George L.

Mosse

Nationalism and Respectability:

Normal and Abnormal Sexuality
in the Nineteenth Century

The relationship between nationalism and respectability in Europe

requires investigation to give us a better understanding of how
nationalism has functioned in the historical process. Both modern
nationalism and the ideal of respectability were responses to a new
century in motion, to the age of the masses and industrialization;
both had their origins in the eighteenth century, and matured
together in the nineteenth. Yet while the history of nationalism has
been well studied, the history of respectability has only recently
begun to receive attention. Our purpose is to initiate an examina-
tion of this relationship to stimulate thought and discussion.
-

We seem to take for granted, however dimly, that nationalism

and respectability have supported each other, while both have con-
demned the unconventional as threatening to the state and to socie-
ty : normal and abnormal behaviour must be clearly defined and
distinguished from one another in order to guarantee a happy and
healthy world. And in the context of respectability, the normal and
the abnormal have been viewed differently for men and for women.
In our analysis of the links between nationalism and respectability,
we will focus on the role of male sexuality. Moreover, we will draw
our examples mainly from Germany, and to a lesser extent from
England.
Nations began to be conscious of themselves and their ideals dur-
ing the age of the French Revolution. They attempted to provide a
force of integration and control in a time of rapid social and
economic changes and the beginnings of modern mass movements.
Modern nationalism was concerned with sexual control and

Journal of Contemporary History (SAGE, London and Beverly Hills),

Vol. 17 ( 1982), 221
221-46

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222

restraint from the start, and as the nineteenth century began the at-
tempt to control sex beyond those controls already attempted by
-

the Church - was part of the larger effort to cope with the ever
more obvious results of industrialization and revolution. Distances
seemed to shrink during the nineteenth century through the new
speed of communications, while the proliferation of factories and
the sudden growth of cities promised increasing mobility. Many
contemporaries saw it as a nervous age which called for greater ef-
forts to keep control over public and private life.
The attempt to cope with a nervous age brought to a climax
changes in manners and morals which had been evolving slowly in
previous centuries. The French Revolution was viewed as divine
retribution for aristocratic frivolity, and modern manners and
morals were to a large extent the products of pietistic and
evangelical revivals. Religious revival and revolution were accom-
panied by the development of middle-class life, with its emphasis
on hard work and the fulfilment of man’s vocation, and its
endeavour to confront the restlessness of the age with respectabili-
ty. Harold Nicolson spoke of ’the onslaught of respectability’
which triumphed during the late eighteenth century, within the life
span of one generation. And in the second decade of the nineteenth
century, Sir Walter Scott’s great aunt felt ashamed to read a book
‘ ... which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for a large circle,
consisting of the first and most creditable society in London’.’ The
free flow of passion and fantasy was seen as a threat to the order of
things: ’Good society hates scenes, vetoes every eccentricity of
manners and demonstrativeness of demeanor as bad form’.22
For society to establish controls of restraint and moderation, the
techniques of physicians, educators and police were in need of
reinforcement: behind their methods of control there had to be an
ideal which might serve to define normalcy and abnormalcy and to
contain sexual passion. Nationalism came to the rescue. The
history of sexuality became part of the history of nationalism in
two ways: nationalism not only helped to control sexuality, to re-
inforce what society considered normal, but it also provided the
means through which changing sexual attitudes could be absorbed
and tamed into respectability. When, as we shall see, members of
the younger generation at the fin de siecle sought to rediscover their
bodies and to liberate themselves from shamefulness, nationalism
co-opted their attack upon respectability. This ability of nation-
alism to absorb - its flexibility seems to be one reason why
-

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those morals and manners which triumphed in the nineteenth cen-

tury have lasted so long. But nationalism also received a sexual
dimension of its own through its advocacy of beauty, its
stereotypes of ideal men and women. The beautiful body as the per-
sonification of the beautiful nation was supposed to transcend its
own sexuality.
An aesthetics of politics was also involved in this new nation-
alism : it used the classical revival of the eighteenth century as a
means of presenting itself to the people. The visual was of prime

importance in national self-representation, providing the symbols

which concretized national myths and aspirations. The vast majori-
ty of Europeans were ’people without books’; the use of visual
means to influence and control the masses was therefore of the ut-
most importance, affecting both the projection of the national im-
age and the preoccupation of respectability with personal
appearance and behaviour. With the help of Greek models in the
national stereotype, the nervous age was controlled and disciplined.3
Thus nationalism, in its own way, expressed ideals of restraint
and control which were congenial to the bourgeois life-style. In-
deed, the triumph of the bourgeoisie and the rise of modern
nationalism took place at the same time. As the nineteenth century
progressed, the fear of modernity became fear of the speed of time,
of a brave new world which constantly threatened to escape
control.
Ina society obsessed with chaos, normalcy and abnormalcy had
to be clearly distinguished from each other, locked into place for
the sake of order. The Outline of Forensic Medicine, written by the
physician Johann Valentin Muller in 1796, foreshadowed attitudes
toward those who sinned against conventions. For example,
Muller, unlike the famous Catholic theologian Alphonse de Liguori
shortly before, no longer distinguished between different kinds of
homosexuality, some less abhorrent than others. To Muller such
vice, no matter how it was practised, had personal and public con-
sequences, and the practise of masturbation led to homosexuality.
Nothing was secret, for outward appearance was supposed to
betray the private practise of vice. Muller believed that those who
practise vice become feeble and depressed, negligent about their
appearance, and let their heads hang down.4 He was not alone in
attempting to link the principal sexual perversions nor in believing
that masturbation led to homosexuality.This refusal to differen-
tiate, the idea that one so-called perversion led to another, served to

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emphasize the contrast between normal and abnormal sexuality.

Towards the end of the French Revolution, the Jacobins staged an
exhibition in the Palais du Tribunat illustrating the consequences of
’sexual abuse’: a youth close to death, enervated by masturbation,
stood next to a healthy young man, and a debauched young woman
next to a healthy lass. La Patrie was in danger from men and
women who failed to control their sexual passions.6 To be sure, the

Enlightenment and the French Revolution also saw attacks upon

arbitrary social codes and a half-hearted defence of homosexuality,
but the future belonged to Muller’s normalcy.’7
For Muller unconventionality was a sickness, dangerous not only
to individual health, but also to the health of the state.8 His
arguments would be repeated constantly during the nineteenth cen-
tury to justify the punishment of vice: sodomy and masturbation
led to impotence and thus to depopulation. Muller also emphasized
the secrecy which accompanied deviant sexuality, likening it to a
conspiracy against the state which sowed hate and unnatural pas-
sion. Men and women who practised such vices were not only
without moral sense and civic responsibility, but their very souls
were thought to be incapable of spirituality. Small wonder that they
have reddened eyes, are soft and subject to fits of depression.9
Against this picture of depravity was set the emerging national
stereotype of Greek beauty, which meant harmony and proportion,
but also vigour and energy. Those who worked at creating the
stereotype praised the symbolic beauty of the male body and saw it
as the manifestation of chastity and restraint.
Greek beauty, the ideal of Winckelmann, was integrated into the
bourgeois life-style by linking that beauty to chastity and purity. At
the beginning of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn
and others had seen no contradiction between respectability and the
ideal of manly beauty.’° Yet Greek models and bourgeois respec-
tability were not always easily integrated. Both Holderlin and
Schiller linked their cult of Greek beauty not to the family but to
male friendships, the Mdnnerbund whose popularity was never to
vanish in nineteenth-century Germany.&dquo; Schiller’s unfinished play
about the order of St John of Malta (Die Malteser), on which he
worked from 1788 to 1803, was to exemplify heroic action on a
Greek scale. It centred, in part, upon two knights whose passionate
friendship became carnal love, and Schiller portrays the homo-
sexual relationship as the fullest expression of friendship. Typically
enough, when others finished and performed this play (in 1865 and

