Coming out in Weimar

Introduction: Weimar, crisis and male homosexuality

The idea that the Weimar Republic represented the high point of ‘classical modernity’, defined by an overarching, systemic sense of crisis from which National Socialism emerged, seems to have had its day as an explanatory model. In his defining work on the Weimar Republic, Detlev Peukert convinced a generation of historians that crisis was a key to understanding the period, but the ongoing use of the term has generated a sense of fatigue: there is much that it fails to explain, and, more importantly from a historiographical point of view, it has become an explanation in itself, although it raises as many questions as it answers (Peukert 1987). More recently, Föllmer et al. have subjected the concept of crisis to scrutiny as a historiographical term and explanatory model specifically in reference to Weimar. Crisis is certainly still relevant to the understanding of this period. However the understanding of crisis as inherently negative and hence leading inexorably to National Socialism can no longer be unproblematically maintained (Föllmer et al. 2005). A new sense of the openness of the crisis environment has been discovered through the revision of Weimar social and cultural history in particular. In the context of the post-war changes in attitudes to sex and gender, male homosexuality emerged as a central theme as it became possible for homosexual men to imagine an identity and a ‘life’ for the first time.

In his study of autobiographical writings by homosexual men from the late 19th century, Klaus Müller has shown how these men began to develop an emancipatory self-consciousness as a result of their confrontation with the deterministic medical and legal identifications that were increasingly generated by the modern state (Müller 1991). The discourse of masculinist homosexuality, which developed during the first decades of the 20th century, was used by some homosexuals as a means to self-identification and self-validation in the open environment of post-war early Weimar. The epic world of masculine comradeship and warrior ethos emerged as the framework or scaffolding for the creation of a new model of homosexual life. Homosexuality became such a central topic because it represented a fundamental challenge not merely to ‘bürgerlich’ or middle-class civic expectations of sexual behaviour, but also to understandings of sexual and gender roles and, as a result of the radical anthropology of Hans Blüher and others, to conceptions of national identity, power and group leadership.

My aim in this paper is to analyse aspects of narrated homosexuality as ‘crisis narratives’, in order to observe how the inner tensions of these narratives reveal the possibilities and the limitations of Weimar masculinism as an enabling framework for male homosexuals. The historiographical concept of crisis is essential to this discussion in terms of both self-perception of actors at the time and of subsequent historiographical approaches to the period. Two literary works have been chosen for analysis in which tensions emerge between homosexual attraction and homosocial or masculinist attitudes or ideologies. ¹ The point of the analysis is to show how the situation of crisis enables an opening up of fields of representation of hitherto taboo, prohibited, censored, or one-dimensional (i.e. as pornography, mental illness, or criminality) material, and enables the thick description of these fields of representation in literature as human situations which involve their own dynamics of genesis, identity-creation, self-fulfilment, inner tension and resolution. In both works under analysis, the dynamics of tension and conflict lead to a negative resolution of the crisis situation. But nevertheless, resolutions are found in these critical narratives of homosexuality, which enable writers and readers to move forward in their understanding of the complex realities of Weimar modernity. These examples are intended as a contribution to the debate about the nature of the ‘crisis of classical modernity’ in Weimar.

Homosexuality and the ‘Männerbund’

During the second half of the 19th century, in the context of the medical discussions of what constituted normal, healthy, and socially productive masculinity, the figure of the homosexual emerged (Bruns 2008: 119). In psychological and forensic terms, the homosexual act came to have an etiology (medical and otherwise) and a set of consequences which rendered it a part of a historical continuum, of social and cultural contexts. A radical strain of thinking emerged which would develop over the following four decades into a pervasive set of linkages regarding homosexuality and the male bonding forces of society. This body of ideas was strongly associated with the highly speculative anthropology developed in the wake of Johann Jakob Bachofen and others since the 1860s and with the youth movement of the Wandervögel.

In 1902 the ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz argued (contra Bachofen) that men and women are determined by two different drives, the Familientrieb (‘family drive’) and the Geselligkeitstrieb (‘sociability drive’). On the latter are built the state and the public sphere, in which social exchange among men takes place in the form of the ‘Männerbund’ (Widdig 1997: 236). The physician, zoologist and anthropologist Gustav Jaeger had by this time posited a type of homosexual whose masculinity, because unadulterated by contact with the feminine, is all the more virile than that of the ‘normally inclined man’ (Bruns 2005: 308–9). Later the Berlin zoologist and homosexual activist Benedict Friedlaender posited bisexuality as the norm and linked the homosexual component of male libido with Schurtz’s ‘Geselligkeitstrieb’, writing that ‘same-sex love … is nearly identical with the social instinct itself’ (Bruns 2005: 312).

