The Brothers Grimm

 

Once upon a time, a family by the name of Grimm carried on a life that was anything but. In the wooded German state of Hessen, Philipp, a town clerk, lived with his wife, Dorothea, and their children in a quaint cottage. Its exterior was an inviting light red, and its doors tan, as if made of gingerbread. The drawing room had been wallpapered with pictures of huntsmen, onto whose faces the two eldest boys, Jacob and Wilhelm (born in 1785 and 1786, respectively), would cheekily pencil in beards. Soon, Philipp was promoted to serve as the magistrate of a town nearby, and the Grimms moved into a stately home staffed with maids, a cook, and a coachman. Every Christmas, the family decorated a tree with apples, as was the German custom. In the summer, the children ventured into the surrounding woods to collect butterflies and flowers, confident they could find their way back home.

Then, one day, a dark cloud appeared, as if summoned by a witch jealous of their domestic idyll. In 1796, Philipp, only forty-four years old, succumbed to pneumonia. Jacob later recalled seeing his father’s body being measured for a coffin. Dorothea and her children were ordered to clear out. Without Philipp’s income, they were forced for a time to shelter in an almshouse just next door—cursed with a view of their former home and the courtyard where they once played, happily, until what came after.

Jacob and Wilhelm, the Brothers Grimm, experienced the kind of sharp reversal of fortune characteristic of the genre that became synonymous with their name: the fairy tale. A prince turned into a frog; a beloved daughter reduced to a scullery maid. Where the French rendition of “Cinderella,” by Charles Perrault, opens with Cinderella already in tatters, laboring away for her stepmother, the Grimms’ version, “Aschenputtel,” begins with the heroine’s mother on her deathbed. Ann Schmiesing, the author of 'The Brothers Grimm, A Biography'  (Yale), observes that the change transforms a “story of ‘rags to riches’ to ‘riches to rags to riches’—a trajectory, incidentally, that parallels the Grimms’ experience.” The Grimms’ version hacks away at the French tale in other ways. When the prince shows up with the fateful slipper, Aschenputtel’s stepsisters slash at their heels to make their feet fit. Each makes it to the gates of the castle before the prince notices blood gushing everywhere.

The dark tenor of the Grimms’ fairy tales is almost a punch line at this point, and their surname, which means “wrathful” in German, hasn’t helped. Even in their lifetime, the brothers were subjected to the obligatory punning. Jacob, an accomplished philologist, thanked a friend for resisting the urge to crack the obvious joke after he published his book “German Grammar”: “I do so appreciate that you have not chided my Grammar as a Grimmer.” In truth, there’s an almost comical severity to their tales, among them ““How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” in which a pair of siblings, having just seen their father butcher a pig, try out the act on each other. In “Briar Rose,” the Grimms’ version of “Sleeping Beauty,” suitors trying to reach the slumbering maiden become snagged on the briar hedge surrounding her castle, dying “miserable deaths.”

These stories amount to wish fulfillment for people who want to believe stereotypes about German austerity, which may be a measure of the Grimms’ success. Their aim in collecting such folklore—alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths—was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers. It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. (Toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.)

The Grimms were Germanists before there was a Germany. When they were born, “Germany” contained what the historian Perry Anderson describes as a “maze of dwarfish princedoms,” and they died not long before the country’s unification, in 1871. In between, the outlines of their homeland shifted again and again, with the Napoleonic invasion of Hessen, in 1806, the Congress of Vienna and post-Napoleonic redivisions of Europe, and, eventually, the rise of Otto von Bismarck. Amid such geographic disarray, the Grimms believed that shared language and cultural traditions could be the connective yarn of a people, their people. All that was needed was a fellow, or two, to come along with a spinning wheel.

Though posterity has conjoined them, Jacob and Wilhelm were two rather disparate men. Wilhelm was the bon vivant to Jacob’s introvert. The elder was the more accomplished scholar. Jacob’s research on phonetics established what is still known today in linguistics as Grimm’s law. (He had noticed patterns by which consonants from other Indo-European languages altered as they made their way into German.) When, in their mid-fifties, the brothers accepted appointments at the University of Berlin, Jacob spurned any honors and illustrious positions that would take him away from his desk. “I would happily don a homespun smock of the coarsest material and strive for nothing other than that,” he joked to a friend. Meanwhile, Wilhelm’s diary from that period shows him watching a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” strolling through the botanical gardens, and taking in the Cabinet of Art, where Napoleon’s hat was on display. A “rare day without any visit,” he noted in one entry.

And yet a joint biography is the only kind that feels appropriate; posthumously disentangling one brother from the other seems tantamount to desecrating a corpse, for Jacob and Wilhelm were ardently inseparable. When, during their undergraduate years, Jacob briefly worked abroad for one of their professors, Wilhelm wrote to him, “When you left, I thought my heart would tear in two. I couldn’t stand it. You certainly don’t know how much I love you.” Jacob pledged that it would never happen again, and sketched out what he hoped their life would look like after they completed their studies: “We will presumably at last live quite withdrawn and isolated, for we will not have many friends, and I do not enjoy acquaintances. We shall want to work with each other quite collaboratively and to cut off all other affairs.” When Wilhelm married, Jacob lived with his brother and new sister-in-law. A friend once addressed the brothers in a letter as “My dear double hooks!”

