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Bulletin of the GHI Washington Issue 44 Spring 2009 Copyright Das Digitalisat wird Ihnen von perspectivia.net, der Online-Publikationsplattform der Max Weber Stiftung – Stiftung Deutsche Geisteswissenschaftliche Institute im Ausland, zur Verfügung gestellt. Bitte beachten Sie, dass das Digitalisat urheberrechtlich geschützt ist. Erlaubt ist aber das Lesen, das Ausdrucken des Textes, das Herunterladen, das Speichern der Daten auf einem eigenen Datenträger soweit die vorgenannten Handlungen ausschließlich zu privaten und nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken erfolgen. Eine darüber hinausgehende unerlaubte Verwendung, Reproduktion oder Weitergabe einzelner Inhalte oder Bilder können sowohl zivil- als auch strafrechtlich verfolgt werden. Features GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND BELONGING: FEMALE HOMOSEXUALITY IN GERMANY, 1890-1933 Marti M. Lybeck 2008 FRITZ STERN DISSERTATION PRIZE WINNER UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN LA CROSSE I would like to begin this essay on my dissertation research with some refl ections on the questions that motivated and shaped it. At its most basic level, my question was: How does social and political change happen? The central topic I investigated, women’s emancipation, is one of the profound long-term changes in modern history. We know a lot about the events and organiza- tions that were important to this transformation, and quite a bit about how abstract processes—such as modernization, capitalist economic development, and political liberalization—aff ected it. But in the end, people have to agree to live their lives diff erently and to make new choices. Economic structures, state actions, and advocacy organizations were, of course, crucial shaping factors in the emergence of New Women in the late nineteenth century, but they only give us context. They do not really explain how women became new. My focus point in trying to penetrate emancipation is sexuality. One of the key terms in my analysis of women’s changing sense of themselves is desire. Desire is clearly one of the things we think about when we think of sex, but desire—desire for something diff erent—is also central to any project of emancipation. Desire also describes what I was about in pursuing this research. I wanted to get below the surface of feminist organizations and the spectacular images associated with New Women and into what was happen- ing in the consciousness and psyche of individuals that prompted them to create new self-defi nitions and new ways of imagining how their stories fi t into the larger social and political stories of their time. I wanted to understand the processes and infl uential factors that gave shape to their choices and sympathies. I wanted a much more troubled view of how people struggle with re-making and re- defi ning themselves as they live out the relationships and activities of everyday life. I wanted to know how sexuality—pleasure, love, and desire—intersected with emancipation. I wanted to fi gure out how national identity and political commitments might be aff ected by changes in gender and sexuality on the very intimate level that encompasses feelings and dreams. And I wanted to connect all of LYBECK | GENDER, SEXUALITY, AND BELONGING 29 this to the pressures and fractures of German history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In satisfying my intellectual and historical desires, I was trans- gressing one of the crucial rules that most of my historical sub- 1 See James Steakley, The jects lived by. Most women I investigated could not simply claim Homosexual Emancipa- emancipation as what they wanted. Articulating desires for things tion Movement in Germa- ny (New York, 1975); and like freedom, ambition, power, a more enjoyable life—even in the Harry Oosterhuis, “Homo- name of justice—was taboo. They needed elaborate self-denying sexual Emancipation in Germany Before 1933: Two justifi cations to support their claims. As they negotiated this para- Traditions,” in Homosexu- ality and Male Bonding in dox, middle-class women produced texts in which their forbidden Pre-Nazi Germany: The desires confronted the ideals they assimilated from their education Youth Movement, the Gay Movement, and Male Bond- and culture. Much of my dissertation was built on reading these ing Before Hitler’s Rise, texts carefully to get beyond the assumption that women naturally ed. Harry Oosterhuis (New York, 1991), 1-27. fought for liberation because they wanted to free their “real selves” from the oppression enforced on them by sexist social norms. 