Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin

pseudonym for Robert Smythe, satirized Oscar Wilde in a novel called The Green Carnation, published in 1894; in his introduction to the novel, Stanley Weintraub provides a good history of the meaning of the flower in the world of Wilde and his followers.³) When Karl publishes a book of poetry, a reviewer calls him a “disciple of Nietzsche.”⁴ Mocking Karl’s understanding of Nietzsche, the narrator does not deny the philosopher’s popularity in the homosexual milieu: “Like most in his generation, he did not actually know Nietzsche and had first heard his name at the Green Carnation, without seeing himself obliged even to read the writings of this man.”⁵ Bierbaum’s narrator points out that such reputations become self-fulfilling prophecies, as Karl does begin to study Nietzsche himself: “Now, however, he sent for Nietzsche’s books and began to read in them in his way.”⁶ Bierbaum’s account of the fin-de-siècle Nietzschean homosexual suggests that the figure was recognizable enough to merit caricature.

      Caricatured or not, many of the Nietzschean masculinists were intriguing personalities. Elisar von Kupffer, who sometimes went by Elisarion, lived from 1872 to 1942. Born to a Baltic German family in Estonia, he studied in Munich and Berlin, where he met his life partner, Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960), and put together his anthology of poetry from throughout the world dedicated to male-male love, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (Ardor for Favorites and Love of Friends in World Literature), which appeared in 1900. Initially confiscated, the book was released for sale after experts, including renowned classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), reassured the censors that it had scholarly value. After 1900, Kupffer and Mayer moved to Italy and eventually settled in Minusio, near Ascona, the artists’ colony in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where vegetarians, socialists, nudists, anarchists, and aficionados of modern dance gathered to celebrate life and ponder its reform. Kupffer established a “Sanctuarium arte Elisarion,” a temple devoted to the beauty of male youth, which he filled with his own paintings.⁷ Although he remained in self-imposed exile in Ascona, he watched the rise of Hitler with interest and even wrote the Führer a letter trying to get him to support the establishment of another temple devoted to male beauty in the new Reich. There was apparently no response. Almost completely forgotten now, Kupffer was the most frequently cited authority throughout the run of the most significant publications devoted to homosexuality and male culture, Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and Brand’s Der Eigene.

      John Henry Mackay (1864–1933) is the nom de plume for John Henry Farquhar. Although both his real and assumed names are Scottish (because of his father), he was raised in Germany and wrote in German. Heavily influenced by Max Stirner (1806–1856), he supported anarchist and radical causes in his fight against bourgeois liberalism. In the early twentieth century, he planned the publication of series of six works of literature under the pen name “Sagitta” that focused on the “nameless love” between men and male youths. They were declared obscene in 1909, but he managed to publish them in 1913 as a collection called Die Buecher der namenlosen Liebe (The Books of the Nameless Love). His most famous novel, Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler, 1926), gives a detailed account of the many and varied venues in which teenage boys prostituted themselves in Berlin, including the streets, the new shopping arcades, the bars, and the clubs. Although self-identified as a leftist anarchist, Mackay was united with his more conservative fellow masculinists in his rejection of liberalism.

      One of Mackay’s supporters was Benedict Friedlaender (1866–1908).⁸ Friedlaender was trained as a zoologist and worked with the ideas of Gustav Jäger, the man who had popularized Kertbeny’s vocabulary of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” among the sexologists. Initially, Friedlaender cooperated with Hirschfeld and published a number of articles in the Jahrbuch, but he became increasingly estranged from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. His Renaissance des Eros Uranios (Renaissance of Eros Uranios), published in 1904, was a manifesto for masculinist culture and one of the most cogent critiques of Hirschfeld and his work. Imbued with the spirit of Nietzsche, Friedlaender favors the aphorism as a stylistic gesture. Married and the father of a son, Eugen Benedict, Friedlaender chafed at the strict sexual categories that he believed medicine had foisted upon modern men. Suffering from an inoperable cancer of the intestine, he committed suicide in 1908.

      Friedlaender also supported the work of Hans Blüher (1888–1955), who caused a major uproar in 1912 when he argued in Die Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen (The “Wandervogel” Movement as Erotic Phenomenon) that homoeroticism was the bond that united male youth groups. His two-volume sequel, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (The Role of Eroticism in Masculine Society, 1917/19), titillated and shocked Germany’s intellectuals with the argument that male-male erotic desire was the important glue holding together human society.⁹ A rightist, he greeted the arrival of National Socialism with approval, but the estimation was not reciprocated. The Nazis regarded him as a danger to youth and didn’t allow him to publish during the Third Reich, although he was allowed to continue private practice. In this capacity, he apparently occasionally provided support for young German men who were discovering their sexual interest in other men in the 1930s.¹⁰

      The leader of the pack was Adolf Brand (1874–1945), who published Der Eigene, which appeared from 1896 to 1933 and can thus lay claim to being the oldest serial devoted to male-male desire in the history of the West. In 1903, he established the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen. As in the case of the journal, the society’s name can be translated in a number of ways: The Community of the Special, The Community of the Self-Owners, The Community of the Free, The Community of the Exceptional, and so on. In any case, Brand’s Community combined an “anarchistic philosophy of freedom and the cult of the Nordic man.”¹¹ Like Friedlaender, Brand was married, considered himself masculine, rejected medical categories of sexuality, and didn’t appreciate the category of the third sex. In 1907 he “outed” Chancelor Bülow and Philipp Eulenburg-Hertefeld, which resulted in substantial court cases that brought the occurrence of sex between men among German aristocrats to the attention of readers throughout Europe. Brand ultimately spent time behind bars for his efforts. Like Blüher, he was sympathetic to the National Socialists, but they treated him with suspicion, confiscating many of his documents and banning his publications.¹² He died during an Allied bombing attack in 1945.

      Nietzsche’s notion of the Übermensch appealed tremendously to these writers, who were smitten by the phantasy of the superman as blond beast. The concept of der Eigene, although taken from Stirner’s philosophical work, overlapped extensively with Nietzsche’s Übermensch.¹³ Brand himself wrote a poem called “Der Übermensch” and published it in Der Eigene.¹⁴ A typical article in Der Eigene was Edwin Bab’s “Frauenbewegung und männliche Kultur” (The Women’s Movement and Masculine Culture), which summed up the difference between the two gendered movements: “The women’s movement is leading us back to ancient Jewish ideals, the movement for male culture to ancient Greek ideals.” Although this sounds ominously as though it would fit into prevalent anti-Semitic rhetoric of the time, Bab actually wanted to see a union of these two cultures and movements which he claimed would lead to “a truly human culture.” He indicated where the philosophical underpinnings of these remark came from in the closing line of his essay: “a truly human culture. Followers of Nietzsche would say, superhuman.”¹⁵ Despite Bab’s hopes for a union of the Jewish feminine and the Greek masculine ideals, most in the movement adulated the Übermensch primarily because of his hypervirility and his opposition to any sort of gender inversion.

      Figure 2. “The masculine ideal,” in Der Eigene, vol. 6 (1906). Personal collection of author.

      In addition, the Übermensch appeals because he is beyond good and evil, rejecting the ascetic moral system imposed by the priestly caste upon the herd. Even Hirschfeld cites a Nietzschean aphorism critiquing morality in his 1896 treatise, Sappho und Sokrates (Sappho and Sokrates): “That which is natural, cannot be immoral.”¹⁶ Typically, Hirschfeld relies on arguments based on the natural and the biological in his defense of same-sex desire. Friedlaender’s 1904 masculinist study, Die Renaissance des Eros Uranios,