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Chapter 1

Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts

Although Kertbeny’s “homosexuality,” Westphal’s “contrary sexual feelings” or sexual inversion, and Ulrichs’s urnings all made appearances in print in 1869, it makes more sense to begin the story of the emergence of modern sexual discourses in German-speaking central Europe with two Swiss accounts of male-male desire: Heinrich Zschokke’s novella, Eros, of 1821 and Heinrich Hössli’s monumental two-volume apology for male-male love of the 1830s, called Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, ihre Beziehung zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks, Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature, and Legislation of All Times). Not even this seeming point of origin, however, is final. The writings of Zschokke and Hössli emerge at the intersection of a variety of geographically and chronologically determined ideas of language, biology, race, gender, and social and political change.

Hössli’s Eros sketches the outlines of a modern conception of same-sex desire that is fixed and the basis of identity. His thought builds on discussions taking place in German-speaking central Europe, where vocabulary such as “sexuality” (Sexualität) itself was just beginning to appear. Hössli makes the case for a desire between men that is distinct from friendship and explicitly sexual. His study uses his era’s biology to posit sexuality as natural, involuntary, immutable, transhistorical, universal, and the basis of individuality. It toys with the idea that same-sex desire is related to gender inversion, and indirectly compares men who sexually love other men to Jews. It concludes that, like women and Jews, such men are in need of social justice through political action.

Hössli deserves credit as the first thinker on the subject of same-sex desire in the German-speaking realm to put together so many of these ideas into the package that many sexologists and activists in the homosexual emancipation movement would transmit throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. However, it is also important to realize how deeply rooted his thinking was in the culture of early nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois central Europe, which glorified a Romantic vision of organic nature and adopted such newly emergent concepts as “sexuality,” Bildung, and “the emancipation of the flesh.”

Hössli & Co.

As Ferdinand Karsch (1853–1936) explains in his essay in the 1903 edition of Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediary Types), Hössli was a fashionable hat-maker and designer in Glarus, a picturesque town high in the Alps in central Switzerland.¹ Married to Elisabeth Grebel from Zürich, he was not the patriarch of a bourgeois nuclear family, as he and his wife did not live together. Their two sons both emigrated to America. Hössli died in 1864, unaware of the work that Ulrichs was beginning to publish on urnings. Ulrichs himself first heard of Hössli in 1865 and never had a chance to meet him.² Although Ulrichs disagreed with some of Hössli’s approaches, he considered him a pioneer in the field and bought all eight remaining copies of Eros he could locate to add to the “common library” of materials pertaining to same-sex desire he was trying to develop.³ Through Ulrichs, Hössli was known to such late nineteenth-century sexologists as Havelock Ellis.⁴

Hössli claimed that his interest in the male love of men developed because of the shockingly horrific execution of Franz Desgouttes (1785–1817), who was put to death for the murder of Daniel Hemmeler (1794–1817), the twenty-two-year-old young man he loved and with whom he had sex. Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, Desgouttes had studied law in Heidelberg in 1806 and returned home, where he lived with his parents and led a troubled life. Desgouttes’s relationship with Hemmeler developed tumultuously with many drunken fights, as the young man attempted to assert his autonomy, including his right to pursue relationships with women. Desgouttes tried to keep his beloved with gifts ranging from chocolate, wine, and hazelnuts to the four-volume history of Switzerland by Johannes von Müller (1752–1809), who had had his own highly publicized scandal involving a male beloved. Desgouttes was not able to keep Hemmeler’s affection, however, and killed the young man on July 29, 1817. In retribution, Desgouttes was broken on the wheel on September 30 the same year. Breaking on the wheel was a gruesome and popular form of execution resembling crucifixion. After the prisoner was tied to the spokes and hub of a large wheel, the executioner shattered the limbs of the prisoner, who then slowly and agonizingly died in view of the public.⁵ This grotesquely medieval form of capital punishment surely added to the liberal Hössli’s horror at what he perceived to be the criminalization of Desgouttes’s love.

A desire to understand Desgouttes’s actions more clearly and represent them more sympathetically inspired Hössli to commission a novella on the subject by the Swiss author Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), one of the many literary figures of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German-speaking culture overshadowed by the sheer number of famous writers from the Age of Goethe. Zschokke was involved with a variety of progressive journals and newspapers, founding Der Schweizerbote (The Swiss Messenger), a periodical that ran from 1804 until 1879, long after its founder’s death. Thinking that a man of such spotless liberal credentials would empathize with the plight caused by the persecution of Greek love, Hössli asked Zschokke to complete a short story based on the Desgouttes case.

Zschokke came through with Eros, published in 1821 in a collection of short stories titled Erheiterungen (Amusements). In the narrative—one of the earliest stories in German attempting to elucidate male-male desire—a judge named Holmar (modeled on Hössli) tries to convince a small group of bourgeois couples that the recent execution by breaking on the wheel of a certain Lukasson (based on Desgouttes) for murdering his beloved Walter (based on Hemmeler) was unjust because society did not understand love between men. Holmar recounts the glory days of ancient Greece, when men like Lukasson were honored philosophers, poets, and politicians, not criminals subject to cruel archaic punishments. His interlocutors ponder Holmar’s arguments as they attempt to understand the passionate male-male relationship that started in love and ended in death.

