As a writer, Zschokke recognizes these issues and identifies the problem of same-sex desire as at least in part a matter of language. Attempting to explain Greek love, Holmar laments that it can be called neither friendship nor love because neither of those terms apply with precision to the phenomenon he is trying to explain.12 Early in the narrative, Claudia, the wife of the king’s counselor, argues that man’s language has overlooked many nuances of love that a woman would have identified: “Man invented language, not woman, as you know from Adam’s story. Man, however, knows only one love, that of his youth; afterwards he only knows affairs. If woman had invented language, she would have thought of a special word for the love of a mother for her child.”13
The kissing father-daughter couple in Kleist’s Marquise von O shows that Claudia’s concern for the inadequacies of language to describe all the phenomena that fall under the category of love is not unreasonable. Claudia, however, doesn’t carry her critique of the language of desire far enough. If men project their definition of love toward too many phenomena, she projects the notion of maternal love toward inappropriate phenomena as well, when she suggests that mother love might be a model to help others understand the love that existed between Lukasson and Walter. Initially, the characters seem to buy the argument, perhaps because they also understand the male-male love of the Greeks as taking place between an older man and a male youth. Later in the novella, some characters suggest that men experience passionate same-sex desire because they don’t experience mother love; by the same token, it is argued that women have mother love and thus no passionate same-sex desire.14 This theory presumably falls apart when a character alludes to La Religieuse (The Nun), Denis Diderot’s 1796 story about sexual activity between women in a convent, pointing out that same-sex desire also exists between women.15 Eventually Claudia’s effort to define the love between men as similar to the love between a mother and her child fails to convince in Zschokke’s narrative. Her effort to understand male-male love with this analogy points to the linguistic struggles of the characters to define a love that had no name.
Far more common than Claudia’s initial gambit was the effort to understand male-male love as friendship. Eighteenth-century friendship bore many markers that might today seem sexual—expressions of undying love, frequent kisses, and even the wish to marry can be found in the documents of eighteenth-century German friendship. Even in the eighteenth century, some readers remarked that these friendships bordered on the inappropriate or could be mistaken for “Greek love.” The reverse interpretation was also possible: perhaps things that looked like “Greek love” were in fact simply passionate friendship. Because the cult of friendship was particularly vibrant in eighteenth-century German culture (while, conversely, the libertine was an especially notable phenomenon in France), it is not surprising that many German thinkers would try to understand same-sex desire in terms of friendship. Hössli, however, makes clear that friendship is distinct from the phenomenon he is trying to describe. In fact, it is possible that the intensity of the cult of friendship in German-speaking central Europe provoked such an extensive discussion of the boundaries of friendship that Romantic friendships became less feasible in the nineteenth century in Germany than elsewhere. In German culture, eighteenth-century friendship was tinged with an erotic dimension that was largely eliminated in the nineteenth century.
In order to promote the distinction between friendship and sexual love, Hössli cites extensively from Friedrich Wilhelm Basilieus Ramdohr (1757–1822), an aesthetician who was an early interpreter of the works of the artist Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840). In 1798, Ramdohr published an exhaustive three-part treatise on love, titled Venus Urania: Über die Natur der Liebe, über ihre Veredlung und Verschönerung (Venus Urania: On the Nature of Love, Its Edification and Beautification), which included significant passages on love between members of the same sex. While working on his book, Ramdohr visited Schiller, who wrote to Goethe that Ramdohr was hoping to use the “sexual drive” (Geschlechtstrieb) to explain beauty and Greek ideals.16 Hössli had many criticisms of Ramdohr, who referred to the intense sexual experience that takes place between two men who loved each other as “the blackest maculation” in their lives.17 He objected to Ramdohr’s inconsistent positions, sometimes explaining Greek love as exclusively Greek, sometimes as innate, sometimes as caused by climate, as well as his ultimate rejection of the physicality of same-sex love.18 Nonetheless, he did consider Ramdohr’s study “indeed far and away the best book about love.”19 Perhaps the most significant contribution of Ramdohr’s book to the history of sexuality was his careful theorizing about the distinction between friendship and love. He felt that the categories were hopelessly confused: “At least until now, people have not appropriately distinguished between friendship and sexual intimacy.”20 As an aesthetician, Ramdohr believed that he was in a particularly good position to help set up a “semiotics [Semiotik], a doctrine of signs, of the distinction between friendship and sexual intimacy [Geschlechtszärtlichkeit].”21
As a basis for his analysis, Ramdohr divides desire into two categories: “sympathy with the similar” and “sexual sympathy.” Sympathy with the similar strengthens one’s own sex, because it brings one together with members of one’s own sex, while sexual sympathy strengthens humanity as a whole, because it brings together members of different sexes.22 Ramdohr clarifies that “friendship is based on sympathy with the similar, while sexual intimacy is based on sexual sympathy.”23 Ramdohr complicates this simple and unsurprising thesis immensely when he claims that some people are different internally than they appear to be externally. That means that there could be pairs consisting of people who looked as though they belonged to the same sex, but whose souls were from different sexes. This leads Ramdohr to the conclusion—rather astonishing in 1798—that “men may happily live together with men in domesticity, women with women, and finally men with women.”24 The only requirement would be that one partner would be more masculine (“leading, dominating”) while the other more feminine (“giving in, but profiting”).25 In the German tradition, Ramdohr’s study is the earliest and most extensive argument for gender inversion—in which a feminine man loves a masculine one or a masculine woman loves a feminine one—as the cause of same-sex desire.
Ramdohr’s thesis on gender inversion means that a couple of men or a couple of women might be “just friends,” or they might be sexually attracted to each other. According to Ramdohr, it takes a good semiotician to read the signs carefully enough to know whether the connection between these couples was based on sexual sympathy or sympathy with the similar. More commonly, people of the same sex would bond under the rules of friendship or sympathy with the similar, while people of different sexes would bond under the rules of sexual intimacy or sexual sympathy. But because of the possibility of gender inversion, the expert requires more specific signals than the simple external appearance of gender, in order to determine if a given pair is bonded by friendship or love. These signals all focus on the body: Ramdohr believes that “in friendship, there are no heart palpitations, no strained sighs, no boiling blood, no skin color changes.”26 Without approaching the question from a medical perspective, Ramdohr implicitly endorses studying the body to analyze sexuality, anticipating developments of the nineteenth century. The body will reveal signs