FICTION IN GERMANY
Before 1914
Insofar as secondhand information is to be trusted, it appears that
female variance figured but twice in German fiction before the late
1890s. Lewandowski’s _Das Sexualproblem in der modernen Literatur und
Kunst ... seit 1800_ lists Johannes Flach’s _Sappho: Griechische
Novelle_ (1886) under the heading of homosexual literature without
further comment. The _Jahrbuch_ during 1907 cited a passage from a
romantic novel of the 1820’s, Ernst Wagner’s _Isidora_, which describes
the same sort of innocent play between a princess and her
maid-in-waiting as Lamartine pictured in “Regina,” with the difference
that the bond between Wagner’s two girls appears wholly physical.[1] As
Lewandowski’s criterion for inclusion seems to have been overt sexual
action, he may have omitted subtler studies of variance; and
Hirschfeld’s frankly biased journal was not too much concerned with
discreditable bisexual records. Therefore it is possible that
nineteenth-century German novels comparable to Balzac’s
_Seraphitus-Seraphita_ or _Cousine Bette_ were passed over as
negligible. But when one recalls the emptiness of the record in English
during the same period, and remembers that in the matter of feminine
mores Germany resembled Victorian England rather than France, any
exhaustive reading of German fiction promises rewards incommensurate
with the labor involved.
Interest in female variance was, however, already alive when
Hirschfeld’s efforts in 1896 began to encourage its literary expression,
as evidenced by the sudden outburst of fiction as well as poetry during
the following decade. In 1897, Gabriele Reuter, a writer of ability,
published a novel of autobiographical pattern, _Aus guter Familie_,[2]
which included among its heroine’s early experiences a variant, possibly
lesbian, attachment—the _Jahrbuch’s_ note does not specify. In 1900
Elisabeth Dauthendey produced _Vom neuen Weib und seiner
Sittlichkeit_,[3] semi-narrative sketches like Colette’s in _Ces
Plaisirs_. The “New Woman’s” ideal is a life of quiet intimacy with
other women, free of the “brutal” relations with men which dull
appreciation of more delicate emotional nuances. An interlude with a
tribade, a ‘confident, wise, almost manly’ individual, at first promises
fulfillment of all the writer’s hopes. But a few amorous nights force
her to recognize that, like a man, this woman cannot distinguish between
crude sex and love. In the same year von Seydlitz used a case history
from the 1840s—possibly from the same source as Kaspar’s _Klinische
Novellen_—as the basis for _Pierre’s Ehe: Psychologische Probleme_.[4]
Its hero is unfortunate enough to love an odd, hard, masculine girl who
finally succumbs to his persistence, but is unable to cooperate
sexually, and presently the partners find themselves in love with the
same woman. In the course of a jealous brawl Pierre believes he has
killed his wife; he makes a successful escape into the merchant marine
and dies in Saigon without learning that he is innocent of manslaughter.
The wife, now a confirmed transvestist, lives out her life as a valet
without further emotional complication.
In 1900 also, Alfred Meebold included a tragic variant novelette, “Dr.
Erna Redens Thorheit und Erkenntnis,”[5] in the volume _Allerhand Volk_.
The larger portion of the tale presents Dr. Erna’s unhappy heterosexual
affair with a fellow medical student. To recover from her consequent
depression she travels in Italy with an artist, Lucie, who has been her
particularly warm and eager confidante. The latter is a homosexual, but
she manages to conceal the nature of her feelings until the two meet
another woman, an artist long acquainted with Lucie. In the course of a
quarrel this woman reveals Lucie’s secret. Although Dr. Erna has now
recovered from her heterosexual disappointment and exhibits a
sympathetic understanding of Lucie’s emotion, she is unable to return it
in kind, and in despondency Lucie kills herself. Dr. Erna then returns
to Germany full of crusading zeal against those who persecute
homosexuals. This bears slight but sufficient resemblance to Borys’s
later _Carlotta Noll_ in French to suggest that both may have been based
on a single known episode, or that the one influenced the other. The
German version, be it noted, is by far the more sympathetic.
In 1901 a Danish novel by O. W. Møller was translated under the German
title _Wer kann dafür?_[6] This traces the efforts of a German officer’s
daughter to overcome a lesbian attraction and marry a young astronomer
in the Heidelberg Observatory. She becomes deeply attached to her suitor
but cannot respond physically; and so they part, although because of her
masculine temperament and interests they are much closer in spirit than
most married couples. Involving little dramatic action, this
psychological study seems to have been of as high quality as Reuter’s
_Aus guter Familie_. In contrast, August Niemann’s _Zwei Frauen_[7]
involves an infatuation between a married woman and the brilliant music
student whom her husband, head of a conservatory, has accepted as a
pupil despite her apprehensive protests. The danger she foresaw
materializes, and from there on the story becomes what the reviewer
calls ‘an imitation of Belot’s _Mlle Giraud_ which is hardly a credit to
German letters.’
Much more interesting, in view of its author’s subsequent reputation,
was Jacob Wassermann’s _Geschichte der jungen Renate Fuchs_ (1900), and
it is a matter of regret that this volume, though it ran to several
editions, has proved inaccessible. The _Jahrbuch’s_ review mentions a
lesbian affair between two minor characters, a university student of
political economy and the daughter of ‘one of Europe’s most famous
courtesans.’[8] A puritanic critic later describes the heroine herself
as “wading through all manner of filth,”[9] but makes no reference to
homosexual experience either on her part or anyone’s else.
The year 1903 saw the publication of three lesbian titles. In Maria
Eichhorn’s _Fräulein Don Juan_[10] the heroine’s strong and domineering
sensual nature is roused in adolescence by homosexual affairs, but she
later knows many men and never returns to her lesbian practices. Maria
Janitschek’s “Neue Erziehung und alte Moral”[11] in _Die neue Eva_ is
the story of an orphan girl raised among seven foster brothers as one of
them and without much supervision, so that she is enlightened early
about matters of sex. At puberty she is abruptly cautioned by her foster
mother against looseness with men and given a fearful picture of the
fate of the unmarried mother. The resulting emotional conflict is
severe, but at sixteen, when she shares her room and bed with a charming
feminine guest, ‘at last in Agathe’s arms Seffi found a lovely peace.’
