Lili Elbe

Biography

A passport in the name of Lili Ilse Elvenes was issued to her at the end of 1930, when a Danish court had already annulled her marriage to Gerda Gottlieb. By then Lili was no longer painting: she regarded her earlier work as part of her earlier life.

She was born on 28 December 1882 in Vejle. At birth she was registered as Einar Mogens Andreas Wegener; her father, Mogens Wilhelm Wegener, was a merchant, and her mother was Ane Marie Thomsen. The year 1886 is sometimes given, but 1882 is considered correct: the date of the 1904 marriage points to it as well.

Einar first trained as a decorative painter and attended the technical school in Vejle. In 1902 he moved to Copenhagen and until 1904 studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. There he met Gerda Gottlieb, a vicar’s daughter and also a student; she worked as an illustrator of books and magazines. They married in Copenhagen on 8 June 1904. In 1907 he was awarded the Neuhausen Prize, and his landscapes were shown at the Artists’ Autumn Exhibition in Denmark, at the Vejle Museum of Art and in the Paris salons. The early pictures showed the streams of his home town; later came landscapes with avenues and views of the French provinces, with some stylisation and a distinctive handling of light. Titles associated with the painter include “Parti fra Capri” (1921), “View from the Garden of Versailles” (1922), “Trianon” (1920), “Coastal View from France” (1918) and “Portrait de femme” (1923).

The couple travelled widely in Italy and France, and in 1912 settled in Paris. By the story usually told, Einar first put on women’s clothes when Gerda’s model failed to arrive: he was asked to wear stockings and high-heeled shoes so that she could paint the legs. He liked it. By some accounts, the name Lili was suggested by the actress Anna Larssen, who sat for Gerda. Gerda became known for drawings of beautiful women with almond-shaped eyes, and in 1913 she admitted that her husband had been the model for them. He, it is said, often painted backgrounds and secondary figures in her pictures, and his own work receded into the background.

In the 1920s Lili regularly appeared as a woman at parties, including those at her own home. In Paris she was introduced as Einar’s sister, and only close friends knew the truth.

In 1930 she went to Germany for sex reassignment surgery, which was still experimental. Over two years she underwent four operations. The first, the removal of the testicles, took place in Berlin, in connection with Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science; the surgeon’s name is given differently in different accounts. The others were performed by Kurt Warnekros at the Dresden Municipal Women’s Clinic. The clinic and its archive were destroyed in bombing raids, so the exact course of the operations is hard to establish. Newspapers in Denmark and Germany reported her case as a sensation. In October 1930 the marriage was annulled; Lili received a new name and a passport. The name Lili Elbe first appeared in print in the Danish newspaper Politiken in February 1931, in an article by the journalist Louise (“Loulou”) Lassen. Back in Dresden, she met a Frenchman, Claude Lejeune, an art dealer, and hoped to marry him and have children.

In spring or summer 1931 she underwent a last operation, a uterus transplant. Her body rejected the organ, and on 13 September 1931 Lili died in Dresden at the age of 48. She was buried in Trinity Cemetery; the grave was levelled in the 1960s, and in April 2016 a new tombstone was erected, paid for by the film company Focus Features.

Gerda Gottlieb married an Italian army officer, divorced in 1936 and died in Denmark in 1940. In 1931 Lili’s memoirs were published, edited by Ernst Harthern, and in 1933 Niels Hoyer published, from her diaries and letters, the book “Man into Woman”. David Ebershoff’s novel “The Danish Girl” appeared in 2000, and the film based on it in 2015.