Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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homosexual.27
In the 1820s, Zschokke no longer needs Ramdohr’s semiotics to distinguish between love and friendship. The educated bourgeois public in his novella knows that “a passion that goes beyond friendship” can develop between members of the same sex. If the comparison between mother love and Greek love ultimately fails, so also do attempts to see Lukasson’s love for Walter as an example of friendship. Always looking on the bright and banal side, Claudia hopes to set aside any anxious questions about same-sex love with the cheerful assertion that “women are the tenderest of friends to women, as men are to men.”28 No one can understand, however, how such innocent friendship would result in Lukasson’s murder of his beloved, so it quickly becomes clear that friendship, however intense, has little explanatory power in this case. Holmar explicitly denies the value of using the word “friendship” to describe the relationships that he believes existed in ancient Greece.
Hössli himself is at his most confident when refuting the argument that Greek love could be understood as some kind of exalted friendship. Toward the end of his two-volume treatise, he lists the reasons why Greek love is not the same thing as friendship. Greek love has a “bodily, sexual [geschlechtlich], purely sensual” side, associated with “charm, beauty, spontaneity, bodily possession and pleasure, passion and bliss, the agony and joy of love.”29 Greek love is directed at people of a specific age and sex—that is, with a particular kind of body—whereas friendship, presumably, applies more universally.30 Showing his knowledge of the classical tradition, Hössli notes that in ancient Greece, male-male love was always directional, flowing from the lover to the beloved, while friendship was reciprocal. He adds that “love is not friendship, precisely for the reason that it can become friendship.”31 He concludes his section on friendship by distinguishing it quite clearly from sexual love: “Love and friendship and sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe], these are three things, of which only the last has its roots in the corporeal, in the absolute, not in the coincidental, the arbitrary, the conditional. The plan of creation could not and would not leave these roots, out of whose development it planned the highest humanity, to accident, and therefore they were placed into the flesh.”32 Hössli’s linkage of the corporeal with the absolute may seem bit eccentric to a reader used to transcendental philosophy, but as a Romantic thinker, he has a profound belief in the unity of mind and body.
Hössli’s distinction between sexual love and friendship becomes apparent in his response to a play called Die Freunde (The Friends) by Sigismund Wiese (1800–1864), published in 1836. An author of historical dramas, Wiese is the author of an 1844 piece, Jesus, which made it to the Vatican’s index of forbidden works. Die Freunde deals with two friends, the Prussian Philipp and the French Eugen, who—in a classic trope of friendship discussed by the German Romantic author Jean Paul and the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida33—are on opposite sides of the battlefield. One smuggles the other out of prison; the other loses an important battle out of love for his friend. Some consider their behavior treason, but neither abandons his duty. Eugen reads his own death sentence (his friends are too overcome to do so) and declares, “I am faithful to my fatherland unto my death.”34
The play’s very title demonstrates that it is interested in friendship itself. References abound to David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, and Orestes and Pylades. This friendship between Philipp and Eugen is cemented with a bond “as strong as death, a bond such as the ancients celebrated,” highlighting the connection to earlier eras.35 While Philipp is looking for his friend among the French prisoners, his servant Leopold alludes to the erotic possibilities inherent in such ancient friendships:
If ever a man
Searched for his girlfriend with hotter ardor
Than you examine the rows of Frenchmen,
Then I’m no woman’s son! Tell me,
Are you in love, is she wearing men’s clothes?
In response, Philipp simply mumbles to himself, “I can’t find him.” Leopold cries out in shrill horror, “Him? Not her? My dear Philipp, what do you mean?”36
There are other moments when the relationship between these men is described in terms that blur the boundary between friendly and sexual love. Eugen claims that he is saving a friend “who means to me / what siblings, spouses, parents and brides mean to you.”37 With the distinction between his own love and that of his interlocutors, Eugen seems poised on the verge of making the claim that there is a clearly defined group of men who love other men rather than women. At one point one character prophesies: “Some day, I scarcely know how to say how, / Our love will also be allowed to speak.”38 Here there seems to be an early understanding of the need for self-expression that accompanies the emergence of modern sexual categories.
Hössli thought that Wiese’s play was one of the few excellent portrayals of male-male love in modern literature. The very fact that he was reading it while writing his own Eros underscores how closely he followed the literary scene at the time. For direction in that literary arena, Hössli relied on the Literatur-Blatt (Literary Journal), edited by Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873). On September 19, 1836, the Literatur-Blatt published a review that declared that “Die Freunde is a drama that in Holland and England could not be performed, without the author’s and the actors’ risking their healthy limbs. The two friends speak exactly like two lovers and awake even in the most tolerant reader a feeling of disgust.”39 Hössli takes from this negative review the belief that the play is indeed about a sexual and erotic friendship: “if my idea about the play is inaccurate why does Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt claim ‘in many places the author and the actors of this play would be stoned’?”40 Anticipating the argument that the play is about Ramdohr’s nonsexual friendship rather than sexual love, he begins his analysis of the play by saying, “I can already predict that people will incorrectly claim that another spirit governs Wiese’s drama than the Greek-erotic one.”41 Despite its implicit resort to threats of violence against those involved with the play, the Literatur-Blatt is useful to Hössli because it confirms the notion that the play is dealing with sexual friendship. Whereas an earlier era might have left the sexual and erotic relations between Eugen and Phillip ambiguous, in part because of a lack of language to delineate such affairs, Hössli and his age feel quite confident that they can distinguish between nonsexual friendship and sexual love.
Certainly, romantic friendship would remain an ambiguous presence in Western literature, even after the widespread adoption of a vocabulary of sexuality. But Germany, which had undergone a particularly intense flowering of passionate male friendship in the eighteenth century, was less fertile ground for ambiguously erotic same-sex friendship in the nineteenth century. A play such as Wiese’s could no longer titillate readers with strong, but indecipherable, emotions. Ramdohr’s semiotic project was on its way to completion, which meant that Wiese’s public was increasingly able to articulate a clear difference between asexual friendship and sexual love. By the early nineteenth century in German-speaking central Europe, language provides a space for sexual love between members of the same sex.
Biology: Sexuality and Bildung
A concept of a natural immutable sexuality that operates on the border between mind and body allows Ramdohr, Zschokke, and Hössli to distinguish so strictly between friendship and sexual love. Whereas most eighteenth-century authors had attributed the male-male love of the Greeks and others to environmental factors that could presumably affect anyone (nude exercising in the gymnasia, for instance, or the segregation of women from men), these early nineteenth-century theorists of sexual identity saw sexual attraction as the product of innate drives. As a phenomenon that is at least in part corporeal, sexuality belongs to the realm of nature and the natural, a fitting subject for study by scientists and physicians. At the same time, this corporeal, scientifically knowable sexuality becomes for Hössli the core of a personal identity, the focus and teleology of an individual’s Bildung.
David Halperin has argued that the concepts of “sexuality” and “the drive” were necessary predecessors to “the invention of homosexuality.”42 In Germany,