Peripheral Desires. Robert Deam Tobin

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      Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts

      Although Kertbeny’s “homosexuality,” Westphal’s “contrary sexual feelings” or sexual inversion, and Ulrichs’s urnings all made appearances in print in 1869, it makes more sense to begin the story of the emergence of modern sexual discourses in German-speaking central Europe with two Swiss accounts of male-male desire: Heinrich Zschokke’s novella, Eros, of 1821 and Heinrich Hössli’s monumental two-volume apology for male-male love of the 1830s, called Eros: Die Männerliebe der Griechen, ihre Beziehung zur Geschichte, Erziehung, Literatur und Gesetzgebung aller Zeiten (Eros: The Male Love of the Greeks, Its Relationship to History, Education, Literature, and Legislation of All Times). Not even this seeming point of origin, however, is final. The writings of Zschokke and Hössli emerge at the intersection of a variety of geographically and chronologically determined ideas of language, biology, race, gender, and social and political change.

      Hössli’s Eros sketches the outlines of a modern conception of same-sex desire that is fixed and the basis of identity. His thought builds on discussions taking place in German-speaking central Europe, where vocabulary such as “sexuality” (Sexualität) itself was just beginning to appear. Hössli makes the case for a desire between men that is distinct from friendship and explicitly sexual. His study uses his era’s biology to posit sexuality as natural, involuntary, immutable, transhistorical, universal, and the basis of individuality. It toys with the idea that same-sex desire is related to gender inversion, and indirectly compares men who sexually love other men to Jews. It concludes that, like women and Jews, such men are in need of social justice through political action.

      Hössli deserves credit as the first thinker on the subject of same-sex desire in the German-speaking realm to put together so many of these ideas into the package that many sexologists and activists in the homosexual emancipation movement would transmit throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. However, it is also important to realize how deeply rooted his thinking was in the culture of early nineteenth-century liberal bourgeois central Europe, which glorified a Romantic vision of organic nature and adopted such newly emergent concepts as “sexuality,” Bildung, and “the emancipation of the flesh.”

      Hössli & Co.

      As Ferdinand Karsch (1853–1936) explains in his essay in the 1903 edition of Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for Sexual Intermediary Types), Hössli was a fashionable hat-maker and designer in Glarus, a picturesque town high in the Alps in central Switzerland.¹ Married to Elisabeth Grebel from Zürich, he was not the patriarch of a bourgeois nuclear family, as he and his wife did not live together. Their two sons both emigrated to America. Hössli died in 1864, unaware of the work that Ulrichs was beginning to publish on urnings. Ulrichs himself first heard of Hössli in 1865 and never had a chance to meet him.² Although Ulrichs disagreed with some of Hössli’s approaches, he considered him a pioneer in the field and bought all eight remaining copies of Eros he could locate to add to the “common library” of materials pertaining to same-sex desire he was trying to develop.³ Through Ulrichs, Hössli was known to such late nineteenth-century sexologists as Havelock Ellis.⁴

      Hössli claimed that his interest in the male love of men developed because of the shockingly horrific execution of Franz Desgouttes (1785–1817), who was put to death for the murder of Daniel Hemmeler (1794–1817), the twenty-two-year-old young man he loved and with whom he had sex. Born and raised in Bern, Switzerland, Desgouttes had studied law in Heidelberg in 1806 and returned home, where he lived with his parents and led a troubled life. Desgouttes’s relationship with Hemmeler developed tumultuously with many drunken fights, as the young man attempted to assert his autonomy, including his right to pursue relationships with women. Desgouttes tried to keep his beloved with gifts ranging from chocolate, wine, and hazelnuts to the four-volume history of Switzerland by Johannes von Müller (1752–1809), who had had his own highly publicized scandal involving a male beloved. Desgouttes was not able to keep Hemmeler’s affection, however, and killed the young man on July 29, 1817. In retribution, Desgouttes was broken on the wheel on September 30 the same year. Breaking on the wheel was a gruesome and popular form of execution resembling crucifixion. After the prisoner was tied to the spokes and hub of a large wheel, the executioner shattered the limbs of the prisoner, who then slowly and agonizingly died in view of the public.⁵ This grotesquely medieval form of capital punishment surely added to the liberal Hössli’s horror at what he perceived to be the criminalization of Desgouttes’s love.

      A desire to understand Desgouttes’s actions more clearly and represent them more sympathetically inspired Hössli to commission a novella on the subject by the Swiss author Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), one of the many literary figures of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century German-speaking culture overshadowed by the sheer number of famous writers from the Age of Goethe. Zschokke was involved with a variety of progressive journals and newspapers, founding Der Schweizerbote (The Swiss Messenger), a periodical that ran from 1804 until 1879, long after its founder’s death. Thinking that a man of such spotless liberal credentials would empathize with the plight caused by the persecution of Greek love, Hössli asked Zschokke to complete a short story based on the Desgouttes case.

      Zschokke came through with Eros, published in 1821 in a collection of short stories titled Erheiterungen (Amusements). In the narrative—one of the earliest stories in German attempting to elucidate male-male desire—a judge named Holmar (modeled on Hössli) tries to convince a small group of bourgeois couples that the recent execution by breaking on the wheel of a certain Lukasson (based on Desgouttes) for murdering his beloved Walter (based on Hemmeler) was unjust because society did not understand love between men. Holmar recounts the glory days of ancient Greece, when men like Lukasson were honored philosophers, poets, and politicians, not criminals subject to cruel archaic punishments. His interlocutors ponder Holmar’s arguments as they attempt to understand the passionate male-male relationship that started in love and ended in death.

      Hössli detested Zschokke’s story, which disembowels his arguments about the acceptance of male-male sexual love in classical culture, insisting that the love between men in ancient Greece was not sensual. Zschokke’s characters reject other key elements of the defense of even this “pure” male-male love, favoring sociomedical explanations that suggest that such love is the product of nervous disorders, developmental problems, or the segregation of women from men in ancient Greece. The narrator, Beda, speaking for the group, cannot exculpate Lukasson for his murder and doesn’t accept Holmar’s argument that Lukasson has been the victim of oppression: “Lukasson was not made unhappy because of a virtuous friendship, but because of a raging passion that destroys all reason and virtue that he did not master at the right time and that turned him into a rake [Wüstling] and ultimately a murderer.”⁶ The older vocabulary of Wüstling could be translated as “libertine” as well as “rake,” and has nothing to do with an innate natural sexual orientation. The group concludes that male-male sexual love ought to remain prohibited by law. To add insult to injury, Zschokke’s Holmar is an odd and eccentric fellow, the only man in the lot without a wife or fiancée who is present. In fact, the narrator implies that Holmar might be one of the men who love other men, which the judge denies.⁷

      Because Zschokke had not adequately addressed his concerns, Hössli wrote his own treatise on the subject. The first volume was published in 1836 in Glarus; that community’s authorities refused to allow the СКАЧАТЬ