Upon being harshly berated for this innocent-seeming play, she defies
authority. ‘It is your own upbringing that has driven me into the arms
of my friend—now leave me there!’
An inferior _Sind es Frauen?_[12] by Aimée Duc pictures a large group of
openly lesbian women in a German university town. Most of them are past
the teens and slightly reminiscent of Peladan’s group centered about the
Russian Simzerla, especially in that they spend much time discussing all
aspects of sexual psychology. Most of them are foreigners—there seems to
be a tendency in second-rate homosexual fiction to saddle some other
country than the author’s own with the origin of lesbian characters. The
leader of this group is Minotschka Fernandoff, a Russian ‘just released
from three years of marriage,’ after having discovered that in sexual
relations she needs to play the man. There is also Annie who has
“escaped” marriage after only six months, Bertha Cohn whose beloved
“Fritz” has moved in the other direction, getting engaged and finding
she prefers a male lover, and Dr. Tatjana, mature and wise in the new
medical psychology. And last, living with Minotschka, is a Polish music
student, Countess Marta Kinzey, on whose account the Russian girl has
come to Germany. The plot proceeds through a separation between Marta
and Minotschka, during which the latter resists the advances of an
actress and the former enters into a marriage of diplomatic necessity
with a man who ‘knows all about her’ and is her husband in name only. In
the end after much painful misunderstanding the two are reunited, to
find that each has been faithful to the other. This is one of the
volumes about which the _Jahrbuch’s_ reviewer was most enthusiastic from
a psychological viewpoint.
In 1901 _Weiberbeute_[13] was published in Budapest over the ambiguous
pseudonym, Luz Frauman, and later it was considered worthy of a
4,000-word summary in Magnus Hirschfeld’s _Die Transvestiten_. Here
transvestism plays a significant role for the first time since
Rachilde’s novels, to the first of which this bears considerable
resemblance. As in _Monsieur Vénus_, double inversion of sexual roles
somewhat blurs the homosexual aspect; however, the period during which
both significant characters are living as women justifies its inclusion
here. Nana, an athletic but seductive girl reminiscent of Maupin,
marries from cool expedience the wealthiest and most enslaved of her
admirers. Thereby she incurs the implacable hatred of his son, a
delicate boy ‘with the face of a Japanese girl,’ who lays an idolized
mother’s death to his father’s dalliance with Nana. The father would
ship his son to Australia, but Nana offers an alternative. She is
skilled in hypnotism; she will throw the boy into a trance, and by
suggestion will eradicate all memory, not only of his hatred but of his
sex, leaving him convinced that he is a girl. ‘Conviction is the very
essence of a human being,’ she says, ‘and so shapes growth that after
this the boy’s male development will be arrested and he will be
virtually a woman.’
This fantastic plan is carried through, and for three years the
changeling, dressed as a girl, is Nana’s passionate adorer. In the
meantime Nana has borne her husband a son who will be his heir unless
the older boy is restored to his proper status. This dilemma naturally
troubles the father and when in addition his wife’s charming ‘companion’
is demanded in marriage, he decides the mummery has gone far enough. But
he reckons without Nana. Exerting her hypnotic powers now upon him, she
moves him to shoot himself, inherits his fortune, consigns her own son
to a boarding school, and sets out upon a world tour with her ‘girl
companion.’ In love with the latter from the outset, she now considers
releasing him from the hypnotic spell so that they can marry, but she
fears a return of his former antagonism, and, in view of her own
seniority, she decides to assume the man’s role herself. Always with the
aid of hypnotism she achieves this end, marries her stepson, and sets up
a household. Presently the desire for a child seizes the couple. Nana is
for adoption but the ‘wife’ objects. And now, as Hirschfeld says, ‘comes
a climax of fantasy so grotesque that the imagination conceiving it must
really have been warped.’ Through her convenient powers Nana induces
illusory pregnancy in the “wife,” bears the child herself, and contrives
to get it into the “mother’s” arms at the correct psychological and
physical moment.
But now an unforeseen complication develops. The “wife” hails the son as
a girl. The necessity for concealing the child’s sex from everyone
throughout its childhood puts a grave strain on Nana, but her ingenuity
is equal to the task, and the family enjoys an uncommonly happy life for
a matter of twenty years. When illness overtakes Nana she refuses a
physician, and only on her deathbed pours out the truth to her “wife.”
Though the hypnotic spell is now broken, the latter’s mental “set” is so
completely established that he takes the story for mere delirious
babbling. The author, Hirschfeld assures us, solves the two survivors’
problem as ingeniously as he contrived it, though it is difficult to
imagine how. Aside from the stepson’s years of subjective lesbianism
before marriage, the novel’s most noteworthy point is its presentation
of hypnotism as able to effect complete endocrine change, an exaggerated
foreshadowing of modern psychosomatic theory, and quite opposed to the
then-popular hereditary hypothesis.
The remaining handful of minor novels before 1910 are of the sort which
invariably appear upon a theme already proved profitable.
_Urningsliebe_, by “O. Liebetreu”[14] is a masochistic tale of a girl
who gives herself, her strength, and her money to a succession of five
or six loves, and ends in prison serving a three year sentence for an
offense committed by the last of them, in order to save her friend’s
good name. Erich Mühsam’s _Psychologie der Erbtante_[15] is a
half-satiric tragedy of a masculine woman of middle age, rather like
Bonifas, who commits suicide because of a mysterious ‘unlucky love’
(supposedly heterosexual), in order to leave all her property to the
girl with whom she had no luck. ‘Theodor’ (probably Anna) Rüling’s
“Rätselhaft,”[16] one of three novelettes in her _Welcher unter Euch
ohne Sünde ist_, also ends with a suicide. It is the story of a girl
whose family has discovered her lesbian relations with a beloved friend
and has separated the pair. _Dreiunddreissig Scheusale_,[17] published
first in Leningrad (then, of course, St. Petersburg), was the work of a
Russian actress, Annibal Sinowjewa. In it, a lesbian woman has lived for
some time with a younger girl in a relation so perfect that she never
doubts its permanence, and from sheer pride in her beloved’s beauty she
encourages the girl to model for a life class of thirty-three men. The
girl, as thoroughly schooled in erotic virtuosity as was the _Girl with
the Golden Eyes_, becomes the common mistress of the artist group and
never returns to her feminine lover. (This was not the sole, or even the
first, Russian notice of feminine variance. Tolstoi had skirted it
earlier in _Anna Karenina_ with the brief emotional flame lit in Kitty
by Varenka, and Dostoievsky came a step closer in _A Friend of the
Family_, with the mutual attraction between Nyelochka and her friend.
