with one volume focusing on witchcraft and the second on male love. Even at this late date, the second volume was given a fictitious place of publication: “Münster in der Schweiz.”8
For Hössli, Greek love had extraordinary significance: “For the entire life organization of the individual, the family, the state—indeed for humanity in every sense of the word—it is in a thousand respects, particularly for the arts and the sciences, as interesting as it is infinitely important and consequential not just to know that men sexually love their own sex, but rather also to know that these men naturally absolutely do not—cannot—should not sexually love the other, the feminine sex.”9 From this passage, one gets a sense of his style, with its repetitiveness, extended clauses, and occasional ascensions to imposing rhetorical heights. More important, Hössli’s passage points to some of the issues that he addresses in his book: individual and society, arts and sciences, sexuality and love.
The tortured prose of his writings reveals the obstacles that face Hössli as he attempts to fashion a new discourse about the sexual attraction between men. It is important, however, to realize that he fashions that discourse out of the fabric of his culture. Hössli’s initial entrepreneurial plan to hire Zschokke to write a short story about the love between Desgouttes and Hemmeler demonstrates both his faith in literary culture as a means to address the social problems of his day and his connections to the important figures in that culture. In fact, Hössli’s Eros is grounded in a vast array of cultural sources, ranging from classical Persia, Greece, and Rome to European authors from the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras, as well as his immediate contemporaries. Whatever his original contributions, the design of Hössli’s thought on sexuality relies on the warp and woof of the culture available to him.
At the same time, Hössli’s discussion of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755), reveals his need to move beyond his sources and to innovate. Referring to the French writer’s comments on male-male love in De l’esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), published in 1748, Hössli writes: “Montesquieu could not say in his book on the spirit of the law, ‘in the Orient male love is neither a sin nor a crime, nor is it considered unnatural’—he can’t say that, he can only say what he really says: ‘in the Orient, pederasty [Knabenschänderei] and sodomy are very popular.’”10 Alongside Hössli’s righteous anger and frustration at the inability of his predecessors to speak more justly about same-sex desire, one can see that he understands that the limits of their discourse have constrained them, for which reason he feels the need to restructure his language in order to make his points.
Definitions: Mother Love, Friendship, and Sexual Love
In 1779, scarcely a half century before Hössli’s Eros appeared, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) had composed Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), in which lovers can plausibly discover that they are really siblings and be happy about that fact. The characters of Lessing’s play, Nathan and Recha, transform the love they feel for each other as potential sexual partners into the love of brothers and sisters as though the love of a married couple and that between family members were interchangeable. In 1811, Zschokke’s friend Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) wrote the novella, Die Marquise von O (The Marquise of O), in which a father and a daughter could, according to the text, console each other with kisses “just like lovers!”11 If the distinctions were vague between erotic love, sibling love, and filial love, the boundary separating same-sex friendship from sexual love was all the more fraught. Indeed, ambiguity was a crucial component of the highly inflamed rhetoric of friendship common among German intellectuals and artists of the late eighteenth century. This is not to say that people in German-speaking central Europe were unable to make distinctions between various types of love and affection prior to the nineteenth century. But evidence suggests that their categories were substantially different from modern ones. For Hössli to write his text, some degree of cultural consensus on the new understandings of the specific nature of the love between men and women and sexual love between members of the same sex needed to be codified in language.
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
