Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe

What discursive significance attaches to the circulation in queer settings of such canonical figures in eighteenth-century German classicism as Friedrich Schiller, art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, or Mignon, the perversely androgynous child of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship? Recent gender studies in the wake of Foucault, Luhmann, Laqueur, and other theorists, have identified the importance of late eighteenth-century Germany for the history of the body and of sexuality. German literature, philosophy, and anthropology of this period displays a pronounced tendency to 'fix' sexuality and gender along polar lines, as well as to inscribe heterosexuality as the normative structure of desire. Robert Tobin's Warm Brothers: Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe, a study of such canonical German authors as Wieland, Moritz, Jean Paul, Schiller, Lichtenberg, as well as Goethe, significantly broadens this inquiry while raising provocative and valuable questions for future research. Always implicated in the inscription of heterosexuality, as Warm Brothers cogently demonstrates, is same-sex desire. (Foucault's by now famous claim that the homosexual is not 'born' until 1870 has, ironically, fueled much interesting work in the eighteenth century, now seen, as it were, as the gestation period of a sexual identity.) The German term "quer," as Tobin points out (p.2), can be deployed productively in the context of the late eighteenth century, suggestive as it is both of a sexual reading and of a reading against the grain of conventional interpretation.

The opening two chapters of Tobin's book make the case for the queer significance of various discourses that emerge in and come to dominate late eighteenth century Germany: Hellenism, orientalism, the cult of friendship, Bildung. The difficulty in identifying sodomitical 'subcultures'-as historians have done for France, England, or the Netherlands-leads Tobin instead to fruitful readings of homoerotic signifiers in two non-canonical yet fascinating texts, Johann Friedel's Letters on the Gallantries of Berlin (1782) and August von Sachsen-Gotha's novel A Year in Arcadia (1805). One venue that presents itself here as the meeting place for the fantasmatic desires and concrete experiences of Germans is, however, Italy: as Paul Derks has already suggested in his encyclopedic study Die Schande der heiligen Poederastie (1990), the vocabulary of the Grand Tour is that of sensuality and homoeroticism. As Tobin's book makes amply clear, classicism itself, which critics have conventionally subsumed under terms such as serenity and control, displays disruptive undercurrents of eroticism and excess. (On this point Winckelmann scholars such as Alex Potts and Simon Richter have led the way).

In the third chapter, Tobin undertakes a suggestive investigation of orientalism in Jean Paul Richter (who was notoriously dubbed "a Chinese in Rome" by Goethe). While the notion of orientalism is construed rather broadly (we find it applied to references to Native Americans as well as to Iceland), nevertheless it is the fantasmatic desire present here (perhaps linked to Germany's largely unrequited colonial desires) that is compelling. Indeed, it may well prove a productive way of reading nineteenth-century fictions of male friendship, such as Stifter's Brigitta, or Raabe's Stopfkuchen, both of which flirt with exoticism and homoeroticism. A particularly rewarding part of this chapter, and of Warm Brothers in general, emerges when the emphasis shifts from biographical questions to questions involving style. Jean Paul is largely ignored today in the English-speaking world, arguably because of the density and willful obscurity of his writing. Tobin proposes that Jean Paul's maddening bricolage of styles and registers may constitute both textual and sexual travesty. Chapter Nine, "Lichtenberg's Queer Fragments: Sexuality and the Aphorism," is the natural counterpoint to the discussion of Jean Paul, posing as it does related questions about the relationship between transgressive sexuality and textual style. The obliqueness and evasiveness of Lichtenberg's aphorisms certainly invite such a queer reading, which positions Lichtenberg as a German precursor to Oscar Wilde.

The medical and psychological pathologization of same-sex desire is the focus of the fourth chapter, "Literary Cures in Wieland and Moritz." Tobin's original readings of Agathon and Anton Reiser demonstrate the ways in which Bildung as a discourse of discipline and desire is framed by the emerging sexological and psychiatric science of the period. In both novels, Tobin persuasively argues, homosexuality is represented as a disease that awaits a cure.

A cluster of chapters on Goethe highlights the performative, mutable aspect of gender and sexuality in canonical heavyweights such as The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Faust, the poems "Prometheus" and "Ganymede," as well as in lesser-known texts such as the brief essay "Women's Roles on the Roman Stage, Played by Men," which has recently caught the eye of Germanists familiar with theories of transvestism by Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler. (The more subversive view of Goethe that emerges here is well founded, and indeed would not have surprised nineteenth century critics, many of whom held the view of Goethe as a sensualist pagan.) In the case of Wilhelm Meister, however, while pederasty and cross-dressing function disruptively, they also serve as the hero's 'cure,' reinstating the order of the patriarchal Tower Society. Tobin's reference to the Derridean 'pharmakon,' as well as his focus on how Goethe ambivalently locates homosexuality both within and outside nature, usefully connects the chapter on Wieland and Moritz with the analysis of the Wilhelm Meister novels. The final chapter on Goethe convincingly rereads the poems "Prometheus" and "Ganymede" as two texts on masculinity, rather than statements about masculinity versus femininity. Interpreting the Faust/Mephistopheles dyad as an investigation of Promethean and Ganymedic positions yields fresh insights into the eternally discussed problem of the "eternal feminine."

A discussion of Schiller's Don Carlos and the play's queer after-life in the early twentieth century-it appears in Thomas Mann's Tonio Kruger as well as in the lesbian film Madchen in Uniform-elegantly bridges the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book's concluding chapter, indeed, makes the large claim that modern homosexuality as a political movement and as a medical discourse was fabricated in Germany. No doubt this chapter, which moves between literature, film, sexology, psychology, Berlin's transvestite culture, the legal status of homosexuals, and activist movements, deserves amplification. For one thing, it raises the question of why the gay rights movements had to be 'reimported' from the United States to Germany. I also wanted to know more about the appropriation of German classicism in lesbian culture of the early twentieth century (although the discourses of same-sex female desire in Germany have so far received far less attention than those of male homosexuality and are admittedly beyond the scope of Tobin's investigation).

Eighteenth-century queer studies have so far concentrated on Britain, France, and the Netherlands, although recent works by Derks, Heinrich Detering (Das offene Geheimnis), Alice Kuzniar (Outing Goethe and his Age), and now Tobin have opened up German classicism to new readings. Given the mutual interdependence of aesthetics, literature, anthropology, and gender theory that we find in German culture of the late eighteenth century, the importance of a study such as Warm Brothers should be clear. Homosexuality, as Tobin conclusively demonstrates, is not at the margins of eighteenth- century German institutions such as Bildung, but at their very center, so that, as Jonathan Dollimore has aptly put it, "the outsider may be said to be always already inside" (Sexual Dissidence, p. 225).