Gay Berlin
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For his part, Hirschfeld insisted that homosexuality was not a particularly German phenomenon (“Our scientific interpretation of the essence of homosexuality [is] as a constant biological variant of sexuality),68 while also acknowledging the influence of the recent “sensational trials” that had given new life to the “old fairy tales” of a “German vice.” If the French spoke of the vice allemande or an Eulenburgue, the Italians now referred to the homosexual as a “Berlinese,” and the English spoke of the “German custom.”69 Through Harden’s campaign, Eulenburg’s name had entered the popular argot to signify homosexual. Eulenburg’s particular scandal and the many others that it exposed were firmly identified as German. But Eulenburg and his associates also helped to broadcast and promote the notion of the innate homosexual as a minority figure in the cast of modern sexual personages.
• CHAPTER FIVE •
Hans Blüher, the Wandervogel Movement, and the Männerbund
What is the explanation for homosexuality in Wilhelmine society? What is specifically German about it? The two conflicting homo-social attitudes toward homosexuality coexisted in Wilhelmine Germany: the one discredited homosexuality and supported a pure, masculine type, and the other, the Männerbund version, allowed that male-male relationships could have a sexual connotation. This is the difference, in fact the contrast to all other European societies. The social (and legal) disdain for homosexuality goes hand in hand with a pronounced disposition for homoerotic relationship models.
—NICOLAUS SOMBART, Die deutschen Männer und ihre Feinde (1991)
The Eulenburg scandal had a powerful and negative impact on the SHC and Berlin’s homosexual rights movement. However, alongside any damage came significant publicity that broadcast theories of homosexuality and brought the work of Hirschfeld and his opponents to public attention. Eulenburg and the Liebenberg Roundtable were likewise inspiring for theorists of the homoerotic Männerbund, a complex German term that nearly defies translation. Rendered most simply as “male association,” the concept of the Männerbund gained tremendous popular currency in Germany in the first decades of the twentieth century. Of course, Männerbund has much broader connotations and might be used to describe phenomena as diverse as the tribal leadership of an indigenous group, the ruling junta of an autocratic state, a political party, or simply cultural patriarchy. As a secretive cabal with tremendous political influence and the whiff of homoeroticism, Eulenburg and the Liebenberg Roundtable appeared to be its very embodiment.
The disclosures that emerged from the Harden-Eulenburg-Brand-Bülow trials provided a timely inspiration for Hans Blüher (1888–1955), who observed the unfolding scandals beginning in 1907 as a student in Berlin. Blüher found the Liebenberg Roundtable a perfect manifestation of the Männerbund, and material for the historical sociology that he would develop into the 1920s. Blüher was also inspired by the incipient German youth movement, in which he himself participated. Germany’s inaugural all-male youth organization, the Wandervogel (which translates roughly as “hiking bird” or “wandering bird”), formed in 1897 in the Berlin suburb of Steglitz. A member of this original troupe, Blüher chronicled the history of the early Wandervogel, and developed his theory of the Männerbund based in part on his adolescent experiences. This participation in the Wandervogel also brought Blüher in contact with Berlin’s homosexual rights movement and the burgeoning sexological literatures of the early twentieth century. In turn, his autobiographical account of the Wandervogel and his sociology of the Männerbund gained him the attention of homosexual activists, psychiatrists, and, by the 1920s, anti-Semitic nationalists. Only the notoriety of his anti-Semitism, which Blüher incorporated into his theory, can explain how such an influential and popular author would have become so obscure after 1945, even in Germany. Since Blüher was an anti-Semite and sometime homosexual rights activist himself, his intellectual biography provides the perfect lens for considering the popularization and influence of this improbable and underappreciated German construct. Blüher’s participation in the original Wandervogel and troupe and his autobiographical chronicle of its early evolution make it nearly impossible to disentangle his experiences from the Wandervogel and the concept of the Männerbund as they developed in Berlin at the turn of the century.1
