That fall, he began legal studies at the University of Göttingen. Founded in 1734 by George II, ruler of Hanover and also king of Great Britain, Göttingen was just one of the twenty-odd German institutions of higher learning established before 1800. Unlike the centralized states of England and France, which had no more than a handful of universities at this time, the semi-sovereign states of the Holy Roman Empire maintained their independence, both culturally and—to some extent—politically. The size and character of these territories varied tremendously, and counting the tiny estates of the imperial knights numbered above eighteen hundred.11 The largest, including Brandenburg-Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Saxony, and Württemberg, often had the trappings of sovereign states. Since the High Middle Ages, the rulers of these largest German territories founded universities in their competition for cultural distinction and to train those who served in state and city bureaucracies. This political fragmentation also explains best the tradition of a Bildungsbürgertum in German central Europe: the many small and medium-sized states, each with its own princely court and administrative bureaucracy, required both literate staff and the institutions to educate them. Ulrichs was fortunate to live in the Hanoverian state, since Göttingen had established itself very quickly as one of the premier German universities. The law faculty was particularly prominent and trained numerous statesmen and scholars, including Austrian prime minister Clemens von Metternich; Wilhelm von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin in 1810; and Otto von Bismarck, first chancellor of the German Empire when it was formed in 1871. By the first decades of the twentieth century, more than twenty-five Nobel laureates had Göttingen affiliations, either as onetime students or professors.12
It was as a student at Göttingen that Ulrichs first identified the issues that would inspire him to take up his activism. He identified his own sexual peculiarity, and also embraced the ideal of großdeutsch, or greater German statehood, a nationalist ideology that promoted the idea of a unified German state that would incorporate all German speakers, including denizens of Austria and the Habsburg crownlands. Although these two strands of political action were seemingly unconnected, Ulrichs’s human rights activism and his nationalism were curiously intertwined. By promoting “greater German” statehood, Ulrichs hoped to counter the influence of Prussia, and, in turn, the likelihood that Prussia’s anti-sodomy statute might be imposed on the other German territories.
After five semesters in Göttingen, Ulrichs transferred to the University of Berlin, where he studied for one year. His decision to move was on its face of no particular note; many German students attended several universities before taking a degree. Ulrichs had a special motive, however, for coming to Berlin. In his second year at Göttingen, he had become self-consciously aware of his attraction to men. As he divulged later in a family letter, “Approximately half a year…before I went to Berlin, I was at a dance…. But among the dancers there were about twelve young, well-developed and handsomely uniformed forestry pupils. Although at earlier dances no one caught my attention, I felt such a strong attraction that I was amazed…. I would have flung myself at them. When I retired after the ball, I suffered true anxieties in my bedroom, alone and unseen, solely preoccupied by memories of those handsome young men.”13 Clearly this sexual awakening jolted the young Ulrichs, but it also underscored the loneliness he felt in Göttingen. As far as he could see, there was no one else there like himself.
Ulrichs almost certainly had an awareness of Berlin’s reputation. With a population of nearly 400,000, the city was bound to be more exciting than the sedate university town of Göttingen. But there was something more specific. As a garrison city, Berlin had been known for its male prostitution since at least the eighteenth century. As early as 1782 one guidebook devoted a short chapter to Berlin’s “warm brothers” and the prevalence of male prostitution as an income source for garrisoned soldiers.14 This reputation was well established by the time Ulrichs moved to the city. One telling account, an 1846 volume on Berlin prostitution, identified the areas where men sought sex with other men. These included the city’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, the large, forested Tiergarten Park at the western edge of the city center, and a grove of chestnut trees just north of the neoclassical Guardhouse, designed by the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel.15 An anonymous informant, corresponding with Berlin’s chief medical officer Johann Ludwig Casper in the 1850s, described his sexual initiation as a youth when, on the promenade of Unter den Linden, he encountered a gentleman, who then accompanied him to the Tiergarten for a tryst.16 Both Unter den Linden and the Tiergarten Park remained prominent locations—well into the twentieth century—for male prostitution and men cruising for sex with other men. Whether Ulrichs took advantage of the city’s soldier prostitution and clandestine sexual networks remains unclear. But his later writings make plain that he was keenly aware that in Berlin he would be far more likely to find congenial company.
