Schurtz’s antifeminism was a common, if unfortunate, reaction to rapid cultural and economic change in the early twentieth century. Not only in Germany but throughout the Western world, industrialization and urbanization had both increased and worsened the life chances and living standards of men and women alike. Factory and sweatshop labor gave employment to rural men and women, drawing a large pool of workers to burgeoning urban centers. But miserable working conditions and poor wages were a source of poverty and extreme degradation. Some women gained new educational opportunities, however, and gradually, by the end of the nineteenth century, began to enter certain white-collar employments—clerking, stenography, shop sales—that had previously been the exclusive domain of men. As differences between the opportunities available to men and women were (very) slowly eroded, social class gained greater significance as the defining feature of modern German society. One of the responses to this dramatic shift, the theory of the Männerbund, was thus born of a profound misogyny.20
The agitation for women’s suffrage was also a feature of the Western political landscape by 1900. Women achieved the vote in Germany under the Weimar constitution in 1919, after decades of piecemeal reform. Some girls were allowed to attend German Latin schools beginning in the 1890s, and Prussian universities opened their doors to women in 1908. The Social Democratic Party (SPD)—Germany’s largest political party—had an explicit platform plank in support of women’s suffrage. In the years before 1914, the SPD’s electoral successes created a genuine fear among organized antifeminist groups that a socialist government would enfranchise women.21
Conflicts about the status of German women resonated within the youth movement, as well. In 1907 a debate erupted on whether or not to admit girls. The oldest troupe in Steglitz had never admitted girls nor allowed the participation of adult women. Like many of the Wandervogel leaders, Blüher’s patron and troupe master Karl Fischer was an outspoken misogynist. The all-male Wandervogel gained the attention of German feminists, however, and in 1905 the Berlin author and philosopher Marie Luise Becker petitioned the Alt-Wandervogel governing council to allow girls to join. Her request was summarily rejected. Though short-lived, the Bund der Wanderschwestern (Association of Hiking Sisters) was organized in 1905. Many others agitated, however, to gain girls’ admission to one of the two major organizations. At this point, of course, there were practically no mixed-gender associations, regardless of class or age. Middle-class boys and girls were almost always segregated; certainly they never mingled socially without chaperones. Liberals within the youth movement argued not only for girls’ rights but also for the benefits of mixed-gender socialization. Conservative opponents claimed that the Wandervogel boys would lose the unique opportunity of masculine development if no longer allowed to interact in an all-male environment. It was believed that “mixed hiking” (Gemischtwandern) also threatened to emasculate Wandervogel boys. By 1911 the Steglitz Wandervogel organization began to sponsor girls’ clubs, and the Alt-Wandervogel soon followed suit, though the Neu-Wandervogel organization sponsored boys’ clubs exclusively. Not until after 1918, however, did the Steglitz Wandervogel allow activities in which both boys and girls could participate.
