In this concise and conceptually elegant study Javier Samper Vendrell examines the ideas, business enterprises, advocacy, and organizing work of Friedrich Radszuweit, a leading figure in the Weimar homosexual rights movement, and the activites and strategy of the organization he founded and led, the League for Human Rights. Vendrell positions Radszuweit and the Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM) as one of three groupings, pursuing divergent strategies to securing the rights of homosexuals. The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (WHK) sought to found homosexual rights on medical science. The Bund der Eigenen (BdE) was built around a shared philosophical and literary culture. Radszuweit and the BfM sought instead to attract public support and a mass membership on the foundation of a language of human rights, but more importantly and practically by publishing magazines that catered to the tastes not of the educated elite but of the urban reading public. These publications are the focus and by far the predominant primary sources for this book.

This may sound like a thin empirical foundation for a monograph, but given the industriousness of Radszuweit and the success of his magazines – with a combined annual circulation of over five million issues by 1926 – it is quite an adequate body of sources for the book. This analysis of a coherent body of sources, moreover, gives the book very satisfying conceptual coherence. Part of the value of these sources, moreover, is that they are quite various in content. Unlike the more intellectually demanding publications of the WHK and the BdE, the BfM’s magazines brought diverse “lowbrow” (p. 48) content to a mass readership. That included short stories, poems, erotic photographs, and advertisements for homosexual-owned businesses as well as information pertaining to homosexual rights more narrowly defined. By speaking to the concrete interests and needs of the broader homosexual population, they (as Chapter 2 argues) “fostered a shared identity (...), helped produce a homosexual subjectivity and strengthened the sense of belonging to a movement” and a “community” (p. 39). Vendrell holds that this strategy was in fact successful in making the BfM “Germany’s first mass homosexual organization,” with a membership that reached some 65,000 by 1927 (pp. 4, 52), dwarfing the WHK and the BdE.

These successes, however, came at a high cost. Radszuweit believed his strategy required that homosexuals adopt a “politics of respectability” (p. 158) built around the “image of the ‘proper’ homosexual” or “normative homosexuality” outwardly indistinguishable from respectable heterosexuality. Homosexuals had to be monogamous, domestic, sober, discreet, productive, and essentially “unnoticeable” (p. 59) or invisible. This “assimilationist discourse” had “exclusionary effects” (p. 13) with respect to all those who did not fit this respectable model. Concretely, at the end of the 1920s Radszuweit actually welcomed a proposed reform of the criminal code that would have legalized sex between men, but set the age of consent at 21 (as opposed to 16 for heterosexual acts) and introduced draconian penalties for male prostitutes or “seduced” young men (Chapter 6).

A further problem was that the tastes of the mass audience Radszuweit sought apparently did not entirely conform to the “respectable” model. To appeal to a mass urban homosexual audience, the BfM’s publications had to speak to sensual desires focused on quite young men – whether in stories, photographs, or poems. Moreover, the BfM’s publications did that not within the bounds of “homoerotic aesthetic traditions” that foregrounded classical themes and literary allusion, but through “simple, even shoddy, banal, and salacious” stories about (and photos of) normal working people and their lives, “written in plain, unpretentious language” (p. 65). Further, precisely the commercial success of Radszuweit’s publications – displayed for example in street kiosks or bookstore or tobacco-shop windows – militated against the invisibility of homosexuality. In both respects, therefore, their success helped to fuel the hysteria of sexual conservatives whose homophobic stereotypes posited precisely the seduction of young men by homosexuals as a threat to the moral, sexual, and demographic health of the nation. Chapter 1 reviews the various theorizations of this danger, all of which held fundamentally that young men’s sexuality was labile, poorly defined, and fragile, and could be given permanent (and pathological) shape by homosexual encounters. At their most virulent, fears of homosexual seduction produced hysterical visions of a wave of homosexuality sweeping over Germany. As Vendrell points out, the unsettled conditions and extensive gender-segregation of the war years, the discovery of hormones in the 1920s, the publications of some advocates of the alleged pedagogical benefits of sensual attraction between younger and older men (Hans Blüher, Gustav Wyneken), and a number of sexually colored murders of young men exacerbated such fears (chapter 5).

Chapters 4 and 6 address some of the legislative consequences of this moral panic. Chapter 4 addresses the history of the 1926 law limiting access to ‘Trash and Smut‘” which aimed to protect specifically young people from immoral influences, and was used in some cases to attempt to suppress the BfM’s magazines. Chapter 6 examines the BfM’s vehement rejection of pederasty and support for punishing homosexual prostitution. Radszuweit and his associates saw this “respectable” stance as the condition for the advance the proposed law reform did concede – the legalization of sex between adult men. But they went further, adopting some of the rhetorical strategy of homophobic agitators – for example warning that homosexual prostitution and pederasty were signs of impending civilizational collapse such as had once befallen Greece and Rome. As Vendrell puts it, Radszuweit incorporated “some of the worst forms of homophobia into his rhetoric” (p. 136).

Ultimately therefore Vendrell’s perspective on Radszuweit and the BfM is grim. He points to the “hypocrisy” (p. 128) of preaching against pederasty while continuing to “entice readers” with the “erotic appeal” of photos of young men. Radszuweit’s was a “flawed, repressive, and conformist demand for rights” (p. 60). It was also a self-sabotaging one, because the “homonormative” (p. 158) model of community-building among the respectable encouraged “withdrawal from the political sphere” as a consequence of the illusory hope that “the right kind of homosexual men could lead happy, productive lives in the privacy of their own homes,” enjoying the same rights as other respectable people (p. 159). The BfM’s “dangerous penchant for accommodation” (p. 160) did nothing to protect homosexual men from the vicious persecution moral conservatives advocated and Nazi racist radicals imposed. Readers familiar with the discussion of Weimar sexual politics will recognize in Radszuweit’s strategy a particularly poignant effort to embrace what Laura Marhoefer has called the „Weimar settlement“.1 That settlement or compromise liberalized laws relating to private sexual behavior while stigmatizing and persecuting those whose public behavior was judged deviant or disturbing.

Vendrell’s verdict is vehement, and it may not entirely do justice to the multi-faceted, nuanced, and ambivalent picture he constructs in the body of the book. It may be correct; but this is a richer book than it suggests. The book does not quite “reconstruct a history of male same-sex desire and subjectivity” (p. 7). But it does give us a lucid, thought-provoking, and nuanced examination of the complexity of the collisions between popular sexual and aesthetic tastes, authoritative moral and medical discourses, and advocacy for human rights.

Note:
1 See Laura Marhoefer, Sex in the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis, Toronto 2015, published in the same University of Toronto series as Vendrell’s book.