which we and all organic beings, without difference, have in common with the plants.”77 Relying on Blumenbach, Ramdohr brings together Bildung, plants, and sexuality.
Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) are the authors who mediate Blumenbach’s Bildung for Hössli’s culture. For them, Bildung represents not only the physical development of an organism, but also the psychological, creative, and artistic development of a person. In the early nineteenth century, Karl von Morgenstern (1770–1852) dubbed Goethe’s 1797 novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) a Bildungsroman or “novel of development,” because it showed the processes whereby its young protagonist sets aside misleading social and cultural influences to discover who he really is and develops himself to the best of his abilities in order to rejoin society as a productive member. Bildung, as intellectual, artistic and cultural self-development, becomes the greatest good for the bourgeoisie of nineteenth-century Germanic culture.
Hössli, true to his liberal bourgeois roots, embraces the concept of Bildung. As Hans Krah has noted, the classical notion of Bildung emerges repeatedly in Hössli: that an individual is born with a specific identity and with certain sexual desires, and that it is the mission of the individual to discover his identity, to become more and more true to himself, and then to integrate himself into society.78 Hössli states with simple poetic elegance: “perfection for a single individual consists of being and becoming oneself in the continuum of one’s existence” (79).
Jews and Witches: Emancipation and Social Improvement
At several points, the innate and natural sexuality that Hössli finds in men who are sexually attracted to other men is tentatively linked to gender inversion and implicitly compared to Jewishness. Although these interpretations and analogies are by no means the main points of Hössli’s arguments, they deserve attention because they become so important in subsequent treatments of homosexuality, uranism, and inversion in the nineteenth century. Both comparisons to women and to Jews have connections to science-based, progressive, emancipatory thought of the early nineteenth century. The argument for gender inversion implies a heightened respect for feminine desire, while the comparison with Jews goes hand in hand with liberal efforts to rejuvenate and improve the lot of minorities within Germany.
The locus of the allusions to the similarity between the category of men who are sexually attracted to men and the categories of women and Jews is a passage that Hössli quotes twice—first, prominently on the frontispiece of volume 1, and second in the text itself. The source is a review published on June 4, 1834, by Menzel in his Literatur-Blatt. According to Menzel, “the Rabbinical doctrine of souls has a peculiar characteristic: Namely, it explains the contradictions in the character of the sexes and their oftentimes strange sympathies and antipathies by the transmigration of souls such that female souls in male bodies reject women and male souls in female bodies reject men, like identical poles of a magnet, while on the other hand they are attracted to each other despite having the same bodily sex because of the different sexes of their souls.”79 Menzel has even more difficulty articulating his ideas than Hössli, who had thought much longer about them. Menzel’s claim is that a woman with a male soul will be attracted to another woman, while a man with a female soul will be attracted to another man.
Hössli himself responds tepidly to Menzel’s argument that same-sex attraction can be explained as a product of gender inversion, asserting that King Frederick I of Württemberg (1754–1816) was hardly “what we tend to understand as a feminine soul,” despite being a lover of men.80 Although Ramdohr emphasizes gender inversion in his account of same-sex desire, neither Hössli nor Zschokke dwells on the subject at great length. In fact, one of Ulrichs’s prime objections to Hössli is his neglect of effemination as an explanation for male same-sex desire.81 As Yvonne Ivory notes, “before the 1830s, the masculinity of practitioners of Sodomiterei was rarely questioned in German legal and medical discourses.”82 Nonetheless, Hössli’s citation from Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt, positioned prominently and repeated in Eros, is an early formulation of the notion of gender inversion, expressed in an intriguingly gender-inclusive form.
While Hössli speaks only of male-male sexual love, Menzel’s formulation allows for a discussion of female-female sexual desire. Even in a discussion restricted to male-male desire, gender inversion theories require an acknowledgement of female desire. If a man who is sexually attracted to other men is really a female soul inside a male body, then it must be time to talk about the possibility of female sexual desire for a man. As Richards’s study of Romantic science makes clear, the same men who articulated many of the principles of the new vision of an organic science also believed strongly in a freer vision of love that promoted the expression of strong feminine desire. Alongside such Romantic writers as Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling worked such brilliant, scintillating, and openly sexually active women as Caroline Böhmer Schlegel Schelling née Michaelis (1763–1809), Dorothea Veit Schlegel née Mendelssohn (1764–1839), and Rahel von Ense Varnhagen née Levin (1771–1833).
Menzel’s Literatur-Blatt was full of arguments about sexual freedom for men and women, specifically in the issues from 1835 and 1836, which Hössli cites in Eros. Most of the controversies swirled around Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878) and his scandalous 1835 depiction of a sexually liberated Jewish woman in Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic). Gutzkow’s novel reminded readers of Friedrich Schlegel’s 1799 Lucinde, which had similarly celebrated female desire. Gutzkow praises Schlegel’s work as a manifesto for the “emancipation of the flesh.”
Gutzkow and other representatives of Junges Deutschland (Young Germany) promulgate the emancipation of the flesh—and specifically the unleashing of female (and not coincidentally, Jewish female) desire—just as Hössli is arguing for the rights of male-loving men, whom he occasionally represents as similar to women and comparable to Jews. Discussions about the emancipation of the flesh were underway in German culture at the time—not least in Hössli’s favored source, the Literatur-Blatt. The Romantic legacy of the emancipations of the flesh, of women, and of Jews colored Hössli’s worldview.
By at least implicitly associating his arguments with the liberal emancipatory ideas discussed in (although admittedly not always endorsed by) the Literatur-Blatt, Hössli aligned himself with forces calling for progressive change. Just as early nineteenth-century progressives thought that the status of women and Jews called out for amelioration, Hössli wanted to see a better situation for men who sexually loved other men. True, Hössli did not refer to explicit legal and political interventions in his text—he seems unaware, for instance, of Feuerbach’s enlightened, post-Napoleonic reforms in Bavaria, which had decriminalized sodomy. Instead, he established the arguably much more arduous goal of changing social attitudes. In hoping to change social attitudes, Hössli drew on two groups that he felt were in various ways analogous to men who sexually loved other men: Jews and witches.
Hössli’s Eros generally attempts to marshal sympathy for the suffering of the Jews, about which he gives focused and detailed reports. He describes the medieval scapegoating of Jews as plague-bearers and movingly outlines a series of horrendous atrocities that befell them: the burning of large numbers of Jews in Basel, Freiburg, Bern, Zürich, Constance, Strasbourg, and Mainz; the desperate self-immolation of Jews in Speier and Esslingen; the torture of Jews in Geneva. Hössli concludes, “and all this happened in Switzerland, throughout Germany, Italy, Spain, France, in 1349, by and for European Christianity.”83 The medieval persecutions of Jews filled him with a sense of liberal outrage at religiously inspired bias in law and culture.
Many of those who were similarly moved by the plight of the Jews hoped the emancipation of the Jews would promote their social improvement. In his 1781 treatise, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews), Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm (1751–1820), for instance, argues, along Rousseauian lines, that Jewish culture and society are in decay because of the political and legal mistreatment of the Jews. Hössli makes the same argument regarding men who sexually love other men. Already in 1810, Karl Ludwig von