- The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic by Javier Samper Vendrell
By Javier Samper Vendrell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020. 280 pages + 14 images. $24.71 paperback or e-book.
With his enjoyably readable new study, The Seduction of Youth: Print Culture and Homosexual Rights in the Weimar Republic, Javier Samper Vendrell makes important contributions to the study of sexuality in the German-speaking world by focusing on two points: (1) Friedrich Radszuweit’s burgeoning empire of organizations and publications devoted to homosexual and trans rights in the 1920s and (2) the confounding position of the male youth in the rhetoric of the era’s homosexual emancipation movement.
Since the days of James Steakley’s foundational monograph of 1975, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany, queer German studies has worked with the rich and still rewarding legacies of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and his concept of the “urning,” Karl Maria Kertbeny’s coinage of the word “Homosexualität,” sexologists such as Carl Westphal and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and the divergent traditions of the masculinists around Adolf Brand and Der Eigene vs. Magnus Hirschfeld and his Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee and the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen. So fruitful is this tradition that many research projects in the field peter out by the time they get to the Weimar Republic and the 1920s. [End Page 711]
As Samper Vendrell points out, however, the readerships of these early pioneers of homosexual emancipation were tiny and elite. Only “a small closed group of subscribers” received Brand’s Der Eigene and “primarily academic audiences” read Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch (43). By 1924, in contrast, Radszuweit’s Bund für Menschenrecht claimed a membership of over 100,000. In 1926 Radszuweit (1876–1932) claimed that his publications—Blätter für Menschenrecht, Die Insel der Einsamen, Die Freundin, Das Freundschaftsblatt—had a combined circulation of over five million (49). While these numbers may well be exaggerated, his reach was undoubtedly far broader than that of his predecessors.
A straightforward history of Radszuweit’s activism and publications would have been useful in and of itself, but Samper Vendrell raises the stakes of his investigation when he centers his examination of the Bund für Menschenrecht and the Blätter für Menschenrecht on the figure of the attractive young male, who constantly and repeatedly confounds the homosexual rights movement in an almost deconstructive way. As Semper Vendrell explains, the youth “remained a contradictory figure: sexless yet full of sexual excess, innocent and guilty” (115). He was simultaneously “officially off limits, but always within reach” (157). The general public, as well as medical and legal experts, perceived the youth as both at risk of corruption by older men and a risk of blackmail to older men.
The attractive male youth also disrupted and undercut Radszuweit’s agenda, according to Samper Vendrell: “While Radszuweit preached the protection of youth, he continued to entice readers with their erotic appeal” (157). Carrying on in the tradition of Brand’s Der Eigene, Radszuweit’s publications prominently featured handsome ephebes, while at the same time admonishing their readers to admire the youthful naked male body for purely aesthetic, nonsexual reasons.
Part of the basis for the challenges that the attractive young man presented to Radszuweit and the homosexual rights movement was the continuing persistence of theories that homosexuality could spread by infection or contamination. Early homosexual emancipation activists from Ulrichs to Hirschfeld had hoped that proving the innate nature of male-male desire would quell any fears that exposure to homosexuality could turn a straight boy into a gay man. This argument never really convinced the public, which continued to worry that lecherous older men might seduce young men into a homosexual lifestyle. Samper Vendrell carefully documents how specialists in the field, including G. Stanley Hall, Emil Kraepelin, and Albert Moll, agreed with Sigmund Freud that adolescent sexuality was fluid and indeed prone to change, further undercutting the argument that sexual orientation was immutable and fanning the flames of anxiety about homosexual seduction.
According to Samper Vendrell, the...