IT’S AS IF NAMING it brought it into being. During the uproar over the Krupp scandal, Wilhelm is startled to learn that the Berlin police have for several years been compiling extensive files, the so-called Criminal Album, listing those who flaunt Paragraph 175 of the German penal code by engaging in homosexual acts (whether proven or rumored). The Album cites many who hold high office: the King of Württemberg is said to be in love with a mechanic, the King of Bavaria with a coachman, and Archduke Ludwig Viktor, brother of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph, with a masseur.
The incriminating Album is sent under seal to the head of the Kaiser’s Civil Cabinet, with the implication that the material will be shown to the Kaiser. The mere suggestion that such “filth” could possibly interest him, outrages Wilhelm. He refuses to break the seal, announcing that it is “all lies” anyway, and orders the Album returned to the Police Commissioner. But Wilhelm knows more than he’s publicly admitting. He’s already been informed that the marriage of his cousin, the Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt, has been “a failure from the beginning” and he is divorcing his young wife. Why? Because, the Kaiser is told, the Grand Duke has “homosexual tendencies.”
Wilhelm, just past 40, is somewhat older than the Grand Duke, but both were grandchildren of the recently deceased Queen Victoria and often played together when young. Those memories soften him; he writes his cousin a long letter that expresses some empathy—but embedded in the moralistic posturing more typical of him. Avoiding any mention of the Grand Duke’s “tendencies,” Wilhelm focuses instead on the need for the Duke to come to an “understanding” with his wife that will allow their marriage to continue. “That will mean,” Wilhelm writes, “sacrifices, perhaps very difficult ones . . . I know many a marriage in which things are just the same as with you, but which have not ended in divorce.” Whether Wilhelm is advocating celibacy outside the marriage bond as well as within, the Grand Duke declines the “sacrifice.”
Matters go no better when the next scandal hits the Hohenzollern drawing rooms. This time it’s Prince Friedrich Heinrich of Prussia, eldest son of Wilhelm’s uncle, Prince Albrecht. Rumors about Friedrich have been circulating for years; at one point the President of the Berlin police even feels the need to warn Friedrich to rein in his indiscretions—not the sort of advice Princes of the Realm welcome or take to heart, sexual indiscretion being something of an assumed prerogative. Prince Friedrich is fond of his prerogatives—and the result is that his imprudent behavior becomes a matter for open discussion in the Reichstag; but given the reluctance of all but the Socialist deputies to bring “discredit” on the Hohenzollern dynasty, the debate is stillborn.
Maximilian Harden, the most famous journalist in Germany, is far less respectful of the Imperial family. In his weekly paper, Die Zukunft, Harden, characteristically, minces no words. Prince Friedrich Heinrich, Harden bluntly writes, suffers from “hereditary perversion of the sexual drive.” He further reveals that the Kaiser has pressured Prince Friedrich to renounce his election as Grand Master of the august Order of St. John of Jerusalem. The Kaiser—having regained his reflexive rectitude—proceeds to banish the Prince from court. Since no one in Berlin will receive him, the Prince is advised to live abroad. Any number of Berlin’s luminaries scatter to the underbrush.
But the elephant is now decidedly in the room. Within a mere two to three years, a far greater scandal bursts over the head of Prince Philipp of Eulenburg—the man who’d been closest to the Kaiser throughout the 1890s. For some time, the Prince’s “moral conduct” has been tut-tutted over in the drawing rooms. Eager to discredit the regime, Max Harden prepares to fan the flames still higher. Catching wind of Harden’s intentions, Eulenburg abruptly resigns his post as ambassador to Vienna and retreats to his estate at Liebenberg. “Grief over my mother’s recent death,” he explains in a letter to the Kaiser, “has affected my already frail health and I have become a burden to Your Majesty.”
“You must receive trustworthy care,” the Kaiser loftily responds. “Such episodes don’t mean much.”
The words alarm rather than comfort Philipp. Is the Kaiser slyly suggesting that he, Philipp, is exaggerating his symptoms, feigning incapacity in order to keep hidden a quite different source of anguish?
“I am bed-ridden with fever,” Philipp hastily replies. “For the time being I’m only a ghastly parcel. There is absolutely nothing more to be expected from my wretched body. But I don’t complain.”
If Philipp is magnifying his symptoms, the grief he feels over the death of his mother, Alexandrine Hertefeld, is very real. From early childhood she’s been his sympathetic confidant, his model of true womanhood—selfless in her devotion to her emotionally extravagant, artistically inclined son. She’d steadfastly mediated between him and his militaristic father, Philipp Konrad, who’s disparaged his son’s interest in music and literature, scowled at his charm and sense of humor—so unsuitable in a truly manly person—and denounced his professional ambivalence.
“You wish to do—what?!” Philipp Konrad had thundered when Philipp suggested, after graduating from the War Academy at Kassel, that he wished to abandon a military career and enter the civil service.
“Why work at all?!” his father shouts. “Why not loll about in the garden reciting verse?!”
Alexandrine softly interjects her view that a person of many gifts might do well to sample them.
“By all means! Why not try needlework? Or perhaps become a fisherman?!” Philipp Konrad storms from the room.
Half fearful that his father’s view of him is accurate, Philipp had gone on to earn a doctorate in law from the University of Giessen in 1875—the same year he married Augusta Sandels, daughter of the last Swedish Count Sandels. In the first 10 years of their marriage, she gave birth to eight children, the last born in 1886, the year Philipp meets Crown Prince Wilhelm, the future Kaiser. Most observers believe that from the beginning of his marriage Philipp has treated Augusta indifferently, though he’s a loving father toward his children and suffers greatly when two die in infancy.
After their first meeting, Philipp and Wilhelm quickly become good friends. By 1888, when the Crown Prince ascends to the throne at age 29 as Wilhelm II, he’s already describing Philipp, a dozen years his senior, as “my bosom friend, the only one I have.” Philipp introduces the youthful Kaiser to his own small group of intimates—the so-called “Liebenberg Circle,” a reference to his country estate in Brandenburg not far from Berlin. Philipp accompanies the youthful Kaiser on exclusive hunts at a succession of noble estates, and in the evenings he often entertains the other guests by singing his own ballads while accompanying himself on the piano.
By the 1890s Wilhelm has installed Philipp in the cabin adjoining his on the royal yacht, Hohenzollern, and Philipp has become a regular participant in the all-male, month-long summer cruises to Scandinavia. When Philipp’s ballads are published as a book—Rosenlieder, a popular success—Wilhelm prominently displays it, alongside a picture of Philipp, on his desk.
The two men are in many ways dissimilar. Philipp, warm, tactful, and somewhat shy, has nothing of Wilhelm’s grandiosity, nor his restless, volatile, hyperactive temperament (Philipp describes his friend at one point as “highly charged with electricity”). Nor does Philipp require, as does Wilhelm, constant praise and admiration; as Philipp privately puts it, the Kaiser “is grateful for it like a good, clever child.” What the two men do share is a strenuous belief in the monarch’s personal rule, based on divine right and free of dictation from a fledgling, politically fractious Reichstag. Wilhelm’s entourage commonly refers to him as the “All-High,” and Philipp eagerly escalates the fawning praise by sometimes referring to his friend as “Wilhelm Proteus”—the ancient prophet able to assume whatever shape he chooses.
By the 1890s it’s widely acknowledged that Philipp has become the most powerful member of the Kaiser’s civil entourage, uniquely positioned to influence his policies and appointments. It’s Philipp who first suggests in 1897 that Bernhard von Bülow be made head of the foreign office; knowing exactly which string to pluck, Philipp emphasizes von Bülow’s “true, deep personal love for Yr. Majesty.” Wilhelm not only accepts Philipp’s ardent recommendation but subsequently promotes von Bülow to Reich Chancellor, a post he will hold from 1900 to 1909. During his tenure von Bülow will outdo Eulenburg in sycophancy and in carrying out the Kaiser’s every autocratic wish; he will also return Philipp’s favor by cunningly maneuvering against him behind his back. Philipp himself at the turn of the century is named ambassador to the Kingdom of Württemberg, then to the more prestigious post at the Kingdom of Bavaria, and finally as the Reich’s representative in Vienna, capitol of Germany’s foremost ally, the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Like everyone around the Kaiser, Eulenburg often has to lavish ingratiating praise on His Majesty, yet he’s able to see clearly many of Wilhelm’s unappealing qualities. They’re legion—his adolescent humor; his harshness; his inability to listen; his pretension to knowledge and wisdom he doesn’t possess; his assumption of infallibility in all matters, including the artistic and the spiritual; his limited attention span—and even more limited compassion (it’s “as if,” Philipp writes a friend, “certain feelings which we take for granted in others are suddenly simply not there”). “He wants to instruct,” Philipp admits, “but does not take to being instructed himself.”
Wilhelm often visits pranks and practical jokes on his guests. His sadistic notion of “fun” is to turn inward the many rings on his right hand (his left arm is withered, having been severely damaged at birth) and then squeeze a visiting dignitary’s hand as hard he can, relishing the anguished reaction. He thinks it the height of hilarity to come up behind an old general and cut his suspenders, and to have another jump over a stick in imitation of a dog. Alternately, Wilhelm enjoys suddenly pinching someone or hitting him hard on the behind with a baton.
The sensitive, gentle Eulenburg is shocked during one Nordic cruise at what he calls “the quite disgusting spectacle” of the Kaiser assembling the older members of his entourage on deck for morning gymnastics—their groans and the Kaiser’s gleeful shouts producing an unsettling medley. Sometimes Wilhelm will baptize a newcomer to the yacht by pouring champagne on his head—or have him carried around on a block of ice. On a visit to Eulenburg’s Liebenberg estate Wilhelm has another guest parade about as a circus poodle, sporting long bangs made out of black wool and a tail appended at the back, performing “tricks” like howling at the moon in response to music cues or a pistol shot. Occasionally His Majesty orders a member of his entourage to cross-dress in a feathery hat and tutu, and dance—as Wilhelm roars with laughter. Eulenburg firmly refuses to participate in any of the Kaiser’s capers.
Serious people bore Wilhelm, yet he requires their unqualified assent to his authoritative pronouncements on a host of weighty matters. Along with dabbling in painting seascapes, he spends millions of marks furnishing multiple royal residences, and confidently compares his garish taste with the Medicis. Eulenburg encourages his interest in art, but not the superficiality of his pronouncements about it. Wilhelm’s artistic preferences are entirely conventional (as are Eulenburg’s for that matter, but unlike the Kaiser, he makes no effort to inflict his opinions on others).
Wilhelm despises anything that smacks of the avant-garde; when a group of Berlin artists withdraws (the so-called “Secession”) from the annual exhibition patronized by the Kaiser, and form their own show, Wilhelm vetoes awarding the gold medal to Käthe Kollwitz because her etchings depicting the plight of impoverished cottagers lack, Wilhelm announces, “patriotic” content and stray from “the feelings in mankind for beauty and harmony.” The Kaiser’s idea of a great painter is Anton von Werner, director of the Institute of Fine Arts in Berlin, whose most famous canvas is The Proclamation of the German Empire, depicting the coronation of Wilhelm I—a picture the discriminating modernist Count Harry Kessler dismisses as “a fashion illustration for military tailors.”
Kessler, approaching 30 at the time of the “Berlin Secession” in 1898, has been edging his way into prominence as an ardent advocate of “modernism,” a posture neither predictable nor “fitting” for someone of his social standing. Harry’s father Adolf comes from a banking family prominent in the world of international finance. His mother, Alice—whom Harry adores—is a renowned, high-spirited beauty whose salon in Paris (where the couple mostly resides, and where Harry and his sister Wilma were born) attracts the likes of Ibsen, de Maupassant, and Sarah Bernhardt. The old emperor, Wilhelm I, not only ennobled the Kesslers but skipped over the traditional stepping stone of “baron” to go straightaway to “count”—as much in tribute, it’s widely believed, to Alice’s extraordinary good looks as to Adolf’s exemplary good deeds.
As a young man, Harry’s life has followed the traditional pathways of a privileged patrician. He’s enrolled in the fashionable St. George’s school in Ascot, where he becomes fluent in both Greek and Latin—and where his classmates include Roger Fry, later a renowned art critic, as well as a handsome boy named Maat with whom Harry becomes romantically infatuated. Harry then returns to Germany to enter the university in Bonn, where his already-impeccable credentials are further burnished through election to the aristocratic Borussia fraternity—which boasts Wilhelm II among its alumni.
Harry is particularly drawn to a fellow member of the Borussia corps, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, whom he describes in the diary he started keeping at age 12 as an “almost ideal beauty, tall, blond, with a slender, nimble, perfectly proportioned body . . . a Greek statue, come to life through some inward fire.” A future industrialist and art patron, von Bodenhausen will become allies with Kessler in the struggle to advance Impressionist and post-Impressionist art against the “dead weight” of the academic establishment.
But first comes a stint at the University of Leipzig, where Harry becomes friendly with another fellow student, Gustav Richter, whose grandfather is the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and whose mother, Cornelia Richter, holds a famed salon in her home on the Bellevuestrasse. Harry attends with some regularity, as do any number of prominent figures of the day, some of whom will loom large in his immediate future—the poet and playwright Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the industrialist and writer Walther Rathenau, and, now and then, the Kaiser’s close confidant Prince Eulenburg, occasionally accompanied by his own dear friend, Count Kuno von Moltke. Harry’s already impressive network of contacts expands exponentially.
His studies, simultaneously, are broadening his critical faculties. Lujo Brentano’s Leipzig lectures advocating trade unionism as a necessary tool for improving working-class conditions lead Harry to personally explore slum conditions; the deplorable plight of laborers and their families further sensitizes him to the need for reform—yet does not convert him to socialism; in 1888 he still defines himself in his diary as “a conservative at heart.” Yet he’s already abandoned a number of orthodoxies: he deplores the upper class treatment of women in Germany as “decorative dolls”—as well as the middle and working class vision of them as “exalted housekeepers and perfect cooks.”
In a similar way, the lectures of Anton Springer—the first professor of art history in Germany—in defense of contemporary art, confirm Harry’s aesthetic taste even as they move him to unconventional speculations about the nature of “beauty” that will resonate far into the future. “The beauty of a thing,” he writes in one diary entry, “lies much more in our imagination than in the thing itself . . . it corresponds to something inside of the person who cherishes it. The truth of an ideal is always, even if it were held by all of mankind at the same time, a subjective one.” In short, so-called “timeless, universal” truths—the “natural laws” shibboleth of an earlier age—are a chimera, a hunger for certainty which is unobtainable. “You cannot answer,” Kessler concludes in his diary, “the fundamental question of aesthetics, ‘What is an artwork?’ . . . You must put the question this way: What processes must a work evoke in the psyche of the observer in order for it to count as a work of art? Then you would discover that something can be a work of art for someone and not for others.”
Such views, when Harry takes up residence to Berlin late in 1893, are the currency of a new generation of artists in rebellion against the hyper-realism of the art academies, artists who—going back at least to the 1870s—concern themselves with the transient play of light, contemporary (rather than historical) imagery, and the quick-change instability of modern life. It is in France that the “Secessionists”—among them Monet, Sisley, Degas, and Pissarro—first make their influence known. And it is in Paris that an independently wealthy young Harry—having tried his hand as an apprentice law court official and quickly realized that it was “a mistaken vocation”—begins to haunt the galleries and studios.
From an early age, he’d always visited the Louvre when in Paris, initially with his mother, then on his own. When 19 he’d taken himself to the exhibition, the Artistes Indépendants, of those Impressionist painters denied access to the official art salons—but this initial exposure had repelled him: “orgies of hideousness and nerve-shaking combinations of colors I thought impossible outside a madhouse,” he wrote contemptuously in his diary.
Over the next five years, Harry began increasingly to question his previous allegiance to traditional culture. It’s “striking,” he confided to his diary in 1894, “that an age that has been more creative than any other in producing original and important forms for machines, railroads, warships, and weapons still has not exploited these forms artistically.” It had, but at the time Harry’s vision had been myopic. Once he dropped the lorgnette, his eyes quickly came into focus. By the time of the “Berlin Secession” in 1898, Harry had become an ardent champion, though never “vulgarly” passionate in his admiration—hot-blooded fervor is foreign to his well-mannered temperament.
He goes now far less to the Louvre than to the avant-garde galleries that have sprung to life on the rue Laffitte—the elegant Durand-Ruel establishment; the daring—he’s among the first to buy and display van Gogh and to give Cézanne his first show in 1895—Ambroise Vollard’s smaller, less luxurious space; and the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, which specializes in the so-called “Nabi” (the Hebrew word for “prophet”) artists, most prominently Bonnard and Vuillard. Paris will for some time remain the center for contemporary art, but one important gallery does open in Berlin—Paul Cassirer’s establishment on Viktoriastrasse, designed by Kessler’s recent acquaintance, the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde (whom he hires to design his own audaciously elegant apartment).
Harry also joins a group of young artists and writers who decide to inaugurate a new illustrated journal, PAN, with the intention of giving voice to insurgent movements in the arts. A noisy, contentious bunch, mostly still in their twenties, they meet haphazardly at a rundown tavern, Turkes Wine and Beer Cellar, at the corner of Unter den Linden and the Wilhelmstrasse. The Swedish exile August Strindberg, who lives in the neighborhood and first discovers the tavern, rechristens it the Black Piglet during one of his alcoholic stupors, a hallucinatory reference to the Armenian wine sack that sways over the entranceway.
The PAN contingent gathers in one of the tavern’s two rooms, just big enough for a solid wood table to hold pitchers of beer and wine, loaves of round black bread, sausage and cheese—and an upright piano, on which one of the group’s central figures, the Polish writer Stanisław Przybyszewski (“Staczu” to everyone), is given, especially when drunk, to pounding away on his own version of “Chopin.” Staczu is married to the beautiful, enigmatic Dagny (“Ducha”, Polish for “soul”) Juel; Ducha is promiscuous as a matter of principal, and several of the other young men, in particular the painter Edvard Munch (for whom she models), find her erotically irresistible.
