Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer & First Emancipation Movement Memorial

The stretch of Spree bank opposite the Federal Chancellery carries the name of Magnus Hirschfeld — the physician who, in 1897, founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the world's first organisation to campaign for homosexual rights. The bank was renamed in his honour in 2008, on what would have been his 140th birthday. Since September 2017 it also carries a memorial: six oversized steel calla lilies, each around four metres tall, painted in rainbow colours. The flower was chosen with intent — the calla carries male and female blossoms on a single plant, a natural emblem of the diversity Hirschfeld spent his life documenting. The memorial, initiated by LSVD Berlin-Brandenburg and designed by Berlin art students, honours the first homosexual emancipation movement that began here in Berlin decades before Stonewall. The location closes a circle: Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, founded 1919 and destroyed by the Nazis in 1933 in one of the first book burnings, stood a short walk away in the Tiergarten. What you see today: a pleasant riverside promenade about ten minutes from the Hauptbahnhof, free and always open — the lilies, an information stele, and the government quarter across the water. Pairs naturally with the Institut site and the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in the Tiergarten.