2 The major periodicals are Die Freundin (1924, 1927- 1933), Frauenliebe (1926- Narrowing the focus even further to homosexuality was uniquely 1930), and Garçonne (1930- possible in the German context. The German homosexual move- 1932). All are available on microfi lm. Descriptions of ment had long roots among men in the second half of the nineteenth the content can be found century and was then the most organized and publicly visible in in Katharina Vogel, “Zum 1 Selbstverständnis lesbisch- the world. When women occupied their own specifi c corner of the er Frauen in der Weimarer developing homosexual public sphere in the late 1920s and early Republik: Eine Analyse der Zeitschrift Die Freundin 1930s, they left a historical record that gave me an intriguing entry 1924-1933,” 162-68, and point for my inquiry. Women active in the German homosexual Petra Schlierkamp, “Die Garçonne,” 169-179, both movement wrote articles, stories, autobiographical fragments, in Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Ber- poetry, and letters to and for newspapers published for their com- lin, 1850-1950: Geschichte, munity.2 But telling the story of that one new public group, as im- Alltag, Kultur, ed. Berlin Mu- seum (Berlin, 1984). portant as it is, did not fully resolve my questions. By taking female homosexuality as a category—and a new one in public awareness—I 3 Similar approaches to the intersection of gender and could move out into discussions and representations of the intersec- sexuality for groups of tion of gender and sexuality in many other contexts. women in this period are exemplifi ed in Martha Vici- nus, Independent Women: Wherever female homosexuality became an issue, it generated Work and Community for anxiety, confl ict, and struggle, and therefore source material docu- Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago, 1985) (on Great menting changes in conceptions and experiences of gender and Britain); and Margit Göttert, sexuality. Following the history of the concept allowed me to set up Macht und Eros: Frauen- beziehungen und weibliche comparisons and trajectories of change over time. I could produc- Kultur um 1900: Eine neue tively bring in historical subjects who struggled with these issues Perspektive auf Helene 3 Lange und Gertrud Bäumer even though they did not think of themselves as homosexual. (Königstein/Taunus, 2000) When medical experts defi ned the category of female homosexuality (on the German women’s movement). at the end of the nineteenth century, they more frequently used the 30 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 44 | SPRING 2009 Features GHI Research Conference Reports GHI News term “invert.” Concepts of inversion prioritized gender over sexual- ity. Same-sex desire was understood as being caused by abnormal gender character—a masculine woman desired women because of her essential masculinity. Medical experts and other intellectuals who used the new categories in thinking about social relations in the late nineteenth century invariably confl ated what they diagnosed as female masculinity with feminist claims on masculine spheres.4 In consequence of these uncertain and overlapping boundaries between sexual desire, gender performance, and aspirations for emancipation, discourse and contention over sexual categories always intimately involved gender and same-sex relations as well. These four elements—sexual desire, gender performance, feminist aspirations, and same-sex love—were exactly the facets of emanci- pation that I wanted to examine. They formed a conceptual quartet that shaped the analysis of texts and group dynamics. As I discovered clusters of sources that fi t these parameters, I found that I had four case studies of groups of women clearly wrestling with emancipation from traditional female roles and expectations. Two of them coalesced in the decades before the turn of the century and two during the Weimar Republic. This chronology is unsurpris- ing since the New Woman was a fi gure much commented upon in 4 The classic analysis of in- both periods. In both periods sexuality as a theme proliferated as version as it related to fe- male homosexual identities a point of experimentation and commentary in the sciences, the is Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, 5 “Discourses of Sexuality arts, and among avant-gardes. My micro-historical methodology and Subjectivity: The New involved careful reconstruction of the social context within which Woman 1870-1936,” in Hid- den from History: Reclaim- each group lived, of some of the texture of its everyday life, and of ing the Gay and Lesbian the confl icts as well as the attractions and aff ections among the Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George individuals within it. Chauncey, Jr. (New York, 1989), 264-280. See also Harry Oosterhuis, Step- I. children of Nature: Krafft- Ebing, Psychiatry, and the The fi rst case study was formed out of the stories of a small but Making of Homosexual Iden- tity (Chicago, 2000). growing stream of German women from well-off families who migrated temporarily to Switzerland in order to take university 5 Two works I have found particularly helpful for my degrees beginning in the 1870s. German universities did not grant contexts are Peter Jelavich, degrees to women before the fi rst decade of the twentieth century, Munich and Theatrical Mod- ernism: Politics, Playwriting, although many women did study with individual professors. Ac- and Performance, 1890-1914 cess to higher education was one of the earliest and strongest (Cambridge, MA, 1985), and Richard W.