Both of these incidents occurred in late adolescence.)
During this same decade two major artists produced a series of works all
of which are still freely available in German, and one, at least, in
English. The symbolists in France did not touch upon female variance,
unless one thinks of _Monsieur Vénus_, _Méphistophéla_, or _La Gynandre_
as distantly related to symbolism, but these two men included the theme
in spreading canvases of definitely symbolic style.
The first is the work of Heinrich Mann, older brother of the more famous
Thomas. His _Die Göttinnen_ (1902-03) is a trilogy within whose epic
sweep he attempts to include every experience open to a woman of his
time. Its subtitle is “Die drei Romane der Herzogin von Assy: Diana;
Minerva; Venus.” But it is not under the aegis of Diana, as one might
imagine, that the countess meets lesbian experience. The first volume
(the only one available in English) is concerned with her devotion to
the cause of Freedom, not for women, but political freedom for all
oppressed people. Under the spell of Minerva in the second book her
interest is turned to the arts, including letters. Though these two
works are far from empty of dramatic emotional episodes, it is Venus who
leads the countess at last to seek every possible form of love. After
experience with several widely different male lovers, the most
satisfying of whom is a younger man who ‘thinks like her,’ she returns
to her mansion in Naples and takes ‘the one lover not yet tried—the
crowd.’
She fills her house with beautiful young people in lieu of canvases and
statues.
‘An unbroken stream of bodies which promised pleasure passed through
her bedroom—slim delicate bodies and athletic, well-trained ones; the
yielding firmness of girls and the delicate bones and melting flesh
of children. The fisherman from Santa Lucia followed the clubman. The
warm golden peasant girl with coarse heavy brows above her quiet eyes
left the impress of her robust figure on the cushions where [a titled
beauty] had lain; and she with her cold perfection interrupted the
convulsive ecstasy of [another girl’s] first passion of surrender and
abandon.’[18]
When this comparatively tame promiscuity palls, the countess turns to
sadism. Though never indulging actively herself, she provokes frenzied
jealousy among her own and others’ lovers, and the resulting violence
would equal, were it not merely suggested rather than amplified, any
recorded by “the divine marquis.” After all this, by way of final
experiment, the countess has staged for herself alone, and at enormous
cost, a lesbian bout between two expert performers, girls already so
spent with depravity that their flesh is ‘like a no longer fresh glove
over a masterfully sculptured hand,’ At the end of their act they
collapse, deeply unconscious, but the countess merely gazes down at them
with weary disillusion.
‘“Is this all? Or have these sweet cheats, ripest of the lot,
withheld some final sweetness? Alas, this fruit is like all the
others. I myself shall never pluck it, and I would its taste were
already gone from my lips.”’[19]
The chief significance of this episode is its serving as climax to all
that has gone before, evidently representing for the author the ultimate
depths of sexual depravity.
The second major German author is Frank Wedekind, who, like Balzac,
presents three sharply contrasting pictures of female variance.
Comparable in innocence to _Seraphitus-Seraphita_ is the devotion in
_Mine-ha-ha_ (1909) of a child dancer to her ballet mistress, a woman in
the late twenties, oriental in coloring, boyish of build, and military
in the ruthlessness of her discipline. For sheer magic in imparting the
illusion of reality to fantastic circumstances this novelette has few
equals, but attention must be confined here to its variant aspects. For
a half-dozen years, between seven and fourteen, Hidalla lives only for
her fortnightly ballet lessons, and the intervening days pass in a maze
of gruelling practice and bemused reverie. The latter, however, is not
sexual. When Hidalla reaches the age—about eleven—for nightly appearance
with the ballet troupe, objective self-expression partially relieves the
intensity of her introverted emotion. As soon as she leaves the
conventual rigors of the school for life as an élite demi-mondaine her
outlook is completely altered. Although she feels no love for her
wealthy male protector, she watches—at the age of perhaps sixteen—from
his loge in the great municipal opera house while her former idol dances
starring roles, and feels only a reminiscent warmth, as much for her own
remembered obsession as for its one-time object.
She skirts the edge of two other experiences which serve to define the
stringent ban upon lesbian intimacies in the training school. In
pre-adolescence she feels a transient tenderness for a companion, but
the latter is terrified at a half-proferred kiss during a twilight
stroll. Does Hidalla not know the penalty for “going with” another girl?
The sour and hideous servants who do the dormitory housework are there
because in their training days they “went with” girls, thereby ruining
forever their chances in that mysterious but alluring world beyond the
gates into which the school’s finished products are released—though
neither of the children has any idea what their place in it is to be.
Hidalla’s second attraction is to one of the younger children whom she
sees enter the school at seven as she did, shy and bewildered, and (like
Claudine) she feels for this reflection of her earlier self a maternal
as well as passionate love. She is barely adolescent at the time, but
the love-starved life of these orphans whose existence is bounded by the
Spartan walls of the school makes some such overflow of the heart
inevitable. The small hours of a night that she spends crouched at the
foot of the little girl’s bed, struggling with the hunger to go closer,
restrained only by the knowledge that to do so may mean the child’s
ruin, make a scene of delicate intensity equalling any in literature.
Wedekind’s second variant woman is the tailored and monocled English
countess slavishly bound to Lulu, central figure of his symbolic dramas,
_Earth Spirit_ and _Pandora’s Box_. Lulu represents amoral, or, one
might say, purely biological Woman. She is irresistible to the male, and
knowledge of her brings brief ecstasy and lasting devastation. But she
is as much victim of the force within her as are the men she enslaves.
