Fenny Skaller

John Henry Mackay Fenny Skaller and Other Prose Writings from the Books of the Nameless Love Translated from the German by Hubert Kennedy Peremptory Publications Concord, CA 2003 Copyright © 1988 by Hubert Kennedy Fenny Skaller and Other Prose Writings from the Books of the Nameless Love was first published in 1988 by Southernwood Press, Amsterdam. The present edition is a Peremp- tory Publications ebook. It may be freely distributed, but no changes may be made in it. This edition is essentially the same as the 1988 edition. A few corrections and minor changes have been made. The illustrations are new to this edition. Comments and suggestions are welcome. Please write to [email protected]. 2 Contents Foreword 4 Fenny Skaller: A Life of the Nameless Love 12 The Nameless Love: A Creed 125 Listen! Only a Moment! A Cry 131 The History of a Fight for the Nameless Love 149 3 Foreword In his memoirs, written late in his life, Mackay recalled, “In the middle of my life there arose, like a deliverance to a new goal, the task of which it still seems too soon to speak (as late as it already is).” This “deliverance” was from the grief he felt over the death of his mother in 1902, when Mackay was thirty-eight years old. The “new goal” was the task of gaining recognition for the equal rights of man/boy love: Mackay began planning his campaign in 1905. This campaign was carried out under the pseudonym “Sagitta”, and although it was an open secret by the time he wrote his memoirs in 1932, he never publicly revealed his identity. In his will, however, he stated that any further publication of the writings of Sagitta were to show his true name. The present volume contains a selection of those writings.1 John Henry Mackay was born in Greenock, Scotland, on 6 February 1864 of a Scot- tish father and German mother.2 His father, a marine insurance broker, died when Mac- kay was only nineteen months old, and his mother, of a well-off merchant family in Hamburg, returned with her son to her native Germany, where she later married a wid- ower who also had a son. Mackay did not get along well with his stepfather, a strict Prus- sian civil servant, and found the small-town atmosphere of Saarbrücken, where he grew up, too restrictive. Thus he was happy to complete his schooling in another town as a boarder with another family. He then spent a year as an apprentice in a publishing house, leaving there to study at three universities, but only as an auditor. Although he often vis- ited his mother afterwards, much of his early life was spent in restless travel. An allow- ance from his mother gave him enough money to live modestly, so that he was able to choose a career as a writer without worrying about eventual sales of his books. This situa- 1. The complete German text of Die Buecher der namenlosen Liebe (Books of the nameless love) in- cludes “The History of a Fight for the Nameless Love” as an introduction, and the following titles: 1. The Nameless Love: A Creed; 2. Who Are We? A Poem of the Nameless Love; 3. Fenny Skaller: A Life of the Nameless Love; 4. Over the Marble Steps: A Scene of the Nameless Love; 5. On the Edge of Life: Poems of the Nameless Love; 6. Listen! Only a Moment! A Cry. 2. Mackay did not become a German citizen until around 1900, after he had decided to settle perma- nently in Berlin. Friedrich Dobe, John Henry Mackay als Mensch (Koblenz: Edition Plato, 1987), p. 39. 4 tion changed in later years, especially after the First World War when the runaway infla- tion in Germany wiped out the value of the annuity he had purchased with money inher- ited from his mother, so that his last years were spent in relative poverty. He died in Ber- lin on 16 May 1933, just six days after the infamous burning of books of “un-German spirit” by the Nazis. Some of Mackay’s books were probably in that bonfire, but the state had already de- clared several Sagitta writings “immoral” and had ordered them destroyed a quarter of a century earlier. Indeed, Mackay’s anarchist poetry had been forbidden in Germany as early as 1887, and it was as an anarchist writer that he remained known to the general public: an obituary in the New York Times said that in Germany he was called an “anarchist lyricist.” Mackay’s first publication was in 1885 when, following a brief visit to Scotland, he wrote a narrative poem in imitation of Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake.3 Instant fame came to him, however, with the publication in 1891 of Die Anarchisten (The Anarchists), which also appeared in English that same year and was quickly translated into six other languages. By 1898, when his