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 225

in 1884) the scenes on the love between the two knights

focussing
were dropped, and minor
a theme from Schiller’s draft, involving a
Greek girl, was amplified.&dquo; In the nineteenth century, the cult of
male friendship which had played such an important role among
German writers of the eighteenth century was looked upon with
increasing suspicion, even though such friends had distinguished
between love among men which was devoid of sensuality and the
love between men and women. Some considered such a Bund as a
precondition to German unity. They agreed with Fichte’s assertion
that true love must transcend personal relationships in order to em-
brace the nation.’3 Nevertheless, the intimacy of such friendships,
their sentimental vocabulary, came under increasing suspicion as
respectability and its concept of normalcy developed in the nine-
teenth century. Further attempts to strip male friendships of all
erotic content will occupy us later when we consider the exaltation
of wartime camaraderie after 1914. Greek ideals of friendship were
not discarded, but adapted to heterosexual love.
During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the emphasis
on order and harmony opposed all passions which might escape
control. Thus the attempt to contrast friendship with carnal love,
and the assertion that a chaste life was in the best interest of the
state.’4 Above all, beauty symbolized order, healed a sick world,
and made time stand still. The function of beauty and of the male
national stereotype was to prevent chaos - such was the message
spread, for example, by Friedrich Theodor Vischer, the most im-
portant German aesthetician of the nineteenth century.’S Abnormal
sexuality, exemplifying chaos and restlessness, threatened to upset
this order, and private vice increasingly became a public matter.
Physicians and educators became obsessed with the personal sexual
habits of those in their charge. Masturbation, and for that matter
homosexuality, were not regarded as organic, but attributed to bad
nerves and bad thoughts.

During the nineteenth century most diseases were traced to a

deterioration of the nerves, and so at times were political and social
problems. According to Simon Andre Tissot’s L’Onanisme (1758),
much quoted by later physicians and educators, the cause of
masturbation was a ’maladie des nerfs’; such a malady determin-
ed all sorts of illnesses as well as the loss of the soul’s spiritual
faculties. Tissot believed that masturbation led to imbecility,’6and
that all sexual excesses, whether they were performed in the mar-
riage bed or alone at night, led to disastrous consequences. The

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226

medical profession became, by the middle of the nineteenth cen-

tury, the guardians of the ’plaisirs d’amour’. Historians who have
examined medical encyclopedias for the second decade of that cen-
tury conclude that physicians descended upon sinners like deities to
stop them from falling off the precipice. &dquo;’We are responsible,’ the
editor of the English medical journal The Lancet proclaimed in
1819, ’for the employment of our peculiar authority in promoting
the purification and well-being of human society. &dquo;8 Physicians
came to see themselves as guardians of the people’s health and
morals.
Tissot’s silence about the state in his discussion of sexuality
became the exception rather than the rule. For example, a century
later Ambroise Tardieu, in his Crimes against Morals from the
Viewpoint of Forensic Medicine (1857), lists all of the inward and
outward signs of pederasty, not only to help courts enforce the laws
against sodomy, but also to aid the state in controlling private
morals. 19 Once more, outward signs were seen as betraying sexual
abnormality: Tardieu stresses the feminine appearance, the diseas-
ed body, which results from sexual practice based on uncontrolled
imagination and fantasy. Though Johann Ludwig Casper, perhaps
the most famous authority on forensic medicine in mid-nineteenth-
century Germany, refused to blame homosexuality for other bodily
ills, he still described homosexuals as bizarre in appearance and
bodily movement.2° Finally, Dr P. Mbbius, in Sexuality and
Degeneration (1903), contrasts the appearance which accompanies
so-called sexual perversion with the fact, as he put it, that ’...the
healthy human being is mostly lithe and tall, his face is never
ugly’.2’ Adolf Hitler would constantly use the phrase ’lithe and tall’
when describing the ideal German.
Crimes against respectability were viewed as affecting the whole
personality, and those who did not share the norms of respectabili-
ty were said to ruin not only their own health but that of the state
and nation. For example, The Lancet opposed contraception when
its use was debated in 1870 because ’... a nation fruitful in healthy
organisms must, in the struggle for existence, displace and swallow
up a nation that is abandoned to conjugal onanism’.11
Such attacks on non-procreative sexual practices were at times
based on arguments which went beyond health and sickness to
appeal to the pragmatism of the industrial age. Tissot had already
condemned masturbation partly because it was a ’besoin sans be-
soin’ -

a need which had no useful purpose23 - and a physician

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 227

during the reign of Louis Philippe in France argued that wasting

one’s sperm through masturbation was like throwing money out of
the window. Pre-industrial society regarded semen as the biblical
seed which must not be spilled; through masturbation society was
flaunted and rejected. Masturbators are ‘... eaten by the
monstrosity of loneliness’, said a French physician.24 Later the
Berlin physician and pioneer sexologist, Iwan Bloch, who approved
of masturbation if it was practised in moderation, nevertheless saw
it as a potential danger. The masturbator, he tells us, becomes lone-
ly and shy, loses the natural enthusiasm of youth, while his ner-
vousness is apt to damage his heart. ’The struggle against mastur-
bation is a fight for altruism.’25 In short, such men and women are
anti-social, a danger to the community.
Though the nation is not explicitly mentioned in this context by
medical writers, it is implicitly included within endangered society.
But the nation does appear as soon as the stereotypes of virtue and
vice are made explicit: the masculine ideal which the nation had
taken over is constantly contrasted to the pervert, who lacks self-
control and follows his morbid fantasies. As we have seen,
nationalism stripped the Greek ideal of its eroticism while emphasiz-
ing its harmony, proportion and transcendent beauty. Unlike the so-
called pervert, this ideal of beauty appropriated a piece of eternity
-
it exemplified unchanging values in a nervous age. The German
Emperor William II summarized this belief in the function of
classical beauty when he proclaimed it as unchanging law, ’the
law of beauty and harmony, the law of aesthetics’.26 The search for
unchanging laws turned back to ancient and pre-industrial values
-
a nostalgia nationalism shared with respectability. Nationalism
saw itself symbolized not only in Greek forms but also in history
and unchanging nature, while respectability used a medieval
vocabulary, and tried to mark its nineteenth-century code of
behaviour with courtesy, civility and knightly grace.
From the nineteenth century on, nationalism and respectability
thought of themselves as menaced by the big city, which symboliz-
ed the nervous age. Nationalism saw in such cities a threat to
rootedness and a symbol of man’s alienation. Those who condemn-
ed sexual passions thought that sexual deviance was encouraged by
the extremes of luxury and poverty to be found in cities. Casper,
for example, held that sodomy flourished in Italian cities,27 and
accepted the stereotyped contrast, all too common in Germany, be-
tween the sensual south and the disciplined north. Somewhat later,

