Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (20 page)

Of course, Freud does recognize a few problems with his theory, and in order to resolve them he once again boxes out any generative role for homo- sexual desire. For example, unless they have triumphed over the father and gained possession of the women,

the psychological condition of the banished sons, bound together in ho- mosexuality, cannot influence the next generations, for they die out as in- fertile branches of the family. . . . But if they do achieve this triumph, then it is one generation’s experience that must be denied the necessary unlimited reproduction.
67

In other words, that generation of brothers, once having renounced women and found their sexual satisfaction with each other, remain fixated in their ho- mosexual stage of development and, as a consequence, remain impotent with women. Freud gets around this reproductive bottleneck through the youngest son, who, thanks to the protection of his mother, avoids castration; he too suffers the vicissitudes of the male sex, is tempted to renounce women and leave the horde, but does not. Although at that stage he was disposed toward homosexuality, he neither realized this possibility nor remained fixated at that stage; homosexuality as an inherited disposition then is propagated through his descendants. Thus, while Freud can explain how humanity survived, he still begs the question of how these dispositions were genetically passed on.
68

Sources

When Freud read Blüher’s
The German Youth Movement as Erotic Phenome- non
he was no doubt struck by the extensive use the author made of his the- ories.
69
He was the source for many of Blüher’s psychological assumptions; in particular Freud’s theories of bisexuality, repression, and neurosis provided Blüher with a way of understanding the persecutors as repressed homosexu- als.
70
His employment of Freud indeed led several reviewers in Austrian Wan- dervogel journals to attack him and contributed to others questioning Blüher’s German identity. Such remarks as “Hey, is Blüher a Jew?” and “Blüher’s book is sick. There is something like a struggle between the German race and another! This one may not forget” were printed.
71

These responses to Blüher’s work were not surprising, since the youth movement had become increasingly racially polarized. Perhaps leading the way were the groups in Austria: they included an Aryan paragraph in their Krems convention of 1913: “We do not want the Slavs, Jews, or French

[Wälsche] among our ranks.” Karl Fischer, the former leader of the Wander- vogel in whose defense Blüher was most vociferous, argued for a separate Jew- ish organization that expressed “Semitic culture.” Other prewar symptoms in- clude the 1912 Zittau case in which a Jewish girl was refused membership because, it was argued, the Wandervogel was a “German movement” that had no use for Jews; another was the publication of Friedrich Wilhelm Fulda’s
German or Nationalist: A Contribution from the Youth Movement to the Race Question
(Leipzig 1913). One Wandervogel journal,
Führer Zeitung
, asserted that “the Wandervogel is neither a depository for old boots formerly worn by flat-footed [Jews] and stinking of garlic nor is it an object of speculation for Jewish enterprises.”
72
Sigfried Copalle, one of the founders of the movement, later wrote that even when not so manifestly antisemitic the youth move- ments were very much influenced by the radical right, antisemitic media of the time. For example, the recommended reading list of the youth movement paper,
Deutsche Zeitung
, excluded Jewish and Catholic writers, as well as those cosmopolitans Goethe and Schiller, but included Theodor Fritsch’s
Antise- mitic Handbook.
The works of Paul de Lagarde, Paul Langbehn, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain were standard reading among Wandervogel.
73
In the second volume of his history of the Wandervogel, Blüher remarks at how many members identified themselves with the values embodied in Langbehn’s
Rembrandt as Educator
and figured themselves as Rembrandt-Germans. Blüher also notes Fischer’s desire to separate German and “Semitic” youth movements.
74

While these and other racial discourses would eventually have a greater influence on Blüher’s writing, they were not absent from
The German Youth Movement as Erotic Phenomenon
—for Freud was not the only source for Blüher’s conception of inversion. While writing that work Blüher was dis- tilling the fruits of his own experience of the youth culture as embodied by the Wandervogel, of the rampant homophobia generated by the Harden- Eulenburg-Moltke scandal, of the subsequent purge of any suspected ho- mosexual members of the Wandervogel (which Blüher chronicled in his his- tory of the movement),
75
and of his reading of Benedict Friedlaender, especially his
The Renaissance of Eros Uranios
.
76

