First of all, thank you for the replies and interest! Second, sorry for the late reply, I didn't have time to give it the attention it deserved until recently.

Was the activity you describe completely disconnected, like how in the west the "new left" was severed from the "old"?

Unfortunately the vast majority of my knowledge of queer history lies in the "Hirschfeld era", for lack of a better phrase. Pretty much everything I know about the GDR queer experience comes from States of Liberation, which is the only major English language source on the subject I am aware of, but I haven't dug into this in a while. There seems to be a fair bit more literature on the subject in German, but I unfortunately cannot read German, let alone at an academic level. The only mentions of Hirschfeld Huneke makes in the book outside of his brief historical context of pre-war Germany is to two groups in the FRG, the "Magnus Hirschfeld Centre in Hamburg" and the "Magnus Hirschfeld Society." Hirschfeld's work would've certainly been in living memory, but only relatively recently (as in the past few decades) has there been a great deal of scholarship on his work as parts of his archive are found in various estates. Heike Bauer's The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture talks a bit about that. The caveat being that I can only speak from an English-reader's perspective. All this to say that I do not know the answer as to whether queer GDR citizens were looking back towards Hirschfeld specifically. He certainly would've made a good figure to turn back to especially for the GDR as the Insitute for Sexual Science was documented to at times allow Comintern members to reside there. States of Liberation is on Anna's Archive if you want to take a look yourself, but a Ctrl+F through it only brings up those couple of instances where Hirschfeld is mentioned aside from his activity pre-war.