These ideas about the formative nature of the ‘Männerbund’ (Schurtz), of the normality of bisexuality (Friedlaender), and of the particular virility of a type of homosexual (Jaeger) were synthesized in the context of the Wandervogel movement that emerged at the beginning of the century by the young Hans Blüher. Blüher proposed that ‘the driving force of male-group activity does not lie in an otherwise unmotivated “Geselligkeitstrieb”, but rather in a component of homoeroticism which is part of every man’s psychological makeup’ (Widdig 1997: 237). Blüher made the sexual drive – specifically its homosexual component – central to the formation of Schurtz’s ‘Männerbund’, and hence an important historical force in the formation of social and cultural structures. He wedded this idea to that of leadership and mentoring of young men. Homosexuals alone, he wrote, ‘could become “Männerhelden”, who could then initiate, through erotic attraction, “Männerbünde”, or male bonding groups. These in turn were the origin of the nation-state’ (Bruns 2005: 313). Against the female sphere of materialism, democracy and rational-bureaucratic aspects of modern society, Blüher posited the male principle of the spiritual-creative sphere, of heroic elitism and charismatic leadership (Widdig 1997: 238). Blüher’s radicalism lay in the theory that masculine groups formed as a result of homosexual, not only of homosocial, relationships (Bruns 2008: 284). In Blüher’s theory the ‘full invert’ was the heroic warrior male who both attracts the love and faith of other men and who himself also relates entirely within the male sphere, although not in any directly sexual sense. Blüher’s concept of the homosexual ‘Männerbund’ was predicated on sublimation, not on sexual expression. It is ‘only the Männerheld’s capacity for sexual sublimation that established the basis for his attractiveness and, as a result, the constitution of the group itself’ (Bruns 2005: 314). The ‘Männerbund’ is not constituted through homosociality: it is funded entirely from homosexual libidinous energies. But Blüher created the framework for validation of homosexual libido as a binding and channelling force for young men, creating a sense of comradeship and fellowship which excluded the love of women and became the focal point of libidinous energies.

In Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft, Blüher recasts the image of the Wandervogel leader into a leader of the people, and from the Wandervogel ‘Männerbund’ he develops the core of the national ‘Männerbund’ elite (Bruns 2008: 387). Blüher’s writings were immensely influential for a decade or so between 1913 and 1923 on writers such as Freud, Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. After the First World War Blüher himself moved further to the right, and away from a sociological towards aesthetic and religious discursive approaches in which a mystical eros is posited as the central motive force in the emergence of the masculine self and masculine society (Bruns 2008: 388–90). With its exclusion of Jews from the ‘Männerbund’ and its turn from the language of sexuality to that of aesthetics, Blüher’s later work was influential in the development of the ‘Männerbünde’ of the Weimar Republic and on later right-wing intellectuals such as Heinrich von Gleichen, Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Alfred Baeumler (Bruns 2008: 194, 211, 449; Brunotte 2004: 76). ²

Men, in particular, were thrown into a crisis of gender identity after the Paris Peace and the Treaty of Versailles as a result of the displacement from their traditional roles as breadwinners and warriors (Föllmer et al. 2005: 27). However, the crisis of gender roles was not necessarily viewed in negative terms, even by men. In Berlin and other German cities and towns, radical experimentation with life possibilities took place. The factors leading to this unique environment have been well documented (Greenberg 1988: 394–6; Mosse 1985). They include the discussions of homosexuality that had been taking place in German scientific, medical, anthropological and sociological circles since the 1860s and the popularization of these debates in journals and newspapers among a sophisticated reading public and the high-level homosexual scandals close to the Emperor Wilhelm II and in the upper echelons of the German middle classes (the Krupp affair) and the trial of Oscar Wilde in England, which aroused curiosity and consternation. In addition, in the early years of the new century youth culture, typified in the Wandervögel, popularized liberated attitudes towards free sexuality and homosexuality, and novels and stories with homosexual themes, particularly in the setting of boys’ schools and military academies, took up this theme; also, soldiers used to the male bonding and homosocial behaviour of the army returned at the end of the war to the peacetime environment where many felt alienated, discredited and disillusioned and sought each others’ company in the context of various types of returned soldiers groups (Tamagne 2006: 26). Individually these factors were not unique to Germany, but together they created an environment conducive to the exploration of homosexuality as a life choice. Föllmer et al. identify narrative as the primary site for the expression of crisis as a result of historical change (Föllmer et al: 2005: 12). Writers began to explore ideas of male homosexuality as the basis for individual and group identity outside the accepted boundaries of civic life with its gender roles, separation of public and private, married couple and civic society, family and state.

Since the early years of the century Adolf Brand’s journal, Der Eigene, had propagated an image of male friendship or comradeship and masculinity drawing on a German tradition of more or less homoerotic friendship (Hohmann 1981; Gleichen-Rußwurm 1920 [1912]). As a part of the post-war trend towards ‘self-help’ (Föllmer et al. 2005: 35), groups of men converged under the broad banner of the ‘Männerbund’ in order to articulate the homosexual male subject. Those drawn to the idea of the ‘Männerbund’ included disillusioned and disenfranchised ex-soldiers, as well as those too young to have fought, who grew up in the shadow of war and whose romantic imaginations were nourished by the writings of Walter Flex and Ernst Jünger, and those who found in male company the promise of sexual fulfilment and hence who gravitated towards these environments and who more or less embraced an ideology which seemed to promise happiness, and even redemption.

In the period from 1919 until the late 1920s at least, homosexual masculinist thinking contributed to a powerful new line of critical opposition to the Weimar Republic. This was just one example of the various radically new constructions of the subject that Föllmer et al. identify as taking place in the crisis-situation of the Weimar Republic and which could only take place in the environment of potential antagonisms and conflicts that characterized and determined the crisis situation (Föllmer et al. 2005: 37). As a radical splinter group in the crisis-situation, homosexuals found themselves attacked from all sides. The communists used the associations of homosexuality to denigrate Nazism, but while Hitler protected his openly homosexual leader of the SA, Ernst Röhm, until relatively late, it had become dangerous to be identified as homosexual in Nazi circles from the late 1920s onward, even earlier at the street level (Reichardt 2002: 678). Christopher Isherwood refers to the raids on the homosexual bars of Berlin as commonplace by the beginning of 1933 (Isherwood 1977: 98), and in March 1933 Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research was ransacked by Nazi Party thugs. With the murder of Ernst Röhm and the conflation of political expediency with ideological purging of homosexual elements in 1934, it became impossible to continue to propagate the type of homosexual masculinism that Röhm himself had openly acknowledged.

