Weimar culture by Peter Gay, 1974, Pengu edn, English
Contents:
GAY MEN UNR THE NAZI REGIME
Liberated, licent, or merely liberal, the sexual eedoms of Germany's Weimar Republic have bee legendary. The home of the world's first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progrsive, secular visn of sexual liberatn. Immortalized - however misleadgly - Christopher Isherwood's Berl Stori and the mil Cabaret, Weimar's eedoms have bee a touchstone for the polics of sexual emancipatn. * gay weimar culture *
Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipatn and the Rise of the Nazis. The home of the world's first gay rights movement, the republic embodied a progrsive, secular visn of sexual liberatn. Sex and the Weimar Republic exam the rise of sexual tolerance through the bat which surround "immoral" sexualy: obsceny, male homosexualy, lbianism, transgenr inty, heterosexual promiscuy, and prostutn.
Still, he had an effect: a few liberal-md lleagu accepted his notn of an nate gay inty, and a Bavarian official privately nfsed to siar yearngs. ”The first chapter of Robert Beachy’s “Gay Berl: Birthplace of a Morn Inty” (Knopf) begs wh an acunt of Ulrichs’s dac act. The tle of the chapter, “The German Inventn of Homosexualy, ” telegraphs a prcipal argument of the book: although same-sex love is as old as love self, the public disurse around , and the polil movement to w rights for , arose Germany the late neteenth and early twentieth centuri.
This msage may surprise those who believe that gay inty me of age London and New York, sometime between the Osr Wil trials and the Stonewall rts. The btal reprsn of gay people durg the Nazi perd largely erased German gay history om ternatnal nscns, and even om German memory. Beachy, a historian who teach at Yonsei Universy, Seoul, ends his book by notg that Germans hold gay-pri celebratns each June on what is known as Christopher Street Day, honor of the street where the Stonewall prott unfold.
Alex Ross on Robert Beachy’s new book, “Gay Berl: Birthplace of a Morn Inty.” * gay weimar culture *
Ulrichs, sentially the first gay activist, enuntered censorship and end up gog to exile, but his ias very gradually took hold.
In 1869, an Atrian ltératr named Karl Maria Kertbeny, who was also opposed to sodomy laws, ed the term “homosexualy.
” In the eighteen-eighti, a Berl police missner gave up prosecutg gay bars and stead stuted a policy of bemed tolerance, gog so far as to lead tours of a growg mimon. In 1896, Der Eigene (“The Self-Owng”), the first gay magaze, began publitn.
The Nazi regime rried out a mpaign agast male homosexualy and persecuted gay men between 1933 and 1945. * gay weimar culture *
The next year, the physician Magn Hirschfeld found the Scientific-Humanarian Commtee, the first gay-rights anizatn. By the begng of the twentieth century, a non of gay lerature had emerged (one early advote ed the phrase “Stayg silent is ath, ” nearly a century before aids activists ed the slogan “Silence = Death”); activists were bemoang negative pictns of homosexualy (Thomas Mann’s “Death Venice” was one target); there were bat over the ethics of outg; and a schism opened between an clive, mastream factn and a more rto, anarchistic wg. In the neteen-twenti, wh gay films and pop songs circulatn, a mass movement seemed at hand.
In 1929, the Reichstag moved toward the crimalizatn of homosexualy, although the chaos ed by that fall’s stock-market crash prevented a fal did all this happen Germany? The towerg legacy of German ialism and Romanticism, which helps to expla why the gay-rights movement took root Germany, has self bee somewhat obscure, pecially outsi the German school system. The episo suggts the gree to which the German cultural and tellectual tradn, particularly the Romantic age, which stretched om Goethe and Schiller to Schopenher and Wagner, embolned those who me to intify themselv as gay and lbian.
Lerary figur pursued a cult of iendship that borred on the homoerotic, although most of the time the fervid talk of embrac and kiss remaed jt talk.
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”) Schopenher proceed to expound the dub theory that nature promoted homosexualy olr men as a way of disuragg them om ntug to surprisgly, Karl Herich Ulrichs seized on Schopenher’s cur piece of advocy when he began his mpaign; he quoted the philosopher one of his g-out letters to his relativ. Ulrichs might also have mentned Wagner, who, “Die Walküre” and “Tristan und Isol, ” picted illic passns that many late-neteenth-century homosexuals saw as allegori for their own experience.
Magn Hirschfeld, his 1914 book “The Homosexualy of Men and Women, ” noted that the Wagner ftival Bayrth had bee a “favore meetg place” for homosexuals, and quoted a classified ad, om 1894, which a young man had sought a handsome pann for a Tyrolean bicyclg expedn; was signed “Numa 77, general livery, Bayrth. The most revelatory chapter of Beachy’s book ncerns Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllsem, a Berl police missner the Wilhelme perd, who, perhaps more than any other figure, enabled “gay Berl” to blossom.