Preliminary Programme

This paper will examine the tenacity of philhellenist narratives in German art and architectural criticism published in late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany. Drawing on the work of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (Der Preussische Stil, 1916), Karl Scheffler (Geist der Gotik, 1917), and Paul Schultze-Naumburg (Kunst und Rasse, 1928) the paper seeks to identify consistencies and abrupt shifts in the German reception of Greek art and architecture. The intersection of idealized Hellenic artistic production and its creators, and emergent biologistic discourses of race and eugenics, will be a particular focus, as the paper asks when, whether and why discursive shifts occurred.

The conflation of the artist’s persona with his work, and his work with his racial background, determined the search for a new national aesthetic that defined the Wilhelmine fin de siècle, and occupied a sizeable niche in Weimar aesthetic considerations. While such unsubtle results as the work of Josef Thorak, Arno Breker, and perhaps most famously, Leni Riefenstahl, have become clichés of the Nazi aesthetic, their roots in Wilhelmine and Weimar philhellenism have been less thoroughly examined. The comparison of three authors who occupied a range of political and ideological ground, spanning Scheffler’s championing of modernism to Schultze-Naumburg’s anti-semitic racialized art history, by way of Moeller’s nationalist middle ground, underscores the nuances of the invocation of the philhellenist ideal, as well as its development. (Show less)

Today, it might seem strange, or even preposterous, to raise allegations of suspected sexual misconduct against an entire social institution and mass organization such as the military. However, the Belle Époque was unquestionably the age of prestige politics. Repeatedly, the most disparate and unconnected of events were transformed into questions of national honour. The moral panic triggered by the Eulenburg scandal (1906-1909) in Wilhelmine Germany, for instance, accelerated efforts to rid the army of all homosexuals, in order to ‘re-masculinise’ the military so that it could fight more effectively in the event of the widely anticipated World War.

Interestingly, the gay rights movement – which was already very active in Germany during this period – engaged intensively with the homophobic accusation that homosexuality and effeminacy were one and the same, and that a gay soldier might therefore harm the military capability of both his army and his nation.

This paper will seek to reconstruct those legitimation strategies of the gay rights movement which were explicitly based upon historical appeals to, and comparisons with, Greek antiquity. For example, works such as Karl Franz von Leexow’s pamphlet 'Armee und Homosexualität. Schadet Homosexualität der militärischen Tüchtigkeit einer Rasse?' (Leipzig 1908) argued that the prevalence of homosexual mores in the ‘virile’ society of ancient Sparta could (and should) justify a positive stance towards homosexuals in the German military.

In conclusion, I will consider the rise of the new, modern, ideal type of the 'hypervirile homosexual' (later cultivated to notorious effect by Nazi figures such as Ernst Röhm during the Weimar Republic and the early Third Reich) and its deployment as a defensive discourse in response to the rise of homophobia in late Wilhelmine society.
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The delineation and solidification of sexuality into a discrete category of individual identity and a distinct field of scholarly and scientific investigation in modern Europe, driven in particular by German sexologists, has profoundly and lastingly changed the ways in which love, desire and sex interrelate with social, cultural and political discourses. President Obama’s alignment of the political struggles for women’s rights, African-American civil rights and LBGT rights in his reference to the watershed moments at Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall in his second inaugural address, for instance, is only possible on the basis of a notion of (non-hetero) sexual identity as somehow equivalent to categories of race and gender. This notional equivalence has manifested itself both in (postulated and/or practiced) alliances between different minority groups in their political activism and in the development of critical frameworks for the collective theorisation of their social and discursive status. This alliance can be traced back to the very origins of LGBT (self-)theorisation and activism, notably to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ (1825-1895) insistence that the emancipation movements of sexual minorities must always stand in solidarity with ethnic, political and religious minorities against oppression by the ‘despotic’ majority (see Ulrichs, Prometheus, 1870: 9-10). Both Obama and Ulrichs thus represent the incorporation of non-hetero sexual-political activism into larger liberal-progressive cultural narratives, in line with the promotion of and appeal to democratic values of equality in diversity, which dominates LGBT rights activism today.

This historical development, however, was neither uncontested nor without alternatives. Ulrichs’ theory of same-sex attraction as a form of hermaphroditism and in particular his pervasive characterisation of men attracted to men as effeminate semi-men – at once popularised and pathologised by leading sexologists – provoked vehement negative reactions in some parts and eventually caused a split in the first gay emancipation movement: after initially supporting Hirschfeld’s ‘Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’, Benedict Friedländer (1866-1908) was instrumental in bringing about the ‘Secession of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’, which also campaigned for the abolition of §175 (i.e. for decriminalising same-sex intercourse) but radically opposed the association of homoeroticism with effeminacy. Friedländer became the chief theorist of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (GdE), a movement he co-founded with Adolf Brand (1874-1945) and which denied an essentialistically conceived ‘otherness’ behind male-male attraction, promoting instead a decidedly masculinist, misogynist, elitist, and socially and culturally revolutionary agenda. Yet, just as Ulrichs developed his theory of the third sex in direct engagement with classical literature, so this group too drew on ancient, predominantly Greek sources to articulate and advance its vision of a Renaissance of the Eros Uranios (Friedländer 1904).

This paper will investigate how this ‘other Greece’ of Friedländer and the GdE is constituted and how it compares and contrasts with the (homo-)hellenism of Ulrichs and the sexologists: which authors and texts are cited, what is their position within the overall conceptualisation of male same-sex desire, and how do the central borrowings from Greek literature and thought relate to this group’s wider vision of a cultural and political revolution in which same-sex sex connects with anarchism and socialism? (Show less)

This paper aims to examine more closely some of the ways in which scholars and educators under National Socialism attempted to construct a model of philhellenism for the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ which explicitly defined itself as descended from, yet opposed to, earlier manifestations of the phenomenon, especially as personified by Enlightenment figures such as Winckelmann and Goethe. These Nazified authors tended to see the ‘great’ eighteenth-century philhellenists as providing an important legacy on which the National Socialist Weltanschauung could draw, yet, at the same time, they often vociferously decried their intellectualisation of philhellenism, and their ‘blindness’ in terms of racial theory. The paper will also consider the ways in which National Socialist educators often attempted to turn the ideal of the Humboldtian Gymnasium on its head, proclaiming instead a return to the true, ‘living’ spirit of the original Greek gymnasion.

In analysing the ways in which these writers ‘problematised’ traditional philhellenist ideals, I also wish to question the prevailing interpretation, popularized by Suzanne Marchand, that: ‘Antiquity, under the National Socialist regime, no longer represented the source of European norms, but had become merely a storehouse of forms to be ransacked for aesthetic effect or political self-legitimation’ [Marchand, Down from Olympus. Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1970, Princeton 1996, p. 341]. While it is undeniably true that the Nazi regime did encourage its advocates to behave as ‘cultural magpies’, snatching from the dust-heap of history whatever gleamed most brightly by their current cultural lights, I do not believe that this interpretation can sufficiently account for all aspects of philhellenism during the Third Reich. Rather, this paper would argue that the rise of Hitler’s Germany also heralded the rise of a new kind of philhellenism.
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