Hössli detested Zschokke’s story, which disembowels his arguments about the acceptance of male-male sexual love in classical culture, insisting that the love between men in ancient Greece was not sensual. Zschokke’s characters reject other key elements of the defense of even this “pure” male-male love, favoring sociomedical explanations that suggest that such love is the product of nervous disorders, developmental problems, or the segregation of women from men in ancient Greece. The narrator, Beda, speaking for the group, cannot exculpate Lukasson for his murder and doesn’t accept Holmar’s argument that Lukasson has been the victim of oppression: “Lukasson was not made unhappy because of a virtuous friendship, but because of a raging passion that destroys all reason and virtue that he did not master at the right time and that turned him into a rake [Wüstling] and ultimately a murderer.”⁶ The older vocabulary of Wüstling could be translated as “libertine” as well as “rake,” and has nothing to do with an innate natural sexual orientation. The group concludes that male-male sexual love ought to remain prohibited by law. To add insult to injury, Zschokke’s Holmar is an odd and eccentric fellow, the only man in the lot without a wife or fiancée who is present. In fact, the narrator implies that Holmar might be one of the men who love other men, which the judge denies.⁷

Because Zschokke had not adequately addressed his concerns, Hössli wrote his own treatise on the subject. The first volume was published in 1836 in Glarus; that community’s authorities refused to allow the printing of the second volume, published in 1838 in St. Gallen. In the 1890s, Hössli’s material was reorganized and reprinted, with one volume focusing on witchcraft and the second on male love. Even at this late date, the second volume was given a fictitious place of publication: “Münster in der Schweiz.”⁸

For Hössli, Greek love had extraordinary significance: “For the entire life organization of the individual, the family, the state—indeed for humanity in every sense of the word—it is in a thousand respects, particularly for the arts and the sciences, as interesting as it is infinitely important and consequential not just to know that men sexually love their own sex, but rather also to know that these men naturally absolutely do not—cannot—should not sexually love the other, the feminine sex.”⁹ From this passage, one gets a sense of his style, with its repetitiveness, extended clauses, and occasional ascensions to imposing rhetorical heights. More important, Hössli’s passage points to some of the issues that he addresses in his book: individual and society, arts and sciences, sexuality and love.

The tortured prose of his writings reveals the obstacles that face Hössli as he attempts to fashion a new discourse about the sexual attraction between men. It is important, however, to realize that he fashions that discourse out of the fabric of his culture. Hössli’s initial entrepreneurial plan to hire Zschokke to write a short story about the love between Desgouttes and Hemmeler demonstrates both his faith in literary culture as a means to address the social problems of his day and his connections to the important figures in that culture. In fact, Hössli’s Eros is grounded in a vast array of cultural sources, ranging from classical Persia, Greece, and Rome to European authors from the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras, as well as his immediate contemporaries. Whatever his original contributions, the design of Hössli’s thought on sexuality relies on the warp and woof of the culture available to him.

At the same time, Hössli’s discussion of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), reveals his need to move beyond his sources and to innovate. Referring to the French writer’s comments on male-male love in De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748, Hössli writes: “Montesquieu could not say in his book on the spirit of the law, ‘in the Orient male love is neither a sin nor a crime, nor is it considered unnatural’—he can’t say that, he can only say what he really says: ‘in the Orient, pederasty [Knabenschänderei] and sodomy are very popular.’”¹⁰ Alongside Hössli’s righteous anger and frustration at the inability of his predecessors to speak more justly about same-sex desire, one can see that he understands that the limits of their discourse have constrained them, for which reason he feels the need to restructure his language in order to make his points.

Definitions: Mother Love, Friendship, and Sexual Love

In 1779, scarcely a half century before Hössli’s Eros appeared, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) had composed Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), in which lovers can plausibly discover that they are really siblings and be happy about that fact. The characters of Lessing’s play, Nathan and Recha, transform the love they feel for each other as potential sexual partners into the love of brothers and sisters as though the love of a married couple and that between family members were interchangeable. In 1811, Zschokke’s friend Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) wrote the novella, Die Marquise von O (The Marquise of O), in which a father and a daughter could, according to the text, console each other with kisses “just like lovers!”¹¹ If the distinctions were vague between erotic love, sibling love, and filial love, the boundary separating same-sex friendship from sexual love was all the more fraught. Indeed, ambiguity was a crucial component of the highly inflamed rhetoric of friendship common among German intellectuals and artists of the late eighteenth century. This is not to say that people in German-speaking central Europe were unable to make distinctions between various types of love and affection prior to the nineteenth century. But evidence suggests that their categories were substantially different from modern ones. For Hössli to write his text, some degree of cultural consensus on the new understandings of the specific nature of the love between men and women and sexual love between members of the same sex needed to be codified in language.

As a writer, Zschokke recognizes these issues and identifies the problem of same-sex desire as at least in part a matter of language. Attempting to explain Greek love, Holmar laments that it can be called neither friendship nor love because neither of those terms apply with precision to the phenomenon he is trying to explain.¹² Early in the narrative, Claudia, the wife of the king’s counselor, argues that man’s language has overlooked many nuances of love that a woman would have identified: “Man invented language, not woman, as you know from Adam’s story. Man, however, knows only one love, that of his youth; afterwards he only knows affairs. If woman had invented language, she would have thought of a special word for the love of a mother for her child.”¹³

The kissing father-daughter couple in Kleist’s Marquise von O shows that Claudia’s concern for the inadequacies of language to describe all the phenomena that fall under the category of love is not unreasonable. Claudia, however, doesn’t carry her critique of the language of desire far enough. If men project their definition of love toward too many phenomena, she projects the notion of maternal love toward inappropriate phenomena as well, when she suggests that mother love might be a model to help others understand the love that existed between Lukasson and Walter. Initially, the characters seem to buy the argument, perhaps because they also understand the male-male love of the Greeks as taking place between an older man and a male youth. Later in the novella, some characters suggest that men experience passionate same-sex desire because they don’t experience mother love; by the same token, it is argued that women have mother love and thus no passionate same-sex desire.¹⁴ This theory presumably falls apart when a character alludes to La Religieuse (The Nun), Denis Diderot’s 1796 story about sexual activity between women in a convent, pointing out that same-sex desire also exists between women.¹⁵ Eventually Claudia’s effort to define the love between men as similar to the love between a mother and her child fails to convince in Zschokke’s narrative. Her effort to understand male-male love with this analogy points to the linguistic struggles of the characters to define a love that had no name.