Born in 1888, Blüher was raised in a conservative, bourgeois family. His father was a university-educated professional who personified the culture and ideals of Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum. Both his paternal and maternal lineages included Protestant ministers, jurists, and government officials. His father and grandfather were Apotheker, pharmacists, a prestigious vocation that combined university training with the entrepreneurial management of a drugstore. In 1897 Blüher’s family moved from Halle to Steglitz, an expanding, middle-class suburb of southwest Berlin, where his father opened an apothecary. Here Blüher attended the Gymnasium in preparation for university study.2
Steglitz grammar school instructor Herman Hoffmann Fölkersamb formed a study circle at Blüher’s school in 1896, and in 1901 it was registered as the Wandervogel, as a formal association (Verein). The group sponsored all manner of youth activities—hiking, camping, team sports, and singing—with an emphasis on independence, accountability, and the spirit of adventure. Despite its back-to-nature character, the group also rented and furnished a clubhouse (Heim), which created a space free from adult authority. Here members played games, rehearsed dramatic skits, conducted poetry readings, and planned excursions. The clubhouse became a central feature of the many other groups inspired by the original Steglitz association. As a reaction to the stern discipline and rigid authoritarianism of the domestic and educational life of prewar Germany, the Wandervogel movement spread quickly beyond Steglitz and Berlin. By 1910, imperial Germany counted 204 local organizations with nearly 9,000 members. On the eve of the First World War the number of active participants had climbed to 25,000. Another 10,000 adults were associated with the clubs as group leaders and members of advisory boards.3
It comes as no surprise that Blüher embraced the Wandervogel youth group after joining as a fourteen-year-old boy in 1902. From his autobiography we know that he relished the homosocial camaraderie of hiking and singing and the charismatic leadership of an adult Führer, or leader, all critical elements of his Männerbund theory. The youth group provided a haven free from the repressive control of parents and teachers. Indeed, Blüher’s school experience was reminiscent of the protagonist’s of Hermann Hesse’s 1906 novel, Beneath the Wheel, the story of a talented young student who falters under autocratic teachers and parents before drowning, an apparent suicide. Blüher described the “school pedagogy” of his own Gymnasium as “pure dressage [Dressur],” a mind-numbing training that “raped the youthful disposition.”4 Literary depictions of afflicted German and Austrian youth—from Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1891) to Beneath the Wheel, or Robert Musil’s The Confusions of Young Törless (1906)—help to explain the reception and rapid growth of the youth movement.
The Wandervogel leader who inducted Blüher was a young man named Karl Fischer (1881–1941), who had graduated from the Steglitz Gymnasium only a few years earlier. Fischer was responsible for developing a rigid club structure based on strict hierarchy. As Blüher described in his autobiography, the initiation ceremony began with a salute: “Heil.” Following a script he had devised himself, Fischer asked the fourteen-year-old Blüher if he was prepared to swear his allegiance to the name of the Wandervogel as well as his obedience to the troupe leader (Fischer himself). To each question, Blüher answered in the affirmative. Although Blüher found Fischer “hard,” “domineering,” and “unpleasant,” he also admired the discipline and loyalty that Fischer inspired.5
Fischer’s leadership style was a source of conflict, however, which led to the first significant Wandervogel division in 1903. Blüher was himself the catalyst when disciplined on an excursion by another group leader for “moral transgressions,” shorthand for sexual relations with a fellow member. The leader of the outing
sent Blüher home early, and then attempted to have him ejected from the troupe. Fischer, who claimed to exercise superior authority, shielded Blüher and prevented his expulsion. In reaction to Fischer’s imperiousness, a splinter group formed in 1904, the catalyst for the so-called “Führer controversy,” creating a division between the Steglitz Wandervogel and the Alt-Wandervogel, the group to which Fischer and Blüher adhered. Fischer’s temperament led to renewed conflict, and in 1906 he was finally forced out of this group as well.6
