Queer History Walk in the Footsteps of Toni Ebel — ENGLISH

The life of painter and trans woman Toni Ebel (1881–1961) is a remarkable queer story of the 20th century. She underwent one of the first gender-affirming surgeries at Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. After the institute’s violent destruction by the Nazis in 1933, Ebel fled to Czechoslovakia, where she lived with her partner Charlotte Charlaque—first in Karlovy Vary, then in Brno, and finally in Prague. In 1945, she was expelled from Czechoslovakia as a German national and spent the rest of her life creating art in East Germany.

Toni Ebel’s story is featured in the Prague Pride Festival exhibition Tina Hrevušová: Pioneers of Identity at Artivist Lab.

This historical walk will begin at the exhibition and continue through key locations of queer history in Prague’s New Town, Old Town, and Lesser Town. It will end at Maltézské Square, where Ebel and Charlaque last lived together.

Guide
Ladislav Jackson – art historian, who teaches at the Faculty of Fine Arts at Brno University of Technology and the Institute of Art and Culture at the University of South Bohemia. His research focuses on the history of queer art and spatiality in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 2024, he published the edited volume Images of Other Desire: Queer Art and Visuality in the Czech Lands. Since 2023, he has led the Society for Queer Memory and previously contributed to the books Homosexuality in Czech Cultural History and Queer Prague.

You may also like the following events from Společnost pro queer paměť:

• This Wednesday, 30th July, 07:00 pm, Teplo domova: Jaký byl vztah queer lidí k domovu ve 20. století? in Prague

Also check out other Arts events in Prague, Exhibitions in Prague, Festivals in Prague.