Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex

by Robert Deam Tobin

In Peripheral Desires , Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe—and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna.

In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient.

As Germany—and German-speaking Europe—became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality.

328 pages, Hardcover

First published October 9, 2015

About the author

Robert Deam Tobin is Henry J. Leir Chair in Language, Literature and Culture at Clark University.

Reviews

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Queer Literacy, Nation, and (Zeit)geist: German speaking people writing and reading queer words and worlds


At the end of his book in an epilogue describing late 20th century American discourse about homosexuality and the searches for its origins, Tobin connects this with the content of his book exploring the German articulations of same-sex desire, writing:

"This brief overview of contemporary discussions about sexuality... on the United States... must remain cursory and speculative. Rather than reaching a definitive conclusion, it suggests how debates that emerged in nineteenth-century German-speaking central Europe still structure discussions today. On the one hand, a modern, minoritizing, biologically based, liberal model of sexual orientation stands as a category comparable to gender and race. On the other hand, a model of a widespread, fluid, classically oriented, majoritizing, culturally based, aesthetically focused desire for members of one's own sex persists. Both models echo the writings of political activists, medical, psychiatriatric, sexological, and psychoanalytic scientists, and literary authors of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German-speaking central Europe, many of whom may seem peripheral to the twenty-first century public, but whose thinking has helped construct the architecture of our most intimate desires" (p. 248-9).

In this book Tobin looks at the development of thought, rhetoric, science and literature surrounding same-sex desire in the German speaking world from the beginning of the 19th century through the Weimar era. In his survey, Tobin shows that present day investigations and conceptions aren't as far-removed from the past as they're made to seem, many of the people in the 19th century having their beliefs reproduced in the ideas and investigations of those in the 21st century, from inversion inclined amateur and expert writers and sexologists, to masculinist writers and men who had fascist and anti-semitic tendencies.

The chapters of the book follow a path that is symphonic, in a way, with its movements and resonance. Starting with a preface and introduction, Tobin situates the mid-19th century ideas of inversion, urningism, and homosexuality. In the introduction and after, he points out an original sin of the History of Sexuality, the inaccurate queer theoretical radiocarbon dating that dated 'modern' ideas of sexual identity (particularly 'homosexuality') as something novel invented in part with a psychiatric article from 1870, per Foucault (or 1869 if you correctly cite the article of Westphal that Foucault cites (or May 6th, 1868 if you cite Kertbeny's letter to Ulrichs, the first documented use of the word homosexual (Tobin, p. 15; p. 202 of Pretsell's Correspondance of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs))). Going against the grain of such theorists, Tobin traces the history of sexuality back further than Foucault did (the late great French theorist not giving due to Ulrichs or Karl Maria Kertbeny, both of whom were cited in Westphal (p. 22)). In the first chapter Tobin looks at the work of Heinrich Hössli, a Swiss hatter and writer who wrote a 2 volume "apology for male-male live of the 1830s, called Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, ihre Beziehung zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eors: The Male Love of the Greeks, Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature, and Legislation of All Times)" (p. 27) and other early German writers and thinkers of sexuality. Tobin points out to us that "the writings of... Hössli emerge at the intersection of a variety of geographically and chronologically determined ideas of language, biology, race, gender, and social and political change" (p. 27) which is true also of the other discourses, writings, and people Tobin examines in this book.

After the first chapter, which introduces the opposing and parallel connections queer emancipationists, writers and others made between queers and ancient Greeks on the one hand, and queers and Jewish people on the other, Tobin delves further into the dialectic, along with other queer ideas and philosophy influenced by nationalism, homonormativity, and racial understandings of Jewishness in the 1800s and early 1900s.

On the racial influence on the discourse of queerness, Tobin notes that "according to Braunschweig," a German writer influenced by racial ideology, "the spread of homosexuality is a direct threat to the racial superiority of the Volk" (p. 87); homosexuality is easily linked here as it is in other times to enemies of the people/State, whether these enemies be witches in the middle ages, Jewish people in the long 19th century and through World War II, or communists in the McCarthyist 50s US. This racialization led to an attempted essentialization that misrepresented and overrepresented certain aspects of same sex desire and attributes of people who felt and acted on it. Following Ruth Wilson Gilmore's idea of racialization as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies" (Wilson-Gilmore, p. 107) which makes use of essentializing markers of difference, we can see how this fits with the political racialization of queer (and trans) people under the Nazis, the AIDS Crisis of the 80s and 90s, and during other times.

