An articulate intersex memoir from the early twentieth century, Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren, or Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, makes for gripping (if occasionally melodramatic) reading. Its concerns feel quite current and presage the struggles of modern intersex activists:

This lament might have been uttered by one of the many intersex adults who were operated on at birth and who have been denied access to their own medical records.

The epilogue written by Magnus Hirschfeld, an important figure of the Sexualwissenschaft movement, helps situate the memoir in the context of the history of sexology. It is both a call for compassion in the treatment of intersexuality and a fascinating, if brief, rumination on the question of gender identity: “The sex of a person lies more in his mind than in his body” (110). In content and context, then, Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years suggests multiple avenues for theoretical and historical analysis of issues that are of immediate contemporary concern.

The translation into English and the accompanying explanatory essays, moreover, will make the memoir accessible to a broader audience working in sexuality and gender. The afterword by Hermann Simon, the current director of the Centrum Judaicum in Berlin, builds a case for the true identity of N. O. Body as Karl Baer, a German Jew, and provides biographical data. Sander Gilman's preface both contextualizes the memoir historically and offers up a preliminary analysis of the gendered and ethnic dynamics at play. The newly published English translation and accompanying contemporary essays make Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years eminently teachable for both Jewish history and gender studies.

Several tantalizing mysteries surround the memoir. The first is, of course, decoding the identity of N. O. Body, the pseudonymous author. As mentioned, Hermann Simon's afterword meticulously argues that N. O. Body is Karl (Martha) Baer, a Jew born in West Germany in 1885 with ambiguous sexual characteristics and assigned female by the attending physician. Simon's family knew Karl Baer personally and believed that he was not intersexed, but rather that his parents lied about his sex on the birth certificate in order to avoid later mandatory conscription in the army.Footnote ¹ Simon, however, is convinced of Baer's intersex status, and evidence regarding Magnus Hirschfeld's interest in Baer (and the memoir, of course) seems to support this view.

Much of the content of Memoir of a Man's Maiden Years describes Baer's childhood in order to illustrate his early conflicts around gender identity. Baer's adult life, while taking up less of the work, is equally fascinating—after discovering feminism and organizing in the struggle against white slavery (some of which is only obliquely referenced in the memoir), Karl Baer fell in love with a woman. As a result, he enlisted the aid of a lawyer and transitioned his gender legally to male in order to be able to marry. After transition (as Simon narrates in the afterword), Baer became the director of the Berlin B'nai B'rith and ultimately immigrated to Palestine in 1938. Throughout the narrative, N. O. Body proffers his own internal conflict over his gender identity while describing the perceptions of others, the impact of the secrecy surrounding his birth, and the cost of his continuing maintenance of a “normal” female persona. All of these constitute evidence for his masculine identity and support his bid for a legal transition. As N. O. Body succinctly describes it, “I was born a boy, raised as a girl” (7).

The memoir is a good example of sexological narrative. As Jay Prosser points out in Second Skins about transsexual autobiographies, narrative is the key to diagnoses, and the technique of collecting narrative can be attributed to early sexologists:

While intersexuality is written on the body, the propensity of the body to “lie” requires the subject's proper narrativization. Baer's self-representation, framed by the testimonies of a journalist and a doctor to help affirm its authenticity, is a rich example of sexology's narrative drive, in part because it is so extended and (presumably) less filtered through doctor's notes. As with the story of Herculine Barbin, this memoir is richly valuable for writing Jewish and intersex histories and for the theoretical issues that it raises.Footnote ³

Lest we simplistically treat memoir as straightforward history, a further mystery entices us. In the opening pages, N. O. Body identifies himself as French Catholic:

Simon demonstrates some of the mechanics of the substitution of French Catholicism for Judaism: for example, he points out that Shavuot is transformed into Whitsunday (119). Gilman further contextualizes N. O. Body's claim by explaining that French identity was in itself a kind of racial othering in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. In overlaying French Catholicism onto German Judaism, Baer pairs two categories of racial other.