Far more common than Claudia’s initial gambit was the effort to understand male-male love as friendship. Eighteenth-century friendship bore many markers that might today seem sexual—expressions of undying love, frequent kisses, and even the wish to marry can be found in the documents of eighteenth-century German friendship. Even in the eighteenth century, some readers remarked that these friendships bordered on the inappropriate or could be mistaken for “Greek love.” The reverse interpretation was also possible: perhaps things that looked like “Greek love” were in fact simply passionate friendship. Because the cult of friendship was particularly vibrant in eighteenth-century German culture (while, conversely, the libertine was an especially notable phenomenon in France), it is not surprising that many German thinkers would try to understand same-sex desire in terms of friendship. Hössli, however, makes clear that friendship is distinct from the phenomenon he is trying to describe. In fact, it is possible that the intensity of the cult of friendship in German-speaking central Europe provoked such an extensive discussion of the boundaries of friendship that Romantic friendships became less feasible in the nineteenth century in Germany than elsewhere. In German culture, eighteenth-century friendship was tinged with an erotic dimension that was largely eliminated in the nineteenth century.

In order to promote the distinction between friendship and sexual love, Hössli cites extensively from Friedrich Wilhelm Basilieus Ramdohr (1757–1822), an aesthetician who was an early interpreter of the works of the artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In 1798, Ramdohr published an exhaustive three-part treatise on love, titled Venus Urania: Über die Natur der Liebe, über ihre Veredlung und Verschönerung (Venus Urania: On the Nature of Love, Its Edification and Beautification), which included significant passages on love between members of the same sex. While working on his book, Ramdohr visited Schiller, who wrote to Goethe that Ramdohr was hoping to use the “sexual drive” (Geschlechtstrieb) to explain beauty and Greek ideals.¹⁶ Hössli had many criticisms of Ramdohr, who referred to the intense sexual experience that takes place between two men who loved each other as “the blackest maculation” in their lives.¹⁷ He objected to Ramdohr’s inconsistent positions, sometimes explaining Greek love as exclusively Greek, sometimes as innate, sometimes as caused by climate, as well as his ultimate rejection of the physicality of same-sex love.¹⁸ Nonetheless, he did consider Ramdohr’s study “indeed far and away the best book about love.”¹⁹ Perhaps the most significant contribution of Ramdohr’s book to the history of sexuality was his careful theorizing about the distinction between friendship and love. He felt that the categories were hopelessly confused: “At least until now, people have not appropriately distinguished between friendship and sexual intimacy.”²⁰ As an aesthetician, Ramdohr believed that he was in a particularly good position to help set up a “semiotics [Semiotik], a doctrine of signs, of the distinction between friendship and sexual intimacy [Geschlechtszärtlichkeit].”²¹

As a basis for his analysis, Ramdohr divides desire into two categories: “sympathy with the similar” and “sexual sympathy.” Sympathy with the similar strengthens one’s own sex, because it brings one together with members of one’s own sex, while sexual sympathy strengthens humanity as a whole, because it brings together members of different sexes.²² Ramdohr clarifies that “friendship is based on sympathy with the similar, while sexual intimacy is based on sexual sympathy.”²³ Ramdohr complicates this simple and unsurprising thesis immensely when he claims that some people are different internally than they appear to be externally. That means that there could be pairs consisting of people who looked as though they belonged to the same sex, but whose souls were from different sexes. This leads Ramdohr to the conclusion—rather astonishing in 1798—that “men may happily live together with men in domesticity, women with women, and finally men with women.”²⁴ The only requirement would be that one partner would be more masculine (“leading, dominating”) while the other more feminine (“giving in, but profiting”).²⁵ In the German tradition, Ramdohr’s study is the earliest and most extensive argument for gender inversion—in which a feminine man loves a masculine one or a masculine woman loves a feminine one—as the cause of same-sex desire.

Ramdohr’s thesis on gender inversion means that a couple of men or a couple of women might be “just friends,” or they might be sexually attracted to each other. According to Ramdohr, it takes a good semiotician to read the signs carefully enough to know whether the connection between these couples was based on sexual sympathy or sympathy with the similar. More commonly, people of the same sex would bond under the rules of friendship or sympathy with the similar, while people of different sexes would bond under the rules of sexual intimacy or sexual sympathy. But because of the possibility of gender inversion, the expert requires more specific signals than the simple external appearance of gender, in order to determine if a given pair is bonded by friendship or love. These signals all focus on the body: Ramdohr believes that “in friendship, there are no heart palpitations, no strained sighs, no boiling blood, no skin color changes.”²⁶ Without approaching the question from a medical perspective, Ramdohr implicitly endorses studying the body to analyze sexuality, anticipating developments of the nineteenth century. The body will reveal signs of homosexual attraction based on gender inversion—the anatomie indiscrète that Foucault finds characteristic of the nineteenth-century homosexual.²⁷

In the 1820s, Zschokke no longer needs Ramdohr’s semiotics to distinguish between love and friendship. The educated bourgeois public in his novella knows that “a passion that goes beyond friendship” can develop between members of the same sex. If the comparison between mother love and Greek love ultimately fails, so also do attempts to see Lukasson’s love for Walter as an example of friendship. Always looking on the bright and banal side, Claudia hopes to set aside any anxious questions about same-sex love with the cheerful assertion that “women are the tenderest of friends to women, as men are to men.”²⁸ No one can understand, however, how such innocent friendship would result in Lukasson’s murder of his beloved, so it quickly becomes clear that friendship, however intense, has little explanatory power in this case. Holmar explicitly denies the value of using the word “friendship” to describe the relationships that he believes existed in ancient Greece.

