inconsistent positions, sometimes explaining Greek love as exclusively Greek, sometimes as innate, sometimes as caused by climate, as well as his ultimate rejection of the physicality of same-sex love.18 Nonetheless, he did consider Ramdohr’s study “indeed far and away the best book about love.”19 Perhaps the most significant contribution of Ramdohr’s book to the history of sexuality was his careful theorizing about the distinction between friendship and love. He felt that the categories were hopelessly confused: “At least until now, people have not appropriately distinguished between friendship and sexual intimacy.”20 As an aesthetician, Ramdohr believed that he was in a particularly good position to help set up a “semiotics [Semiotik], a doctrine of signs, of the distinction between friendship and sexual intimacy [Geschlechtszärtlichkeit].”21
As a basis for his analysis, Ramdohr divides desire into two categories: “sympathy with the similar” and “sexual sympathy.” Sympathy with the similar strengthens one’s own sex, because it brings one together with members of one’s own sex, while sexual sympathy strengthens humanity as a whole, because it brings together members of different sexes.22 Ramdohr clarifies that “friendship is based on sympathy with the similar, while sexual intimacy is based on sexual sympathy.”23 Ramdohr complicates this simple and unsurprising thesis immensely when he claims that some people are different internally than they appear to be externally. That means that there could be pairs consisting of people who looked as though they belonged to the same sex, but whose souls were from different sexes. This leads Ramdohr to the conclusion—rather astonishing in 1798—that “men may happily live together with men in domesticity, women with women, and finally men with women.”24 The only requirement would be that one partner would be more masculine (“leading, dominating”) while the other more feminine (“giving in, but profiting”).25 In the German tradition, Ramdohr’s study is the earliest and most extensive argument for gender inversion—in which a feminine man loves a masculine one or a masculine woman loves a feminine one—as the cause of same-sex desire.
Ramdohr’s thesis on gender inversion means that a couple of men or a couple of women might be “just friends,” or they might be sexually attracted to each other. According to Ramdohr, it takes a good semiotician to read the signs carefully enough to know whether the connection between these couples was based on sexual sympathy or sympathy with the similar. More commonly, people of the same sex would bond under the rules of friendship or sympathy with the similar, while people of different sexes would bond under the rules of sexual intimacy or sexual sympathy. But because of the possibility of gender inversion, the expert requires more specific signals than the simple external appearance of gender, in order to determine if a given pair is bonded by friendship or love. These signals all focus on the body: Ramdohr believes that “in friendship, there are no heart palpitations, no strained sighs, no boiling blood, no skin color changes.”26 Without approaching the question from a medical perspective, Ramdohr implicitly endorses studying the body to analyze sexuality, anticipating developments of the nineteenth century. The body will reveal signs of homosexual attraction based on gender inversion—the anatomie indiscrète that Foucault finds characteristic of the nineteenth-century homosexual.27
In the 1820s, Zschokke no longer needs Ramdohr’s semiotics to distinguish between love and friendship. The educated bourgeois public in his novella knows that “a passion that goes beyond friendship” can develop between members of the same sex. If the comparison between mother love and Greek love ultimately fails, so also do attempts to see Lukasson’s love for Walter as an example of friendship. Always looking on the bright and banal side, Claudia hopes to set aside any anxious questions about same-sex love with the cheerful assertion that “women are the tenderest of friends to women, as men are to men.”28 No one can understand, however, how such innocent friendship would result in Lukasson’s murder of his beloved, so it quickly becomes clear that friendship, however intense, has little explanatory power in this case. Holmar explicitly denies the value of using the word “friendship” to describe the relationships that he believes existed in ancient Greece.
Hössli himself is at his most confident when refuting the argument that Greek love could be understood as some kind of exalted friendship. Toward the end of his two-volume treatise, he lists the reasons why Greek love is not the same thing as friendship. Greek love has a “bodily, sexual [geschlechtlich], purely sensual” side, associated with “charm, beauty, spontaneity, bodily possession and pleasure, passion and bliss, the agony and joy of love.”29 Greek love is directed at people of a specific age and sex—that is, with a particular kind of body—whereas friendship, presumably, applies more universally.30 Showing his knowledge of the classical tradition, Hössli notes that in ancient Greece, male-male love was always directional, flowing from the lover to the beloved, while friendship was reciprocal. He adds that “love is not friendship, precisely for the reason that it can become friendship.”31 He concludes his section on friendship by distinguishing it quite clearly from sexual love: “Love and friendship and sexual love [Geschlechtsliebe], these are three things, of which only the last has its roots in the corporeal, in the absolute, not in the coincidental, the arbitrary, the conditional. The plan of creation could not and would not leave these roots, out of whose development it planned the highest humanity, to accident, and therefore they were placed into the flesh.”32 Hössli’s linkage of the corporeal with the absolute may seem bit eccentric to a reader used to transcendental philosophy, but as a Romantic thinker, he has a profound belief in the unity of mind and body.
Hössli’s distinction between sexual love and friendship becomes apparent in his response to a play called Die Freunde (The Friends) by Sigismund Wiese (1800–1864), published in 1836. An author of historical dramas, Wiese is the author of an 1844 piece, Jesus, which made it to the Vatican’s index of forbidden works. Die Freunde deals with two friends, the Prussian Philipp and the French Eugen, who—in a classic trope of friendship discussed by the German Romantic author Jean Paul and the French poststructuralist Jacques Derrida33—are on opposite sides of the battlefield. One smuggles the other out of prison; the other loses an important battle out of love for his friend. Some consider their behavior treason, but neither abandons his duty. Eugen reads his own death sentence (his friends are too overcome to do so) and declares, “I am faithful to my fatherland unto my death.”34
The play’s very title demonstrates that it is interested in friendship itself. References abound to David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, and Orestes and Pylades. This friendship between Philipp and Eugen is cemented with a bond “as strong as death, a bond such as the ancients celebrated,” highlighting the connection to earlier eras.35 While Philipp is looking for his friend among the French prisoners, his servant Leopold alludes to the erotic possibilities inherent in such ancient friendships:
If ever a man
Searched for his girlfriend with hotter ardor
Than you examine the rows of Frenchmen,
Then I’m no woman’s son! Tell me,
Are you in love, is she wearing men’s clothes?
In response, Philipp simply mumbles to himself, “I can’t find him.” Leopold cries out in shrill horror, “Him? Not her? My dear Philipp, what do you mean?”36
There are other moments when the relationship between these men is described in terms that blur the boundary between friendly and sexual love. Eugen claims that he is saving a friend “who means to me / what siblings, spouses, parents and brides mean to you.”37 With the distinction between his own love and that of his interlocutors, Eugen seems poised on the verge of making the claim that there is a clearly defined group of men who love other men rather than women. At one point one character prophesies: “Some day, I scarcely know how to say how, / Our love will also be allowed to speak.”38 Here there seems to be an early understanding of the need for self-expression