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228

Alois Geigel, another expert on forensic medicine, made the same

point: big cities encourage vice.28 The secrecy and darkness within
the ’jungle of cities’ was usually cited as the breeding ground of
homosexuality and masturbation. Sexual deviance was once again
linked to a secret conspiracy, to darkness and stealth. The village,
the small town close to nature, possessed no dark bowels within
which vice could flourish; it symbolized those eternal values which
stood outside the rush of time. Such values harked back to a
healthy and happy universe, in contrast to the rush of time sym-
bolized by the modern city.
Iwan Bloch wrote about the ’vibrations’ which resulted from the
efforts of men and women to join the modern age, and in his in-
fluential The Sexual Life of our Times (1906), listed the temptations
of the big city: ballrooms and dance floors, cabarets which exist
only to kill time (’besoin sans besoin’ again), and are little more than
glorified bordellos.29 Not only is the linkage between cities and sex-
uality carried over into the twentieth century, but Bloch, like many
of his predecessors, believed for some time that so-called sexual
vices were acquired tastes and that those who practised them had
given in to temptation. Modernity, Bloch thought, encouraged
homosexuality and masturbation. Restfulness and rootedness
facilitated that inwardness held essential to avoid excess: Bloch,
like many others, asserted that a properly functioning soul would
keep sexuality under control. 30
Frequently nationalism supplied the content and the goal of the
inward spirit. The line between normalcy and abnormalcy had to be
tightly drawn in order to protect the nation against its enemies.
During the second half of the nineteenth century Darwinism
strengthened the nationalists: the survival of the fittest necessitated
a healthy national organism, free of hereditary disease and moral
weakness. Demographic growth was dependent upon eliminating
those vices that sapped men’s virility, led to physical sickness, and
weakened will-power. Typically enough, Iwan Bloch thought that
the way to cure so-called perverts was through strengthening their
will-power, and Alois Geigel, writing about homosexuality,
asserted that industrious and free nations encourage moral purity
in their struggle to survive.&dquo; Even those who advocated greater
freedom for homosexuals felt compelled to assert a respectable
manliness whose bodily and mental characteristics would en-
courage the national struggle for survival. Thus Benedict
Friedlander, a pioneer of homosexual emancipation, felt obliged to

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 229

assert that the decriminalization of homosexuality would not

damage the ability of the race to wage wars. Indeed, long before the
coming of the First World War, the question whether greater
freedom for homosexuality endangered Germany’s military
strength had been a subject of lively debate.32 Maintaining the ideal
of masculinity opposed to sensuality and effeminacy was thought
essential to the health of the nation. The image of the homosexual,
of the abnormal, became part of that contrast when Richard von
Krafft-Ebing called masturbators cowardly, without courage or
self-confidence, and asserted that periods of moral decadence in
the life of a nation were always accompanied by effeminacy, sen-
suality and luxury.33
The contrast between masculinity and effeminacy was one more
effort to draw a tight line between normalcy and abnormalcy.
Here, just as in the case of the so-called perverts, the stereotype had
to be upheld and reaffirmed. Confusion between the sexes was
feared all the more because it was thought that children were bi-
sexual and their masculine and feminine components could develop in
a normal or abnormal way. Even Albert Moll, who otherwise sym-

pathized with the Woman’s Emancipation Movement, complained

in 1911 that women were becoming increasingly like men, and men
like women. Havelock Ellis joined in this lament.34 The vibrations
of modernity not only encouraged homosexuality, as Bloch had
thought, but also threatened to abolish the differences between the
sexes. Moll asserted that such a clear difference was the ultimate
foundation of all culture. The ideal of masculinity was reaffirmed
as an imperative of the modern age.3s
The emphasis on manliness in the struggle for survival went hand
in hand with the concept of ’degeneration’. First formulated by
Benedict Augustin Morel in 1857, degeneration was a medical term
describing the destruction of men and women through what he call-
ed moral and physical poison. Physical infection through disease or
alcohol was linked to moral failing, and degeneracy was largely
caused by lack of restraint due to the exhaustion of the nervous
system.36 The formulation, the term itself, rather than its under-
lying concept, was new; Tissot had already called sexual excess a
’maladie des nerfs’. Max Nordau, who was the chief popularizer of
the concept in his famous Degeneration ( 1892), used it to sharpen
the distinction between normalcy and abnormalcy, bourgeois vir-
tues and destructive vice. His preoccupation with the exhaustion of
the nerves and the lack of self-discipline was rooted in his fear of

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230

the speed of time: steam and electricity, he tells us, have turned
new

everyone’s life upside down, while railway travel has ruined the
nervous system. Normalcy must defeat degeneration; victory will
be won by those with strong nerves, a clear head, and dedication to
hard work. Fantasy and imagination must be strictly controlled. 37
The degenerate was easily recognized because his deformed body
manifested internal decay. At the end of the nineteenth century,
Darwinism and degeneration had sharpened public attitudes
towards the abnormal which had existed for over a century. Nor-
dau himself, as well as many Darwinists, made clear distinctions
between bourgeois virtues which led to progress and degeneration
which led to extinction not only extinction of the individual, but
-

of the family and the national community as well.

The word ’degeneration’ became an integral part of the
vocabulary of nationalism. Benedict Augustin Morel had believed
that degeneration was an inherited tendency, and Darwinism en-
couraged an emphasis on the importance of human inheritance.
For the so-called ’degenerates’ these influences had contradictory
results: on the one hand their condition tended to be regarded as
hopeless and incurable, while on the other perversion was looked
upon as congenital, and thus natural rather than unnatural. At first
the concept of degeneracy put homosexuality in a worse light.
Homosexuality as an acquired taste was thought to be curable
through punishment or contrition, but homosexuality as a sign of
degeneration encompassed physical as well as moral deformity. To
be sure, outward appearance had been linked to the practice of vice
long before, but now accusations of degeneration were accom-
panied by ever more aggressive attempts to enforce normalcy.
The concepts of degeneration and the survival of the fittest in-
evitably became embroiled with European racism. The character-
ization of inferior races was similar in almost every respect to that
applied to so-called sexual degenerates. The stereotypes of beauty
and ugliness were the same, and so were the fears which inspired
them. Lack of morality was thought to be characteristic of an in-
ferior race, part of its lack of self-discipline and proper spirituality.
First blacks and then Jews were endowed with excessive sexuality, a
female sensuousness said to transform love into lust. They lacked
manliness: Jews were said to have female characteristics, just as
homosexuals were generally called effeminate. Both were held to
engage in secret conspiracies, the spawn of dark and dank alleys in
big cities, estranged from the healing power of nature, strangers to

