Dezső Kosztolányi | Kornél Esti / 2011

the writer's other self

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dezső Kosztolányi Kornél Esti, translated from the Hungarian by Bernard Adams (New York: New Directions, 2011)

 

 This 1933 classic Hungarian fiction begins with the author's comments about a supposed friend, Kornél Esti, a boy from his childhood, who, in opposition to the author's decorous and often unadventurous behavior, relentlessly challenged his friend to take chances, racked up debts for which the author was often charged—the two are often confused and apparently even look alike— and behaved generally in a way that caused the narrator to break off their relationship. Yet years later the two encounter one another again and strike up a new friendship in which together they write a book based on Esti's fabulous adventures, the very book the reader holds in his hands. Of course, the reader quickly recognizes this relationship as a convenient "dopplegänger," which permits the author to tell stories about himself that he might not dare otherwise reveal.

 

   Strangely, however, once the tales get underway, Esti, we perceive, is not all the scandalously misbehaving creature that he has been depicted to be in the first chapter, and basically the author, Dezső Kosztolányi, disappears into authorial objectivity as Esti's life is gradually revealed in the first or third person throughout. While the publisher and others quoted on the back cover refer to this book as a novel, it might be more accurately described as a series of loosely connected stories, a kind of relaxed picaresque that in portraying Esti's travels and adventures portrays Hungarian culture from a humorous perspective.

     If Esti seems all-knowing and a bit of a cad in Kosztolányi's first chapter, he is soon revealed as an utter innocent, a proper and almost prudish young man. In an early tale he is forced to endure a railroad trip in a car with a mother and daughter, the latter of whom, a plain and simple looking child, pretends to sleep so Esti that himself will doze as well, at which point she mischievously plants a kiss upon his lips. Throughout she makes lewd gestures, while the mother politely looks on. She is, we discover, insane, and will eventually have to be institutionalized. What is hilarious about this story, is that Esti, far from being the man-of-the-world as he been portrayed, is both a prude and, we soon discover, a sentimentalist who becomes highly affected by the young girl's behavior. In Venice he don's a bathing suit and gradually wades into the water:

 

                             Then in flung his body, arms outstretched, into the pearly

                             blueness, at last to be united with it. He no longer feared

                             anything. He knew that after this no great harm could come

                             to him. That kiss and that journey had consecrated him for

                             something.

 

      The contradictory nature of this story matches the pattern of most of the works in the fiction. In the very next story, the author moves closer to a kind satiric philosophical tale as Esti and a friend visit a town where everyone is painfully honest, going out of their way to tell the truth. The citizens of this town do not speak to one another unless they truly want to, a beggar carries a card saying: I am not blind. I only wear dark glasses in summer. A shoe store announces Crippling shoes. Corns and abscesses guaranteed. Several customer's feet amputated. In trying to comprehend this seemingly self-destructive behavior the friend discovers that by going out of their way to suggest the worst, the citizens discover that things are never as bad as they suspect, and, accordingly, find everything far more pleasant than they might in a city where proclaims that everything is perfect, which, of course, is all lies.

     In another tale, Esti comes into to a rather large inheritance, but as an aspiring writer he dare not reveal his good fortune, fearing that it would end his career and he might lose his struggling friends. Consequently, while putting away just enough to survive a meager life for a few years, he attempts to give it away to strangers, slipping money into books, coats, and even—in a kind of reverse of pickpocketing—into the pockets and billfolds of people on busses and trams. Ironically, he is arrested when a recipient is convinced that he has stolen something from him. 

      It is this kind irony that permeates the book and perhaps best characterizes the author's style. In another story, Esti attempts, while traveling through Bulgaria—speaking a language in which he knows only one or two words—to carry on a long conversation with a train conductor without the other ever suspecting that he does comprehend the conversation. Through the use of "yes" and "no," tonal differences, head and hand movements and patient listening, he succeeds in befriending and, later, offending the conductor, bringing him even to tears. Another "yes" restores their close friendship.

    While swimming in a river, Esti is nearly drowned, surviving only because a young man rushes in to pull him out. Beholden to his savior he offers to become a life-time friend. But when the boring young man moves in with him, revealing a greater interest in theater magazines and the women they portray than in serious ideas, Esti becomes disgusted with his savior and fearful that he will never be able rid himself of the pest. One night, as they pass not far from the spot from where he has been saved, the elder pushes the young man into the river.