Throughout the book there are ideas of sexuality that are interesting historical alternatives to today's understandings of strictly defined orientations and genders:

In the first chapter, Tobin notes the ideas expressed by writers like Hössli and others of sexuality as a type of drive, Bildung (formation, development, among other meanings), or natural thing. Countering the fixation of psychiatrists and people like Ulrichs and Hirschfeld who believed same-sex desire involved inherent inversion, whether psychic or biological, the masculinists took to Nietzschean, yet often anti-semitic and misogynist, views of male-male desire that described it as an elevated expression of homosocial bonds that structured society. One such writer, Benedict Friedlander, stated that "friendship is precisely the love between members of the same sex" (p. 67).

In a short yet fascinating examination of Austria-Hungary, Tobin reveals intriguing developments in queer identities and experiences that resulted from Austro-Hungarian nationalism and culture. With "assertion of national and ethnic rights," the General Rights of people in Austria-Hungary included a statement that "All national races (Volksstämme) of the state have equal rights and every national race has an inviolable right to the protection and fostering of nationality and language" (p. 115). This sense of pluralism caused Karl Maria Kertbeny, a notable homosexual, writer, and Hungarian nationalist, to "regard homosexuality as analogous to a racial category. [Kertbeny] report[ed] to [Gustav] Jäger that he has a 'sharp eye for questions of race' (p. 126)

Elaborating further and in detail that makes one think about the idea of Queer Nation and queer nationalisms, and imagined communities (in this case, queer Magyar nationalism (who would've imagined)), Tobin writes:

"It is important to note here that although Kertbeny uses a vocabulary of race to make his point, this race is primarily based on culture—language, literature, poetry. Even if Kertbeny regards homosexuality as a race (or "nationality" in Austro-Hungarian parlance), that race is one that he and others can join through a shared cultural upbringing. It is a malleable identity that literature and culture can mold. For Kertbeny, as well as for many Hungarian nationalists, language, literature, and culture are the most important bearers of national identity. As a translator, he argues vigorously for "the consistent international representation of the intellectual interests of the Hungarian nation," including a foreign ministry that would represent the "national literary interests" to the outside world. Only in literature can one transmit national character: "every smaller language and literature must develop at home absolutely nationally, but must look for external mediation with the general culture via one of the languages of world culture." Because of the belief in the possibilities of acquiring a Magyar identity through language and culture, the Hungarian model avoids the essentializing and pathologizing features of Ulrichs's model. If this link between Hungarians and homosexuals did not leave many explicit traces in the literature, the hope for an identity based on culure and Bildung, rather than pure biology, is quite deeply engrained in many aspects of European thought and on some level it affected many of the early homosexual emancipation activists" (p. 126).

I found this book really eye-opening and interesting, especially the questions and thoughts I developed based on his findings: Is same-sex desire an oral language that some writers, theorists and sexologists prescribed the grammar and fixed and fit to print? And what if queerness, or queer ways of being and making meaning are cultures, languages, and nationalisms in and of themselves? Cultures (systems of meaning making), languages with and without developed print (fixed) forms from previous oral traditions, that can codify in ways to conform with nationalists' ideas of their imagined communities and beliefs of what a queer Nation might be, conforming to the zeitgeist and preponderant ideas of ethnicity and culture, antiquarian or nationalist, cosmopolitan or fascist, with resistant ungovernable and imprescriptible queerness always a possibility and experience outside whatever norm it finds itself, whether cisheterosexist or homonormative.

If queerness can be considered a language of sorts, or perhaps pidgins and creoles people from different places come together and create, those who seek to find a singular system to explain or circumscribe the polysemy and polyphony of queerness may be likened to the Académie Française, out of touch defendants of the systematized French representing prescriptive grammar that fails to describe the evolved spoken and symbolic language and forms developed, sticking to a nationalist, exclusionary orthography of life; the queer lived experiences of the actual people of France and la Francophonie, however little recorded, would represent the plurality of languages and cultures actually present.