Wiese’s play was one of the few excellent portrayals of male-male love in modern literature. The very fact that he was reading it while writing his own Eros underscores how closely he followed the literary scene at the time. For direction in that literary arena, Hössli relied on the Literatur-Blatt (Literary Journal), edited by Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873). On September 19, 1836, the Literatur-Blatt published a review that declared that “Die Freunde is a drama that in Holland and England could not be performed, without the author’s and the actors’ risking their healthy limbs. The two friends speak exactly like two lovers and awake even in the most tolerant reader a feeling of disgust.”39 Hössli takes from this negative review the belief that the play is indeed about a sexual and erotic friendship: “if my idea about the play is inaccurate why does Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt claim ‘in many places the author and the actors of this play would be stoned’?”40 Anticipating the argument that the play is about Ramdohr’s nonsexual friendship rather than sexual love, he begins his analysis of the play by saying, “I can already predict that people will incorrectly claim that another spirit governs Wiese’s drama than the Greek-erotic one.”41 Despite its implicit resort to threats of violence against those involved with the play, the Literatur-Blatt is useful to Hössli because it confirms the notion that the play is dealing with sexual friendship. Whereas an earlier era might have left the sexual and erotic relations between Eugen and Phillip ambiguous, in part because of a lack of language to delineate such affairs, Hössli and his age feel quite confident that they can distinguish between nonsexual friendship and sexual love.
Certainly, romantic friendship would remain an ambiguous presence in Western literature, even after the widespread adoption of a vocabulary of sexuality. But Germany, which had undergone a particularly intense flowering of passionate male friendship in the eighteenth century, was less fertile ground for ambiguously erotic same-sex friendship in the nineteenth century. A play such as Wiese’s could no longer titillate readers with strong, but indecipherable, emotions. Ramdohr’s semiotic project was on its way to completion, which meant that Wiese’s public was increasingly able to articulate a clear difference between asexual friendship and sexual love. By the early nineteenth century in German-speaking central Europe, language provides a space for sexual love between members of the same sex.
Biology: Sexuality and Bildung
A concept of a natural immutable sexuality that operates on the border between mind and body allows Ramdohr, Zschokke, and Hössli to distinguish so strictly between friendship and sexual love. Whereas most eighteenth-century authors had attributed the male-male love of the Greeks and others to environmental factors that could presumably affect anyone (nude exercising in the gymnasia, for instance, or the segregation of women from men), these early nineteenth-century theorists of sexual identity saw sexual attraction as the product of innate drives. As a phenomenon that is at least in part corporeal, sexuality belongs to the realm of nature and the natural, a fitting subject for study by scientists and physicians. At the same time, this corporeal, scientifically knowable sexuality becomes for Hössli the core of a personal identity, the focus and teleology of an individual’s Bildung.
David Halperin has argued that the concepts of “sexuality” and “the drive” were necessary predecessors to “the invention of homosexuality.”42 In Germany, there was already considerable discussion of the unity of mind and body in the eighteenth century; by the end of the century, there are even references to the sexual drive (Geschlechtstrieb), as we have seen in Ramdohr’s writings. For Ramdohr the existence of the drive itself suggests that sexuality is natural and innocent: “drives that are based on the original plan and development [Bildung] of a being do not merit reproach and their striving for unification cannot be attributed to the satisfaction of an unclean desire.”43 While Ramdohr does not consistently defend the satisfaction of drives between members of the same sex, his statement anticipates many of the themes, including the importance of “nature” and Bildung, that Hössli will argue more coherently.
The vocabulary of sexuality itself appeared a little bit later than the vocabulary of “drives.” A critical piece by William Cowper (1731–1800) on “Lives of the Plants” by Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) provides an early citation in English: “All of his flowers undergo a change, not a simple one, but each into as many persons, male and female, as there are symptoms of either sex in their formation: for it is on their sexuality that he has built his poem.”44 Cowper uses “sexuality” to refer to the sexing or the “sexedness” of the plants—he is interested in the masculinity and femininity of the characters that emerge from Darwin’s plants. It is no surprise that the term comes up in a discussion of plants, for many intellectuals in Europe probably first encountered it through Carl Linnaeus’s studies of botany, which described the “sexuality” of plants with graphic detail that at times shocked its readers. By 1798, though, for instance, one French translation of Linnaeus’s works was given the title Systême sexuel des végétaux (Sexual System of Plants). It is around this time that German word starts to make its first appearance. The absence of a vocabulary of sexuality prior to these developments is one of the factors leading Isabel Hull to argue that one cannot responsibly talk about “sexuality” in the German context prior to the nineteenth century.45
By the time Hössli is writing, however, the vocabulary of “sexuality” is in circulation. In Eros, Hössli quotes a medical essay by the gynecologist Joseph Hermann Schmidt (1804–1852), demonstrating once again his highly developed connections to the contemporary scientific world: “The concept of sexuality [Sexualität] is no longer derived exclusively from the sexual organs, but rather from the entire organism.” Schmidt continues with an observation about gender: “The woman is primarily vegetation, the man primarily animality,” adding that odd hybrids can develop between these two polarities.46 As in the case of the Cowper citation, the term is being used primarily to describe the sexedness of an organism, whether it has been sexed as male or female. Interestingly, the connection to plants remains strong.
As Halperin suggests, a fundamental prerequisite for any modern understanding of sexuality is the belief in the unity of mind and body. Steeped in the Romantic tradition of the organic oneness of the physical and mental worlds, Hössli takes for granted such a belief in mind-body unity. He cites Menzel, the editor of the Literatur-Blatt, as arguing that “in the human being the mental and the physical are so internally and vitally bound up with each other that they necessarily always stand in the most intimate interaction with each other.”47 The unity of mind and body could have multiple consequences. For the philosophical physicians and their Romantic successors, the unity of mind and body meant that artistic and poetic insights into the body had as much validity and legitimacy as scientific ones.48 Later in the nineteenth century, somaticists would approach the union of mind and body from the perspective of the body, suggesting that physical cures could solve mental and psychological problems. In either case, however, bringing together mind and body was a necessary prerequisite for the assumption of sexuality.
It is telling that physicians were among the intellectual leaders in the effort to reconceptualize the unity of mind and body; nor is it surprising that Hössli’s use of the term “sexuality” comes in a quotation from a distinguished expert in the medical field of gynecology. The modern field of medicine, which rose to unprecedented prominence in the nineteenth century, is practically coterminous with the category of sexuality. For many physicians, the unity of mind and body meant that forms of sexuality could be viewed as a matter of health or illness. This thinking already pervades much of Zschokke’s text, in which one of Zschokke’s characters attempts to understand Lukasson’s love of Walter as the result of a faulty mental process, perhaps even a matter of nerves. The explanation moves in the direction of mental illness and implies psychiatric or medical solutions. Claudia floats the idea that Lukasson’s “corrupt way of thinking” perhaps caused the turn of events. Beda, the narrator, uses the vocabulary of “sick” to describe these corrupted thought processes, suggesting that a “misattuned structure of nerves” made it impossible for Lukasson to act properly. Gerold, Claudia’s