She is driven to murder in self-defense; then, fleeing the law in more
and more desperate circumstances, she herself is murdered by an
underworld wretch modeled upon Jack the Ripper. The English woman alone
of all her lovers goes unrewarded throughout years of abject devotion,
for Lulu is too completely Woman to feel any response save to Man. The
countess not only exhausts her fortune in the service of her beloved,
but at one point voluntarily contracts cholera so that she can enter the
hospital where Lulu is hiding from justice; thus permitting Lulu to
escape by assuming her clothing and identity. (It could be that the plot
of the later _Urningsliebe_ had its germ in this devotion.) In the end,
realizing that Lulu has always wilfully used her, the countess attempts
suicide, but Lulu feels neither pity nor compunction. She tells Jack—the
man who finally kills them both—that the countess is her sister and
insane, but his sophisticated intuition suggests the truth. He strokes
the Englishwoman’s head and mutters ‘Poor creature,’ quite the only
sympathy she has ever received. It does not, however, prevent Jack’s
knifing her when she attempts to defend Lulu against him. Just before
this happens, in a solitary monologue, the countess says:
‘I am not a man, my body has nothing in common with those of men. Is
it that I have a man’s soul? But tormented men have small and narrow
souls, and I know that is not my case, when I have given up
everything, made every sacrifice.’[20]
She resolves to leave Lulu, who, she realizes, has from the beginning
felt an uncontrollable antipathy to her. She will study law and devote
the rest of her life to fighting for the rights of women—the implication
being, of women like herself rather than the _Ewigweibliche_. It is at
this point that the apache’s knife ends her unhappy existence.
In 1911 Wedekind published the satiric and still more symbolic drama,
_Franziska: A Modern Mystery_, in which the primary theme is a woman’s
struggle for individual independence. The protagonist Franziska, a girl
just under twenty when the play opens, has been irrevocably prejudiced
against the traditional feminine lot by childhood circumstances. She has
also refused marriage with two men, one a physician who assumed that her
surrender to him meant abject adoration, the other an elderly nobleman
from whom she accepted an insurance policy securing the future of any
child her free life might produce. She is bent upon living with all the
independence of a man. Opportunity offers when she meets Veit Kunz, a
theatrical manager whose sudden bursting into her drawing room out of a
thunderstorm marks him as Mephistopheles to her Faust. He sees in her
boyish bravura the possibility of exploiting her in the world of
entertainment. Until lately, he says, audiences wanted women with lovely
breasts, shoulders and arms. But his hunch is that taste is changing,
and his business is to keep one jump ahead of the mode. Interestingly
enough, it is as a singer he means to feature her, indicating a taste
for feminine tenors a good decade earlier in Europe than in the United
States, where they were not fashionable until the Twenties.
While studying voice and posing as a man, ‘Franz’ has a tavern affair
with a young prostitute which is cut off at its zenith when the girl is
shot by a jealous lover. Her next adventure is as the husband of a
middle-class heiress, who wants, not a romantic hero, but a respectable
husband and _pater familias_. When children fail to appear, the woman
blames her husband’s fondness for a young dancer, and threatens to kill
the girl unless she lets “Franz” alone. From a scene between Franziska
and Veit Kunz, however, it appears that he and she have been intimate
for a year, and a child is on the way. Franziska is resentful. Marriage
has proved irksome because of her wife’s desire for a family, and has
limited her freedom with both sexes. A child will be the final handicap.
Kunz tells her that her wife is a much worthier soul than she, and that
motherhood will bring more maturity than multiple adventures or his own
dramatic training. However, he says that if she persists on her chosen
path, vanity, selfishness and ambition such as hers are the drives that
produce successful artists. An enemy informs her wife that Franziska is
a woman, and the shock of the revelation causes the wife to commit
suicide, setting Franziska free.
The third act of the drama moves to the estate of a wealthy nobleman,
amateur playwright and owner of a private theatre, who has applied to
Kunz for the services of his intriguing “male” star. Most pertinent to
the present study is an interlude in which Franziska, in
eighteenth-century man’s costume, appears to the count in a species of
symbolic vision as the wish-fulfillment of his most secret dreams. She
tells him she is neither boy nor woman, but the ideal of all those
incapable of real passion; for love of another cannot go beyond love of
self in these “Wunschlosen.” This technical description of narcissism
(along with the drastic effect upon Franziska of early hatred of her
father) shows Wedekind’s familiarity with the then very new doctrines of
psychoanalysis.
The remaining acts show Franziska first sufficiently feminized by early
pregnancy to play the part of Delilah on the stage, and to become
infatuated and run off with the actor cast as Samson, who treats her
with rough and contemptuous masculine superiority. Veit Kunz is
prostrated. At fifty he sees his lifelong conviction controverted that
happy sexual and professional association on a footing of equality must
guarantee a permanent union. His brilliant intellectual acumen is
outplayed by female biology—Woman beats the devil!—and he is barely
saved from suicide. Finally Franziska, persuaded to abandon her career
for the sake of her son’s health, is shown living in rural poverty with
him. She refuses support from either Kunz or “Samson,” each of whom is
sure her child is his, and accepts the protection of an ascetic artist
who paints her as the madonna. Here Wedekind hits the narcissist complex
dead center. It is proof against both homosexual and heterosexual
experience and only partially resolved by maternity, since she can
tolerate only a man weaker than herself and one romantically deluded
about her.
Because of the Eulenberg scandal in 1907 literary reference to
homosexuality was checked for a time in Germany, and no doubt only
Wedekind’s established reputation and his disparaging treatment of the
theme made the theatrical production of _Franziska_ possible in 1911. By
1914 Dr. Kurt Heller was asking in the _Jahrbuch_: “Wo bleibt der
homoerotische Roman?”[21] He was referring to male homosexuality, and he
deprecated the moralistic tone of Thomas Mann’s _Death in Venice_,
considering it disappointing from the author of _Buddenbrooks_. His
answer to his own rhetorical question was that no sympathetic work could
clear the hurdle of state censorship, for even a wholly “spiritual”
treatment must be defined by some contrast with the sensual. Only true
literary freedom could provide incentive for creative writing of first
quality.