      Sought out for of a contribution, Esti becomes a benefactor to a woman and her suffering family. He helps the woman get a newspaper kiosk, and places her tubercular daughter in a hospital. The more he does for the family, however, the worse off their lives become. Finally, her son dies, the daughter grows more ill, and the mother, attempting to care for them, gives up her kiosk. As the old woman tells her sad story, Esti runs away from her, begging her to stop!

     Perhaps the funniest satire in the volume concerns Esti's studies in Germany, where he discovers a university president who falls peaceably asleep whenever one of the professors begins a speech, waking up precisely at each speech's conclusion. Kosztolányi takes his humor even further when, during summer break, the president becomes an insomniac, nearly dying for lack of rest. 

     The last tale, in which Esti can hardly cling on to an overstuffed subway, might be said to be an allegory of his life. Gradually, through pushes and pulls, he makes his way further and further into the car, finally finding a small slot in which can sit. Disgusted by most of the humanity around him, he finds joy in the face of a poor working woman, and ultimately feels some comfort in the trip only to have the conductor call out: "Terminus."

      Despite the publisher's enthusiasms, I cannot describe this work as a "masterpiece," but it is, nonetheless, an enjoyable series of ironic musings that nicely alternate between the comic and the tragic, the everyday and the bizarre.

 

Los Angeles, September 28, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (September 2011).

 

Elizabeth Bowen | Eva Trout / 1969

caught in the whirl

by Douglas Messerli

 

Elizabeth Bowen Eva Trout (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969)

 

The title character of Elizabeth Bowen's deliciously written fiction of 1969 is an outsized woman, described variously by the author as "monolithic," "a giantess," and "an Amazon," along with other unflattering appellations. From the very first action, as Eva Trout drives the Dancey children past the castle she owns and where she was schooled for a short while, Bowen fixes her figure in our minds as a purposeful being constantly on the move: at the moment at the wheel of her Jaguar. The book is subtitled "Changing Scenes," a suggestion of the numerous shifts in location and emotional states of its hero. Even Eva's position in the car, as the author puts it, is "not, somehow, the attitude of a thinking person."

     As we first glimpse this towering and overpowering figure, she is about to bolt from the household in which she had originally asked her guardian to place her: Larkins, the run-down farm house wherein reside the Arbles. Iseult Arble, a former teacher of the girl, is perhaps the first and only person who attempted to actually educate her; while Iseult's husband, the less than brilliant Eric, has grown comfortable with Eva's presence, he feels a growing tension with his wife, a shift that Eva interprets as Eric's attraction to herself.

     In preparation for the move, announced to the Dancey family, while kept secret from the Arbles, Eva's London-based guardian, who has gotten wind of Eva's plans, calls Iseult to the city in order to plot a way to keep his charge from running off before inheriting, a few months later, the fortune left to her by her father, Willy. And the interchange between the two is one of the great moments of the book, as these most intelligent figures of the work attempt to comprehend and outwit one other. Constantine, as one might describe him, is a darker and more sinister version of Iseult, a man who clearly is used to hatching plots—although in this case he fails. For Eva rushes to the small town of Broadstairs, purchasing a house by the sea. But it is clear that this woman, incapable of even boiling water, will not be able long to care for herself.

     Eva has left behind numerous signs of her destination, and both Eric and, soon after, Constantine follow her, the latter believing he has found the two in an uncompromising situation (in fact, Eric has simply taken a nap).  Eric and Iseult divorce, just the first of numerous negative effects that this giantess will have on all the figures around her.

     After gaining her inheritance, Eva travels again, this time to the US to purchase what is presumably an illegal baby, there coincidentally meeting up with her first love, a former fellow classmate, Elsinore, who is now married to a traveling salesman. Her encounter with Eva results in an expression of great unhappiness with her current circumstances.

     Eva soon returns to England with her young son in hand, this time staying in a series of hotels. The child is a deaf mute, perfect for a mother who has little of intelligence to say, and who throughout the fiction is searching for someone upon which to shower love. In short, Eva continues to wreck havoc upon all those with whom she becomes involved.