For Blüher, the social interaction of boys and girls was nonsensical and a positive threat to the Männerbund. Like Schurtz and other contemporary misogynists, Blüher believed that men and women were profoundly different and that masculine characteristics were intrinsically superior to femininity. Blüher had an additional reason to segregate boys and girls, of course, and that was his theory of the role of overt homosexuality in the forging of male associations. While Schurtz described sexuality as a largely feminine characteristic confined to the family and biological reproduction, Blüher conceived the homoerotic Männerbund as a way to accommodate his own homosexuality. He effectively sexualized Schurtz’s “social drive” to explain homoeroticism as the binding and creative force of male associations.22
The third volume of Blüher’s Wandervogel history, Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen: Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis der sexuellen Inversion (The German Wandervogel movement as an erotic phenomenon: A contribution to the discovery of sexual inversion), developed the thesis that homoeroticism and even explicit homosexuality were fundamental and natural features of the youth movement, and by extension, of the Männerbund. The volume was condemned by the Wandervogel board and quickly drew ire from conservative groups. It also made Blüher’s reputation as a cultural radical. The reaction to Blüher’s audacious claim, it appears, was an important turning point in his intellectual trajectory. Despite the denunciation by former allies, Blüher remained committed to the phenomenon of homoeroticism as an explanatory factor of the Männerbund and, as such, a supporter of homosexual rights. The condemnation of right-wing critics, which often included character assassination, drove Blüher to declare his own sexual “normalcy,” however, and in 1914 he married his girlfriend, Louise, the first of his two wives. Right-wing invective also helped to shape Blüher’s theoretical model, which emphasized an implicit patriarchal misogyny and, increasingly, racialist anti-Semitism.23
In 1917 and 1919, Blüher published the first two volumes of Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (The role of eroticism in masculine society), which presented his full-blown sociology of state formation. In this work it was the hierarchical German Männerbund—still homoerotic—that claimed responsibility for the origin and growth of not only the state but also world culture. The family, the domain of femininity, was neither a creative force nor even a complement to the Männerbund, but rather its rival, with the single function of human procreation. Germany’s Jewish minority, in Blüher’s analysis, was a foreign and destructive graft on an otherwise vibrant organism that could best be managed with the Zionist-inspired outmigration envisioned by Theodor Herzl.
Although Blüher made anti-Semitism a central feature of his Männerbund formulation, this did not prevent him from reading and assimilating the sexology and psychiatry of the Jewish doctors Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud.24 Following both Hirschfeld and Freud, Blüher believed in a sexuality continuum that ranged from the absolute heterosexual to the complete homosexual. In his account of the “third sex,” Hirschfeld argued that there were specific physical attributes of male and female homosexuals, though he later changed his emphasis to psychological characteristics. It was this theory that informed Hirschfeld’s diagnosis of Kuno von Moltke as a “homosexual” in the first Moltke-Harden trial. Recall that although Moltke might never have engaged in homosexual practices, according to Hirschfeld, he could still be classified an “unconscious homosexual,” whose telltale signs could be read like a book, at least by a trained expert such as Hirschfeld. Despite his focus on the effeminate male homosexual, Hirschfeld actually proposed a nearly infinite number of natural variations, developing a complicated set of physical and psychological markers that allowed for some forty-three million potential combinations. Most famously, Hirschfeld claimed that sexuality or a particular sexual constitution was inborn and established at birth.
In contrast, Freud argued that all infants were fundamentally pansexual (or polymorphous perverse). With his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905)—another text that Benedict Friedlaender introduced to Blüher—Freud laid out a psychodynamic explanation that emphasized infant and childhood development. The polymorphous perversion of the infant, in Freud’s view, was molded through parental relationships and channeled into a normative heterosexuality. The objective in Freud’s model, as any good Darwinian would understand, was adult heterosexual coitus, necessary for procreation and social reproduction. For Freud, then, homosexuality reflected a misstep in this psychodynamic process, since sex between two men (or between two women) was not (re)productive. Freud discounted the notion that same-sex erotic desire was somehow hardwired from birth, and he also rejected the emancipatory project of Hirschfeld. Legal reform was not a priority for Freud, since he considered homosexual desire to
be fundamentally pathological.
Blüher drew opportunistically from both thinkers. He embraced Freud’s theory of an innate bisexuality, which described, for Blüher, the orientation of a vast majority. Of course, this confirmed Blüher’s own experience and identity as an adolescent who loved men but eventually married women. Bisexuality also conformed to the theory and actual sexual practice of most of the masculinists, including Friedlaender and Adolf Brand, both of whom had married. Blüher made an exception to Freud’s theory of bisexuality with his notion of the Männerheld, a word that defies easy translation but might be defined as a super-virile homosexual who eschews all contact with women and loves men exclusively. This reflected the influence of Friedlaender and was modeled on historical military figures, such as Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Blüher parted company with Freud more significantly in his embrace of Hirschfeld’s biological determinism. Here Blüher endorsed Hirschfeld’s activism and advocacy for legal reform, and supported—unlike Freud—the abolition of anti-sodomy statutes, in both Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Blüher also rejected any application of degeneration theory for explaining homosexual behavior. Homoeroticism, including the exclusive homosexuality of the Männerheld, or the super-virile homosexual, was not abnormal and was, moreover, an absolute and essential feature of any successful civilization. The Führer of a given Männerbund engaged in creative cultural labor. Blüher completely rejected Freud’s implicit assessment of homosexuality as the result of a failed psychodynamic development. Homosexuality for Blüher, unlike for Freud, was a positive and absolute good.
