm was born in Dresden in 1890, where she still ran a mail order bookstore in 1920.[1] In the first half of the 1920s she came to Berlin, where she started working as a lesbian activist in 1926. Of particular importance for the city's lesbian scene was her founding of the "Damenklub Violetta", which was one of the largest lesbian clubs in the city with up to about 400 participants.[2] The club was associated with the Deutscher Freundschaftsverband (DFV), one of the major homosexual organisations of the time.[3]

In 1929 Hahm's club Violetta united with Käthe Reinhardt's club "Monbijou", a similar sized lesbian club. In the course of this Hahm and Reinhardt changed to a larger competing organization, the Bund für Menschenrecht. The merger of the two big clubs and the change caused a great stir in the lesbian scene of the time; in the DFV and it's magazine Frauenliebe there was talk of betrayal and intrigue. As justification Hahm wrote that it would have been considered "grotesque" that "a heterosexual man should be the leader of homosexual women" and on the other hand due to financial irregularities of Bergmann. She summed up that "the time has finally come for Karl Bergmann, who founded the Monbijou Women's Club only to exploit it for his personal purposes, to disappear."[3]

Advertising photos of Hahm show her in a casual position wearing men's clothes. It is suspected that she was the holder of a so-called transvestite license, but nevertheless the identity of Lotte Hahm as a woman is assumed.[4] Together with Felix Abraham,[5] in 1929 Hahm was involved in the foundation of the first German organisation for transgender people, the transvestite association D'Eon, which still existed in 1932. D'Eon was open to biologically male and female transpersonalities alike, was based at the Institute for Sexology of Magnus Hirschfeld and was directed by Hahm until 1930. Hahm was also involved in the organization of lesbian groups, for example, she had been the leader of the women's group of the BfM since 1928 and in 1930 she called - unsuccessfully - for the foundation of a Germany-wide "Federation for ideal women's friendship".[6]

Between 1926 and 1929, Hahm met Käthe Fleischmann, ten years her junior, who became her long-time partner. The bar and restaurant owner, married and mother of two sons, divorced in 1929 and supported Hahm in opening and running the two lesbian restaurants "Monokel-Diele" and "Manuela-Bar".[4]

As a Jew, Fleischmann's bars had been repeatedly disrupted by the SA since the autumn of 1932, which ultimately led to Fleischmann having to sell her premises at a knock-down price as part of the anti-Semitic deprivation of rights by the state. Then in 1933 all lesbian bars were closed by the National Socialists, magazines were banned, open events as before were no longer possible, so that Hahm could no longer work either.[4]

In spite of the risks involved, Hahm and Fleischmann had now joined forces to continue offering places of lesbian subculture. They renamed the women's club "Violetta" veiled in "Sportclub Sonne", whose events took place until December 1934 in the Jewish Lodge House in Joachimsthaler Straße 13 (today the Central Orthodox Synagogue Berlin) and in 1935 in Berliner Straße 53. After a denunciation[4] on 17 July 1935, officers of the police and the Reich Chamber of Music observed about sixty-five women there; fifty-four women were recorded by name in the subsequent raid on 24 July, and further events of the club were prohibited.[3]

Hahm was not found at this event because, according to her representative, she was in Hiddensee, according to a note in the file "known as a meeting place of homos. women".[3] There she opened a pension, probably for lesbian women.[4]

Her further life under National Socialism is poorly documented and partly contradictorally reported. It is possible that Hahm first came into the National Socialists' focus in 1933. According to a report by a contemporary witness, she was arrested when she was charged by the father of a friend with seducing minors.[3]

It is certain that she was taken to the Moringen concentration camp in early 1935, but files from there no longer exist. She told fellow prisoners that an unknown person at Alexanderplatz asked her to look after his suitcase. The Gestapo had searched the suitcase, found Communist material in it and arrested her. In the camp, Hahm had joined a communist group, and presumably she had been tortured. Hahm kept silent about her experiences in the concentration camp even after the Second World War.[2]

By 1937 at the latest, Hahm was free again and worked as a textile trader in the Berlin area. Her success was limited; for lack of money she cheated her driver for his wages, who sued her for fraud. Hahm was sentenced to a fine and imprisonment; the latter she probably did not have to face.[4]

At least in 1939 Hahm resumed her earlier activities and again founded a lesbian meeting place on Alexanderplatz on the first floor of the Lehrervereinshauses[6] which, however, was only of short duration.[2]

Fleischmann remained secretly active as a restaurateur, despite the life-threatening situation for her. In 1938 she was sentenced to forced labour; in 1941 she managed to escape and survived by changing hiding places, supported by Hahm.[4]

Immediately after the end of the war, Hahm began to become active again in 1945 together with Käthe Reinhardt. They tried to organize lesbian balls in the "Magic Flute"; later they moved to Oranienstraße 162.[3] In the same year Hahm and Reinhardt opened a bar for lesbian women near the Alexanderplatz, the name and exact location of which is unknown. The bar existed from 1945 to 1947 for about one and a half years and was the first lesbian restaurant in East Berlin.[7] Hahm was involved in the 1958 refoundation of the Bund für Menschenrecht, which failed.[2]

Hahm and Fleischmann separated at the end of the 1950s at the latest. In the 1960s, Fleischmann was asked whether she would agree to an official tribute to Lotte Hahm for her support during the Nazi era. Fleischmann denied this request; her reason was that she felt abandoned. In 1967 Fleischmann died in Berlin-Schöneberg. Hahm died in August of the same year in Berlin-Wannsee.[4]

Lotte Hahm's work was already highly appreciated in contemporary times. Already for the first anniversary of Klub Violetta two poems about her were published in Frauenliebe, one by Selli Engler: "You, who have prepared a home for us through noble and serious diligence, and who with a proud and free forehead only strides forward with strength, you shall continue to be our guide, and we shall trust in you... Therefore, guide, show us the way to good and happiness, and build with us a strong bridge to all the world."[8] In 1928 the gay magazine Neue Freundschaft described Hahm as "one of our best known and most popular leaders in the Berlin homoerotic women's movement."[9]

Franz Scott saw Hahm in retrospect at the beginning of the 1930s alongside Selli Engler as an important personality of the first lesbian movement.[6]

Today, Hahm is recognized for her activist work as one of the "most important activists of the homosexual subculture, especially in Berlin" and "a significant champion for the organization of homosexual women and "transvestites" during the Weimar Republic". Her "organizational skills, untiring energy and [...] a lot of courage are emphasized".[10]