The slender, impeccably groomed Harry Kessler, his penetrating eyes alert with intelligence even as his courtly bearing hints at the need for emotional distance, is on the surface something of a fish out of water when compared to the unbridled bohemianism of Staczu’s circle. But various other young people move in and out of the PAN group, including several of Harry’s more disciplined classmates and friends: Eberhard von Bodenhausen (his Borussia fraternity brother), the poet Richard Dehmel, and Julius Meier-Graefe (whose forthcoming book, The Impressionists, will win a mixed review from Harry).
Besides, Harry can more than hold his own when Staczu and his acolytes—all of whom find Nietzsche a source of profound inspiration—heatedly debate the merits of Huysmans, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé, or Staczu’s mystical views on the value of hypnosis and alchemy, or his theory (pre-Jung) of a collective memory and the importance of the unconscious forces (what he calls “psychic naturalism”) underlying our surface behavior. Staczu’s mesmerizing voice and biting sarcasm are potent persuaders, yet Harry meets them not with a competing brand of uninhibited clamor, but with the more disarming style of graceful urbanity. (Once again, as with his sexual encounters, Harry deliberately omits from his diary any details of the turbulent combat that characterizes PAN’s meetings. He keeps his worlds distinct). Staczu and the others in PAN’s more profligate contingency recognize in Kessler not only a first-class intelligence, but also a genuine desire to foster the journal’s fortunes. They’re in agreement that Harry would be the best choice to visit the poet Paul Verlaine in Paris with an invitation to contribute to the new journal.
Kessler first calls on the poet on July 10, 1895. More than 20 years have passed since Verlaine fell obstinately in love with Arthur Rimbaud, abandoned his wife and infant son (after an abusive, alcoholic scene), later shot and wounded Rimbaud in a fit of jealousy, and went to prison for the crime, where he converted to Roman Catholicism. When Harry enters Verlaine’s decrepit building on the rue St. Victor, the place smells to him “of cats, coal, and the drying diapers of the proletariat.” Feeling his way through a dark antechamber to the designated door, Harry opens it to a melancholy scene: a sparsely furnished room, with a few straw chairs, a white wooden table, and a large double bed. In it lies Verlaine—to Harry, “the greatest lyrical poet of France”—amidst a disordered array of pillows, fully dressed and with slippers on his feet.
The poet explains that rheumatism and the heat have forced him to take to his bed. But he does rouse himself, brings Harry over to the flat’s sole window to show off the flowerpots and birdcages that surround it, and explains that the “little, old, fat” woman (as Harry describes her in his diary) making currant wine in a corner of the room “takes cares of me very well”; in Harry’s view she seems more “a governess than a mistress.” He tells Verlaine about PAN, describing it as “an important journal with money to offer” in return for some of his poems. The poet lethargically mumbles something indistinct in response, and then lapses into silence.
Thinking to rouse him, Harry deliberately makes reference to Rimbaud and notices at once “a nervous flame darting” in Verlaine’s eyes. When he speaks, it’s with quiet simplicity: “He had a great influence on me. He was the cause of a great deal of pleasure and pain for me. We left together in pursuit of adventure. A lot of absurd things, à la Wilde, were said about us. The publication of his poems is encountering difficulty because his sister, an old spinster, wants to censor everything that, in her opinion, portrays her brother in a satanic light. She wants to make of him an angel, which he wasn’t at all, but rather a man, or rather a child, of genius.” Verlaine stops abruptly and Harry’s highly developed sense of discretion prevents him from pressing the poet to continue. Seeing Verlaine’s face cloud over with a heavy veil of melancholy, Harry suggests that he return some other time, and diplomatically takes his leave.
He does visit Verlaine several more times, and each time finds the poet spruced up a bit more in clean white pants, a black coat, and a brown velvet hat (and even the “fat grisette,” as Harry refers to her, has on a pink blouse “in which she almost looks smart”). With each visit Harry finds Verlaine “more sympathetic”; he begins to understand “how this man can exert an irresistible charm.” Verlaine speaks no German, but there’s no need—Harry is fluent in English (and in French as well), which Verlaine does speak. Without prodding, the poet returns again and again in their conversations to Rimbaud, describing “his Herculean figure, his deep blue eyes with their somewhat fixed stare, the striking mobility of his face, his little turned-up nose, which had, like his character, something mocking and pert about it, and his great, fantastic genius standing in almost uncanny contrast to his childlike exterior and his youth.”
Reflecting back on the experience years later—Verlaine never does contribute to PAN and dies in 1896, within a year of Harry’s last visit—Kessler concludes that despite the poet’s “great sexual passion” for Rimbaud and his incessant pressure on the younger man to yield, Rimbaud had the stronger will—“exceptionally strong”—and managed to hold Verlaine at bay. “Unhinged” by his unconsummated passion, Verlaine, in Harry’s view, shot Rimbaud “in complete desperation.” Even then, Rimbaud refused sex, and the relationship—“very much against Verlaine’s will”—remained chaste.
The details will never be known, but many—at the time and since—draw a conclusion opposite to Kessler’s, thus raising the question of why he chooses to believe the theory of unrequited love. His verdict of chastity is likely the result of superimposing his own recent and exceedingly painful experience onto Verlaine’s. Just two years prior, during his prescribed year of military service (in his case with the aristocratic Third Guard Lancers), Harry roomed with another cadet, the handsome 19-year-old Bavarian nobleman Otto von Dungern—and fell intractably in love with him. They rode together, swam naked in the Karthane River, spent hours exchanging stories and experiences—and never touched, other than glancingly. When they parted, Harry wrote in his diary that he was “right lonely without Dungern.” And that is all he wrote.
Harry is fully aware that his sexual attraction is solely to other men, but just as his diary says almost nothing about the boisterous side of his evenings at the Piglet, so it’s scrubbed clean of all but the most oblique references to his homosexuality. Like every diarist, Harry knows (or hopes) that he’s writing for posterity as much as for himself—after all, he saves his voluminous journals. Yet his avoidance of certain topics isn’t solely due to conscious dissembling. Social discretion has been bred into Harry’s bones. Much like his contemporary Edward Carpenter in England, who does openly acknowledge—and publicly champion—his homosexuality, Kessler carries what one of Carpenter’s friends calls ineradicable “tattoo-marks of gentility” (the comment made in regard to Carpenter burning his dress clothes and leaving his house barely furnished in a futile effort to divest himself of all outer marks of class privilege—gestures which Harry would have found grotesque).
The closest Harry ever comes to a frank declaration of his sexual attraction to men is a diary entry he makes in 1888, when 20: “I have flirted more or less seriously with over half a dozen young girls within the last two years, but love I have never felt for any of them and I am sure I do not wish to break anybody’s heart. I know by experience”—that is, with Otto von Dungern, unnamed—“what it is to love passionately and hopelessly, and that fearful misery I would not bring on anybody for the world.”
When it comes to evaluating others, Harry often ignores what some see as homoerotic—even transparently carnal—behavior; the verdict of “chastity” that he passes on the Verlaine/Rimbaud relationship carries over onto his judgment of a variety of other relationships. He blankets with the discreet gloss of “social rituals” the common practice in the military of officers and cadets dancing together, tossing bouquets to one another, and forcing drunken younger men to strip naked. And in the next few years, as the so-called “Eulenburg Affair” begins to heat up, Kessler will deplore what he views as the confounding of conventional rites of male friendship with homosexuality, deploring the “sea of dirt and contempt” unleashed on Eulenburg and Count Kuno von Moltke—both of whom he’s gotten to know and like at Cornelia Richter’s salon.
That storm is still a few years down the road. Eulenburg, for now, remains sequestered at his Liebenberg estate and the journalistic muckraker Max Harden, temporarily appeased by the Prince’s retirement—yet still rabidly opposed to the regime—bides his time. As for Harry Kessler, he remains happily preoccupied with developments in the arts, involving himself in a host of projects beyond PAN that encompass painting and sculpture, dance, theater, and design. For roughly the next five years, Kessler puts his energy, contacts, and wealth centrally at the disposal of those individuals and organizations increasingly determined to “secede” from the acceptable forms of expression dictated by the academies and controlled by the central government.
Despite the enormous growth of Germany over recent decades—the population nearly doubles between 1870 and 1900—Berlin, its capital and financial center, remains something of a backwater in regard to the arts. In those same decades, as the dynamic revolutions of Impressionism and post-Impressionism sweep France (and in its wake, most of the cultural capitals of northern Europe), Berlin, in the mid-1890s, still has a grand total of two art galleries. Even within Germany itself, the cities of Munich and Dresden are far in advance of Berlin in accepting the new art.
All of which is about to change—and Harry Kessler, along with his newfound friend, the art dealer Paul Cassirer, are in the vanguard of the transformation. When Cassirer decides in 1898 to open a new gallery on Viktoriastrasse, a fashionable street filled with large homes that abuts the famed Tiergarten park, Harry persuades him to hire Henry van de Velde to design the space. Van de Velde creates a spare, sleek interior, its light gray linen walls decorated with discreet oak paneling running along the top. The gallery’s mission, Cassirer announces, will be “the promotion of a number of great artists who are virtually unknown in Germany.”
True to his word, Cassirer, within three years, fills his gallery with the first full-scale exhibition of the works of Vincent van Gogh. By then, Harry Kessler, through his writings, organizational efforts, and patronage, is also emerging as a key figure in transforming Germany from a timid straggler in the current aesthetic revolution to a serious contender for front-rank status—though never able to overtake France, its historic enemy, as the paramount center for artistic innovation.
The pace of change within Germany resembles a tortoise more than a steamroller. From the start, the new art runs into fierce opposition. Its critics are a resourceful, powerful, and unrelenting lot, and at certain points the secessionists suffer a string of reverses that at times resemble a total rout. More is involved than aesthetics; inherent in the sustained debate over art are contending political assumptions that centrally involve the Kaiser and his court. It’s recognized on all sides that what is at stake is not only the kind of art Germany will endorse, but the kind of political rule it will sanction.
The fine arts in Germany have long been dependent on the Kaiser’s favor. It is he who dispenses state patronage, controls exhibition space, and decides whose work will be exhibited. Wilhelm II takes his role as art patron seriously; he has decided tastes and doesn’t hesitate to intervene directly to reward favorites and blacklist dissenters. Aesthetic “truth,” he declares, lies in the “eternal laws that the creator himself observes, and which can never be transgressed or broken without threatening the development of the universe.” The Kaiser refrains from revealing the precise content of those eternal laws (or when and how the creator transmitted them)—but he knows aesthetic truth when he sees it. After all, he rules by “divine right,” which mandates automatic respect and legitimacy for his pronouncements. Kessler puts it succinctly: “the state spends money for hot air, but not for art.”
Much of the German establishment, and the middle class as well, strongly agrees with the Kaiser’s tastes and actions. The powerful conservative and anti-Semitic elements that dominate German life equate innovation with degeneracy, and any challenge to tradition is seen as a cosmopolitan plot to destroy German folkways. The Kaiser’s favorite painter, Anton von Werner, specializes in depicting scenes from Germany’s “glorious” past and, like the Kaiser, believes that historical verisimilitude is the marker of artistic merit. Werner detests modern art, yet is not, like most of those who side with him, a kneejerk conservative: when presented with an anti-Semitic petition from students and faculty of the Verein Berliner Künstler—the association of artists that Werner heads—he not only rejects it but forbids any circulation of comparable material.
The city of Weimar, capital of the small Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, boasts a glorious past. In the early 19th century it had been home both to Goethe and Schiller, the storied eminences of German letters. Yet in the middle of the century, Franz Liszt had abandoned Weimar in disgust over its retrograde values, and the town sank into mossbacked oblivion. The first intimation that it might emerge from its smug slumber and again become an important cultural center is the interest Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche shows in moving her brother Friedrich’s archives there. The philosopher is still alive at the end of the 19th century, but in a ruinous state of health, wholly dependent on his sister’s care. Nietzsche’s doctors diagnose his disorder variously, as mercury poisoning, debilitating strokes, brain cancer, psychotic dementia, and tertiary syphilis (now thought to have resulted from visiting a male brothel in Genoa).
Harry Kessler first meets Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche when he travels to her home in Naumburg in the fall of 1895 to negotiate for the publication in PAN of some of her brother’s speculative works on music. Förster-Nietzsche has a reputation for being exceedingly difficult—malicious, spiteful, obstinate—but she’s much taken with Kessler’s debonair manner and lucid intelligence, invites him to stay for dinner, and gives her assent to publication in PAN. When Kessler tells her that he’s an enormous admirer of her brother and a staunch supporter of his work, Elisabeth allows him a rare glimpse of the great man. Nietzsche sits immobile in a chair—and according to Elisabeth will do so for hours on end—in a kind of stupor. He recognizes only acquaintances from childhood, and even that connection is soon lost.
Kessler’s visits to Förster-Nietzsche not only continue but gradually increase; he becomes something of a confidant and advisor. Elisabeth shares with him details of her many quarrels, especially with Wagner’s widow, Cosima, and with Lou Andreas-Salomé, the gifted writer (and later psychoanalyst) who is the only woman—so Nietzsche once declared when proposing marriage—that he’d ever found attractive. Harry is an attentive listener and discreet counselor, though he often finds Elisabeth’s conversation “silly” and “self-pitying.” But it gradually dawns on him that if he succeeds in persuading her to move her brother’s archives to Weimar, the coup would instantly boost the city’s profile and open the way for its return to prominence—and could even, conceivably, turn it into a dynamic center for fostering avant-garde art.
By the time of Nietzsche’s death in the summer of 1900 Elisabeth, under Harry’s guidance, has made Weimar the permanent home for her brother’s archives. Kessler has even persuaded her to hire his friend Henry van de Velde to design a building to house the material. Through Elisabeth’s introductions over the next few years, and then through the grace and subtlety of his own personality, Kessler moves with consummate ease in Weimar society, which he mostly finds comically parochial. The exception is the young grand duchess Caroline, who is genuinely attuned to artistic innovation and becomes his particular champion. Among his other new acquaintances is the Polonius-like figure of the court chamberlain Aimé de Palézieux, who also serves as director of the Weimar Museum; for a time Palézieux expresses enthusiasm for the idea of returning Weimar to its former glory—yet only for a time.
Förster-Nietzsche, pleased with van de Velde’s architectural plans, successfully lobbies for his appointment as director of the Weimar art school. From there, in what seems like a natural progression, Kessler is himself in 1902 given a curatorial post in the Museum of Arts and Crafts and then, the following year, accepts the offer to become its official director. He buys a house in Weimar, and begins to travel frequently between London, Paris, and Berlin to attend exhibitions, personally meet with many of the most innovative artists and gallery owners of the day, and make plans for some of them to take up short-term residence in Weimar.
Kessler assumes his new post at the Museum with eyes wide open to the petty quarrelling and entrenched conservatism of the local populace. He’s aware early on that court chancellor de Palézieux, on the surface friendly and enthusiastic, is intriguing behind his back, filling the fairly empty head of the Grand Duke with accusations of Kessler’s “immoral” preferences in art. Kessler characteristically retains his poise, rarely allowing any extreme emotion to show. Initially he’s too involved in the work at hand, too excited at finally having an official platform from which to foster contemporary art, to heed the steadily mounting drumbeat of opposition. “We will build what we have in mind,” he writes van de Velde, “a clear, clean, healthy, invigorating apprenticeship. Let the others follow with sour expressions. It won’t change anything.”
The plan he comes up with is for van de Velde’s school to serve as a design center for local industries and for his own museum to transform itself into a center that, through exhibitions and lectures, will convert the public to the cause of aesthetic modernism. The culminating moment of several years of effort on Kessler’s part is the foundational gathering he organizes late in 1903 of scattered groups of secessionists from various parts of Germany to form a new body—the Deutsche Künstlerbund (the German Artists League)—designed to counteract the influence of Anton von Werner’s own union of German artists, the Allgemeine Deutsche Kunstgenossenschaft. Kessler’s aim, as he describes it in his diary, is “to eliminate the historical point of view insofar that history does not provide an aesthetic insight.” To that same end he succeeds in bypassing the Museum of Arts and Crafts and creating the “Grand Ducal Museum for Craftsmen”—after all, he writes, “painters are, or should be, principally craftsmen.”
In a pamphlet, Kessler spells out his vision for the new German Artists League: it must be tolerant of a great variety of styles, and not—unlike the von Werner coalition of artists—seek to “eliminate individualism.” “We must create,” he writes, a counter-force “which will enable talent to follow its artistic conscience in safety . . . For there can be no doubt, in art only the exceptional has value . . . Everything else is not only worth less; it is worth nothing.” Kessler explicitly draws the political parallel: the protection and fostering of individualism, he argues, should “be accepted as well in the political life of the nation.”
Though Kessler believes that the central purpose of the Artists League is to maximize the individual’s free expression, he doesn’t extend the democratic principle to organizing the affairs of the League itself. He argues against the proposition that the opinion of every member should have equal weight in deciding every issue that arises; that sort of mistaken egalitarianism, he insists, would invite chaos and paralyze the decision-making process. Kessler proposes instead that an executive committee of 30 members, elected for five-year terms, be empowered to make all decisions regarding such matters as membership applications and appointing juries. “You may call this framework elitist if you like,” Kessler boldly asserts, “but I call it representative—functioning—democracy.” His proposals easily carry the day and he, along with such friends and allies as Henry van de Velde, Max Liebermann, Max Klinger, and Eberhard von Bodenhausen, are chosen to serve on the executive committee.
During these same few years at the turn of the century, as Kessler invests enormous time and energy into creating an institutional structure to support contemporary art, he’s simultaneously augmenting his own private collection. Sometimes he buys through the galleries—two Cézanne pictures and a drawing from Vollard; Bonnard and Renoir from Durand-Ruel; Maurice Denis from Paul Cassirer, and then, also from Cassirer, he purchases in July 1904 for 1,689 marks—the equivalent then of $399, and today roughly $10,000—van Gogh’s masterful Portrait of Dr. Gachet; in 1990, before the recent art boom, it will re-sell for nearly a hundred million.
As Kessler meets and forms friendships with many of the leading artists themselves, he often visits their studios and buys directly from them—Signac’s Brume du Matin, two of Vuillard’s paintings, a bust by Rodin, several of Aristide Maillol’s sculptures, Odilon Redon’s lithographs, Max Liebermann’s drawings, Monet’s views of London, and so on—filling his Weimar home, amassing one of the critically important modernist collections of the time.
