The Legend of Lili Elbe

by Karin on Monday, 3 August, 2009

Author:

EarthAngel

Publication Date:

August 2009

Screenshot:

LOTL magazine, August 2009: The Legend of Lili Elbe

LOTL magazine, August 2009: The Legend of Lili Elbe

Story:

GREAT stories often live on beyond the times that gave them birth, and great novels are sometimes re-issued, even occasionally made into feature films. The life of Lili Elbe is one such story – David Ebershoff’s novel about her has been re-published in Australia, and principal photography on the feature film of the same name commences early 2010.

The Danish Girl was first released to considerable acclaim in 2001. After being off the shelves for some years here, Allen & Unwin re-released it in May of this year.

Timely indeed; Nicole Kidman’s production company Blossom Films announced that it was co-producing the film of The Danish Girl late 2008 and Kidman herself signed up to play the lead role, Lili Elbe née Einar Wegener. Charlize Theron has taken the role Nicole had originally been asked to consider, Einar’s wife Gerda, who is known as Greta in the novel.

Like Ebershoff’s other novel, The 19th Wife, The Danish Girl is based on a true story and the protagonist’s memoirs. Lili wrote Man into Woman in 1931 and it was published soon after under the byline of her friend and editor, Niels Hoyer. An English translation followed in 1933.

The news that someone apparently born a man had been surgically and hormonally transformed into a woman was a worldwide front page sensation back then. Just as quickly though, Lili’s story was overtaken by other events during the Depression and the lead up to World War II. Lili’s story was lost for decades, until Ebershoff read a brief paragraph about a Danish painter named Einar Wegener in a book about gender theory sent to him by a friend. He was hooked.

As he learned more about Einar and Lili, Ebershoff kept asking himself, how could this person be missing from history? He had been under the impression that Christine Jorgensen was the first person to undergo ‘sex change’ surgery in 1952. Ebershoff’s curiosity took him to Europe, to Copenhagen where he discovered newspaper articles that Lili herself had written under a pseudonym after she was outed in the Danish press, and Dresden, where her major surgeries were performed and where he read about her at the Dresden Hygiene Museum.

Some clarification is called for here. Although Nicole Kidman’s news about The Danish Girl has been hailed in the press as the story of the world’s first transsexual and the first person to undergo ‘sex reassignment surgery,’ there is much evidence Lili was intersex. That is, she had ‘genetic, hormonal and physical features that may be thought to be typical of both male and female at once,’ according to OII Australia.

Photographs of Einar Wegener bear that out – he was so feminine that he was often abused for being a young woman masquerading as a man when wearing man’s clothes on his errands in the streets of Paris. Einar and Gerda had moved to France in 1912 to further their careers as painters. Einar had been the famous one in Denmark, but the acclaim for Gerda’s paintings and illustrations soon outstripped his and his career became subordinated to hers.

In fact, it had almost been that way for years. Einar acquired the name ‘Lili’ when he stood in for one of Gerda’s portrait clients in Copenhagen. ‘Elbe’ came later, in 1930 when she fell in love with the river of that name that passes through Dresden, then one of the most beautiful, Baroque-style cities of Europe. She had gone to the city’s Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic for her final three surgeries.

Ebershoff sticks to the facts when it comes to how Einar became Lili, but quite rightly uses artistic license when it comes to the why. Lili’s memoir, as remarkable as it is, does have its limitations. Ebershoff had questions, and only imagination could provide the answers.

“What do you do when the person you love changes? How much change can love withstand before your relationship becomes something else?” he asked himself.

Ebershoff was fascinated, too, by Lili’s steadfast courage. Einar had visited doctors of all persuasions in Denmark, France and Germany, sticking with it throughout insults, threats and medical misadventures at the hands of quacks and the grossly ignorant. Then he encountered Doctor Kurt Warnekros, from Dresden, through a friend.

I interviewed David Ebershoff during his visit to Sydney for the Writers Festival, and asked him about Lili’s groundbreaking surgeries.

“None of this had ever been done before, this idea of accomplishing a transition through surgery,” he said. “There are just no records of anyone even thinking about that before this, so in some ways [Warnekros] was experimenting on Lili.”

About Lili herself, Ebershoff told me “If no one else has ever done it, and you don’t know what is on the other end, it’s like going to the moon for the first time.”

“She was so courageous to envision a future for herself, a future that no one else had ever achieved,” he added.

When I asked Ebershoff to sign my copy of the 2001 US paperback edition, he wrote a simple phrase that will stay with me for the rest of my life, “With much admiration and respect.” And I knew that he was writing those words not for me alone, but for Lili too, and all of us who must follow unconventional paths to becoming ourselves.

Book, Publication Details:

  • Book – The Danish Girl
  • Author – David Ebershoff
  • Publisher – Allen & Unwin
  • Publication date – May 2009
  • ISBN – 9781741758405

References: