The movement for homosexual rights was bolstered as well by imperial Germany’s cultural avant-garde. Despite the conservative political and social views that emanated from the Hohenzollern court, Germany’s creative classes enjoyed surprising latitude. If the emperor dictated foreign policy, he had great difficulty dominating or even influencing the arts, despite his pretentions and significant efforts to do so. Under the leadership of Walter Leistikow and Max Lieberman, for example, German impressionists forged the Berlin Secession movement in 1898, breaking with the tradition of academic art (and the implicit patronage it enjoyed from the Hohenzollern court). Both men were early supporters of the SHC and its petition.33
Germany’s broad and diffuse counterculture was yet another wellspring of support and activism. The so-called life reform movement (Lebensreform Bewegung) included a hodgepodge of vegetarians, teetotalers, nudists, free-love proponents, clothing reform activists, anti-immunization zealots, advocates for alternative medicine including homeopathy and naturopathy, and the back-to-nature Wandervogel (“wandering bird”) hiking groups that formed the backbone of the incipient youth movement.34 Hirschfeld was himself a proponent of alternative medicines, an avid nudist, and an apostle for sobriety. In 1907, for example, he published a short study, Die Gurgel Berlins (The Throat of Berlin), which analyzed consumption patterns—food and drink—and the deleterious effects of alcohol on the city’s working classes. Hirschfeld was also personally acquainted with the leaders of many of Berlin’s Lebensreform groups.
Of greatest significance was the fact that several prominent Lebensreform figures actively supported homosexual rights and even joined the SHC. The prominent Wandervogel leader Wilhelm Jansen was not only an active SHC member but also director of the SHC subcommittee based in Frankfurt. Jansen was forced to relinquish his leadership position in the Wandervogel when exposed as a “homosexual” in 1910—the Jansen “scandal” provoked a crisis among the Wandervogel about the propriety of homoeroticism, creating a rift in the organization. Another Wandervogel figure with ties to the SHC was Hans Blüher, an adolescent member of the original Wandervogel troupe, organized in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz in 1896. His accounts of the Wandervogel and his full-blown historical sociology of the Männerbund, imbued, as he theorized it, with a constitutive homoeroticism, gained him tremendous notoriety (this is considered in greater detail in chapter 5).
One important bastion of early SHC support was the community of writers, painters, intellectuals, and nudists who established an artists’ commune in 1890 in the village of Friedrichshagen on the outskirts of Berlin. By the 1880s the electrified train network of greater Berlin had connected Friedrichshagen with the city proper, making it a practical resort for bohemians fleeing the city. Many of Germany’s leading naturalist writers, including Frank Wedekind and Gerhart Hauptmann, were Friedrichshagen residents. Swedish playwright August Strindberg was a frequent guest and also one of those who toured Berlin’s homosexual nightlife with Hüllessem in the early 1890s. Hirschfeld was personally acquainted with Wedekind and his brother Donald. Significantly, adolescent homosexual self-discovery was an important theme in Wedekind’s most famous play, Spring Awakening, which he completed in Friedrichshagen in 1891. It comes as little surprise, then, that both Wedekind and Hauptmann were signatories to the anti–Paragraph 175 petition. A number of other prominent German writers—some, though not all, with ties to the German naturalists, symbolists, or expressionists—were early supporters as well, including Detlev von Liliencron, Max Nordau, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Richard Dehmel, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Heinrich and eventually Thomas Mann, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, and Stefan Zweig.35
Anarchism was another ideological current—nurtured by the Wilhelmine counterculture and by Friedrichshagen particulary—that fostered supporters of homosexual rights. As one resident and chronicler described the colony, “[I]t satisfied all the conditions of an actual Bohème, an anarchistic community.”36 The number of early SHC members and supporters who were either resident at Friedrichshagen in the 1890s or occasional visitors is remarkable: Peter Hille, Else Lasker-Schüler, Erich Mühsam, Wilhelm Bölsche, Bruno Wille, Johannes Holzmann, Fidus (Hugo Höppener), Adolf Brand, Benedict Friedlaender, and John Henry Mackay. The leading theoretician for many of the German anarchists was left-Hegelian Max Stirner (1806–1856), author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (literally “the individualist and his own,” and published in English as The Ego and Its Own), which first appeared in 1844.37 The Scottish-born John Henry Mackay, who joined the German movement of literary naturalism in the 1880s, made his name within and beyond anarchist circles in the 1890s with an intellectual biography of Stirner as well as with literary accounts of the German anarchist movement. Mackay was also a self-described “boy lover,” and produced, under the pen name “Sagitta,” a large collection of pederastic novels and poetry, including his most famous, The Hustler (Der Puppenjunge), in 1926. Ultimately, his eccentric individualism prevented him from joining any of the Berlin homosexual rights organizations, although he remained a ubiquitous (if enigmatic) figure in Berlin through the end of the Weimar Republic.38
A common feature of the anarchists was a commitment to individualism and the freedom of sexual expression, an obvious motivation to support homosexual rights. For this reason Paragraph 175 came to symbolize much of what was considered insupportable about Wilhelmine culture. As a result, the emancipation of homosexuals and the work of the SHC—at least for some anarchists—was more of an ideological mission or even a cause du jour than a commitment motivated for personal reasons. Some if not many of the initial anarchist supporters, including Erich Mühsam, claimed to be heterosexual. Many short-lived anarchist journals and papers published around 1900—Neues Leben (New life), Der freie Arbeiter (The free worker), Der arme Teufel (The poor devil), or Der Kampf (The struggle), Die Kritik (The critique), or Magazin für Literatur (Magazine for literature)—included articles and essays that promoted legal reform or reported on the SHC and the homosexual rights movement more generally.39
One well-documented example of the nexus of anarchism and the struggle for homosexual rights was the League for Human Rights (Bund für Menschenrechte), founded in Berlin in 1903 by Johannes Holzmann, a veteran of Friedrichshagen and SHC activist who also published Der Kampf. As an anarchist organization, the group was carefully monitored by Berlin police officers, who filed detailed reports on the fortnightly meetings, sometimes attended by fifty or more people. The freedom of sexual expression and the rights of homosexuals were frequent topics of discussion, and Magnus Hirschfeld addressed the group in September 1904.40 It is unfortunate from the historian’s perspective that there are no similar, detailed police reports on the SHC. But, of course, Hirschfeld invited Commissioner Hüllessem to the SHC’s founding meeting, and cultivated a close working relationship with him and with his successor, Hans von Tresckow. Clearly state officials were far more exercised about the activities of an anarchist outfit than they ever were about the doings of homosexual rights activists.
The principle of sexual self-expression, promoted by anarchist philosophy, did not always jibe, however, with Hirschfeld’s biological determinism. In this regard, the counterculture fostered alternative communities of sexual minorities as well as competing theories of same-sex eroticism. Hirschfeld’s greatest intellectual challenge came from dissenters eventually identified as the “masculinists,” many of whom had been among his first supporters. One of the leading masculinist figures, Adolf Brand, was also, like Hirschfeld, a pioneer. In 1896, Brand published the first issue of a literary journal, Der Eigene, which is now considered the first homosexual magazine. The name is difficult if not impossible to translate—either “The self-owner” or perhaps “The self-possessed”—and was inspired by Max Stirner’s philosophy. Brand was also influenced by the residents of Friedrichshagen, due in part to geographic proximity. The son of a village blacksmith, Brand was raised and spent his life in Wilhelmshagen, another Berlin village that neighbored t
he artists’ commune. Like the Friedrichshagen Bohemians, Brand rejected the traditional morality of church and state. He had met Hirschfeld by no later than 1896 and attended SHC meetings, at least for a time. But Brand also came to disdain the classifications of the medical profession, especially those of the incipient disciplines of sexology and psychiatry.
The earliest issues of Der Eigene—which were published erratically and in various formats—emphasized Stirnerian anarchism. By 1898, however, the journal was also explicitly homosexual. Brand was especially interested in promoting a revival of Greek “pederastic” love—the idealized relationship of an older man who befriends (and takes as his lover) a male adolescent. The journal established a reputation for its homoerotic illustrations and aesthetics, and Brand was one of the first to publish the nude male photography of Wilhelm von Gloeden, for example, who lived and worked in Italy. Today, von Gloeden’s portraits of Italian adolescents are considered key works in the shaping of a modern gay male aesthetic. Early editions of Der Eigene also included drawings by the important symbolist artist Fidus (Hugo Höppener), who was resident in Friedrichshagen in the 1890s. Fidus was an illustrator for the Munich magazine Jugend (Youth), and contributed to the development (and labeling) of German Art Nouveau or Jugendstil. By the time the last issue of Der Eigene appeared in 1932, more than 450 authors had contributed to the journal.41
The nudity in Brand’s publications was a source of significant trouble, and Der Eigene was confiscated and censored on numerous occasions. Brand’s legal entanglements were legion, and his living quarters and press were routinely subject to police searches. He was, in fact, the perfect counterpoint to Hirschfeld, who cultivated strong relations with police and municipal officials. Unlike Hirschfeld, Brand was short-tempered, abusive, and often violent. For example, in 1899 he struck a Reichstag deputy in central Berlin with a dog whip. In 1903 Brand was arrested for Der Eigene’s “lascivious content” and imprisoned for two months on immorality charges. Max Spohr had published the confiscated issue—the only time he worked together with Brand—and for his part was fined two hundred marks (approximately a month’s salary for a skilled tradesman).42
After serving his short sentence in 1903, Brand founded a literary society, Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Special, or CoS), which offered an alternative of sorts to the SHC. Brand’s initial motivation, however, was to elude the censors. Now subscribers were required to join the CoS, which allowed Brand to characterize the journal as a “manuscript,” privately printed for the limited membership of a closed association. Member-subscribers were also forced to sign a declaration promising not to be shocked by the journal’s images or content. Although the number of members probably never exceeded fifteen hundred, Brand attracted an elite readership, including residents of the Friedrichshagen literary circle and several classical scholars. An avid nudist himself, Brand also drew in early leaders of the FKK (German nudist) movement, including Heinrich Pudor and Karl Vanselow, who edited the first nudist journal, Die Schönheit (Beauty), beginning in 1903.43
The society was more than a pretext for publishing the journal, however, and was run by Brand as a kind of symposium—styled on the ancient Greek model—which he also compared to a Masonic lodge. Weekly meetings were held in Brand’s home in Wilhelmshagen, where he organized outings and nature hikes. The printed announcement that Brand distributed as a membership application listed the ten principles of the CoS. These included a pledge to “promote the rebirth of friend-love [Freundesliebe] and strive for the social recognition of its natural and moral justification in public and private life as it existed during the period of its greatest estimation in ancient Greece.” Brand also supported a “closer connection of the man with the youth and of the youth with the man.”44 Implicit in this formulation, of course, was the endorsement of an erotic relationship between adult men and adolescent boys, or ephebes, in the language of the ancient Greeks. Fundamentally Brand embraced and promoted his own understanding of the sexuality of elite men in ancient Greece. Adolescents would be mentored by older male patrons until old enough to marry and begin their own families. As adult family patriarchs they could then patronize a male adolescent lover of their own. The so-called Freundesliebe expressed in these relationships or in those of adult men transcended any romantic ties forged between men and women. Brand managed to live out his ancient Greek fantasy, in fact, and actually married sometime around 1900. Although he never fathered children, Brand resided with his wife and several generations of his extended family (and serially, several younger lovers) in Wilhelmshagen until killed in an Allied bombing raid in 1945.45
If Brand’s views seem idiosyncratic (or worse) today, they were less unusual in fin-de-siècle Germany. The so-called “tyranny of Greece over Germany” expressed the extent to which Greek aesthetic and political models pervaded and influenced—at least superficially—imperial German culture.46 The genealogy of this love affair with the classical world reaches back to the seminal work of Johann Winckelmann (1717–1768) and follows a rich trajectory of scholarship in art history, political history, and philosophy. Winckelmann, whose sexual relationships were exclusively with other men (and who allegedly was killed by a male prostitute in Trieste in 1768), completed his German Gymnasium training, steeped in the classics, before studying medicine at universities in Halle and Jena. In 1755 he first traveled to Italy, where he spent most of the rest of his life. Published in 1764, Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art is a foundational text for both scientific archaeology and art history. Historian and Nobel laureate Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903), a founder of the subfield of ancient history, is considered one of the greatest classicists of the nineteenth century, based in part on his four-volume History of Rome, which he published in the 1850s. The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), a brilliant classical philologist, was inspired by his (re)interpretation of ancient Greek literature (he published The Birth of Tragedy in 1872), and had an outsized influence on Brand and his entire generation.
Several of Brand’s early supporters were friends from Friedrichshagen (and refugees from the SHC), including the physician Edwin Bab, Peter Hille, and Benedict Friedlaender. In 1903 Bab delivered a lecture to the CoS—a part of which was later published under the title Die Gleichgeschlechtliche Liebe (Same-sex love) with a dedication to Brand—which rejected Hirschfeld’s assertion that homo-sex reflected some kind of psychological hermaphroditism or that it sprang from a congenital difference confined to only a minority. Like Brand, Bab contended that most men were capable of loving men and women alike—therefore essentially “bisexual”—and that it was misleading to identify “homosexuals” either as a minority or as somehow sexually distinct from the larger population.47 Benedict Friedlaender offered a complementary view in his monographic study Renaissance des Eros Uranios (Renaissance of uranian eros), which he published in 1904. Like Brand, Friedlaender was married, and he was also the father of a young child. Unlike Brand, however, Friedlaender remained—at least until 1906—a member of both the CoS and the SHC. He was a major source of financial support, in fact, not only for the SHC but also for some of Brand’s publications, including Der Eigene; a number of anarchist papers, including Johannes Holzmann’s Der Kampf; and the pederastic literature of “Sagitta,” John Henry Mackay.48
Even if the differences between Hirschfeld and the masculinists undermined a fleeting unity that might have aided the cause of legal reform, their wrangling fostered a range of theories about (and sensibilities toward) same-sex erotic love that proved in its own right tremendously productive. One of the important achievements of this struggle was the creation of a homosexual cultural canon.
A practice that proved irresistible—and still proves so today—was the naming of famous historical figures alleged to have been homosexual. The political utility of a “pink” pantheon is not difficult to imagine: “If we judge homosexuality to be immoral,” one Jahrbuch contributor opined in 1902, “must we not also then agree that the great and noble
figures who manifested this orientation be excluded from the ranks of humanity?…. Should the love of a Michelangelo, a Shakespeare, or Frederick the Great be considered immoral?”49 Of particular interest were powerful political and military figures, including King David (and his friend Jonathan), Alexander the Great, Emperor Hadrian (and Antinous), Valois king of France Henry III, Frederick the Great, or Bavarian king Ludwig II. Arguably, Henry III and Ludwig II lacked the virile qualities of the others, yet the allegation of homosexuality made any political ruler worthy of study.50 Most popular among these, and naturally so in Berlin, was Frederick the Great, who never cohabited with his wife and died childless. It is clear that Frederick attempted as a young prince to escape his cruel father, King Frederick William I, by fleeing Potsdam with his friend (and presumed lover) Hans Hermann von Katte. After they were apprehended, the king forced his son to witness Katte’s beheading.51
A perhaps surprising candidate for membership in the order of heroic homosexuals was the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who had died only in 1900. By this date his reception was in full swing and he had become the philosophical guru—across the entire political spectrum—of the German cultural avant-garde. Certainly both wings of the homosexual rights movement were votaries of the incipient cult. In the pages of Jahrbuch, Hirschfeld paraphrased Nietzsche approvingly (without providing any clear citation): “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up into the topmost summit of his spirit.”52 Brand and other masculinists were no less adulatory. Like the anarchist Max Stirner, whose work (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum), we recall, inspired the title of Brand’s journal, Nietzsche was one of the key philosophical guides of the masculinist movement. Der Eigene advertised Nietzsche’s publications in its very first issue, and frequently published aphorisms from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, as well as excerpts from his other published works.53 Popular understandings of the “Dionysian” or the “transvaluation of values”—the rejection of traditional Christian morality—seemed to endorse non-normative sexuality. But the pious devotion of all of Berlin’s homosexual activists was also due to Nietzsche’s rumored homosexuality; at least one theory ascribed his insanity (and incarceration in an asylum for the last ten years of his life, beginning in 1890) to tertiary-stage syphilis, which he allegedly contracted in a boy brothel in Italy.54
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