Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex by Robert Deam Tobin (review)

The “peripheral desires” in Robert Deam Tobin’s title refer not only to non-normative ones, in the Foucauldian sense, but also to the geographic periphery of Europe—from Switzerland to Samoa—where German-speaking writers explored such desires and speculated about their nature. Tobin argues that his chosen writers—some of them relatively unknown and therefore “peripheral” in their own right—defined the political and theoretical boundaries of discussions about same-sex attraction that obtain to this day. By the turn of the century, these writers had coalesced into two loose schools of thought, one that viewed sexuality as fixed and biologically innate, which increasingly gained favor in medical and legal circles, and another—the “masculinist” view—that insisted on the potential for same-sex attraction in every man.

Tobin singles out Heinrich Hössli, whose two-volume Eros appeared in Switzerland in the 1830s, as the “first thinker” in the German-speaking lands to present same-sex attraction as fixed and innate (28). Hössli’s interest in the matter had stemmed from the case of a man executed in 1817 for having murdered the object of his thwarted affections, which prompted Hössli to examine those affections and to advocate greater social acceptance of the men who expressed them. Hössli viewed sexuality as natural, immutable, and fundamentally constitutive of one’s identity, and he saw men who loved men as a discrete and unjustifiably persecuted minority of the population in much the same way as Jews. This “minoritizing” view of same-sex desire, as Tobin convincingly shows, has profoundly shaped the dominant strand of German (and western) discourse on sexuality ever since.

If the 1830s witnessed some of the earliest efforts to theorize male-male attraction for a German-speaking audience, then 1869 marked the point at which German became the dominant language for such theorizing. Tobin attributes this to the political environment in central Europe at the time, when a unifying German state and a restructuring Habsburg Empire both revised their legal codes, bringing sodomy laws under renewed scrutiny. In that year, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published two brochures on the subject; Karl Maria Kertbeny first used the word “homosexual” in print; and a psychiatrist at Berlin’s Charité Hospital, Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal, diagnosed two patients as sexual “inverts.” All three believed that some men and women had fixed, biologically rooted attractions to members of the same sex, although Kertbeny saw sexuality—like national identity—as susceptible to cultural forces. Moreover, none of them, says Tobin, believed that homosexual activity per se warranted criminalization.

Within a couple of decades, though, a competing vision to this innate, minoritizing view of same-sex desire began to emerge. “Masculinists” argued that most men had the capacity to love men and women, for different purposes and at different stages in their lives. As the name suggests, these “masculinist” writers focused exclusively on male sexuality; rejected outright the opposing school’s notion that homosexual behavior went hand in hand with “gender inversion”; and celebrated the intergenerational, sexually fluid couplings of ancient Greece. Leading figures in this group included Benedict Friedlander, who argued that male-male desire was an oppressed aspect of masculinity; Hans Blüher, who insisted in 1912 that homoeroticism bound male youth groups together; and Adolf Brand, whose magazine for the movement, Der Eigene, first appeared in 1896. They and their followers tended toward anti-Semitism, misogyny, and a Nietzschean rejection of a moral system that religion had imposed upon them. Blüher, in particular, claimed “male-male love as […] a specific positive quality of the Germans,” something that Thomas Mann echoed in his reference to Germans as a “homoerotic folk” (106, 188).

After having charted the increasing dominance of German thinkers in theorizing male-male desire, the second half of Tobin’s book offers suggestive and often insightful readings of Ernst von Wolzogen’s forgotten 1899 novel Das dritte Geschlecht, Mann’s 1912...