Hössli himself is at his most confident when refuting the argument that Greek love could be understood as some kind of exalted friendship. Toward the end of his two-volume treatise, he lists the reasons why Greek love is not the same thing as friendship. Greek love has a “bodily, sexual [geschlechtlich], purely sensual” side, associated with “charm, beauty, spontaneity, bodily possession and pleasure, passion and bliss, the agony and joy of love.”²⁹ Greek love is directed at people of a specific age and sex—that is, with a particular kind of body—whereas friendship, presumably, applies more universally.³⁰ Showing his knowledge of the classical tradition, Hössli notes that in ancient Greece, male-male love was always directional, flowing from the lover to the beloved, while friendship was reciprocal. He adds that “love is not friendship, precisely for the reason that it can become friendship.”³¹ He concludes his section on friendship by distinguishing it quite clearly from sexual love: “Love and friendship and sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe], these are three things, of which only the last has its roots in the corporeal, in the absolute, not in the coincidental, the arbitrary, the conditional. The plan of creation could not and would not leave these roots, out of whose development it planned the highest humanity, to accident, and therefore they were placed into the flesh.”³² Hössli’s linkage of the corporeal with the absolute may seem bit eccentric to a reader used to transcendental philosophy, but as a Romantic thinker, he has a profound belief in the unity of mind and body.

Hössli’s distinction between sexual love and friendship becomes apparent in his response to a play called Die Freunde (The Friends) by Sigismund Wiese (1800–1864), published in 1836. An author of historical dramas, Wiese is the author of an 1844 piece, Jesus, which made it to the Vatican’s index of forbidden works. Die Freunde deals with two friends, the Prussian Philipp and the French Eugen, who—in a classic trope of friendship discussed by the German Romantic author Jean Paul and the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida³³—are on opposite sides of the battlefield. One smuggles the other out of prison; the other loses an important battle out of love for his friend. Some consider their behavior treason, but neither abandons his duty. Eugen reads his own death sentence (his friends are too overcome to do so) and declares, “I am faithful to my fatherland unto my death.”³⁴

The play’s very title demonstrates that it is interested in friendship itself. References abound to David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, and Orestes and Pylades. This friendship between Philipp and Eugen is cemented with a bond “as strong as death, a bond such as the ancients celebrated,” highlighting the connection to earlier eras.³⁵ While Philipp is looking for his friend among the French prisoners, his servant Leopold alludes to the erotic possibilities inherent in such ancient friendships:

If ever a man

Searched for his girlfriend with hotter ardor

Than you examine the rows of Frenchmen,

Then I’m no woman’s son! Tell me,

Are you in love, is she wearing men’s clothes?

In response, Philipp simply mumbles to himself, “I can’t find him.” Leopold cries out in shrill horror, “Him? Not her? My dear Philipp, what do you mean?”³⁶

There are other moments when the relationship between these men is described in terms that blur the boundary between friendly and sexual love. Eugen claims that he is saving a friend “who means to me / what siblings, spouses, parents and brides mean to you.”³⁷ With the distinction between his own love and that of his interlocutors, Eugen seems poised on the verge of making the claim that there is a clearly defined group of men who love other men rather than women. At one point one character prophesies: “Some day, I scarcely know how to say how, / Our love will also be allowed to speak.”³⁸ Here there seems to be an early understanding of the need for self-expression that accompanies the emergence of modern sexual categories.

Hössli thought that Wiese’s play was one of the few excellent portrayals of male-male love in modern literature. The very fact that he was reading it while writing his own Eros underscores how closely he followed the literary scene at the time. For direction in that literary arena, Hössli relied on the Literatur-Blatt (Literary Journal), edited by Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873). On September 19, 1836, the Literatur-Blatt published a review that declared that “Die Freunde is a drama that in Holland and England could not be performed, without the author’s and the actors’ risking their healthy limbs. The two friends speak exactly like two lovers and awake even in the most tolerant reader a feeling of disgust.”³⁹ Hössli takes from this negative review the belief that the play is indeed about a sexual and erotic friendship: “if my idea about the play is inaccurate why does Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt claim ‘in many places the author and the actors of this play would be stoned’?”⁴⁰ Anticipating the argument that the play is about Ramdohr’s nonsexual friendship rather than sexual love, he begins his analysis of the play by saying, “I can already predict that people will incorrectly claim that another spirit governs Wiese’s drama than the Greek-erotic one.”⁴¹ Despite its implicit resort to threats of violence against those involved with the play, the Literatur-Blatt is useful to Hössli because it confirms the notion that the play is dealing with sexual friendship. Whereas an earlier era might have left the sexual and erotic relations between Eugen and Phillip ambiguous, in part because of a lack of language to delineate such affairs, Hössli and his age feel quite confident that they can distinguish between nonsexual friendship and sexual love.

Certainly, romantic friendship would remain an ambiguous presence in Western literature, even after the widespread adoption of a vocabulary of sexuality. But Germany, which had undergone a particularly intense flowering of passionate male friendship in the eighteenth century, was less fertile ground for ambiguously erotic same-sex friendship in the nineteenth century. A play such as Wiese’s could no longer titillate readers with strong, but indecipherable, emotions. Ramdohr’s semiotic project was on its way to completion, which meant that Wiese’s public was increasingly able to articulate a clear difference between asexual friendship and sexual love. By the early nineteenth century in German-speaking central Europe, language provides a space for sexual love between members of the same sex.

