The life of the German-American Charlotte Charlaque (1892–1963) crosses the Atlantic several times – from Schönberg to Berlin, San Francisco and Prague to New York. As a Jew, Charlaque left Nazi Germany in 1934. Eight years later, she made the life-saving "leap" to the USA. In New York, she became a dazzling celebrity as the uncrowned queen of the Brooklyn Heights waterfront. She now liked to call herself Charlotte von Curtius. But what not even her closest friends knew was that her new surname was an allusion to her old birth name. Because when Charlotte Charlaque was born, her parents assumed she was a boy and gave her the name Curt ... And she was not the only one.
A report by the Swedish journalist Ragnar Ahlstedt (1901-1982), which was published in 1933 under the title "Män som blivit kvinnor" (Men who have become women), drew attention to the life of Curt Scharlach and Charlotte Charlaque, but until recently remained largely unnoticed. According to Ahlstedt, the young Curt was already aware of being a girl at the age of seven. From the age of twenty, he also moved in women's clothes with official permission.
Around 1930, Erwin Gohrbandt (1890-1965), then chief physician of the Am Urban Hospital in Berlin-Kreuzberg, performed gender reassignment surgery. The cost of 50 Reichsmarks was covered by the physician Felix Abraham (1901-1937?), who was an employee of Magnus Hirschfeld at the Institute of Sexology and head of the sexual forensic department there. Charlotte Curtis Charlaque, as she now called herself, is also said to have been employed at Hirschfeld's institute around this time – in what function, however, is unknown. This is also where Charlotte met her future friend and life partner Toni Ebel (1881-1961), also a transgender woman.
Available via magnus-hirschfeld.de
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