Mackay’s sports novel Der Schwimmer (The Swimmer) appeared in 1901. (A “Centenary Edition” English translation was published by Xlibris in 2001.) He was at the height of his literary power. But the death of his beloved mother the following year brought on a depression from which he only recovered by dedicating himself to a new cause. Using the pseudonym “Sagitta” (Latin for “arrow”), he began a literary campaign in 1905 for the acceptance of man-boy love—Mackay himself was attracted to boys 14—17 years old. He later said of his works under that name: “I was Sagitta. I wrote those books in the years in which my artistic strength was believed to have died out.” In fact, he never regained the literary esteem that he had earlier enjoyed under his real name. The edition of his collected works in eight volumes in 1911 contained little that was new—two short stories and a few poems—and drew little attention from the literary establishment, especially since he published it himself. Following World War I Der Freiheitsucher (the Freedomseeker) appeared in 1920, but in contrast to the attention given his earlier anarchist work, it was largely ignored. Mackay’s mother had generously supported him and left him enough to live on the rest of his life, so that he was not dependant on the sale of his books, but the runaway inflation of 1923 wiped out the value of the lifetime annuity he had purchased. After that he wrote for money, but never regained the attention of the reading public, so that he died in Berlin in relative poverty on 16 May 1933, shortly after the Nazis came to power.
Mackay, who had been living in Berlin since 1892, first appeared as Sagitta with five poems in the journal Der Eigene in 1905. In his effort to keep his identity secret, he even had the poems sent to the editor in the handwriting of his friend the Dresden actress Luise Firle (1865—1942; Mackay may have met her when she was appearing on the Berlin stage before she moved to the Dresden State Theatre in 1896). Rejecting as derogatory all the names previously used for his love, he called it the “nameless love.”
Six “Books of the Nameless Love” were planned, to be sold by subscription, two each year. But after the first two were published in 1906, objections were raised that led to a long court battle that ended only in 1909. It is fortunate that Mackay was able to keep his identity as Sagitta secret, for otherwise he would probably have gone to prison. But the result was bad enough: The offending “obscene writings” were ordered destroyed and the publisher was fined and sentenced to pay court costs—all paid by Mackay, of course. He reported the result to his American friend Benjamin R. Tucker on 12 October 1909: “That means, that everything, I did as Sagitta, is absolutely destroyed and stamped out. The work of years is lost and, besides, it costs me about 6300 Marks loss” (in John Henry Mackay: Autobiographical Writings, Xlibris 2001).
In fact, Mackay persevered and was able to publish a complete edition of the Books of the Nameless Love in 1913, in which he also included a history of his fight as Sagitta. The title page gives the place of publication as Paris, but it was prepared by him in Berlin and sold by him underground. In a further irony, the first two books were not destroyed, but were kept in the publisher’s warehouse as “confiscated”—and were forgotten. Following the revolution of 1919, Mackay was able to retrieve and sell them. Five years later he published a new edition—in a handier format, as requested by friends in the Wandervogel movement—and, in the freer atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, sold it openly. But the “window of opportunity” in 1924 was brief: What was impossible ten years earlier was just as impossible ten years later, for all the writings of Sagitta were put on the Nazi list of forbidden books.
Although Mackay’s name was on the first published list of signatories of the petition for revision of the German anti-homosexual law § 175 (in Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1 [1899]; Mackay’s name is on page 256), the petition circulated by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee directed by Magnus Hirschfeld, Mackay soon came to see the limitation of that effort, especially with regard to his own fight for the right of men and boys to love one another. In “The History of a Fight for the Nameless Love” in the 1913 edition of the Books of the Nameless Love (in English in Fenny Skaller and Other Prose Writings from the Books of the Nameless Love, Southernwood Press, Amsterdam, 1988) he wrote: “My fight is ended. But I cannot take my leave from a cause to which I have given the best years of my life without having a word yet for its fate in the near future. Mistakes and errors have been made that must absolutely be avoided. Two above all.” The first mistake was that of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of
Self-Owners), the group organized around the journal Der Eigene. Despite his closeness personally to several members of this group, Mackay had sharp criticism of them:
“In a reaction to a persecution that had increased until it was unbearable, it has been sought to represent this love as special, as ‘nobler and better.’ It is not. This love is a love like any other love, not better, but also not worse, and, if it is truly love, results in blessings as rich as any love. The fight for it should never degenerate into a fight against another, for every love is entitled to its nature and the same source of life nourishes all. And from similar, often only too understandable feelings, it was sought to promote the freedom of man’s love at woman’s expense. This, too, is an error. However false the position of the other sex (in all classes) still is today—to prevent and to deny that sex its possibility of developing does not mean making friends out of enemies, but rather making the enemies of today into the implacable enemies of tomorrow and forever, and it is above all a complete misunderstanding of the great law of the future. This law is called freedom. Freedom includes all and excludes none.”
But Mackay’s strongest words were directed to the Scientific Humanitarian Committee:
“Finally, however, a mistake has been made that, in my eyes, is more disastrous than all the others. This love, persecuted by judges and cursed by priests, has fled to the medical doctors as if it were a sickness that could be cured by them. But it is not a sickness. Doctors have as little to look for and examine here as judges, and those who have accepted it as a sickness are mistaken if they believe they can free it from the clutches of power by making a pact with this power. This—making a pact—they are doing, and by doing it they seek to save some at the expense of others. Knowing well how very much ‘public opinion’ (whose influence above all appears to them so important) opposes precisely the love of the older man for the younger of his sex, since the thoughtless always are able to see here only ‘seduction’ while they are more and more inclined to the thought of a ‘legalization of love between adults,’ these dangerous helpers consent to, yes, advocate, a law that legalizes the one while it condemns the other. And this they do, who can claim for themselves no excuse of ignorance and bias, but rather know, and know precisely, that here not the age but rather the maturity alone can be decisive, and who know and teach the inborn nature, the inevitability, and the immutability of this love for the same sex as a scientifically grounded fact!
“Is this their science? Then I shudder at it and them, and the quicker and more explicitly a clean-cut separation takes place here, the better—for them and for us!”
In a foreword to the 1924 edition of the Books of the Nameless Love Mackay once again complained of the latter group:
“For it has been shown again in these years [since the first edition] that this love has to look for its worst enemies precisely among those not outside, but within its own camp. Again those who call themselves ‘leaders’ in this fight, and as such label themselves as responsible, have publicly advocated, in one of their ridiculous and degrading petitions to the currently ruling powers, an ‘age of consent’—not in the case of a child, but rather for the mature boy and youth!—and with it the prosecution and punishment of those who they, like no others, know are exactly as innocent as themselves. Once again those who love a higher age have thus sought to save themselves at the expense of the comrades-in-destiny of their time; a betrayal of the cause more harmful in its intentions and more terrible in its results
cannot be imagined. Once again here, as the only opportunity offered to me, just as before in the history of my fight, I would never be able to forgive myself for not having branded it as such.”
I have quoted the above statements of Mackay at some length, not only to make his position quite clear, but also to point up how remarkable was the reception of his novel Der Puppenjunge only two years later—and precisely from those he criticized most severely. Already before publication of the novel the Mitteilungen des Wissenschaftlich-humanitaren Komitees (Communications of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee) of October/November 1926 called attention to it: “With this seventh in the series of his ‘Books of the Nameless Love’ Sagitta is entering into a completely new area of international belles lettres—that of male prostitution. Once selected, possession must be taken of it with a fearless hand if the description of its marginal and nocturnal depths is to have a genuine and convincing effect. Thus, already because of its subject matter perhaps the most fascinating of his books, it will amaze, revolt, enthuse—depending on the attitude of the reader.”
Following publication of the novel, Hirschfeld himself reviewed the book in the Mitteilungen (in no. 5, January/February 1927, p. 34, where there is also an indication that the book was sold by the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.):
“This seventh book in the series of Sagitta’s works on the ‘nameless love,’ in its perfectly formed language and in its deep psychological content, is a worthy addition to its predecessors. Less so perhaps in its choice of title, but this scruple against a hitherto unliterary word disappears as soon as one reads with what mastery Sagitta even here again understands how to bring humanly closer people and their circumstances, whose existence and essence the majority stand opposite with such lack of understanding.
“In the middle point of the narrative stands the emotional connection between the young bookseller Hermann Graff, extremely finely sketched in his mixture of bitter holding back and passion (here the excursion to Potsdam deserves to be given special mention), and the teenage runaway ‘Gunther,’ who is called in his circle by the significant name ‘Chick.’ It is he from whom the book takes its title. Their experiences are played out in the well-known Berlin background: Passage—Friedrichstrasse—Tiergarten—Tauentzien—Adonis Lounge—their regular bar by the Stettiner Bahnhof—Moabit etc.; all are drawn by the brush of a genuine artist so true to life that many details come to light that ordinarily escape the superficial observer—and unfortunately even most professional observers are only superficial onlookers. But however great the admiration this ‘milieu description’ deserves, I believe we would not be doing the author and his work justice if we did not place in the foreground the misunderstood and persecuted love of the older man for the younger in its infinite tragedy, tragic not only for the lover, but also for the beloved, who does not understand its magnitude—from his upbringing, too, is unable to understand it (here the claim of his discoverer and patron Arthur Klemke, called ‘the refined Atze,’ is especially worth noting: ‘If one of them would once fall in love with me, I would really take advantage of him!’), but also tragic for humanity, which loses the value that it too could gain from this love, if its humanitarian and fostering, pedagogical and productive character would be evaluated in an unprejudiced way.
“Hermann Graff is spared nothing from the fate of a homosexual: ‘Either I am a criminal or the others are, who have made these laws and enforce them,’ he once cries out with very understandable bitterness. But Chick, too, comes back from his flight out of the home nest with clipped wings—not through his friend’s fault. It is a sign of the poverty of our time, which prefers not to hear the truth, that this book written with such beautiful humanity can only be ‘privately published’ by its author.”
Hirschfeld’s generosity is evident in this review, but especially noteworthy is his rare statement of the value of man-boy love in its “humanitarian and fostering, pedagogical and productive character.”
Here, perhaps, is the place to explain the “hitherto unliterary word” of the title of Mackay’s novel Der Puppenjunge. Not that it ever became a “literary” word: “Puppenjunge”—or, in its primary spelling, “Pupenjunge”—was a slang word for a male prostitute and its use was almost entirely confined to the early years of the twentieth century. (The more common slang word was “Strichjunge,” which is found already in Magnus Hirschfeld’s Berlins drittes Geschlecht of 1904 and is still used.) It is so defined, for example, in the standard dictionary Deutsches Worterbuch (edited by Lutz Mackensen, 10th edition, 1982), where only the spelling “Pupenjunge” is given. That this was its primary spelling is seen in Mackay’s novel, for every occurrence of the word in the text of the novel is spelled with a single-p. Only in the title is the word spelled with a double-p. The reason is this: Whereas the title suggests a derivation from “Puppe” (doll) and “Junge” (boy), the actual derivation is from “Pup” (fart). Clearly Mackay did not want to display this in the title and so chose to put the euphemized spelling there. (“Pupe”—a short form of “Pupenjunge”—was also used. It occurs once in Mackay’s novel.)
Since my English translation of the novel was meant primarily for American readers, I chose the corresponding American slang term “hustler” for the title. This term is ambiguous, but the subtitle of the book immediately told which meaning was intended—just as it immediately told the reader of Mackay’s original book that it was not about a “boy doll.” (A search of the Internet for “Puppenjunge” in November 2001 found references to this novel and a number of sites selling dolls, distinguished as Puppenjunge = boy doll or Puppenmadchen = girl doll.) Other English-speaking countries have other slang words for a male prostitute. For example, Wayne Dynes has noted in his Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of Homosexuality (New York: Gay Academic Union, 1985), under the heading “Hustler”: “In nineteenth-century England, male prostitutes were called rent or renters. In London today the term dilly boy occurs, since Picadilly Circus is a major pickup center.” Although the slang word “hustler” is currently (in the United States) giving way to the more “politically correct” term “sex worker,” I have kept the title The Hustler. (An extensive list of gay slang can be found on the Internet at: http://www.hurricane.net/
~wizard/19.html.)
We may also note the word “Pupentisch,” used by Mackay for the regular table of the hustlers at Uncle Paul’s pub. He says in the novel that the proprietor “tolerated the name.” I have given it as “Hustler Table,” but the name also suggested, of course, “farting table.”
As noted (above) by Christopher Isherwood, Mackay’s description of Berlin’s sexual underworld in the 1920s is “authentic.” How was this authenticity achieved? Mackay’s good friend Friedrich
Dobe (in a memoir written in 1944, when Dobe was sixty years old, but only published in 1987) relates at length how Mackay prepared to write the book:
“This book, in construction, in thickening and unraveling the plot, probably the most mature artistic achievement of Mackay, is at the same time one of the truest books ever written. I accompanied the author, at times also with Dr. Hartwig, in all his study trips through Berlin for it. I saw what he described and observed himself. In the course of the year 1924 we systematically visited what in the Berlin vernacular were called “queer” [schwul] bars by following the advertisements in the magazine Die Freundschaft—and indeed with such thoroughness that not a single one was left out, however difficult they often were to find. The scene with the policeman is literally true. It happened under the “Bulow curve” (the elevated in Bulowstrasse), where we were looking in vain for the Dede Restaurant; Mackay asked the policeman in his amiable fashion, and I still see today the indignant motion of his hand with which he showed us the way!
“The Adonis Lounge, which plays the principal role in this book, actually existed under another name exactly as Mackay described it. To be sure, there was also a real Adonis Lounge—if I’m not mistaken, in Berlin South in Alexandrinenstr
asse. The bar described by Mackay was actually named Marienkasino and was found in Marienstrasse, not far from the eastern end of the north side and not too far from the Friedrichstrasse Train Station. Mackay described the life there very exactly: the rooms, the old proprietor whom they called “Father” (Mackay too!), the boys—they all existed and I myself saw and recognized them repeatedly. Even the refined Atze lived and sat at a table with me. Only the principal persons of the story, Hermann Graff and his beloved, the boy Gunther, are free creations of Mackay.
“In the summer and fall of 1924 the author made no appointments: ‘You can find me as often as you wish, always from six o’clock on in the Marienkasino!’ And I followed his word as often as I could, as did Dr. Hartwig. There Mackay sat then in the back room at the head of a long, narrow table with his back against the wall and around him two, three, four, and even more boys. He ordered sausage sandwiches, cigarettes, and beer for them and let them talk, talk, talk. There was only one thing that he did not tolerate: that erotic things should be dragged in the dirt. Since the boys soon noticed that he wanted nothing further from them, they were glad to have his friendship, and the author was truly able to plumb the depths of that part of the population that frequented there. He never took notes, but only sat there among the flock of “lost sheep,” pleasantly laughing along with them, at times also consoling and helping. They, of course, had no concept of why he came, but accepted him as a welcome diversion and as a contributor of many welcome gifts. Dr. Hartwig, differently organized than Mackay, got close to individual boys that he liked and could therefore relate to the author many additions to what was heard at the open table.
The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse Page 29