It’s a heady period for Kessler, yet his triumphs are shadowed by growing antagonism in Weimar to his “scandalous” attempt to corrupt the citizenry. As one local artist writes in the provincial newspaper, “in the new museum we encounter paintings and drawings that deeply offend our feelings. What is displayed is so revolting that we must warn our wives and daughters not to visit the museum.” The smear campaign against him reaches a climax in 1905 when Kessler mounts an exhibit of Rodin’s watercolors of female nudes, and the Grand Duke joins in denouncing it. Appalled at such crude philistinism, Kessler submits his resignation. The Grand Duke ignores it, informing Kessler instead that he has been dismissed.
When Prince Eulenburg retires to his estate in 1902, his intention, of necessity, is to keep a low profile. He does remain in touch, however, with close friends in Berlin and, to a diminished degree, with the Kaiser himself. Family life proves no substitute for the excitement of being at the center of the Emperor’s entourage and his chief confidant. “I enjoy the family little,” Eulenburg writes to Axel Varnbüler, one of his closest friends in the Liebenberg Circle. “I gladly go my way, like a peculiar sheep, who avoids the herd with a scowl. The dog ceaselessly and pitilessly drives him back to an acquired sense of duty. Heaven knows it’s not innate.”
Varnbüler is a suave, somewhat irreverent voluptuary whose diplomatic career Eulenburg has in the past advanced, and who sees Harry Kessler occasionally on the upper-crust social circuit. Kessler finds Varnbüler’s wife Natasha, with her flare for the dramatic—“all artifice and Slavic cleverness” (her father was a Russian sea captain)—more consistently entertaining than her husband, and Kessler and Natasha Varnbüler occasionally go together to the theater. Both are particular fans of Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, and Kessler deeply admires and forms close friendships with the contemporary theater luminaries Max Reinhardt and the designer Gordon Craig. Harry thinks his theater outings with Natasha are making her husband jealous—“laughable, if it’s true,” Harry writes in his diary.
Eulenburg is still closer to his other dear friend, Count Kuno von Moltke, his ghostly doppelgänger. Both men are gentle, musically inclined, ill-suited to military rigor—and problematically attached to family life. Kuno does marry, but he and his wife Lily are constantly at odds, sometimes arguing in public; the marriage quickly dissolves, and Philipp plays a role in its failure. He opposed the union from the first, having described the prospect as “extremely gruesome to me” and having claimed that Kuno was in a state of “despair” over the pending alliance.
Philipp does his best to advance Kuno’s career, though the task isn’t easy. Kuno’s sensitive, passive temperament, even his posture, bears so little resemblance to the ramrod model of Prussian manhood that few take him seriously. Though he manages to botch every political appointment Philipp gets for him, Eulenburg’s influence is such that Kuno, with each failure, somehow continues to move up a notch until his starting point as a mere military attaché culminates in 1905 with Wilhelm appointing him Commandant of the city of Berlin.
Many upper-class 19th-century men, especially in Germany, share the view that male friendship stands at the apex of human relationships, but Kuno’s version is so mawkishly sentimental that “friendship” with him takes on intractably erotic overtones. In letters between Kuno and Axel Varnbüler, they refer often to Philipp as “Philine”—the feminized version of his name—and Kuno, in describing his feelings during a temporary separation from Philipp, writes “I long for the old Philine . . . [I] must see her out of the feeling that we must hold each other doubly tightly after this tear in our intimate circle.” If this is “friendship,” it’s of a declared profundity that neither Kuno nor Philipp has ever made to their wives.
Harry Kessler knows both men from their occasional appearance at Cornelia Richter’s salon, and he finds both likeable enough, though in their linked sentimentality and deference to authority, foreign to his own sensibilities. Kessler’s capacity for friendship is profound, but he recoils from bonds he finds artificially cloying. He equates sentimentality with “phony feelings”—its presence is to him a sure sign that no genuine emotions are at hand; sentimentality in his view equates not with strength of feeling, but with its absence.
Kessler also feels at odds with von Moltke and Eulenburg’s adoring attitude towards the Kaiser, exemplified by their conviction that he rules by “divine right.” Absolutism of any kind raises Kessler’s hackles. In his view there are no preordained masters and no absolute truth, there are only ideas that are “absolutely compelling” because they meet felt needs at a particular point in time—and those ideas lose their validity with the passage of time and the rise of different needs. So it is, he feels, with the idea of God: “You can no longer argue,” he insists, “about whether the idea of God is true or untrue. It has been shown to be untrue”—shown by Nietzsche, among others. In all these ways Harry Kessler is a renegade, a traitor to his class.
Kessler is startled, in the summer of 1906, to get an invitation from Maximilian Harden, the hard-hitting editor of Die Zukunft, to lunch with him at the posh Palasthotel. It happens to be one of Kessler’s favorite restaurants in Berlin, but given his hectic social schedule he accepts reluctantly. He hardly knows the man, though they’ve been introduced here and there. Everyone, of course, hears about Harden; given his penchant for provocation he’s become the most feared—and widely read—journalist in Berlin.
Kessler shares many of Harden’s views, and in particular his fierce criticism of the person and policies of Wilhelm II. But Kessler’s interests are at this point in his life centered on culture, not political polemics. Increasingly connected to artistic circles throughout the continent, he spends nearly as much time in France and England as he does in Germany, and he tends to think of himself more as an urbane cosmopolitan than a German nationalist.
Could it be, he wonders, as he works his way across the Tiergarten to the hotel, that Harden wants to write a piece about the avant-garde German Artists League that he’s done so much to form? No, that seems unlikely; the League is nearly two years old and art has never fallen within Harden’s purview. What then? Some controversial aspect he’s dug up regarding the removal of the Nietzsche Archive to Weimar? Possibly, since Harden manages to find controversy wherever he looks and since Kessler did play an active role in the transfer of the archives from Naumburg. Still, Harden isn’t known for his interest in matters of philosophy or literature either.
Perhaps he’s caught wind of the splash Kessler made as director of the Weimar Museum and the whispering campaign that the town’s conservative burgher class designed to get him removed from his post. Yes, that’s probably it, Kessler decides, as he moves through the crowded Berlin streets (its population has nearly tripled in the years since it became the capital of a unified Reich following the successful 1870–71 war with France); Harden is thinking of writing about the Weimar controversy. Well, Kessler tells himself as he pushes through the fortress-like doors to the hotel, whatever it is, I’ll know soon enough.
On entering the restaurant, Kessler immediately spots Harden’s distinctive face—he’s still ruggedly handsome, Kessler thinks, though older than me, probably in his early forties; a pity he compromises his good looks with a permanently-creased brow of suspicion, his thin lips tightly drawn, his eyes beadily intent.
Harden is already seated at a quiet table toward the back of the crowded restaurant and, as Kessler approaches, rises quickly to greet him.
“So sorry to be late,” Kessler says, as they crisply shake hands.
“I’m grateful to you for coming at all,” Harden replies. “Most grateful.”
“When was it we last met? At the Richters’?” Harden looks puzzled. “Or perhaps it was at Walther Rathenau’s?”
“No, I think this is the first time. I should certainly have remembered.”
“Oh? My mistake. I thought we’d crossed paths earlier.” Curious, Kessler thinks, as he sits down opposite Harden: does he have a bad memory or a bad conscience?
“Perhaps I’m mistaking you for someone else,” Kessler mischievously adds.
The two are now seated facing each other. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering lobster and wine,” Harden says. “I hope that meets with your approval.”
“Indeed yes. Very extravagant of you.” They smile warily at each other.
At that very moment a waiter in white tie arrives at the table and, after serving the food, pours a small amount of white wine in Harden’s glass. He tastes it and smiles with pleasure. “Superb!” he tells the waiter, who, with a flourish, pours wine in both their glasses, then bows and departs.
Kessler glances at the bottle. “Château d’Yquem!” He exclaims. “You are being extravagant!”
“My pleasure . . . And the Ducal Museum, is it still making the locals rabid?” Harden asks.
“I’ve ended my role there. Too much else to do. My friend and ally Henry van de Velde will carry on the good fight.”
“I’ve seen a few of his buildings and admire them.”
“Did you know he designs furniture as well? My own house in Weimar—which I’m keeping—is filled with it. It’s wonderfully comfortable, elegant yet unpretentious.”
On they wander for a time, at one point segueing somehow into Pre-Raphaelite painting, with Harden expressing special enthusiasm for the work of Burne-Jones.
Kessler politely dissents. “Burne-Jones,” he says, “dreams of women he’s seen in photographs, not of real women in flesh and blood. But I do credit the Pre-Raphaelites with agitating for something new. Millais, I believe, is the only one of them to hint at a glimpse of the unforeseen. At best, he’s a continuation of Constable.”
“I’m clearly out of my depth here,” Harden responds, aiming for a graciousness that doesn’t come naturally.
“Augustus John,” Kessler continues, “is the real comer, though still in his twenties. He’s an uncombed bohemian, with more passion and fire than anything I saw in the Pre-Raphaelite exhibit recently in London.”
At the mention of London, Harden perks up. “And how do you find the English these days?”
Ah, Kessler thinks, so politics is to be our topic—what else would it be with Harden? “If you mean working-class Englishmen, their plight is lamentable. Everywhere I go, on the streets, in the shops, I see the same exhausted, pale faces, or rather clueless remnants of faces, that make you despair of democracy, if that’s what the English system is.”
“Surely more so than Germany,” Harden offers.
“I find, strangely, that autocracy and religious intolerance can go hand in hand with absolute freedom in moral, artistic, and economic matters—in Turkey, for example.”
Harden noticeably perks up. “Surely the democracies of England and America are in advance of our own autocracy.”
“I can only say that in both countries I saw a public of mute, tired workers too worn out from their daily labor to engage with political matters. When you see the people, you despair of democracy. When you see the nobility in Germany you despair of the aristocracy.”
“Yet Germany, thanks to Bismarck, is unrivaled in passing legislation to provide health insurance, pensions too, to factory workers.”
“Yet the average work day is still twelve hours long, six days a week—hardly conducive to health, not to mention participation in public affairs.”
“Forgive me, my dear Kessler, but nothing seems to please you.”
“Not in politics, you’re quite right. I don’t think the form of government most conducive to individual freedom has yet been invented. Which is why I devote myself to promoting contemporary art.”
“But there, too, our dear sovereign runs the show. Is that not true?”
“To a great extent, yes. And his taste is abysmal.”
“Did he interfere with your work in Weimar?”
“No, no. That would have been beneath him. But two years ago, he interfered with the committee appointed to choose art pieces for the St. Louis World’s Fair.”
“In what way ‘interfered?’”
Kessler laughs. “He disbanded it!”
“Really? I hadn’t heard a word . . .”
“It seems the committee dared to select a few—a very few—modernists. The Kaiser promptly turned over the choice of paintings entirely to—Anton von Werner!”
“Of course!—The Kaiser’s favorite.”
Kessler thought they were moving from art to politics, but as Harden’s guest he lets him have the reins.
“Several of us from the Artists League started a petition,” Kessler continues. “The Kaiser, you know, views the League as an alliance for the advancement of the Jews—as he so delicately puts it.”
“The Kaiser isn’t fond of Jews. I am one, you know.”
“I do.”
“That is, I was born one.” Harden stares fixedly at his guest, as if daring him to pursue the subject.
Kessler decides to oblige, annoyed at his host’s transparent eagerness for combat. “I see. You converted.”
“I’m a Lutheran now,” Harden says evenly, his tone some unpleasant amalgam of sarcasm and melancholy.
“Would it be rude of me to ask why?” Kessler asks blandly.
“Yes, it would!” Harden cheerfully responds. “But rudeness is my middle name. Haven’t you heard?”
“I ask because my good friend Walther Rathenau, also a Jew, regards conversion—though he’s in no formal sense religious—as futile. In two senses. Christians will still regard you as a Jew: superficially acceptable—unless you’re a Jew from Poland or Russia—yet fundamentally alien. And futile, too, because you cannot disinherit, will away, what is indelibly ingrained—like the Jew’s profound sense of apartness.”
“Your friend Rathenau is wrong. Judaism in Germany has become no more than an empty shell. It has outer form, but no content. A hereditary relic.”
“An empty shell? I myself am not Jewish, but—”
“—you’re a Count—of course you’re not Jewish!” Harden can’t help but chuckle.
“Yes, of course. I see your point.” Kessler looks uncomfortable.
“Come, come—I didn’t mean to interrupt you.”
“I have no religion of any sort myself, you understand, but it does seem to me that Jews are culturally distinctive in a number of ways. Their intense respect for the intellect, for one. And—at least so their detractors claim—an aggressive desire to achieve, a will to power, if you like. Both traits, as you surely know, have often been ascribed to you.”
Harden can feel his temper flare, but manages to control it. “It’s possible to be culturally distinctive within the context of absolute patriotism.”
“If public opinion will permit. Jews, as you have been quick to remind me, are barred from the higher ranks of the civil service, the nobility, and the officer corps.”
“And are disproportionately represented in the medical and legal professions, and in science—for heaven’s sakes, my dear Kessler, men like Einstein and Paul Ehrlich stand at the very pinnacle of the scientific world!”
“And silently endure the intense resentment of their colleagues.”
Harden shakes his head in dismay. “I can see there’s no persuading you.” Harden is ready to abandon the topic, but Kessler feels the need for a final statement.
“I cannot help but think it a fantasy, a fiction, to insist that the Jewish people are fully assimilated into German life. Such assimilation as exists seems to me partial, superficial, and hollow. I plainly see anti-Semitism in myself. Yes, I admit it. At lunch yesterday at the Natansons’ I thought to myself, ‘There’s an awful lot of talk going on here about how much something costs or is worth.’ What nonsense! There was a great deal more talk—excited talk—about the Nabis school and Vuillard and Bonnard’s new paintings. At the Richter salon, I daresay, there’s at least as much talk of how much something costs, yet I pass right over it. I tell you anti-Semitism is ingrained in all of us. And not just in Germany, though it surely flourishes here.”
“And I can only respond by telling you that as a dissimilated—converted—Jew, I find no doors closed to me that I would care to open in any case. Nor any venue for expressing any views I might wish to offer.”
Topic closed—though Kessler cannot resist a final thrust: “I’ve been told the Kaiser is furious that ‘a Jew’—which is how he refers to you—“should be able to make money by insulting him.”
“When I attack the Kaiser,” Harden icily replies, “it’s because he’s done or said something stupid. He provides abundant copy.” Harden pushes away his plate and signals the waiter to bring coffee. “Come now, Kessler—this petition you mentioned earlier . . . tell me more about that . . .” “I doubt it will interest you . . . The petition’s in support of the modern movement in art. Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Liebermann, Gordon Craig—a number of luminaries have signed it. Though not—predictably, I suppose—Stefan George. He objects to something he calls ‘interference with the transcendental importance of individual sovereignty.’”
Harden laughs. “Such rubbish. Affectation only suits genius; everyone else is ruined by it.”
“Exactly! It was in order to foster ‘individual sovereignty’—in opposition to lockstep academic conventions—that we formed the Artists League!”
“Has your friend Rathenau signed the petition?”
Kessler picks up Harden’s arch tone, but chooses to ignore it. “He has. Though not before lecturing me about the need to call more attention to the aesthetics of the machine—to ‘suggest to the workers,’ as he put it, ‘the freedom to be found in technology.’”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“Never mind. Rathenau’s a brilliant man, but I fear his longing to combine Prussian order with utopian socialism will never bear fruit.”
“Yes.” Harden has the uneasy feeling that Kessler’s range of interests and suavity will keep them moving further and further away from his agenda.
“Allow me, if I may, to return for a moment to the Kaiser. You see, aside from the sheer pleasure of your company, I did hope to seek your advice today about a certain matter that directly involves his Majesty.”
So here we are at last then, Kessler thinks. The topic is the Kaiser. Why beat around the bush so? “I consider his meddling with French influence in Morocco foolish,” Kessler offers. “It will bring Britain to France’s defense and further cement the Entente.”
This is not the topic Harden has in mind. Better to play along a bit, he decides, rather than risk another abrupt divergence. Harden shakes his head in mock sadness. “First the Kaiser provokes a crisis by visiting Tangiers, then when a conference is called at Algeciras to deal with the crisis, he impedes every effort at compromise—all the while announcing his ‘cherished hope’ for a ‘unified Europe.’”
“Meaning a Europe he controls. About as likely as Victoria returning from the grave—which I don’t doubt she could.” The two men chuckle. “Is it any wonder,” Kessler continues, “that our only remaining friend in Europe is Austria—so feeble it hardly counts as an ally.”
Harden lowers his voice: “I’m glad to hear we’re of one mind about this . . . this situation. But . . . but I . . . I in fact invited you to dine to ask for your counsel on quite another matter.”
Kessler inadvertently sighs. Another shift in topic? Oh well. “What then?” he mildly asks. “Do speak freely. I’m not as reserved as most people think, though I am discreet.”
“Precisely why I’ve come to you . . . the matter at issue is . . . is delicate . . . Prince Eulenburg, you see. Do you know him?”
“Our paths occasionally cross. Mostly at the Richters’ salon. But I barely know him. We move in quite different circles.”
“Gossip has a way of traversing them all.”
“Gossip about Eulenburg?”
“It relates to Kuno von Moltke.”
“The Commandant. We’ve met. He’s close to the Kaiser, is he not?”
“Not as close as Eulenburg. No, not nearly.”
“No one is. Have we arrived at the gossip?” Kessler smiles at his own bravado.
Harden pauses. He thinks one more circumvention may be needed. “Can I pour you more wine?” he solicitously asks. “Or perhaps a blancmange—a lovely sweet.”
“No thank you, I’m fine.” Whatever is coming, Kessler muses, I do wish it would hurry.
“Is . . . is Count von Lynar . . . Johannes . . . familiar to you?” Harden asks tentatively.
“Of the Potsdam Guards?” Kessler doesn’t wait for an answer. “I know that gossip, if that’s what you’re asking . . . about getting too close to his orderlies . . .”
