Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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into the impossibility of producing anything good, so despised and damned that it can rarely gnaw on beauty but must satisfy itself with generally rejected flesh, this vice creeps around us with its unfruitful heat in narrow remote alleys, dark hiding places, and—when in brighter surroundings—among the rabble of civil society.”84 Similarly, Zschokke’s characters put forth the notion that modern society has so “branded” this love that it has taken on perverted forms. Holmar traces the repression of Greek love all the way back to the sixth-century edicts against the defilement of males (de stupro masculorum) that Emperor Justinian (483–565) promulgated.85 Zschokke’s character insists that “the law … is unjust; it first created and then punished the horror that it made.”86 Zschokke, with his experience in law and policy, creates a fictional version of Hössli who argues more explicitly for decriminalization of male-male love than Hössli himself. Zschokke’s novella depicts the horrifying fate of nineteenth-century men who love other men: “With a shudder must the man or youth perceive the effect of such a psychological drive in himself. His own conceptual world has been so distorted by the insanity of the world that he must consider himself to be insane and unnatural … when an involuntary, irresistible passionate affection for a man grabs hold of him.”87 According to Zschokke’s character Holmar, such a man hates himself, his nature, and the whole world.
In his own writing, Hössli insists that deleterious social conditions can alter the appearance of male-male love by perverting it through oppression. Asserting that Plato’s writing is a product of his society’s positive treatment of male-male love, Hössli insists that the philosopher today would have “succumbed to misdeeds, internal battles and misery and ruin and would have ended on the cart, in jail and—perhaps on the gallows.”88 (Zschokke’s Holmar argues conversely that in ancient Greece Lukasson could have been “one of the great artists, wise men or heroes of the nation” instead of a murderer executed on the wheel.89) Whereas Greek love had flourished in the time of Plato, today, according to Hössli, “it creeps around in our midst as a vice under the burdens of general damnation, destroyed and destructive, without blessing, power or deed, full of guilt and torture, beyond all human dignity and ideal, usually in disgusting, not Greek, figures, creating its own circle of corruption, vice, sin, decay, whose origins we do not search.”90 He continues with melodramatic flair: “it flows as its own rich poisoned well of indignity and misery … ejected, it howls in thousands of prisons on our continent, cursing itself and the hour of its birth, surrounded by night and dark, a daily self-renewing, self-consuming and endlessly self-contradictory monster.”91 Today, “it provides in this form work and bread to prison masters and hangmen,” as well as leading to “suicides inexplicable to us.”92 “Thus waves,” Hössli bitterly and sarcastically concludes, “our victory palm, our psychology, over Greece’s poor old humanistic art and science.”93 Through the Romantically tinged prose, Hössli’s argument emerges: sexuality, while not eradicable, can assume new and terrible forms as a consequence of societal oppression and persecution.
The comparison between Jewishness and same-sex love is a big enough topic in the German history of sexuality that it deserves and will receive its own chapter. For now, let us turn to another historical development Hössli believed augured well for his cause: the disappearance of witch hunts, which he hoped was evidence of the dawning of a more enlightened day. While the expression “witch hunt” is still used in English (and its corollary Hexenjagd exists in modern German), its literal meaning has probably lost much of its original vivid force. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, however, memories of actual, not metaphorical, witch hunts were still alive, and a sense of the injustice of this persecution burned brightly in enlightened spirits.
Eros begins with an extensive discussion, not of same-sex love, but of the persecution of witches. In fact, there is enough material on the subject that one of the two volumes in the 1896 reprint of his work was devoted primarily to witches. The subject matter must have been particularly significant for Hössli because, two years before his birth, a woman who was executed for being a witch lived in the very house in which he was born, according to his biographer Ferdinand Karsch.94 Hössli himself cites from the death certificate of July 21, 1782, of this unfortunate woman, whose name was Anna Güldin.95 Although her family name is spelled in a variety of ways (Goldin, Göldin, Göldi), Anna is well known as the last woman executed as a witch in Europe.96 Other relatively recent executions would have been present in the memories of his readers, too—and not just in Mediterranean countries where the Inquisition held sway. Hössli reminds readers of the burning of hysterical nuns in Würzburg in 1749 and in West Prussia in 1779.97 Alluding to an execution in Swabia in 1766 of someone who claimed to be able to change the weather, he stresses the contradictions between such executions and the Enlightenment: “In the year 1766, in Swabia, in the little city of Buchloe, one person among the people was convicted and really executed as a weather changer; in this century witches have been burned at the stake and beheaded—and this century called itself the enlightened, the philosophical.”98 Bitterly, Hössli suspects that many of his contemporaries might actually desire a return of the “good old days.”99
Hoping to appeal to other enlightened readers, Hössli therefore begins his analysis of Greek love with an extensive report on the witch hunts, without immediately spelling out the connection between witchcraft and Greek love. He commences with references to witch hunts and witch trials, describing in detail some of the goriest stories from the Middle Ages and detailing the extremes to which religious fanaticism can go. By the end of his study, when he addresses more explicitly male-male desire, he still makes allusions to witchcraft to show how superstitious beliefs can damage people and societies.100 Hössli alludes to the sexual underpinnings of some of the witch hunts when he mentions Pope Innocent VIII’s papal bull against “carnal intercourse with the devil.”101 Generally, Hössli finds the comparison to witches useful as a way of setting up his polemic against what he considers to be superstitious and outdated religious prejudices against same-sex desire.
In his publications on urning love, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs also makes frequent references to witches, werewolves, and others.102 Ulrichs also cites others who make the same comparison, including an anonymous urning who hopes that the laws against male-male desire will go the way of the laws against witchcraft and heresy: “I demand that in the nineteenth century we do not allow laws to stand that belong to the era of the persecution of heretics and witches.”103 Ulrichs notes that this reader came upon the comparison between urnings and witches on his own, without having read Ulrichs’s own thoughts on the matter.104 Ulrichs cites a friend who teaches jurisprudence at a southern German university, who is concerned that “most of the well-educated resist enlightenment in this matter.”105 In his earlier works, like “Vindex” of 1864, Ulrichs optimistically sees the cessation of the persecution of male-male love as a continuation of the Enlightenment triumph over the persecution of heretics and witches: “It was the task of the previous two centuries to eliminate the persecution of heresy and witchcraft. It will be the task of our century, indeed hopefully our decade, to eliminate the persecution of male-male love.”106 Not everyone who used this metaphor was so positive. A certain “upper-class man of the world,” who lived in Italy and loved other men and whose autobiography was published by the physician Johann Ludwig Casper (1796–1864) in 1863, reported that people in his circle sometimes said, “they used to burn witches at the stake, our time will come too.”107 This “man of the world,” like Ulrichs in the 1860s, was actually more sanguine than his friends about the future of his fellow men who loved men, but the interesting point here is the widespread acceptance of the similarity between witches and practitioners of same-sex desire.
Like Hössli, Ulrichs uses the example of witches to set up a polemic against religious critiques of love between members of the same sex. The frequent linkage of witches and heretics makes it clear that witches were persecuted because they did not conform to a medieval religious worldview. In this respect, witches and heretics also resemble Jews, and sometimes Ulrichs refers to them in a single breath. At one point, Ulrichs describes male-male love as a “riddle of nature,” and insists that such riddles need to be handled differently from the way religious outsiders have been handled in the past: