Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

Hubert Kennedy Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement Peremptory Publications San Francisco 2002 © 2002 by Hubert Kennedy Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement is a Peremtory Publica- tions eBook. It may be freely distributed, but no changes may be made in it. An eBook may be cited the same as a printed book. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please write to [email protected]. 2 3 When posterity will one day have included the persecution of Urnings in that sad chapter of other persecutions for religious belief and race—and that this day will come is beyond all doubt—then will the name of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs be constantly remembered as one of the first and noblest of those who have striven with courage and strength in this field to help truth and charity gain their rightful place. Magnus Hirschfeld, Foreword to Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (1898) Magnus Hirschfeld 4 Contents Preface 6 1. Childhood: 1825–1844 12 2. Student and Jurist: 1844–1854 18 3. Literary and Political Interests: 1855–1862 37 4. Origins of the “Third Sex” Theory: 1862 59 5. Researches on the Riddle of “Man-Manly” Love: 1863–1865 67 6. Political Activity and Prison: 1866–1867 105 7. The Sixth Congress of German Jurists, More “Researches”: 1867–1868 128 8. Public Reaction, The Zastrow Case: 1868–1869 157 9. Efforts for Legal Reform: 1869 177 10. The First Homosexual Magazine: 1870 206 11. Final Efforts for the Urning Cause: 1871–1879 217 12. Last Years in Italy: 1880–1895 249 13. Conclusion 282 Afterword 287 Appendix A: Curriculum Vitae 294 Appendix B: Antinous 300 Appendix C: Genealogy of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs 306 References 307 Index 325 5 Preface The reception to the first edition of my biography of this courageous pioneer was very gratifying, although there were still questions about Ulrichs’s life that I was unable to answer. Why, for example, did he leave state’s service in Hanover after only six years as an administrator and assistant judge? I could only speculate. With the German edition in 1990, however, I was able to give a definitive answer to that question. In the decade since then even more information has become available, so that I welcomed the request for a revised German edition (2001), to which the present edition essentially corresponds. I am very grateful to all the researchers who have shared their findings, and I am very pleased that interest in this important figure from our past continues to grow. I hope that this new edition, which is about 16% longer than the first edition, will contribute to an even greater appreciation of Ulrichs’s hopes, his dreams, his accomplishments. * Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was perhaps the first self-proclaimed homosexual (or, in his terminology, Urning—the word “homosexual” was not invented until later) to speak out publicly for the rights of homosexuals. This was in 1867 at a Congress of German Jurists in Munich. He was shouted down on that occasion and not allowed to finish his speech, but this may have seemed to him a mild reaction for he had twice been imprisoned for speaking out against the Prussian invasion and annexation of his homeland Hanover in 1866. Already in 1864 and 1865 Ulrichs had published a series of five booklets presenting a new scientific theory of homosexuality, the so-called third sex theory, which, by assert- ing that the condition is inborn and natural, formed a basis for his demand that the con- temporary antihomosexual laws be abolished. Ulrichs himself was a trained lawyer and had been briefly an assistant attorney in the civil service of the Kingdom of Hanover, but from 1855 he lived as a freelance journalist, with many literary, scientific, and political interests. He was for a while the private secretary of a diplomat at the parliament of the German Confederation in Frankfurt. 6 Ulrichs’s series of twelve booklets on “The Riddle of ‘Man-Manly’ Love” (the title of the English translation of Ulrichs’s writings by Michael Lombardi-Nash, 1994) continued until 1879, but despite his courageous efforts he was unable to form an effective movement for legal reform. On the contrary, following the unification of Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, the harsh Prussian antihomosexual law was ex- tended to all parts of Germany. In disappointment Ulrichs left Germany to spend the last fifteen years of his life in Italy, where he wrote and published a journal promoting yet another interest: the Latin language. In 1897, two years after the death of Ulrichs, Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Scien- tific Humanitarian Committee, the first homosexual rights organization, and the following year he edited