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, follows Nietzsche even further in taking on morality itself as a product of the ascetic spirit and the priestly type. Whereas Brand emphasizes the radical individualism of the superhero, equating the man who loved men with the man beyond good and evil, Friedlaender concentrates in Nietzschean terms on the confining power of the priestly class, its ascetic approach to life, and the role of women in embracing this ideology. He argues that such asceticism creates a class of “the stunted,” men whose ability to love other men has atrophied under the influence of heterosexual moralistic obligations. Nietzsche and his followers often literalize this distrust of the priestly class as an attack on the Jews, who supposedly are responsible for one of the most insidious forms of priestliness—Christianity. The belief that women are particularly prone to submit to the teachings of the priests underscores the misogynist tendencies of this group. With the exception of Mackay, most of the masculinists exhibit these anti-Semitic and misogynist inclinations. In addition, the brilliant dénouement of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral (Genealogy of Morals), where he identifies science as the new, nihilist religion of the modern age, influences many of these masculinist thinkers, who urgently reject the medical and psychiatric efforts to treat them. Following Nietzsche’s lead, they see such scientific efforts as deleterious continuations of the tradition of religious strictures against sexual behavior.
The Civilizing Legacy of the Greeks
Let us return for a moment, though, to the period before Nietzsche’s thought reset the image of the Greeks. Throughout the nineteenth century, Greece provided legitimization for same-sex love and sexuality. Almost everyone in that era who thought about same-sex desire felt obliged to comment on the prominence of same-sex sexual acts in ancient Greek culture. Those who wanted to justify or condone such sexual acts found tremendous legitimizing authority in accounts of sapphism and platonic love. Even those who condemned such inclinations found it necessary to address and explain their open presence in a culture routinely held up as a model for Germany in particular and the West in general.
Even though Zschokke’s Eros is set in nineteenth-century Switzerland, the Greek precedent colors this novella too. Not only do various characters cite ancient Greek examples throughout the text, but the whole work is constituted as a response to Plato’s Symposium. In Eros, as in the Symposium, a series of characters discuss the significance of male-male love, although in the case of the nineteenth-century story the occasion is a dreadful crime of passion in which an older man has murdered his beloved younger friend, rather than the celebration of Agathon’s victory in a dramatic competition. In the Swiss story, a wise man has the last word, mirroring Socrates’ role in the Symposium; tellingly, it is not the character based on Hössli, Holmar, but the moderate narrator, Beda: “Go ahead Beda, you be our Socrates at our symposium.”17 Holmar in fact is styled as the intemperate Alcibaides, who interrupts Plato’s Symposium by arriving drunk at the end to put the group’s wisdom into question. When Holmar shows up late to the discussion group in order to sing a defense of sensual relations between men, his demand for wine serves as a hint to the reader that he has taken on the role of the drunken Alcibiades: “I’ll gladly take a glass!”18 This is all of course an ironic inversion of Plato’s text, which cannot have pleased Hössli, especially since Holmar is not even beautiful like Alcibiades.
Hössli himself argues that ancient Greece provides the most convincing evidence on the nature of male love: “No phenomenon in all history is more inexplicable in our days than this love of the Greeks,” he declares with a certain ironic detachment.19 Summing up the thoughts of his contemporaries, Hössli continues: “We believe (sadly enough) either that the Greeks had a different nature than the general, eternally unchangeable nature that we now