Biology: Sexuality and Bildung

A concept of a natural immutable sexuality that operates on the border between mind and body allows Ramdohr, Zschokke, and Hössli to distinguish so strictly between friendship and sexual love. Whereas most eighteenth-century authors had attributed the male-male love of the Greeks and others to environmental factors that could presumably affect anyone (nude exercising in the gymnasia, for instance, or the segregation of women from men), these early nineteenth-century theorists of sexual identity saw sexual attraction as the product of innate drives. As a phenomenon that is at least in part corporeal, sexuality belongs to the realm of nature and the natural, a fitting subject for study by scientists and physicians. At the same time, this corporeal, scientifically knowable sexuality becomes for Hössli the core of a personal identity, the focus and teleology of an individual’s Bildung.

David Halperin has argued that the concepts of “sexuality” and “the drive” were necessary predecessors to “the invention of homosexuality.”⁴² In Germany, there was already considerable discussion of the unity of mind and body in the eighteenth century; by the end of the century, there are even references to the sexual drive (Geschlechtstrieb), as we have seen in Ramdohr’s writings. For Ramdohr the existence of the drive itself suggests that sexuality is natural and innocent: “drives that are based on the original plan and development [Bildung] of a being do not merit reproach and their striving for unification cannot be attributed to the satisfaction of an unclean desire.”⁴³ While Ramdohr does not consistently defend the satisfaction of drives between members of the same sex, his statement anticipates many of the themes, including the importance of “nature” and Bildung, that Hössli will argue more coherently.

The vocabulary of sexuality itself appeared a little bit later than the vocabulary of “drives.” A critical piece by William Cowper (1731–1800) on “Lives of the Plants” by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) provides an early citation in English: “All of his flowers undergo a change, not a simple one, but each into as many persons, male and female, as there are symptoms of either sex in their formation: for it is on their sexuality that he has built his poem.”⁴⁴ Cowper uses “sexuality” to refer to the sexing or the “sexedness” of the plants—he is interested in the masculinity and femininity of the characters that emerge from Darwin’s plants. It is no surprise that the term comes up in a discussion of plants, for many intellectuals in Europe probably first encountered it through Carl Linnaeus’s studies of botany, which described the “sexuality” of plants with graphic detail that at times shocked its readers. By 1798, though, for instance, one French translation of Linnaeus’s works was given the title Systême sexuel des végétaux (Sexual System of Plants). It is around this time that German word starts to make its first appearance. The absence of a vocabulary of sexuality prior to these developments is one of the factors leading Isabel Hull to argue that one cannot responsibly talk about “sexuality” in the German context prior to the nineteenth century.⁴⁵

By the time Hössli is writing, however, the vocabulary of “sexuality” is in circulation. In Eros, Hössli quotes a medical essay by the gynecologist Joseph Hermann Schmidt (1804–1852), demonstrating once again his highly developed connections to the contemporary scientific world: “The concept of sexuality [Sexualität] is no longer derived exclusively from the sexual organs, but rather from the entire organism.” Schmidt continues with an observation about gender: “The woman is primarily vegetation, the man primarily animality,” adding that odd hybrids can develop between these two polarities.⁴⁶ As in the case of the Cowper citation, the term is being used primarily to describe the sexedness of an organism, whether it has been sexed as male or female. Interestingly, the connection to plants remains strong.

As Halperin suggests, a fundamental prerequisite for any modern understanding of sexuality is the belief in the unity of mind and body. Steeped in the Romantic tradition of the organic oneness of the physical and mental worlds, Hössli takes for granted such a belief in mind-body unity. He cites Menzel, the editor of the Literatur-Blatt, as arguing that “in the human being the mental and the physical are so internally and vitally bound up with each other that they necessarily always stand in the most intimate interaction with each other.”⁴⁷ The unity of mind and body could have multiple consequences. For the philosophical physicians and their Romantic successors, the unity of mind and body meant that artistic and poetic insights into the body had as much validity and legitimacy as scientific ones.⁴⁸ Later in the nineteenth century, somaticists would approach the union of mind and body from the perspective of the body, suggesting that physical cures could solve mental and psychological problems. In either case, however, bringing together mind and body was a necessary prerequisite for the assumption of sexuality.

It is telling that physicians were among the intellectual leaders in the effort to reconceptualize the unity of mind and body; nor is it surprising that Hössli’s use of the term “sexuality” comes in a quotation from a distinguished expert in the medical field of gynecology. The modern field of medicine, which rose to unprecedented prominence in the nineteenth century, is practically coterminous with the category of sexuality. For many physicians, the unity of mind and body meant that forms of sexuality could be viewed as a matter of health or illness. This thinking already pervades much of Zschokke’s text, in which one of Zschokke’s characters attempts to understand Lukasson’s love of Walter as the result of a faulty mental process, perhaps even a matter of nerves. The explanation moves in the direction of mental illness and implies psychiatric or medical solutions. Claudia floats the idea that Lukasson’s “corrupt way of thinking” perhaps caused the turn of events. Beda, the narrator, uses the vocabulary of “sick” to describe these corrupted thought processes, suggesting that a “misattuned structure of nerves” made it impossible for Lukasson to act properly. Gerold, Claudia’s husband and the king’s counselor, concludes that “sickness” was present in Lukasson’s actions and they therefore cannot be compared with criminality. This leads then to a discussion of whether and how the civil code needs to be changed to allow for the accommodation of those who act on impulses that are beyond their control. It hints at a tentative argument for the decriminalization (or at least the reduction of the severity of the criminalization) and a medicalization of sexual love between men.⁴⁹