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 231

Greece.
Proust, homosexual and part Jew, with his peculiar sensibilities,
wrote in Remembrance of Things Past (1913-1927) that homo-
sexuals, like Jews, were invested by their persecutors with all the
moral and physical characteristics of a race. The parallel is all the
stronger since Proust regarded homosexuality as an incurable
diseases Moreover, according to Proust, both the Jew and the
homosexual felt ’one of a brotherhood’, and each intuitively
recognized a member of his group.39 There is throughout Remem-
brance of Things Past the sense that the persecuted collaborate with
the persecutor, as Proust did himself when he characterized the
homosexual as degenerate and feminine in appearance. His hate of
his own ’secret vice’, the outrage at being called feminine, and the
duel he fought with a homosexual who had questioned the purity of
his friendship with Lucien Daudet - all show Proust trying to
escape the ’race maudit’, as he called it.10
Self-hate among Jews was equally familiar the reaction of -

those who wanted to be normal but who found themselves locked

into abnormality, who were tolerated only as long as their vice had
the charm of unfamiliarity. Their physical appearance was thought
to oppose all that the male ideal stood for, the chasteness and puri-
ty of spirit exemplified by the national stereotype. Such parallels
are not unfamiliar: racism was an extreme form of nationalism,

geared to providing security against the onslaught of modernity, to

preserving the by now conventional bourgeois morality. The Nazi
legal expert, Hans Frank, distinguished between what he called the
’normal community’ and the ’anti-community’ of homosexuals.4’
Jews were also thought to form an ’anti-community’, while blacks
were generally believed incapable of constituting any organized

community whatever. During the Third Reich, exhibitions of

degenerate art and degenerate music were supposed to reveal how
abnormality was manifested through outward expression. Perhaps
it is not surprising that the alliance between nationalism and respec-
tability made use of racism, as it attempted to control a world at the
brink of chaos, banish the abnormal, and introduce eternal values
into a nervous age.
Homosexuals themselves could resort to racial arguments in
order to prove their usefulness to the nation. Benedict Friedlander
in his efforts to legitimize homosexuality argued that homo-
eroticism was essential to a well-functioning army and nation. At
the same time he contended that the attacks upon homosexuals

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232

were led by Jews who wanted to undermine Aryan virility and self-
consciousness.42 Friedlander attempted to use racism and anti-
semitism in order to win acceptance by nationalism. Such
arguments had no future, they demonstrated a feeling of despera-
tion in the face of an unbreakable union between nationalism and
respectability. Proust’s characterization of both homosexuals and
Jews as the ’race maudit’ was closer to the nationalist reality.
We have examined the relationship between nationalism and
respectability as it was affected by the need for restraint, modera-
tion and order. Nationalism also made use of institutional controls
to support ideas of respectability. Educational institutions, the
family and the army have not yet been examined in this context,
and we can only mention them briefly. Their function as in-
struments of sexual control was built on the concept of normalcy
and abnormalcy which must remain the focus of this essay.
Certainly the family exercised control over sexuality. Physicians
advised marriage as the best cure for masturbators,43 and even
those sexologists who came to legitimize homosexuality praised
marriage as the finest expression of the human spirit. The well-
being of the nation was often linked to that of the family. During
the eighteenth century it was said that the state had a right to de-
mand that its subjects marry, and at the beginning of the nineteenth
Friedrich Ludwig Jahn wrote, ’im Familienglfck lebt die
Vaterlandsliebe’44 (patriotism flourishes in a happy family).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing asserted towards the end of the century
that destruction of family life is accompanied by material and
political ruin.45 The Swedish sexologist Seved Ribbing wrote that by
encouraging normal sexual development the family fulfils this task
of the state well, simply and cheaply.46 Yet throughout the nine-
teenth century the family withdrew into ever greater privacy, mak-
ing essential questions difficult to answer .41 Did the father appeal
to national sentiment within the family circle in order to safeguard
his own domination? We do not know, and can only suggest that
there were links between nationalism, respectability and the family.
The institutionalization of nationalism and respectability
through education would require a full-length study, though it is
clear that teachers and schools used national appeals to inculcate
manners and morals. Certainly such an appeal was subsumed in the
English motto ’Godliness and good learning’, and it was com-
monplace in German schools.
Institutionalization through the army reveals a more direct and

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 233

unambiguous link between nationalism and respectability. The

subordination of body and mind to military discipline was suppos-
ed to control sexual passions. The elite military schools for the
training of officers provide an extreme example of more general
attempts to control all aspects of soldiers’ lives: here was a self-
contained world in which superior officers controlled the contact of
their men with girls at the annual dance, just as they commanded
drills, manoeuvres, eating and sleeping. The recruit became pre-
occupied with his own body in his efforts to pass ever-present
physical tests. Sex was externalized and compartmentalized,
separated from the serious business of life which concerned the
well-being and might of the nation. Women fulfilled a need regard-
ed as superficial, while inwardly soldiers turned away from them
and their company. 48 To be sure, there was always a tendency
towards homoeroticism within this male camaraderie. The male
national stereotype emphasized the beauty of body, yet the in-
dividual’s sexuality was supposedly transcended by his function as
a national symbol.
These institutionalizationsof sexuality remained static, a part of
the status quo built upon the new manners and morals at the begin-
ning of the nineteenth century. Yet eventually respectability led to a
revolt, and in this instance the institutional framework proved less
flexible than nationalism. Towards the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, when members of a new generation discovered the joys of
their bodies and sexuality, nationalism attempted to transform this
attack on conventional manners and morals into a new respectabili-
ty. The institutions we have discussed were slow to follow, and con-
tinued their strictness of function well into the twentieth century.

The rediscovery of the human body was part of the fin de siecle
revolt of youth against their elders, the society in which they lived,
and the accepted respectabilities. These bourgeois youths did not
address themselves to the social and economic conditions which
had helped form society, but to the manners and morals which
touched them directly. They attacked their elders for being
hypocrites whose public respectabilities were accompanied by
secret fornication. And their revolt went beyond books and journals
to inspire youth movements, sport, plays, poetry, and eventually a
new national consciousness.
Children of prosperity, these youths longed to escape from their

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gilded cage. They wanted to experience everything life had to offer,

to escape boredom and to taste forbidden fruit. The revolt went
in
deepest Germany, from which most of our examples are drawn,
but it influenced England as well. The shock value of such protests
as Frank Wedekind’s play, Spring A wakening ( 1891), in which boys
and girls flaunt their sexuality through masturbation, heterosexual,
and even homosexual experiences, satisfied youthful rebels (though
Wedekind’s play was not performed until 1906). Wedekind anti-
cipated a generation of Expressionists who combined their cries
for individual freedom with demands for the abolition of sexual
restraints. The rediscovery of the human body meant at one ex-
treme the attempt to publicize and legitimize all forms of sexual
activity.
The human body as it was rediscovered by the new generation of
rebels differed from that found in the realistic nudes painted, for
example, by Ingres, Manet or Hans von Marees. Their nude women
were voluptuous, tempting, but remote - framed in a picture, to
be officially appreciated but not appropriated as a part of one’s indi-
viduality. Such ’framing’ can be used to capture a rapturous mo-
ment in painting or in photography, but the moment remains
detached from time and reality. Gert Mattenklott has shown how
the poet Stefan George built his myth upon stylized, carefully pos-
ed photographs which documented the master’s inaccessibility.49
But at the fin de siecle, the preoccupation with nudity was part of a
longing for the genuine that was set in opposition to the prevailing
artificiality, sexuality became a shorthand for revolt, and youth
proposed to tear down all barriers of respectability.
Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century the gymnasts
clad in their uniforms had associated the beauty of the body with
naturalness and gymnastic exercises were often combined with
roaming the countryside. s° Gymnasts were the national stereotype
in the making; manliness and morality were perceived as a reflec-
tion of unspoilt nature. Now, at the end of the century, regenera-
tion through the sun became a continuous quest. The bronzed
body was thought to be especially beautiful a contrast to the ideal-

of whiteness that Winckelmann had admired in Greek sculpture a

century earlier. To be sure, the early nineteenth century had regard-
ed the sun as bad for one’s health. Nevertheless, the analogy be-
tween the sun, light and national regeneration was present even
then, and the blondness and blue eyes of the German and English
stereotypes reflected such ideals. The sun was generally accepted as

