Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex

Description

In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin charts the emergence, from the 1830s through the early twentieth century, of a new vocabulary and science of human sexuality in the writings of literary authors, politicians, and members of the medical establishment in German-speaking central Europe—and observes how consistently these writers, thinkers, and scientists associated the new nonnormative sexualities with places away from the German metropoles of Berlin and Vienna. In the writings of Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Switzerland figured as a place for women in particular to escape the sexual confines of Germany. The sexual ethnologies of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack and the popular novels of Karl May linked nonnormative sexualities with the colonies and, in particular, with German Samoa. Same-sex desire was perhaps the most centrifugal sexuality of all, as so-called Greek love migrated to numerous places and peoples: a curious connection between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism emerged in the writings of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny; Arnold Zweig built on a long and extremely well-developed gradation of associating homosexuality with Jewishness, projecting the entire question of same-sex desire onto the physical territory of Palestine; and Thomas Mann, of course, famously associated male-male desire with the fantastically liminal city of Venice, lying between land and sea, Europe and the Orient. As Germany—and German-speaking Europe—became a fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, what factors helped construct the sexuality that emerged? Peripheral Desires examines how and why the political, scientific and literary culture of the region produced the modern vocabulary of sexuality. Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 8 Preface. Peripheral Desires......Page 10 Introduction. 1869—Urnings, Homosexuals, and Inverts......Page 22 Chapter 1. Swiss Eros: Hössli and Zschokke, Legacies and Contexts......Page 48 Chapter 2. The Greek Model and Its Masculinist Appropriation......Page 74 Chapter 3. Jews and Homosexuals......Page 104 Chapter 4. “Homosexuality” and the Politics of the Nation in Austria, Hungary, and Austria-Hungary......Page 132 Chapter 5. Colonialism and Sexuality: German Perspectives on Samoa......Page 155 Chapter 6. Swiss Universities: Emancipated Women and the Third Sex......Page 183 Chapter 7. Thomas Mann’s Erotic Irony: The Dialectics of Sexuality in Venice......Page 206 Chapter 8. Pederasty in Palestine: Sexuality and Nationality in Arnold Zweig’s De Vriendt kehrt heim......Page 232 Conclusion. American Legacies of the German Discovery of Sex......Page 251 Notes......Page 272 Bibliography......Page 304 B......Page 318 D......Page 319 G......Page 320 H......Page 321 K......Page 322 M......Page 323 P......Page 324 S......Page 325 W......Page 326 Z......Page 327 Acknowledgments......Page 328