A corollary to the notion that sexuality resides in the body as well as the mind is the belief that it is “natural.” Hössli explicitly announces that “male love is true nature, a law of nature.”⁵⁰ Here it is of course worth recalling that male-male love was frequently condemned as “unnatural,” “the crime against nature.” Particularly in the eighteenth century, legal codes referred with increasing consistency to sodomy as “unnatural” or “against nature.”⁵¹ Johannes Valentin Müller’s 1796 Entwurf der gerichtlichen Arzneywissenschaft (Plan for a Forensic Medicine) refers to sodomy as “unnatural” as well.⁵² Common to both these legal attacks on sodomy and Ramdohr and Hössli’s defenses of Greek love is a Romantic Rousseauian belief in the goodness of nature. In his one extensive case study, Ramdohr describes the love of the two young men as natural: “The youth loved first—that was nature. He admired, he was suffered, felt, led, and eventually loved back—that also was nature.”⁵³ Hössli reveals his implicit debt to Rousseau when he argues that the true “sinner against nature” is he who lacks sympathy, he “who has no tears for the misery of his brothers and the injustice and misdeed of his fathers and his fatherland.”⁵⁴ This view of a sympathetic nature should ground all human institutions, he argues. Nature must undergird all pedagogy, laws, and religion: “it must say yes wherever we establish or remove laws or education, wherever we want to achieve a salutary goal for humanity, it must say yes to the marriages and religions everywhere where there is supposed to be a blessing or a salvation of our race.”⁵⁵ Hössli specifically mentions marriage as an institution that needs rethinking in light of his conception of the naturalness of male-male love. At the end of volume 2, he remains certain that “this love had to be alive, present, grounded and completely a given in nature itself before laws, knowledge and the arts could lead, appreciate, understand, represent, teach and elevate it, could introduce into house and temple as life in the life of human nature.”⁵⁶ In arguing that same-sex desire is “natural,” he is also claiming that it should be allowed to flourish.

Because Greek love is “natural” in the sense that it appears in “nature,” Hössli also considers his work “natural research” (Naturforschung).⁵⁷ Hössli hopes for a scientific solution to the question of sexuality. The use of scientifically quantifiable, often medical sources for evidence is a hallmark of liberal approaches to sexuality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Hössli’s discussion of nature is complicated, however, by his use of the term in the sense of “human nature” or the “nature” or a particular person.⁵⁸ In a locution that is particularly awkward to translate, he at times refers to people “being,” rather than “having,” a nature: those who love the other sex “cannot be the nature of those who do not love the other sex.”⁵⁹ Discussing the linguistic structures of modern English, Judith Butler writes suggestively about the tension between the notion of “being” a gender and “having” a sexuality.⁶⁰ Hössli contests this linguistic structure, asserting that people are their sexuality. He implies with this phrasing that the sexual nature of a person is identical with that person—that there is not even the distinction that exists between a person and the nature that he or she has. (Kertbeny also makes use of this rhetorical convention, asserting that “the homosexual is a fixed nature.”⁶¹) When Hössli does use language that suggests that someone has, rather than is, a sexuality, he rather consistently attributes that language to his intellectual opponents. It is critics of male love who argue that the men-loving men have “laid aside” their original nature.⁶² It is men who are sexually attracted to women who say things like, “I was born with my sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe].”⁶³ Hössli asserts that such people regard their sexuality as a separate thing with which they are born, rather than as an essence that constitutes them. He continues the elision of the universal nature and the personal nature when he has such critics saying to men-loving men that male-male love “is not nature and is not your nature.”⁶⁴ The focus of his word play is that nature (the universal order of the world) has room for the individual natures (essences) of men who are man-loving as well as those who are woman-loving.

As he begins to sum up his arguments near the end of his second volume, Hössli confidently asserts that the sexual aspect of human nature is not a product of arbitrary will, but rather a matter of the “individuality, the basic being, the most primal depths of the human psyche, his inmost unchangeable nature and being.”⁶⁵ He is certainly moving here in the direction of what Foucault would call the “truth” of sex in modern society. For Hössli, Plato provides a prime example of someone whose sexuality completely imbues his productive nature: without Plato’s love of men, “the world would have no Plato, this fullness of mind, this splendor of the soul, this harmony of the body would be sunk in night and vice and would have given birth to the opposite of everything that it did bear.”⁶⁶ Whereas many would like to disassociate the philosopher from his lived experience in order to concentrate on his transcendental truths, Hössli insists that Plato’s Greek love was no coincidence, but rather integral to his personality. Sexuality is at the nexus of the unified mind and body.

By the end of his first volume, he asserts that he has demonstrated that “there is a man-loving, purely humane, specific, male human nature” (eine männerliebende, rein menschliche, bestimmte, Männermenschennatur).⁶⁷ His reference to a “specific” male human nature implies that this is not just part of the more general sexual nature of all men, but rather that a specific group of men have (or “are”) this nature. It is not the case, as in the Biblical story of Sodom, that any and every man in a community might be struck with lustful desires for another man. Only men with a specific immutable type of human nature are sexually attracted to other men, as Hössli flatly asserts: “The large and general portion [of the human population] that loves the other sex cannot be the sort [literally, ‘the nature’] that does not love the other sex, and the sort [again, literally, ‘the nature’] that loves its own sex cannot be lovers of the other sex.”⁶⁸ The implication of the unchangeability of sexual nature is that there are discrete categories: men who sexually desire men are distinct from those who love women.

Hössli mocks the notion that any man could change his sexual desire for other men when he sarcastically paraphrases the position of women-loving men, who foolishly assume that “the man-lover has set aside his most original first nature and now glows in an arbitrarily adopted love, in a nature other than his own visage; in this other love his emotional being now suffers for completion, his heart burns, his eyes swim in tears, his bosom heaves, his soul gleams.” His antagonists erroneously argue that this male-male love “isn’t his nature, he’s set that [his real nature] aside, he’s arbitrarily exchanged it, his actual nature is silent, even when this other non-nature should lead him to destruction and even to death.”⁶⁹ Hössli adds that the terrible discrimination that men who love other men face would prevent any man from exchanging a love for women with a love for men:

Is it thinkable that in this case a person, a man, would exchange an inborn love—in which he enjoys his life, his being, his general human destiny in honor, under the protection and recognition of the law, in the unperturbed enjoyment of external and internal human rights [Menschenrechte], with the respect of his people and of the entire human society, with the blessing of the dominant religion, with the public recognition of his life questioned by no one, so that he can act, effect, live as a man, as a person, as a spouse and as a citizen and can enjoy his being—for a notorious, forbidden, dishonorable outcast nature that is everywhere condemned and universally persecuted?⁷⁰

The sentence is hard to get through, but Hössli’s point is that the civil protections given to male-female love are so powerful that it is virtually impossible to imagine male-male sexual love emerging as a frivolous lark.

