homosexuality was an innate, immutable condition affecting only a discrete minority of individuals in need of legal and social protection. In addition, the Greek model seemed to imply intergenerational sex, rather than long-term relationships between adults. By the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, many physicians and activists had hollowed out the Greek model. They continued to refer to prominent figures such as Sappho and Socrates as famous “homosexuals” in order to argue for the eternal nature of that category of sexual desire, as well as to cash in on some of the prestige of antiquity, but they rarely predicated their discussions of same-sex desire on analyses of Greek texts. Instead the Greek tradition came to be honored by a subgroup of peculiarly German nationalist sexual radicals known as “masculinists” who harbored antiliberal, antibourgeois, antimodernist tendencies and who were disproportionately influential among literary writers from Sigmund Freud to Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka.
Nietzsche and His Disciples
While Greece in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had stood for the Enlightenment and rational, liberal, humanist views, by the end of the nineteenth century the German vision of Greek culture came to be tragic, illiberal, imperial, and pessimistic. No one did more to engineer this change than Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), whose darker view of Greece suited many aspects of Wilhelmine Germany. Under Nietzsche’s tutelage, Greek culture came to be seen as the remedy for the soulless, bourgeois, prosaic liberalism that, according to many conservatives, endangered central European culture. Because Greece was also still known for its representations of same-sex desire, this new vision of antiquity afforded a space for antibourgeois models to compete with the emergent liberal and progressive view of homosexuality found in Ulrichs, Kertbeny, and Westphal. At the close of the nineteenth century, these antiliberal masculinist thinkers echoed a variety of Nietzsche’s arguments about antiquity—including his antifeminist and anti-Enlightenment stances—as they contemplated the role of same-sex desire in Germanic culture.
As Andrew Hewitt observes, “the Greek state offers itself to rightwing ideologues as an alternative to ‘Jewish,’ ‘liberal’ democracy.”1 The question of anti-Semitism in Grecophilic, post-Nietzschean thinking is significant enough that it will be addressed separately in the next chapter. For now, let us focus on the shift in the meaning of Greece from its standing at the beginning of the nineteenth century as a guarantor of human rights, including the rights of men who loved men, to its mobilization at the end of the nineteenth century as part of a critique of liberalism. In the realm of sexuality, this late nineteenth-century version of the Greek model became shorthand for a rejection of liberal models of sexual identity.
Nietzsche’s influence on the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century homosexual emancipation movement in general is surprisingly strong. The writings of the masculinists in particular are laced with discussions of the Übermensch, the priestly spirit, the ascetic ideology, and the herd. In her summary of the authors cited by contributors to Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and Brand’s Der Eigene, Marita Keilson-Lauritz finds that Nietzsche is without question the most frequently cited author in Der Eigene, the mouthpiece of the German masculinist homosexual movement.2 Der Eigene often cites epigraphs from Nietzsche and originally sported the subtitle, “Ein Blatt für Alle und Keinen” (A Paper for Everyone and No One), which was a direct allusion to the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One).
The Nietzschean homosexual is humorously parodied in Otto Julius Bierbaum’s novel Prinz Kuckuck (Prince Cuckoo), which appeared in 1906 and 1907. Although Bierbaum (1865–1910) has remained on the fringes of the canon, Prinz Kuckuck merits attention, because it has one of the earliest German literary representations of a character clearly labeled a homosexual in the modern, sexological sense. Bierbaum’s writings take from Nietzsche a glorification of a pagan, heathen sensual life and are filled with anti-Semitic passages. The novel does not necessarily endorse this philosophy: its anti-Semitic protagonist, Henry, who doesn’t realize his mother is Jewish, comes off as an antihero. In fact, the Nietzschean legacy comes in for particular ridicule in the character of Henry’s adoptive cousin Karl, who in the course of the novel discovers his sexual orientation toward men and becomes a member of a community of homosexual men in London who meet at a private club called the Green Carnation. (Interestingly, Robert Hichens, pseudonym for Robert Smythe, satirized Oscar Wilde in a novel called The Green Carnation, published in 1894; in his introduction to the novel, Stanley Weintraub provides a good history of the meaning of the flower in the world of Wilde and his followers.3) When Karl publishes a book of poetry, a reviewer calls him a “disciple of Nietzsche.”4 Mocking Karl’s understanding of Nietzsche, the narrator does not deny the philosopher’s popularity in the homosexual milieu: “Like most in his generation, he did not actually know Nietzsche and had first heard his name at the Green Carnation, without seeing himself obliged even to read the writings of this man.”5 Bierbaum’s narrator points out that such reputations become self-fulfilling prophecies, as Karl does begin to study Nietzsche himself: “Now, however, he sent for Nietzsche’s books and began to read in them in his way.”6 Bierbaum’s account of the fin-de-siècle Nietzschean homosexual suggests that the figure was recognizable enough to merit caricature.
Caricatured or not, many of the Nietzschean masculinists were intriguing personalities. Elisar von Kupffer, who sometimes went by Elisarion, lived from 1872 to 1942. Born to a Baltic German family in Estonia, he studied in Munich and Berlin, where he met his life partner, Eduard von Mayer (1873–1960), and put together his anthology of poetry from throughout the world dedicated to male-male love, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur (Ardor for Favorites and Love of Friends in World Literature), which appeared in 1900. Initially confiscated, the book was released for sale after experts, including renowned classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848–1931), reassured the censors that it had scholarly value. After 1900, Kupffer and Mayer moved to Italy and eventually settled in Minusio, near Ascona, the artists’ colony in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where vegetarians, socialists, nudists, anarchists, and aficionados of modern dance gathered to celebrate life and ponder its reform. Kupffer established a “Sanctuarium arte Elisarion,” a temple devoted to the beauty of male youth, which he filled with his own paintings.7 Although he remained in self-imposed exile in Ascona, he watched the rise of Hitler with interest and even wrote the Führer a letter trying to get him to support the establishment of another temple devoted to male beauty in the new Reich. There was apparently no response. Almost completely forgotten now, Kupffer was the most frequently cited authority throughout the run of the most significant publications devoted to homosexuality and male culture, Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch and Brand’s Der Eigene.
John Henry Mackay (1864–1933) is the nom de plume for John Henry Farquhar. Although both his real and assumed names are Scottish (because of his father), he was raised in Germany and wrote in German. Heavily influenced by Max Stirner (1806–1856), he supported anarchist and radical causes in his fight against bourgeois liberalism. In the early twentieth century, he planned the publication of series of six works of literature under the pen name “Sagitta” that focused on the “nameless love” between men and male youths. They were declared obscene in 1909, but he managed to publish them in 1913 as a collection called Die Buecher der namenlosen Liebe (The Books of the Nameless Love). His most famous novel, Der Puppenjunge (The Hustler, 1926), gives a detailed account of the many and varied venues in which teenage boys prostituted themselves in Berlin, including the streets, the new shopping arcades, the bars, and the clubs. Although self-identified as a leftist anarchist, Mackay was united with his more conservative fellow masculinists in his rejection of liberalism.
One of Mackay’s supporters was Benedict Friedlaender (1866–1908).8 Friedlaender was trained as a zoologist and worked with the ideas of Gustav Jäger, the man who had popularized Kertbeny’s vocabulary of “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” among the sexologists. Initially, Friedlaender cooperated with Hirschfeld and published a number of articles in the Jahrbuch, but he became increasingly estranged from the
