Committee Approval Form
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UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI _____________ , 20 _____ I,______________________________________________, hereby submit this as part of the requirements for the degree of: ________________________________________________ in: ________________________________________________ It is entitled: ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ Approved by: ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ BODY CRISIS, IDENTITY CRISIS: HOMOSEXUALITY AND AESTHETICS IN WILHELMINE- AND WEIMAR GERMANY A dissertation submitted to the Division of Research and Advanced Studies of the University of Cincinnati in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTORATE OF PHILOSOPHY (Ph.D.) in the Department of German Studies of the College of Arts and Sciences 2003 by David James Prickett B.A., University of Cincinnati, 1993 M.A., University of Cincinnati, 1999 Committee Chair: Dr. Katharina Gerstenberger Abstract The following study inquires into the emergence and development of homosexuality in German medical, legal, and social discourses from the turn of the last century through the Weimar Republic. Literary works, medical journals, homosexual journals, visual art, and film from the turn of the last century to the early thirties reflect a growing “gender crisis” throughout German society. Such primary media provide the data for this study. Of particular interest are the works, theories, and the person of Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician whose politics were social-democratic and who was of Jewish background. Hirschfeld was himself homosexual, but never portrayed himself as such due to the legal and political climate of his times. Having published extensive studies on homosexuality, hermaphroditism (today’s “intersexual”), and transvestism, Magnus Hirschfeld was an established sexologist in Wilhelmine Germany. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the world’s first Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. This Institute was a site of research, consultation, and therapy for those who sought enlightenment in sexual matters including birth control, venereal disease, intersexuality, and homosexuality. This project examines the dissemination and reception of Hirschfeld’s progressive theories both inside and beyond the medical community—indeed, how homosexuals themselves responded to Hirschfeld’s project of normality. This response, which I term the “modernist homosexual aesthetic,” is the basis of my thesis. The “modernist homosexual aesthetic,” an aesthetic, self-affirming expression of male homosexual identity, arises from this period of gender crisis in Germany, and is that aesthetic force that not only defines but is defined by the homosexual male body. I maintain that the media of photography, literature, and popular journals disseminated this aesthetic among those who sought to define themselves simultaneously outside normative gender roles and in a positive manner. I Abstract Body Crisis, Identity Crisis: Homosexuality and Aesthetics in Wilhelmine- and Weimar Germany take care to examine the ambivalence surrounding the discourses that played a role in the emergence of homosexuality during this period in Germany. Such discourses include (1) medical pathology, (2) aesthetics, and (3) criminology. Finally, I maintain that these discourses were not separate unto themselves; rather, the narrative, visual, and theoretical construction of the homosexual relied on an interplay of said discourses. Preface The following study inquires into the emergence and development of homosexuality in German medical, legal, and social discourses from the turn of the last century up through the Weimar Republic. Of particular interest in this study are the works, theories, and indeed the person of Magnus Hirschfeld, a physician whose politics were social-democratic and who was of Jewish background. Hirschfeld was himself homosexual, but never portrayed himself as such due to the legal and political climate of his times. Having published extensive studies on homosexuality, hermaphroditism (today’s “intersexual”), and transvestism, Magnus Hirschfeld was an established sexologist in Wilhelmine Germany. In 1919, Hirschfeld founded the world’s first Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. This Institute was a site of research, consultation, and therapy for those who sought enlightenment in sexual matters including birth control, venereal disease, intersexuality, and homosexuality. Literary works, medical journals, homosexual journals, visual art, and film from the turn of the last century to the early thirties reflect the growing “gender crisis” throughout German society. Such primary media provide the data for this study. While I primarily consider myself to be a Germanist, during the course of this project I have worn the hats of the Historian, the Art Historian, and the Semiotician. In developing my own analytic “voice,” I have relied on critical theory ranging from Barthes to Butler, from Foucault to Freud, from Riviere to Theweleit. What is of interest to me is the method in which these theoreticians analyze the subject’s position in a narrative. I in turn utilize this theoretical method in my analysis of various narratives—be the narrative a text from Hirschfeld, a novel from Klaus Mann, or an act-photo of the 1920s. In analyzing said media, I examine the dissemination and reception of Hirschfeld’s progressive theories both inside and beyond the Body Crisis, Identity Crisis: Homosexuality and Aesthetics in Wilhelmine- and Weimar Germany medical community—indeed, how homosexuals themselves responded to Hirschfeld’s project of normality. This response, which I term the “modernist homosexual aesthetic,” is the basis of my thesis. The “modernist homosexual aesthetic,” an aesthetic, self-affirming expression of male homosexual identity, arises from this period of gender crisis in Germany, and is that aesthetic force that not only defines but is defined by the homosexual male body. I maintain that the media of photography, literature, and popular journals disseminated this aesthetic among those who sought to define themselves simultaneously outside normative gender roles and in a positive manner. I take care to examine the ambivalence surrounding the discourses that played a role in the emergence of homosexuality during the period in question. Such discourses include (1) medical pathology, (2) aesthetics, and (3) criminology. Finally, I maintain that these separate discourses were not separate unto themselves; rather, the narrative, visual, and theoretical construction of the homosexual during the period in question relied on an interplay of said discourses. As Foucault and others1 have established, homosexuality was primarily understood as pathology until the turn of the last century. This model of homosexuality arose with the gendering of the individual—or more specifically, the gendering of “man”—that began with the mid-eighteenth century debate on masturbation. Around 1800, not only was the “healthy” individual differentiated from the “sick” individual, but also the penis and the vagina were defined as two autonomous genitalia (the vagina had been defined previously as “the inverted penis”).2 Therefore, whereas “man” was once seen as an autonomous and “gender-neutral” individual who was molded by “culture,” and “woman” was seen as “gender” and as “fertile ground” for reproduction, “man” came to be understood as a Body Crisis, Identity Crisis: Homosexuality and Aesthetics in Wilhelmine- and Weimar Germany specifically gendered individual. Not only this, but “man” became the “norm” vis-à-vis the construction of a decidedly deficient, “weibliche Geschlechtsidentität” (Mehlhorn 96). By 1840, the “sick” or “deficient” nature of the homosexual biological male was defined via his feminine nature as “die Figur des Weichlings” (Mehlhorn 108). Medical books archived case studies and measured individuals along a bell-curve model of normality. Such conceptions about those on the margins of the medical bell-curve were not only formed and spread by language, but also by the new medium of photography. For contemporary thinkers, the photograph provided unquestionable, visual proof of the external physical stigmata of the social outsiders’ undesirable inherited traits. Like case studies and criminal cases, photographs of individuals who exhibited similar traits were organized by type: the prostitute, the pocket-picker, the homosexual.3 This new “visual discourse” contributed greatly to medical and criminological discourses, which were understood only by the medical and legal experts who constructed them. Before 1900, the heterosexual, the homosexual, and the variations that existed in between these polarities were defined purely in terms of a person’s sex and gender, terms which were understood on a one-to-one basis: biological males were by definition “masculine” in behavior and appearance, while biological females exhibited “feminine” traits. In order to legitimize homosexuality, Hirschfeld had to find a category for homosexuals somewhere within the schema of respectable heterosexuality; somewhere among the masculine male and the feminine female. Already in the 1860s and 1870s, the lawyer and outspoken homosexual Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had published twelve booklets that comprised the series Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Herzer, Magnus 103).