Goethe Männer Knaben: Ansichten zur “Homosexualität.” by W. Daniel Wilson (review)

W. Daniel Wilson’s engaging, thorough, and original analysis of the role of male-male love and sexual desire in Goethe’s writings makes significant advances in our understanding of Greek love in the age of Goethe, as well as of Goethe’s contributions to the representation of same-sex desire in the West. Published in German, the text reads smoothly and elegantly despite its highly scholarly and even technical nature—no doubt in part thanks to Angela Steidele’s translation. While most of Wilson’s conclusions about Goethe’s writings are convincing, his framing of and approach to Goethe’s texts and the study of sexuality provide an opportunity for stimulating discussions about the international study of sexuality and textuality.

Wilson’s study begins with a stunning interpretation of Goethe’s poem “Ganymed” (1774). The poem, concluding with its beautiful harmonization of active and passive in the phrase “umfangend umfangen,” sets about to do nothing less than provide “a radical reinterpretation of Greek love,” by unsettling the dynamics between the classical Greek erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved (60; all translations are my own). The beloved Greek shepherd, long portrayed as the passive object of the attentions of the lover Zeus, finds in Goethe’s poem, “for the first time in 2,500 years of literary history, a voice” (69).

For Wilson, “Ganymed” stands in opposition to “Der Erlkönig” (1782), in that the former tells the story of a sexually mature youth who desires the attentions of the lover, while the latter represents the feelings of a boy who is the unwilling object of an older man’s advances. Wilson argues that Mignon, from the Wilhelm Meister novels, is similar to the boy in the “Erlkönig”—that is, the victim of sexual violence. He concludes with the tantalizing suggestion that Mignon might in fact have been castrated, which would certainly shed revelatory light on the following line in the poem “Mignon” (aka “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?”): “Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?” (2:4).

In his chapter on Goethe’s experiences in Italy, where—as Goethe reported in 1787 in a letter written to Duke Carl August—he came upon many instances of the “love of men amongst themselves,” Wilson demonstrates his virtuosic hermeneutic gifts, with an especially compelling and comprehensive interpretation of the Venetian Epigrams. Composed in response to a trip in 1790 to Venice, published in a highly edited form in 1796, and mutilated by censors in the archives, the Epigrams present a notoriously difficult interpretive challenge. Wilson argues convincingly that Goethe originally planned a “homoerotic subcycle” (117) within the Epigrams, focusing on, in Goethe’s own phrase, the “four boys from antiquity,” Hylas, Hyacinth, Giton, and Antinous, the beloveds of Hercules, Apollo, Encolpius (of the Satyricon), and Emperor Hadrian, respectively. Once again, “Goethe continues his lifelong project of giving a voice to the allegedly passive partner, the maturing youth, who remains mute in the ancient sources” (124).

The public humiliation of Johannes Müller, the Swiss historian who fell victim to a student in Vienna claiming to represent a Hungarian suitor, encouraged Goethe “to give up his discretion, take a stand, and raise his voice” (135). Immediately after the scandal, Goethe offered Müller employment at the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, emphasizing “his support for a man whose same-sex tendencies had been exploited” (136). Wilson argues that Müller’s travails inspired Goethe to publish his homage to Winckelmann (1805), which openly and positively portrays the art historian’s male-male love as masculine and laudable. The Winckelmann essay appeared in opposition to an increasingly socially conservative and homophobic cultural turn, as late Romanticism became nationalistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic.

Wilson’s lovely and detailed study of the West-Östlicher Diwan (first published in 1819) returns to many of the themes of his examination of “Ganymed.” The Diwan, inspired by Persian poetry and...