The cabaret doors are open once more in Immoral Berlin, birthplace of sexual freedom

Imre Karacs reports on 100 years of the Gay Metropolis

The flattened scrubland in the arch of the River Spree, where Helmut Kohl hopes one day to indulge in his passion for breeding rabbits, is hallowed ground. There is nothing here now, except the bulldozers levelling the earth so work can soon begin on the new chancellery.

But some time ago, before the machines, the barbed wire and the bunkers, there stood a very special building on this plot. It was Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Research, a shrine dedicated to studying the love which only in Berlin dared speak its name.

Nothing is left now of the man and the place, except the distant echoes of the hedonistic days of the Roaring Twenties and the ashes of retribution exacted by another bunch of leather-clad men a decade later. That Berlin in its golden age was more than a just string of wild cabaret spots, and that it drank its fill of freedom long before the rest of the world discovered the Eldorado night club, is almost forgotten. Yet, for a brief interval between despotism and annihilation, this was the capital of enlightenment; the place where liberation of every kind began. Now the city's gay community, eclipsed in the meantime by the likes of San Francisco, wants to put the record straight.

An exhibition entitled "Goodbye to Berlin? - 100 Years of Gay Liberation", has been running for two months at the Academy of Arts, a worn Sixties concrete pile a short walk from the pioneering institute. It is in Hirschfeld's apartment that the century of emancipation began in May 1897, when the doctor and three of his friends set up the first organisation in the world openly committed to fighting sexual intolerance.

The "Scientific-Humanitarian Committee" was their outraged response to the imprisonment, two years previously, of Oscar Wilde. The first months of the movement were bedevilled by internal ideological strife as the founders sought to spread their influence worldwide. A certain Sigmund Freud from Vienna was the most prominent early defector. He had insisted that homosexuality, while not a crime, was a disease - a diagnosis not acceptable to the homosexual Hirschfeld. Nevertheless, despite its troubled start, the committee had enough clout by 1899 to reach a modus vivendi with the Berlin police, persuading them to stop raiding cafes frequented by gays.

This was an era of double standards. The authorities often turned a blind eye to homosexuality because many powerful men in Prussia, including a top general and a close confidant of the kaiser, were gay. But there were frequent scandals and those exposed faced a life in ruin. Not surprisingly, it was in the Berlin of this period that "outing" was invented. Many hypocrites were thus expelled from the closet, but the weapon sometimes proved double- edged. In 1907 an anarchist gay publisher named Adolf Brand aimed a little too high, "outing" the reactionary Reichschancellor Prince von Bulow. He sued for defamation and Brand ended up in jail.

In all this time, the committee published books, collected signatures, and campaigned for the repeal of the notorious Paragraph 175 proscribing homosexuality. They were never to succeed, but love between men eventually became de facto tolerated in the Weimar republic. And so the German capital became the "Gay Metropolis", "Immoral Berlin" - in the words of the title of a 1930 alternative guide - the home of Auden, Isherwood, Spender and other artists drawn to its permissive milieu.

It is no coincidence that when 1933 came, Hirschfeld's institute was singled out for an early ransacking and book-burning visit. The committee was forced into exile and, after Hitler's coup a year later against Ernst Rohm, the - gay - leader of the Nazi storm-troopers, a war was declared on "deviants". The police were ordered to draw up lists. Some 50,000 Germans were convicted of homosexuality, many perishing in concentration camps. Those who escaped went on to carry the torch beyond the Third Reich, helping to set up gay self-help organisations in their adopted homes.

These days, when Dr Hirschfeld's institute is gone yet the whole of Berlin seems engaged again in sexual experimentation, it is difficult to conceive why it took nearly three decades after the war to right the wrongs. Homosexual acts between consenting adults were only legalised in the former West Germany in 1973, and a lot later in the East.

United Berlin is now making up for lost time, but finds itself, as in so many other things, overtaken. The slogans and tactics of the movement born by the River Spree have to be reimported from the United States, from "Gay Pride" marches to lobbying techniques developed across the Atlantic. Curiously, "outing" has yet to return. Perhaps Berlin gays learnt their lesson first time round, exactly 90 years ago.