male-male desire, gender inversion theories require an acknowledgement of female desire. If a man who is sexually attracted to other men is really a female soul inside a male body, then it must be time to talk about the possibility of female sexual desire for a man. As Richards’s study of Romantic science makes clear, the same men who articulated many of the principles of the new vision of an organic science also believed strongly in a freer vision of love that promoted the expression of strong feminine desire. Alongside such Romantic writers as Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling worked such brilliant, scintillating, and openly sexually active women as Caroline Böhmer Schlegel Schelling née Michaelis (1763–1809), Dorothea Veit Schlegel née Mendelssohn (1764–1839), and Rahel von Ense Varnhagen née Levin (1771–1833).
Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt was full of arguments about sexual freedom for men and women, specifically in the issues from 1835 and 1836, which Hössli cites in Eros. Most of the controversies swirled around Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878) and his scandalous 1835 depiction of a sexually liberated Jewish woman in Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic). Gutzkow’s novel reminded readers of Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 Lucinde, which had similarly celebrated female desire. Gutzkow praises Schlegel’s work as a manifesto for the “emancipation of the flesh.”
Gutzkow and other representatives of Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) promulgate the emancipation of the flesh—and specifically the unleashing of female (and not coincidentally, Jewish female) desire—just as Hössli is arguing for the rights of male-loving men, whom he occasionally represents as similar to women and comparable to Jews. Discussions about the emancipation of the flesh were underway in German culture at the time—not least in Hössli’s favored source, the Literatur-Blatt. The Romantic legacy of the emancipations of the flesh, of women, and of Jews colored Hössli’s worldview.
By at least implicitly associating his arguments with the liberal emancipatory ideas discussed in (although admittedly not always endorsed by) the Literatur-Blatt, Hössli aligned himself with forces calling for progressive change. Just as early nineteenth-century progressives thought that the status of women and Jews called out for amelioration, Hössli wanted to see a better situation for men who sexually loved other men. True, Hössli did not refer to explicit legal and political interventions in his text—he seems unaware, for instance, of Feuerbach’s enlightened, post-Napoleonic reforms in Bavaria, which had decriminalized sodomy. Instead, he established the arguably much more arduous goal of changing social attitudes. In hoping to change social attitudes, Hössli drew on two groups that he felt were in various ways analogous to men who sexually loved other men: Jews and witches.
Hössli’s Eros generally attempts to marshal sympathy for the suffering of the Jews, about which he gives focused and detailed reports. He describes the medieval scapegoating of Jews as plague-bearers and movingly outlines a series of horrendous atrocities that befell them: the burning of large numbers of Jews in Basel, Freiburg, Bern, Zürich, Constance, Strasbourg, and Mainz; the desperate self-immolation of Jews in Speier and Esslingen; the torture of Jews in Geneva. Hössli concludes, “and all this happened in Switzerland, throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, in 1349, by and for European Christianity.”83 The medieval persecutions of Jews filled him with a sense of liberal outrage at religiously inspired bias in law and culture.
Many of those who were similarly moved by the plight of the Jews hoped the emancipation of the Jews would promote their social improvement. In his 1781 treatise, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews), Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820), for instance, argues, along Rousseauian lines, that Jewish culture and society are in decay because of the political and legal mistreatment of the Jews. Hössli makes the same argument regarding men who sexually love other men. Already in 1810, Karl Ludwig von Woltmann (1770–1817) writes about same-sex love in his biography of Johannes von Müller, “banned by the law, under threat of the severest penalties, forced into the impossibility of producing anything good, so despised and damned that it can rarely gnaw on beauty but must satisfy itself with generally rejected flesh, this vice creeps around us with its unfruitful heat in narrow remote alleys, dark hiding places, and—when in brighter surroundings—among the rabble of civil society.”84 Similarly, Zschokke’s characters put forth the notion that modern society has so “branded” this love that it has taken on perverted forms. Holmar traces the repression of Greek love all the way back to the sixth-century edicts against the defilement of males (de stupro masculorum) that Emperor Justinian (483–565) promulgated.85 Zschokke’s character insists that “the law … is unjust; it first created and then punished the horror that it made.”86 Zschokke, with his experience in law and policy, creates a fictional version of Hössli who argues more explicitly for decriminalization of male-male love than Hössli himself. Zschokke’s novella depicts the horrifying fate of nineteenth-century men who love other men: “With a shudder must the man or youth perceive the effect of such a psychological drive in himself. His own conceptual world has been so distorted by the insanity of the world that he must consider himself to be insane and unnatural … when an involuntary, irresistible passionate affection for a man grabs hold of him.”87 According to Zschokke’s character Holmar, such a man hates himself, his nature, and the whole world.
In his own writing, Hössli insists that deleterious social conditions can alter the appearance of male-male love by perverting it through oppression. Asserting that Plato’s writing is a product of his society’s positive treatment of male-male love, Hössli insists that the philosopher today would have “succumbed to misdeeds, internal battles and misery and ruin and would have ended on the cart, in jail and—perhaps on the gallows.”88 (Zschokke’s Holmar argues conversely that in ancient Greece Lukasson could have been “one of the great artists, wise men or heroes of the nation” instead of a murderer executed on the wheel.89) Whereas Greek love had flourished in the time of Plato, today, according to Hössli, “it creeps around in our midst as a vice under the burdens of general damnation, destroyed and destructive, without blessing, power or deed, full of guilt and torture, beyond all human dignity and ideal, usually in disgusting, not Greek, figures, creating its own circle of corruption, vice, sin, decay, whose origins we do not search.”90 He continues with melodramatic flair: “it flows as its own rich poisoned well of indignity and misery … ejected, it howls in thousands of prisons on our continent, cursing itself and the hour of its birth, surrounded by night and dark, a daily self-renewing, self-consuming and endlessly self-contradictory monster.”91 Today, “it provides in this form work and bread to prison masters and hangmen,” as well as leading to “suicides inexplicable to us.”92 “Thus waves,” Hössli bitterly and sarcastically concludes, “our victory palm, our psychology, over Greece’s poor old humanistic art and science.”93 Through the Romantically tinged prose, Hössli’s argument emerges: sexuality, while not eradicable, can assume new and terrible forms as a consequence of societal oppression and persecution.
The comparison between Jewishness and same-sex love is a big enough topic in the German history of sexuality that it deserves and will receive its own chapter. For now, let us turn to another historical development Hössli believed augured well for his cause: the disappearance of witch hunts, which he hoped was evidence of the dawning of a more enlightened day. While the expression “witch hunt” is still used in English (and its corollary Hexenjagd exists in modern German), its literal meaning has probably lost much of its original vivid force. In the early and mid-nineteenth century, however, memories of actual, not metaphorical, witch hunts were still alive, and a sense of the injustice of this persecution burned brightly in enlightened spirits.
Eros begins with an extensive discussion, not of same-sex love, but of the persecution of witches. In fact, there is enough material on the subject that one of the two volumes in the 1896 reprint of his work was devoted primarily to witches. The subject matter must have been particularly significant for Hössli because, two years before his birth, a woman who was executed for being a witch lived in the very house in which he was born, according to his biographer