Friedlaender’s infl on Blüher’s early work is clear—as the accusation of plagiarism by Friedlaender’s intellectual heirs might attest.
77
Similar to the later elaboration by Blüher,
78
Friedlaender distinguished between the female family sphere and the exclusively male sociopolitical sphere founded upon male-male sociality. Friedlaender sought validation of his theories of innate male-male at- traction both in the practices of ancient Greece and of so-called primitive peo- ple (
Naturvölker
)
79
: societies that did not suppress the male’s natural instinct for

male friendship. Friedlaender explained the presence of this in a tropismatic characteristic of human physiology that Gustav Jaeger before him proposed as grounded in the perception of aromas or what Friedlaender prefered to call chemotaxis (117ff, 214ff ).
80
Friedlaender asserted that not only are homosexu- als attracted to the olfactive emissions of other homosexuals, and repulsed by the scent of women, but that male-to-male chemotaxis occurs in all men; it is only his repulsion from women that distinguishes the invert from the hetero- sexual. Still following Jaeger, Friedlaender considered the natural repulsion of Europeans toward those internally and externally colonized peoples, the Jews and the Africans (cf. 123), as the exemplary instance of chemotaxis. Thus the stereotype of the
foetor judaicus
or Jewish stench is grounded in physiological truth; Jews smell different because they are different. Beyond the descriptive level, Friedlaender also followed Jaeger in his antipathy toward Jews, although the extremely misogynist Friedlaender justifi his aversion on what he per- ceived as the Jewish feminizing infl on society as well as his belief that the infl status of women and the prohibition against male-male love were racial- ly Jewish institutions. Moreover, for Friedlaender the Jewish family sense rein- forced that bourgeois institution.

Friedlaender also transformed Jaeger’s notion of the supervirile male into the homosexual Männerheld, the hero of men. Thus, in contrast to Hirschfeld’s depiction of the homosexual as an effeminate male, Friedlaender’s determina- tion of the invert was a manly man, the most exemplary of which was that Män- nerheld, the charismatic leader about whom the group of men, both inverted and not, were oriented. When detailing his understanding of the role of inver- sion in male groups, Blüher readily appropriated Friedlaender’s conception of the manly hero of men. Further echoing Friedlaender, Blüher argued that the family (as the product of the heterosexual drive) was in no way the basis for state formation—rather the state was founded on homosexual drives.
81
He conclud- ed that inversion, attraction toward the charismatic Männerheld, is the organ- izing principle of society.

In “The Three Basic Forms of Homosexuality,” published with an open letter publicizing his disagreements with Freud over homosexuality just before the appearance of
Totem and Taboo
, Blüher elaborates further on the sources for his understanding of the role of male associations in the formation of the state. That essay, among other provocations, acknowledges Otto Weininger— who, since the 1903 publication of his misogynist and antisemitic
Sex and Character
and subsequent suicide, had been a problematic figure for Freud— along with the aforementioned antisemites Gustav Jaeger and Benedict Fried- laender as contributors to his understanding. At this juncture Freud discon- tinued their correspondence.

Soon thereafter the anti-Jewish implications of Blüher’s theories (already suggested by his references to those three predecessors) became manifest. Al- ready in the
Youth Movement as an Erotic Phenomenon
Blüher notes that the membership of the youth circles (
Horden
) “strongly emphasized German racial type.”
82
As new editions of Blüher’s work appeared during the 1910s, his depiction of the healthy inversion of the Männerbund increasingly bor- rowed from the rhetoric of German racialism and Völkisch ideology. Thus as opposed to Germanic inversion Blüher would pejoratively categorize the ho- mosexuality of so-called
weibliche Männer
(effeminate men) as the decadent- Jewish type; eventually the evaluation of psychoanalysis shifted from a form of enlightenment to the Jewish mimetic translation of Christian confession and penitence—and mimesis was far from a favorable quality for Blüher.
83

