Gay Berlin

by Robert Beachy

  The early publications of Hirschfeld, Brand, and the Spohr Verlag also helped to create what was arguably the first “gay” literary canon. Brand’s Community of the Special was essentially a reading and literary circle, after all. And Hirschfeld’s SHC also sponsored cultural events, including dramatic readings and musical performances; in 1904 the SHC announced the formal organization of a lending library, collecting quality scientific works as well as German and world literature to “serve the enlightenment” of the members and donors granted borrowing privileges.55 This “enlightenment” aided the construction of an identity, transcending time and place, as well as the formation of a cultural community, which allowed at least some to identify with a collective “we.” All of this was made possible, of course, by the necessary though not sufficient condition of imperial Germany’s (relatively) liberal censorship. An equally important element was the middle-class readership that consumed these publications and provided the commercial support for an incipient homosexual press. The process of canon formation was dynamic and unsteady, moreover, and relied intrinsically on a stream of original literature as well as literary and cultural criticism served up by both Der Eigene and Jahrbuch.

  The compiling of homoerotic writings, however, was not original to the late nineteenth century. By the Renaissance, humanist scholars had begun collecting classical texts documenting “Greek love.” Borrowing from these models, Eros oder die Männerliebe der Griechen (Eros or the male-male love of the Greeks) was one of the earliest anthologies of classical Greek texts that explicitly celebrated same-sex eroticism; it was published by the Swiss-German author Heinrich Hößli in 1838.56 Pioneering activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs also published excerpts of homoerotic literature in two of his pamphlets, “Ara Spei” (1865) and “Memnon” (1868). In 1896 the Spohr Verlag published Der Eros und die Kunst: Ethischen Studien (Eros and art: Ethical studies), under the pseudonym “Ludwig Frey.” This was arguably the first volume devoted entirely to “gay canon formation.” As the author “Frey” argued—with a prescient, AIDS-era sensibility—“Silence is death” (Stillschweigen ist der Tod). “The spirit through which the knowledge of the essence of Urningtum is spread exerts itself,” according to Frey, “and will not rest until its idea has achieved victory.”57 Other anthologies followed, including Elisar von Kupffer’s Lieblingminne und Männerliebe in der Weltliteratur (The love of favorites and the love of friends in world literature), first published by Spohr in 1900. This volume was a direct inspiration for one of the only non-German-language anthologies published in this period, Edward Carpenter’s Ioläus, which escaped English censorship by using the euphemism of “friendship” and avoiding explicit mention of same-sex love.58

  Friendship—Freundschaft—was a particularly vital theme for much German literature, and one that lent itself easily to the incipient “gay” canon.59 The seemingly homoerotic language of the German Romantics was especially useful for demonstrating both the trans-historical and particularly the Germanic character of same-sex love. As the literary historian Paul Derks has argued, the German Romantics lived in a golden age (1750–1850) when relationships between men that were potentially sexual were (mis)recognized as mere friendships. Only the scrutiny of scientific and medical study after 1850, Derks argues, created a new visibility that ruined the inconspicuous same-sex sensuality of “romanticism.”60 This peculiar feature of German literature was remarked upon not only by Germans. The Russian and Francophone psychiatrist Marc-André Raffalovich emphasized the special, erotic character of “German friendship” (“L’amitié allemande”)—citing the works of Schlegel, Hamman, Gleim, Arnim, and Brentano, among others—in a chapter of his 1896 treatise on homosexuality (Uranisme et Unisexualité).61 Commentary and criticism published in both Jahrbuch and Der Eigene deduced male eroticism in the works of Goethe, Grillparzer, Hölderlin, Kleist, Platen, and Schiller, as well as the alleged sexual character of many of their same-sex relationships.62 For example, the recent discovery of a letter from Heinrich von Kleist to his friend Ernst von Pfuel inspired an animated debate in the pages of Der Eigene about Kleist’s sexual orientation, a discussion that was dutifully recounted in the literary reviews of Jahrbuch.63

  In Berlin’s hothouse climate of homosexual rights activism, some of this classical literature was so fervent that it risked censorship. For example, the officials who brought obscenity charges against Adolf Brand and Max Spohr for the May 1903 issue of Der Eigene cited—among others—Schiller’s poem “Die Freundschaft” as obscene, but without naming Schiller or recognizing, apparently, his authorship.64

  Was’t not this omnipotent desire,

  That in love’s eternal happy fire

  Did our hearts unto each other force?