The mainstreaming of Nazism and the bringing into line or ‘Gleichschaltung’ of the diverse right-wing masculinist groups that had provided an umbrella identity for homosexuals in search of a masculine identity models led to the exclusion of homosexuals by the early 1930s. By 1928 the Party had explicitly condemned homosexuality (Giles 2002: 260). After coming to power, the Nazis revised the law pertaining to homosexuality, Paragraph 175, replacing it with the much more punitive Paragraph 175A in 1934 (Spurlin 2009: 9, 31, 123). This formally marked the end of the period of crisis or openness of discussion of homosexuality, male bonding and the ‘Männerbund’ that had been taking place since the early years of the century. By the end of the war, despite considerable unevenness in its application, homosexuality was made a capital offence under Nazi law. During this period, the men who had identified as homosexuals in the ‘Männerbund’ were forced with the choice of either repressing their sexuality in order to remain within the ideological framework, or distancing themselves from the political right and the ‘Männerbund’ altogether. Those who chose the latter path were left dangerously exposed, particularly since the left offered no place of refuge for homosexual men. Isherwood gives characteristically succinct expression to the situation of those deluded homosexuals of the Weimar Republic who, ‘misled by their own erotic vision of a New Sparta … fondly supposed that Germany was entering an era of military man-love’ (Isherwood 1977: 98).

Both Max René Hesse’s Partenau (1929) and Thomas Mann’s ‘Mario and the Magician’ (1930) end with the resolution of homosexual attraction into violence and death rather than sexual fulfilment. What happened during the period of the crisis of masculinist homosexuality to bring about the negative resolution? Was the political and legal activity of the Nazis responsible, or were other dynamics at work during those Weimar years to render the interrelationships of ‘Männerbund’ ideology and homosexuality problematic and ultimately fatal? Was there a positive moment in the dynamics of Weimar masculinist homosexuality? If so, where did it end?

The failure of homosexual militarism in Max René Hesse’s Partenau

Max René Hesse’s novel Partenau reveals the tragic conflict in the link between the ‘Männerbund’ and the homosexual. I aim to show the extent to which this novel demonstrates the failure of ‘Männerbund’-militarist ideology to provide a model for homosexual identity despite its implicit claim to valorize homosexuality as a modernist mode and its reception by many men as a framework within which self-identification and self-validation could take place.

Hesse’s novel contains no explicit references to Nazism or to Blüher, but it draws on various aspects of German social, political and cultural life of the ’20s, including the broad debate that took place in Germany about male homosexuality and the ‘Männerbund’. Partenau was successful in late Weimar Germany despite the fact that its protagonist, the Reichswehr lieutenant, regiment adjutant, and decorated First World War hero Ernst Partenau, is more or less openly homosexual. The story tells of Partenau’s growing obsession with the young officer-cadet and Junker Stefan Kiebold and is set around 1927–8. Ernst Partenau is a fanatical militarist, a strategist and warrior, decorated with the supreme bravery award, pour le mérite, for his exploits in the First World War. He represents the extreme revanchist attitudes of the German right towards the end of the Weimar Republic. The interactions between Partenau and Kiebold are underwritten by suggestions of intimacy and sexuality from the opening pages.

Beyond the barracks is the social sphere of the Steifelt estate, where Stefan is courted by the youngest daughter of the house, Stasie, and by her older and more worldly cousin, Hermine Brühl. He, however, prefers the male company of Partenau, with whom he develops an intimate friendship as they revisit the German losses of 1914–18 in war games and fantasize about the conquest of huge swathes of Eastern Europe by a resurgent Germany. At the height of their imagined success, Partenau seals their friendship with a far from brotherly kiss, to which Kiebold, slightly confused, acquiesces. Finally, their intimacy provokes the censure of fellow officers and the Junkers of the Streifelt circle, particularly as Partenau is provocatively candid in his opinions regarding the nature of military comradeship and the importance of the ‘Männerbund’. A scandal occurs when a drunken lieutenant accuses them of being lovers. While the military men in the story are surprisingly unjudgemental about the relationship and the most poisonous comments come from the wives and daughters, it has become clear to all that the situation is untenable. Hauptmann von Gillern, Partenau’s comrade from the trenches of Flanders, urges his friend to act in Kiebold’s and his own best interest by separating. By this stage Kiebold, too, is aware of the extent of the scandal as well as of the nature of Partenau’s (and his own) feelings, and acquiesces to the planned separation. Unable to contemplate a future without his idealized comrade and brother-in-arms, Partenau shoots himself.

In the first half of the novel the older man takes on the role of mentor and leader, and while the erotic aspects of the relationship are clearly manifest, he appears to be able to balance them in his role as mentor. Kiebold’s state of emotional arousal is confused and nebulous. The younger man falls much more clearly into Blüher’s role of the follower, at least in the first half of the novel in which the classic homoerotic relationship is established. He is described in terms of an adolescent romantic, motivated by dreams of power, command and domination. Partenau’s war decoration pour le mérite throws an aura around the man and Kiebold’s arousal is unclearly sexual and still strongly narcissistic. In this young man’s mind violence and eros comingle and his attraction to the older man is expressed in the language of attraction and submission to the warrior and hero. At the point where Partenau in a moment of mutual fantasy of German greatness kisses Kiebold on the mouth, the latter is euphoric and he leaves Partenau’s lodgings in a state of ‘spiritual inebriation’. It is unclear just what level of intimacy has been reached, especially given the amounts of alcohol consumed. At this point Kiebold has identified completely with the ideal of fascist masculinity and community represented by Partenau.