     For Eva, we gradually discover, is not so much a realist character for the author, as she is a metaphor of pure action, a big, clumsy, whirlwind of a figure of thoughtless motion. Those least able to act, the emotionally complex and introspective Iseult and the eldest Dancey child, Henry, a bright and witty boy who ultimately enrolls in Cambridge, are naturally attracted (if slightly disgusted) by this energized force. Eva represents precisely what these two are missing in their lives. Yet by nature they both fear her: Iseult is not at all amused by Eva's blank stares, and Henry chastises Eva several times for her failure to think things out. Yet both enter into strange commitments with this force. Iseult determines to read to the young Eva in hopes of opening her mind and, later, of course, opens her house to her. Against his better judgment, Henry agrees to play her husband in order to fulfill the fantasy of love and marriage for which Eva has so longed.

     The disaster with which Bowen's fiction ends, the child murdering his mother with Eric's loaded and real gun, is somehow inevitable. For in a sense, the great vortext that Eva symbolizes must be destroyed in order that other, more normal figures, can survive. Ultimately Eva's son, Jeremy, would have suffocated in Eva's fantasy of love, and he would never have been able to return enough to fill the vacuum at its center.

     Bowen reiterates the tension between the two kinds of people she has created with references to Victorian literature that both Iseult and Henry mention. Broadstairs, the town to where Eva first retreats, is the home of Charles Dickens, a place which Iseult later visits. Henry mentions Browning's narrative poem-play, Pippa Passes. These two authors could not be more different. Dickens' works, filled with motherless and fatherless orphans desperately seeking for love, are played out on huge stages of vast action that catches up its characters into circumstances that are nearly always extreme, very bad or very good.

     Pippa, of Browning's carefully rhymed poem, walks through the city, singing songs that almost no one hears, but who changes everyone for the better as she invisibly passes. While the figures of Browning's work may be contemplating divorce, rape, murder, revenge, and other horrible acts, Pippa's very existence, for the most part, alters their awful plans.

     Iseult must certainly see herself more as a Pippa than a Dickensian figure, while Eva, it is clear, is a 20th century equivalent of more than one of the great novelist's desperately needy beings. Iseult's feeling that she has somehow magically connected to Eva's son Jeremy, is perhaps a kind of Pippa fantasy. But Iseult, in the end, does find some sense of balance, returning to Eric.

      Henry, like Constantine is too cynical to see himself as aligned with either, but the family in which he has grown up behave much like a series of Dickens' comic characters. But he, like Constantine—who changes in the process of the story from a wicked controller of others to a man in love, in his case with a priest—is so thoroughly affected by Eva that by work's end, he is ready to really marry her instead of simply mimicking the act. Eva, drama itself, may be wonderful to contemplate, but is impossible to have and to hold.

 

Los Angeles, July 18, 2011

Reprinted from EXPLORINGfictions (August 2011)

 

Amiri Baraka | The Toilet / 1998

essential dichotomies

by Douglas Messerli

 

Amiri Baraka The Toilet, first presented in New York at St. Mark’s Playhouse, on December 16, 1964; reprinted from Douglas Messerli and Mac Wellman, eds., From the Other Side of the Century II: A New American Drama 1960-1995 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1998)

 

On the surface, Amiri Baraka’s short play of 1964, The Toilet, appears to be nothing but a documentation of a bullying incident in a high school, with a majority of black boys beating a frail white boy, Karolis, who has apparently written a kind of love letter to the head of the black gang, Foots (or Ray). It might be superficially represented as a kind of abbreviated “rumble” scene out of West Side Story.

 

     But the authenticity of Baraka’s language and his briefly catalogued “types” at the beginning of the script, quickly—and the play is performed, surely, at nearly lightning speed—transforms this work into a drama which, quite subtly, explores a whole series of dialectical issues: masculinity and its inverse, weakness, power and powerlessness, futility and hope, justice and brutal punishment, leadership and rebellion, and, most importantly, love and hate.