Until the post-war change in government no such freedom prevailed. In
1917 Sophie Hoechstetter’s _Selbstanzeige: Die letzte Flamme_[22] had to
be printed privately. When it was attacked by a reviewer in _Der Tag_,
the author defended the criticized “urnische Beanlagt” as an essential
stage in the self-comprehension which was the theme of the whole novel.
She also offered to supply the volume gratis to any interested reader,
an indication that it had been excluded from public sale. With 1918,
however, the ban was relaxed, and during the 1920s Germany shared with
the rest of the western world a period of sexual freedom which ended
only with the growing influence of Hitler in the 1930s. Even so,
post-war sentiment in the English-speaking countries made German
material unwelcome there, and the homosexual novels and magazines which
abounded in Germany for a decade gained little circulation abroad.
With Hitler’s ascendancy these titles were so soon obliterated that it
is difficult now to find more than the mere record in German trade
bibliographies of their original publication. This is especially
true because in 1921 Hirschfeld’s _Jahrbuch_ (by then a
_Vierteljahrsschrift_) ceased publication. All efforts of the
Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee for repeal of the anti-homosexual
Paragraph 175 of the Prussian criminal code had failed, and the
organization was disheartened by the failure. Moreover, the fields of
history and biography had been well covered in factual articles during
the twenty-two years of the journal’s existence. And as for its function
of reporting current homosexual belles-lettres, that was abandoned even
before its own death because such literature was regularly reviewed in
‘other journals,’ (e.g., _Die Freundin_, _Die Freundschaft_,
_Freundschaft und Freiheit_—later _Eros_—_Junggesellen: mit den
Beiblättern “Frauenliebe,”_ and _Transvestit_.) These are now almost
completely lost, so that even descriptive notes on the literature in
question are not accessible today.
Post-War Gleanings
Of the few lesbian novels to reach the United States one of the best was
Anna Elisabet Weirauch’s three-volume _Scorpion_, which appeared in
Germany between 1919 and 1921. It was translated a dozen years later in
an abridged edition as two separate titles, _The Scorpion_ (1932) and
_The Outcast_ (1933). Though slightly inferior in literary quality to
_Marie Bonifas_, it shows equal mastery in accounting for and tracing
the full history of an exclusively variant woman. The scene of Metta
Rudloff’s childhood is a dreary city household consisting of her
ineffectual father and a spiteful puritanic spinster aunt. Her care is
entrusted to a nursery governess hired for no sounder reason than that
the child takes an instant fancy to her. The young woman exhibits a
facile affection which quickly enslaves her little charge, but her
emotions are wholly bound to a cashiered military officer, who controls
her completely and who alternately neglects her and lives on her bounty.
To supply him with funds, she more than once pawns the Rudloff’s
seldom-used family silver, employing Metta to secure it from its
cupboard and taking her along on visits to the pawnbroker. When the
misdemeanor is detected, the child is seriously involved, and the
uncomprehended scandal, plus the loss of her beloved Fräulein, leaves a
lasting scar.
During puberty and adolescence Metta attends a public school, but her
father’s snobbery discourages friendships with her mates, and she grows
up a bored and lonely introvert. Nearing twenty, she meets, at the home
of relatives, a handsome and enigmatic woman a decade her senior and
falls violently in love with her. Soon she is spending most of her time
in her new friend’s rooms in a pension, and she is spurred for the first
time to real intellectual effort in order to keep up with Olga’s wide
interests. (Among these is the life and work of Karoline von Günderode,
for whom Olga has come to feel an almost mystic affinity which stirs
Metta to jealous fury.) At the pension Metta also meets a Dr. Petermann,
musical aesthete and cripple, who frequently plays his violin for the
two young women.
Discovering that Olga is financially embarrassed, Metta contrives to
take foreign language lessons from her, but the two spend most of the
funds so earned on concerts, opera, and long country excursions. On one
of the latter, Metta notices that they are followed by a man. Her friend
becomes distraught at the discovery and betrays that she has suffered
the same experience before. The mystified younger girl on arriving at
home is forbidden by her father to see Olga again or to leave the house,
and presently she is visited by a psychiatrist. Under his questioning,
she suddenly recalls that she has pawned the silver, following her
childhood pattern, in order to redeem a gold cigarette case Olga was
forced to sacrifice to momentary need. This object, a gift from an
earlier beloved friend of Olga’s, is decorated with a jeweled scorpion,
the zodiacal symbol of passion and death under which Olga was born. The
psychiatrist delivers a subtle lecture on the destructive effects of
emotional friendships between women. The mysterious man, he explains,
was a detective employed by Metta’s father, who for some time has had
the two girls under surveillance, and to gain legal power over Olga, has
bought up her not-inconsiderable debts. Metta is to be sent to an
uncle’s in the country so that separation may cure her of her unhealthy
infatuation. Eventually, she is assured, she will thank her family and
the doctor for having saved her from ruin. She is forced to leave Berlin
without either explaining her departure or saying goodbye to Olga.
At her uncle’s she sets herself one goal: to escape and return to Olga.
Before long she has so ingratiated herself with the household that it is
not too difficult to obtain money secretly from her uncle’s desk and to
reach the railroad station. In Berlin, Olga meets her, but instead of
the warm welcome Metta anticipated, she merely remonstrates against the
madness of Metta’s flight and refuses to harbor her, knowing the girl
will at once be tracked to her rooms. After a very bad quarter-hour,
however, Metta succeeds in persuading Olga to accompany her in an
impulsive flight. The two take the next train scheduled for departure
and get off at a station elected by chance. In the modest hamlet so
discovered they spend a few ecstatic days of veritable honeymoon.
Hitherto they have exchanged no caresses—indeed, Metta has often been
deeply hurt by Olga’s show of brusque coldness. Now at last she learns
the true significance of her own feelings and of the older girl’s
previous restraint. Though Olga felt a reciprocal passion, she has had
previous difficulties because of an affair with a woman, and she dreaded
risking another such ordeal. She declares that never again can she
endure “to be stripped naked in public.” Once enlightened, Metta
determines that they shall never be separated. Within six months she
will attain her majority and be mistress of a large maternal
inheritance. She writes her father of her whereabouts and her
intentions, asking for temporary funds, but assuring Olga that if they
are refused she will raise money on her expectations.
