of this unfortunate woman, whose name was Anna Güldin.95 Although her family name is spelled in a variety of ways (Goldin, Göldin, Göldi), Anna is well known as the last woman executed as a witch in Europe.96 Other relatively recent executions would have been present in the memories of his readers, too—and not just in Mediterranean countries where the Inquisition held sway. Hössli reminds readers of the burning of hysterical nuns in Würzburg in 1749 and in West Prussia in 1779.97 Alluding to an execution in Swabia in 1766 of someone who claimed to be able to change the weather, he stresses the contradictions between such executions and the Enlightenment: “In the year 1766, in Swabia, in the little city of Buchloe, one person among the people was convicted and really executed as a weather changer; in this century witches have been burned at the stake and beheaded—and this century called itself the enlightened, the philosophical.”98 Bitterly, Hössli suspects that many of his contemporaries might actually desire a return of the “good old days.”99
Hoping to appeal to other enlightened readers, Hössli therefore begins his analysis of Greek love with an extensive report on the witch hunts, without immediately spelling out the connection between witchcraft and Greek love. He commences with references to witch hunts and witch trials, describing in detail some of the goriest stories from the Middle Ages and detailing the extremes to which religious fanaticism can go. By the end of his study, when he addresses more explicitly male-male desire, he still makes allusions to witchcraft to show how superstitious beliefs can damage people and societies.100 Hössli alludes to the sexual underpinnings of some of the witch hunts when he mentions Pope Innocent VIII’s papal bull against “carnal intercourse with the devil.”101 Generally, Hössli finds the comparison to witches useful as a way of setting up his polemic against what he considers to be superstitious and outdated religious prejudices against same-sex desire.
In his publications on urning love, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs also makes frequent references to witches, werewolves, and others.102 Ulrichs also cites others who make the same comparison, including an anonymous urning who hopes that the laws against male-male desire will go the way of the laws against witchcraft and heresy: “I demand that in the nineteenth century we do not allow laws to stand that belong to the era of the persecution of heretics and witches.”103 Ulrichs notes that this reader came upon the comparison between urnings and witches on his own, without having read Ulrichs’s own thoughts on the matter.104 Ulrichs cites a friend who teaches jurisprudence at a southern German university, who is concerned that “most of the well-educated resist enlightenment in this matter.”105 In his earlier works, like “Vindex” of 1864, Ulrichs optimistically sees the cessation of the persecution of male-male love as a continuation of the Enlightenment triumph over the persecution of heretics and witches: “It was the task of the previous two centuries to eliminate the persecution of heresy and witchcraft. It will be the task of our century, indeed hopefully our decade, to eliminate the persecution of male-male love.”106 Not everyone who used this metaphor was so positive. A certain “upper-class man of the world,” who lived in Italy and loved other men and whose autobiography was published by the physician Johann Ludwig Casper (1796–1864) in 1863, reported that people in his circle sometimes said, “they used to burn witches at the stake, our time will come too.”107 This “man of the world,” like Ulrichs in the 1860s, was actually more sanguine than his friends about the future of his fellow men who loved men, but the interesting point here is the widespread acceptance of the similarity between witches and practitioners of same-sex desire.
Like Hössli, Ulrichs uses the example of witches to set up a polemic against religious critiques of love between members of the same sex. The frequent linkage of witches and heretics makes it clear that witches were persecuted because they did not conform to a medieval religious worldview. In this respect, witches and heretics also resemble Jews, and sometimes Ulrichs refers to them in a single breath. At one point, Ulrichs describes male-male love as a “riddle of nature,” and insists that such riddles need to be handled differently from the way religious outsiders have been handled in the past: “One solves riddles of nature, insofar as they are soluble at all, with science, not with a blind declaration of infamy, which has all too often proven itself to be a sword of injustice against heretics, Jews, and witches.”108 Like Hössli, Ulrichs hopes that science—in contrast to superstitious religion—will play a great and positive role in this endeavor. Karl Maria Kertbeny also assigns strictures against homosexuality to the same category as irrational concerns about “original sin, devils, and witches.”109
While the comparison between homosexuals and witches has reappeared over the years, Hössli’s analysis underscores one reason why the metaphor of the witch ultimately loses power as a way of describing the identity of men who sexually love other men. Part of the absurdity of the prosecution of witches is that they are supernatural and, therefore, in the eyes of the Enlightenment, “actually didn’t exist at all.”110 But Hössli, Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and their allies argue that inverts, urnings, and homosexualists do exist. Indeed, they sometimes have to argue against those who dismiss the occurrence of same-sex love as a rare and trivial issue. For this reason, the comparison to witches and warlocks gradually fades from sight in the texts of the nineteenth-century German homosexual emancipation movement. Nevertheless, the persecution of the witches is for Hössli and others in the nineteenth century a potent symbol of the unjust mistreatment of men who loved other men. The disappearance of witch hunts in the eighteenth century encourages Hössli and his successors to believe that society could actually stop persecuting men who loved other men.
Conclusion
Far from being a historical outlier, irrelevant because it was so unique in its defense of male-male love in the 1830s, Hössli’s Eros is intricately enmeshed in the cultural movements of its time and place. Hössli was in contact with literary figures such as Zschokke who were leading liberals in his native Switzerland. He tracked down the most recent scientific, gynecological evidence about sexuality available. As he completed Eros in the 1830s, he kept abreast of literary developments reported in Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt.
Because of his learned appropriation of the culture of his era, he had at his disposal a variety of concepts that were current in his time. He no longer had to rely on notions of “friendship” to describe sexual attraction between men. Instead, he had a concept of sexuality as a driving force at the intersection of mind and body that was innate, immutable, and essential to a person’s identity. Following Menzel, he could tentatively suggest that men who loved men really had female souls and make implicit comparisons between adherents of Greek love and Jews. Such analogies connected him to liberal and progressive movements of his era calling for the emancipation of women and Jews. The gradual elimination of the persecution of witches provided him with a positive example of the social change he hoped to see with respect to Greek love. Hössli would not have been able to write his study if his intellectual culture had not extensively discussed matters such as: the sexual borders of friendship, the unity of the mind and the body, the existence of sexuality, and the emancipation of women, Jews, and the flesh. At the same time, it would be doing him a disservice to deny that he reorganized the intellectual givens of his time to put forth one of the first comprehensive visions of an identity based on same-sex sexual love that was inborn, natural, unchanging, essential, universal, ahistorical, and in need of some sort of social protection.
Chapter 2
The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation
The very title of his book, Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks, underscores the importance of the classical Greek legacy for Heinrich Hössli’s efforts to explain and justify male-male desire. In the first part of the nineteenth century, allusions to ancient Greece not only proved the transhistorical and intercultural nature of same-sex desire, but also vouched for its legitimacy and even nobility. As the century progressed, however, those who thought