But Blüher not only read and applied the theories advanced by Hirschfeld and Freud. He also made personal contact with both men, and used their professional reputations to further his own career. The publication of the first two volumes of Wandervogel history garnered the attention and positive notice of Hirschfeld and the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Blüher was invited to attend SHC meetings, which he did, and he also lectured to the group on the Wandervogel phenomenon. In a personal letter, Berlin sexologist Iwan Bloch, a staunch supporter of Hirschfeld and member of the SHC, wrote Blüher that his Wandervogel study was “a commendable contribution to the research on the problem of homosexuality.”25 Hirschfeld himself wrote the laudatory introduction to the third volume of Blüher’s Wandervogel history. Of course, Blüher’s earlier friendships with Jansen and Friedlaender had helped him to secure the support of the masculinist wing of the homosexual rights movement. The positive reception of his Wandervogel history allowed him, in turn, to ingratiate himself with the sexological faction, namely Hirschfeld and the SHC.
Blüher also initiated a brief correspondence with Freud beginning in 1910. Although Freud never extended patronage, he was intrigued by Blüher’s Wandervogel history and offered the young scholar encouraging advice.26 Freud even appears to have drawn inspiration from Blüher’s work for his 1912–13 publication Totem and Taboo, one of his most popular studies. Addressing the cultural psychology of primitive communities and the origins of social organization, Freud adopted the Männerbund—using the term Männerverbände, or “male associations”—as the primal form of social organization. In Freud’s theory, the tribal leader and original patriarch excluded his sons to eliminate their sexual competition. The exiled offspring then formed the “brother clan,” assassinated the patriarch, and established a new, more egalitarian society. The “brother clan,” in Freud’s conception, was an all-male society created through the oedipal slaying of the father, which resulted in the invention of religion, morality, society, and art. Although Freud refused to sign the SHC petition for homosexual emancipation, he was clearly unable to resist the intellectual allure of the Männerbund.
The homoerotic Männerbund captured the attention of Germany’s leading scientists of sexuality, emboldening Blüher to elaborate on his theory. In 1913 he published a lengthy three-part study, “The Three Models of Homosexuality,” in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch. Hewing to his belief in a near-universal bisexuality, Blüher argued that sexual “inversion” was a pervasive phenomenon and that nearly all men experienced same-sex erotic desire. The Männerheld was ascribed a special status, defined by an exclusive and congenital homosexual orientation. Blüher also created a third category for effeminate homosexuals, who lacked the attributes of true masculinity. Only this category, in Blüher’s assessment, represented an aberration.27
Much of Blüher’s analysis undermined Hirschfeld’s own theories—so much so that one is astonished that Hirschfeld published the essay. Hirschfeld did take the liberty of editing Blüher’s title, however, exchanging the word “Inversion” with “Homosexuality” and editing out several pages. Blüher still embraced Hirschfeld’s biological determinism and his emancipatory project. But Blüher’s characterization of the effete homosexual as an aberration of nature was highly insulting to Hirschfeld. Blüher also blurred Hirschfeld’s all-important distinction between friendship and erotic love. For Blüher, there existed a seamless continuum from one to the other. Hirschfeld maintained, in contrast, that heterosexual men could cultivate close and even affectionate friendships with other men that never aroused sensual desire.28 In response to Hirschfeld’s edits, Blüher published his piece in its entirety with the Spohr Verlag as a seventy-nine-page pamphlet. The word “homosexual” connoted a medical condition or illness, in Blüher’s mind, so he restored the title to its original, “The Three Models of Inversion.”29
This was Blüher’s final collaboration with Hirschfeld and the SHC, and they never had any significant interaction again. And while Blüher’s theories clashed powerfully with those of Hirschfeld, his endorsement of homoeroticism was too extreme for Freud. Blüher’s alienation from both men, however, was also the result of his growing anti-Semitism.