biography of Max Stirner appeared, Mackay was also known as the rediscoverer of that philosopher of egoism. But Mackay also wrote many love lyrics, several of which were set to music, including the popular “Morgen” of Rich- ard Strauss. (These poems were inspired by boys, but Mackay carefully left the age and gender of the poems’ “beloved” unstated.) And in 1901 his novel Der Schwimmer (The Swimmer)—which Mackay later tried, unsuccessfully, to have made into a film—was one of the first literary sports novels. Thus Mackay, who had settled in Berlin by then, was at the height of his fame when he conceived in 1905 the idea of using his writing ability in the cause of “the nameless love”. He chose the term “nameless love” since, as he said, “no name yet correctly names it”. Today’s North American Man/Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) uses the term “man/boy love”, giving equal weight to “man” and “boy” in a “love” relationship. But, as Mackay could have predicted, its spokespersons must constantly oppose the prejudice that holds such relations to be impossible. This was Mackay’s love, however, and in the 3. See Edward Mornin, “A Late German Imitation of Walter Scott”, Germanic Notes 17 (1986): 49– 51. 5 novel Fenny Skaller, in which Mackay wished to “deepen psychologically” the concept of the “nameless love”, he naturally called on his own life. In addition to the autobiographical novel Fenny Skaller, the present volume contains two short propaganda pieces and “The History of a Fight for the Nameless Love”, in which Mackay wanted to “let the facts speak for themselves”, so that future historians could understand the origin of the movement he believed would eventually triumph. Nevertheless, the world has changed greatly since then, so that the context of the “facts” needs to be clarified if they are “to speak for themselves”. To this end, notes have been added that, for example, name some of the names Mackay deliberately chose to omit from his account. But some further background may also be helpful. The first self-acknowledged homosexual to publicly speak out for the equal rights of sexual minorities was Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–1895). This was at a Congress of German Jurists in Munich on 29 August 1867. Ulrichs proposed a resolution urging repeal of all anti-homosexual laws. But he was shouted down on that occasion and, afterwards, the first actual proposal in the German parliament to repeal the law did not occur until 1898. This was a result of the activity of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, founded in Berlin the previous year by Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), who was then, and for many years following, the leader of the German movement for homosexual emancipation. Hirschfeld had taken over Ulrichs’s so-called third sex theory (“a feminine soul confined in a masculine body”) and developed it into his own theory of “sexual in- termediates”, whereby the homosexual was considered a mental/physical type somewhere between true men and true women. Indeed, Hirschfeld appeared many times in court as an expert witness to give his opinion as to whether or not a particular individual was homosexual, based on his observation of their physical characteristics. But whereas this theory can be considered progressive when Ulrichs introduced it, since it gave him the courage to speak out publicly for homosexual rights, it appears less so in the time of Hirschfeld, since, as Mackay clearly saw, it excluded by definition individuals such as Mackay, who saw himself as entirely masculine. Further, Hirschfeld’s suggestion that an arbitrary “age of consent” (of sixteen) be written into the law ruled out, again by definition, boy-lovers and the boys who love them. 6 To be sure, Hirschfeld’s view was not without opposition at the time. A group com- posed mostly of bisexuals and/or boy-lovers, organized around the periodical Der Eigene (The Self-Owner) in Berlin, promoted “male culture” or, perhaps better, the cult of the male. Mackay had personal friends among this group and felt closer to it, but as an indi- vidualist anarchist he could not accept the view that one gender or one kind of love was better than another. In all aspects of life his slogan was “equal freedom for all”. In discussing the “Books of the Nameless Love”, Mackay’s American biographer Thomas A. Riley wrote: Of these books the novel Fenny Skaller is peculiarly interesting in that it seems to be entirely autobiographical; at least the writer has found no important disagree- ments between the novel and what he knows of Mackay’s life.

Load more