Blüher’s sources for his “Three Basic Forms” were not limited to Freud or various acknowledged and unacknowledged anti-Jewish writers; he also cites, most notably, Heinrich Schurtz.
84
This primacy accorded Schurtz also reveals how Germany’s colonial experience affected the theorizing of new so- cietal origins and forms. Schurtz had been the primary research assistant at the Bremer Übersee-Museum and the beneficiary of the flood of colonial ar- tifacts deposited there, especially after Germany entered into the colonial competition in 1884.
85
Schurtz’s first major distillation of his work at the Übersee-Museum, the 1900
Early History of Culture
, provided intimations of the theory of the formation and development of society
86
that he would elaborate two years later in
Age Classes and Male Bands
(
Altersklassen und Männerbünde
).
87
Schurtz argued that the sib obsession of ethnographic predecessors had blinded them to a phenomenon that was not derivative from the family but intrinsic to itself: the existence of age classes and men’s houses. He also argued that all attempts to found society and the state on the family were retrojections. Schurtz grounded the development of the major social institutions of culture in two fundamental natural differentiations: first is the opposed psychologies of men and women, second is the antago- nism between younger and older generations. The social instinct of men, as opposed to the familial instinct of women, led to the formation of men’s houses, which were often distinguished by age.

Just as the perception of the important role of kinship may be tied to the tendency of bourgeois thinkers to view the institution of the bourgeois fami- ly as both the culmination of an evolutionary trajectory and the universal standard, Schurtz may well have been drawing upon those social tendencies out of which the Wandervogel and the various antibourgeois male movements noted above emerged in Germany and other German-speaking lands. Schurtz’s title captured these alternatives to the bourgeois family: age classes

and male associations. His theorizing of a natural difference—gender—res- onated in a world in which capitalism and modernization had collapsed tradi- tional identities and differences into so much exchange value, in which bureau- cracy had rendered the individual anonymous; the
Gesellschaft
now recognized as feminine had eviscerated, unmanned, the masculine
Gemeinschaft
. Blüher took Schurz’s work and sexualized it. And description paved the way for action.

The Erotics of Race

Already planning it in 1913 while corresponding with Freud,
88
Blüher pub- lished volume 1 of
The Role of the Erotic in Masculine Society
in 1917; the sec- ond volume appeared a year later. He felt this work provided both the biologi- cal and the empirical basis for his earlier claim that the youth movement was an erotic phenomenon; it also demonstrated that the youth groups were not the exception but the rule. To these ends Blüher embraces Schurtz’s data and valu- ation of the bipolar gendered nature of human society.
89
While noting that Schurtz skirts the sexual content of these male associations, Blüher cites Karsch- Haack’s
Das gleichgeschlechtliche Liebesleben bei den Naturvölken
90
as supple- mental evidence for the “strong inclination toward inversion” in tribal soci- eties.
91
Blüher then argues that Schurtz’s own speculation about a male social instinct proves more tautologous than sociological and offers instead his own more dynamic—psychosexual—theory: the existence of male-male (
mann- männliche
) attraction and of the invert type (
typus inversus
) as explanation.

In
Role of the Erotic
Blüher writes that “beyond the socializing principle of the family that feed off the Eros of male and female, a second principle is at work in mankind, ‘masculine society,’ which owes its existence to male-male Eros, and finds its expression in male bonding.” In contrast to Schurtz’s work, this second principle is neither supplementary nor complementary to the first; it is to an extent its adversary:

In all species where the familial urge is the sole determinant . . . the con- struction of a collective is impossible. The family can function as a con- stitutive element of the State, but not more. And wherever nature has produced species capable of developing a viable state, this has been made possible only by smashing the role of the family and the male-female sex- ual urges as sole social determinants.
92

The Männerbund bound together by male-male eros embodies the second principle that overcomes the claims of the family and heterosexuality.