In the third and final part of the novel social structures re-enter the lovers’ world and Kiebold begins to realize what he is sacrificing in order to remain with Partenau. The environment of openness or ‘crisis’ has begun to close in. Partenau represents this aspect of the contingency of the Weimar Republic most strongly. He works through a process of self-realization within this framework which reaches a peak and then is destroyed by the inner contradictions between the ideology itself of masculinist homosexuality and the feelings of homosexual attraction which this ideology had enabled. Kiebold, the younger, less formed character, represents the stage of becoming, of being attracted to a set of ideas which in fact enable the unfolding of his sexual identity until the point where both social change and social necessity step in and force him to accept the constraints of heterosexual normality.

When the scandal breaks, things are quickly brought under control by the senior officers. Hauptmann von Gillern, also possibly a homosexual figure, tells Partenau that the relationship must end, and that Kiebold will be moved to another training institution in order to preserve his reputation. Partenau, contemplating suicide, expresses his despair in terms of the failure of an idea, imagining his death as a protest at the failure of the German nation to rise up against the spirit of Versailles. But the reality is that he is in despair at losing his lover. The prospect of physical separation drives Partenau to the recognition that he loves Kiebold and cannot face life without him. This breaks the model of the ‘Männerbund’, revealing homosexual passion to be a libidinous driving force which demands physical satisfaction, not ideological displacement and projection. It is thus not the idea of the failure of Germany (i.e. of the ‘Männerbund’) that motivates Partenau’s suicide, but disappointed love.

The narrative weight of this story lies in the unfolding of the love affair in all its masculinist false consciousness. For Partenau, the older more established figure, whose life hitherto has been mapped out in terms of war, heroism and the ‘Männerbund’, the realization comes late that it is love that moves him, not German manhood or Germany. He dies still pulling the cover of his beliefs over him like the blanket that he hugs on the couch. Kiebold is a different story. He has retreated to social acceptance, or rather he is withdrawn from the proximity of Partenau, but we learn little more. The situation with Hermine and Stasie remains unclear: will he marry one of them or not? The fact that he is relocated to a different officers’ training facility in another part of Germany implies that his story remains to be told. Which way will he go? Into social conformity and a hypocritical marriage, or further into the ‘Männerbund’, like his hero, but without the possibility (yet) of breakthrough, perhaps finding in Nazism his self-realization, or maybe living the lie as a Nazi officer, one of those whose real existential tendencies would be increasingly proscribed. Or will he turn away altogether from the ‘Männerbund’ fantasy and realize his homosexual life in other ways? The latter course seems unlikely. Like most of his generation, he will submit to the ropes being pulled tight around him and his sexual identity and social identity will be separated again.

The narrative reveals the trajectory of each character more or less clearly, and the achievement of the novel is to register the processes of self-realization of homosexual love in this tragically self-deluding environment. The fantasy of male comradeship and wartime heroism and the ideology of a Germany led by men bound together under a charismatic leader gradually gives way to the recognition of incompatibility of this material with the bonds of true affection.

Partenau brings the earlier speculative material of figures such as Jäger, Friedländer, and Blüher into the imagined lifeworld of the German officers’ corps of the late Weimar Republic. However, Partenau’s recognition that he loves Kiebold breaks the model of the ‘Männerbund’, revealing homosexual passion to be a force which demands physical satisfaction, not ideological displacement and projection. The historiographical term ‘crisis’ has been used to identify the sense of openness or contingency and absence of overwhelming determinations in Weimar society. In Partenau we can observe the inner dynamics of limitation of this sense of contingency. The most powerful negative determinant in this story of homosexual love in the ‘Männerbund’ is not the social condemnation, but rather the inner contradictions between masculinist ideology and human affection.

The question we must ask is whether this crisis period engendered positive outcomes or even included a positive moment in an otherwise negative dynamic for homosexuals. In relation to Partenau the answer is in the negative, at least in relation to the narrated events. Neither Partenau nor Kiebold is able to maintain a positive dynamic of personal liberation in terms of sexual identity from the early stages of the ‘Männerbund’ model of self-justification and self-valorization to the point in the late ’20s when that model is subjected to the strictures of social and political reality and the homosexual component is forced back into hiding or is excluded altogether from the realm of possibility. Hypocrisy or death are the only two possible outcomes.

The liberating framework of the speculative anthropological and social theory of the late 19th and early 20th century which generated the popular culture of the ‘Männerbund’, and the crisis environment of the Weimar Republic which enabled extraordinary diversity in the field of sexual behaviour and identity-formation, are wound back in this novel. Moreover, the disaggregation of homosexual identity from the realm of individual and social possibility takes place as a result of internal developments as well as external factors. It is not primarily social pressure which destroys the relationship of Partenau and Kiebold; it is the inner recognition of the incompatibility between the ‘Männerbund’ ideology in its sharpened, increasingly Nazified post-war form and human affection as the love affair of two men. The radical ‘Männerbund’ model depended on an ideology of sublimation of homosexual libido in the name of national cohesion and the formation/building of a warrior class. This model falls victim to its own contradictions in as much as Partenau cannot both love Kiebold and remain true to the role of leader and mentor. At the point where he is threatened with separation, Partenau’s ethos of a masculinist-militarist paedeia disintegrates.

Homosexuality in Thomas Mann’s ‘Mario and the Magician’

The themes of homosexuality and right-wing or nationalist masculinism emerge explicitly in only one of Mann’s novellas, ‘Mario and the Magician’ of 1929–30. This third of Mann’s trilogy of homosexual artists, after ‘Tonio Kröger’ and ‘Death in Venice’, gives expression to Mann’s most negative view of the relationship of art and life. The magician Cipolla, a degraded artist-figure and heightened version of Gustav von Aschenbach, crosses the line between the inner and outer worlds, aestheticizing life and living out a degraded aesthetic. In the story of the magician, Cipolla, and the homosexual waiter, Mario, Mann explores the dynamics of homosexual libido as homosocial binding force and as individual eros, using the figure of the artist as leader in order to bring together the realms of the aesthetic and the political.