  Friend, upon thine arm—delight!

  Venture I to th’ spiritual sun so bright

  Joyful on perfection’s course.

  Happy! happy! Thee have I thus found,

  Have from out of millions thee wound round,

  And from out of millions, thou art mine—

  Let the savage chaos come once more,

  Let the atoms in confusion pour,

  For eternity our hearts entwine.

  Must I not from out thy flaming eyes

  Draw th’ reflection of my paradise?

  But in thee I wonder at myself—

  Fairer does th’ fair earth to me appear,

  In the friend’s demeanor shines more clear,

  Lovelier the Heaven itself.

  Melancholy drops the tearful weight,

  Sweetly th’ storm of passion to abate,

  In the breast of charity;—

  Seeks not e’en the tortuous delight,

  Friend, within the spirit’s sight,

  A voluptuous grave impatiently?65

  The state attorney claimed that “the depicted embraces and kisses between friends, if not a direct glorification of pederasty are doubtless a glorification of pederastic foreplay, which offends popular feelings of shame and morality, as long as Paragraph 175 remains the law.”66 The censors’ ignorance of the poem’s authorship and their claim that Schiller had glorified “pederastic foreplay” was widely ridiculed in the liberal press. According to literary historian Marita Keilson-Lauritz, mention of the poem was eventually expunged from the formal charge after its correct attribution, signaling the officials’ embarrassment. Of course, Spohr was fined two hundred marks all the same, while Brand received a two-month prison sentence.67

  Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and Brand’s Der Eigene were also responsible for identifying the inherent “gayness” of many contemporary German works (and in some cases their authors) by reviewing and critiquing them. Austrian writer Robert Musil published The Confusions of Young Törless (Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß) in Vienna in 1906, which was reviewed the following year in Hirschfeld’s Monatsbericht.68 Hirschfeld and Brand both established and adhered to fairly specific theories, or perhaps creeds, and did not always embrace work that was later very popular. For example, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Tod in Venedig), published in 1912, was virtually ignored by the homosexual press, at least initially. Not until 1914 did Jahrbuch finally discuss the novella in a larger review essay by Kurt Hiller, who described Mann’s work as “an example of moralistic narrowness,” since the protagonist’s love for a boy is treated as a “symptom of degeneration” and depicted “nearly the same as cholera.”69 What Hiller was first to identify was an implicit theme in Mann’s work, expressive of Mann’s repressed homosexuality—explored exhaustively in Hiller’s essay by literary scholars and critics—that equated homosexuality with degeneration.70

  Whether negative or positive, such reviews were not limited to German-language writings. Hirschfeld, Brand, and the Spohr Verlag were instrumental in introducing much foreign-language literature to their German readers and often in providing them with German translations. The 1901 French-language Dédé, by Achille Essebac (the pseudonym for and an anagram of the author’s surname, Bécasse), was a sto
ry of the homoerotic relationship of two schoolboys. The novel was published in German translation by Spohr in 1902, and gained a cult following in Germany.71 (In the 1920s there was even a Dédé bar in Berlin, named for the novel.) The French-language novel Escal-Vigor, by Belgian author Georges Eekhoud, was published in German translation in 1903, likewise by Spohr. In this novel an aristocratic aesthete and artist falls in love with his peasant model and protégé; Eekhoud was brought before a Belgian court on obscenity charges, which only increased the book’s popularity in France and soon after in Germany.72 With its homoerotic overtones, André Gide’s L’Immoraliste (1902) was reviewed in Jahrbuch in 1903; the German translation appeared in 1905.73 In 1904 Danish author Herman Bang published Mikaël, the story of an artist who falls in love with his much younger model “Michael.” The novel appeared in German translation with Fischer Verlag in 1906, and was made into a feature-length (silent) film in Germany in the 1920s.74 Russian author and composer Mikhail Kuzmin published Wings, the first Russian novel with an explicitly homosexual theme, in 1906. The book received its first German review in 1907, and a German translation appeared in 1911.75

