Kurt Hiller
German essayist and activist (1885–1972)
Kurt Hiller (17 August 1885, Berlin – 1 October 1972, Hamburg) was a German essayist, lawyer, and expressionist poet. He was also a political (namely pacifist) journalist, and he came from a middle-class Jewish background. A communist, he was deeply influenced by Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer, despising the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, which made him quite unpopular with Marxists.
Hiller was also an influential writer in the early German gay rights movement in the first two decades of the 20th century. Hiller was elected as vice-chairman of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in 1929.
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- From time immemorial there has existed among all peoples an unusual, but otherwise perfectly worthy, harmless, guiltless variety of human being, and this variety — as if we were still living in the darkest Middle Ages — is senselessly and horribly persecuted by many peoples, following the lead of their legislators, governments, and courts. Let the intellectual world, the researchers and policy makers of all nations, stand up against this barbarism and demand in the name of humanity: Halt!
- Appeal to the Second International Congress for Sexual Reform on Behalf of an Oppressed Human Variety. Copenhagen, 1928