In 1907 Blüher received his Gymnasium diploma and began studying classical philology, matriculating first at the University of Basel and then transferring to the University of Berlin. He spent a total of sixteen semesters pursuing a doctorate, and finally dropped his studies in 1915 without receiving the degree. Because of color blindness, Blüher was exempted from military service, and he spent the remainder of the war providing nursing care. Though nominally a student in Berlin, Blüher was much more a student of the city. It was during this period that he first encountered the fledgling homosexual rights movement with its masculinist and sexological factions. He also spent his student years reading the most recent psychiatric literature—scholarship that had not yet penetrated the conservative halls of the German academy—assimilating these to help make sense of his personal experience. Blüher was also an attentive observer of the Eulenburg scandal and the court trials of Moltke, Harden, Bülow, and Brand. Indeed, the homoeroticism of the Liebenberg Roundtable provided what Blüher considered a clear manifestation of the Männerbund.7
In 1906 the wealthy estate owner Wilhelm Jansen replaced Karl Fischer as director of the Alt-Wandervogel, and it was Jansen who created the first direct connection between the homosexual rights movement and the youth organization. A member of Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, Jansen was listed on SHC newsletters as business manager and contact person for western Germany. Jansen’s estate (Rittergut) was in Hessen, and he was responsible for organizing SHC events in Frankfurt. Jansen was also affiliated with Adolf Brand and his organization the Community of the Special (CoS). In 1905 Jansen encountered the Alt-Wandervogel by accident and was intrigued to learn more about it. Once involved, he became an aggressive apostle for the Wandervogel organization and helped to found many affiliated clubs in western Germany.8
Jansen introduced Blüher in 1907 to Benedict Friedlaender, who represented, along with Brand, the masculinist faction of Berlin’s homosexual rights community. Just months before making the young Blüher’s acquaintance, in December 1906, Friedlaender had broken openly with Hirschfeld and initiated the Secession movement out of the SHC. Friedlaender was at that point dying of colon cancer, and Blüher visited him regularly until his death in June 1908. This provided Blüher with his introduction to Friedlaender’s Renaissance des Eros, which he was able to discuss at length with the author. The work had become an inspiration for the masculinists and promoted the notion of the hyper-virile homosexual as an agent of cultural innovation and political leadership.9
Blüher was drawn to Jansen, and likewise to Friedlaender (and his theories), because they helped him to sort out and make sense of his own homoerotic feelings. And like Jansen, Friedlaender provided a positive role model of a same-sex-loving man. Since adolescence, Blüher had been sexually involved with other boys, experiences he chronicled with surprising candor in his writings. His affairs began at the Steglitz Gymnasium, where Blüher’s classmates were sexually active, primarily with one another. “It was a matter of principle that no one touched a prepubescent boy,” Blüher explained. “But among those of the same age, erotic relationships were very passionate; we were seized with a fully aroused Eros which swept through us in the darkness.”10 As a fifteen-year-old, Blüher described falling in love with another member of his Wandervogel troupe: “As he stood in front of me, I saw suddenly how beautiful he was, and from that moment forward, I was in flames. I managed to ignite him and break through all of his barriers; he was too princely a human being not to be free to do whatever he pleased, but generally it was the case that I was always attempting to lure him. He was never submerged in the bath of Eros.”11 Blüher had passionate affairs with other boys or young men at least into his very early twenties, though some of his crushes were clearly unrequited.12
He first pursued romantic relationships with women in 1908. In a letter to his parents just before publication of his Wandervogel history in 1912, Blüher described his ascendant heterosexuality as the work of fate. “I have a well-founded belief that it was only a question of chance that weighted the scale to fall on this side [the side of heterosexuality],” he wrote; “for years I had had bad luck in the direction of inversion [homosexuality], and much better luck in that of normalcy, and because the one requires a complete effort, there is not much left for the other. And so the other goes to sleep. The experiment to see if I could awake it again would have cost me too much. In the conditions in which I now live, it is no longer possible.”13
Blüher never tells us what he believed it might have “cost” him to remain “inverted,” though his language suggests fear of both the potential legal persecution and the social discrimination suffered by many homosexuals. In the same letter to his parents, Blüher explained further that his girlfriend, Louise, whom he married soon after, had “had a strong, moderating influence, though it was hardly a passionate relationship.”14