  The most notable such publications from the Spohr Verlag were translations of Oscar Wilde’s works. Although Wilde’s 1895 trial had received considerable German press (and was followed closely by Hirschfeld and others), his writings were all but unknown in Germany before his death in 1900.76 In 1901 Spohr published the first Wilde work in German, The Picture of Dorian Gray, translated by the Hirschfeld associate and SHC member Johannes Gaulke. In 1902 Gaulke published his translation of The Portrait of Mr. W. H. with Spohr, and in 1903 The Happy Prince and Other Stories. Another SHC member, Hermann Freiherr von Teschenberg, who had fled his native Austria in the wake of a homosexual scandal and then made Wilde’s acquaintance in London in 1895 before settling in Berlin, translated several of Wilde’s plays—including The Importance of Being Ernest, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and Salomé (which also served as Richard Strauss’s opera libretto)—and published them with Spohr between 1901 and 1904. Although most of Spohr’s Wilde publications went through multiple editions, the press was soon faced with competing translations issued by more prominent German presses, including Fischer, Insel, and Reclam.77

  Arguably the German-homosexual criticism of many non-German authors—Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, or André Gide—played a significant if not central role in their initial recognition as “queer.” The German reception of Walt Whitman is especially striking. Not only was it the Berlin activists who “outed” Whitman (followed by the vehement denials of many of his American, English, French, and German admirers); a debate also unfolded among the Germans about the exact character of Whitman’s sexuality. Was Whitman a “homosexual” who experienced erotic feelings exclusively for men, or was he a virile “masculinist” figure who potentially loved women but realized his highest spiritual expression in male friendships, whether erotic or not? Or was it irresponsible even to speculate about Whitman’s sex life?

  Although Whitman had been discussed and translated in Germany since at least the 1870s, it was only in a lengthy character sketch published in Jahrbuch in 1905 that his suspect sexuality was first addressed.78 The author Eduard Bertz, who studied philosophy in Germany and later lived in Paris, England, and America before returning to Berlin, had signed the SHC petition against Paragraph 175 and also served as a member of the SHC board of directors. In his essay Bertz analyzed Whitman’s apparent indifference to women and also described his intimate male friendships. More significantly, perhaps, Bertz dismissed the masculinist credo that sexual intimacy among men (and implicitly bisexuality) was all but ubiquitous. Bertz’s analysis, moreover, had a political motivation: he judged “masculinism” an ineffective strategy for legal reform: “The small minority that has been persecuted and despised by the normal majority must first strive to be tolerated by this majority,” Bertz opined. “Anything beyond this is foolishness and forgets to consider the facts.”79

  Bertz’s allegation that Whitman was homosexual most disturbed Whitman’s German admirers. Chief among these was Johannes Schlaf, naturalist author and founder of the German “Whitman cult.” Like Bertz, Schlaf had signed the SHC petition. But he clearly feared that Bertz’s claims would affect Whitman’s reputation and rejected them in a pamphlet published the following year. In the debate that followed, Bertz argued even more vehemently that Whitman displayed the signs of congenital homosexuality. Literary historian Walter Grünzweig argues that Schlaf “secured” Whitman’s reputation in Germany and that “if Bertz had prevailed, German reception of Whitman would have taken a different and, at least at that time, decidedly more narrow turn.”80 As the most important German editor and translator of Whitman’s work, Schlaf was able to undermine Bertz’s credibility.81 American reviews of the Bertz-Schlaf dispute were sharply critical of Bertz. According to the SHC Monatsbericht, one of these reviews made the first-ever mention in an American periodical of the German homosexual rights movement.82