Harden’s taken aback at Kessler’s frankness—as is Kessler. “Well, yes . . . after all, a commander in the Gardes du Corps, right-hand to the Crown Prince . . .” A pause ensues. Kessler is determined not to rescue Harden, but then his own civility takes over.
“My dear Harden,” he finally says, “in regard to such personal matters I prefer to speak in generalities only. Perhaps if we begin on the plane of philosophy . . .”
Harden looks perplexed, as if unable to make out a foreign tongue. The pause lengthens, then Kessler speaks again.
“I regard ‘sexual morality,’” he says, as if pronouncing the words from a great height, “as the artificial rules currently dominant in a given society . . . Such rules should never be confused with ethical behavior. You see my point?”
Harden manages an unconvincing murmur: “I . . . I believe so.”
“Take the case of Oscar Wilde. Surely a superior soul, a man richly gifted. Following his trial, the same people who once brazenly fawned over him, now insolently shun him. For what? There was nothing unethical in his behavior. But he’d broken the rules. My question to you is: Has Prince Eulenburg been unethical or, like Wilde, merely reckless?”
Harden runs through several possible replies in his own head, then settles for an unresponsive, “Both.”
“The same answer, I suspect, that the Kaiser would give.” Kessler is enjoying being more candid—enigmatically candid—than the man notorious for frankness; the competitive game has pierced Kessler’s natural reserve. “Which leads me to the next question: What purpose will you serve, in whatever it is that you’re proposing to do?”
“I haven’t determined on a specific course of action. Yet something must be done.”
“About?”
“About the Kaiser’s entourage.”
Kessler feigns astonishment. “The entire entourage?! That takes in rather a large group.”
“The Kaiser ignores and belittles most of them. Eulenburg and the Liebenberg Circle are among the few who actually have the Kaiser’s ear.”
“But my understanding is that Eulenburg has retired from court circles. Rheumatism and gout, I believe.”
“Retired until recently. It seems he’s written the Kaiser expressing a longing to see him again. His Majesty has promptly responded with a visit to Eulenburg at his Liebenberg estate. The two have subsequently hunted together in Silesia. At this point Eulenburg has not only rejoined the entourage, but the Kaiser has invested him with the Order of the Black Eagle. As you know, the highest Prussian order.”
“Should I be surprised? Offended? I don’t understand.”
“During the Kaiser’s visit to Liebenberg”—Harden lowers his voice to an ominous whisper—“only half a dozen other guests were present.”
“That strikes me as too large a number for intimate conversation. Don’t you agree?” Kessler is having a wonderful time. Harden looks dumbstruck. “I find that with six or more people,” Kessler continues, “the conversation splits off into two groups, each vying for triviality.”
Recovering his voice, Harden’s tone remains grave: “Among the few guests were Jan Freiherr von Wendelstadt, Raymond Lecomte, and—”
“—do you mean the secretary of the French legation?”
“One and the same.” Harden’s eyes are now alight with suppressed glee.
“Oh I see,” Kessler quietly responds.
“I’m sure you do.” There’s just a hint of accusation—or is it threat?—in Harden’s voice. “Lecomte—the most notorious homosexual on the continent. With von Wendelstadt a close second. It’s outrageous of Eulenburg to have surrounded the Kaiser with so rakish a group. Think of the possible scandal!”
“My dear Harden”—Kessler can’t conceal a smile—“just a minute ago you were deploring Wilhelm’s autocratic hold on power. I should think you of all people would welcome catching the Kaiser with a group of—what shall we say?—‘reprobates.’”
Even when trapped, Harden is quick with a comeback: “Did I mention that ‘Herr Tutu’ was also present?”
Kessler laughs—both at the nickname and at Harden’s agility. “I fear I’m not enough ‘in the know,’” Kessler replies, “to know who ‘Herr Tutu’ is.”
“‘The Sweetie’—why Kuno Moltke, of course!”
Kessler tries not to smile, but fails. “Moltke seems a perfectly decent fellow. Where’s the harm?”
Harden sighs deeply, suppressing the strong desire to blurt out “Don’t play Mother Superior with me, you sodomite!” Instead he blandly says, “I’m not alone in thinking that Moltke—and even more, Eulenburg—encourage the Kaiser to overestimate his abilities.”
“I doubt the Kaiser needs encouragement.”
“Look here Kessler!”—Harden’s exasperation suddenly boils over, though he quickly reins it in.
Aware that Harden is notoriously volatile, Kessler retreats to the innocuous. “Perhaps you overstate the danger of Eulenburg’s influence,” he calmly replies. “As I hear it—and to be sure, I hear little about politics—he’s using his influence with the Kaiser to ease our antagonistic stance towards the French. All to the good, in my view. But I take it that you disagree, you find his influence baneful.”
“I do . . . but not because of his peacemaking efforts.”
“Would you think better of him if he was a warmonger?”
Harden’s face flushes, but he manages once more to control his temper. “You confuse me with the Kaiser,” he says, his tone indignant despite himself. “Are you aware, my dear Count, that the Kaiser has declared that until the leaders of the Social Democratic Party are dragged out of the Reichstag and shot, Germany will never achieve its place in the sun?”
“Good heavens.” Kessler is genuinely surprised. “I count myself a loyal member of the SPD.”
“Prince Eulenburg recently wrote to a friend that he felt—”
“—excuse me, my dear Harden, but you seem to have access to Eulenburg’s entire correspondence! How can that be?”
Flaring at the implied accusation, Harden’s tone is more curt than he intends: “A portion of it only. As I’ve explained, I have some well-placed sources.”
Kessler discards indirection: “Wouldn’t ‘spies’ be the more accurate term?”
Kessler’s insistent parrying leads Harden to try on the alien role of supplicant: “Would you rather I not continue?”
The strategy works: Kessler abandons the game. “See here, Harden,” he says directly, “I am having trouble understanding where all this is leading.”
“If you’ll indulge me just a bit longer . . .”
“Very well . . . a bit longer . . .”
“As I was saying . . . Prince Eulenburg writes in one letter that he feels he’s ‘sitting on a powder-keg.’ He reports hushed talk of the Kaiser being on the brink of a nervous breakdown, perhaps even insanity.”
“I’ve heard such talk myself.”
“We all know that the Kaiser’s traumatic birth made his left arm useless, but who can say what other, unseen damage may have occurred? Damage perhaps to the brain.”
Harden lowers his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I tell you the man must go. Yes, I say it openly—at least to you. The Kaiser must be forced to abdicate before he drags the country into some monstrous adventure that engulfs the entire continent in war.”
Kessler’s eyes narrow, as if squinting to see clearly. “I think I begin to understand what you . . . you plan to force an abdication by discrediting Eulenburg, the Kaiser’s closest friend. Guilt by association, as it were.”
Harden finds himself yearning for a return to indirection: “I should have known. You’re way ahead of me,” he says placidly.
Kessler smiles grimly: “I’m barely keeping pace.”
“The era of personal rule must come to an end,” Harden spits out. A pause follows while both men take in the implications. “I assume,” Harden adds warily, “that such a view is congenial to you.”
“Are you inviting me to join a coup d’état?” Kessler smiles at what he knows is an absurdity.
“No one is planning a coup d’état—as you put it.”
“But you do have some plan of action. That much is apparent. Shall I guess?”
“If you like.” It’s no longer clear who is the cat and who the mouse.
“Let me be forthright, your preferred style: On what grounds do you plan to attack Eulenburg? What specifically has the man done? I’ve barely met him, but he seems charming and genial, if too conservative for my taste. Hardly the conspiratorial type.”
“Friedrich von Holstein disagrees. He blames Eulenburg for ousting him from the Foreign Office. He despises Eulenburg—and von Holstein can be a fierce enemy.”
“Holstein has many more enemies than Eulenburg. He’s played the intriguer for years.”
“But unlike Eulenburg, Holstein has a low opinion of His Majesty’s abilities and works to limit his personal rule. Here, let me show you something.”
Harden reaches into his breast pocket and extracts what appears to be a letter. “This is the copy of a recent letter Holstein wrote Eulenburg after resigning from the Foreign Office.”
Kessler holds up his hand in protest. “I don’t think so, Harden, I really don’t wish to—”
Harden interrupts him, his voice authoritative: “—this you must hear! No one will ever learn that you’ve heard it.” Without waiting for Kessler’s reply, Harden starts to read from the letter: “‘Your aim of many years, my removal,’ Holstein writes Eulenburg, ‘has now at last been achieved . . . I am now free, I need exercise no restraint, and can treat you as one treats a contemptible person with your characteristics. I do so herewith and expect to do more—”
“—‘your characteristics,’ indeed!” Kessler scoffs. “Should I assume the reference is to Eulenburg’s penchant for writing poems? Really!—what vileness . . .”
“Eulenburg has challenged Holstein to a duel.”
“A duel!—in this day and age! The whole thing’s preposterous.”
“Light comedy, I’d call it. It’s all been settled. In return for Holstein withdrawing his letter, Eulenburg has solemnly sworn that he had nothing to do with Holstein’s dismissal as Foreign Secretary. Both, of course, are lying through their teeth. And both will continue to intrigue against the other. Holstein at seventy has more taste for battle than Eulenburg at sixty.”
“How did you ever get hold of Holstein’s letter? Haven’t you had your fill of being charged with lèse-majesté?”
Harden smiles broadly. “I’ve been fined and jailed four times,” he says insouciantly. “Only a bit more than other journalists worth their salt. But it won’t come to that this time.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The dossier I’ve gathered is very full. Holstein himself has been most cooperative. And, I might add, Chancellor von Bülow as well. They believe more is at stake here, that the Liebenberg Circle is aiming at a full-scale seizure of power.”
“What nonsense! Eulenburg’s a poet, a spiritualist. His aim has never been anything more than becoming the Kaiser’s devoted friend. He wouldn’t know what to do with power if it was handed to him.”
“Perhaps you’re confusing your own distaste for intrigue with Eulenburg’s? As the dossier I mentioned proves, poetry and power can coexist very comfortably.”
“Dossier? You make it sound like a criminal trial.” Kessler uncharacteristically raises his voice: “How do you know what is slander and what is truth, especially when it comes from sources as self-interested as Holstein and von Bülow? What precisely are the charges contained in this so-called ‘dossier?’”
“To give you but one example: the Baden envoy, von Berckheim, has written in a letter that—I believe this is verbatim—Prince Eulenburg ‘harbors passions allowed in the Orient and tolerated in Russia, but punished as a criminal offence in this country.’ Von Berckheim cites various letters in his possession in support of his claim—including the Bavarian Prime Minister’s reference to Eulenburg’s ‘moral defects.’”
“I must say, Harden, I don’t wish to hear any further confidences. Nor am I prepared to provide any.”
Harden’s ears perk up. “Which suggests that you could if you chose . . .”
“I lead a private and circumspect life,” Kessler replies enigmatically but firmly. “Whatever it is that you plan to accuse Eulenburg of, I don’t wish to be implicated on any level.”
Harden decides he might as well go for the jugular: “As an ‘insider’ you must have heard talk of Eulenburg’s ‘activities’—some information that could—”
Kessler stands up abruptly. “An ‘insider’? That’s quite enough, Harden! I’ve heard all I intend to . . .”
“I can assure you of absolute anonymity,” Harden replies suavely. “You are not, after all, a political person.”
“Your suspicions are exorbitant, Harden. Like your reputation.” Kessler is angry, a state he rarely allows himself.
“Yes, I’m known for that,” Harden counters. He gestures invitingly to Kessler to sit back down. “Why don’t we shift the subject entirely . . . Do stay for a cognac. I understand you’re off to the continent for the summer . . .”
Kessler remains standing. “Should I act surprised that you know my plans?”
“Come now, Kessler . . . I am capable of congenial conversation, you know—”
“—regretfully, I have another engagement.”
Harden also stands up. “Very well. I can see you’re adamant. I do thank you for your time . . . it’s very good of you,” he rather formally adds.
Kessler nods stiffly. “This is a nasty business, Harden. You would do well to back off.”
“It’s not in my nature.” Harden’s voice somehow has a teasing edge, or so Kessler believes.
“More’s the pity.” Kessler turns unceremoniously and walks away. Harden smiles at his disappearing back.
Soon after, the scandal breaks. On November 17, 1906, Harden begins publishing in Die Zukunft an extended series of open attacks, culminating in two articles in the spring of 1907 that strongly imply the secret homosexual nature of the Liebenberg Circle. Harden places the revelations within a “disinterested” framework that expresses concern for the baneful political influence that Prince Eulenburg—“an unhealthy late Romantic and spiritualist”—exerts above all others over the Kaiser.
Eulenburg, Harden charges, has strongly endorsed Wilhelm’s view “that he is called to rule alone and that, as an incomparably blessed being, he may expect and beseech light and support only from the seat among the clouds, from the heights of which the Crown was bestowed on him; and to feel responsible only to that place.” Eulenburg’s “calamitous influence,” Harden writes, “should at least not be allowed to continue in the dark” and “the vermin surrounding the Kaiser must be cleared out.” Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow contributes his own bit: from the Berlin police he extracts the information that Prince Eulenburg has recently “slept with a rent boy in a hotel in Berlin.”
Shards of the Harden bombshell land everywhere, setting Berlin aflame. His focus in the articles is on Eulenburg and Kuno von Moltke, but Harden mentions by name a number of others, including the French diplomat Raymond Lecomte (“who as we know does not have to rely on the front entrance”). The gossip mill proceeds to grind out still other names—Eulenburg’s close friend Axel Varnbüler, and the general-intendant of the royal theater, Count von Hülsen-Haeseler. Some of the whispered gossip even has it that Eulenburg and the Kaiser have long been lovers.
Only Wilhelm himself seems disengaged from the enormity of the sensation Harden’s articles produce. The Kaiser has earlier denounced Harden as an “insolent Jew,” a “poisonous monster from some bottomless pit,” and he’s refused to allow Die Zukunft within sight. Yet his advisors realize that someone has to tell him about the articles, and some response must be made. Chancellor von Bülow is for a time considered the appropriate messenger, but his influence with the Kaiser has of late declined. Besides, von Bülow’s manipulative personality makes for uncertainty; will he attempt to defend Eulenburg, his benefactor? And if he does, will the Kaiser listen to him?
Someone suggests as a possible go-between Cornelia Richter, whose dazzling salon is the most illustrious in Berlin, attracting on occasion Prince Eulenburg himself. The Kaiser, however, dislikes women who push themselves forward, and it’s feared he might discount her report as “malicious nonsense.” Wilhelm’s military cabinet finally settles on the reluctant Crown Prince to break the news to his father. The Kaiser is at first disbelieving and dismissive, insisting that his dear Eulenburg has been defamed. But when told that the dignity of the Crown is at stake, Wilhelm reverses fields and lets it be known that Eulenburg must be “cleared or stoned.” On May 4, 1907, the Kaiser instructs his Adjutant-General to send Eulenburg an ultimatum: “the All-Highest Person [i.e., Wilhelm] expects to hear whether you have taken steps, and if so what steps, to start a legal action against certain suspicions expressed in . . . recent articles in the ‘Zukunft’ . . . His Majesty awaits an explanation as to whether you consider yourself beyond reproach with regard to these allusions . . . Your report is to be sent direct to His Majesty.”
Eulenburg immediately responds. “I declare to Yr. Majesty,” he writes, “that I consider myself beyond reproach. I believe I may also assume that more than twenty years of life together and the extremely thorough knowledge of my nature and character which Your Majesty’s perspicacious mind possesses cannot ever have allowed any doubt to arise on this score.” In regard to bringing a law suit, Eulenburg hedges: “I have hitherto hesitated to react to the gibes of the Zukunft . . . due purely to political considerations . . . I saw it as my duty towards Yr. Majesty and Yr. Majesty’s Government to overlook many a personal attack in order to avoid a lawsuit.” To bring action against Die Zukunft, Eulenburg argues, would provide Harden with an opportunity to fan the flames still further. In an attempt to bolster the Kaiser’s sympathy, Eulenburg adds that he’s taken to his bed, “completely paralysed by neuritis in both feet and knees.”
The Kaiser declines to call upon his (paltry) reserve of compassion. Having read the incriminating contents of Eulenburg’s correspondence with von Moltke, as well as secret reports of the vice police in Vienna, Munich, and Berlin, Wilhelm orders Chancellor von Bülow—who seems to have needed no urging—to send Eulenburg a peremptory directive: the Prince must forthwith return his decoration, the Order of the Black Eagle, and go abroad at once. Wilhelm has decided that the evidence against the Prince is so strong that it would be impossible for Eulenburg to exonerate himself in a court trial, and a verdict of guilty would have disastrous consequences for the prestige of the monarchy.
Eulenburg discovers within himself an untapped vein of iron. He lets von Bülow know that he considers flight abroad tantamount to admitting guilt, and reiterates—the product of denial mixed with a mistaken assumption of pedigreed immunity—his protestations of innocence. But he takes care to avoid any direct rejection of the Kaiser’s “suggestion” that he leave Germany, announcing instead that a debilitating attack of gout has confined him to bed at his Liebenberg estate. Harden, for his part, lets it be known that he has in his possession enough additional, and “crushing,” evidence to wreak considerably more damage if he chooses, though he’s content for now to let matters lie. He has, after all, already achieved his essential objective—to destroy the influence of the Liebenberg Circle and the support it unflaggingly gave to the Kaiser’s misguided sense of infallibility.
In the midst of this rapidfire cascade of demands and accommodations, no one seems to have given much thought to Kuno von Moltke—which has long been the story of this “likeable and decent” chap’s innocuous life. Yet Moltke himself has not been idle. Sharing Eulenburg’s misguided conviction that his noble pedigree will protect him, Moltke makes the disastrously bold decision to bring a civil suit against Harden for libel. Soon after, a hearing is convened in Moabit, at Berlin’s monstrously eclectic central courthouse.
