Masking/Unmasking Identity in Early Twentieth-Century Germany: The Importance of N. O. Body

Within the context of early-twentieth-century medical discourses, this article focuses on the masking and unmasking of identity in N. O. Body’s Memoirs of a Man’s Maiden Years (Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren), an autobiography of a German “pseudo-hermaphrodite” published in 1907. Highlighting the author’s attempts to normalize the protagonist’s indeterminate body within both a medical and a narrative framework that attempt to negate the body’s “otherness,” I argue that Body’s autobiography actually exposes the protagonist’s ambiguity and multiple positionalities that threaten to spill out of the structures set up to contain them. Furthermore, the author’s attempt to mask his own Jewish identity while at the same time superimposing “Jewishness” back on the body of the protagonist illustrates the complex intersectionality in this text that is simultaneously hidden and on display. (HT)