Ulrichs’s campaign to end the punishment of same-sex love appeared poised to succeed. Like Kertbeny, many of those sympathetic to Ulrichs and his cause took inspiration from his public stance while remaining skeptical of his theories. Stimulating open debate among legal and medical professionals—and perhaps influencing their views—was a critical achievement. But what Ulrichs could not easily control was entrenched prejudice, nor the brutal, unsolved sex crimes that enraged popular sentiment in Berlin in the late 1860s. In early 1867 the mutilated body of a sixteen-year-old apprentice was found in a Berlin park. According to the coroner’s report, the boy had been constrained by one assailant and anally raped with a stick-like object by a second. His colon and stomach cavity were perforated, and blood loss from these wounds caused his death. His attackers also severed and removed the boy’s testicles. Whether he was castrated before or after his death remained unclear.
Only a censored version of this vicious and sadistic attack was published in the papers. The motive suggested was theft and the cause of death given as a fatal blow to the head. Although the press also reported the mutilation, this was explained as an attempt to cover the true nature of the crime and to mislead the police. Rumors circulated quickly, however, that the attack was of a more demented and sinister nature. Located on Berlin’s northwestern periphery, the Invaliden Park, where the assault occurred, was known for its male and female prostitutes. Newspaper reports soon claimed that the police had identified suspects among criminal circles, including pimps, prostitutes, and their patrons. The police raided locales and outdoor areas where men cruised for sex with other men and also interviewed those with prior sodomy convictions. The investigation was unsuccessful, despite a substantial reward, and no plausible perpetrator could be found. This failure had political repercussions. Prussian king William I demanded daily reports on the status of the investigation, and according to court reporter Hugo Friedländer, the king held the Berlin police president, Otto von Bernuth, accountable for not bringing the culprits to justice. In April 1867 Bernuth was dismissed and replaced by Günther Karl Lothar von Wurmb.
The failure to solve the crime also heightened public anxiety. Within the calendar year (1867), Berlin residents provided the police with more than fifty anonymous tips—all of them fruitless—that identified men presumed to be “perverted.” Public outrage reached a boiling point with the discovery of another mutilation victim. In January 1869 a five-year-old boy was discovered whimpering in pain in the attic of his apartment building, located in the eastern working-class neighborhood of Friedrichshain. The youth was delivered to the nearest police precinct and then taken to a hospital. His doctors discovered a wound in his anus and tears in his rectum. Like the first victim, the boy had been anally penetrated with an object and then possibly raped by his attacker. He was also the victim of mutilation: most of his foreskin was severed and he suffered bite marks on his neck. The attacker had also strangled the youth, and assuming him to be dead, deposited the body in a chimney flue. The boy was able to free himself, however, and neighbors responded to his pitiful cries.
In his initial police statement, the delirious boy seemed to accuse his father, a poor laborer, who was subsequently arrested and questioned. The boy’s mother provided her husband with an alibi, however, and the man was released the following day. In a second statement, the boy described a bearded man as his assailant, who had lured him to the attic with the promise of books. He was unable to provide additional details, and the only other clues were a white walking stick and red handkerchief found at the crime scene. Once again, King William took a personal interest in the crime, placing the investigating officers—as well as the entire police administration—under tremendous pressure. Despite extensive interviews with neighbors, the police were unable to identify a suspect.
A break in the case came when a neighborhood tailor reported seeing a man, Carl von Zastrow (1821–1877), loitering in the area several days before the attack. The man who fingered Zastrow, Ferdinand Müller, had worked as a police informant and knew Zastrow personally, and he demanded the five hundred taler reward after Zastrow’s arrest. (Later, at trial, Zastrow claimed that he had once had a sexual relationship with Müller and that the denunciation was an act of vengeance.) A onetime Prussian officer, the forty-eight-year-old Zastrow had a significant record of sodomy charges. He had been arrested or detained in Dresden, Kassel, and Berlin for suspicious behavior. Zastrow’s “Herculean form” made him a striking figure, and he was known in Berlin—at least by police—for propositioning strange men on his evening jaunts. He is also believed to have belonged to a group of homosexual men who congregated at the old Berlin National Theater, an august cadre that included the court actor Hermann Hendrichs, Prince Georg von Preußen (a relative of King William), and Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, whose arrest in 1862 was the initial spur for Ulrichs’s campaign.