Masculinity is ubiquitous in this story, in the belligerent nationalism of the Italians, the strutting and preening on the beach, the earthy physicality of the men, in Mario’s heavy-lidded passive sexuality and above all in the charismatic, overbearing and imperious domination of the magician, Cipolla. This charismatic masculinity is something quite different to the steadfastness and forbearance of Gustav von Aschenbach and his hero, Frederick the Great, although it is related: for them, masculinity also expresses itself in strength of mind, clarity of purpose and commitment. And while there is an erotic element in Aschenbach’s image of the ‘intellectual and virginal manliness’ of the artist as St Sebastian (Mann 1946: 384), the charismatic, demonic or Dionysian aspect is missing from Aschenbach’s reality. It only appears as dream, not in art or reality. However, the novella is full of threats of realization of this force, from the threat of war at the beginning and the glimpse of bersaglieri carrying out drills on the quayside of the Lido to the figures of disoriented and belligerent masculinity whom Aschenbach encounters outside the cemetery in Munich and on the terrace of the Grand Hotel in Venice. In ‘Mario and the Magician’ masculine self-assertion precedes and fuels homoeroticism as a demiurgic force. Mann himself had never shown much attraction to the demonic masculinity symbolized by the magician’s whip. Yet his narrator, so clearly an alter-ego, is passively acquiescent to this Dionysian force.

Mann’s work during the crisis period, from the German defeat and the end of the First World War until the end of the Weimar Republic, involved the attempt to make new syntheses in an ever more polarized environment. ‘Mario and the Magician’ is his most radical attempt at finding a new middle ground between aesthetics and ethics, creativity and politics, homoeroticism and masculinity, in light of the increasing appropriation of the latter sphere by fascism in Italy and Nazism in Germany. In the crisis situation of awakened fascist Italy, and with clear reference to Germany as well, Mann explores the interrelationships between masculinism, the homoeroticism of the ‘Männerbund’ and homosexual attraction. Bridges and others have viewed the ending, in which the magician, Cipolla, is killed by the waiter, Mario, in terms of the rejection of homosexual eros, whether on the personal or the social and political plane (Bridges 1991: 501; Pörnbacher 1996: 32–60). But despite its tragic ending, the story adumbrates a possible new creative synthesis between homoeroticism and normality. In his attempts to come to terms with the Weimar Republic as a social and political phenomenon of modernity, Mann struggled to find a new place for the homoeroticism that was so important for him personally, but that he had long since consigned to the individual imagination as a symbol of narcissism – aesthetic, psychological and anthropological. The 1922 essay ‘On the German Republic’ (Mann 1974: 11: 809–52) marked a major turning point in Mann’s political Weltanschauung, in which he sought to wed homosexual eros to the program of Weimar democracy. As his diaries show, Mann knew all too well that homosexual desire demands physical gratification, and he recognized the need to give constructive social expression to this aspect of the life-force. He found it in the left-wing ‘comradeship’ of the American homosexual poet Walt Whitman, which is posited against the ‘Kameradschaft’ of the right. From this time onwards, homosexuality is not merely a symbol of literary aestheticism or narcissism for Mann. In ‘Mario and the Magician’, Mann confronts his fears of the release of homosexual eros through the mouthpiece of his alter-ego, the German narrator, and begins, perhaps, to look beyond the crisis of homosexual masculinity in the figure of the gentle waiter, Mario. In this story desire spills over into reality, Gustav von Aschenbach reaches out and lays a hand on Tadzio, and Thomas Mann seeks a new aesthetic and moral resolution to the loss of old forms.

The story begins in familiar territory with the evocation of travel and crisis. Having arrived too early in the season, the German narrator and his family find the small seaside resort town of Torre di Venere still full of middle- and upper-class Italian tourists. The tone is chauvinistic and haughtily patriotic, and the social environment characterized by ‘misuse of power … injustice, … sycophantic corruption’ (Mann 1946: 533). A magician arrives in town to perform in the little cinema. The hour is late for children, but it is, after all, vacation time. However, the performance is made up of hypnotic tricks rather than magic acts and the interactions of the magician, Cipolla, with members of the audience are of a discomfitingly personal and demeaning nature. Finally Cipolla coaxes one of the waiters, Mario, to the stage and ridicules him, flirting, requesting a kiss, and exposing him as a homosexual. Released from the hypnotic spell and realizing what has happened, Mario takes a pistol and shoots the magician dead, to the horror of the audience but the delight of the narrator’s children who have failed to recognize the transition from illusion to reality.

While the early responses to Mann’s story were primarily political in focus, post-war critics have pointed to the theme of homoeroticism at least since 1945 (Bridges 1991: 503). In 1986 Gerhard Härle identified homosexual seduction as the main motif in the relationship between Cipolla and Mario and several years later George Bridges pointed to the discrepancy between the act and its consequences, suggesting that the killing only makes sense ‘when one assumes that homosexuality … is such an Entwürdigung [disgrace] and such a Schändung [violation] to the soul that violence, even murder, is an entirely justifiable reaction to it’ (Bridges 1991: 503). Bridges refers to Mann’s own documentation of the family visit to an Italian seaside town, Forte dei Marmi, in 1926 in which many of the events recounted in the story took place. Mann subsequently wrote that the real Mario ran away in comic embarrassment and appeared as usual the next day in his waiter’s role. The idea of the shooting came from his daughter, Erika (herself lesbian and hence perhaps alert to the deeper suggestions of the story), who commented that she ‘wouldn’t have been surprised had he shot him’. From that moment, Mann writes, the novella took form. The long prologue of the irritations and annoyances in the holiday town was the necessary prelude (Pörnbacher 1996: 26). The death of Cipolla is the driving motive of the story.

