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Journal of the History of Sexuality 17.1 (2008) 85-109

The Rites of Artgenossen: Contesting Homosexual Political Culture in Weimar Germany
Glenn Ramsey
University of Memphis

Serious activists who fight for an outlawed and suppressed minority must be themselves conscious of what they do. Therefore, it is necessary that in the future everything that can do harm to homosexuals be censured, and foremost here belongs the presenting of films which always show only the effeminates among the homosexuals. Similarly, such scenes must also be suppressed where the great masses are made aware of older men who only lure youth into homosexual acts. The League for Human Rights has never taken the "freaks" among homosexuals as its guiding principle and displayed them to the public; rather, it has always pointed to the healthy, highly-valued citizens who are homosexual by pre-disposition. The League is firmly convinced that we can procure the liberation of homosexual people only in this way.

—Friedrich Radszuweit, "Falsche Wege" (1925)1

Referring to richard oswald's 1919 film Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), the leader of the new Bund für Menschenrecht (League for Human Rights, BfM), Fritz Radszuweit, underscored what was at stake in the movement to abolish the German sodomy law in the context of 1920s Germany.2 The three groups that made up this movement—the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, WhK), the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of the Self-Owned, GdE), and the BfM—had much in common. They had a shared goal, namely, [End Page 85] to persuade public opinion, government officials, and party leaders of legal reform. Strategically, they also all worked within a larger reform effort to frame a "modern" sociological approach to sexuality that included other movements such as sexual hygiene, birth regulation, and sex education. However, in their efforts to overturn the German sodomy law, the theoretical differences between the three activist groups revealed the indeterminate nature of homosexual being. These differences had political implications. The attempts to win legal recognition of already long-standing aesthetic and scientific images of homosexuality ultimately hinged upon rhetorical and sometimes political alliances with radical forces of German nationalism on the Right (namely, among the GdE), with socialism and Communism (within the WhK), and with liberal centrist values of "middle-class respectability" (among the BfM).

This article addresses the tensions between these strategies within the political climate of Weimar, specifically, how each group tried to shape an image of homosexuality that could speak for an activist body of homosexual political culture and the political discourses of like-minded sexual comrades (often termed Artgenossen).3 This body, already variously defined through biological and psychiatric sciences, traditions of German neoclassical aesthetics, and liberal legalist concepts of "civil rights," had become socially mobile by the 1920s in Germany through the more contested rhetorical and graphic differences of "representative" homosexual behavior. In other words, interactions both within and outside this strategic community became increasingly burdened with the twin demands for personal and public enlightenment and legal reform. Thus, despite the lack of political consensus (and opposition from nationalist and religious groups), "homosexuality" developed into a politically visible and effective category in Weimar Germany. However, the new conceptual fragmentation that marked this category signified, in turn, the inconclusive political dynamics of association itself among activist homosexuals, who were intent on bringing questions of legitimacy out of institutional circles and into a negotiated space of social identity.

The initial historiography of the early-twentieth-century German movement for homosexual rights has been hampered by largely unexamined notions of liberation and homosexual identity. These histories reduce the historical struggles for reform into a self-evident imperative to overturn Paragraph 175, the law that criminalized "unnatural" sex acts between males (widernatürliche Unzucht), which in turn presents a history shaped by the post-Stonewall demands of "lesbian and gay" politics. This positivistic approach assumes that homosexuality, like all nonnormative forms of sexual expression, can be de...

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