Her answer is a telegram from the aunt telling her that her father has
had a stroke occasioned by the shock of her “robbing” her uncle, and
that he is dying. Metta suspects a trap, but returns to find the news
true, and lives through several hideous days before her father’s death
ends the nightmare. During the subsequent night, half-delirious from
exhaustion and her aunt’s vicious reproaches, she slips away to Olga’s
rooms for solace. Here she is found at dawn by the aunt, the wronged
uncle, and detectives. She declares her intention of never leaving her
friend, but Olga, in the face of public denunciation, fails to come to
her support, merely insisting that she is without responsibility in the
whole matter.
Confined at home and half-ill, Metta finds herself suddenly surrounded
by medical books and pamphlets on homosexuality, all condemnatory or
scandalmongering. Despite the bitter blow dealt her love and pride by
her friend’s defection, she writes Olga repeatedly, but receives no
answer. After a time, sickened by her reading and wounded by Olga’s
silence to the point of apathy, she allows herself, under pressure from
her aunt, to become engaged. The socially noteworthy match is featured
in the news, and on the eve of her marriage she has word from Petermann
of Olga’s suicide. Olga had, of course, none of her letters, but had
received many scurrilous anonymous threats in which Metta recognizes the
hand of her hated aunt, and Olga had, moreover, been prosecuted by the
Rudloff estate which held her debts. Shocked into sudden hard maturity,
Metta sells the family house, settles an allowance on her aunt, and
leaves Berlin, her only mementos Olga’s “scorpion” cigaret case and the
revolver with which she shot herself.
The first German volume ends here, and the second opens in an
unspecified large city, which in all probability actually represented
another aspect of Berlin. There Metta, completely on her own, attempts
to adjust to independent life. She plunges resolutely into solitary
study, but without the incentive of discussion with Olga she finds the
effort empty. Consequently she determines to “learn by living,” and
allows herself to be drawn into a bohemian group, several members of
which room in her own pension. Among these artists, journalists, and
entertainers she finds a sexual freedom which profoundly shocks her, but
laying the shock to her hitherto sheltered life, she refuses to
withdraw, and shrugs off the half-maternal admonitions of a
“respectable” coterie in the house. She is presently involved with a
night club singer, Gisela, to whom she is drawn by learning that the
girl’s obvious physical wasting and reputed drug addiction are the
results of hopeless love for a woman. Their affair is essentially a
matter of mutual physical assuagement, each girl being still in love
with someone else. It is developed slightly more in the German volume
than in the English _Scorpion_ of which it forms the second part, but is
not seriously expurgated in the latter.
A much more vital attachment begins between Metta and a handsome
sculptress, Sophie, but is broken off by the latter because she has
lived for years with an invalid who is completely dependent on her. This
woman was Sophie’s salvation in a desperate period of her youth, and
would give up the struggle to live if she felt herself no longer needed
by her partner. Left essentially friendless by Sophie’s withdrawal,
Metta drifts into a restless quest for diversion among the group of
professional entertainers and homosexuals of whom Gisela is one. In the
course of making a round of night clubs Metta becomes wretchedly ill
from experimenting with cocaine, and recognizing amused contempt in the
eyes of attractive strangers of the social class in which she was
raised, she goes home filled with self-loathing to employ Olga’s
cherished revolver and rejoin her lost love. She is checked by the
ministrations of one of the “respectable” older women in the house, who
confesses to a deep (though entirely innocent) affection for her, tells
her she is too young to be knocking about alone, and sends her to stay
with a sister in Hamburg whose husband is an alderman and whose daughter
is a sheltered adolescent.
In this new milieu Metta is at first terrified lest she be followed by
Gisela, but her fears prove groundless, and she is soon acting the model
young lady, though she has need to guard her allusions to places
recently frequented and uncensored books she read with Olga. She soon
discovers that the daughter of the house is, beneath a seraphic
exterior, as sophisticated as any of her late associates. The girl is
carrying on an affair with a man twice her age whose charm briefly
touches even Metta. She also constantly presses Metta to confess to
lesbian tastes and experience, declaring that she “can always recognize
the type,” and doing her best to seduce Metta by skillful caresses. This
Hamburg interlude ends with a weekend trip on which Metta is supposedly
Gwen’s chaperone. The fascinating man joins the expedition secretly, and
proves a connoisseur of liquors and an adept at clandestine contrivance.
In the girls’ room, Gwen, spurred by alcohol and the spring night, makes
an unusually insistent play for Metta, but just as the latter is about
to yield, the connecting door opens to admit the man, and she recognizes
the whole trip as “a put up job” to seduce her into a party _à trois_.
Utterly revolted, she makes a clean break with this life also, and
searches further for some emotional stability and peace.
The third German volume (of which _The Outcast_, in English, is a
literal and complete translation) shows Metta in a mountain town where
she has made no personal contacts and has told no one anything of
herself or her past. Falling in love with the beauty of the region, she
buys land and decides to build; consequently, she must go to Berlin for
legal and architectural advice. There, renewing connections with the
crippled Petermann, she meets in his pension a woman who reminds her
strongly of Olga and who produces almost as instantaneous an emotional
impact. Metta soon learns that this is the friend who originally gave
Olga the scorpion cigaret case, and that it was Corona who terminated
the association because she believes it is always better to end love
while it is still beautiful than to let it die. Corona has not even
known of Olga’s death until she sees the scorpion in Metta’s hands.
Instead of returning to the mountains to watch her hitherto thrilling
new house take form, Metta lingers in Berlin in Corona’s toils. She
finds this woman less intellectual and harder than Olga, and dislikes
intensely the exhibitionistic group of lesbians, some tailored, some
merely histrionic, with whom her new flame associates. When she finally
discovers that Corona is still half-involved in an old affair with a
married woman, and is also encouraging the advances of a Russian girl in
the pension, Metta flees to her mountains and lives quite alone in her
new house, save for visits from Petermann and another man of tragic
history met at Sophie’s before the end of that association. A
passionately-anticipated visit from Corona, which Metta hopes may result
in the latter’s taking up residence with her away from urban
distractions, proves a bitter disappointment. Corona finally confesses
that she is incurably restless and empty, a huntress who is free of an
actual pain of physical need only while she is in process of snaring a
new victim. She asks the privilege of using Metta’s mountaintop as an
occasional sanctuary. Thereafter Metta settles in, not happy but at
least relatively serene, to live alone and provide temporary peace for
such of her friends as care to seek her out.