a new edition of the twelve booklets of Ulrichs. In later writings Hirschfeld modified Ulrichs’s theory to form his own theory of “sexual intermediates,” in this and other ways continuing the work and spirit of Ulrichs. In his book Die Homosex- ualität des Mannes und des Weibes (1914), Hirschfeld gave fourteen pages to a discus- sion of Ulrichs, concluding: “We have lingered a bit longer with Ulrichs, because he is of triple importance: as a researcher into Uranismus [homosexuality], as a fighter for it, and last but not least as a Uranian personality” (Hirschfeld 1914, 967). I share Hirschfeld’s view of the “triple importance” of Ulrichs and I have tried to give all three points full weight in this biography. As a gay man, I am not an impartial observer of his life and works. But despite my admiration for the man, which will be evi- dent enough, let me state here my prejudices. I do not share the belief of Ulrichs and Hirschfeld that a study of the biology of homosexuality must eventually lead to a general understanding and acceptance of gay people. Ulrichs posited an invisible “germ” that was responsible for the development of homosexuality. Despite their repeated failures, biolo- gists have continued to seek to uncover this “germ” in one form or another. Indeed, in the past decade we have been exposed to such “discoveries” almost annually. For various reasons I think this project is doomed to failure. More importantly, I think history shows that, even if such a biological explanation were revealed, it would not automatically lead to better treatment of homosexuals. I am more inclined to the view of the German anarchist John Henry Mackay, that “after all, each person only understands his own love and every other is foreign and in- 7 comprehensible to him,” so that “here only the concept of the right to equal freedom, the tolerance of foreign lifestyles as the final and highest result of civilization can be salu- tary” (Mackay 1979, 68). I agree with him that this is part of “the struggle of the individ- ual for his freedom against any kind of oppression whatever” (Mackay 1979, 61). Nevertheless, I think it is important, and not only for gay people, to understand the development of a theory of homosexuality that has been historically important and continues to be influential. I agree with John Addington Symonds’s comment to Edward Carpenter in 1893: “He must be regarded as the real originator of a scientific handling of the phenomenon” (Symonds 1967–69, 3: 814). For this reason I have carefully tried to trace its origins, to see what was original in Ulrichs’s thinking, and to determine the in- fluences on him. This means placing Ulrichs in the intellectual, social, and political cli- mate of his time; but competing theories of homosexuality, for example, have only been discussed as they came into conflict with his. Ulrichs will be best remembered, as Hirschfeld noted already in 1898, as a fighter for his cause: the freeing of his fellow homosexuals from legal and social oppression. Early on he saw this struggle as a continual one, writing, in a slight paraphrase of Goethe: “Only he gains his freedom and life, who must daily conquer them” (Inclusa, 28).1 To- day, more than a century after Ulrichs ended his campaign, it appears that some progress has indeed been made. How fragile this gain may be, however, is shown by the ease with which in the 1930s the Nazis wiped out the first flowering of our movement in Germany. But the courage and integrity of Ulrichs more than a century ago remains an inspiration. Ulrichs was also flesh and blood, with sexual desires and a need for love, and I have tried to present this side of him as well. His candor about himself allows us a picture that is rare indeed in the nineteenth century, for his story is not one of the case histories of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis, of which Mackay complained: “They had locked up his love in science’s wax-figure cabinet of monsters, deformities, and monstrosities of all kinds” (Mackay 1979, 214). Ulrichs gave literary evidence of his loves in a number of poems throughout his writings. Several of them are included here. * 1. See Faust, part 2, act 5. In the translation of George Madison Priest: “Of freedom and of life he only is deserving / Who every day must conquer them anew.” 8 In the first edition I expressed some debts in the following paragraph, which I gladly and sincerely repeat here: It is a pleasure to acknowledge the help and encouragement of many people in the preparation of this biography. I am grateful in the first place to Jonathan Ned Katz, who first called Ulrichs to my attention. The help of Menso Folkerts and Manfred Herzer has been indispensable, both in personal encouragement and in the procuring of documents (and assistance in reading them!) otherwise unavailable to me.

Load more