After just one year, however, Ulrichs returned to the town of Burgdorf, where his mother, sister, and uncle still lived, and studied for the Hanoverian civil service test. The aspiring jurist had already distinguished himself as a student and legal scholar. First in Göttingen and then following his stint in Berlin, Ulrichs wrote prize-winning Latin-language legal essays. With these awards in hand and his rigorous education completed, he sat for the exhausting three-day examination with a “very good” assessment. This impressive result allowed him to assume his first position as a Hanoverian bureaucrat in the entry-level post of “auditor.” The career path Ulrichs had chosen began with positions in local government but held the promise of promotions leading to service in the Hanoverian state administration. After four years of service, he was permitted to take the next examination, for which he again received a “very good” rating, qualifying him for promotion to the next level, “assessor.” By this time, though, Ulrichs had grown disillusioned with government administration, and he asked for a transfer to the Hanoverian Ministry of Justice. This was a plausible lateral move within the structure of the state civil service, particularly for a talented jurist. His request was granted, and he received the title of assistant judge.17
Ulrichs’s promising career was cut short by the threat of scandal, however, which followed him from his earlier posting and forced him to resign in late 1854. A report submitted by the superior court in Hildesheim informed the Justice Ministry in Hanover about Ulrichs’s alleged sexual activities: “Ulrichs is said often to be seen in the company of lower-class persons under circumstances that allow one to conclude a closer connection…. [T]here came to my attention a rumor that Ulrichs practices unnatural lust with other men.”18 Although Ulrichs’s superior was skeptical initially, the rumors were soon confirmed by a police official. The report also noted that Ulrichs was suspected of similar indiscretions in his previous posts, but it further conceded that Ulrichs had broken no law, strictly speaking, because the Hanoverian penal code did not make a crime of same-sex love. Still, Ulrichs’s alleged behavior was unacceptable, since the Hanoverian law included the provision that “[w]hoever is guilty of unnatural lust under circumstances that cause public offense, shall be punished with imprisonment.”19 Since he was a state official and public personage, mere rumors of disreputable private conduct made Ulrichs liable to disciplinary action. As a result the report called for his dismissal from office. Although he was technically innocent of any crime, gossip about his same-sex affairs, particularly with “lower-class persons,” cost him his position and his career.
Aware of the gossip, Ulrichs tendered his resignation within weeks of assuming the new post on November 30, 1854. Ulrichs’s abrupt decision to give up his career was certainly influenced by the dawning realization that he could not accommodate his private life to his public status as a state official. While he was able to preempt disciplinary procedures, his superiors refused to grant him a formal certificate of service, which limited his ability to find future employment. Almost overnight, his professional training had
become virtually worthless, and now he was left—as he approached his thirtieth birthday—without prospects for employment.20
Soon after his resignation Ulrichs fled Hildesheim, venturing first to Burgdorf, “for religious considerations,” as he later explained, “where my pastor lived,” and then to a small town near Göttingen, where he lived with his sister and her Lutheran-pastor husband. To them Ulrichs revealed the reasons for the demise of his career and explained that he found himself sexually attracted to men. Against the protests of his brother-in-law, he began to question conventional morality. In the most painful fashion, Ulrichs was forced to confront the fact that even the liberal Hanoverian law—which did not make a crime of same-sex eroticism—was an oppressive instrument. Indeed, if his sexual attraction to men was innate, inborn, and, by extension, God given, as he increasingly believed, what law or human custom should censor that?