Comparison of this novel with _La Bonifas_ is interesting because,
despite their similarity in basic theme and the influence of initial
traumatic incident, they are so widely different. Even the first
incidents illustrate the difference: in _La Bonifas_, the physical
violence of suicide enacted before the child’s very eyes; in _The
Scorpion_, a psycho-social teapot-tempest involving the child only
through her cross-questioning by a children’s psychiatrist, which she
meets with passive resistance. In the one novel a female creature is
endowed with all the extroverted tastes, interests, and abilities
usually considered male. In the other the female creature is wholly
feminine save for her sexual inclinations. Accordingly, Weirauch
stresses the influence of environment. None of her lesbians are really
masculine in appearance, and only one male homosexual looks born to the
role. On the other hand, biographical vignettes are adroitly introduced
to account for almost every variant in the story, and these are even
more effective because they are not notably Freudian in pattern. Indeed,
this novel’s quality lies in its verisimilitude, an effect naturally
easier for a woman writer in this field than for a man. The inevitable
conclusion drawn from these two novels together is that sexual variance
is not so much an inborn factor in a life pattern as it is a concomitant
result of other aspects of personality and experience.
A second German lesbian item, _Die Schwester_, is a drama of 1924 which
in style shows the influence of Wedekind. The author, Hans Kaltneker,
takes care to present in a foreword his convictions about homosexuality:
it represents the height of egotism, the antithesis of the Christian
spirit, for to love one’s own sex is to withdraw from the common life of
humanity and imprison oneself in a futile sterility. He doubtless felt
it necessary to voice this reassurance because in the first act of the
play his attitude to the heroine appears wholly sympathetic. The
homosexual Ruth loves her young stepsister, Lo, but controls her
feelings until chance throws them together for a night. She is
subsequently cast out by her stepfather, and his daughter is hastily
married to the first available man. Ruth then lives with a lesbian
artist, whose ‘eyes and mouth were shadowed by black melancholy,’ and
who tells her that lasting love is impossible for their sort—they can
gain satisfaction only through debauchery. The two visit a homosexual
tavern—presented symbolically after the fashion of Wedekind—and Ruth
chooses among the commercial dancing partners a girl who resembles her
lost stepsister. As she is very drunk, she imagines this is her sister’s
spirit, and she “receives a message” that Lo really loves her, but
advises her to abandon her vicious way of life and devote herself to
helping other lost women. She later learns that Lo had died but a few
moments before she received this mystic communication, and takes it for
a supernatural revelation. Accordingly she becomes a nurse in a women’s
hospital for veneral disease, but her unconcealable preference for the
gentler, slim, young patients breeds antagonism, and when she herself
becomes infected she is discharged. Too ill to work, she is violated by
men and robbed even of her clothing. She ends in a woman’s prison where
her dying act is to give her one remaining garment to an ungrateful
drunken prostitute. Thus, she is redeemed through having sacrificed
herself for others.
In 1927 Frank Theiss, in _Interlude_, employed a lesbian episode to
explain the failure of his hero’s first marriage. The wife had, at
eighteen, been “entrapped” by an older woman highly esteemed in the
community. “The enticements and snares must have been cunningly laid,
for it was always unthinkable to Kurt ... that Sabina could have been in
love with her.”[23] When, after six months or so, the affair came to
light, “the furious father would certainly have called on the police
authorities if any power of police or judiciaries could have helped,” a
subtle thrust at the injustice of legal penalty for homosexual men as
compared to none for women.
The parents then married their daughter off to the first available man,
but the affair had left a scar. This was not the frigidity one might
expect. On the contrary, it was “an alert and conscious, a more than
mature ... an erotic atmosphere”[24] which made the girl unusually
“beguiling” to men. Still, she was not happy in her marriage, and the
explanation given is that she had been physically awakened without
knowing love. Thus, she was drawn to her husband also without love, and
their marriage was the “exchange of a conventional form of excitement.”
Once she had obtained a divorce and married someone whose appeal for her
was complete, not merely physical, she “became another person. This
voluptuous glitter was all gone, she was just sweet and charming.”[25]
While the handling of the episode is somewhat hasty and superficial, the
argument it presents against pre-marital lesbian experience is more
subtle and rather more convincing than many one meets in anti-variant
fiction.
A sterner condemnation of lesbianism came from Herbert Eulenberg in “Der
Maler Rayski,” a novelette in the volume _Casanova’s Letzte Abenteuer_
(1929), in which he presents a domineering lesbian woman of almost
sadistic ruthlessness. This titled landowner has long kept a younger
cousin-companion in lesbian bondage. She loathes men, but must have an
heir to inherit her properties, and hits upon the device of inducing her
beloved to bear a child whom she can then adopt. Since the sire must be
of good stock, she selects a contemporary artist whose qualifications
please her, summons him to paint portraits of her and her companion, and
contrives to get the latter married to him by stressing the excellence
of the girl’s financial prospects. The couple fall genuinely in love,
and, under the influence of normal love, the girl blooms from strained
pallor into perfect health and loveliness. As soon as a child is
expected, however, the older woman secures a series of such advantageous
commissions for the artist that he must be absent until after his
child’s birth. She then denies him access to the infant—what right has
any man to the child in whose begetting he has played but a momentary
part, while the woman has carried it for nine months and must nurse it
for as many more? To clinch the matter she tells him of the long years
of intimacy between herself and his wife. Now he feels that his bride’s
innocence was all pretence, and that anyone who could have deceived him
about so black a past can never be trusted. He makes off, proudly
refusing any monetary settlement then or later, and deteriorates into a
worthless drifter because of this devastating blow to his self-respect.
The two women remain together, apparently happy, since motherhood
provides the girl with some normal interest.