It is instructive to contemplate the vision of justice that Hössli has in mind. While not a trained lawyer, Hössli relies on a liberal vocabulary of human rights in the context of honor, legal protection, respect, religious acceptance, and public recognition. He expects “protection and recognition” from the law. His demand that a male-loving man should enjoy “honor” and “recognition of his life” suggests that he hopes that same-sex love will be able to express itself openly and publicly. Notably, he argues that religion too should support the rights claims of the men about whom he is writing. Intriguingly, he insists that such men should be able to function “as a spouse and as a citizen,” suggesting that marriage itself belongs to the rights of citizens and that both marriage and citizenship need reassessment.

In a sense, Hössli is building on the glorification of love that had already taken place in bourgeois literature of the eighteenth century. He repeats that love in general—whether a man’s or a woman’s, whether for a man or for a woman—“is not up to a person’s arbitrary will, but rather a specific given primary component of the purest, deepest, individuality.”⁷¹ This Romantic argument, relying on the centrality of sexual love for human identity, spurs Hössli to uncharacteristic eloquence as he grapples with the definition of “sexual love (we are not speaking here of mere sexual drive)” as it pertains to male-male desire: “it involuntarily desires, searches out, and needs a masculine being, because of his sex, and not a feminine being, again precisely because of her sex, because whatever in our sexual life addresses, grabs, excites, thrills, attracts, possesses, completes, perfects us—that tells us which love is in us.”⁷² In this case, Hössli works with the conventions of his era, which had already declared the primacy of love, and sharpens them to bring out the importance of sexuality and the body. When he asks “which love is in us,” he adds the notion of specific sexual categories to the mix.

For Hössli, one of the “natural” aspects of this desire has to do with its innateness: “The whole man is in the seed, in the germ, in the embryo.”⁷³ He asserts “we cannot bring anything into it [the seed, germ, embryo], but can only let that which is within him develop and at least not eliminate it, even if much that is in him is not allowed to flourish and is strangled or crippled.”⁷⁴ Sexual nature is inborn—society’s only choice is whether to let it develop or not. The notion that an organism’s being springs from its embryo, germ, or seed was a crucial part of a variety of efforts by German Romantic thinkers to explain development and the concept of Bildung, which was to become extremely important for German culture. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) used the vocabulary of embryos to explain his Bildungstrieb, or drive to development, in his 1781 essay Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäft (On the Drive to Development and the Operation of Reproduction). As Blumenbach puts it, “there exists in all living creatures, from men to maggots, and from cedar trees to mold, a particular, inborn, lifelong active drive.”⁷⁵ Continuing the eighteenth-century tradition of employing plants for discussions of sexuality, Bildung appears in Goethe’s discussion of the growth of plants in his Metamorphosen der Pflanzen (Metamorphoses of the Plants) of 1790 as the preordained pattern of development of an organism.

Ramdohr relies explicitly on Blumenbach’s notion of Bildung to describe his understanding of sexuality. “The unnamable drive is the grounds for the unnamable pleasure,” he declares, defining that pleasure as “that circumstance of effusive voluptuous effectiveness of the power of development [Bildungskraft] of our vegetable organism.”⁷⁶ “Unnamable” though the pleasure may be, Blumenbach is fairly bold to discuss it so openly in his analysis of the sexual drive. His theory that sexual pleasure belongs to the human being’s vegetable nature is yet another legacy of Linnaeus’s discussion of sexuality in the realm of plants. Blumenbach restates the connections between Bildung and sexuality when he announces that “especially during the unnamable drive, we feel the effects of that power of development [Bildungskraft], which we and all organic beings, without difference, have in common with the plants.”⁷⁷ Relying on Blumenbach, Ramdohr brings together Bildung, plants, and sexuality.

Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) are the authors who mediate Blumenbach’s Bildung for Hössli’s culture. For them, Bildung represents not only the physical development of an organism, but also the psychological, creative, and artistic development of a person. In the early nineteenth century, Karl von Morgenstern (1770–1852) dubbed Goethe’s 1797 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) a Bildungsroman or “novel of development,” because it showed the processes whereby its young protagonist sets aside misleading social and cultural influences to discover who he really is and develops himself to the best of his abilities in order to rejoin society as a productive member. Bildung, as intellectual, artistic and cultural self-development, becomes the greatest good for the bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Germanic culture.

Hössli, true to his liberal bourgeois roots, embraces the concept of Bildung. As Hans Krah has noted, the classical notion of Bildung emerges repeatedly in Hössli: that an individual is born with a specific identity and with certain sexual desires, and that it is the mission of the individual to discover his identity, to become more and more true to himself, and then to integrate himself into society.⁷⁸ Hössli states with simple poetic elegance: “perfection for a single individual consists of being and becoming oneself in the continuum of one’s existence” (79).

Jews and Witches: Emancipation and Social Improvement

At several points, the innate and natural sexuality that Hössli finds in men who are sexually attracted to other men is tentatively linked to gender inversion and implicitly compared to Jewishness. Although these interpretations and analogies are by no means the main points of Hössli’s arguments, they deserve attention because they become so important in subsequent treatments of homosexuality, uranism, and inversion in the nineteenth century. Both comparisons to women and to Jews have connections to science-based, progressive, emancipatory thought of the early nineteenth century. The argument for gender inversion implies a heightened respect for feminine desire, while the comparison with Jews goes hand in hand with liberal efforts to rejuvenate and improve the lot of minorities within Germany.