The police had interrogated Zastrow once before in relation to the unsolved 1867 murder, so the denunciation for the new crime was especially compelling. When officials presented Zastrow to the victim, still recovering in the hospital, the young boy responded with shock and muted crying. Press reports on the investigation brought public reaction to a fever pitch, and there were popular demonstrations in front of the Berlin town hall. Even the distinctive Berlin dialect incorporated his name, both as verb and subject: “Zastrow” became synonymous with homosexual, and the verb zastrieren meant to commit homosexual rape. The evidence itself was hardly compelling. A plaster cast of the teeth marks in the boy’s neck appeared to match Zastrow’s mouth. But neither handkerchief nor walking stick could be tied with certainty to Zastrow. The alleged culprit also had witnesses who placed him in a café in the western suburb of Charlottenburg at 3 p.m. Reaching the crime scene on the other side of town by 3:30, when the attack was estimated to have taken place, was impractical, although carriage drivers were able to demonstrate that it would have been possible.
The investigation concluded in April, and the trial opened in July 1869. The press and public were usually excluded from the courtroom when cases involved sexual crimes. The Berliner Gerichtszeitung protested this successfully and gained access for its own and other reporters. This helped to fuel public interest and sell newspapers, but it also preserved a detailed trial record. At the point of his arrest and throughout the trial Zastrow maintained his innocence. He also admitted freely his sexual attraction to men, and identified himself with Ulrichs’s definition of a congenital Urning. He denied vehemently, however, any attraction to boys or adolescents. Zastrow’s open admission that he was homosexual complicated the prosecution, so the court summoned three Berlin psychiatrists as expert witnesses. The physicians were unable to provide immediate testimony, claiming inadequate time and opportunity to examine the defendant.
The judge halted the proceedings until the three doctors could conduct their own assessments. In short, they assumed the same role that Casper had played during the trial of Count Alfred von Maltzan-Wedell in 1849. The three expert witnesses were familiar with Casper’s published research, and accepted Zastrow’s sexual orientation as innate and fixed. Explaining same-sex eroticism as a congenital trait had eclipsed traditional medical theories that stressed masturbation, excessive sexual activity, or acquired perversion. In this connection, Zastrow’s own assertions—that he had always felt “that way” and that he embraced Ulrichs’s writings—reinforced the doctors’ diagnosis.
But the experts reached widely differing conclusions. One physician determined Zastrow to be mentally unbalanced, and therefore incompetent to stand trial. The second agreed that Zastrow was clinically insane, but felt all the same that he was morally accountable for his actions. A third emphasized Zastrow’s congenital homosexuality and concluded that the sexual assault and mutilation conformed to Zastrow’s unnatural sexual urges as a “pederast”; he also agreed that Zastrow was competent to stand trial. Most striking was the extent to which all three physicians explained homosexuality within the context
of disease or pathology, which influenced them to conflate it with pedophilia, rape, and sexual mutilation. At this early date in the development of sexology, there were no distinct categories for “homosexual,” “pedophile,” “sexual predator,” or “sadist.” If Ulrichs had helped to introduce the identity of a congenital homosexual or Urning, this “creature” was also believed to be psychologically diseased, at least by most medical professionals.
