Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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As Ferdinand Karsch (1853–1936) explains in his essay in the 1903 edition of Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediary Types), Hössli was a fashionable hat-maker and designer in Glarus, a picturesque town high in the Alps in central Switzerland.1 Married to Elisabeth Grebel from Zürich, he was not the patriarch of a bourgeois nuclear family, as he and his wife did not live together. Their two sons both emigrated to America. Hössli died in 1864, unaware of the work that Ulrichs was beginning to publish on urnings. Ulrichs himself first heard of Hössli in 1865 and never had a chance to meet him.2 Although Ulrichs disagreed with some of Hössli’s approaches, he considered him a pioneer in the field and bought all eight remaining copies of Eros he could locate to add to the “common library” of materials pertaining to same-sex desire he was trying to develop.3 Through Ulrichs, Hössli was known to such late nineteenth-century sexologists as Havelock Ellis.4
Hössli claimed that his interest in the male love of men developed because of the shockingly horrific execution of Franz Desgouttes (1785–1817), who was put to death for the murder of Daniel Hemmeler (1794–1817), the twenty-two-year-old young man he loved and with whom he had sex. Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, Desgouttes had studied law in Heidelberg in 1806 and returned home, where he lived with his parents and led a troubled life. Desgouttes’s relationship with Hemmeler developed tumultuously with many drunken fights, as the young man attempted to assert his autonomy, including his right to pursue relationships with women. Desgouttes tried to keep his beloved with gifts ranging from chocolate, wine, and hazelnuts to the four-volume history of Switzerland by Johannes von Müller (1752–1809), who had had his own highly publicized scandal involving a male beloved. Desgouttes was not able to keep Hemmeler’s affection, however, and killed the young man on July 29, 1817. In retribution, Desgouttes was broken on the wheel on September 30 the same year. Breaking on the wheel was a gruesome and popular form of execution resembling crucifixion. After the prisoner was tied to the spokes and hub of a large wheel, the executioner shattered the limbs of the prisoner, who then slowly and agonizingly died in view of the public.5 This grotesquely medieval form of capital punishment surely added to the liberal Hössli’s horror at what he perceived to be the criminalization of Desgouttes’s love.
A desire to understand Desgouttes’s actions more clearly and represent them more sympathetically inspired Hössli to commission a novella on the subject by the Swiss author Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), one of the many literary figures of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German-speaking culture overshadowed by the sheer number of famous writers from the Age of Goethe. Zschokke was involved with a variety of progressive journals and newspapers, founding Der Schweizerbote (The Swiss Messenger), a periodical that ran from 1804 until 1879, long after its founder’s death. Thinking that a man of such spotless liberal credentials would empathize with the plight caused by the persecution of Greek love, Hössli asked Zschokke to complete a short story based on the Desgouttes case.
Zschokke came through with Eros, published in 1821 in a collection of short stories titled Erheiterungen (Amusements). In the narrative—one of the earliest stories in German attempting to elucidate male-male desire—a judge named Holmar (modeled on Hössli) tries to convince a small group of bourgeois couples that the recent execution by breaking on the wheel of a certain Lukasson (based on Desgouttes) for murdering his beloved Walter (based on Hemmeler) was unjust because society did not understand love between men. Holmar recounts the glory days of ancient Greece, when men like Lukasson were honored philosophers, poets, and politicians, not criminals subject to cruel archaic punishments. His interlocutors ponder Holmar’s arguments as they attempt to understand the passionate male-male relationship that started in love and ended in death.
Hössli detested Zschokke’s story, which disembowels his arguments about the acceptance of male-male sexual love in classical culture, insisting that the love between men in ancient Greece was not sensual. Zschokke’s characters reject other key elements of the defense of even this “pure” male-male love, favoring sociomedical explanations that suggest that such love is the product of nervous disorders, developmental problems, or the segregation of women from men in ancient Greece. The narrator, Beda, speaking for the group, cannot exculpate Lukasson for his murder and doesn’t accept Holmar’s argument that Lukasson has been the victim of oppression: “Lukasson was not made unhappy because of a virtuous friendship, but because of a raging passion that destroys all reason and virtue that he did not master at the right time and that turned him into a rake [Wüstling] and ultimately a murderer.”6 The older vocabulary of Wüstling could be translated as “libertine” as well as “rake,” and has nothing to do with an innate natural sexual orientation. The group concludes that male-male sexual love ought to remain prohibited by law. To add insult to injury, Zschokke’s Holmar is an odd and eccentric fellow, the only man in the lot without a wife or fiancée who is present. In fact, the narrator implies that Holmar might be one of the men who love other men, which the judge denies.7
Because Zschokke had not adequately addressed his concerns, Hössli wrote his own treatise on the subject. The first volume was published in 1836 in Glarus; that community’s authorities refused to allow the printing of the second volume, published in 1838 in St. Gallen. In the 1890s, Hössli’s material was reorganized and reprinted, with one volume focusing on witchcraft and the second on male love. Even at this late date, the second volume was given a fictitious place of publication: “Münster in der Schweiz.”8
For Hössli, Greek love had extraordinary significance: “For the entire life organization of the individual, the family, the state—indeed for humanity in every sense of the word—it is in a thousand respects, particularly for the arts and the sciences, as interesting as it is infinitely important and consequential not just to know that men sexually love their own sex, but rather also to know that these men naturally absolutely do not—cannot—should not sexually love the other, the feminine sex.”9 From this passage, one gets a sense of his style, with its repetitiveness, extended clauses, and occasional ascensions to imposing rhetorical heights. More important, Hössli’s passage points to some of the issues that he addresses in his book: individual and society, arts and sciences, sexuality and love.
The tortured prose of his writings reveals the obstacles that face Hössli as he attempts to fashion a new discourse about the sexual attraction between men. It is important, however, to realize that he fashions that discourse out of the fabric of his culture. Hössli’s initial entrepreneurial plan to hire Zschokke to write a short story about the love between Desgouttes and Hemmeler demonstrates both his faith in literary culture as a means to address the social problems of his day and his connections to the important figures in that culture. In fact, Hössli’s Eros is grounded in a vast array of cultural sources, ranging from classical Persia, Greece, and Rome to European authors from the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras, as well as his immediate contemporaries. Whatever his original contributions, the design of Hössli’s thought on sexuality relies on the warp and woof of the culture available to him.
At the same time, Hössli’s discussion of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), reveals his need to move beyond his sources and to innovate. Referring to the French writer’s comments on male-male love in De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748, Hössli writes: “Montesquieu could not say in his book on the spirit of the law, ‘in the Orient male love is neither a sin nor a crime, nor is it considered unnatural’—he can’t say that, he can only say what he really says: ‘in the Orient, pederasty [Knabenschänderei] and sodomy are very popular.’”10 Alongside Hössli’s righteous anger and frustration at the inability of his predecessors to speak more justly about same-sex desire, one can see that he understands that the limits of their discourse have constrained them, for which reason he feels the need to restructure his language in order to make his points.
Definitions: Mother Love, Friendship, and Sexual Love
In 1779, scarcely a half century before Hössli’s Eros appeared, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) had composed Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), in which lovers can plausibly discover that they are really siblings