Bridges focuses his interpretation on Mann’s need to kill Cipolla as an ‘attempt at self-correction’, an attempt to ‘kill’ once and for all … a part of himself that the author never ceased to experience as anything but painfully problematic and threatening’ (Bridges 1991: 503). Bridges identifies the phallicism and ‘aggressive narcissism’ of the heroic, militaristic posture of Cipolla and the predominantly male audience but primarily interprets the magician with reference to Mann’s essay of 1925, ‘On Marriage’ (Mann 1974: 10: 191–207) as a degraded version of Gustav von Aschenbach, killed off by Mann in order to resolve the central issue of his life ‘in favor of bourgeois morality – heterosexuality, marriage, family, respectability – and against homoeroticism’ (Bridges 1991: 508). Of course such an interpretation, while giving full weight to the theme of homosexuality, underplays the political component and does not explain the character of Mario other than as Cipolla’s victim: ‘It is Mario’s unrequited love for Silvestra that leads him to kill Cipolla’. However, the question of Mario’s sexuality is important to the resolution, and the point of the story lies in the confluence of the personal with the political, of libido and sexuality (in both characters and the audience as a whole) with fascistic nationalism. Most of the political interpretations of this work underplay the sexual factors and those, such as Härle and Bridges, who highlight the importance of homosexuality relate it to the personal or individual sphere of authorial biography or of the ‘perverted’ fascist leader. However, as Mann identified in a 1930 letter to Otto Hoerth and repeatedly demonstrates in the telling, the ‘perversion’ of libidinous energy is ubiquitous: it flows through the story, from the antics on the beach to the assassination at the end of the performance (Pörnbacher 1996: 26–7). Libido as the life energy of a people in a state of crisis in Koselleck’s sense, namely as ‘an open situation in which change is imminent but has not yet occurred’ (Koselleck 1976: 134), is the medium of this tale and it manifests itself primarily in the sphere of masculinity, rivalry and humiliation in Cipolla’s theatre. In this environment Mann tells his story of masculinism and homoeroticism not in order to deaden those feelings in himself but rather to extend his analysis of the relationships between masculinity and homoeroticism in the fascist environment of the 1920s.

The unsettling environment of the lead-up to Cipolla’s performance is underwritten by the issues of national honour, pride, assertion and aggrandizement. Problematic masculinity is introduced on a comic note in the figure of the ghastly 12-year-old Fuggièro, who bullies the other children and is feted by his mother as a paragon of Italian heroism on the beach. Even the name of the town, literally ‘Tower of Venus’, is unambiguously phallic, although as the narrator notes at the beginning, the tower is nowhere to be seen; during his performance the magician Cipolla refers repeatedly to the name of the town in sexually suggestive contexts (Mann 1946: 529, 543, 544, 547, 563). With the magical performance, the themes of masculinity, power and group libido move to the centre of the narrative. By the time the narrator and his family arrive to take their seats, the local young Italian working-men have already filled up the standing room with their muscular bodies, ranging physicality and ‘enterprising’ looks.

The performance begins on a note of male rivalry. When the magician finally appears, a young man ironically greets him. This young man too is defined by a powerful sense of bellicose youthful masculinity. The interchange that follows is expressed in terms of sexual aggression and the young man is humiliated in physical and sexual terms. He is made to extend his tongue to its extremity in a gesture of self-exposure that is suggestive, intimate and demeaning. And yet he seems to want to do it as well. Humiliation and desire go hand in hand. Later Cipolla performs the trick of laying a hypnotized subject between two chairs and sitting on him, perched on him like Fuseli’s famous nightmare in an image suggestive of sexual domination and submission. Cipolla’s power depends on ‘lingua’ in its double sense of language and tongue, word and body, imagination and sex, and the performance consists of a contest among men for mastery and submission. The ‘cavaliere’ Cipolla remains in control and the nascent revolt against his power remains locked in the ‘subterranean’ (Mann 1974: 8: 689), at least until Mario’s ‘liberating’ pistol shots at the end. The claw-handled whip that the magician uses to reinforce his commands, and the intake of alcohol and nicotine, make up for the physical disability that has rendered him unfit to do his bit ‘in the war for the greater glory of the Fatherland’ (Mann 1946: 544). The strength that Cipolla draws from these props after each of his triumphs represents an increase in his power over the audience, a diminishing of their spiritual autonomy and an augmentation of his masculine charisma. Any quality of buffoonery or clownishness is lacking as he subjects the audience to his spell, drawing on the men’s sexual rivalry and aggression and funnelling it through himself. His charismatic power lies in his representation of what they themselves crave, namely masculinity as dominance. Even in their rivalry they are beholden to him. The narrator assumes that Cipolla’s interest in humiliating these young men is compensatory, a means of dealing with his own damaged masculinity. Yet Cipolla repeatedly tells his audience that he is really only doing what they want, that he is the vehicle of their wishes and hence the real victim in his performance.

Searching for an explanation of the magician’s power, the narrator settles on the mystical term ‘occult’. However, what he terms ‘occult’ is that base level of sexual and psycho-social material which is shared by the men in terms of sexuality, libido, masculinity, male bonding and male rivalry. What Cipolla is both manipulating and obeying is not ‘pure will’ but the deep group instincts of human beings. It is the binding force that had fascinated German anthropologists since Bachofen, the motive force of patriarchal society, the powerful network of libidinous forces among men that generated the model of the ‘Männerbund’. Cipolla plumbs the wellsprings of patriarchal society, namely the deep structure of male rivalry and male bonding. His incessant reference to the masculinity of his interlocutors and their response in the same terms reveal that they are all operating within the same framework. Even the narrator is alive to the nuances of Cipolla’s attentions, repeatedly acquiescing to his power by remaining, and giving expression to his own admiration of the southern good looks and sexual charisma of the local youths.