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 235

the great healer and by the turn of the century, exposure to the sun
had become part of the cure for tuberculosis. To hide the body
from the sun in shame was taken as a sign of moral and mental
sickness, of being part of the conspiracy by which the ruling classes
suppressed the natural instincts of man. 51
The connection between exposure and immorality which had
been common coin was now reversed. Yet, significantly, this did
not generally lead to license, for the majority of youth was in-
fluenced by nudism but not by the Expressionists’ call for sexual
liberation. The ’culture of sun and light’, as nudism was first called
in Germany, was founded in the middle of the century but did not
make its mark until the 1890s. It was part of the broad ’Lebens-
reform’ movement, which attempted to return to the so-called
genuine forces of life, and to reform man and society through
vegetarianism, anti-alcoholism, nature-healing, land-reform and
the advocacy of garden cities. Cities were condemned as breeding
grounds of immorality and moral sickness, and were said to induce
bodily ills, all arguments we have met before.52 The enthusiasm for
nude swimming, athletics and sunbathing, even while condemning
false shame, harnessed the rediscovery of the body to respect-
ability.
While much of the movement toward life reform tended to sym-
pathize with the political left and with pacifism, its nationalist wing
was to have a disproportionately large influence. Nudity, so it was
said, furthered the regeneration of the race, reconciled social dif-
ferences, and ranked the Volk according to character and well-built
bodies. And nudism, one of its strongest advocates wrote, is not to
be blamed for lustful thoughts; the blame rests on those degenerate
men and women without souls who have such thoughts.53 Further-
more, veiling the human body was said to whet the sexual appetite,
and bourgeois dress to invite immorality.54 As a journal close to the
German Youth Movement had it, modern clothing hid the faults of
the body, making it difficult to select the proper partner in mar-
riage.55 Choosing healthy partners was thought to be vital for the
future of the race and nation. The distinction between the sexes
continued to be emphasized: girls wore ’reform dress’ which gave
them room to breathe but hid their bodies the image of the
-

chaste mother of the race and nation; boys were encouraged to

show themselves much as God made them - young Greeks become
German. Nationalism supported nudism in trying to harness the
rediscovery of the body to traditional respectabilities, keeping the

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236

distinction between normal and abnormal intact, stripping nudity

itself of sensuousness and sexuality.
The so-called rediscovery of the human body has attracted
relatively greater attention in Germany than it has elsewhere
because of its association with the Youth Movement. Yet sun-
drenched and naked youth was a constant theme of Uranian poetry
in nineteenth-century England,56 and became an English pre-
occupation. For example, the quest for youth and beauty informed
the cult which grew up around Rupert Brooke - ’young Apollo
golden haired’ -
after his wartime death in 1915. Winston Chur-
chill’s obituary for Brooke in The Times set the tone for the cult:
’joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed with symmetry of
mind and body’, he exemplified England’s noblest sons.57 Brooke
became the symbol of youth, purity and beauty, and of
timelessness as well. 58 But his poetry was seldom discussed in the
postwar years without reference to his looks, and his blondness:
classical features and whiteness of skin had symbolized male beauty
in England even before the First World War. The extent to which
Brooke’s appearance was discussed is startling from his sup- -

posedly unfurrowed face to his supposedly spindly legs, ’his beauty

of person and kindness of heart’. He died on the way to Gallipoli,
and eventually his grave on the Greek Island of Skyros was marked
by a large statue of a nude youth. At the time of unveiling (1921) he
was called ’a poet and demi-God’.59
Homoerotic themes were much closer to the surface in England
than they were elsewhere, encouraged by the male society of the
public schools, Oxford and Cambridge. There were few life
reform, nudist, and youth movements to help control the
homoeroticism of upper-class British male society. Literary life in
England was filled with allusions to it, especially during and after
the war. Youth, nudity and the sun continued to fascinate
Englishmen. Stephen Spender wrote admiringly about the sun as
the primary social force of Germany, healing the wounds of war.
Thousands of Germans went to open-air swimming pools, and boys
sunned themselves to the deepest mahogany.6° In Germany, the
nation itself became the target of repressed homoerotic feelings, and
the national stereotype took on much greater importance. Martin
Greene called his book about young English writers between the
wars Children of the Sun. Yet in England the rediscovery of the
human body remained tied to literary sensibilities. English writers
were not engaged in a search for national identity, even though dur-

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 237

ing the war homoerotic imagery became popular as part of the

national stereotype. The British Empire was an exceedingly masculine
affair which could absorb many sexual tensions,6’ while the short-
lived German Empire could not fulfil this function.
The German Sonnenkinder did not merely talk or write, but
attempted to live their ideal, and - most important the life-style -

of this German youth became part of the search for a true,

unhypocritical nationalism. The German Youth Movement began
its search for a genuine community in the late 1890s as its members
roamed the countryside trying to rediscover an inwardness of feel-
ing they felt they had lost in the city; the Wanderv6gel originated in
rapidly expanding Berlin. Youths took up sunbathing and nude
swimming and the steeled and bronzed body became part of the
Youth Movement’s ideal of manly beauty. Again the Greek exam-
ple was referred to, naturalness was stressed over artificiality, and
the healthy body contrasted to the sick body. Health was no longer
associated with shame of the body; ’nudity truth’, 6z as they put it.
=

To these tenets German youth added the assertion that unity of

body and soul must prevail. These youths saw themselves alienated
from the society of their parents and they sought a cure through a
communal affinity which encompassed all aspects of life.
Those who have analyzed the Youth Movement have often found
eroticism at its core, a male society which at first excluded women
and only later accepted them with extreme reluctance. According to
Hans Bluher, who based his book The Role of the Erotic in Male
Communities (1917) on his experiences in the Youth Movement,
the homosexual alone creates human communities and states, and
exemplifies a principle of association which extends beyond and
complements the family. His libidinal energies are fulfilled in the
male community, the only kind of association Blfher recognized.
Although Bluher believed that homosexual acts were occasionally
practised by leaders and followers of the Youth Movement, this
was of little importance to him for he held that homosexuality

represented spiritual principles: heroism, leadership and com-

munity. To be sure, it seems absurd to treat the roaming of boys
from thirteen to nineteen years old as a paradigm, but Blfher was
far from alone in his theorizing. The influence of Sigmund Freud in
such thinking is obvious: sexuality becomes the foundation of all
other aspects of life. If Freud was attacked for his failure to
recognize the difference between love and sexuality, the spirit and
the body,63 the Youth Movement also blurred such distinctions, for

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238

it wanted a fully furnished house, an all-encompassing community.

