Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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a blind declaration of infamy, which has all too often proven itself to be a sword of injustice against heretics, Jews, and witches.”108 Like Hössli, Ulrichs hopes that science—in contrast to superstitious religion—will play a great and positive role in this endeavor. Karl Maria Kertbeny also assigns strictures against homosexuality to the same category as irrational concerns about “original sin, devils, and witches.”109
While the comparison between homosexuals and witches has reappeared over the years, Hössli’s analysis underscores one reason why the metaphor of the witch ultimately loses power as a way of describing the identity of men who sexually love other men. Part of the absurdity of the prosecution of witches is that they are supernatural and, therefore, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, “actually didn’t exist at all.”110 But Hössli, Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and their allies argue that inverts, urnings, and homosexualists do exist. Indeed, they sometimes have to argue against those who dismiss the occurrence of same-sex love as a rare and trivial issue. For this reason, the comparison to witches and warlocks gradually fades from sight in the texts of the nineteenth-century German homosexual emancipation movement. Nevertheless, the persecution of the witches is for Hössli and others in the nineteenth century a potent symbol of the unjust mistreatment of men who loved other men. The disappearance of witch hunts in the eighteenth century encourages Hössli and his successors to believe that society could actually stop persecuting men who loved other men.
Conclusion
Far from being a historical outlier, irrelevant because it was so unique in its defense of male-male love in the 1830s, Hössli’s Eros is intricately enmeshed in the cultural movements of its time and place. Hössli was in contact with literary figures such as Zschokke who were leading liberals in his native Switzerland. He tracked down the most recent scientific, gynecological evidence about sexuality available. As he completed Eros in the 1830s, he kept abreast of literary developments reported in Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt.
Because of his learned appropriation of the culture of his era, he had at his disposal a variety of concepts that were current in his time. He no longer had to rely on notions of “friendship” to describe sexual attraction between men. Instead, he had a concept of sexuality as a driving force at the intersection of mind and body that was innate, immutable, and essential to a person’s identity. Following Menzel, he could tentatively suggest that men who loved men really had female souls and make implicit comparisons between adherents of Greek love and Jews. Such analogies connected him to liberal and progressive movements of his era calling for the emancipation of women and Jews. The gradual elimination of the persecution of witches provided him with a positive example of the social change he hoped to see with respect to Greek love. Hössli would not have been able to write his study if his intellectual culture had not extensively discussed matters such as: the sexual borders of friendship, the unity of the mind and the body, the existence of sexuality, and the emancipation of women, Jews, and the flesh. At the same time, it would be doing him a disservice to deny that he reorganized the intellectual givens of his time to put forth one of the first comprehensive visions of an identity based on same-sex sexual love that was inborn, natural, unchanging, essential, universal, ahistorical, and in need of some sort of social protection.
Chapter 2
The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation
The very title of his book, Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks, underscores the importance of the classical Greek legacy for Heinrich Hössli’s efforts to explain and justify male-male desire. In the first part of the nineteenth century, allusions to ancient Greece not only proved the transhistorical and intercultural nature of same-sex desire, but also vouched for its legitimacy and even nobility. As the century progressed, however, those who thought critically about same-sex desire came to believe that the Greek model provided little evidence in support of the case that homosexuality was an innate, immutable condition affecting only a discrete minority of individuals in need of legal and social protection. In addition, the Greek model seemed to imply intergenerational sex, rather than long-term relationships between adults. By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, many physicians and activists had hollowed out the Greek model. They continued to refer to prominent figures such as Sappho and Socrates as famous “homosexuals” in order to argue for the eternal nature of that category of sexual desire, as well as to cash in on some of the prestige of antiquity, but they rarely predicated their discussions of same-sex desire on analyses of Greek texts. Instead the Greek tradition came to be honored by a subgroup of peculiarly German nationalist sexual radicals known as “masculinists” who harbored antiliberal, antibourgeois, antimodernist tendencies and who were disproportionately influential among literary writers from Sigmund Freud to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
Nietzsche and His Disciples
While Greece in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had stood for the Enlightenment and rational, liberal, humanist views, by the end of the nineteenth century the German vision of Greek culture came to be tragic, illiberal, imperial, and pessimistic. No one did more to engineer this change than Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose darker view of Greece suited many aspects of Wilhelmine Germany. Under Nietzsche’s tutelage, Greek culture came to be seen as the remedy for the soulless, bourgeois, prosaic liberalism that, according to many conservatives, endangered central European culture. Because Greece was also still known for its representations of same-sex desire, this new vision of antiquity afforded a space for antibourgeois models to compete with the emergent liberal and progressive view of homosexuality found in Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal. At the close of the nineteenth century, these antiliberal masculinist thinkers echoed a variety of Nietzsche’s arguments about antiquity—including his antifeminist and anti-Enlightenment stances—as they contemplated the role of same-sex desire in Germanic culture.
As Andrew Hewitt observes, “the Greek state offers itself to rightwing ideologues as an alternative to ‘Jewish,’ ‘liberal’ democracy.”1 The question of anti-Semitism in Grecophilic, post-Nietzschean thinking is significant enough that it will be addressed separately in the next chapter. For now, let us focus on the shift in the meaning of Greece from its standing at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a guarantor of human rights, including the rights of men who loved men, to its mobilization at the end of the nineteenth century as part of a critique of liberalism. In the realm of sexuality, this late nineteenth-century version of the Greek model became shorthand for a rejection of liberal models of sexual identity.
Nietzsche’s influence on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homosexual emancipation movement in general is surprisingly strong. The writings of the masculinists in particular are laced with discussions of the Übermensch, the priestly spirit, the ascetic ideology, and the herd. In her summary of the authors cited by contributors to Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and Brand’s Der Eigene, Marita Keilson-Lauritz finds that Nietzsche is without question the most frequently cited author in Der Eigene, the mouthpiece of the German masculinist homosexual movement.2 Der Eigene often cites epigraphs from Nietzsche and originally sported the subtitle, “Ein Blatt für Alle und Keinen” (A Paper for Everyone and No One), which was a direct allusion to the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One).
The Nietzschean homosexual is humorously parodied in Otto Julius Bierbaum’s novel Prinz Kuckuck (Prince Cuckoo), which appeared in 1906 and 1907. Although Bierbaum (1865–1910) has remained on the fringes of the canon, Prinz Kuckuck merits attention, because it has one of the earliest German literary representations of a character clearly labeled a homosexual in the modern, sexological sense. Bierbaum’s writings take from Nietzsche a glorification of a pagan, heathen sensual life and are filled with anti-Semitic passages. The novel does not necessarily endorse this philosophy: its anti-Semitic protagonist, Henry, who doesn’t realize his mother is Jewish, comes off as an antihero. In fact, the Nietzschean legacy comes in for particular ridicule in the character of Henry’s adoptive cousin Karl, who in the course of the novel discovers his sexual orientation toward men and