Desiring Emancipation: New Women and Homosexuality in Germany, 1890–1933

3. Asserting Sexual Subjectivity in Berlin: The Proliferation of a Public Discourse of Female Homosexuality, 1900–1912

3 Asserting Sexual Subjectivity in Berlin The Proliferation of a Public Discourse of Female Homosexuality, 1900–1912 “So you can’t sleep either,” she said. “I’m lying here and longing for you, as I have been longing for weeks—don’t you feel it, you beautiful, sweet, marvelous woman? And she laid her arms heavily around my neck— Then she fell to her knees in front of me, kissed my feet, embraced my knees— “Be mine, completely mine in unbounded tenderness—that’s how I want to enjoy you.” And before I could recover from my astonishment, she lifted me with her strong arms and carried me over the threshold into my room. She fell on me now with an urgent and ravenous tenderness . I couldn’t defend myself against this right away, since I was completely unprepared for it. Finally however, I succeeded in freeing myself from her. Firmly but carefully, since I felt sorry for her, I took her in my arms—and led her back to her room and closed the door between us. Then she understood me and knew that it wasn’t Sapphic love that I wanted, that my feminine instincts were too complete and too healthy for that. And we parted ways. Because the New Woman wants purity at any price.1 83 84 Desiring Emancipation This passage from Elisabeth Dauthendey’s 1900 novel The New Woman and Her Love marks a radical departure from the veiled eroticism and absence of stigma characterizing descriptions of same-sex intimacy in the sources from the 1890s. This same-sex erotic scene drew a strict boundary between the figure of the New Woman and sexual activity between women. Dauthendey’s recognition of the homosexual woman as a threat to the sexual innocence and normality of the New Woman is symptomatic of a significant shift in public discourse about sexuality in relation to “masculine” independent women who enjoy intimacy with other women. This turning point came right at the turn of the century. All of a sudden, German publications explaining homosexuality to a general audience proliferated. In the 1890s the term the third sex referred to the New Woman. After the turn of the century, its use as a synonym for homosexual began to predominate. In both meanings the term provoked with its sense that the rigid binary of nineteenth-century gender roles could be complicated by a third term—a third that threatened the stability of male-female opposition. However much the existence of intimacy between people of the same sex might have aroused fear or disgust, its more significant role was to add new force to interpretations and critiques of the existing binary—an opening that was threatening to some and liberating to others. As the slippage from gender to sex indicates, writers and readers were becoming more aware of discourses about homosexuality and were beginning to think about their implications beyond psychiatry, where they had been developing since the 1860s. Although the debates of the next decade were rooted in nineteenth-century issues such as urbanization, women’s emancipation, law reform, and criminology, a discursive figure called the homosexual woman now became clearly visible. A crucial factor in changing public perceptions was the increasing activity of Magnus Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftliches humanitär-Komitee [WhK]).2 In order to achieve their goal of repealing Paragraph 175 of the Criminal Code, which criminalized certain sexual acts between males, leaders of the WhK published several pamphlets meant to enlighten the public with the “scientific truth” about homosexuality. For example, in 1901 Hirschfeld published a pamphlet about homosexuality titled What Should the People Know about the Third Sex?3 As might be expected, male homosexuality was central to the WHK propaganda campaign. Yet a tone of objective authority and claims that homosexuality was biologically natural and distributed equally across human populations meant that women were implicitly subsumed in these explanations. The emerging problematic of female homosexuality was debated in four public sphere arenas between 1900 and World War I. Women, including some 85 Asserting Sexual Subjectivity in Berlin with a personal stake in the debates, made their voices heard in responses to sexological information, feminist sexual politics, scandal-mongering newspaper articles, and law reform proposals. These early debates bridge what has often been taken for granted as a caesura separating the female couples of the prewar era from the postwar mass movements.4...