Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin
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behind more disturbing legacies.
My tendency is to place more weight on the will and volition of the characters involved than has been the case in much post-Foucauldian work on the history of sexuality. One of Foucault’s great insights was to see the importance of institutions (like medicine, psychiatry, academic scholarship and the penal system) in mobilizing power in the construction of modern sexual identities. The scholarship that has followed in his wake has too often envisioned sexual identities as an imposition by the socially powerful upon disempowered individuals. As Harry Oosterhuis, however, observes, it is clear that many patients willingly went to the sexologists, often with the express aim of helping in the creation of the definition of sexual categories, trying to alter the misconceptions of the medical establishment.6 Similarly, it is clear that the sexologists often relied heavily on self-conscious and self-identified homosexuals as sources for their information.
Many historians of sexuality and other readers of Foucault will be concerned with the use of words like “homosexual,” “gay,” and “queer” to describe people and sexualities from late nineteenth-century Germany. Such cautious skepticism is in order when reading sweeping rejections of social construction such as Graham Robb’s: “First, there always were people who were primarily or exclusively attracted to people of their own sex. They had no difficulty in identifying themselves as homosexual (or whichever word was used), often from a very early age. Second, these people were known to exist and were perceived to be different.”7 Robb valuably emphasizes that the life for nineteenth-century homosexuals was “not unremittingly bleak,” concluding that “nineteenth-century homosexuals lived under a cloud, but it seldom rained.”8 A rousingly positive review of his work in the New York Times underscores the hunger for essentialist understandings of sexuality, even among the most educated readers in the United States.9 Without rehashing old essentialist-constructivist debates, it seems self-evident that, for those sexually interested in members of their own sex, the sense of identity must have changed significantly in the late nineteenth-century as new vocabularies of “urning,” “invert,” and “homosexual” arose, backed up with scientific, medical and cultural—rather than religious—evidence. Peripheral Desires seeks to delve into these nuances of identity, reclaiming some of what was new and distinctive about sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Robb is responding to social constructionists at the other end of the spectrum, where scholars like Rüdiger Lautmann, an intellectual leader of the post-War German gay rights movement, declare that “gay life today has little in common with the urning life of the nineteenth century or ancient pederasty.”10 This claim is overstated, or at least not useful for the discussion I hope to begin. While it is undoubtedly important to distinguish between different forms of sexuality, both within the culture of a specific area as well as between various historical periods, it is also worthwhile to trace the roots and origins of modern Western conceptions of sexuality. The conceptualization of sexuality that emerges in late nineteenth-century Germany has enough points of similarity and continuity with modern Western understanding of sexuality that a comparison between the two becomes useful and instructive.
As is clear from my earlier book, Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe, I strongly believe that there is a space for queer interpretation of texts that—because they lack a modern vocabulary of sexuality—do not refer directly to such modern institutions as homosexuality. No default heterosexuality to all texts written prior to 1869! But these strategies of appropriation and reading against the grain—so essential for queer theory in general—are less important for the project of Peripheral Desires and may indeed even obfuscate some of its goals. Since I am hoping to analyze the origins of the modern vocabulary of sexuality, I have tended to stick with the nomenclature employed by the authors I have studied. If they use the word “urning,” I use the word “urning.” If they use the word “homosexual,” I use the word “homosexual.” In order to organize authors and concepts, I have had to resort to the occasionally awkward but nonetheless necessary phrase, such as for instance “people who sexually desire members of their own sex” or a broad category like “non-heterosexual,” but in general matters of vocabulary are fairly straightforward because many of the authors in question have clearly stated views about how to refer to sexuality.
My readings also tend to be fairly straightforward, reporting unambiguous descriptions of homosexual acts or feelings of same-sex desire on the part of characters in literary texts, patients described in medical reports, or people referred to in the writings of activists. Thus, in this study, I am not typically reading against the grain or looking for secret queer meanings in seemingly straight stories. Insofar as I refer to the sexual actions, fantasies and identities of historical figures such as Ulrichs, Kertbeny, Hirschfeld and Mann, I have tried to rely on their own writings and honor their own often complex self-assessments, while of course acknowledging that at times they might themselves have consciously disguised aspects of the truth for political or personal reasons.
If the word “homosexual” requires some thought, then the word “German” does too. Stylistically unpleasant phrases like “German-speaking central Europe” are necessary because the authors in this study lived under a variety of political administrations and cultural firmaments. A number of them—notably Kertbeny, Krafft-Ebing and Freud—worked primarily in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which presents its own complex set of identities. Prior to 1869, the Empire was a polyglot conglomerate of nationalities, unifed by the person of the Emperor. In 1869, the Empire restructured itself as Austria-Hungary; there was the hope that the nationalities could be subsumed under the two headings of Austrian or Hungarian. But the Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ruthenians, Ukrainians, Romanians, Slovenes, Serbs, Croats, Romany and Jews didn’t play along. It was not the case that citizens of the Habsburg Empire had the same kind of national identity as “Austrians,” “Hungarians,” or “Austro-Hungarians” that the “French,” the “Dutch,” the “English” or arguably the “Germans” had. “Germanic” Austrians and German-speaking Austrian Jews certainly played a leading role in the governance of the Empire, but their identity was distinct from the culturally more homogenous German Empire to the north. The complex question of Habsburg, Austro-Hungarian, and Austrian identities had an influence on the origins of modern concepts of sexuality.
While Austrian identity is undoubtedly complex, German identity is not much simpler. Those authors who wrote in non-Habsburg German-speaking lands before Otto von Bismarck unified Germany as an Empire under the Hohenzollerns in 1871 had their own sense of being “German,” which tended to focus on an idealist and cultural concept of nation, rather than a specific concrete state. Many of the writers analyzed in this book lived and worked most of their lives in Wilhelmine Germany, in the unified empire constituted in 1871 and demolished at the end of the First World War. Indeed, this book argues that the politics and history around the establishment of that Empire had more to do with the creation of modern sexual categories than is usually acknowledged. But, by the same token, many of the authors in this book continued to live and work under the very different circumstances of the Weimar Republic and some were still active in the 1930s, either within Hitler’s Third Reich or in exile.
Those in exile scattered to the four corners—Hirschfeld around the world and then to France for a few years before dying, Mann to the United States and eventually Switzerland, Freud to England, Zweig to Palestine before returning to the German Democratic Republic. While few of the exiles had the temerity to say, as Mann did, that “wherever I am, there is German culture,” it is nonetheless worth stating here that all these authors count as “German” in some sense, regardless of their ultimate citizenship. Of course, all those who survived the Second World War lived in a world with profoundly new kinds of “Germany”: a pro-Western Federal Republic of Germany, a communist German Democratic Republic, and to the south, Switzerland and Austria, neutral in different kinds of ways. This brief reminder of the complexity of “German” identity hints at some of the reasons why an analysis of sexuality and literature in the German-speaking world plays out so differently than it would in, say, France, Britain, Spain or Holland.
Although some of the authors studied in this book lived on into the post-War era, the main body of Peripheral Desires ends with Zweig’s 1932 novel, De Vriendt kehrt heim. The further