      The play begins, strangely enough, somewhat offstage, as several members of the gang, the “short, ugly, crude, and loud Ora” (a.k.a. Big Shot), the “tall, thin, and somewhat sensitive,” Willie Love, and the “big, husky, somber, and cynical” Perry report to each other that their would-be victim is upstairs hiding in various classrooms as others of their group attempt to seek him out. Like young, angry youths everywhere, these boys not only report the goings on, as they meet in the stinking, high-school boy’s bathroom, but swear at each other, and pretend to battle, all the while showing off their supposed virility and strength through their acts of urination and other uses of their sexual members. The following “attack” on Karolis, accordingly, is not only a response to his homosexual challenge to their leader, Foots, but is to be a kind of proving of the only thing these desperate kids have left, their “manhoods.”

     Through their jests with each other, we quickly learn that several of these young men do not even have parents, others live lives of destitution, and nearly all of them are doomed to failure in their future lives. They describe each other the way the society around them has, with words like “bastid,” “punk,” “muthafucka,” “sonofabitch,” and, yes, “nigger.” These are the lost boys of the street, forced to gather in the institution which they so detest.

      Only Foots (Ray) seems to have any intelligence, as he reports that the authorities, evidently, think highly of him, and hope that we will prevent any attack of another student. Baraka describes him, quite poetically, as “short, intelligent, manic,” a “possessor of a threatened empire.” That empire, of course, is a mean-spirited gang, ready to implode or explode, depending on which series of emotional responses they take. They have already exploded by the time they bring Karolis to their lair, having beaten him so badly that for much of the play he cannot even talk.

      Foots wisely refuses to beat him any further, insisting that to do so would be meaningless, since the white boy is already sprawled out upon the floor. But the others, particularly Ora, are determined to see more blood in revenge for his daring. Another white boy, Donald Farrell (“tall, thin, blonde, awkward, soft”)—who seems tangentially part of the gang, but is not very welcome in its midst—tries to talk them down from doing any further damage, bravely refusing to leave the toilet unless Karolis goes with him. He fails, and is literally physically expelled from their group.

     Foots, accordingly, is in a difficult position. If he does not show enough outrage for Karolis’ challenge, he will be seen as weak, possibly even in cohorts with the boys offer to “blow him.”; yet he rightly sees no pleasure in fighting someone who has already been felled. A lesser playwright may have had this character throw a couple of more sucker-punches and left it at that. But Baraka intensifies the situation by suddenly having Karolis demand a fight with Foots, a fight he knows he cannot win. It may be that the gay boy has even a lower self-esteem than the blacks in this work; or, at least, in fighting he might have some sort of physical contact with Ray, whom he describes as “beautiful.”

     Foots, now gradually being described by Karolis and the others by his ordinary name, Ray, continues to refuse to fight. But Karolis, quite eloquently (described by the playwright as “Very skinny and not essentially attractive except when he speaks”) continues to challenge his “rival,” bragging that he will “kill him.” Suddenly everything changes, as the gang members, eager to see the fight, move in on the two, egging on the fight Ray is trying to prevent. When the fight does get underway, it is Karolis who gets Ray into a stranglehold, while the gang head is rendered inoperative; when his power is suddenly thrown into question, the others, in response, enter into the fray, beating Karolis again into submission, as Ray lays also flattened across the floor.

      Finally getting their revenge, the others move off, as Karolis drags himself into a toilet cubicle to recover. And, here again, Baraka surprises us, as with the last of his stage instructions:

 

                    After a moment or so karolis moves his hand. Then his head moves

                    and he tries to look up. He draws his legs up under him and pushes

                    his head off the floor. Finally he manages to get to his hands and knees.

                    He crawls over to one of the commodes, pulls himself up, then falls

                    backward awkwardly and heavily. At this point the door is pushed

                    open slightly, then it opens completely and foots comes in. He

                    stares at karolis’ body for a second, looks quickly over his shoulder,

                    then runs and kneels before the body, weeping and cradling the head

                    in his arms.

