Peter Schult

Rare photo of Peter Schult, by this time elderly

Peter Schult (born June 17, 1928, Berlin - died April 25, 1984, Munich) was an anarchist German writer and journalist, and, from the 1970s, a prominent participant and protagonist in public debates on sexual morality and sexual politics, especially homosexuality and pedophilia. This page provides details about Schult's life, his openness about being and living as a practicing pederast/MAP, and his participation and status as a key figure in the German 1st wave of the MAP Movement.

The life of Peter Schult

Schult briefly saw military service at the end of the Second World War and escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp in 1945, before fleeing to West Germany and being imprisoned for black market trading and automobile theft. From 1950, Schult led a respectable life as an active political liberal, directed a youth home and was, briefly, married. In the summer of 1954, he was arrested and sentenced to five months in prison for "serious indecency with persons under the age of 21", where he subsequently resigned from his position as deputy federal chairman of the Young Democrats, vice-president of the “Liberal Youth of Europe”, and head of a men's dormitory in Stuttgart (Germany) where runaway youths were admitted.

From 1955 to July 1961, he served in the French Foreign Legion which he deserted towards the end of the Algerian War after becoming convinced of the injustice and inhumanity of the war. He was imprisoned for drug dealing and homosexual relations in the 1960s and - during a different stretch of imprisonment - worked for the German far-left prisoner support group Red Aid, participating in a hunger strike to support the group and protest solitary confinement in May 1973.

After his release on February 21, 1974, he worked in the collective Red Aid Munich, contributed to the Munich city newspaper Blatt and the magazine Autonomie. With Herbert Röttgen, the publisher of Trikont publishing house, Schult campaigned against the ban on the memoirs of the Left-wing militant Bommi Baumann, organizing a solidarity campaign by 380 public figures and achieving the release of Bommi Baumann's work.

Schult and MAP politics

Cover of Gefallene Engel (Fallen Angels, 1982)

The most concise source on Schult's life and MAP politics in English, comes from a 1985 obituary by gay historian Hubert Kennedy, who wrote:

At the time of his death one year ago at age 55, Peter Schult was the best known boy-lover in Germany. This was due partly to a public campaign to have him released from prison on humanitarian grounds, since he was terminally ill with lung cancer [...] Until then, however, he was generally known only to activist boy-lovers, left-radical political groups, and, of course, the many boys he had loved and helped and had sex with.

Peter found and took home the homeless — or they found him. In state institutions his address was passed from one boy to another as a place where runaways could find temporary shelter. His address was also well-known to the authorities, whose “authority” the anarchist Peter refused to recognize, and he was sent to prison numerous times on charges of drug possession and “seducing minors.” In 1971–74 he was in prison for “kidnapping” (read: sheltering a runaway from a state institution) and spent nearly two years in isolation [...]

With the publication in 1978 of his autobiography, "Besuche in Sackgassen: Aufzeichnungen eines homosexuellen Anarchisten" (Visits in Dead-End Streets: Memoirs of a homosexual Anarchist), written while he was again in prison, Peter became notorious, both for the frankness with which he revealed and accepted his sexuality and for his antagonism to the state.[...]

When Peter was convicted for the last time in 1982 for “corrupting a minor” and was given the lengthy (for Germany) sentence of two years and ten months, the judge particularly pointed out Peter’s lack of regret for his actions. Nor were the authorities pleased by Peter’s writing in prison his second book, "Gefallene Engel" (Fallen Angels, 1982), a collection of short stories and essays, again describing his experiences with boys and his anarchist views.

Although Peter was unable to obtain treatment for what he believed to be a tumor in his lung, he finally gained a transfer to a prison in Berlin, where the presence of the tumor was confirmed. Efforts to gain his release having failed (although 1,500 people signed the petition), Peter fled the hospital in Berlin in March 1984, and a month later was back in Munich, where he died of bleeding in the lungs on April 26, 1984.

As Peter lay dying in Munich, a special issue of the journal "Die Aktion: Zeitschrift für Politik. Literatur, Kunst" was being prepared in Hamburg. It was devoted entirely to Peter and expressed an appreciation of him and outrage at his treatment. (pp. 10-11)

An extensive and detailed biography (in German only) was published by Prof. Florian G. Mildenberger in 2006, titled "Beispiel Peter Schult – Pädophilie im öffentlichen Diskurs" (Peter Schult - Pedophilia in Public Discourse).. See our page Beispiel Peter Schult which summarizes this book.