Harden’s defense attorney, Max Bernstein, is a well-regarded figure in German juridical circles and an equally renowned hater of homosexuals. His known bias makes it all the more puzzling when he announces that the prominent sexologist Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, himself openly homosexual, and a Jew, will appear as a medical expert. Is he being called by the prosecution or the defense? Has Bernstein himself suggested Hirschfeld’s appearance or has it occurred over his objection? Will Hirschfeld’s view that homosexuality is an inborn, benign natural variant put him on the side of Moltke—or Harden? Confusing matters further, Hirschfeld is a known member of the Social Democratic Party, dominated by anti-monarchists and defenders of socialism, and a growing thorn in the Kaiser’s side. The rumor mill leans to the view that Hirschfeld will use his opportunity on the stand to exaggerate the amount of homosexuality in Wilhelm’s entourage; since he regards homosexuality as no cause for apology, will the result of his testimony be to discredit or to sanctify the Liebenberg Circle?
The more widely speculation spreads, the more expectations grow that the pending Moltke case will rival in notoriety the scrumptious scandal that surrounded the trial of Oscar Wilde in England a dozen years earlier. That seems all the more likely when the Berliner Morgenpost digs up and publishes a statement Hirschfeld made at the time of Wilde’s trial: “The married man who seduces the governess of his children remains free, but this genius of a writer has been put into prison.” Yes, the breathless public agrees, the prospects for the Harden trial are in every sense ravishing.
Though still only 39, Hirschfeld has already made a considerable reputation for himself—even while simultaneously becoming, as an openly homosexual man and a Jew, a figure of ridicule and disgust. He’d grown up in a large, progressive family in the spa town of Kolberg in present-day Poland and seems to have had a happy childhood. His father, Hermann Hirschfeld, a secularized Jew and civic-minded physician, became the leading figure in the small Jewish community in Kolberg, and helped bring to the town both running water and a sewer system. Among his acquaintances he’d counted August Bebel, one of the founders of the Social Democratic Party—and an early proponent of decriminalizing homosexual behavior.
Another of Hermann Hirschfeld’s early acquaintances had been the remarkable Rudolf Virchow under whom he completed his medical studies at Berlin University. Virchow had been among the few medical experts who (unsuccessfully) advised against the adoption of the anti-sodomy clause—the notorious Paragraph 175—in the German constitution of 1871. He was also the first German scientist to challenge the then-standard view of Jews as an entirely separate racial group unchanged through time in physiognomy and temperament. As early as the 1880s Virchow had insisted that there was no such thing as “pure” races, that Jews, like other Germans, displayed a variety of character traits—that, for example (and tellingly), at least 10 percent of Jews were blond (as were only about 30 percent of other Germans).
Virchow’s views found little favor in Wilhelmine Germany. The popular stereotype of the Jew was of a creature apart, biologically different from—and inferior to—Nordic Germans. Jews were believed to suffer a predisposition to insanity, hysteria, sexual perversion, and melancholia. Both the leading German psychiatric figures of the late 19th century, Emil Kraepelin and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, cited race—“hereditary degeneration”—as a leading cause (religious fervor was another) of the Jewish propensity to mental illness. And even the unconventional Karl Marx once commented, when characterizing his opponent, the Jewish socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, that Jews were “descended from the negroes who joined Moses in his flight from Egypt” and were “nigger-like”—which is to say, inferior to whites.
At the dawn of the 20th century, it’s widely agreed that the presumed “physical disabilities” which set the Jews apart denote moral incapacities as well: Jewish men may no longer be thought to menstruate (as was believed in the Middle Ages), and a certain amount of social assimilation exists in Germany’s cities, yet—to a greater extent than elsewhere in Europe—widespread antipathy to the Jews continues; they remain decidedly Other. In England, in contrast, Jews have become more comfortably assimilated and no notable racialist science has arisen to explain their “dangerously peculiar” attributes. Even in France—where vicious anti-Semitism periodically surfaces, as in the notorious Dreyfus affair—civil rights had been granted to Jews by the late 18th century.
In Germany endemic anti-Semitism exists side-by-side with an uneasy awareness that, although Jews make up only 1 percent of the population in 1900, they figure prominently in business and industry, account for more than 15 percent of the country’s doctors, and turn out more than 6 percent of university graduates. Yet prestigious academic and government appointments remain largely closed to them; a German Disraeli is unthinkable. Some German Jews, paradoxically, regard themselves as more fully integrated into German culture, and more widely accepted as “good Germans,” than in fact they are. Richard Wagner had in 1850 exemplified the deep-seated disparagement of Jews when he declared that “our whole European art and civilization . . . have remained to the Jew a foreign tongue.”
A bookish young man, Magnus Hirschfeld is physically unprepossessing—short and overweight, with stereotypically Jewish facial features, except for the bushy walrus moustache he grows (so his detractors whisper) to disguise them. As a young adult Hirschfeld acknowledges that his family’s Judaism has to have had some formative influence on him, but only, he insists, in a vague, tangential way. When a university student filling out a standard matriculation form, Hirschfeld lists under “religious affiliation” not “Jewish,” but “dissident”—consciously rejecting institutionalized religion in favor of scientific rationalism as his guiding principle in life. As someone who will be taunted and denounced as “a dirty Jew” throughout his life, Hirschfeld, ironically, never has more than incidental contact with Jewish life and institutions. During World War I he’ll attend a Zionist conference, but will come away from it more convinced than ever that the mission of the Jews is not to establish a separate state but to assimilate into—and change—the various countries of their birth.
Similarly, when tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews migrate to Germany in the early decades of the 20th century, bringing with them a revival of interest in Hebrew and Yiddish culture, some German Jews welcome them as bearers of the “authentic” version of their own watered down and hollowed-out assimilationist Judaism. But Hirschfeld—like the majority of Germany’s Jews—continues to give primacy instead to his national rather than religious identity. He does attend a performance of the Hebrew theater group Habimah, but, unlike Max Reinhardt and Albert Einstein who, respectively, hail it as “thrilling” and “truly monumental,” Hirschfeld rejects the revival of Hebrew as part of a regrettable tendency to emphasize Jewish “apartness”—instead of the preferred goal of creative assimilation.
From an early age Hirschfeld has been the predictable butt of jokesters and bullies, derided for being both a Jew and—in local parlance—a “sweetie,” a soft sister. He manages to insulate himself somewhat by focusing on his strengths—a fine intelligence, a profound capacity for hard work, and a high tolerance for isolation. As a young man he’s drawn to the arts, but eventually follows his father into medicine and opens a practice in the Charlottenburg area of Berlin. Initially specializing in hydrotherapy (the “water cure”), he begins, in 1896, to study human sexual behavior, with particular attention to homosexuality.
That same year, still only 28, Hirschfeld publishes under “Th. Ramien”—the first and last time he’ll use a pseudonym—the pamphlet, Sappho and Socrates, or What Explains the Love of Men and Women for Persons of Their Own Sex. In it, he lays out many of the views that will underlie his attitude towards human sexuality throughout his life, though he’ll constantly modify it around the edges. His bedrock principle is that same-sex erotic desire is biological—predetermined, fixed at birth, homosexuality can neither be acquired through experience nor changed through theological exhortation or medical intervention. Nor was homosexuality a pathology; it was simply one aspect of the “almost limitless” variety of erotic expression that characterized human sexuality—with no single form morally superior to any other. Only science—certainly not religion—could, in Hirschfeld’s view, bring us to the liberating understanding that “love is as varied as people are.” Religion, oppositely, with its emphasis on abstinence and procreation, propagated the mis-understanding that pleasure was sinful.
Quoting Nietzsche’s purported dictum, “That which is natural cannot be immoral”—Hirschfeld further argues that laws against homosexuality have no effect other than to instill disabling self-hate—and the suicidal destruction that often follows. It makes no more sense to persecute homosexuals, Hirschfeld insists, than it would to haul into court people with blue eyes; in neither case is choice at issue, nor, therefore, the legitimacy of punishment. Which is not to say, Hirschfeld contends, that all homosexuals are alike; along with Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis in England, Hirschfeld argues that homosexuals are no less diverse in personality, intelligence, aptitude and, yes, desire, than are heterosexuals. To elucidate the latter point, he posits—50 years before Alfred Kinsey—a scale ranging from 1–10 (Kinsey’s would be 0–6) for designating the object and strength of sexual desire.
The following year Hirschfeld establishes the Scientific Humanitarian Committee—chiefly aimed at the repeal of the anti-homosexual Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, which makes intercourse among men (not women) a punishable offense. One of the first to join the SHC is Leopold von Meerscheidt-Hüllessem, Berlin’s police commissioner. Married with children, Hüllessem is aware of his own homosexual inclinations—and also aware, in his official capacity, of the horrors wrought by the legion of blackmailers who prey on Berlin’s homosexuals. As early as 1885, Hüllessem establishes a police sub-division, the “Department of Homosexuals”—a testimony both to his enlightenment and to the flourishing nature of Berlin’s homosexual subculture (which Hüllessem’s leniency helps expand still further).
Hüllessem lets it be known that henceforth homosexual bars and clubs—but not the multiplicity of outdoor cruising spots, nor male prostitution—will be tolerated: no more police raids, plainclothes spies, paid informants, or graft. Hüllessem goes so far as to arrange “tours” for bona fide medical professionals and writers to the city’s homosexual nightspots, including the occasional same-sex costume ball. No less a figure than the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing acknowledges Hüllessem’s assistance when he publishes the pioneering Psychopathia sexualis. (Though one of the avant-garde members of PAN, August Strindberg, who also participates in a tour, pronounces it “the most horrible thing he has ever seen”). Involved in a cover-up to protect a well-placed friend from charges of rape, Hüllessem commits suicide in 1900. His policy of benign neglect of bars and clubs is continued by his successor, Hans von Tresckow.
Thanks to the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810, homosexual acts between consenting adults were made legal in France, Holland, and Italy, but not in Germany, nor England. Under the combined influence of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, there had been a period of forbearance in Germany regarding homosexuality at the beginning of the 19th century, particularly in Bavaria, where in 1813 all laws regarding sex had been liberalized, including those that punished homosexual acts. But by mid-century attitudes had again reversed; in 1851, Prussia had declared such acts “unnatural”—and punished those caught with prison terms. Then, in 1871, the newly united Germany passed a legal code that included the notorious Paragraph 175 which, using earlier Prussian law as a model, characterized male-male sexuality as “criminally indecent,” with jail terms mandated for those apprehended.
The Scientific Humanitarian Committee’s petition campaign to repeal Paragraph 175 gathers momentum over time; among those who sign it early on are Hermann Hesse, Franz Werfel, George Grosz, the socialist leader Eduard Bernstein, the theologian Martin Buber, Albert Einstein, Count Harry Kessler, Käthe Kollwitz, Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Émile Zola, and Leo Tolstoy—a veritable pantheon of celebrated figures. One of the earliest signatories is Hermann Hirschfeld’s old friend, August Bebel, head of the Social Democratic Party, who in 1898 introduces as well an unsuccessful bill in the Reichstag to void the offending paragraph.
Following the formation of Hirschfeld’s Scientific Humanitarian Committee, several other groups devoted to homosexual rights soon emerge, their views and agendas often at odds with his, leading to prolonged in-fighting and frequent character assassination. In 1902 Benedict Friedlaender and Adolf Brand organize the Community of the Special in opposition to Hirschfeld’s theory that homosexuality is inborn and confined to a distinct minority of “intermediaries” (the so-called “third sex” model). In their long-lasting journal Der Eigene, Friedlaender and Brand focus their efforts on eradicating the association of homosexuality with effeminacy and on restoring the “glory that was Greece”—emphasizing traditional “masculine” behavior and the primacy of homoerotic relationships between older and younger men. A third organization, the League for Human Rights, follows in 1903; based on a broad concern with the rights of the individual, including homosexuals, it proves particularly attractive to politically conservative homosexuals, and by the 1920s will become the largest homosexual organization in Germany.
Several leading members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (SHC) try to talk Hirschfeld out of appearing—as has been announced in advance—as an expert witness in the upcoming von Moltke trial. Among the most outspoken is Max Spohr, the pioneering publisher of Hirschfeld’s 1896 Sappho and Socrates—and three years later of his Jahrbuch (Yearbook for Intermediate Sexes), the scientific journal of sexology that sometimes runs to 1,000 pages and which is published annually for nearly 25 years. Nothing comparable is happening in English publishing: the pioneering figures—like Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds—either circularize their work privately or, in the case of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion, see their work officially banned. England is somewhat in advance of Germany in the easing of hostility towards Jews, but behind it in accepting homosexuality. In France, the censorship of books relating to homosexuality is tame compared to England—but public discourse on the subject is negligible compared to Germany, where the SHC offers a variety of lectures over the years that draw sizeable audiences.
Max Spohr is a man to whom Hirschfeld owes much, whose sympathy he counts on, and whose opinion he values. When Spohr warns him, during one of their afternoon walks through the Tiergarten, that “serving as a witness in Harden’s trial will run the risk of seeming to defend, whether meaning to or not, the journalist’s equation in his articles of homosexuality with immorality,” Hirschfeld takes the warning seriously.
“All that I will do,” he uncertainly replies, “is to provide my opinion that—”
“—your expert opinion.”
“—very well: my expert opinion, as to whether Count Moltke is homosexual or not. That is all.”
“And how,” Spohr asks, “do you propose to ‘prove’ that one way or the other? No man has come forward—certainly not Eulenburg—willing to testify that he’s had sexual congress with Moltke. Nothing less than that can ‘prove’ a damn thing. Only detailed testimony from his sexual partners could be convincing.”
“Not so, Max. It’s possible, I believe, to identify constitutional homosexuality through non-sexual behavior. For instance: the extent to which a man exhibits feminine characteristics or shows a certain kind of temperamental disposition which distinguishes him as a member of the ‘Third Sex.’”
Spohr snorts with derision. “The ‘Third Sex’! You know perfectly well what Benedict Friedlaender and others think about that!”
“Friedlaender, Brand—my detractors are many—as I needn’t tell you. Not to mention Albert Moll, still peddling the notion of homosexuality as a mental disturbance, though as a neurologist he should know better. I suppose,” Hirschfeld sighs, “this disarray of conflicting views is to be expected in a new field like sexology. I do regret, though, that Friedlaender and Brand are such misogynists.”
“In their hostility to Helene Stöcker and feminism they speak for many more male homosexuals than you do, with your support of her extremist views.”
“That I cannot help. I will not join Friedlaender in confining women to the kitchen.”
“The kitchen and motherhood!—he’s very broad-minded.” They both laugh.
“Yes, ‘broad-minded,’” Hirschfeld says sarcastically, “if you agree with him that men are more important than women, homosexuals more virile than other men, Christians more moral than Jews, and Germans superior to all other nationalities! No thanks.”
“He accuses you of an excessive interest in cross-dressers and prostitutes—of conflating them with homosexuals.”
“He accuses me of many things. So be it. I’ve invited him to give a lecture to the SHC.”
Spohr groans. “Oh Magnus . . . he’ll contradict everything you stand for. I don’t think he even believes homosexuality is inborn—let alone born with a female soul.”
“I’ll ask Helene to attend,” Hirschfeld good-naturedly says. “She’ll set him to rights.”
Spohr laughs derisively. “She’ll side with him. Helene doesn’t know, nor do I, that there are male souls and female souls. There are people, people with infinite variations.”
“About which we need infinitely more study.”
“On that we can agree. But Friedlaender and his kind are more interested in propaganda than scholarship. Look at how they explain lesbians—women disappointed or mistreated by men! They want nothing to do with the ‘inferior’ female species. They pine for the rebirth of ancient Greece, where handsome warriors with decidedly male souls”—Spohr smiles broadly at his own cleverness—“lusted after post-pubescent boys! . . . But we’ve gotten off the subject—I tell you, Magnus, that if you appear as an ‘expert’ in the Moltke trial, Friedlaender and Brand will denounce you as a charlatan.”
“They do anyway. I can’t help that. My position is no different from Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, not to mention our own predecessors in Germany, Karl Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing. I’m content to be in such company.”
“Krafft-Ebing, no less! For Heaven’s sake, Magnus, he thinks homosexuality results from a degeneration of the central nervous system—that it’s a disease! Whereas you insist it’s nothing more than a benign human variant. Do show more discrimination in your associations!” Spohr adds with some heat.
“Krafft-Ebing has made some real contributions . . .” Hirschfeld responds haltingly.
His indecisiveness further provokes Spohr. “Why in heaven’s name, for example, have you let Baron von Teschenberg join the SHC—especially after circulating that bizarre picture of himself!—oh so stylishly dressed, and leaning ever so coyly over a basket of flowers! Friedlaender has sent it everywhere, chuckling at his good fortune—and he includes von Teschenberg’s statement that the photo reveals his true nature—a poor womanly soul languishing away in a man’s body.”
“You shouldn’t make fun of people who are different, Max. I’m surprised at you. Teschenberg sincerely means what he says.”
Spohr stops walking and raises his voice. “Of course he means it! That’s precisely the trouble.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Hirschfeld calmly replies. “The mind takes precedence over the body.”
“Oh I see,” Spohr sputters. “If I think I’m a sea bass, then my ability to survive out of water is irrelevant?”
“You’re making an absurd analogy.”
They resume their walk. “I can understand the political advantage of insisting that erotic desire is involuntary. ‘What is inborn cannot be helped and should not be punished.’ Yes, yes, I understand all that,” Spohr impatiently goes on, “but one consequence of your biological explanation is that it confines same-sex desire to a small minority, the members of your precious Third Sex. You’re categorizing homosexuals as a separate species—as entirely Other.”
Hirschfeld looks unperturbed. “And your problem with that is . . . what?”
“Can’t you see?!”
“Apparently not, my dear Spohr. Do enlighten me.”
“In my view homosexual desire is much more common—even if not acted upon—than your theory allows.”
Hirschfeld looks genuinely puzzled.
“But it isn’t. It’s the biological property of a small minority.”
“There—there, you’ve said it! That’s precisely what bothers me about this Third Sex business. If only a small minority finds members of the same gender erotic, then how do you explain ancient Greece?”
“I don’t know enough about the ancient world to explain anything.”
“Come, come Hirschfeld! You’re an educated man, a polymath. You have all sorts of knowledge. Surely you know that in Periclean Athens every adult male citizen went down to watch the naked young men perform gymnastics, drooling over the curve of a calf, the musculature of the back, the—”
“—every male citizen?” Hirschfeld looks incredulous.
“Only the normal ones!” Spohr bursts out laughing at his own quick wit. “An adult male who did not lust after a comely teenager was considered highly peculiar!”
