We mourn the loss of our former Head of Archives and Collections, Dr. Jens Dobler, who passed away on 13.09.2024. During his work at the SMU from 2010 to 2015, he laid the foundation for professionalizing the archive work and thus making our unique collection known to the public and accessible to science. “Without his preparation, his knowledge of the holdings, his prudence and his organization, the archive’s move from Mehringdamm to Lützowstraße in 2013 could easily have ended in chaos,” recalls Kristine Schmidt, a research assistant at the SMU archive and Jens Dobler’s colleague at the time. “With his friendly and calm manner, he involved the team and the volunteers in this huge project and got them on board.”
His contributions to queer historiography, in particular to the surprisingly ambivalent role of the Berlin police in the first decades of the 20th century, are groundbreaking and a lasting and inspiring basis for research. In the controversial debate about the recognition of lesbian women as victims of Nazi persecution, Dobler was one of the historians who argued for a complex definition of the crime of persecution and not for it to be based on the wording of Section 175. His latest book is also groundbreaking and opens up a new field of research that has received little attention to date. Under the title “You have never seen a dancer like Voo Doo”, Dobler reconstructed the “incredible life” of Willy Pape. Pape was a world star of the variety theater of the Weimar era and thus one of many protagonists of this vibrant queer subculture, many of whom we do not even know their real names. Dobler also did groundwork as an exhibition organizer with projects on the queer history of the city of Berlin: his exhibition on the queer history of Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain (“Von andereren Ufern”, 2003) and above all the show “Verzaubert in Nord-Ost” (2010) opened up a multi-layered view of the fascinating and today sometimes neglected LGBITI* history of the east of the city. Jens Dobler has also supported numerous exhibition projects at the Schwules Museum with his in-depth historical knowledge and comprehensive insight into our collections. In 2013, he provided an exciting insight into our collection work with “News from the Collection”. In the same year, he curated the traveling exhibition “lesbian. jewish. gay”, which has already been shown in many places and is still being shown.
After his time at Schwules Museum, Jens Dobler headed the Police History Collection at Berlin Police Headquarters until 2022. Since October 2022, he has been working for the Magnus Hirschfeld Gesellschaft, of which he was a board member from 2007 to 2022, on the research project “The Plundering of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science during the Nazi Era”, which is funded by the Deutschen Zentrum Kulturgutverluste.
“Jens Dobler’s contributions to our collective knowledge are profound,” says Ben Miller from the board of the Schwules Museum. “It is impossible to write about the queer history of Germany without encountering either his academic arguments or collections that he helped to preserve and promote. When I was a very young scholar, he supported my work with respect and encouragement. We will miss him deeply.”
Honoring his memory is a mission for us to continue our intensive commitment to the development, preservation, indexing and public visibility of our collections.
Photo: Jens Dobler at the opening of “exhibiting queer” on July 3, 2014 at the Schwules Museum (Axel Wippermann, Archive Schwules Museum)