Precisely these views determined Zastrow’s fate. The trial finally resumed on October 25, and four days later the jurors delivered a “guilty” verdict. The judge sentenced Zastrow to fifteen years imprisonment. During this final stage of the trial, the judge permitted the testimony of a new witness: a woman came forward and declared that Zastrow had given her two packets, one containing a severed penis, the other a woman’s breast. These absurd claims were completely unsubstantiated, and the judge asked a single question: “It was really flesh, what he showed you?” It appears unlikely, in fact, that this outrageous story had any influence on the trial’s outcome. It does illustrate, however, the tenor of the proceedings—the gullible willingness of court officials to entertain incredible stories and baseless slander. Although the 1867 murder remained formally unsolved, the two attacks were virtually conflated in the mind of the public. For police and politicians alike, a conviction for the second crime conveniently mollified demands to find the perpetrator of the first. Until his death in the Berlin Moabit Prison in 1877, however, Zastrow always maintained his innocence.64
The same ignorance and popular prejudice that condemned Zastrow also derailed Ulrichs’s campaign to end the legal persecution of Urning sexuality. On November 7, little more than a week after the conclusion of the Zastrow trial, Prussian officials announced their decision to include the anti-sodomy statute in the revised law code. Prussian cultural minister Heinrich von Mühler, citing “the people’s sense of right and wrong” (Rechtsbewusstsein des Volkes) that held homosexual conduct to be a crime and not just a vice, rejected the counsel of his own leading medical advisers.65 A draft of the North German penal code was published in December, and the section addressing same-sex eroticism reproduced the language of the Prussian penal code from 1851. Sodomy was defined as the sexual penetration of one man by another, as well as “sexual contact between man and beast.” The draft code was debated in the Reichstag of the North German Confederation from February to May 1870, and during this period Ulrichs petitioned again, requesting that lawmakers, if the sodomy paragraph were preserved, also insert the following qualification: “The preceding does not pertain to a person who commits sexual acts that correspond to his innate sexual drive.” The only significant change, however, was the assignment of a new paragraph number, which provided the nickname—Paragraph 175—for the statute criminalizing sex between men. The North German penal code was finally promulgated as law on May 31, 1870.
The precise machinations that led Mühler to overrule the recommendation of the medical board are not clear. Kertbeny argued that the Zastrow affair had an inordinate influence on the process of legal codification. Ulrichs held the same view, and he devoted his tenth pamphlet, “Argonauticus,” to Zastrow’s trial and alleged crime. While avoiding pronouncements about Zastrow’s guilt or innocence, Ulrichs complained that “for the opponents of the cause I champion, the Zastrow case was a plum fallen into their laps.”66 It may be unfair to claim that the trial was directly responsible for the inclusion of the anti-sodomy statute in the new criminal code. The timing suggests clearly, however, that the publicity surrounding Zastrow’s trial strengthened proponents of the sodomy statute. The obverse dynamic is equally probable: public hysteria about a sadistic pedophile might easily have weakened the resolve of influential progressives like Rudolf Virchow, as well as other medical and legal experts, to oppose its inclusion.
It is almost certain that those with access to conservative Prussian cultural minister Mühler lobbied forcefully to include the sodomy paragraph. Later Ulrichs reported receiving a letter in early 1870 from a sympathetic Berlin university professor who wrote, “[T]he decisive reason for certain influential persons, even if they never say so, is this: they want to make a concession to the orthodox religious tradition.” Others speculated that Mühler was unduly influenced by his own wife, Adelheid, who had access to the Hohenzollern court and direct contact with King William I. It bears noting that her brother Gustav Gossler was appointed to her husband’s post as cultural minister in 1881. This clash of Prussia’s conservative officials and churches with a progressive medical establishment was a perennial tension that would characterize the life of the German Empire after 1871.67
The third and ultimate war of unification was a crushing political denouement for Ulrichs (and the other German opponents of Prussia). Once again, Bismarck outmaneuvered a weaker and less capable adversary, Napoleon III, emperor of France, by deftly manipulating his French rival into declaring war. The immediate cause was the candidacy for the Spanish throne of a distant Catholic cousin of the Prussian king, Prince Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Napoleon III feared the prospect that his neighboring states, Prussia and Spain, might be ruled by members of the same Hohenzollern dynasty, and he pressed the Prussian king to pledge never to support Leopold’s candidacy. In June Bismarck allowed the press to publish a version of the Prussian king’s dispatch, the so-called Ems telegram, which described the king’s discussion of the Spanish throne with the French ambassador. Bismarck did so without royal permission, however, and he also edited the telegram with the intention of inflaming both French and German public opinion. He succeeded spectacularly, and on July 20 Napoleon III declared war. At the Battle of Sedan in early September, superior German forces—which included not only Prussians and North Germans but also the armies of the southern German states—defeated the French and captured the French emperor. French republican forces regrouped and continued the fight, but the Germans besieged Paris successfully from October to January, forcing the new republican government to sue for peace. Before the armistice was even signed, the German Empire was declared, on January 18, 1871, from the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. Here the Prussian king was crowned German Emperor William I.
