On the Ground of Nature: Sexuality and Respectability in Die Freundschaft’s Wandervogel Stories

ABSTRACT

Die Freundschaft [Friendship] was a popular gay magazine during Germany’s Weimar Republic. Unlike other gay magazines which preceded it, Friendship’s mission was to support a mass movement for homosexual emancipation aimed at respectability and rights. This study examines how the stories about nature – particularly the Wandervogel stories – which were published in Friendship, supported the magazine’s efforts at presenting homosexuality in a way that would be acceptable to the Weimar public. It argues that these stories drew from the legacy of the Wandervogel, as well as the conflicting movements of Adolf Brand and Magnus Hirschfeld, to formulate a kind of homosexuality that was connected to nature, steeped in Germany’s literary tradition, and deeply commited to values such as duty and commitment to one’s fellow man. This study problematizes these efforts by examining how they celebrated a specific kind of “respectable” homosexuality at the expense of other kinds of queerness.

KEYWORDS:

• Homosexuality
• Weimar
• Germany
• Wandervogel
• nature
• respectability
• Die Freundschaft

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the support of the Tina and Morris Wagner Fellowship, and the Conway Scholarship, which made the research for this project possible, as well as the Schwules Museum in Berlin for their generosity with the source material. I would like to extend thanks to the faculty at the University of British Columbia, particularly Dr.s Joy Dixon, Eagle Glassheim, and Christopher Friedrichs. I would also like to thank Dr. Birga Meyer for their assistance with translations, the members of the German Studies Association’s 2014 seminar on Sexual Pathologies, and my colleague Dr. Stephanie Fink, for her helpful input on revisions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.