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Preface

Peripheral Desires

In the nineteenth century, new potential villains and threats began to frighten Europe: “hyperactive children, precocious girls, ambiguous schoolboys, dubious servants and teachers, cruel or maniacal husbands, solitary collectors, ramblers with strange impulses.”¹ Lurking inside these scary people were sexual secrets, which—according to Michel Foucault—had truth claims that gave them identities with new explanatory powers: “nymphomaniac,” “pedophile,” “sadist,” and “homosexual.” Reviewing these developments in the first volume of his Histoire de la sexualité (History of Sexuality), Foucault restates one of the central questions of his scholarship: “What does the appearance of all these peripheral sexualities signify?”² In the phrase, sexualités périphériques, Foucault uses “peripheral” primarily in the sense of “non-normative,” referring to sexualities forced centrifugally away from the vortex of bourgeois life and thereby required to speak endlessly about themselves. The word “peripheral” can also, however, shed light on the cultural geography of German-speaking central Europe, where many of the new discourses around sexuality emerged.

From Foucault’s perspectives in Paris and Berkeley, the German-speaking lands beyond the Rhine were themselves in the periphery. This is not to bring up the old resentments between France and Germany, but to underscore Marshall Berman’s insight that late eighteenth-century German-speaking central Europe was one of the first geographical regions to experience a sense of underdevelopment in contrast with a developed and modernized West.³

Despite Germanic anxieties about being peripheral, however, Berlin and Vienna were also the capitals of powerful empires in the center of Europe. Even as German-speaking thinkers reconstructed sexual identity on the periphery of the West, they consistently pushed these new non-normative sexualities and locales outward, away from German centers of gravity—to Switzerland, Greece, Hungary, Samoa, Italy, and Palestine. Early nineteenth-century authors Heinrich Hössli and Heinrich Zschokke wrote and published their analyses of male-male love in Switzerland, relying on information and evidence from German centers like Stuttgart; later, Ernst von Wolzogen, Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé saw Switzerland as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of the German-speaking world. Throughout the nineteenth century, thinkers of all political stripes relied on the ancient Greek tradition, projecting same-sex desire on to the Hellenic world. One such Grecophile, the poet and artist Elisar von Kupffer, grew up on the fringe of the German-speaking world, among the Baltic German nobility in Estonia, and then resettled just beyond the boundaries of the German-speaking part of Switzerland, near the artistic colony at Monte Verita in Ascona. Karl Maria Kertbeny’s commitment to Hungarian nationalism produced an intriguing connection between Hungarian identity and homosexual identity that shows up in literary texts such as Adalbert Stifter’s Brigitta; on the other side of the Austro-Hungarian divide, Robert Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Man without Qualities) reveals traces of Austrian thought about sexuality and nationality. Intersections between German colonialist discourses and sexological-emancipatory discourses (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 “Ha…”—another man devoted to cross-dressing. Some, like Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, have moved into the pantheon of gay heroes, while others, like Brand, leave 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 development of sexuality and the study of sexuality in Germany after the National Socialists took power in 1933 is fascinating, but it is such a huge topic, requiring such delicacy, that I would like to leave it for future studies.