In his wooing of Signora Angiolieri, the hostess of the Pensione Eleonora, Cipolla reinforces the implicit same-sex identification of the woman through her late friend and heroine, the great Italian actress, Eleanora Duse (1865–1923). In her early years Signora Angiolieri (now presumably only in her early 30s) had been ‘companion, fellow traveler … friend to the actress, and this period was clearly the high point of her life’ (Mann 1946: 532). However, even the manipulation of the Signora is aimed not primarily at her, but at her husband, the quiet, bald, middle-aged man who silently dotes on his wife but who appears to play a secondary role to that of La Duse, the real object of his wife’s affections.

The seduction of Mario does not follow the pattern of his predecessors. Mario arrives early and has been following the act with attention but little amusement. He seems to have more in mind than merely watching the show and appears to have sought the proximity of the youth with the ‘warlike haircut’. Mario is described in passively sexual terms – the thick lips, heavy-lidded eyes, the dreaminess, modesty and lack of any ‘brutality’ of expression, the red silk scarf. Unlike the others, he is neither assertive nor aggressive. He is not coerced in the way the others are; he simply does as he is told. He is after all, as the narrator comments, a waiter. The whip remains unused other than at the end, to release him; it is not used to enforce the kiss. The ‘warlike’ youth guffaws knowingly as Mario is brought to indicate a lack of interest in the fair sex and Cipolla pursues the suggestion of homosexuality with references to the waiter as a ‘Ganymede’, again arousing the youth’s complicit laughter (Mann 1946: 564). Mario remains struck dumb as the magician enacts his heartache in a parody of heterosexual love. Cipolla outs Mario, or at least makes public what some of the men already know. It is Mario’s silence here which is remarkable: he has no voice because he has no identity. He is identified by Cipolla and the youth. Cipolla combines all roles into himself: male and female, active and passive, public and private. He takes on the role of ‘Silvestra’, inveigling Mario to kiss him as he would the object of his passion, identifying him as the chosen one (‘Erwählter!’; Mann 1974: 8: 709) and thereby identifying the deepest desire of the homosexual outsider lingering close to the object of his fantasies and attentions. He who is merely a nameless sexual object in a public place is finally chosen, and Cipolla follows up the choice with an authorization: ‘Trust me, you may do it!’ (Mann 1946: 566).

Mario’s release is effected with a crack of Cipolla’s whip: ‘he who was caressed above cracked his riding whip below, next to the chair leg’ (Mann 1946: 566). Härle suggests that the female name ‘Silvestra’ is a masquerade to conceal the truth of Mario’s homosexuality and notes the contradictory sexual suggestions in Mann’s contorted syntax: ‘The caress “above” is paired with the phallic movement “below”, but tenderness and drive, eros and sex find no common ground’ (Härle 1988: 16–19). The movement of the whip is ‘masculine’ as well as ‘phallic’: in the first instance it commands. The symbolism of above and below is paired with sexual aggression and passivity, and masculinity and femininity, sexus and eros. Cipolla embodies all identities. The ambiguities of his gestures reveal the impossibility of masculinity and eros together. In this environment male-male sex may be possible, but male-male eros is not. One partner must play-act a female role. There is no third way – namely, of homosexual identity. Only Cipolla, the artist and representative of the illusory world of imagination, can masquerade as both. Awakened from his dream, recognizing what has happened, Mario shoots the magician. Active masculinity is the only role publicly available to a young male in this Italian fascist environment – even in the sleepy secondary seaside resort of Torre di Venere where public fascism is still relatively passive. Was the gun in his pocket the last refuge of his masculinity, his secret proof to himself, if to no-one else, that he too can be a man? A proof which he renders public with this act of violence? Mario fires not one but two shots, his arm raised in the same gesture of fascist salute that the retired colonello had earlier been unable to make, stopped by the magician’s greater power. Mario has broken the spell and liberated the ‘subterranean’ force of masculinity into open revolt against Cipolla’s transgression and domination.

The homosexual artist Cipolla uses the Italian environment of fascist patriotism, masculinity, rivalry and charisma to realize his desire for the homosexual waiter, Mario. In doing so he crosses the border between art and life; he is the artist-magician who steps out of his role momentarily to reach out for self-fulfilment at the moment of his greatest power over his audience. His powers truly mirror those of his subjects. In doing so he ventures beyond Gustav von Aschenbach, who keeps his fantasies of Tadzio to himself. The moment of transgression leads to the ironic ending of the performance in shocking reality. Only the narrator’s children, clamouring for an ‘ending’, still believe in the illusion. But the magician has released something that he cannot control, and he pays for it with his life. The confusion of art and reality, homosexuality and masculinity, love and social convention has resulted in tragedy, again. The tragedy occurs as a result of the exposure of a homosexual man in an environment of sexual innuendo and masculine rivalry. Robbed of his anonymity, the homosexual waiter Mario turns on his aggressor and kills him. At the point of exposure, Mario asserts his masculinity through violence. However, this violence is fuelled by outrage. Mann places masculine civil courage into the hands of his homosexual protagonist.

The police arrive and order is restored – at least for some. The children remain safe in their belief that it was all just theatre. For their father, the German tourist, the murder of Cipolla represents a release that he was unable to bring about for himself. In retrospect, as we see in the opening pages of the story, he recasts the memory so that Cipolla alone is responsible for the evil of the evening. But at the time he is filled with disquiet as well as relief.