As we shall see, it found this community in the nation.
In spite of its higher purpose, the German Youth Movement was
at first perceived as a threat to respectability, especially as nude
swimming, sports and even dancing spread outside the movement.
At the same time, the surface of respectability showed other,
perhaps even more serious cracks. For example, Emile Zola,
despite his proven courage, had been afraid to write the preface to a
homosexual novel in 1895,~ yet less than a decade later Andre Gide
published his Immoralist (1902) for all the world to read. And
though English writers generally remained more discreet, especially
after Oscar Wilde’s trial and conviction in 1895, in that same year
Aubrey Beardsley began to publish his much-acclaimed pictures of
hermaphrodites and pederasts.65 Those castigated as abnormal by
society were becoming more willing to speak out, attempting to
define themselves instead of having others define them. Earlier
writings in defence of homosexuality were without real influence; it
was largely through the new science of sexology at the fin de siecle
that homosexual rights threatened accepted categories of nor-
malcy and abnormalcy.
The new science of sexology encouraged an onslaught on respec-
tability which further solidified the alliance between nationalism
and respectability. Sexology joined the challenge to respectability
presented by the revolt of youth and the rediscovery of the body.
The influence of sexology was exemplified by the change in Iwan
Bloch’s attitude towards homosexuality. At first he had held the
conventional belief that homosexuality was an acquired taste en-
couraged by bad examples - men wearing long hair and kissing
each other. Bloch joined in the condemnation of Oscar Wilde, and
affirmed that male friendships must be devoid of erotic feelings
But his hostility to homosexuals, still firm in 1903, had become
ambivalent by 1906: now most homosexuals were to be accepted as
legitimate members of society, although others continued to ex-
emplify human degeneration. For those born with such an in-
heritance, congenital homosexuality was normal rather than abnor-
mal, and should be accepted by society and the state. Homosexuals
who had acquired this sexual taste pseudo-homosexuals, Bloch
-

called them - were ’Wüstlingspederasten’ (libertine pederasts)

who continued to exemplify the restlessness and excesses of moder-
nity.67 Making the distinction between true and pseudo-
homosexuals was one way of trying to preserve the categories of

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 239

normalcy and abnormalcy while attempting to legitimize homosex-

uality. Nonetheless, Bloch did challenge the traditional boundaries
between normalcy and vice.
The change in attitudes of Richard von Krafft-Ebing, perhaps
the most celebrated sexologist at the turn of the century, was
similar. He was attacked by Magnus Hirschfeld, the most radical
sex reformer of the time, for his claim that he could recognize
homosexuals by physical signs of degeneration, believing homo-
sexuality to be an illness not unlike masochism and sadism.
However, when Krafft-Ebing came to summarize his life’s work in
Hirschfeld’s own journal (1901), he stated that sexual deviance was
not the fault of the homosexual, and that homosexuality, though
against natural law, was compatible with intellectual excellence and
highly developed spiritual faculties. Homosexuality could be ac-
quired, by some, and in others it was a malfunctioning of the
human organism; its victims deserve pity, not scorn.68
Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis took a more straightfor-
ward stand. Like Bluher, Ellis believed that homosexuality made
human civilization possible. While the homosexual must not flaunt
his sexuality before normal society, he should nevertheless be pro-
tected. He might even possess greater worth than the normal person
(though Ellis also has much to say in praise of family life). Essen-
tially, Ellis held that sexual acts were a private matter, not subject
to public judgment.69 Yet, typically enough, he was not at ease in
his collaboration with John Addington Symonds, not only because
this overt homosexual might compromise the scientific claims of
Sexual Inversion (1897), but also because he was uncomfortable
with abnormal sexuality.10
Magnus Hirschfeld was still more straightforward, treating
homosexuality as the ’third sex’, an intermediate stage between the
masculine and the feminine. As such, it was a natural variant and
legitimate. Homosexuals looked and behaved normally, and should
never be treated as though they were abnormal. Hirschfeld made
no distinction between true and pseudo-homosexuality.
For all their attachment to contemporary manners and morals,
Bloch, Ellis and Hirschfeld changed the manner in which homo-
sexuality was discussed. Sigmund Freud was part of this group of
sexologists whose work he knew well and who influenced his own
psychoanalytic theories. Contemporaries were particularly struck
by the simple, detailed and precise way in which Freud described
sexual experiences, refusing to use Latin like his colleagues .7These

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240

physicians presented one more challenge to the conventional way of

dealing with sex, though their readership was largely confined to
medical circles. They challenged the assertion that homosexuals
were insane or decadent with the claim that rigid standards of

morality were preventing homosexuals from leading normal and

productive lives. Physicians and scholars did not want to challenge
the basic norms of respectability, just as the German Youth Move-
ment did not mean to advocate sexual liberation. Yet all of these
men were pushing at the limits of respectability; worse still, they
were joined by openly homosexual publications, and however often
these were banned, they managed to continue their subversion.

Magnus Hirschfeld counted a thousand publications about

homosexuality between 1898 and 1908.72
The bars of the golden cage needed strengthening, and here the
German Youth Movement had shown the way: all personal rela-
tionships within the community must be stripped of eroticism,
spiritualized and directed to a higher purpose. For the Movement,
seeking an inward patriotism more genuine than the sabre-rattling
of older generations, nationalism provided that purpose. Germanic
nature and the Germanic soul would stop male friendships from
sliding into sensuality.
The work of the painter Fidus, so popular in the Youth Move-
ment, exemplified how national symbols and stereotypes could
strip male beauty of its sexuality. Fidus, painting man as an integral
part of nature, used the to make nude bodies transparent: ideal
sun

Germans suffused by light. Sun and nudity were corollaries with

the sun symbolizing the Germanic people with their festivals of
spring and summer, their sacred flames and fires. This was a pan-
theism which integrated man, nature and the nation, directing at-
tention from the physical to national mythology. 13 Fidus’s pain-
tings were often framed by theosophical symbols which further
linked his nudes with religious feelings directed toward nature or
the nation.
The contemplation of human beauty was thus stripped of sen-
suality. Any connection between sexuality and life had to be
broken, and the longing for an experience was not supposed to lead
to its fulfilment. Fidus was likely to talk about admiring girls
without desiring them,&dquo; and Peter Behrens in The Kiss (1898) wrote
about the longing for a kiss, not the kiss itself. 75 The whole imagery
of pining youth, so typical of the fin de siecle, depended in part
upon his chastity. This purity was symbolized by the red rose in the