  While Bertz upset the “straight,” mainstream Whitman followers, he also annoyed the masculinists for employing a Hirschfeldian paradigm. Writing in response in Der Eigene, Herbert Stegemann, a onetime SHC member who made common cause with Brand and then Benedict Friedlaender, questioned Bertz’s Hirschfeldian science, arguing that psychology or medicine did not have the objective expertise to assess the “homosexuality” of a literary figure and that only the individual author or poet should be allowed to proclaim (or not) his (or her) sexual preference(s).83 In another response, Peter Hamecher, who had complicated relationships with both Hirschfeld and Brand, argued that Whitman was without question a representative of “physiological friendship,” an expression that aligned him clearly with Brand and Friedlaender, and defined Whitman as a “masculinist,” a man who chose homosocial or homoerotic relationships, but not a “homosexual” with an inborn sexual orientation.84

  While the explanatory frameworks of Hirschfeld and the masculinists fostered creative tensions, the groups grew further and further apart, arguably weakening the struggle for legal reform. Brand had attended SHC meetings, at least until his incarceration in 1903, but he clearly lost patience with Hirschfeld’s science and more timid strategies. Hirsch-feld’s theory of sexual intermediacy could more easily accommodate Brand’s pragmatic bisexuality, but Brand—who likely never really understood Hirschfeld’s theoretical position—rejected Hirschfeld’s essentialism as hopelessly emasculating. Brand also promoted a more aggressive approach to legal reform. Beginning in 1903, SHC members debated the efficacy of staging a mass “self-outing,” something that Brand strongly endorsed. If a thousand SHC members, many of them public figures or successful professionals or wealthy aristocrats, were to profess publicly their homo- or bisexuality, it would cause a law enforcement crisis. Prosecuting a large number of otherwise respectable citizens would be inconceivable; allowing such a group to flout the law, on the other hand, would render it meaningless. The scheme was debated in SHC meetings on several occasions and ultimately rejected. Along the way, the SHC took baby steps, advising members to begin to “out” themselves to trusted friends and family and encouraging donors to allow their names to be disclosed in SHC publications.85

  The discussion that surrounded the tactic of “outing,” whether third-party or voluntary, appears to have emerged from the Krupp scandal of 1902. Recall that Vorwärts, the official, national paper of the Social Democratic Party, had essentially “outed” Krupp by reporting his escapades (with underage boys) on the island of Capri, leading to his official expulsion from Italy. The German press coverage that followed the Vorwärts scoop led, in turn, to Krupp’s alleged suicide. In a short piece published in Maximilian Harden’s weekly Die Zukunft, psychiatrist Albert Moll reflected sarcastically on Krupp’s demise and its lessons for the homosexual rights movement: “The homosexuals are sometimes reproached for agitating too much. But what should they otherwise do?…. Perhaps they simply need an uncompromisin
g leader who can lead them to their goal over a mountain of corpses. They need only to name publicly those men whose homosexuality is notorious and can easily be proven.”86 This was a striking and perhaps chilling observation, even if Moll was making it in jest. It also inspired the expression “path over corpses,” which was uttered with great frequency in discussions about the utility of “outing.”

  Brand found the “path over corpses” a particularly appealing tactic, and in 1904 he published a short pamphlet, Kaplan Dasbach und die Freundesliebe (Kaplan Dasbach and friend-love), in which he recounted his correspondence and confrontations with Georg Friedrich Dasbach, a Jesuit priest, parliamentarian, and sometime leader of the Catholic Center Party.87 A native of Cologne, Dasbach was also a central figure in the opposition to the SHC petition and its efforts to reform Paragraph 175. The minutes recorded from SHC meetings mention the repeated efforts that were made to reach out to Dasbach, and on at least one occasion in 1902 Hirschfeld actually met with the politician. Although SHC sources are never explicit, it appears almost certain that the homosexual rights activists believed they had identified one of their own in Dasbach, and therefore a natural ally, or, if in fact an opponent, alternatively, one who might be silenced.88 The occasion for Brand’s particular initiative (and publication) was a Vorwärts article claiming that Dasbach had been unsuccessfully blackmailed by an adolescent hustler in Cologne. (This was reminiscent of the report published about Krupp, and incredibly opportunistic, of course, since Dasbach, as a Catholic Center politician, was likewise considered a political and class enemy.) After the boy had demanded one hundred marks, Dasbach reported him to authorities, who identified the boy as a prostitute and a convicted perpetrator of blackmail. The boy received a nine-month prison sentence, and Dasbach appeared to emerge from the scandal with his reputation intact.89