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G&S Typesetters PDF proof Chapter 7 Pioneers: Germany While Walt Whitman was perfecting his views of comradeship in America, from his first use of adhesiveness in his own special sense in the mid-1850s, through the publication of the Calamus poems in 1860 and his tending of the sick and wounded during the Civil War, to the publication of Democratic Vistas in 1871, a parallel process was going on in Germany. It too was largely the work of one man, Karl Ulrichs, but of a different type and in very different circumstances. Whereas Whitman had a poet’s vision of what America could be, Ulrichs was involved on a practical level with the legal status of his kind in an emerging German nation. Like many, perhaps most, Germans of his generation—he was born in 1825—Ulrichs eagerly anticipated the apparently inevitable unification of his fragmented homeland; his concern was with the form unification would take. He feared and opposed the so-called Kleindeutsch solution to the problem of German unification, a narrow, predominantly Protestant, Prussian-dominated state, favoring instead the Grossdeutsch solution, an inclusive and broadly tolerant Germany incorporating the Austrian lands, with their large Catholic and Slavic populations. This is hardly surprising given his background as well as his sexuality. Though a north German Protestant, he was born far from Prussia, near the Dutch border. His father was a minor bureaucrat in the Hannoverian government, and Ulrichs himself studied law in preparation for a career in the civil service at the University of Göttingen in Hannover (where homosexuality as such was not illegal) and in Berlin, the capital of Prussia (where it was). Nonetheless, it was probably in Berlin that Ulrichs came out sexually. The city had a thriving homosexual subculture, sufficiently active and visible at this time to be a source of concern to the police, and in at least one respect militaristic Prussia must have appealed to young Ulrichs, who had a weakness for men in uniform. In every other respect he had little use either for the mil-| 85 07-V2660 6/19/03 6:50 AM Page 85 G&S Typesetters PDF proof itary or for Prussia. He enthusiastically supported the revolution of 1848 and even applied for a post with the revolutionary Frankfurt parliament. Failing to get that post, he returned to his job in the Hannoverian civil service, where, however, he became increasingly frustrated and unhappy as the government retreated from the liberal constitution granted in 1848. Finally, in 1854, he resigned , possibly to avoid revelation of his sexuality, a public scandal, and likely dismissal. Ulrichs then turned to literary pursuits, which he combined with his own brand of liberal nationalism. He joined the Young German Society, a panGerman cultural organization founded in 1858, and was appointed secretary when it changed its title to the All German Society a year later and took on a more overtly political tone. Ulrichs settled in Frankfurt and soon became active in the city’s leading cultural society, the Free German Foundation for Science , Art, and General Culture. He supported himself, precariously, largely by writing for newspapers, and it was the combination of his journalism with his interest in national cultural organizations that brought him to the issue of homosexual rights. In the summer of 1862 Ulrichs reported on the All German Shooting Festival for his paper. The organizer of the festival, Johann Schweitzer, was active in a number of German workers’ organizations as well as in the model for all later institutions linking sport with nationalism in Germany , the gymnast movement. Two weeks after the end of the shooting festival he was arrested on a morals charge, accused of having seduced an underage boy. Ulrichs, who had already come out to his family and was planning an essay on homosexual law reform for submission to the Free German Foundation , decided to intervene. He sent Schweitzer a legal brief for his defense (which was not used) and offered his newspaper an article on law reform (which was not published). Given Ulrichs’s natural stubbornness, if anything these reverses pushed him into even greater commitment to this new cause. For some time he had been groping toward a theory of the origins of homosexuality. Like Whitman, he was briefly drawn to the idea of animal magnetism, speculating that it might provide an explanation for same-sex attraction, but he soon abandoned that as cause rather than effect. By the end of 1862 he had...

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