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 241

hand of a dying youth, or by the sun-drenched innocence of nude

soldiers bathing behind the front lines in the First World War.
During the first years of the twentieth century the poet Stefan
George and his circle provide another excellent example of the
attempt to lift male friendship from an earthly to an ideal plane to -

strip love of sexuality. George exalted the beauty of the young

Maximin, presented Maximin to his followers as an ideal to be wor-
shipped, and through festivals built around the youth, tried to
transform sensuousness into artistic beauty. The nude youth
became a symbol for the pagan ’lightening of the soul’, represen-
ting Greek order and harmony, playing a chaste Beatrice to
George’s Dante.76 For George and his circle the pagan and Greek
beauty of Maximin was part of a ’secret Germany’ as yet confined
to their Bund, but eventually destined to save the nation. To be
sure, George’s homosexuality was thinly veiled, and Fidus’s strong
heterosexuality was only superficially redirected, for after watching
nude pictures during the evening, Fidus faithfully chronicled his
self-abuse at night.&dquo; Nevertheless, homosexual or heterosexual,
nudity was supposedly stripped of its sensuality, transformed by
Fidus’s sun symbolism and George’s poetic rites; men’s thoughts
were to be directed from sexuality to a spiritual principle, and this
was more often than not symbolized by nature and the nation.
Male beauty as the national stereotype served to tame the
rediscovery of the body.
The First World War strengthened the link between transcendent
beauty and the national stereotype. Rupert Brooke’s praise of war
as an aid to mastering the passions, cleansing man’s body of lust,
was typical of the ‘generation of 1914’. Earlier, he had praised male

friendships because they were safe, without lust and therefore

without poison.78 In Germany, Otto Braun noted in his war diary
(later to become the popular Testament of One Who Died Young,
published in 1921) that ... war became our higher fate... so that
the body in our nervous times becomes steeled, matured and latent
with the glorious deeds of the future and manly beauty’. 19 It is as if
youth, facing the challenge of war, wanted to live up to its fin de
siecle image as beautiful, young and pure, and from that image to
gain manliness. The national stereotype had come to the nation’s
rescue.

Sexuality must be transcended infavour of ‘... that radiance of

love which is to feel one has safe hold of eternal things’,10 to cite
Rupert Brooke again. Ernst Wurche, the hero of Walter Flex’s

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242

popular Wanderer Between Two Worlds (1917), is the twin of

Rupert Brooke, a Germanic ‘... young Apollo golden haired’,
well-proportioned and chaste. His friendship with Flex was intend-
ed to exemplify the kind of safe love among men that Brooke had
praised. But the line between friendship and sexuality seems to
wear thin when Flex and Wurche bare their ’genuine’ feelings for
each other and admire the sun-drenched bodies of nude soldiers
bathing behind the front. Everywhere the male society of the tren-
ches, the camaraderie during the war, seemed filled with erotic
temptations. Normalcy was once more challenged by the ’little
world of the trenches’.
This challenge was made explicit by Brooke and Flex, as well as
by Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man, with its loving por-
trait of Dick Tiltwood.8’ The memory of such relationships lingered
on in the minds of those who would always remember the war.
That is why, perhaps, little effort was spared to cleanse the wartime
ideal of camaraderie from all suspicion of homoeroticism. For ex-
ample, the second-rate but highly popular German writer, Rudolf
Herzog, in his novel, Comrades (1922), was at great pains to attach
a woman to every soldier, however passive her role and unimpor-
tant her presence. Throughout such literature passive women were
present, ’tender, small and white’. 82 Whenever news was received
that the squad was in danger, soldiers broke off their leave and
readily abandoned their sweethearts. Wartime heroes exemplified
normalcy and at the same time the priority of male comradeship.
The exaltation of wartime camaraderie was permeated by the
attempt to spiritualize this experience, to direct men’s thoughts to the
national purpose rather than to their own tangled relationships.
Nationalism supported respectability, those manners and morals
which had triumphed at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It
provided an ideal well-suited to stripping sexuality from that
rediscovery of the human body which accompanied the fin de siecle
revolt against conventional manners and morals. This function of
nationalism has not changed; keeping intact the distinctions be-
tween the normal and abnormal, health and sickness, is still thought
to determine the strength of most nations. Even today sexual per-
missiveness is occasionally blamed for the decline of the Weimar
Republic -
a cautionary tale for the present. What started as an
alliance forged in the course of the historical process was
transformed into a relationship that was believed to have existed
from the beginning of time. Nationalism and respectability jointly

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 243

provided a reference point in an unsettling world, a piece of eterni-

ty which could be appropriated by those caught up by the vibra-
tions of modernity. The enemy was easily identifiable. The German
Children’s Protection League had written as far back as 1909 that
’a splendid physique is rarely accompanied by vicious traits’.83 The
normal and the abnormal were thought to have been clearly defin-
ed and expressed, and their effects laid down for all time and all
places.

Notes

I would like to thank Sterling Fishman, James D. Steakley, Anson Rabinbach, Paul
Breines and F.B. Smith for their helpful suggestions.

1. Harold Nicolson, Good Behaviour (London 1955), 236; George L. Mosse,

’Norbert Elias and the Civilizing Process’, New German Critique (Fall 1978),
178-183.
2. Peter T. Cominos, ’Late-Victorian Respectability and the Social System’,
International Review of Social History, Vol. 8 (1963), 42.
3. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses (New York 1975),
Chapter 2.
4. Johann Valentin Muller, Entwurf einer gerichtlichen Arzneiwissenschaft
(Frankfurt a. Main 1796), reprinted in Der unterdruckte Sexus, ed. Joachim S.
Hohmann (Lollar/Lahn 1977), 132, 139. For Liguori see Graf von Hoensbroech,
Das Papsttum in seiner sozialen-kulturellen Wirksamkeit (Leipzig 1902), Vol. 2,
310-312.
5. I.e. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Philadelphia and Lon-
don 1892), 190.
6. Jean-Paul Aron, Roger Kempf, Le pénis et la demorahsation de l’Occident
(Paris 1978), 189.
7. Jacob Stockinger, ’Homosexuality and the French Enlightenment’,
Homosexualities in French Literature, ed. George Stambolian and Elaine Marx
(Ithaca 1979), 161-186.
8. Johann Valentin Müller, op. cit., 136.
9. Ibid., 137.
10. George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses, 128.
11. Hans Dietrich Hellbach, Die Freundesliebe in der deutschen Literatur, In-
augural Dissertation, Universität Leipzig (Leipzig 1931), 38, 43.