Since the film _Mädchen in Uniform_ had fairly wide circulation in this
country, Christa Winsloe’s corresponding novel _The Child Manuela_ will
need but a brief résumé. The motion picture was released in 1932 and
reached this country in the latter part of the same year, but the novel
did not appear even in Germany until 1933, and so must have been one of
the last variant publications launched before Nazi ascendancy wiped out
homosexual literature. Those fortunate enough to have seen this
remarkably sympathetic picture or any of several good amateur
productions of the play on the legitimate stage here are unlikely to
have forgotten it. The motherless Manuela, at fourteen, enters a
boarding school for the daughters of officers where the headmistress,
herself descended from a military line, imposes barracks discipline upon
her young charges. One mistress alone contrives to preserve some human
warmth despite the severity she is obliged to maintain, and the girls
worship her.
Manuela, accustomed to maternal tenderness throughout childhood, is made
almost ill by the harsh regime until her emotions fix themselves upon
the general favorite, Fräulein von Bernberg. It is soon evident that her
feelings are more profound and violent than the average. The mistress,
moved by the pathetic and neglected girl, befriends her and becomes
warmly attached to her, even confessing that she prefers her to the
other students, but she warns Manuela that such emotions are not
countenanced among soldiers’ daughters and admonishes her to learn
self-control. The knowledge that she is loved raises Manuela to a dizzy
ecstasy which she manages to conceal for a time. But the excitement of
playing male lead in an amateur theatrical, plus a party afterward with
heavily “spiked” punch and abandoned dancing, prove too much for her
high-strung temperament, and, slightly hysterical as well as literally
drunk, she proclaims her secret to the entire school. The relation
between pupil and teacher, though passionate, has been wholly innocent,
and Manuela is unaware of its further potentialities. The adamant
headmistress puts the worst construction on her hysterical outburst,
sentences her to solitary confinement for the remainder of the
term—diplomacy prevents her expulsion—and forbids her to see Fräulein
von Bernberg again. Now genuinely ill from shock and emotional
frustration, the girl contrives to reach her idol’s room, but the older
woman, aware of the danger to them both and afraid of her own emotions,
maintains a frigid composure. Beside herself, Manuela climbs to the top
floor of the tall school building and leaps to her death at the foot of
an open stairwell.
This school interlude comprises only the last third of the novel, the
previous sections portraying Manuela’s development from her earliest
memories to the time of her entering the institution. The family has
moved from one army post to another, the necessity for maintaining her
father’s military prestige taking precedence over all other family
needs. The girl was first passionately devoted to her mother. During
pre-adolescence she falls in love with a public schoolmate, Eva, who is
also the choice of her older brother. Manuela spins fantasies of being a
male acrobat or dramatically winning the notice of her adored in other
ways, but it is only as Berti’s sister that she is of interest to Eva.
After her mother’s death, at thirteen, she has a brief and stimulating
friendship with a boy violinist, but it is his mother who appeals to her
emotionally and to whom she sends flowers. When the woman embraces her,
she experiences the first stirrings of unrecognized passion. Aware of
her obvious blossoming, her father’s prim housekeeper assumes it is
young Fritz who has roused her emotions, and the woman persuades her
father and aunt that she must be separated from him. Hence the boarding
school.
Here one has an uncommonly high-strung child with a strong
mother-fixation, without friends of her own age up to the time of her
mother’s death. She often mentally assumes a boy’s role because only men
and boys seem to count in the life about her. At puberty she is deprived
of both mother and mother-substitute and shut into a virtual military
prison, the opposite of her hitherto relatively free existence. Both the
inevitable emotional explosion at school and the careful preparation for
it owe a debt to Freudian theory.
In a second novel, translated in 1936 as _Girl Alone_, Winsloe includes
variance only in passing. The heroine is Eva-Maria, whose name
skillfully forecasts the mixture of sensuality and romantic mysticism in
her later experience. As a struggling art student, she first loves a
handsome boy whom she does not succeed in winning. She is next seduced
by one of her instructors, an established sculptor and Don Juan for whom
she poses nude, and as an aftermath of this bitter affair she gives
herself recklessly to a stranger on a night when otherwise she might
have leaped into the river. The variant element is introduced in the
person of Fax, a tailored and gauche fellow student with whom she shares
an apartment. This girl loves Eva passionately, but receiving no
response, she is satisfied to look after her with almost maternal
solicitude. The two enjoy sundry revels with a bohemian group including
one inseparable lesbian couple and a number of unattached homosexual
women. When Fax, though still in love with Eva, engages in a flirtation
with one of these, an alluring actress, jealousy spurs Eva toward giving
Fax what she craves. Eva waits in her roommate’s bed for her return from
a studio party, but Fax does not come home until daybreak—she has
succumbed to the actress’s blandishments—and Eva never confesses what
she had intended. Eva herself remains unmoved by genuine passion
throughout the crisis.
This is apparently the final variant episode in German fiction before
the Nazi purge began, and three years later authors who had dealt with
the subject, however mildly, were eager only for general oblivion of
that fact. Thus far, there has been no evidence of a subsequent variant
renascence.
One feature of these foreign twentieth-century novels which must strike
even a casual observer is the high incidence of suicide among variant
women. Physical or mental illness is also often attributed to lesbian
practices. Both reflect the extent to which variant fiction was based on
clinical reading. Both, too, are facile means of producing dramatic
effect, and tend to placate the strait-laced by suggesting that, though
man may tolerate aberration, nature will not. Such devices are avoided
by writers of first rank—Colette, Rolland, Proust, Lacretelle and
Mann—while in Wedekind the melodramatic is seasoned by satire. A second
conspicuous motif is the struggle for personal independence which leads
women to eschew marriage and motherhood or to achieve self-realization
at the expense of family responsibilities. This reflects the progress of
the women’s movement and the influence of Ibsen, Ellen Key and others.
Discernible also is a slight decrease in the proportion of bisexual
experience, due undoubtedly to the prevalence of hereditary theory. And
last, there appears in more than a few novels a background of shifting
homosexual groups, far above the underworld level, such as Peladan alone
pictured earlier and then only as small private closed circles. It will
be interesting to see how many of these continental features appear in
English and American fiction.