Peripheral Desires is not the first effort to answer these questions regarding the relationship between German culture and modern sexual categories. In fact, there is an astonishing amount of material available. In Germany, activist scholars like Manfred Herzer have uncovered and republished important documents from the nineteenth-century homosexual emancipation movement. Due to the work of Herzer and his colleagues, a significant number of early texts by Hössli, Ulrichs, Kertbeny and others are available in reprints. In the United States, the Arno Press republished in the 1970s a number of important documents from the German homosexual rights movement as well. James Steakley’s pioneering Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany appeared in 1975, long before gay and lesbian studies was accepted in the academy. His ground-breaking analysis still structures most thinking on the emergence of the nineteenth-century homosexual rights movement in Germany—my own work is deeply indebted to it. Not only is Steakley’s work written in English, many of the early sexological and emancipatory texts are published in English translation. Translators such as Michael Lombardi-Nash have translated Ulrichs as well as Hirschfeld into English.¹¹ Hubert Kennedy has not only written an extensive biography of Ulrichs (available both in German and English), but also helped keep the work of authors such as John Henry Mackay in print. In Germany, curators at the Schwules Museum and scholars at the Magnus-Hirschfeld-Gesellschaft have continued to uncover new primary material while also holding the door open for new interpretations. There have been several major exhibitions devoted to the subject, notably the 1984 exhibit Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850-1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (El Dorado: Homosexual Women and Men in Berlin, 1850-1950: History, Daily Life, and Culture) and the follow up, Goodbye to Berlin? 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung, which opened at the Berlin’s Academie der Künste in 1997. Rosa von Praunheim has cinematically documented this history in his 1998 documentary, Schwuler Mut: 100 Jahre Schwulenbewegung (Gay Courage: 100 Years of the Gay Movement) and his 1999 biopic about Hirschfeld, The Einstein of Sex. Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of an Identity, published in 2014, testifies to the ongoing interest in the subject as it presents a brisk and lively overview of the history of male homosexuality in the German context.

Given this large amount of scholarship, it might seem that another book on the subject was superfluous. But as previously unknown source material from the nineteenth century has been rediscovered, our understanding of the era needs redefinition and refinement. When Steakley’s work appeared in 1975, very little of the foundational theoretical work of gay and lesbian studies and queer theory had appeared—the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality was not published in English until 1978, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men did not appear until 1985, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble came out in 1990. On the other hand, many of the fundamental texts in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory don’t interact with the historical German texts. Foucault, for instance, had apparently little first-hand knowledge of Ulrichs, Kertbeny and the other emancipationists. There is therefore a need to bring together newer findings in the history and literature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German sexuality with more recent theoretical work in gay and lesbian studies and queer theory.

The need is more than purely academic. The cultural constructs in which nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-language authors wrote established the framework for their discussions of sexuality. That framework has remained remarkably consistent in the intervening two centuries, as these modern discourses of sexuality have become globally omnipresent. Much of the scientific research on sexual orientation continues to work on the assumption that homosexuals constitute a discrete minority, with biologically identifiable characteristics that often have something to do with gender inversion; this research typically claims to be part of a liberal political agenda. At the same time, a counter-discourse persists, according to which most people are bisexual and capable of strong erotic and emotional bonds with members of their own sex, even if they typically favor heterosexual liaisons; many of the theoreticians behind this position frame their arguments as a critique of liberalism. The outlines of this debate go back to the discussions between liberal sexologists and emancipationists, who believe in a specific homosexual identity, and the masculinist critics of liberalism, who believe in a broader, more diffuse, eros. Those who believe in a specific homosexual identity tend to think not only in terms of gender inversion, but also in terms of analogies to race, also a trope that begins in the nineteenth century. The politics of the discussion have remained largely unchanged, hovering between demands for decriminalization and hopes for gay marriage, although of course the goals of the movement have come closer to realization than ever before.

It is particularly striking that so many of these debates continue at the highest levels of science, politics and culture in the United States, a country that was certainly on the periphery of the imagination of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-language writers whom we will be reading. Now, of course, the United States has taken on a central role, not only in the cultural construction of gender, but also in specifically in terms of gay and lesbian self-awareness and assertion, as well as queer theory. Journalistic, scientific, legal, political and administrative discourses have tended to coalesce around biologistic theories of fixed sexual identity and clear sexual categories; academic theorists who work in the realm of queer theory have been more skeptical of such identity politics, as have literary sources, such as Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall (2010) and Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding (2011). From newspaper accounts of current scientific research on sexual orientation to legally binding documents released by various branches of the government of the United States of America, from contemporary queer theory to critically acclaimed novels, we shall see that the debates begun by nineteenth-century German thinkers on sexual identity remain vibrant in the twenty-first century.