Early years Giese was the youngest of six children of a working-class family and had three brothers and two sisters. His family lived in Schulstraße 17, not far from today's subway station
Leopoldplatz.
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft Around 1918, when Giese was a student, he met
Magnus Hirschfeld after a lecture in
Munich. Later he became an employee at the
Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. He took over the management of the archive of the Institute and gave lectures, curated exhibitions and wrote articles. Eventually he became Hirschfeld's life partner; Hirschfeld described their relationship as a "physical-mental connection". During this time, Giese met the British archaeologist
Francis Turville-Petre and the French author and later Nobel Prize laureate
André Gide. British-American writer
Christopher Isherwood, who lived for some months in the neighboring building, wrote about himself and Karl Giese:
Exile in Paris Hirschfeld did not return to Germany from his world journey in 1932, and Giese went to meet him in Paris. Hirschfeld was by then living with another partner, a 23-year-old Chinese medical student named
Li Shiu Tong. Despite some initial jealousy, which nearly killed each other, they all lived together in Paris in a . After the in Berlin fell victim to the Nazi regime, with books from its library burned, Giese spent several months in Brno in 1933 trying to purchase surviving literature from the Institute's archives. He also made contact with the magazine (
New Voice: Journal of Sexual Reform), arranging the publication of some articles by both Hirschfeld and himself.
Later years In 1934 Karl Giese traveled to Paris to join Hirschfeld but was soon apprehended in a public bathhouse, arrested on charges of "public indecency", and sentenced to three months in prison. Following his imprisonment, Giese's French visa was terminated, and he was expelled from France in October 1934. After Hirschfeld's death in 1935, Giese was allowed to enter France to attend Hirschfeld's funeral in
Nice. Two months before his death, Hirschfeld had designated Li Shiu Tong and Karl Giese as his principal heirs, stipulating in his will that both men should use their inheritances to advance sexual science, not for personal expenses. Karl Giese was heir of the library and the few objects that had been saved from the Institute. Ultimately he was not able to use his inheritance.
Norman Haire privately provided Giese with financial help in the hope that he would relocate to Britain as per Hirschfeld's wishes. However, Giese moved to
Brno in 1936 and lived with the Jewish lawyer Karel Fein (1894-1942) for several months before moving into his own flat. It is known that around this time he was still in contact with the two transgender pioneers, the Jewish German-American actress
Charlotte Charlaque and the German painter
Toni Ebel, whom he knew from Berlin and who, like Giese, had fled to Czechoslovakia after 1933. At the time of the Nazi
annexation of Austria and shortly before the Nazi
takeover of the Czech Sudetenland, Giese committed suicide in Brno on 16 March 1938. His heir, Karel Fein, was deported to the
Lodz Ghetto by the Nazi regime in October 1941, and died on 2 May 1942. Giese's possessions, including his inheritance from Hirschfeld, were lost in the Holocaust. == Other information ==