rights in the context of honor, legal protection, respect, religious acceptance, and public recognition. He expects “protection and recognition” from the law. His demand that a male-loving man should enjoy “honor” and “recognition of his life” suggests that he hopes that same-sex love will be able to express itself openly and publicly. Notably, he argues that religion too should support the rights claims of the men about whom he is writing. Intriguingly, he insists that such men should be able to function “as a spouse and as a citizen,” suggesting that marriage itself belongs to the rights of citizens and that both marriage and citizenship need reassessment.
In a sense, Hössli is building on the glorification of love that had already taken place in bourgeois literature of the eighteenth century. He repeats that love in general—whether a man’s or a woman’s, whether for a man or for a woman—“is not up to a person’s arbitrary will, but rather a specific given primary component of the purest, deepest, individuality.”71 This Romantic argument, relying on the centrality of sexual love for human identity, spurs Hössli to uncharacteristic eloquence as he grapples with the definition of “sexual love (we are not speaking here of mere sexual drive)” as it pertains to male-male desire: “it involuntarily desires, searches out, and needs a masculine being, because of his sex, and not a feminine being, again precisely because of her sex, because whatever in our sexual life addresses, grabs, excites, thrills, attracts, possesses, completes, perfects us—that tells us which love is in us.”72 In this case, Hössli works with the conventions of his era, which had already declared the primacy of love, and sharpens them to bring out the importance of sexuality and the body. When he asks “which love is in us,” he adds the notion of specific sexual categories to the mix.
For Hössli, one of the “natural” aspects of this desire has to do with its innateness: “The whole man is in the seed, in the germ, in the embryo.”73 He asserts “we cannot bring anything into it [the seed, germ, embryo], but can only let that which is within him develop and at least not eliminate it, even if much that is in him is not allowed to flourish and is strangled or crippled.”74 Sexual nature is inborn—society’s only choice is whether to let it develop or not. The notion that an organism’s being springs from its embryo, germ, or seed was a crucial part of a variety of efforts by German Romantic thinkers to explain development and the concept of Bildung, which was to become extremely important for German culture. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) used the vocabulary of embryos to explain his Bildungstrieb, or drive to development, in his 1781 essay Über den Bildungstrieb und das Zeugungsgeschäft (On the Drive to Development and the Operation of Reproduction). As Blumenbach puts it, “there exists in all living creatures, from men to maggots, and from cedar trees to mold, a particular, inborn, lifelong active drive.”75 Continuing the eighteenth-century tradition of employing plants for discussions of sexuality, Bildung appears in Goethe’s discussion of the growth of plants in his Metamorphosen der Pflanzen (Metamorphoses of the Plants) of 1790 as the preordained pattern of development of an organism.
Ramdohr relies explicitly on Blumenbach’s notion of Bildung to describe his understanding of sexuality. “The unnamable drive is the grounds for the unnamable pleasure,” he declares, defining that pleasure as “that circumstance of effusive voluptuous effectiveness of the power of development [Bildungskraft] of our vegetable organism.”76 “Unnamable” though the pleasure may be, Blumenbach is fairly bold to discuss it so openly in his analysis of the sexual drive. His theory that sexual pleasure belongs to the human being’s vegetable nature is yet another legacy of Linnaeus’s discussion of sexuality in the realm of plants. Blumenbach restates the connections between Bildung and sexuality when he announces that “especially during the unnamable drive, we feel the effects of that power of development [Bildungskraft], which we and all organic beings, without difference, have in common with the plants.”77 Relying on Blumenbach, Ramdohr brings together Bildung, plants, and sexuality.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) are the authors who mediate Blumenbach’s Bildung for Hössli’s culture. For them, Bildung represents not only the physical development of an organism, but also the psychological, creative, and artistic development of a person. In the early nineteenth century, Karl von Morgenstern (1770–1852) dubbed Goethe’s 1797 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) a Bildungsroman or “novel of development,” because it showed the processes whereby its young protagonist sets aside misleading social and cultural influences to discover who he really is and develops himself to the best of his abilities in order to rejoin society as a productive member. Bildung, as intellectual, artistic and cultural self-development, becomes the greatest good for the bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Germanic culture.
Hössli, true to his liberal bourgeois roots, embraces the concept of Bildung. As Hans Krah has noted, the classical notion of Bildung emerges repeatedly in Hössli: that an individual is born with a specific identity and with certain sexual desires, and that it is the mission of the individual to discover his identity, to become more and more true to himself, and then to integrate himself into society.78 Hössli states with simple poetic elegance: “perfection for a single individual consists of being and becoming oneself in the continuum of one’s existence” (79).
Jews and Witches: Emancipation and Social Improvement
At several points, the innate and natural sexuality that Hössli finds in men who are sexually attracted to other men is tentatively linked to gender inversion and implicitly compared to Jewishness. Although these interpretations and analogies are by no means the main points of Hössli’s arguments, they deserve attention because they become so important in subsequent treatments of homosexuality, uranism, and inversion in the nineteenth century. Both comparisons to women and to Jews have connections to science-based, progressive, emancipatory thought of the early nineteenth century. The argument for gender inversion implies a heightened respect for feminine desire, while the comparison with Jews goes hand in hand with liberal efforts to rejuvenate and improve the lot of minorities within Germany.
The locus of the allusions to the similarity between the category of men who are sexually attracted to men and the categories of women and Jews is a passage that Hössli quotes twice—first, prominently on the frontispiece of volume 1, and second in the text itself. The source is a review published on June 4, 1834, by Menzel in his Literatur-Blatt. According to Menzel, “the Rabbinical doctrine of souls has a peculiar characteristic: Namely, it explains the contradictions in the character of the sexes and their oftentimes strange sympathies and antipathies by the transmigration of souls such that female souls in male bodies reject women and male souls in female bodies reject men, like identical poles of a magnet, while on the other hand they are attracted to each other despite having the same bodily sex because of the different sexes of their souls.”79 Menzel has even more difficulty articulating his ideas than Hössli, who had thought much longer about them. Menzel’s claim is that a woman with a male soul will be attracted to another woman, while a man with a female soul will be attracted to another man.
Hössli himself responds tepidly to Menzel’s argument that same-sex attraction can be explained as a product of gender inversion, asserting that King Frederick I of Württemberg (1754–1816) was hardly “what we tend to understand as a feminine soul,” despite being a lover of men.80 Although Ramdohr emphasizes gender inversion in his account of same-sex desire, neither Hössli nor Zschokke dwells on the subject at great length. In fact, one of Ulrichs’s prime objections to Hössli is his neglect of effemination as an explanation for male same-sex desire.81 As Yvonne Ivory notes, “before the 1830s, the masculinity of practitioners of Sodomiterei was rarely questioned in German legal and medical discourses.”82 Nonetheless, Hössli’s citation from Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt, positioned prominently and repeated in Eros, is an early formulation of the notion of gender inversion, expressed in an intriguingly gender-inclusive form.
While
