Castration and Critique: Resisting Rehabilitation in Ernst Toller's Hinkemann

On April 23, 1928, playwright Ernst Toller was sent a questionnaire. It was mailed by the office of world-renowned sexologist and gay rights advocate Magnus Hirschfeld, who was nearing the ripe old age of sixty. In honor of its founder's birthday, Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexual-Wissenschaft was collecting remarks on his life and work from various literary, scientific, and political personalities—including Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig, and Thomas Mann—for a celebratory Festschrift. Toller, a leftist revolutionary, successful playwright, and sexual rights advocate, was a natural fit for the volume.¹

Two years earlier, Toller had appeared in Hirschfeld's Geschlechtskunde after the sexologist had been particularly taken by his drama Hinkemann. The play is mentioned by name on the very first page of the fivevolume Geschlechtskunde, where Toller is cited as the first author to stage the human version of a phenomenon that had been "observed in countless animals" "for millennia": the loss of the gonads (Hirschfeld 3).² The play, which Toller wrote while in prison for treason in 1921–22, tells the story of Eugen Hinkemann, a veteran who had the misfortune of being castrated in battle during World War One.³ Despite having been back from the front for several years and also maintaining his strapping manly figure, post-war Eugen has not been restored to his pre-war existence in any meaningful way—neither sexually, nor emotionally, nor occupationally. Relations between Eugen and his wife Grete are strained because of his mental and physical trauma, which have led him to quit his job at the local factory. While her husband is out hunting for a new job, Grete is left alone with their suggestively named friend Paul Großhahn. As Grete and Paul stay close to the hearth and very close to each other, Eugen is driven to the margins, specifically to the carnival. A fasttalking sideshow operator takes advantage of Eugen's desperation and convinces him to take a well-paying, but demoralizing job as a strongman who bites the heads off small animals.⁴ For the remainder of the play, Eugen—tormented by his brutal work in the sideshow, by the unfounded fear that Grete is laughing at him for being a "eunuch," and by surrealist visions of amputee war veterans—is living in a state of mental anguish that drives his wife to jump from a window. The curtain finally falls on a despairing Eugen, standing over his wife's mangled body and lamenting the arbitrariness of fate. In the first edition of the play, the curtain fell on that same scene, but also showed Eugen also tying himself a noose (Toller and Frühwald 58).⁵

In that story of tragic injustice which so spoke to Hirschfeld, Toller's hero had no choice but to sacrifice his body for a homeland that then offered no home for a body like his. The full impact of Toller's drama on Hirschfeld becomes clear in later chapters of Geschlechtskunde, where the sexologist uses it to lobby the scientific community to revise its terminology for conditions like Eugen's. Previously known as Eunuchoidismus, a term with a clear connection to the culturally pejorative eunuch, the condition would now be called Anorchie, a medical neologism of Hirschfeld's making that simply means "without testes" (Hirschfeld 1:399–400). That awareness of the power that medical language holds, both to help and to harm those who live inside it, was typical for Hirschfeld, and Toller knew this when he penned his response two years later to that questionnaire in the spring of 1928. In his contribution to the birthday Festschrift, he wrote: "Magnus Hirschfeld bedeutet Wissenschaft nicht neutrale Theorie, ohne persönliche Verpflichtung, sie dient ihm als Mittel, seinen fanatischen Kampf für Verständnis menschlicher Mannigfaltigkeiten […] zu fundieren" (Toller, Für Magnus Hirschfeld insert).⁶

In this article, I show that a careful reading of Hinkemann suggests a similar mindset and aim for Toller's work prior to its invocation by the sexologist. In fact, Toller and Hirschfeld's continued professional contact and their shared interest...