Ulrichs now faced the quandary of finding a new vocation and the more pressing task of supporting himself. Having returned to Burgdorf, he lived with family members. The death of Ulrichs’s mother in Burgdorf in 1856 was a significant blow, which he recalled sadly in later writings. An inheritance of 2,800 florins, as well as a share of his mother’s house, satisfied his immediate material needs. As a university-trained lawyer, Ulrichs hoped to augment this nest egg with the small fees he collected from clients. His fledgling legal practice was stymied, however, when he was fined for “unauthorized practice as an advocate” and for using the title of “former Assessor.” The report explaining the penalty cited “a not unfounded suspicion that he [Ulrichs] is guilty of the crimes of unnatural lust…[which] are said to have led to his resignation from Royal Service.” Ulrichs protested the fine, which was ultimately pardoned in 1860. Though never convicted of breaking any law, Ulrichs was forced once again to contend with the rumors surrounding his resignation from public office.21
Humiliated for his private affairs, Ulrichs was determined to find a way of living so that he would never again need to fear exposure. He soon found himself caught up in the nationalism that so animated German public sentiment. While the nationalist revolutions of 1848 had sparked hopes for German unification, the failure of the Frankfurt Parliament that convened later that year to establish a viable constitutional system left the question of statehood unresolved. The Frankfurt lawmakers were divided by the overarching difference between those who promoted a großdeutsch (large German) state and those favoring a kleindeutsch (small German) solution to the national question. While großdeutsch partisans hoped to forge a federal state that would include Austria, the proponents of a kleindeutsch solution favored a German state led by the Prussian Hohenzollern dynasty. Of course, the rivalry between Hohenzollern Berlin and Habsburg Vienna had dominated intra-German politics since at least the eighteenth century, and neither dynasty was prepared to cede influence to the other. As the Frankfurt Parliament dithered, the German princes reestablished their control, and when the bourgeois nationalists finally offered an imperial German crown to the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, in May 1849, their opportunity had passed. The Prussian king spurned the offer contemptuously, and claimed that he would never accept such a title from a representative assembly; he ruled, in his own view, by the grace of God. The nationalist project was defeated, at least for a time. In the wake of this failure, German rulers vigorously repressed nationalist agitation and unleashed the forces of political reaction.22
Although the repression of the 1850s inhibited more direct political action, German nationalist sentiment gained expression through literary and cultural associations. As a staunch supporter of großdeutsch unification, Ulrichs fervently promoted this broader movement, and he joined nationalist literary and cultural associations, including the German Association of Jurists, to whom he would later make his epochal appeal for legal reform. He also began writing articles for the Allgemeine Zeitung, a daily paper with a pan-German readership issued by the prominent Cotta publishing house based in Augsburg, Bavaria. Perhaps the most important German political newspaper of the nineteenth century, the Allgemeine Zeitung developed an international reputation and supported correspondents around the globe. The paper also maintained strong ties to Austria and a großdeutsch editorial perspective.23
Pan-German newspapers and cultural associations were not the only forces that promoted German unification after 1848. Commerce and transport played a powerful role in gradually knitting together the disparate regions that would eventually form the new empire. In 1834 Prussian officials had organized a customs union (Zollverein), which, by 1842, embraced more than half of the thirty-nine members of the German Confederation. This seemingly neutral commercial association was more effective in breaking down the barriers of import taxes, varied currencies, and disparate systems of weights and measures—which had stifled intra-German trade for centuries—than any overt political initiative. But the effect of forming a closer union among its members was indeed unintended. Prussian rulers remained completely dismissive of German nationalism, and supported the Zollverein simply to promote their commercial advantage, particularly over Habsburg Austria. Significantly, Austria was banned from joining the union.