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244

12. Adolf Beyer, Schiller’s Malteser, Inaugural Dissertation, Universitat Tub-

ingen (Tubingen 1912), 45, 46, 75.
13. Fichtes Reden an die deutsche Nation (Berlin 1912), 137 (Achte Rede); Paul
Kluckhohn, Die Auffassung der Liebe in der Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts und in
der deutschen Romantik (Tubingen 1966), 137, 331.
14. I.e. Albert Moll, Untersuchungen uber die Libido Sexualis (Berlin 1898),
Vol. 1, 848.
15. George L. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 22, 23.
16. M. Tissot, L’Onanisme, Dissertation sur les Maladies produites par la
Masturbation etc. (Lausanne 1717), 193, 219.
17. Jean Paul Aron, Roger Kempf, op. cit., 162. It is striking to what extent the
physician is the villain in lesbian literature, i.e. Lillian Faderman, Brigitte Erikson,
Lesbian-Feminism in turn of the Century Germany (Iowa City 1980), 4.
18. Cited in F.B. Smith, The People’s Health 1830-1910 (Canberra 1979), 121.
19. Ambroise Tardieu, Die Vergehen gegen die Sittlichkeit (Weimar 1860), tr.
Wilhelm Theile, 124, 140ff.
20. Johann Ludwig Caspar, in Vierteljahrsschrift fur gerichtliche und offentliche
Medizin (1852), reprinted in Der unterdruckte Sexus, 73, 63, 64.
21. Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1904), Vol. VI, 499.
22. F.B. Smith, op. cit., 300.
23. M. Tissot, op. cit., 66.
24. Cited in Der Spiegel (12 March 1979), 123, in review of Jean Paul Aron and
Roger Kempf, op. cit.
25. Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, in seinen Beziehungen zur
modernen Kultur (Berlin 1906), 601, 464, 468.
26. Quoted in Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession (Cambridge, Mass. 1980), 25.
27. I.e. Johann Ludwig Casper, op. cit., 59.
28. Alois Geigel (?), Das Paradoxon der Venus Urania (Wurzburg 1869), reprint-
ed in Der unterdruckte Sexus, 7.
29. Iwan Bloch, Die Perversen (Berlin n.d.), 28; Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben
unserer Zeit, 384, 385.
30. Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 753.
31. Ibid., 753; Alois Geigel, op. cit., 7.
32. Benedict Friedländer in Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1905), Vol. 1,
463-470; James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in Germany
(New York 1975), 69.
33. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, op. cit., 6; ibid. (1898), 186.
34. Albert Moll, Handbuch der Sexual-Wissenschaften (Leipzig 1921), 334.
35. Ibid., 334.
36. Bénedict Augustin Morel, Traité des Dégénéresences Physiques, Intellec-
tuelles et Morales de l’Espèce Humaine (Paris 1857), preface and Chapter 1.
37. Max Nordau, Degeneration (New York 1968), 37, 39, 41, 541.
38. M. Proust, Remembrance of Things Past (New York 1932), Vol. 2, 14. My
reading of Proust does not agree with the statement by Jean-Paul Aron and Roger
Kempf that his disdain for homosexuality was, in fact, an attempt to have it
accepted. ’Triumphs and Tribulations of the Homosexual Discourse’, Homo-
sexualities and French Literature, 125.
39. M. Proust, op. cit., 311.
40. Jean Recanati, Profils Juifs de Marcel Proust (Paris 1979), 119.

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 245

41. Hans Peter Bleuel, Sex and Society in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia 1973), 217.
42. Benedict Friedländer cited in Karl Franz von Leexow, Armee und Homo-
sexualität (Leipzig 1908), 5, 61-63; see aso Friedländer’s Die Liebe Platons im Lichte
der modernen Biologie (Treptow 1909), 30, 203, 204; there ignoring the usefulness
of homosexuality is said to weaken the white race while leading to the triumph of the
yellow races, 278.
43. Robert H. McDonald, ’The Frightful Consequences of Onanism’, Journal of
the History of Ideas (1967), Vol. 28, 425.
44. Carl Euler, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (Berlin 1881), 118.
45. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, op. cit., 6.
46. Albert Moll, Handbuch der Sexual-Wissenschaften, 939.
47. Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York 1975), 121.
48. Ernst von Salomon, Die Kadetten (Hamburg 1957), 42-43; Klaus Theleweit,
Mdnnerphantasien (Frankfurt a. Main 1978), Vol. 2, 87, 199-201.
49. Gert Mattenklott, Bilderdienst, Asthetische Opposition bei Beardsley und
George (Munich 1970), 198.
50. George L. Mosse, Nationalization of the Masses, 133.
51. Heinrich Pudor, Naktkultur (Berlin-Steglitz 1906), Vol. 1, 49.
52. Wolfgang R. Krabbe, Geselischaftsveränderung durch Lebensreform (Got-
tingen 1974), 13, 91, 94, 98.
53. Richard Ungewitter, Naktheit und Moral, Wege zur Rettung des deutschen
Volkes (Stuttgart 1925), 10, 11.
54. Heinrich Pudor, Nackende Menschen (n.p. 1917?), 15.
55. Vortrupp (1 May 1913), 279-280.
56. Timothy d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, Some Notes on the Lives and
Writings of the English ’Uranian’ Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London 1970), passim.
57. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, with a Memoir (London 1918), xxvii,
clix.
58. Edward Howard Marsh, A Number of People (New York and London 1939),
274; Michael Hastings, The Handsomest Young Man in England, Rupert Brooke
(London 1967), passim.
59. Stanley Casson, Rupert Brooke and Skyros (London 1921), n.p. As usual,
reality was more complex than the myth. For example, Virginia Woolf wrote that
Brooke was jealous, moody and imbalanced. Like many of those who knew Brooke
personally, she disliked the Memorial by Edward Marsh which accompanied
Brooke’s collected poems (1915) and which had transformed him into all that
English youth should be. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, ed. Anne Olivier Bell
(New York and London 1977), 172. By then, Brooke had broken with the
Bloomsbury group. Yet his growing anti-semitism and anti-feminism does not quite
fit Marsh’s and Churchill’s myth. John Lehmann, Rupert Brooke His Life and His
Legend (London 1980), 73.
60. Stephen Spender, World within World (London 1951), 107.
61. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914 (London 1976), 141,
137.
62. Der Anfang (September 1913), 138.
63. Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1903), Vol. 2, 921.
64. Ibid. (1905), Vol. 1, 377.
65. Gert Mattenklott, op. cit., 57ff.

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66. Eugen Duhren (Iwan Bloch), Englische Sittengeschichte (Berlin 1912), 14, 24,
46; (first published in 1903).
67. Iwan Bloch, Das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, 541, 543, 591, 595.
68. Jahrbuch fur sexuelle Zwischenstufen (1901), Vol. 2, 7-71; ibid. (1903),.
Vol. 1, 93.
69. Vincent Brome, Havelock Ellis, Philosopher of Sex (London 1979), passim.
70. Phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds (London 1964), 291.
71. Frank J. Sulloway, Freud Biologist of the Mind (New York 1979), Chapter 8.
72. Frank J. Sulloway, op. cit., 283; for example, 320 works on homosexuality
were published in Germany in 1905 alone, James D. Steackley, op. cit., 24.
73. Jost Hermand, Der Schein des schönen Lebens (Frankfurt a. Main 1972),
55-128.
74. Janos Frecot, Johann Friedrich Geist, Diethart Krebs, Fidus, 1869-1948
(Munich 1972), 176.
75. Gert Mattenklott, op. cit., 299.
76. Ibid., 113.
77. Janos Frecot et al., op. cit., 145, 151.
78. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, cii, 5.
79. Otto Braun, Aus nachgelassenen Schriften eines Frühvollendeten, ed. Julie
Vogelstein (Berlin 1921), 120.
80. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke, lxxv.
81. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London 1975), 90ff.
82. Franz Schauwecker, Aufbruch der Nation (Berlin 1930), 41.
83. John R. Gillis, Youth and History, Tradition and Change in European Age
Relations 1770 to the Present (New York 1974), 157.

George L. Mosse
is Bascom Professor of History, University
of Wisconsin, Madison and Koebner
Professor of History at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem. He is the co-editor
of the Journal of Contemporary History
and his latest book is Man and Masses,
Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of
Reality (1980).

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