The new German Empire incorporated the core states of the North German Confederation, as well as Baden, Württemberg, Bavaria, and the territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been annexed from France. The exclusion of Habsburg Austria from a unified German nation-state was now absolute. The empire was broadly federalist, allowing its member states wide latitude in cultural affairs (including the regulation of religion and education). Prussia dominated the new national institutions, however, including the judiciary. One central challenge was to forge a uniform imperial law code that would simplify jurisprudence across former state boundaries. While the German Civil Code required nearly thirty years of careful planning and was only promulgated in 1900, the criminal code proved less difficult to introduce. The Prussian or North German penal code served conveniently as a template. Although the individual states formally “adopted” the Prussian penal code, the benefits of uniformity created both pressure and incentive to accept the existing North German law. In his eleventh pamphlet, “Araxes,” Ulrichs described Bavaria—since eliminating laws against sodomy in 1813—as “the oldest asylum for Urning nature in Germany.” Ulrichs urged Bavaria to resist Prussian pressure, and opined optimistically that the state “might yet continue, thanks to destiny, to offer an asylum in the heart of Germany to a persecuted nature, a place of refuge where martyred and hunted human beings can breathe.” This hope was misplaced, and at the beginning of 1872 Bavaria also adopted the penal code and with it the Prussian anti-sodomy statute, Paragraph 175.68 Ulrichs’s worst-case scenario had effectively come to pass. Not only were the Berlin medical proponents of decriminalization ignored but the Prussian unification of Germany served to reintroduce an anti-sodomy statute in those German states that had long ceased to punish sodomy as a crime.
Although the foundation of the empire thwar
ted hopes for Urning emancipation, at least in the near term, Ulrichs continued his public campaign. In 1879 he completed his twelfth and final pamphlet, “Critische Pfeile” (“Critical Arrows”). In this tract, Ulrichs tacitly conceded the unlikelihood of eliminating the sodomy statute, and instead emphasized the need for additional research and study. He also argued again that the fundamental disposition of an Urning was both congenital and natural—not acquired through “perverse” actions or the product of mental disease or physical degeneration. His assessment of the Urning character had grown more complex than in his earlier publications and allowed for a broad and rich spectrum of intermingled sexual and gender attributes spanning the stereotypical extremes of masculinity and effeminacy for Dionings and Urnings of both sexes.69
In 1880 Ulrichs traveled to Italy, crossing the Alps on foot. Italy had become the home to immigrant German and English homosexuals—increasingly throughout the nineteenth century—who fled the persecutory laws of their native countries. This was Ulrichs’s first trip to Italy, and he anticipated an extended visit. Although he had plans to return to Germany, ultimately he remained in Italy for the rest of his life. Ulrichs’s itinerary took him to Ravenna, Florence, and Rome, and he finally settled in Naples. After three years there, Ulrichs moved to L’Aquila in the Abruzzo region, where he favored the colder climate and mountain air. Although Ulrichs befriended the local notabilities in L’Aquila, he led a largely solitary life. His writing projects were varied, but he no longer pursued his erstwhile dream of Urning emancipation. In 1889 Ulrichs began publishing Alaudae, a small Latin-language literary journal consisting of his own poems, translations, and reviews. Within a few years, Ulrichs had garnered subscribers from throughout Europe and North America. Initially, the journal appeared in some twenty issues annually, but it was published less frequently later on. The last installment was produced in February 1895, five months before Ulrichs’s death from a kidney infection on July 14, at the age of seventy-four.70
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