 

I don’t know how this scene is represented in the stage production—I’ve never seen the play performed—but the way the scene is written seems more appropriate for film than for stage, simply because we are, at first, not told that it is Foots who is about to enter the cubicle, the fact of which is kept from us, in the directions, until the very last moment. Similarly, his actions—reminding us of both a kind of crucifixion and pietà, as well as an expression of sorrow and, finally, homosexual love—startlingly reveals that the young “skinny” white boy has won this battle, at least, that the bullied has defeated his tormentors through his unconditional love. What we might have perceived as a set and predetermined series of events is, in fact, flexible. The realities of youth, as we must always admit, are never quite what they seem to be. And with one fell swoop, this gifted playwright dispenses with the very essential dichotomies which he seems to have created. Everything in this play, we suddenly recognize, is not so “black and white” as it originally seems.

      That the angry revolutionary of 1964—by this time Baraka had already traveled to Cuba, arguing that art and politics should be indissolubly linked, the same year as The Toilet writing his screed of white and black hate, Dutchman—is equally surprising—unless you know the Baraka I and others knew—a man who might continually be seen, as The New York Times obituary yesterday reiterated, as a “provocateur”—but as a true “optimist,” even though he admitted his optimism was “one of a very particular sort.”

 

Los Angeles, January 11, 2014

Reprintted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2014).

 

Robert Beachy | Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity / 2014

city with no virgins

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Beachy Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014)

 

The remarkable history that Robert Beachy details in his 2014 book, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity is the result, in large part, of the existence of just a few individuals who so influenced the lives of their fellow citizens of the Weimar Republic, that Germany, and Berlin in particular, was able to sustain a nearly open society for gay, lesbian, transgender and bi-sexual individuals that would not be available to these outsider communities in other countries for more than a half-century later.

 

    The fact that these radical shifts in sexual politics and cultural inclusion were utterly destroyed in 1933, with the rise of Hitler’s National Socialist party and government, makes these social advances even more significant and poignant because of their fleetingness. Certainly one would not wish to compare the Nazi attempts to exterminate an entire population of individuals on the basis of religion (which Hitler and his associates misperceived as an issue of “race”), but within the context of the abolishment of freedoms for thousands of homosexuals, the Hitler-ordered 1933 destruction of the Berlin shrine to gay sexuality, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science, serves almost as a symbol as painfully potent for many gays as the burning of synagogues and other places of worship. That a few of the homosexual groups and the leaders behind them might also have contributed to some of the anti-Semitic ideology and organizational structures upon which the Nationalist Socialist Party would pattern their own methods to grab power merely reiterates the complexity of the sexual politics and its effects on the society of its day, and makes it even more important to study texts such as Beachy’s in order to better comprehend how intertwined was German culture, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in the seventy-year period from the 1860s to the 1930s.

     No short review or essay, accordingly, can truly summarize the vast network of interconnections between these various aspects of German social and private life. And not even Beachy, who argues that the Berlin experiments with sexuality helped to define our social-political-sexual attitudes toward homosexuality today, convincingly shows us precisely how what I will call the Berlin experiment later affected political-sexual shifts in French, British, and American thinking.. But what Beachy does make apparent is that certainly in any evaluation of “advanced” sexual thinking, for better or worse, Berlin got there first.

    Beachy suggests that modern attitudes toward homosexuality reach back to the open advocating of sexuality by an obscure German lawyer, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who as early as 1867 courageously attempted to introduce the idea to the Association of German Jurists meeting in Munich that became the basis of pro-homosexual arguments for generations, namely that same-sex attraction was an inborn quality, not a learned response or an illness with which one could inflicted; and accordingly, argued Ulrichs, the Jurists should work to repeal the current penal law (the Prussian law that later was adopted by the new German Empire, making sodomy a crime). Beachy summarizes Ulrichs’ position as being not simply courageous, but, since he based his ideas upon his own personal experiences and explanations of his same-sex desires, was a call for a radical redefinition of sexuality itself:

 

             The truly remarkable aspect of Ulrichs’ brave initiative was the important

             contribution he made to the redefinition—indeed the invention—of sex-

             uality (and homosexuality) in nineteenth-century Europe.