Certainly the fate of Wilhelm Jansen must have been prominent in Blüher’s mind. In 1908 Jansen was demoted as the executive director of the Alt-Wandervogel, and two years later he was excluded entirely from the organization. After succeeding Fischer in 1906, Jansen had turned his manor house in western Germany into a retreat for Wandervogel members. Jansen was also an adherent of the German life reform movement and an avid nudist; in 1907 he built a swimming pool and bathhouse for nude sunbathing, and he also erected a professional photography studio specifically for nude photography. Unguarded about his sexuality, Jansen experienced significant scrutiny throughout his short tenure as the Alt-Wandervogel director. Rumors swirled about his affairs with individual members, confirmed in his correspondence with Blüher.15 In March 1908 a newspaper article claimed that “a certain Jansen had organized a club of pederasts (Päderastenclub) made up of Latin school boys.”16
This created much unwanted publicity for the youth movement, which was especially sensitive to charges of homosexual conduct following the Eulenburg scandal. As the Alt-Wandervogel organization expanded, it faced not only external pressure but also the scrutiny of new members, or their fathers, who manned the Parents’ Council. In a thoroughgoing purge of troupe leaders suspected of “inversion,” Jansen was finally forced to sever his affiliation completely in 1910. He was not so easily defeated, however, and he formed a third organization, the Jung-Wandervogel, in 1911. Surviving until 1933, this group quickly gained a reputation for tolerating homosexuals, although relationships between adult leaders and boys were forbidden.17
Drawing on personal experience, Blüher published a three-volume history of the Wandervogel movement in 1912. The study garnered significant attention: both Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud (in Vienna) were intrigued by Blüher’s synthesis; initially the official Wandervogel organization promoted the first two volumes of his study for its fulsome endorsement of their own goals and ideals. The third volume, as we will see, proved to be more problematic. With his autobiographical account, Blüher created a foundation myth for the Alt-Wandervogel by emphasizing the leadership principle and his central role in its realization. The role of the Führer—the leadership principle—in Blüher’s retelling, became a central feature not only of the Wandervogel organization but also of the Männerbund. In Blüher’s account, both the Führer principle—embodied by Fischer—and the same-sex eroticism of male associations were present in the older, purer Alt-Wandervogel group. In this fashion Blüher used personal experiences to fashion central features of his Männerbund sociology.
Thus the three volumes of Blüher’s Wandervogel
history were based on his personal experience and the fractious internal politics of the youth movement. But Blüher also drew heavily from a recent, influential work, Altersklassen und Männerbünde (Age groups and male associations), which he encountered through his friendship with Benedict Friedlaender. The author of Altersklassen, Heinrich Schurtz (1863–1903), had completed a doctorate in geography at the University of Leipzig before accepting a position at the Museum of Natural History in Bremen. Published in 1902, his work was based on more than a decade of careful synthesis of ethnographic studies of the non-Western world. One of the first systematic theorists of the Männerbund, Schurtz argued against earlier anthropological claims that primitive human society had been matriarchal. (One example of such a work was Friedrich Engels’s Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State, published in 1884.) Generalizing from the “primitive” indigenous cultures of Africa, Asia, the southwest Pacific, and the Americas, Schurtz claimed to have identified a dramatically different origin of human society, namely the Männerbund.
For Schurtz, the battle of the sexes was a given, and it reflected “the nearly unbridgeable opposition” between men and women.18 The age-old conflict did not simply pit man against woman, however, but, rather, contrasted the masculine Männerbund with the “maternal” institution of the family. This polarity helped to cement the incommensurability of the sexes. It also explained the inherent superiority of men, and the fundamentally masculine engine of all human culture and social evolution. According to Schurtz, the woman was tied to the family through her sexual drives. In contrast, the man experienced an asexual “social drive” that made him a “facilitator” of the growth of “nearly all higher social development.”19