“I’ve lost your point . . .”
“How can you argue that today only a few third sexers find young men erotic when Athenian culture all but uniformly agreed they were?! You’ve backed yourself into a corner, Hirschfeld—unless you want to argue that it’s only in this enlightened century that we’ve succeeded in shifting the appreciation of male beauty from a near-universal to a small group of biologically-driven inverts. Some progress!”
“Isn’t it quite possible that Athenian culture over time—for reasons not yet understood—mandated an erotic attraction that ran counter to biology?”
“Possible—barely. But do you really want to characterize the fount of Western civilization as based on the un-natural?”
“Spohr, Spohr . . . you’re playing with words . . . ‘natural’, ‘unnatural’, who can define such abstractions?”
“No one! That’s my point! It’s absurd to pretend to know, to start pronouncing, on what is inborn and what is not!”
“Please, Spohr, STOP! I don’t ‘pronounce,’ I inquire . . .”
Spohr is adamant. “You sometimes pronounce. And you’re about to again.”
Hirschfeld looks puzzled. “I don’t follow you. I’m about to pronounce about—what?”
“The trial—the trial, for heaven’s sake! You’re about to testify, to state a point of view—isn’t that ‘pronouncing’? Isn’t that where this whole discussion began?!”
“I can’t shirk my responsibility to testify. After all, I’m widely considered an expert on—”
“—this trial is malignant!” Spohr nearly shouts. “Harden has brought the libel suit on himself! Who knows where the truth lies? If Eulenburg and Moltke are homosexual, let Harden prove it, though I don’t see how he can. Nor do I see how you can enter the lists in any capacity without falling off the horse. I predict a disaster for you—and for the Committee.”
Hirschfeld holds to an even tone: “I do not think so. But we will soon see, will we not?”
The Moltke v. Harden trial begins on October 23, 1907, in a courtroom so crowded with spectators that they spill out for several blocks outside the huge Criminal Court building located in the recently fashionable northwest Moabit section of Berlin, an area surrounded by elegant apartment houses, broad avenues, the Glass Palace, and Exhibition Park. The court building itself is a massive, anachronistic pile seemingly glued together from the leftovers of four centuries worth of architectural discards. Victorian church towers frame and collide with a 17th-century façade rumored to be a relic from the Wars of Religion. The building’s interior is dark and dreary: wood carvings, stained-glass windows, and look-alike portraits of past dignitaries underscore the stale air and the bewildering maze of halls, courtrooms, passageways, holding cells, and law offices. The most that can be said for the building is that it stands at the convenient intersection of an omnibus line and a horse-drawn streetcar—the attendant ruckus outclamoring the bustle and pace characteristic of all of Berlin’s rapidly expanding metropolis.
As his first witness, Harden’s lawyer Max Bernstein calls to the stand Moltke’s former wife, Lily von Elbe. Elegantly attired and strikingly attractive, von Elbe takes her seat in the witness box in an unhurried manner. Bernstein gives her a respectful nod, aware that her modish self-presentation will add conviction to her testimony.
Despite his reputation for brusque provocation, Bernstein begins politely: “I’m sure that I speak for the court, my dear Madame, in expressing our thanks for your willingness to provide testimony on matters of a most delicate nature. We are sensible of the fact that references will be made in these proceedings rarely heard in the public sphere, and never in the presence of a woman of refined disposition. We will do our utmost to limit the potential for embarrassment and will confine our questions as much as possible to generalities. Our highest priority, I assure you, is to avoid any needless offense to your sensibilities. We thank you in advance for your forbearance.”
A caustic trace of amusement crosses Lily’s face—no surprise to friends who know her tart temperament—but she quickly erases it, adjusting her features to that look of bland imperturbability considered appropriate to a woman of her station.
“Difficult as these circumstances are for me,” Lily says in a muted voice, “I consider it my duty to testify truthfully, however painful the obligation.”
“For which we are most grateful, Madame. I would like to begin, if I may, by asking you to characterize the conjugal relations that existed between you and your husband, Count Kuno von Moltke, during the two-year period of your marriage.”
“Yes of course,” Lily replies, a bare hint of mockery in her voice.
There’s a brief pause.
“Whenever you feel comfortable,” Bernstein says solicitously.
“In our two years of marriage we had conjugal relations on the first two nights.”
Another pause.
“Yes?” Bernstein prods.
“Yes?” Lily responds, with the merest suggestion of impishness.
She’s enjoying all this, Bernstein thinks. But the game will be played my way.
“I well understand how this inquiry offends your sense of propriety,” Bernstein says, feigning courtly concern. “Alas, the nature of this case dictates a line of questioning we would all, in ordinary circumstances, prefer to avoid. Regrettably, I must ask you what the nature of your conjugal relations consisted of subsequent to the first two nights of your marriage.”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?” Bernstein inadvertently sounds surprised.
“Nothing. After the first two nights we rarely shared a bed.”
“And whose choice was that?”
“My husband’s.”
“Did he offer any explanation?”
“No.” Lily is enjoying her recalcitrance.
“Did you ever share a bed subsequent to the first two nights?”
“Yes. But rarely. Only when paying an overnight visit to family or friends—our hosts assumed we wished to sleep together. On those occasions my husband placed a pan of water between us.”
There are audible gasps in the audience. Deliberately pausing for maximum effect, Lily continues. “He did so, he said, in order to discourage advances between us. As if I would dream of such a thing,” she haughtily adds. “By then I knew perfectly well that he preferred the company of men.”
“Do you mean in bed?”
“Good heavens!—how would I know that?!”
Bernstein hurriedly retreats. “Of course, of course, I see what you mean.”
“I cannot testify to what I never saw. If you recall, I wasn’t invited into his bedroom.” After a slight pause, Lily adds a non sequitur: “He said marriage was ‘a filthy business,’ that ‘a woman was no more than a lavatory.’”
There’s a collective grumble of astonishment from the audience.
Bernstein stumbles for words, sounding lost: “ . . . As for ‘preferring the company of men . . .’”
“What I can say,” Lily slyly begins, “is that I once saw my ex-husband take a handkerchief Prince Eulenburg had left behind after a visit, press it to his lips, and murmur, ‘My soul, my love!’”
This time, the stir in the courtroom is considerably louder and above the din one man audibly hisses, “A disgrace!”
The judge bangs his gavel and admonishes the spectators, threatening to clear the courtroom should there be further outbursts.
Bernstein proceeds. “May I ask what your reaction was to the incident with the handkerchief?”
“I considered it disgraceful!” Lily replies, deliberately echoing the anonymous shouter. “Revolting. At other times,” she continues, “I heard him refer to Prince Eulenburg as ‘my soulmate,’ and once I even overheard him tell another man that Eulenburg was his ‘one and only cuddly bear.’ They often referred to Kaiser Wilhelm as their ‘darling.’”
A growl of disapproval rises from the spectators. The judge again bangs his gavel, but doesn’t make good on his threat to clear the courtroom.
“What was your reaction on hearing those terms of endearment?”
Ignoring the question, von Elbe says with unexpected vehemence, “Prince Eulenburg had opposed my marriage from the beginning, opposed it vehemently. He once said to me angrily, ‘Set my friend free, give my friend back to me.’ I never suspected the real reason for his—” She stops in mid-sentence.
For a moment, Bernstein lets her abrupt silence hang in the air, then coaxes her into finishing the thought.
“—Yes? What was it that you never suspected?”
Von Elbe again ignores his question. “Kuno—Count Moltke—spent more time with Eulenburg than with his own family, including on Christmas Eve. I told my husband that I wanted a divorce.”
“How did he react?”
“With utter calmness. He said he would make no objection if I began proceedings. Indeed, he seemed relieved at the idea. We separated soon after. He said to me, ‘I don’t find you revolting as a human being, but rather as a woman.’”
“Good heavens!”—Bernstein’s shock is calculated, and he quickly recovers. “I don’t believe I have any further questions for the witness,” he says, his tone now one of gratified complacency.
As Lily von Elbe steps down from the witness chair, the crowd vigorously applauds her. The judge makes no objection. Lily momentarily glances towards Harden. The two exchange a barely perceptible smile.
The next witness called is an attractive young man in his early twenties wearing the uniform of the Volunteer Rifle Corps, Lancer Squadron. Bernstein begins by asking him to state his full name and the regiment in which he serves.
“My name is Stefan Bollhardt. I enlisted in the Cuirassiers Rifle Corps two years ago and currently hold the rank of Oberleutnant. Until recently, I was stationed in Potsdam.”
“Thank you, Oberleutnant Bollhardt. Let me begin by asking whether the name Adolf Brand, or the publication Der Eigene, mean anything to you?”
“One of my fellow officers told me that he was a friend of that fellow Brand. I’m pretty sure that was the publication he showed me.”
“Der Eigene?”
“Yes, I’m pretty sure.”
“What did you make of it?”
“It talked about ancient Greece.”
“Can you be more specific?”
“The lost heritage of Greece . . .” Thinking Bollhardt is about to complete the sentence, Bernstein lets a moment pass, then somewhat irritably says, “Yes . . . yes . . . the ‘lost heritage’ of—what?”
“Oh—of male bonding, which, it said, was the highest kind of relationship . . .”
“Spiritual or carnal bonding?” Bernstein abruptly asks.
Bollhardt looks stunned, as if someone had slapped him hard across the face. “I . . . I . . . don’t know,” he stumbles on. “I really just, uh, glanced . . . at it, you know. I remember something about . . . about—”
“—Yes?” Bernstein again interrupts, his voice snappish. “Surely, my dear Oberleutnant, you are able to recall something of—”
“—it was about male bonding . . . the lost Greek tradition because of . . . of—yes, lost because of ‘the barbarous repression of Christianity,’ it said.”
A few angry murmurs erupt in the courtroom.
“Very good, Oberleutnant. Now, please tell the court more about your experiences when stationed in Potsdam.”
“You mean what I told you about Johannes Count von Lynar?”
“Yes,” Bernstein gruffly responds, annoyed at the exposed implication that Bollhardt has been rehearsed.
“Well, Count Lynar has a villa in Potsdam and he often throws parties . . .”
“What sort of parties?”
“Parties for . . . men . . .” Bollhardt stops himself. Bernstein makes the instant, shrewd decision to throw Bollhardt a curve: “Tell the court, if you will, about the ‘cuirassiers’ ’ uniforms.” A puzzled murmur spreads among the spectators. Bollhardt himself seems confused.
“Our uniforms?”
“If you would.”
“Well . . . as everyone knows, we wear white pants and knee-high boots . . . Everyone knows that . . . But now that’s been forbidden. I mean in public.”
“And why has it been forbidden?”
Bollhardt’s face flushes. “It brought us unwanted attention.”
“‘Unwanted’? Please explain.”
“Well, you see, our uniforms, the white pants, are . . . tight and . . . and that seems to appeal to . . . to an element . . . in the male population.”
“A homosexual element, is that not correct?”
“Well, yes. But it’s okay to wear the pants at private parties, like at Count Lynar’s villa.”
“At the Count’s parties.”
“Yes. Both officers and enlisted men.”
Bernstein swirls around dramatically and points directly at Count Moltke, seated at the prosecution’s table. “And was Count Moltke among those officers?”
“Yes sir. I saw him often at the parties. We would drink a lot of champagne.”
“Were there women at these parties?”
“No, sir. After a lot of champagne, some of the men would, would . . .”
“Would what, Officer Bollhardt?”
“Would . . . well, I guess you could say, would . . . get amorous.”
A commotion erupts in the courtroom—sounds of laughter, punctuated by derisive hoots. This time, the judge does call the crowd to order.
Bernstein has remained stony-faced throughout. Clearing his throat loudly, he turns to the witness: “And did you yourself participate in these, er, activities, Officer Bollhardt?”
Bollhardt looks stricken, and blushes.
Bernstein repeats his question, this time reminding Bollhardt that he’s testifying under oath.
Bollhardt swallows hard, then mumbles a few words: “ . . . Well, participating? . . . I wouldn’t call it that, I think . . . some caresses maybe . . . allowing myself to be caressed . . .”
“You say ‘caressed,’ Officer Bollhardt. Caressed by several people?”
“Yes sir.” Bollhardt looks sheepish.
“And was one of those people Count Moltke, perhaps?”
“Oh, I couldn’t say, sir,” Bollhardt bursts out. “It was . . . it was quite dark, you know!”
The spectators erupt in laughter. Two young men in the middle of the crowd stand up and pantomime being blind men “accidentally” bumping into each other, feeling up each other’s pant legs—to a sprinkling of applause, and high-spirited shouts of “Degenerates! Villains!”
The judge again bangs his gavel, but to no avail. Unable to silence the crowd, he shouts above the din that “Court is adjourned! . . . We reconvene . . . at ten tomorrow morning.” He then pushes back his chair and strides from the platform. Officer Bollhardt beats a hasty retreat through a side door while Bernstein stands his ground, arms folded across his chest, a contented smile on his face.
The following morning the judge opens the court session with a brief but stern warning that, should there be any “outrageous breach of decorum” such as characterized the preceding day’s testimony, he will bar all spectators for the remainder of the trial. “The dignity of the juridical system,” he sonorously intones, “is no trifling matter.” The crowd takes his no-nonsense tone seriously. Noise dies down to an intermittent whisper. A general stiffening of posture is perceptible.
The morning session opens with Harden’s lawyer, Max Bernstein, calling Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld to the stand. Visually, Hirschfeld fits the physical stereotype of a Jew and his appearance elicits a low murmur of disapproval—which the judge chooses to ignore.
“The concluding witness for the Harden defense,” Bernstein solemnly intones, “is Doctor Magnus Hirschfeld, the well-known expert on human sexuality. Would you be good enough, Dr. Hirschfeld, to begin by telling the court why it is that you qualify as an expert witness in these matters.”
“I chair the Scientific Humanitarian Committee,” Hirschfeld matter-of-factly states, “an organization devoted to the repeal of Paragraph 175 of the German penal code, the paragraph that calls for the punishment of homosexual behavior.”
“You do not feel that punishment is befitting?”
“I do not. I consider homosexuality to be a natural variant found among some men and women. Certainly not a majority of men and women. Of course only a minority of human beings are left-handed, or have blue eyes. We do not send them to prison for having been born with uncommon features.”
“When you use the term ‘natural variant,’ is that merely your opinion or is it established scientific fact?”
“The scientific study of homosexuality goes back no further than the middle of the last century. Yet we have amassed a considerable body of evidence on the subject. Specialists in the field, among whom I count myself, disagree on some matters but are nearly unanimous in the view that homosexuality is innate. One is born homosexual, one does not become homosexual.”
“The court will no doubt be eager to learn”—Bernstein’s tone is arch—“on which matters the experts in the field agree or disagree. But may I ask you, Doctor Hirschfeld, to begin what will no doubt be your edifying testimony by telling us whether you believe homosexuality to be a disability?”
“Yes, in some sense. Because our society—unlike Periclean Athens, say—tends to regard male-male sexuality as degenerate, sinful or criminal—often all three. This attitude, in turn, leads to self-doubt, blackmail, and sometimes suicide. I refer you to the recent well-known case involving Friedrich Alfred Krupp, the industrialist.”
There’s a stir in the audience at the mention of Krupp’s name, but Hirschfeld continues imperturbably. “In the Middle Ages, the mentally disabled were thought to be possessed of the devil—and were often burned at the stake. Fortunately that view has become outmoded. Not so with homosexuality. One well-known journalist recently referred to it as ‘dog morality.’ That view will in time become equally outmoded.”
“You referred to the Krupp case.”
“Yes. I feel sure that most people recall it vividly. The German press made a scandal of it, hounding the poor man to his death. Nor is his an uncommon case. There have been numerous instances when both the press and individual blackmailers have led the persecuted victim to kill himself. There was the terrible death recently at the—”
Bernstein, exasperated, interrupts: “—without going into too much detail, Dr. Hirschfeld, about matters extraneous to this trial, I should like to call your attention to—”
“—‘extraneous’? I hardly think so. Were it not for the terrible consequences in our society of being labeled a ‘homosexual,’ I cannot think Count Moltke would ever have brought a libel suit against Mr. Harden in order to clear—”
“—yes, yes, Dr. Hirschfeld, I do see your point.”
“Then I may continue?”
Bernstein sighs deeply. “If you wish . . . though not too detailed, if you please . . .”
“My point is simply that when a prominent journalist like Mr. Harden calls someone ‘homosexual,’ it’s taken to be a libelous accusation. Yet speaking scientifically, the designation is morally neutral. From what I’ve been able to learn, Mr. Harden has no particular prejudice against homosexuals and has even been a signatory to our petition to drop Paragraph 175 from the penal code. He appears to be less biased than is the case with most Berliners. I cannot pretend, of course, to know what was in his mind when he referred to Count Moltke as a ‘homosexual.’ Was the intent to pay him a compliment? I very much doubt it. Was he attempting to defame Count Moltke? It would seem so. Perhaps he was merely being descriptive, with no moral judgment whatever implied. Only Mr. Harden can tell us.”
As all eyes turn towards Harden, seated at the defense table, he instantly wipes away what had been a smile of amusement.
Bernstein feels momentarily paralyzed, his head full of contradictory impulses about how to proceed. The landscape seems strewn with unexploded bombs.
“Am I correct in assuming,” he tentatively begins, “that had you been in Count von Moltke’s place, you would not have brought charges of libel against Mr. Harden for calling you homosexual?”
“I would not,” Hirschfeld urbanely replies. “I have long been entirely open about being homosexual. There are no grounds for shame or guilt. Many of the world’s greatest figures have been homosexual. Shall I name a few?” Hirschfeld throws Bernstein a mischievous smile.
“I take your point. Doubtless the list is long.” He pauses, as if again uncertain about what question might yield testimony favorable to his client.
“Germany,” Bernstein hears himself saying, as if portentously channeling the muse of history. “What can we say about Germany? Our traditions, our standards . . . Are we not a singular people, with our own perspective on these matters?”