German railway construction was another critical force that promoted exchange among the German states. Two long-distance rail lines were completed in the 1830s, the first in Bavaria and a second in Saxony. Into the 1860s, more than half of the German railways remained in private corporate hands, since there was no centralized state that could initiate, plan, and construct a national system. Public excitement over the first successful railways sparked a flurry of projects, however, and by 1852 investors had created more than 4,000 miles of track, a figure that increased sixfold, to 24,000 miles, by 1873. Between 1850 and 1875, some 25 percent of German industrial investment flowed into developing railways, stimulating collateral industries such as coal mining, steel production, and manufacturing. The railways also lessened bulk transport costs, while opening markets and improving distribution. Of course, the trains reduced travel time, creating a dramatic increase in both commerce and communications.24
Ulrichs belonged to that generation of Germans who experienced this transportation revolution firsthand. He could travel from Hanover to Berlin in 1846 in less than a day, a trip that had taken three days by horse-drawn coach. In the 1850s Ulrichs traveled widely outside of his native Hanover—to the German cities of Bamberg, Würzburg, Darmstadt, Mainz, and Wiesbaden, as well as to the Netherlands, Belgium, Bohemia, and Switzerland—trips easily compressed into short periods with the benefit of trains. Thus the convenience of rail transport also made Ulrichs’s work as a freelance journalist easier.25 Cheaper and faster distribution also increased the circulation of a pan-German paper such as the Allgemeine Zeitung and lowered the cost of its European-wide coverage. In the years 1862–63, Ulrichs wrote more than one hundred articles, many of which required significant travel.
In the summer of 1862, Ulrichs reported stories for the Allgemeine Zeitung on a pan-German shooting festival held in Frankfurt. The German sharpshooting clubs were yet another manifestation of the infectious nationalism that animated a wide spectrum of educated and working-class Germans after 1848. (Equally popular were the pan-German choral and gymnastics societies, which sponsored hundreds of local societies and also organized regular festivals, drawing thousands from throughout the German states.) The sharpshooting festival captivated Ulrichs, but not merely for its promotion of großdeutsch nationalism. At the beginning of August, Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, a club official and event organizer, was arrested and imprisoned for allegedly molesting an adolescent boy. Ulrichs was outraged by the uncorroborated charges and supported Schweitzer with a pair of lengthy legal defenses. These briefs were little help, and in September Schweitzer received a two-week jail sentence: he was not convicted of committing a sexual crime, however, but of provoking public offense. The youth with whom Schweitzer was alleged to have had sexual relations disappeared before the trial; no witnesses appeared who could sw
ear that a crime had been committed. The only “evidence” provided in court was the account of two women who reported overhearing the boy’s description of his encounter with Schweitzer. This testimony alone proved sufficient to convict Schweitzer of offending public decency. Curiously, the witnesses who recounted the story—and not the youth—were themselves considered the injured parties.26
The apparent injustice of Schweitzer’s imprisonment inspired Ulrichs to begin his public campaign. The centerpiece of this project was a series of publications on same-sex eroticism and the implications of the various German anti-sodomy statutes. By turning to print, Ulrichs hoped to provoke open debate and ultimately win support for legal reform. Print culture, he felt, would also provide an important medium for fostering identity and community. This was a daring initiative with little pre-cedent, and it exposed Ulrichs to ridicule or worse. But working alone and without models, Ulrichs proved to have a remarkably sophisticated ability to garner publicity and also to support men—and likely a few women—who lacked other information or resources.
Ulrichs explored the character of same-sex love by drawing first on his own experience. The drive to understand himself was unquestionably a product of his Lutheran background. Like the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther, who defied pope and emperor, Ulrichs was driven by his own stubborn reason and a personal integrity that would not allow him to turn away from the truth, as he perceived it. This need to explain himself required first that he confront his family. In the months following Schweitzer’s conviction Ulrichs wrote a series of circular letters, explaining both his attraction to men and his writing campaign. Although only four letters from this extended correspondence survive, the character of this discussion is clear. In a letter to his sister dated September 1862, Ulrichs dismissed her claim that he might simply “make the decision to change”; his nature, he told her, was “inherent.” The inclination to love men, Ulrichs argued, was as natural for him as the attraction most men feel toward women. Ulrichs also rejected his sister’s charge that his study in Berlin had somehow “perverted” him. “To believe that this tendency was at some time assumed is an error,” he wrote; “it came about exactly at the time of my puberty.” Ulrichs closed by asking his sister to circulate the letter among their closest family members.27
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