Anti-Semitism was Blüher’s defensive response to the criticism he received from the Wandervogel establishment for the third volume of his study. In 1913 Dr. H. Albrecht, a leading member of one of the national Wandervogel umbrella organizations, reviewed Blüher’s three volumes and described his theories as “perverse,” “monstrous,” and “sick.” Responding to the third volume, subtitled “Erotic Phenomenon,” Albrecht claimed that Blüher had made a sexual orientation (namely, homosexuality) that “was pathological, according to the generally accepted opinion of contemporary social morality,” the basis of the youth movement. “The sexually normal,” as Albrecht understood Blüher’s claim, had no role to play, and instead only the inverts could be true “commanders of youth.” Albrecht also faulted Blüher for sending three thousand “sensational, colored brochures” advertising his Wandervogel study to all of the Prussian school directors.30
The national Wandervogel umbrella association responded to Blüher’s advertisement with its own letter, addressed to “All School Directors.” The association rebuked Blüher for his “odd views” and claimed dishonestly that the Alt-Wandervogel directorate had expelled him years earlier. The letter also claimed that they had already removed anyone who “glorified homosexual inclinations.”31 The Alt-Wandervogel directorate, which had excluded Wilhelm Jansen in 1910, responded similarly with its own missive announcing its intention to expel any remaining homosexuals from its ranks and promising that it had already banned Blüher’s publications. Only the “homo”-friendly Jung-Wandervogel umbrella committee did not attempt to discredit Blüher. Among the “respectable” Wandervogel groups, however, it was feared that school officials might ban all youth groups as “pederasts’ clubs.”32 And since Blüher’s three volumes were widely publicized, the damage had potentially been done.
As Blüher’s study gained circulation, and notoriety, the furor within the youth movement exploded. Increasingly, Blüher was not only accused of being a homosexual but also labeled “un-German,” “mixed-race,” “Jewish,” or “half-Jewish.” These attacks on Blüher coincided with an anti-Semitic radicalization of the youth movement. In June 1913 the Berliner Tageblatt reported an incident in the Saxon town of Zit
tau where a Jewish girl was expelled from the local Wandervogel chapter because she was not considered “German.” The article complained that any “German Jew” who otherwise enjoyed all the rights of German citizenship could be rejected as not a “real German” by the Wandervogel. The newspaper also noted that the girl’s father and grandfather had both performed military service in the German army.33
The “Zittau event” was a catalyst for a broad discussion of the “Jewish question” within the youth movement. The major Wandervogel publication Wandervogelführerzeitung (The journal of Wandervogel leadership) devoted its October edition to the relationship between “Jewry” and the Wandervogel movement. Except for one, every contribution to the special issue recommended that Jews be excluded. Typical was an article by the young engineer Dankwart Gerlach, who had joined as a fourteen-year-old in 1904 and now served as a group leader. Gerlach opined,
The justification that the Wandervogel is a German movement hits the nail on the head. It is unwise, of course, to be vehemently anti-Semitic, since that would incite the daily press like a mob at our throat…. I know many Jews of different ages in the Wandervogel, and I have yet to find one who has internalized the Wandervogel ethos…. Rather than force an instinctively anti-Semitic German youth to accompany a Jew on an excursion, is it not better perhaps to say to the Jews: we get along better without you, stay away!?34
Gerlach’s unabashed bigotry was representative, and the so-called “Jewish issue” of the Wandervogelführerzeitung turned a subtle and implicit anti-Semitism into an explicit, though informal, policy. Nationwide by 1914 most German-Jewish youth in the Wandervogel had left the organization.35
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