 

As opposed to the view of traditional medical science, which explained sodomy as a willful perversion and the product of masturbation and sexual excess, a condition that supposedly arose from “oversexed predators who had simply grown bored with women,” Ulrichs was advocating—along with only a few others—that such desires were not only inborn but were a natural sexual yearning (which he called Urning) among a minority of the population. In short, Ulrichs posited the notion that same-sex desire represented the emotions of a group separate from and yet equal to the general population, a third sex. Moreover, not only did this former local official argue his views in public, but he wrote numerous pamphlets arguing his case. From his first pamphlet, “Vincex: Social and Legal Studies on Man-Manly Love,” to his fifth such work, “Ara Spei” (“Refuge of Hope”) Ulrichs attempted to see the issues surrounding same-sex love from every perspective possible, positioning himself, as Beachy puts it, as “the defender, indeed emancipator, of all Urnings who suffered under the prejudice and persecution of a Dioning majority.”

    While Ulrichs personally had little effect on changes in the law, he had an enormous impact on German thinking by stimulating debates through his publications, which found audiences not only in Saxony, Baden, and the western Rhine provinces, but in Italy, France, the Low Countries, and England. Newspapers and journals carried notices of his publications, and the press of several cities attacked his viewpoints. More importantly, early sexologists such as the Austrian Richard von Krafft-Ebing were quoted in, and, in return, read Ulrich’s works. In short, “by publishing his experiences and theories of same-sex love, Ulrichs offered himself as both subject and muse for medical doctors who studied the subject,” opening up an entire new field of consideration.

     Despite Ulrichs’ odd-sounding designation for same-sex love, “urning,” (named for the Greek goddess of love Aphrodite Urania, created from the god Uranus’s testicles), he was also indirectly responsible for the invention of the German word Honosexualität (homosexuality), a term coined by the journalist Karl Kertbeny, who, in response to the legal review brought about under Ulrichs’ impetus, used the term in his own pamphlets sold by booksellers in Leipzig and Berlin, arguing that “homosexuality” was an inborn condition, which, accordingly, made the anti-sodomy stature a violation of fundamental civic and constitutional rights. Kertbeny, rejected Ulrich’s notions of the urning desire as being related to psychological hermaphroditism, but was encouraged by Ulrichs’ writings (and had corresponded with him) to peruse his own commentary.

     Ultimately a series of brutal attacks in a Berlin park worked against legal reform. But writings such as those published by Ulrichs had an enormous impact through its effects on doctors and scientists and, in particular, upon the attitudes of Berlin police commissioners such as Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem and those that followed him. By the late 19th and early 20th century the quickly expanding city of Berlin was already home to numerous gay bars located in small neighborhoods throughout the city. Parks and streets such as Tiergarten Park, Unter den Linden, and the Passage were already established same-sex pick-up areas. And increasingly in the militarist Prussian city, many soldiers were actively homosexual or bisexual, willing to prostitute themselves to gay clients in order to supplement their incomes. Although the police occasionally raided bars such as Seeger’s Restaurant, a raid which Beachy details, most of the gay activity occurred under Meerscheidt-Hüllesssem’s tolerant eye and even, occasionally, as in the case of the numerous grand homosexual costume balls celebrated throughout the city, often with him in attendance.

    One might add that Berlin was also growing more and more tolerant with regard to all sexual activity in the years leading up to World War I, the same Berlin which so enticed the American painter Marsden Hartley. Even before that, moreover, figures in the 1890s such as Magnus Hirschfeld were beginning to establish the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (SHC), which, through its several publications, would work to redefine misconceived notions of same-sex homosexuality, to promulgate new theories of sexuality, to protect same-sex activities in within the city, and, to continue to protest and work toward abolition of Paragraph 175, the anti-sodomy clause of the legal code. By the end of the war, the SHC had become such an important organization, made up of a wide-range of individuals—including heterosexual celebrities of government and the elite as well as homosexuals, lesbians, and transgendered individuals—that its impact cannot be compared with any such organization today. With the establishment of his Institute for Sexual Science, Hirschfeld combined services by medical doctors, a large sexual library, and dormitories for homeless youths and others, as well as providing surgery for some individuals seeking transgender transformations—and a wide range of educational activities that might be the envy of any lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender organization of today. 