The locus of the allusions to the similarity between the category of men who are sexually attracted to men and the categories of women and Jews is a passage that Hössli quotes twice—first, prominently on the frontispiece of volume 1, and second in the text itself. The source is a review published on June 4, 1834, by Menzel in his Literatur-Blatt. According to Menzel, “the Rabbinical doctrine of souls has a peculiar characteristic: Namely, it explains the contradictions in the character of the sexes and their oftentimes strange sympathies and antipathies by the transmigration of souls such that female souls in male bodies reject women and male souls in female bodies reject men, like identical poles of a magnet, while on the other hand they are attracted to each other despite having the same bodily sex because of the different sexes of their souls.”⁷⁹ Menzel has even more difficulty articulating his ideas than Hössli, who had thought much longer about them. Menzel’s claim is that a woman with a male soul will be attracted to another woman, while a man with a female soul will be attracted to another man.

Hössli himself responds tepidly to Menzel’s argument that same-sex attraction can be explained as a product of gender inversion, asserting that King Frederick I of Württemberg (1754–1816) was hardly “what we tend to understand as a feminine soul,” despite being a lover of men.⁸⁰ Although Ramdohr emphasizes gender inversion in his account of same-sex desire, neither Hössli nor Zschokke dwells on the subject at great length. In fact, one of Ulrichs’s prime objections to Hössli is his neglect of effemination as an explanation for male same-sex desire.⁸¹ As Yvonne Ivory notes, “before the 1830s, the masculinity of practitioners of Sodomiterei was rarely questioned in German legal and medical discourses.”⁸² Nonetheless, Hössli’s citation from Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt, positioned prominently and repeated in Eros, is an early formulation of the notion of gender inversion, expressed in an intriguingly gender-inclusive form.

While Hössli speaks only of male-male sexual love, Menzel’s formulation allows for a discussion of female-female sexual desire. Even in a discussion restricted to male-male desire, gender inversion theories require an acknowledgement of female desire. If a man who is sexually attracted to other men is really a female soul inside a male body, then it must be time to talk about the possibility of female sexual desire for a man. As Richards’s study of Romantic science makes clear, the same men who articulated many of the principles of the new vision of an organic science also believed strongly in a freer vision of love that promoted the expression of strong feminine desire. Alongside such Romantic writers as Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling worked such brilliant, scintillating, and openly sexually active women as Caroline Böhmer Schlegel Schelling née Michaelis (1763–1809), Dorothea Veit Schlegel née Mendelssohn (1764–1839), and Rahel von Ense Varnhagen née Levin (1771–1833).

Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt was full of arguments about sexual freedom for men and women, specifically in the issues from 1835 and 1836, which Hössli cites in Eros. Most of the controversies swirled around Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878) and his scandalous 1835 depiction of a sexually liberated Jewish woman in Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic). Gutzkow’s novel reminded readers of Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 Lucinde, which had similarly celebrated female desire. Gutzkow praises Schlegel’s work as a manifesto for the “emancipation of the flesh.”

Gutzkow and other representatives of Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) promulgate the emancipation of the flesh—and specifically the unleashing of female (and not coincidentally, Jewish female) desire—just as Hössli is arguing for the rights of male-loving men, whom he occasionally represents as similar to women and comparable to Jews. Discussions about the emancipation of the flesh were underway in German culture at the time—not least in Hössli’s favored source, the Literatur-Blatt. The Romantic legacy of the emancipations of the flesh, of women, and of Jews colored Hössli’s worldview.

By at least implicitly associating his arguments with the liberal emancipatory ideas discussed in (although admittedly not always endorsed by) the Literatur-Blatt, Hössli aligned himself with forces calling for progressive change. Just as early nineteenth-century progressives thought that the status of women and Jews called out for amelioration, Hössli wanted to see a better situation for men who sexually loved other men. True, Hössli did not refer to explicit legal and political interventions in his text—he seems unaware, for instance, of Feuerbach’s enlightened, post-Napoleonic reforms in Bavaria, which had decriminalized sodomy. Instead, he established the arguably much more arduous goal of changing social attitudes. In hoping to change social attitudes, Hössli drew on two groups that he felt were in various ways analogous to men who sexually loved other men: Jews and witches.

Hössli’s Eros generally attempts to marshal sympathy for the suffering of the Jews, about which he gives focused and detailed reports. He describes the medieval scapegoating of Jews as plague-bearers and movingly outlines a series of horrendous atrocities that befell them: the burning of large numbers of Jews in Basel, Freiburg, Bern, Zürich, Constance, Strasbourg, and Mainz; the desperate self-immolation of Jews in Speier and Esslingen; the torture of Jews in Geneva. Hössli concludes, “and all this happened in Switzerland, throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, in 1349, by and for European Christianity.”⁸³ The medieval persecutions of Jews filled him with a sense of liberal outrage at religiously inspired bias in law and culture.

Many of those who were similarly moved by the plight of the Jews hoped the emancipation of the Jews would promote their social improvement. In his 1781 treatise, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews), Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820), for instance, argues, along Rousseauian lines, that Jewish culture and society are in decay because of the political and legal mistreatment of the Jews. Hössli makes the same argument regarding men who sexually love other men. Already in 1810, Karl Ludwig von Woltmann (1770–1817) writes about same-sex love in his biography of Johannes von Müller, “banned by the law, under threat of the severest penalties, forced 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: “One solves riddles of nature, insofar as they are soluble at all, with science, not with 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.