Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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(found for instance in Ferdinand Karsch-Haack’s sexual ethnologies, as well as Karl May’s popular novels) link non-normative sexualities and the colonies, particularly Samoa. Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) famously associates male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, on the border between Europe and the Orient. Arnold Zweig’s De Vriendt kehrt heim (De Vriendt Goes Home) builds on a long and extremely well-developed tradition in the German-speaking world of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine.
“Peripheral” also could describe many of the authors cited in this study, who tended to be far from the center of influence. Even the most established—the physicians and researchers specializing in sexology and nervous conditions, like Carl Westphal, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Magnus Hirschfeld—had to struggle for respectability, given their focus on sex and sexuality. Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis were more marginalized—excluded by the already suspect sexologists from the academy. While medical and scientific writings had a protective scholarly cover, which meant that they found an academic audience and a way into libraries, the political work was more ephemeral. Despite some connections to influential people and some reservoirs of political capital, activists from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs to Adolf Brand were nonetheless on the outskirts of power. Even in liberal republican Switzerland, Hössli’s publications were barely legal. Legal authorities repeatedly persecuted Ulrichs for his sexuality and his politics, until he moved to Italy where he spent the final decades of his life in poverty. Kertbeny spent decades leading the marginal life of an émigré. Censors initially banned Kupffer’s collection of male-male love poetry.
If the medical and political texts about sexuality seem at times peripheral to the more immediately influential work going on in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in central Europe, then the literary works may appear even less important. While some of the authors under study in this book—Adalbert Stifter, Robert Musil, Karl May and Thomas Mann—are well known, many—Heinrich Zschokke, Ernst von Wolzogen, Aimée Duc, Franziska zu Reventlow, Otto Julius Bierbaum and Arnold Zweig—are obscure from the perspective of the twenty-first century. The literary texts seemingly pale in comparison to the truth claims of science and medicine or the practical implications of politics and law.
Nonetheless, it is precisely in these apparently peripheral literary texts that some of the most insightful analysis of sexuality takes place. Literature is arguably that form of language that monitors language as language, language that—in addition to carrying a message, telling a story, describing a scene, calling for political change, defining an illness, and prescribing a cure—watches, observes, and records change in language itself. Zschokke, Stifter, Musil, Bierbaum, May, Wolzogen, Duc, Reventlow, Andreas-Salomé, Mann, and Zweig are some of the literary figures who repeatedly provide evidence alongside the activists, sexologists, physicians, lawyers, and reporters whose work helped create modern categories of sexuality.
Whether literary, medical or political, the conceptions of sexuality analyzed in Peripheral Desires are purely textual. That is to say, I make no effort to determine how many people in German-speaking central Europe were engaged in exactly what sexual practices (although some of the more empirical sources try to do just that). The focus is on articulations of sexuality and conceptualizations of new forms of identity. Although it is clear that these new identities, like homosexuality and heterosexuality, eventually became very powerful in structuring the real lives of many people, this book does not make any attempt to prove that they were influential or widespread in the nineteenth century. It would certainly be hard to argue that Hössli, for instance, had a broad or immediate impact on his society. Even Ulrichs and Kertbeny reached only a small segment of the population, but that small segment included physicians like Westphal, Krafft-Ebing and Hirschfeld, whose medical discourses did begin to affect the lived experience of many individuals. Literary writers gave a broader reading audience throughout the world tools for thinking about sexuality. Ultimately, this book is about a history of ideas—ideas that would one day have a concrete force in people’s lives, although they may have been obscure at the time of their emergence.
One consequence of studying this history of sexual ideas is that the sources are limited to the people who had access to possibilities of publication, to medical educations and to a sense of political empowerment—limited in short to the bourgeoisie and the upper classes. Virtually none of the writers studied in this book come from the lower or working classes. Many are middle class, confirming one of Foucault’s foundational theses, that sexuality is itself a bourgeois construct.
Bourgeois, many of the subjects of this study also understood themselves as liberal. “Liberal” entered the German language as a political concept at the beginning of the nineteenth century, about the same time as “sexual.”4 While the meaning of the term “liberal” is in no way monolithic, a core of liberal beliefs provides the basis for much of the emancipatory thinking on sexuality. These beliefs include the separation of church and state, the individual’s right to privacy, limiting the government’s role in the personal life of the citizenry, protecting the rights of minorities, faith in the power of progress and science, and an aversion to cruel and archaic punishments. This loose conglomeration of ideas makes liberalism a fertile ground for rethinking sexual categories and identities.
The fact that the Liberal parties in German and Austria-Hungary became increasingly devoted to economic liberalism further complicates the issue. When possible, I try to distinguish between lower-case “liberal,” referring to a broad philosophy of individual rights and freedoms, and upper-case “Liberal,” referring to specific parties which became more and more associated with concern for the sanctity of private property and the importance of free markets.
Peripheral Desires also focuses almost exclusively on men. Virtually all of the writers that I study are men, with the exception of Duc, Reventlow and Andreas-Salome, who come up primarily in the chapter on Wolzogen’s treatment of third sex and the women’s movement. Clearly there is much more to be done on lesbian history.5 Despite the focus on male authors and their primary interest in male-male sexuality, I hope that Peripheral Desires will contribute to feminist conversations and debates in gender studies. Many of the authors analyzed in this study rely on an implicit or explicit gender inversion model, which assumes that men who love other men must have some sort of feminine desire. Even if they are writing about men, their effort to isolate a kind of female soul within these men is of interest for feminist and gender studies, no matter how wrong-headed their approaches. Given that notions of effeminate gay men and masculine lesbians are still pervasive on multiple levels of modern discourse, these nineteenth-century speculations on feminine desire are of more than historical interest. On the other hand, other authors (notably the so-called masculinists) strenuously object to the gender inversion model and insist that male-male desire is fundamentally masculine. These authors also offer insights into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century constructions of masculinity. The efforts of all the authors in this book to describe same-sex desire produces countless disturbances in what was to become the model of masculinity and femininity within normative heterosexuality, making them of interest not only to gender studies, but also specifically to feminism.
The lives of many of the authors in this study have a certain novelistic or even operatic quality. Some are quirky: Hössli, the Alpine hat-maker, obsessed with the mistreatment of men who love men; Ulrichs, the Hanoverian lawyer, fighting lonely battles to raise the political consciousness of urnings, before moving to southern Italy where, impoverished, he devotes himself to another hopeless battle—the restoration of Latin; Kertbeny, the German-born Hungarian nationalist eking out a precarious living as a translator and critic of Hungarian poetry; Kupffer, the German Baltic aristocrat, living in what he calls “self-imposed exile” in southern Switzerland, where he founds a religion based on beauty, in particular, the beauty of young men; Sasha Schneider, the art professor who established an athletic center at his university in order to produce more attractive models for his art. Many are tragic: Franz Desgouttes, executed on the wheel because he murdered a young man whom he claimed to love; Daniel Hemmeler, the young man Desgouttes murdered; Israel Blank, who ultimately died in prison because of his passion for cross-dressing; Westphal’s patients, “N.”—a woman who wanted to live as a man and go to engineering school—and