Thomas Mann did not experience the attraction to fascist masculinity as a personal problem: his diary entries imply an interest in open-faced young waiters, the school-boy friends of Klaus and Erika, passing images of adolescent beauty, not uniformed soldiers with ‘warlike’ haircuts. But in Weimar Germany he did recognize that his sexuality – the homosexual eros that he had incorporated into a personal mythology of creativity – as narcissistic aestheticism, had become a social issue since the days of Gustav von Aschenbach. He had come to recognize the Dionysian pull of Cipolla’s homoeroticism on the ‘warlike’ young men in both Italy and Germany, where fascism and Nazism mingled the aesthetic with the political. In the essay on ‘The German Republic’, he had tried to channel this deep energy towards the politics of democracy and Whitmanesque comradeship; several years later, in ‘Mario and the Magician’, he recognizes the deeper, more urgent and less rational force of this passion.

The convergence of the themes of the male and of masculinity (of rivalry and submission, homoeroticism and group bonding) with those of sexuality (libido, charisma and group dynamics) and art (theatre, illusion and imagination) renders ‘Mario and the Magician’ a powerful contribution to the exploration and analysis of masculinity and homosexuality in the context of Weimar modernity, namely in revealing the ways in which the crisis opened the way for radical articulations of masculine and homosexual identity. At this moment of history of homosexuality in Germany, where anonymity is ‘no more’ but identity is ‘not yet’, in Broch’s terms, Mario is outed and responds with violence. In Mann’s version of the emergence of the homosexual, the violence is brought about by humiliation of the homosexual and is in the way of compensatory masculinity. Mario carries a gun in preparation for becoming himself. Homosexual masculinity validates itself through violence.

Contingency and control: The end of Weimar homosexuality

It has been my thesis that the Weimar crisis situation represented a period of openness in terms of the possibilities for self-realization of male homosexuals. In the analysis of Partenau we observed that the fictive exploration of this crisis situation, in which the liberating process of subject-formation – in this case the individual male homosexual’s self-construction through the framework of the ‘Männerbund’ – revealed fatal contradictions as the real context and the implicit values of this imaginative framework hardened during the 1920s into a concrete politics of Nazism. Moreover, it is not primarily external condemnation of the homosexual relationship that is critical but rather the conflict in the protagonist between a fantasy of masculinity and the realization of love as a homosexual relationship between two men. The crisis situation resolves itself tragically as a result of the inner conflicts between ‘Männerbund’ fantasy and individual feeling. In ‘Mario and the Magician’, evoking the environment of Italian fascist masculinity from the narrative viewpoint of a German pater familias, demonic fascist masculinity also comes into fatal conflict with a homosexual man’s longing for affection, leading to a tragic ending in which violence is the outcome. In both stories, homosexual identity emerges from within a masculinist environment as something which is in conflict with the core beliefs and attitudes of this environment. This was a wider phenomenon of modernity, but it emerged most dramatically in the surcharged Weimar context.

The narrative consciousness in Hesse’s Partenau distances itself from the totalizing ‘Lebensideologie’ of militarized masculinity as a result of the exploration of the conflicts in the imaginary life of the literary protagonist. The movement here is potentially away from the ideology and toward a restatement of contingency if the tragedy is to be avoided. Hesse, to be sure, is unable to see a way forward and out of Nazism: the suicide reflects this. However the novel, if not the narrative voice, recognizes the conflict. The social realism of Partenau suggests the ongoing ‘Gleichschaltung’ of the ‘Männerbund’ into an increasingly concrete Nazi society by the late ’20s that is entirely incompatible with either Partenau’s self-image of warrior masculinity or his love-affair with Kiebold. Neither of these scenarios is compatible with the other, and while his suicide is described as the consequence of this dawning recognition and of his despair at the loss of Kiebold, the social environment at the end suggests a tightening of real social relations in the context of political developments in which any expression of homosexuality is increasingly proscribed. In terms of the ‘crisis’ thesis of the late years of the Weimar Republic, this novel demonstrates the processes of tightening and control. In the case of Mann’s ‘Mario and the Magician’, contingency is potential in the figure of Mario but the incompatibility between masculinity and homosexual love is manifested in Cipolla’s manipulation and instrumentalization of sexual energies and in Mario’s attempt to reclaim an identity through violence. Figures such as Partenau, Cipolla and Mario try in different ways to come to terms with homosexuality as a constituent of their self-identities. Partenau seeks to subsume homosexual feeling into an ideology of warrior masculinity and national rebirth which reveals itself to be secondary to his affection for Kiebold. Mario does not deny his homosexuality but he is unable to correlate his homosexuality with the dominant masculinity that Cipolla represents, exaggerates and manipulates. In both works violence leads to restitution of the status quo. However, in both works also this restitution is questioned at differing levels of narrative irony and ambiguity.

The rhetoric of change and radical possibility for homosexuals in the ‘Männerbund’ turned out to be over-stated, contradictory and self-defeating over the period from the turn of the century to the reinstatement of a surcharged Paragraph 175A in 1934. In using radical theories of masculinity and male bonding in order to create a framework or ‘scaffolding’ within which a homosexual identity could be articulated, homosexuals borrowed from a deeply incompatible ideology. The tensions between self-perceived masculinity and homosexuality, which led to compensatory attempts to identify the homosexual as the exemplar of extreme masculinity, led to the victory of the one and the defeat of the other. As the ‘30s began, those homosexuals who predicated their homosexuality on this type of masculinity would discover just how tragically wrong their choice had been.