Hirschfeld smiles inwardly at so artless a question. He’d expected more subtlety from the well-known lawyer. “Goethe, Germany’s greatest man of letters, might be a good place to begin. How, for example, are we to understand Goethe’s lines, ‘Happy are they who, without hatred, hide from the world, hold a friend in their heart, and enjoy life with that friend’? Is that not a very German form of expression? It speaks to the romance of friendship, the deeply held German conviction that male bonding has a profound spiritual dimension that transcends any relationship between a man and a woman.”
A stunned silence greets Hirschfeld’s invocation of the revered Goethe.
Bernstein finally ends it: “Perhaps some will feel,” he suggests, “that artists and writers are a peculiar breed. Can you provide examples from other fields?”
“Yes of course. But let me first say that in this country, the glorification of male friendship has, unfortunately, been the handmaiden of female denigration. Misogyny, I would venture to say, is more pronounced in Germany than elsewhere in Europe—despite the best efforts of feminists like Helene Stöcker, with whom I feel a deeply sympathetic—”
“—really, Dr. Hirschfeld!” Bernstein’s annoyance is more apparent than he intended. “I don’t wish to be rude, and the court very much appreciates your remarkable erudition . . . but I, I must ask you to share only that part of it which is directly responsive to the question.”
Hirschfeld appears unruffled. “And that question was—?”
“Never mind, never mind . . .”
“Oh—now I recall. You wanted some examples of distinguished Germans who were homosexual. You wanted non-artists, I believe, since artists are known to be peculiar.” Hirschfeld intended a bit of comic relief and is pleased to hear some laughter from the audience.
“Will King Ludwig II of Bavaria do? Perhaps he’s a bit obscure. A better choice might be Frederick the Great.” Hirschfeld grins happily, a small pachyderm dancing among the daisies. “As you probably know, Frederick never cohabited with his wife. When a young man, he tried to run away with his dearest friend, Hans von Katte; after the King—King Frederick William I—apprehended the pair, he forced his son to witness von Katte’s beheading. Yes, it’s safe to say that Frederick the Great is among those who—shall we say, ‘jumped the line’—that is, between spiritism and eroticism—as his correspondence with Fredersdorf makes abundantly clear, and which—”
“—forgive my interrupting again, Dr. Hirschfeld, but your use of the term ‘spiritism’ inevitably brings to mind the Kaiser’s known interest in the subject, along with certain members of his entourage, including Prince Eulenburg. Do you mean to imply that—?”
“—I’m aware that your client, Mr. Harden, has attacked the Liebenberg Circle, and in particular Prince Eulenburg, as—and here I believe I’m quoting him directly—‘a nest of spiritism.’ By which he meant, apparently, people with a pronounced interest in mysticism and the occult. I am myself an admirer of the Kaiser’s, but have had no contact with him or his intimate circle, and am therefore in no position to evaluate the accuracy of Mr. Harden’s description.”
Bernstein sits resignedly in a chair near the witness box—an acknowledgement of defeat in his attempt to stop a locomotive with his bare hands.
Hirschfeld continues smoothly on: “I can only say that I myself have never been drawn to the practices of clairvoyance or hypnotism. Far from being interested in contacting through séance the world of spirits, I have no religious conviction of any kind, nor any belief in the miraculous.”
“I thank you for your candor, Dr. Hirschfeld,” Bernstein says mechanically. “But I would urge you to conclude your current train of thought.”
“I believe I was speaking of Frederick the Great and had been about to mention as well his brother Heinrich, who actually dedicated a temple to one close male friend, inscribing on its portal, ‘Testimony of a grateful heart.’ But one could go on and on . . . German history provides an ample supply of candidates who seem to have crossed back and forth over the line dividing spiritual friendship and carnal knowledge.”
Bernstein suddenly sees an opening and rises from his chair. “And are we to assume that your view of these matters is widely held among your colleagues?”
“Widely, yes. But not unanimously. Not even within the Scientific Humanitarian Committee. In his recent book Renaissance of Uranian Eros, Benedict Friedlaender uses the porous borderline between nonsexual friendship and amorous sexuality to posit what he calls ‘physiological friendship’—that point, often reached, when tenderness merges into eroticism. The erasure of that fine line is regarded by Friedlaender as an achievement of the highest order.”
“And how do you regard it?”
“How one views the difference between loving friendship and erotic love hinges on the historical moment, on the national customs then prevailing. What is considered acceptable or desirable behavior shifts through time and across cultures. I agree with Friedlaender’s defense of homosexual behavior, but I would not rank it—or heterosexual behavior, for that matter—as being of “the highest order.” I do not believe in a hierarchy of erotic expression, one form being ‘better’ than others. I find sexual expression of various kinds equally acceptable—as long as no force is involved, nor any person under the age of sixteen.”
Bernstein is determined to bring closure: “Which brings us, Doctor Hirschfeld, to the heart of the matter for this hearing. In Die Zukunft, as you know, Mr. Harden has described Count von Moltke and Prince Eulenburg as ‘homosexual.’ My question for you is: ‘How does one know? What scientific criteria do you employ when deciding whether an individual is or is not ‘homosexual?’”
“A very difficult question. In my own work, I have been much influenced by the renowned evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, and in particular by his view that the intricate interaction of internal secretions within individuals is principally responsible for outcomes relating both to gender and to sexual attraction.”
Due to audible giggling in the audience, Hirschfeld pauses. When the commotion settles down, he continues: “That is what I meant earlier in referring to a continuum, a spectrum, different individuals landing on different sites along that spectrum. In a widely dispersed questionnaire, our Committee found that only 2 percent of the population is exclusively homosexual, but many more people fall along intermediate positions on the spectrum. Some people, for example, may be psychically homosexual, though they themselves are unaware of the fact and though they have never had a homosexual experience.”
“Can you explain—briefly—what you mean by ‘psychic’ homosexuality?”
“Certainly. One must first ask, ‘Is there a primary orientation towards members of one’s own sex?’ Does the individual man prefer the company of other men rather than women? Does he invest greater emotion in his friendships with men than he does with his female acquaintances, even with his wife? A further issue is that some active homosexual men show no outward signs of their nature—they give a thoroughly masculine impression; nothing in their manner, appearance, or behavior suggests sexual attraction to other men. Other homosexuals—no one has exact figures—betray their erotic natures in various ways: nervousness and oversensitivity, for example, squeamishness, a tendency to depression. Other manifestations might be the elegant decoration of one’s home, the profusion of silks and satins, the excellence of the cooking, an interest in flowers and birds; and as well, oppositely, a lack of interest in typical male pursuits like politics or hunting.”
“Perhaps I misunderstand you, Doctor Hirschfeld, but haven’t you just described symptoms, qualities, and behaviors that we associate with the female sex, but not necessarily with male homosexuality?”
“You have understood me perfectly,” Hirschfeld replies. “I have been describing a female soul. But a soul, in the case of a homosexual man, housed in a male body, and a body, incidentally, anatomically intact regarding the testes, prostate, penis, and—under the microscope—spermatozoa. This is precisely why I have referred to such men as a Third Sex: a female soul in a male body.”
“Am I correct in assuming, then, that it is accurate to refer to an individual as homosexual even if he has never engaged in the crass acts of oral or anal copulation with a member of his own sex?”
“You would be correct. Not having engaged in such behavior, the individual you describe would be entirely sincere in denying that he is a homosexual, since he is defining that term—as do most people—in regard to his behavior, not his psyche.”
“Allow me at this point, if I may, to underscore your point, Dr. Hirschfeld. In the articles Mr. Harden wrote for Die Zukunft, he never once accused Kuno von Moltke of engaging in homosexual acts. He confined his description solely to the Count’s homosexual orientation.”
“To the best of my knowledge, that is correct. Some men, I might add, including some decidedly virile ones, are quite unaware of the feminine features of their own psyches or, for that matter, their erotic attraction to other men. Such an individual could accurately insist that he is not homosexual. He is not lying, nor guilty of perjury. According to his understanding, he cannot legitimately be labeled homosexual because he has never had sexual congress with another man.”
Hirschfeld adds—in testimony that would become much quoted—that “whether a person engages in homosexual behavior is irrelevant from a scientific perspective. Just as some heterosexuals live celibate lives, so too can homosexuals express their love in an idealized, platonic manner.”
“Moreover”—as Hirschfeld signals that he’s still not finished, Bernstein unintentionally lets out a sigh of resignation. Catching it, Hirschfeld laughs good-naturedly and calls over, “Do not despair, Counselor, I have very nearly completed my testimony.”
Bernstein gives Hirschfeld a mock-courtly bow, as the audience breaks into laughter.
“To conclude,” Hirschfeld goes on, “the phenomenon of bisexuality is quite real. Many men who engage in erotic behavior with other men, at various points in their lives also have quite satisfactory sexual congress with women. And the same, in reverse, is true of lesbians; many have had sex with men and many are married to men. Indeed, as we know from the study of embryology, the fetus up to a certain point is undifferentiated in regard to sex.”
Hirschfeld catches a glimpse of Bernstein rolling his eyes upward, as if to say “When will he stop talking?!”
In reaction, Hirschfeld makes a quick adjustment: “I fear some of this is too technical—too scientific—to be readily understandable to nonprofessionals.”
There’s a collective groan of agreement from the audience. In response, Hirschfeld good-naturedly says, “ . . .I will try to conclude in everyday language.”
Bernstein smiles with relief: “That would be much appreciated, Dr. Hirschfeld. If I may, I would like to pose a direct question to you.”
“By all means. I assure you that I wish to make this difficult subject as intelligible as possible.”
“And what an excellent job you’ve made of it!” Bernstein’s tone is transparently insincere. “I believe we’ve now arrived at the point where I can pose directly the central question at issue in this trial.”
As Hirschfeld’s mouth opens to reply, Bernstein hurries on: “Was Mr. Harden accurate in describing Count von Moltke as ‘homosexual,’ or, to put it another way, Is Mr. Harden guilty of libel, as Count von Moltke insists? With the background you’ve already given us, I now ask you to address that question directly.” Bernstein gives Hirschfeld a sharp look. “And only that question.”
“Certainly,” Hirschfeld agreeably responds. “To do justice to the question, however, I must begin with—”
“—forgive me, Dr. Hirschfeld, but given the lateness of the hour, we do not wish, surely, to try the court’s patience.” Bernstein’s exhaustion is now patent.
Hirschfeld “innocently” sails on: “I simply wish to make clear that I have no personal acquaintance with any of the parties to this legal suit. The conclusions I’ve offered are drawn not only from my scientific studies but from what I’ve observed in the course of this trial. I refer in particular to the testimony of Count von Moltke’s wife. She has made it clear that he is strongly aversive to sexual contact with women. I would add that his visage appears unmanly, neurasthenic, lacking in strength and vigor. Conclusive as well, in my opinion, is the fullness with which he has expressed his romantically passionate devotion and intense love for, among other men, Prince Eulenburg and Kaiser Wilhelm II.”
“The court duly notes, Dr. Hirschfeld”—Bernstein’s tone drips with sarcasm—“that your admirable integrity propels you to situate your observations so carefully. Now then: do let us proceed.”
“In conclusion, then, I believe that given the plaintiff’s feminine side, which strongly deviates from the norm, he could accurately be described as an ‘unconscious homosexual.’”
Hirschfeld’s statement is so unexpectedly stark that it produces a considerable stir among the spectators.
The judge uses his gavel to quiet the courtroom, while Bernstein, nearly inaudible, profusely compliments Hirschfeld on having concluded his testimony.
As he rises to step down from the witness box, Hirschfeld again speaks, his voice carrying over the courtroom commotion: “I want it to be absolutely clear that I am not saying Count von Moltke ever progressed to actual sexual activity with other men. I’ve heard no evidence to that effect. The Count has not broken the law as defined by Paragraph 175 in the German penal code.”
In the ensuing tumult the judge manages to adjourn the court until the following day.
On reconvening the next morning, von Moltke’s lawyer begins calling witnesses for what turns out to be a brief and pedestrian response. He attempts no cross-examination of Hirschfeld’s testimony, though it proves centrally important—and immediately controversial, with some of his fellow experts questioning the very existence of a “psychical” form of homosexuality (“Is a man’s ‘softness of skin,’” one asks, “also a sign of psychic homosexuality?”).
In the upshot, the judge acquits Harden of the libel charge—which is tantamount to validating the assertion that von Moltke is homosexual—and the Count is forced to pay all court costs. In announcing his verdict, the judge declares that von Moltke clearly “has an aversion to the female sex and an attraction to the male sex.” The judge adds, echoing Hirschfeld’s testimony, that Moltke “has certain feminine features”—his passive temperament is cited—“characteristic of homosexuals.” The judge then adopts Hirschfeld’s distinction between homosexual acts and “abnormal sexual feelings” in order to conclude that, although no evidence of von Moltke acting on his attraction to men has been claimed or established, he is homosexual “and has not been able to disguise this orientation in the presence of others.”
Von Moltke has lost his libel suit, but the situation is hardly concluded. A storm of outrage at the verdict sweeps the country. Press coverage of the trial has been extensive, with dozens of journalists from continental Europe as well as from Germany present throughout the proceedings. People everywhere begin to discuss the startling concept of a homosexual identity that’s emerged during the trial. Many are not persuaded, and others (mostly from among the aristocracy) protest the “dangerous” precedent of trying a member of the ruling elite as a common criminal—and finding him guilty no less.
Those on the left, oppositely, consider the courtroom revelations proof of the “debauchery” of the Kaiser’s entourage, and members of the Social Democratic Party enlarge that indictment to include the “idle, decadent” upper classes in general. The response of monarchists and conservatives is to denounce the trial as a dangerous farce. They ascribe Moltke’s weak legal defense to a deliberate plot engineered—the means unspecified—by the Social Democrats, and further charge that Harden made his accusations not out of moral concern about homosexuality, but as a backdoor way of discrediting the Kaiser.
“Hirschfeld the Jew” is widely attacked in the press for having invented accusations against his “betters.” That much Hirschfeld expected. But his composure is decidedly ruffled by the sharp criticism he sustains from within the ranks of his own Scientific Humanitarian Committee. A heterosexual ally in the petition drive to repeal Paragraph 175 tells Hirschfeld that one regrettable result of his testimony will be to conflate feelings of deep friendship between men with homosexual desire; as a correspondent of Hirschfeld’s puts it, “I lived for three years as a student inseparable from my dear, old friend . . . We had not the slightest notion that any suspicion could stain such a relationship. I reject out of my own experience the assumption that such friendship must always carry a sexual connotation.” A number of wealthy homosexual supporters resign from the SHC out of fear that Hirschfeld might someday prove willing to testify against them. Financial contributions fall from over 17,000 marks in 1907 to a little over 6,000 in 1909.
The scientific views Hirschfeld expressed during his testimony also come in for censure, even ridicule, from fellow sexologists. Adolf Brand, editor of Der Eigene, angrily denounces the equation Hirschfeld drew at the trial between effeminacy and homosexuality. Brand and others reject as well his insistence on the biological nature of homosexual eros. To these critics, homosexuality is culturally, not biologically, determined—as are definitions of “masculinity” and “femininity.”
Moltke and Eulenburg—through letters, intermediaries (in particular their close mutual friend, Axel Varnbüler) and occasional clandestine meetings—consider their plight and review their options. During one secret meeting, Moltke, certain that his reputation has been irremediably damaged, is reduced to tears. “Harden,” he weepily tells Eulenburg, “has put an absolutely devilish misinterpretation on our affectionate being.”
“We must not view ourselves in terms invented by our enemies,” Philipp responds, meaning to comfort his friend. “We were simply given different shells and differently coloured wings than most men. We have both been granted the magic gifts of artistic talent. Let us be gladdened, not downcast.”
“I do not have your strength, Philipp. Not even your bearing.”
“We are middle-aged men, Kuno. We are not fragile youths. You remain, after all, aide-de-camp to His Majesty. That is no small mark of distinction. So long as we serve him, we are required to present an effective image to the world.”
“It is you he values. Poor Kuno serves only at your behest,” Moltke says, with more than a touch of self-pity.
“The Emperor takes everything personally, as you know. In order to get and keep his approval, never forget to praise him. If you do not fail to express appreciation for his ideas and actions, he will not fail to sustain you. But if you—if we—fall into a hole, he will let us lie there.”
“You speak as if in a trance! We are in a hole!” Moltke cries. “Are you telling me the Kaiser will do nothing to extricate us from it?”
“That is precisely what I am telling you. We must act on our own behalf. If we do, the Kaiser will continue to embrace us. Remember what happened to my poor brother, and let it be a lesson.”
“Ah, poor Friedrich! His Majesty was not kind.”
“His Majesty had little choice. When Friedrich’s wife accused him of ‘unnatural passions,’ he should have resigned at once from his regiment and demanded an investigation to clear his name. Once the charges became public, His Majesty had no choice but to treat Friedrich with absolute hostility. He even demanded—this you may not know—that I break off all contact with my brother. But I refused.”
“Only you could have gotten away with such a refusal.”
“I survived because I pleaded illness—severe rheumatic pain—and retired to Liebenberg. After a time, I returned to court. But it has never been quite the same between us. I have seen for the first time how hard His Majesty can be, and how all-consuming his ego. Let us act accordingly this time around.”
“I do not see, my dear Phili, how we are in any less of a hole than was your dear brother.”
“Do you trust me, Kuno?”
“You know I do. Why, what are you planning?”
“On the assumption that I still have powerful friends—a shaky assumption, perhaps—my goal is to get the verdict in your trial reversed.”
“What?” Kuno is suddenly animated. “Is that possible?!”
“I believe it can be voided on grounds of ‘faulty procedures’—a mistrial, in other words. That would be the first goal. Then I will ‘persuade’ the state prosecutor to retry Harden—this time on grounds of criminal libel.”
“I’m astonished. What a marvel you are!”
“I haven’t done anything yet. My first step, I think, should be a consultation with Axel. He’s more a master of intrigue than the two of us combined. He’ll know how to prepare for all eventualities.”
Axel Varnbüler himself has one primary goal: to avoid any suspicion of homosexuality falling on his own head. He lets it be known that he considers Phili’s male friendships “highly idealized and often enraptured”—a formulation sufficiently abstract to avoid the charge that he’s turning on an old friend. At the same time Axel goes to considerable lengths to spread rumors of his own extramarital affairs with women. When Kuno Moltke sends him a tempestuous letter lamenting the fact that their “beloved circle” is in jeopardy and urging that “we must hold on to each other doubly, more firmly,” Axel decides not to reply. Ah poor Kuno, Axel thinks to himself. All suffering sensibility, and no sense.
