Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity - Softcover

Beachy, Robert

 
9780307473134: Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0307473139 ISBN 13: 9780307473134
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Winner of Randy Shilts Award

In the half century before the Nazis rose to power, Berlin became the undisputed gay capital of the world. Activists and medical professionals made it a city of firsts—the first gay journal, the first homosexual rights organization, the first Institute for Sexual Science, the first sex reassignment surgeries—exploring and educating themselves and the rest of the world about new ways of understanding the human condition. In this fascinating examination of how the uninhibited urban culture of Berlin helped create our categories of sexual orientation and gender identity, Robert Beachy guides readers through the past events and developments that continue to shape and influence our thinking about sex and gender to this day.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert Beachy was trained as a German historian at the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in 1998. He is presently associate professor of history at the Underwood International College of Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea.

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• Chapter One •

The German Invention of Homosexuality

When considering the questions “What is natural?” and “What is unnatural?” it is paramount to apply a standard that is not foreign to one’s own nature.

karl ulrichs, “Vindex: Social-­Juristic Studies of Male-­Male Love,” 1864

On a bright Thursday morning in late August 1867, the German lawyer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a former member of the civil service in the kingdom of Hanover, approached the Odeon concert hall in Munich. Since the beginning of the week, the Association of German Jurists had been assembling in this magnificent neoclassical structure to present papers and discuss the legal issues of the day. The professional group included lawyers, officials, bureaucrats, and legal academics from the thirty-­nine states and cities of the former German Confederation, a loose association created at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. This imposing body of Ulrichs’s colleagues made up the government establishment of the nascent German Empire. Dressed formally even in the midst of summer, they had first met in 1860 to facilitate great tasks of statecraft. As ardent nationalists, they hoped to promote German legal unification, even before the emergence of a nation-­state. Although the jurists’ political program would have important consequences for the incipient German state, Ulrichs’s appearance at the Odeon marked a revolution all its own. He was preparing to address his professional colleagues on an unmentionable subject, same-­sex love, and to protest the various German anti-­sodomy laws that criminalized it.

Ulrichs had celebrated his birthday the day before, and now, at the age of forty-­two, he hoped to deliver a speech for which he arguably had spent most of his adulthood preparing. As a university student, he had recognized that he was attracted to other men. This sexual peculiarity and rumors of his intimate affairs had forced him to resign the only professional position he had ever held, as a government official. Finally, in an act of enormous courage, he disclosed his secret to his closest kin. Raised in a pious Christian family whose extended members included numerous Lutheran clergy, Ulrichs struggled for years with heart and intellect to make sense of his seemingly unacceptable feelings. Were they unnatural? Had he somehow caused them himself, through actions of his own? He examined carefully his own motivations and desires; he scoured legal and scientific publications on the topic. Following the tradition of the great Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Ulrichs countered prevailing beliefs and developed a theory of his own selfhood—­though defined in sexual, not spiritual, terms—­forming the conviction that he must face down an established authority and counter centuries of prejudice. To that end, since 1864, Ulrichs had published pamphlets under a pseudonym, arguing his case that sexual deviance was an endowment of nature and must be respected.

But on that morning in August, crossing Munich’s imposing Odeonsplatz, framed by government and cultural buildings, past the grand loggia of the Field Marshals’ Hall and the baroque spires and dome of the Theatine Church, Ulrichs felt his heart palpitate almost audibly as he neared the Odeon hall. As he would later recount, an inner voice whispered, “There is still time to keep silent. Simply waive your request to speak, and then your heart can stop pounding.” But Ulrichs also remembered those “comrades” who were anticipating his protest—­“Was I to answer their trust in me with cowardice?”—­and he recalled a desperate acquaintance who had committed suicide to escape criminal pros­ecution for sodomy and the public humiliation that would have followed. “With breast beating,” Ulrichs entered the building, mounted the speaker’s platform, and began reading his text to more than five hundred professional colleagues. “Gentlemen,” he intoned, “my proposal is directed toward a revision of the current penal law” to abolish the persecution of an innocent class of persons. “It is at the same time,” Ulrichs continued, “a question of damming a continuing flood of suicides.” The victims, he said, were those sexually drawn to members of their own sex.

Expressions of outrage and scattered cries of “Stop!” began echoing through the chamber. Alarmed by the voluble hostility, Ulrichs offered to surrender the floor, but others in the audience urged him to continue, and he again took heart. This “class of persons,” he went on to say, suffered legal persecution only because “nature has planted in them a sexual nature that is opposite of that which is usual.” Raucous shouts now emanated from the audience; Ulrichs heard hooting, catcalls, and cries of “Crucify!” from groups on his left and directly in front. On his right stood those who were not prepared for the content of his address and out of curiosity demanded that he finish. But the cacophony overwhelmed Ulrichs and forced him to descend from the podium without finishing his speech, while the assembly chairman attempted to reestablish order. The Association of Jurists refused to press Ulrichs’s agenda after the meeting concluded. Within five years member states of the new German Empire had adopted a full penal code in which the punitive Prussian law making a crime of sodomy prevailed over the far more liberal statutes of the other German states. But standing at the podium in Munich, Ulrichs had started something important with the first public coming-­out in modern history.

Just how much courage did this take? By August 1867 Ulrichs had already forfeited his career and exposed himself to potential rejection by family members. He had little left to lose and later described his appearance before the jurists at the Odeon as the proudest moment of his life. Freed now to go on making a public case for his cause, he continued publishing pamphlets after 1867, but under his own name, not a pseu­donym. And although he failed to avert the imposition of an anti-­sodomy law throughout the newly unified German nation after 1871, his writings and actions helped inspire the world’s first movement for homosexual rights, launched a generation later in Berlin, in 1897.

The truly remarkable aspect of Ulrichs’s brave initiative was the important contribution he made to the redefinition—­indeed the invention—­of sexuality (and homosexuality) in nineteenth-­century Europe. Traditional medical “science” explained “sodomy” as a willful perversion and the product of masturbation or sexual excess. “Sodomites” were understood to be oversexed predators who had simply grown bored with women. The established science of sexual “perversion” viewed same-­sex erotic activity as that which it seemed to be and nothing more, an isolated genital act. It was possible to imagine, in fact, that almost anyone might succumb to the crime of sodomy, either through seduction or by willful decision, but ultimately as a result of moral weakness. Sexual desire was considered a fluid and malleable drive that might easily be warped and perverted. Only in the 1850s did the first medical doctor, a German in Berlin named Johann Ludwig Casper, question this received wisdom and argue that some “sodomites” had an innate, biological attraction to the same sex. By 1900 a progressive school of German psychiatry had formed around the belief that same-­sex attraction might be congenital, and somehow an integral feature of a small sexual minority. It became possible now to imagine that...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0307473139
ISBN 13 
9780307473134
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
352
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