Peripheral Desires

      In the nineteenth century, new potential villains and threats began to frighten Europe: “hyperactive children, precocious girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious servants and teachers, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with strange impulses.”¹ Lurking inside these scary people were sexual secrets, which—according to Michel Foucault—had truth claims that gave them identities with new explanatory powers: “nymphomaniac,” “pedophile,” “sadist,” and “homosexual.” Reviewing these developments in the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (History of Sexuality), Foucault restates one of the central questions of his scholarship: “What does the appearance of all these peripheral sexualities signify?”² In the phrase, sexualités périphériques, Foucault uses “peripheral” primarily in the sense of “non-normative,” referring to sexualities forced centrifugally away from the vortex of bourgeois life and thereby required to speak endlessly about themselves. The word “peripheral” can also, however, shed light on the cultural geography of German-speaking central Europe, where many of the new discourses around sexuality emerged.

      From Foucault’s perspectives in Paris and Berkeley, the German-speaking lands beyond the Rhine were themselves in the periphery. This is not to bring up the old resentments between France and Germany, but to underscore Marshall Berman’s insight that late eighteenth-century German-speaking central Europe was one of the first geographical regions to experience a sense of underdevelopment in contrast with a developed and modernized West.³

      Despite Germanic anxieties about being peripheral, however, Berlin and Vienna were also the capitals of powerful empires in the center of Europe. Even as German-speaking thinkers reconstructed sexual identity on the periphery of the West, they consistently pushed these new non-normative sexualities and locales outward, away from German centers of gravity—to Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Samoa, Italy, and Palestine. Early nineteenth-century authors Heinrich Hössli and Heinrich Zschokke wrote and published their analyses of male-male love in Switzerland, relying on information and evidence from German centers like Stuttgart; later, Ernst von Wolzogen, Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé saw Switzerland as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of the German-speaking world. Throughout the nineteenth century, thinkers of all political stripes relied on the ancient Greek tradition, projecting same-sex desire on to the Hellenic world. One such Grecophile, the poet and artist Elisar von Kupffer, grew up on the fringe of the German-speaking world, among the Baltic German nobility in Estonia, and then resettled just beyond the boundaries of the German-speaking part of Switzerland, near the artistic colony at Monte Verita in Ascona. Karl Maria Kertbeny’s commitment to Hungarian nationalism produced an intriguing connection between Hungarian identity and homosexual identity that shows up in literary texts such as Adalbert Stifter’s Brigitta; on the other side of the Austro-Hungarian divide, Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Man without Qualities) reveals traces of Austrian thought about sexuality and nationality.