On the occasion of the exhibition “Wish you were queer. Un-Sichtbarkeit von LSBTI* in Kunst und Geschichte,” which closed on October 26, 2025, the Prediger Museum in Schwäbisch Gmünd received two significant gifts. One was a view of Istanbul with the Bosporus by the painter Hermann Hörner (1904-1967), donated by a private collector in Gmünd. The painting had been on loan for the exhibition and, during the presentation of the painter’s biography, stood there as a stand-in for his talented work.
Hermann Hörner began his artistic training with Schwäbisch Gmünd painter Alois Schenk before moving to the art academies in Stuttgart, Berlin, and Paris. Because his paintings were deemed “degenerate” starting in 1933, he gradually faded from public view. This withdrawal, however, also had a positive side: Hörner did not come under the gaze of the law under Paragraph 175.
Hermann Hörner was homosexual and lived with his partner. In his family and among his circle of friends, this was no secret—in the 1940s he returned to his hometown and worked again as a painter. In 1967 Hörner died of a heart attack. His family, which never rejected him because of his sexual orientation, buried him in the family grave. His death notice, in which “the friend” is named first even ahead of Hörner’s siblings, testified to the unusually positive family relationship in that era of hostility toward homosexuality.
Rinaldo Hopf entrusted the Museum with the Marla Glen portrait
The second donation was also presented as a loan in the exhibition: the portrait of Marla Glen. The Freiburg-born artist Rinaldo Hopf portrays the Black subject, who at the time of the portrait’s creation identified as a lesbian, with extraordinary strength and self-assurance. With her head held high, Marla Glen looks directly at the viewer, without hesitation and full of optimism. Glen had relocated from America to Europe in the mid-1990s. Most recently, in 2023, Marla Glen publicly came out as a trans man.
The portrait’s immediate expression of self-confidence became the exhibition’s media leitmotif. In this way, the image itself became a piece of museum history, and Hopf left the original from his “Golden Queers” series to the Prediger Museum. Both gifts are on display in the museum’s exhibition collection.
The museum tallied more than 3,600 visitors
The exhibition proved to be a magnet for visitors. “With over 3,600 people, attendance far surpassed that of our more recent shows. Guests arrived from near and far—besides our local residents in Gmünd, many day-trippers as well as unexpectedly large numbers of regional visitors from across Germany,” said museum director Max Tillmann. Among them were a noticeable number of younger visitors and families. “The Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart was delighted to book a guided tour, the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich organized an excursion to us, and the German Journalists Association also came,” added curator Martin Weinzettl.
The exhibition catalogs required a reprint in August; the initial print run of 10,000 copies had already sold out, and for the first time the museum ran out of printed admission tickets before the show ended. The guestbook, filled with notes in multiple languages, offered abundant praise. A Stuttgart day-tripper wrote: “Thank you for this important exhibition and the courage to show it!” A Gmünder visitor exclaimed: “Awesome! Keep it up! The Unicorn City is a role model!” Finally, a guest from Speyer noted: “I’m delighted to visit such a cosmopolitan city!”