Axel’s attitude toward Philipp Eulenburg is quite different. Phili remains, at least for the time being, a powerful figure, perhaps not as close to the Kaiser as he’d once been, but far closer than Axel. He agrees to Phili’s suggestion of a secret meeting at the estate of Count Emil Görtz, a close mutual friend whose sexual “abnormality” has also been rumored. Görtz, like many in the Liebenberg Circle, is drawn far more to the worlds of theater and art than to the administrative or military duties for which they’ve been groomed and at which they’ve often groaningly labored. When Axel and Philipp arrive—separately—at Görtz’s estate, he leads each directly—avoiding even perfunctory contact with his family—to an inconspicuously small room off the library. Discreetly, he leaves the two alone.
Axel, with no intent at irony, begins by asking after Philipp’s wife and children.
“I enjoy my family but little,” Philipp says with impolitic candor. “Not because of our current situation. I love my family, but I go my own way . . .”
“Yes—what I call ‘the oppressive atmosphere of the ‘normal,’” Axel replies with a smile. “We must take care to preserve the specialness of our innermost being.”
“And take care as well,” Philipp enigmatically responds, “to shroud our efforts at self-preservation.”
“Which is something, I fear, that our beloved Kuno is not adept at.” Axel lowers his lanky frame into a chair, and Philipp follows suit. “Lily’s testimony at the trial,” Axel continues, “in my view sealed the verdict against him.”
“I warned Kuno before he married her that she was a jealous vixen. The more I got to know her, the less I liked her. Still, I believe she can be influenced; and if not, then discredited. Kuno’s reputation can be cleared, though he doesn’t make it easy. The first step, of course, is to ensure a second trial. I’m grateful for your help in that regard.”
“I assure you that I am the grateful one. My appointment to the Federal Council is due entirely to your influence with His Majesty. Now I have an opportunity to repay my indebtedness.”
Philipp smiles warmly. “You exaggerate the importance of my intervention, I assure you.”
“I know better. But never mind. Your modesty, dear Philipp, has always been one of your most endearing qualities. That, and your reluctance ever to push your own advantage. I, on the other hand, am as thick-skinned as the rest of the hippopotami who surround His Majesty.”
Philipp laughs. “That long black beard you’re sporting is, I believe, the telltale sign of a plotter.”
“A plotter who brings news that will please you. Von Bülow, well aware of the role you played in securing the Chancellorship for him, is willing to exert backstairs influence in securing a mistrial.”
Philipp jumps up from his chair with excitement. “It’s the Guiding Hand of Providence that lies behind this! I feel certain of it!”
“I don’t share your mystical confidence, dear Phili. Especially since Bülow is carefully hedging his bets.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Bülow has secured the secret reports of the vice police and sequestered them in the Foreign Office safes.”
Philipp reacts with alarm, which Axel picks up on. “Yes, Phili, some of those reports do name both you and Kuno.”
“Good heavens,” Phili whispers.
“Bülow thinks the implications are serious. He asks me to convey to you his opinion that you should forego a second trial and go on ‘sick leave’ until this whole nasty business dies down.”
“That old bully! He’s been waiting for the chance to get me out of the picture. I put nothing past him.”
“In Bülow’s view, the secret files contain material that would not only damage you personally but would reflect badly on the Kaiser as your close friend.”
“Bülow knows perfectly well that I would do nothing to undermine public confidence in the regime! He’s trying to force me from the scene. So much for his gratitude about the Chancellorship!”
Axel hesitates before completing the picture, but decides he must. Lowering his voice, he quietly adds, “Bülow suggests you go abroad for a time.”
“Admit my guilt by fleeing, eh?! Certainly not!” Philipp wheels around to face Axel: “If you can arrange for a second trial,” he says firmly, “I give you my solemn promise to appear.”
“Very well then. Consider it done.”
Knowing all three principals—Moltke, Eulenburg, and Harden—Count Harry Kessler has followed the first trial closely, noting down his reactions in his voluminous diary. His interest is not impersonal, having himself, at age 40, recently taken up with a 17-year-old male lover, the bicycle racer and jockey, Gaston Colin. In the summer of 1907, on one of Kessler’s frequent trips to Paris, he commissions Aristide Maillol—one of several artists his patronage helps to support—to do a nude sculpture of Colin. Yet in his diary Kessler never once directly references sexual desire or activity in relation to him; Colin is simply described as “a very nice, clever young fellow” whom he’s decided to help out from time to time (and will continue to do so even after Colin marries).
Yet if circumspect, Kessler now and then does express views in the privacy of his diary about sexuality in general that are dangerously in advance of official morality (which he describes as “resting merely on social convention”). To Kessler, the moral of the Oscar Wilde case is that there “is no ugly sensuality. Everything that is truly sensual is beautiful . . . A beautiful boy’s body and the great love that Plato establishes as the axis of the world are—like cause and effect—one.” In his view, so-called “perversion” is best seen as representing the “penetration of the imagination into sexual desire”; he believes “there is no sexual act that some culture or drive has not promoted, and you never hear that those practicing it suffered somehow in their ‘psyche.’” Kessler sees no reason, other than baseless prejudice, “why it should be more objectionable to amuse yourself with young lads rather than with young girls.” “It is unnatural,” he writes in one diary entry, “that Don Juan would be limited to the female.” Generalizing further in another entry, he rhetorically asks, “Are there absolute truths?” His answer is an unqualified “No . . . They are not absolutely true but indeed absolutely compelling.”
He is, however, temperamentally a noncombatant. He stands poised above the fray, every fray—the exact opposite of Harden, whose pugnacity and doggedness he finds mildly alarming. Politically, Kessler often agrees with Harden—agrees, above all, that the Kaiser’s “personality is certainly damaging the prestige and position of Germany”—but he writes those sentiments in his diary, not in the pages of Die Zukunft, as Harden does. Kessler disapproves, however, of Harden’s penchant for personal attacks, including his recent naming of Count Johannes Lynar as another member of what Kessler humorously refers to as the “black band of allied criminals”; yet at the same time he feels that “if you want to amuse yourself with boys, you should at least refrain,” as Lynar has not, “from doing it with your orderlies.”
On the few occasions when Kessler has run into Moltke and Eulenburg at Cornelia Richter’s salon, where literature and music are discussed far more often than politics, he’s found them both congenial; Moltke, in particular, has always been kind to him. While the first trial was still in progress, Moltke put in a surprise appearance at the Richter salon one evening, and Kessler went out of his way to express sympathy to him, praising “the dignity” he’d been maintaining throughout the ordeal. Knowing that Harden has little personal prejudice against homosexuals, Kessler wonders—as he writes in his diary—“How far are you justified in using a prejudice that you don’t share to destroy a political opponent and, to be sure, not simply politically, but utterly and totally?”
Kessler decides that his dinner with Harden, however abrupt its close, has placed them on familiar enough terms to allow him to put the question to him directly. When he does, Harden points out that Moltke, not he, brought the libel suit, thus making a trial inevitable. Kessler can’t get himself to condemn Harden completely, but he continues to feel that the journalist’s intelligent, decent instincts are at war with his “passionate, extremely egoistic temperament”—and his divided soul makes him, in Kessler’s view, a dangerous and unscrupulous foe.
The second trial opens on December 18, 1907. It lasts only two weeks, but within the first few days the conclusion is predictable. The proceedings open with “expert” medical witnesses attesting to the “fact” that Moltke’s wife, Lily von Elbe, is “obviously” suffering from what they call “unstable hysteria.” Given her state of mind, the learned doctors testify, the inflammatory account she gave of her marriage with Count von Moltke at the first trial should be considered utterly unsound, and discounted.
Next up on the stand are Count Moltke and Prince Eulenburg, each of whom in turn swears under oath that he has never transgressed in regard to the strictures of Paragraph 175 (which judicial opinion has earlier interpreted to mean anal intercourse, leaving activities ranging from hand-holding to mutual masturbation to oral sex between men non-actionable). While Eulenburg is on the stand, Bernstein, still Harden’s advocate, presses him to state whether or not he’s ever committed any homosexual act.
Eulenburg’s evasive reply—that he has “never engaged in any ‘depravity’ whatsoever”—is allowed to pass, and the emboldened Prince then proceeds effectively to challenge the distinction Hirschfeld had drawn in the first trial between psychical homosexuality and actual homosexual contact. The former, Eulenburg heatedly insists, is nothing more or less than the kind of deeply spiritual male friendship that the German nation has long rightly prided itself on. “I have been an enthusiastic friend in my youth,” he tells the court, “and am proud of having had such good friends! Had I known that twenty-five to thirty years later a man would come forward to claim that potential filth lurked in every such friendship, I would have truly forsaken the search for friends. The best that we Germans have is friendship, and friendship has always been honored!”
Magnus Hirschfeld is also put briefly back on the stand—just long enough to retract his earlier statement that Moltke was, psychically-speaking, homosexual. Hirschfeld claims that he based that conclusion primarily on Lily von Elbe’s now “discredited” account of her marriage—though at the time he’d in fact given a number of additional reasons for concluding that Moltke was “psychically” homosexual. This is not Hirschfeld’s finest hour; he’ll later acknowledge that his initial testimony was the single worst professional error of his career.
The verdict in the second trial is handed down on January 4, 1908: Harden is convicted of libel and sentenced to a prison term of four months. In the commotion that follows, Axel Varnbüler rushes to the front of the courtroom to embrace his dear friends, Moltke and Eulenburg. Within days, the Kaiser—who’d been enraged at the results of the first trial and had (in Kessler’s view) shown “ignoble haste” in “suddenly discarding his old friends without even hearing them”—lets it be known that he’s delighted with the new verdict and looks forward to once again (metaphorically) clasping Moltke and Eulenburg to his bosom. In his view both men have been fully exonerated of the “perfidious” attempts at character assassination during the first trial—brought, the Kaiser insists, by the wretched enemies of his regime. The so-called Eulenburg Affair is over.
Or so it is widely thought. What few have taken into account is the bellicosity and resourcefulness of Maximilian Harden. He’s convinced that Eulenburg has perjured himself in denying any participation in homosexual acts and is determined to find the evidence that will irrefutably prove it. Personally he rather admires Eulenburg as a decent man whose pacific temperament has long served as a brake on the Kaiser’s combative dreams of an expansive German empire. But if Harden can restore his own good name only at Eulenburg’s expense, then so be it.
Harden lays his plans carefully. He hires a private detective to scour the resort area around Lake Starnberg in southern Germany—where Eulenburg often took vacations in the 1880s, before his marriage—in search of potential witnesses. Through a series of bribes to local informants, the detective hits pay dirt. He’s put in touch with two men, Jakob Ernst, a day laborer, and Georg Riedel, a fisherman whom Eulenburg had initially befriended and then hired as his valet. Both are reluctant to testify, but after being alternately threatened with imprisonment or reassured that the statute of limitations has run out and there’s no risk of self-incrimination, they agree to appear as witnesses.
Harden sees one remaining problem: finding a sympathetic venue for the trial. He wants to avoid a Berlin courtroom, with its deferential attitude towards Prussian aristocrats, and devises a brilliant option: He persuades a journalistic friend, Anton Städele, a Bavarian editor, to publish an entirely bogus article claiming that Eulenburg paid Harden the enormous sum of a million marks to desist from further attacks. As agreed beforehand, Harden then brings suit against Städele for libel and arranges to have it heard on April 21, 1908 in a courtroom in Munich—a city known for its antagonism towards Prussian nobility. The libel suit hasn’t been staged to disprove Harden’s receipt of hush money—which never happened—but to provide him with an opportunity to put Ernst and Riedel on the stand. As pre-arranged, Städele “accuses” Harden in court of being unable to prove that Eulenburg ever engaged in homosexual relations, thus giving Harden the chance to present the new evidence that’s been dug up in the interim.
On the stand, both men come across as entirely credible witnesses. Ernst claims to recall only a single instance of sexual contact with Eulenburg, but Riedel confesses to a long-term arrangement. When he was 19, Riedel tells the court, Eulenburg seduced him, thus initiating a relationship that’s continued until recently. His testimony is devastating:
“If I have to say it: What people say is true. What it’s called I don’t know. He taught it to me. Having fun. Fooling around. I don’t know of no real name for it. When we went rowing we just did it in the boat. He started it. How would I have ever dared! And I didn’t know anything about it. First he asked me if I had a girlfriend. Then it went on from there. I was willing to oblige a fine gentleman.”
The trial causes a sensation—just as Harden has hoped and planned. To the German middle class, long convinced that “licentiousness” and moral rot are characteristic of the aristocracy, it now seems clear as day that princely prerogative has led an unworldly young fisherman into depravity.
Eulenburg’s close friend, Axel Varnbüler, reads the court testimony in the newspaper and finds it “devastating.” Deeply shaken, he no longer doubts that Eulenburg had earlier perjured himself and lied both to the court and to his friends. Varnbüler’s primary concern is to avoid guilt by association. He considers Eulenburg “irretrievably lost” and is determined not to be brought down with him. He convinces himself that it’s his duty as a friend to try and persuade Eulenburg to kill himself. Not wanting to risk being seen at Liebenberg, he sends an intermediary to convey the suggestion. He even manages to persuade himself that he’s performing an act of great compassion. Unremarkably, Eulenburg doesn’t see it that way. He takes to his bed, “severely unwell,” continues to maintain his innocence, and claims that Harden bribed Riedel and Ernst to give false testimony.
But the damage is done. A mere two weeks after the sensational Munich trial, the state prosecutor indicts Eulenburg on charges of perjury. The police do a thoroughgoing search of his Liebenberg home and turn up a number of books relating to homosexuality issued by “Max Spohr Verlag”—Hirschfeld’s own publisher and the man who had tried to persuade him not to appear as a witness at the first trial. The police also discover a letter Eulenburg sent Jakob Ernst in December 1907, imploring him to recant his testimony of events that happened “far too long ago”—which is tantamount to admitting that the “events” had indeed taken place.
Eulenburg’s doctor claims that he’s too ill to travel from his estate to Berlin in order to appear at the perjury trial. But the climate of opinion has decisively shifted: The court orders Eulenburg taken to a hospital in the capital to facilitate his availability. When the new trial opens on June 29, 1908, Eulenburg is carried into court on a stretcher. He again maintains his innocence, but does adjust his earlier testimony; what he now insists is that he has never engaged in any “punishable depravities” (judicial opinion has interpreted Paragraph 175 as criminalizing only anal copulation between men). But dozens of witnesses, one after another, take the stand to testify against him, including a working-class man from Munich who recounts looking through the keyhole of a hotel room and seeing Eulenburg having sex with another man. On July 13, Eulenburg collapses in court, and the doctors in attendance declare him “dangerously ill.” In September, he is allowed to return to his Liebenberg estate. The trial is postponed until the defendant’s health improves.
The outcome infuriates the Kaiser. He sends an indignant telegraph to Chancellor von Bülow saying he’s been “very unpleasantly surprised” at the “sudden calamitous decision” of the court. Perhaps with Hirschfeld’s testimony in mind, Wilhelm blames the destruction of his “close circle of friends” on “Jewish impudence, slander, and lies.” But he also rages against the contradiction inherent in Eulenburg’s apparent ability on the one hand to give a speech in his own defense, and the doctors on the other hand declaring him unfit to provide evidence. “How can these two things go together?” the Kaiser fulminates. “The trial should have continued, even if Eulenburg is consumed by the flames.”
Harden sees matters quite differently. Though he’s brought no public testimony against Moltke, he hints to a variety of prominent people that he’s withheld a great deal of evidence implicating additional, highly-placed individuals. To those still pushing him explicitly to exonerate Moltke, Harden darkly implies that they will end up forcing him to “produce without scruple all evidence, letters, and witnesses and to give the matter a scope which for years, at the greatest sacrifice” he has done his best to avoid. His own preference, Harden adds, is to let the matter lie dormant.
Unlike the Kaiser, Alex Varnbüler does come round. He soon changes his mind about urging Eulenburg to commit suicide and gradually renews—unlike the rest of Philipp’s old friends—distant contact with him. He no longer believes in Eulenburg’s innocence, but he understands why his friend has had to insist upon it, given the climate of opinion. After all, no less a figure than the famed psychiatrist Professor Emil Kraepelin of Heidelberg University has spoken for most people in classifying “contrary sexual proclivities” as a form of “lunacy”—along with “cretinism” and “congenital feeblemindedness.”
Yet another trial is convened in mid-1909, but Eulenburg again faints in court and the proceedings are again postponed. For the next decade—nearly up to the time of Eulenburg’s death in 1921—he’s subjected to periodic medical examinations with the aim of determining whether he’s fit to stand trial. He never is. Nor is he ever restored to favor, which Harden himself comes to regret, given Eulenburg’s temperate influence on the Kaiser’s saber-rattling tendencies—which will soon enough escalate.
Hirschfeld, too, has reason to feel contrite. In declaring Moltke a “psychic” homosexual (and, by implication, Eulenburg as well), he’s failed to understand, or perhaps care, that the consequences for them, given the hostility of public opinion, would be grave. And not only for them. The prominence of the “culprits,” and Harden’s claim that he’s withheld a great deal of evidence about a still wider contamination, has left the impression that the spread of homosexuality has reached epidemic proportions in Germany. Support for the repeal of Paragraph 175 weakens in tandem with a sharp rise in arrest rates under its aegis.
The “natural variant” views of Hirschfeld, and of Count Harry Kessler as well, have little immediate impact at the turn of the century. Yet both men are sanguine about the future. As Kessler writes in his diary, “Once the ‘outrage’ has run its course—that is, in ten to twenty years—the movement will start once again with an intensity never achieved nor achievable before.” The result, he predicts, will be “a kind of sexual revolution through which Germany will very quickly overtake the lead that France and England have had up to now in these things. Around 1920 we will hold the record . . . like Sparta in Greece, which is not the case today.”
Kessler has uncannily predicted Weimar Germany of the 1920s.