     Savvy in his abilities to organize and publicize these activities, Hirschfeld also had great influence over many in the medical establishment, and helped to sway numerous institutions and even large elements of general public that homosexuality was inborn and harmless as a social activity. His own views about the development of homosexuality, relating it to a feminine inversion which occurred in birth, however, also created powerful enemies among those of the gay community who disagreed. Particularly, Adolf Brand, who himself published a homosexual journal of literature and erotic art, argued against Hirschfeld and, often, his SHC organization. Brand, who considered himself bisexual, believed that homosexuality was a masculine phenomenon that emanated from virile males (including the great historical homosexual figures of literature such as Achilles and Hannibal); he also argued for man-boy relationships, living in pederast relationships with young boys while continuing to reside with a wife. Although Brand would at times support Hirschfeld’s activities, more often he worked against him, particularly since he saw Hirschfeld (a converted Jew) through the lens of his increasingly anti-Semitic attitudes.

 

    The rise of the Wandervogel Movement, a youth movement encouraging both young boys and girls to join in groups tutored by a strong individual (who male students often described as “Führer” or leader) engaged in scouting-like (hiking, camping and other activities), further complicated the situation, particularly since one of the central figures in this movement, Hans Blüher, took the role of Führer, like Brand, in the direction of what he described as a healthy man-boy bond which often included sexual activity. The initiation ceremony ended with a salute and shout of “Heil!”

   Others, particularly many of the German homosexual militarists joined in other Mänerbünde associations, masculinist gatherings that included homosexual friendships. One such military grouping, involving The Liebenberg Roundtable (Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg-Hertefeld, Kuno von Moltke and others closely associated with Emperor William I) resulted in a scandal that ultimately swept up both Hirschfeld and Brand in secondary roles as testifiers and plaintiffs.

 

    Oddly, what all of the conflicts reveal, however, is just how open homosexuality had become in post-World War I Germany. By the 1920s Berlin had become a tourist destination for anyone who might seek a free sexual atmosphere. Over a hundred gay bars, catering to both transvestites and those seeing rough trade; dozens of gay magazines and journals; numerous works of fiction and films centered upon gay life or implying it; and dozens of gay ball celebrations; and a proliferation of drugs all helped to turn bay Berlin, along with its heterosexual counterparts, into an international attraction for figures as various as the afore-mentioned Hartley, Christopher Isherwood, Djuna Barnes, Klaus Mann, Robert McAlmon, Philip Johnson, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Alan Bush, John Lehmann, Grant Wood, Aldous Huxley, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Renoir, Bertolt Brecht, and thousands of other poets, artists, filmmakers, architects, musicians, dancers, actors, and others involved in the arts. Some returned home shocked or, at least, taken aback by what they had seen; many others stayed.

      By the late 1920s and the first years of the new decade, despite the radical economic disasters that Germans had faced, younger figures such as Friedrich Radszuwelt, as Beachy puts it, “came to emblematize the flowering of homosexual culture and rising activism in the Weimar Republic,” organizing more centrist and financially supportive coalitions that would challenge Hirschfeld’s gender definitions of homosexuality (to be fair, as his theory progressed, Hirschfeld himself recognized hundreds of sexualities within a broad spectrum of outsider sexual activity), which, along with the SHC, would surely have affected the desired change in the penal code had it not been for the rise of Hitler and his Nationalist Socialist Party.

     With the events of July 2, 1934, the Night of the Long Knives—when a group of Hitler’s Stormtroopers murdered the second most powerful Nazi, Ernst Röhm as he was sexually consorting with some hundreds of his brown-shirt associates (it is estimated that around eighty-five SA leaders and Röhm’s friends were slaughtered in the incident)—nearly all the homosexual leaders perceived they could not survive in the new order.  Hircshfeld had already escaped to Italy where he was to remain for the rest of his life. Radszuweit had already died in 1932 of a heart attack. Brand was forced to stop publishing and was harassed, but remained free because he was married and was not Jewish. Brand had already predicted that when the Nazi Party came to power, all homosexuals will be “strung up in the gallows,” being, as Beachy laments, “completely unaware of his own complicity in this development.”

     If Berlin had been the birthplace of modern identity, with the Nazi outlawing all homosexual activity, a large swath of Germany sexual history would seemingly disappear from memory. Today, he observes, Berliners and other Germans colloquially describe their annual gay pride parades as CSD (Christopher Street Day).

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2014

Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XX, No. 1 (Spring 2015).