As Sander Gilman points out in his preface, however, this detailed invention of a grand (Catholic) past is strictly unnecessary for the plot of the memoir. N. O. Body's Catholic identity seems to be as irrelevant to the subject matter at hand as Baer's actual Jewish identity, as the stated purpose of the work is to assist science in its understanding of gender and sexuality. Neither Gilman nor Simon answers the question of why Baer substitutes Catholicism for Judaism throughout the memoir. Moreover, neither proposes an answer for this strange origin myth: why begin an intersex memoir not with an intersex birth (the rather obvious starting point), but with the ancestry that precedes the birth? It could be argued that the choice of situating himself within a grand past serves to both legitimate his voice and to recontextualize the memoir within a framework of otherness writ large.

Gender, ethnicity, and the experience of foreignness are tightly woven together in N. O. Body's description of his origin. In a sense, then, the genre itself begs for interpretation: in what ways does the anonymous memoir both conceal and reveal N. O. Body's identity, and how are we to understand the construction of gendered and ethnic identity in the persona of N. O. Body?

It is so easy to become engrossed in the interpretative difficulties that surround the reading of the memoir that one faces the danger of losing sight of the interpretative difficulties of the content. One of the earliest anecdotes occurred when the narrator was four years old, and it sets up the themes of the memoir succinctly: “Three children dressed in girls' clothing are sitting beneath a tree” (16). Note the use of the third person to create a rhetorical distance in this self-description, as N. O. Body describes himself as a child dressed in gender. Notice also how N. O. Body's indeterminate gender seems catchy, undermining, at least momentarily, the girlness of the other children who accompany him.

The vignette develops into a story of sexual awakening, in which one of the girl children, Hilde, begins a game of kissing and caressing Nora (the name that the other characters in the text call N. O. Body). The stream of this erotic memory is interrupted briefly by N. O. Body's voice as an adult: “I still recall that we felt no revulsion for one another's bodies, although we had been taught to do so by our mothers” (18). By the end of the vignette, Nora/N. O. Body's playmates discover his bodily differences in the course of their explorations. Thus, we see the simultaneous moment of sexual differentiation paired with sexual experimentation. The consistent emphasis on erotic awakening throughout the memoir leads one to be constantly aware of Nora/N. O. Body's physical desiring body and the desire his body inspires in others.

Gilman's preface raises central questions about the connection of sexuality, ethnicity, and gender identity. As he writes in his introductory paragraph,

Although Gilman raises some interesting questions about the poetics of the pseudonym, whose meaning stands in direct tension to the emphasis on erotic arousal throughout the text, his preface tends to dispel such tensions: as Gilman puts it, in the end “Masculinity, like Jewishness, will out” (xxiv).

I would argue that Gilman's interpretation is not a foregone conclusion. While the teleology of the narrative tends toward erotic enlightenment (through marriage to Hanna), and to transition to a masculine identity, the memoir also emphasizes the struggle that the protagonist undergoes in order to achieve this ending. The effort to claim an identity is what compels the narrative, and the excruciating tension between gender assignment and gender identity belies the implication that masculinity “will out,” as do N. O. Body's plaintive questions about who he really is. And of course, the analogy is flawed, because Jewishness does not out itself in the memoir; it is only through a painful process of reconstruction that Baer's Jewish identity is proposed after the fact.

N. O. Body asserts his arrival at an untroubled masculine identity, and Gilman (in an essentialist manner) clearly wishes to uphold Baer's self-identification. However, it is possible to respect his self-identification and recognize the underlying fractures that animate this memoir of a man's maiden years. One hopes for a good dissertation on the topic sometime in the not too distant future that will offer a reading on some of these textual and historical challenges. In the meantime, we can be grateful to the University of Pennsylvania Press for the release of the recent translation by Deborah Simon in paperback. The accessible English translation and contextualizing essays will make it a great primary text for general scholars who work in gender and sexuality studies. And Sander Gilman's invaluable notes will lead any generalist in Jewish history looking to expand their repertoire in gender analysis to some of the more current scholarship on intersex issues. This volume should hold an important place in both of those scholars' libraries, and will be invaluable to anyone interested in Judaism and gender.