Their bond was forged through their shared history of loss and social isolation. After Philipp’s death, Jacob and Wilhelm no longer enjoyed the status that came with being the sons of a magistrate. Matriculating at the University of Marburg, in their late teens, they had to pay their own way; stipends were typically reserved for the sons of aristocrats and landowners. Jacob saw his situation at Marburg as akin to the slights that the German people—lacking the political and economic advantages that came with being part of a nation-state—suffered on the European stage. He wrote in his autobiography, “Sparseness spurs a person to industriousness and work, keeps one from many a distraction and infuses one with noble pride that keeps one conscious of self-achievement in contrast to what social class and wealth provide. . . . A great deal of what Germans have achieved overall should be attributed to the fact that they are not a rich folk.”

While at the university, the brothers came under the influence of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a young law professor who maintained that laws should not be imposed upon a people but, rather, be derived from them. A legislator, then, must be a kind of historian, or, better yet, a philologist, alert to a people’s desires as expressed in their language and storytelling. In a study of the Brothers Grimm and German nationalism, the scholar Jakob Norberg argues that, if Plato prescribed a “philosopher king” to rule the city-state, the Grimms envisioned a “philologist king” to lead the nation-state.

It was also at Marburg, and through Savigny, that the Grimms fell in with Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, two wellborn writers who had begun to amass German folk songs, aiming to capture the Volksseele—the soul of the people—that predated the European Enlightenment and French neoclassicism. Arnim and Brentano were founding members of what became known as Heidelberg Romanticism. If early German Romanticism, which flowered in Jena, in the seventeen-nineties, prized the “individual, subjective worldview,” Schmiesing writes, “the Heidelberg Romantics celebrated folk and heroic literature because they saw in it the collective experience of a people.”

Savigny’s dictum situated the national will in the hearts, or, more precisely, on the tongues, of common folk. Though the Grimms began by helping Arnim and Brentano, they came to see themselves as uniquely fluent, by virtue both of their family’s impoverishment and of the lore surrounding their home state of Hessen. They would gather many of their fairy tales there, convinced that the region’s relative remove from commercial roads preserved its authentically German character.

Hessen also had a touch of myth to it. The land had been settled in ancient times by the Chatti people, described by the Roman historian Tacitus as being brawnier than other Germanic tribes. With much of its rugged terrain a hindrance to agriculture, mercenaries became a primary export. Twenty-five per cent of British land forces in the American Revolutionary War were Hessian. (Washington Irving’s headless horseman was rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian trooper.) The philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a father of German nationalism, even accused Europeans of deliberately keeping German lands fragmented—the better to enlist German valor for their own conquests. It was on this embattled landscape that the Grimms set about stitching together a cultural heritage that they could raise as a flag.

A foe for the ages had appeared. Napoleon’s conquest of Germanic lands was a watershed moment for German Romanticism. “Soon everything changed from the ground up,” Wilhelm recalled, of French troops occupying his home town of Kassel, in 1806. “Foreign people, foreign customs, and in the streets and on walks a foreign, loudly spoken language.” Hessen was subsumed into the Kingdom of Westphalia, led by Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon’s hapless brother, who had scarcely learned more than three words of German: those for “tomorrow,” “again,” and “jolly.” (This earned him the moniker King Jolly.) Jérôme was rumored to bathe in red wine, which, Schmiesing writes, “underscored his foreignness in a region accustomed to white wine.”

Jacob actually served as Jérôme’s personal librarian, but his real vocation was as a kind of foot soldier-folklorist amid the Napoleonic Wars. He later assembled a group of folklorists who took an oath to “honor the fatherland” through the “rescuing of our folk literature.” The tales they gathered were bread crumbs that would guide the German people to their cultural home.

The first volume of the Grimms’ “Children’s and Household Tales” was published in December of 1812. It contained eighty-six stories, including classics like “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Briar Rose,” and “Little Red Riding Hood,” along with extensive footnotes. Critics weren’t sure what to make of a collection of “children’s tales” that came with scholarly addenda and randy animals. “Mrs. Fox,” where a fox with nine tails, which scan as furry phallic symbols, tests his wife’s faithfulness, was not the kind of bedtime story that parents had in mind. The same went for “Rapunzel,” in which the fairy (not the witch) realizes that her long-tressed prisoner has been receiving visits from the prince when, one day, Rapunzel asks, “Why are my clothes becoming too tight?” For the Grimms, what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate, and fairy tales, across many literary traditions, weren’t always intended for children. According to the scholar Maria Tatar, these were folktales shared among adults after hours, while the children were asleep. She cites a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” in which the big bad wolf has designs on the little girl that are not gastronomical. In that version, she does what amounts to a striptease, peeling off her clothes as the disguised wolf watches from the bed, giving fresher context to “What big hands you have!”

Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the brothers boasted of the collection’s fidelity to their sources: “No circumstance has been poeticized, beautified, or altered.” Well, that much was clear, complained the Grimms’ old friend Clemens Brentano, who thought they went too far. “If you want to display children’s clothes,” Brentano wrote, “you can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.” But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured.

Schmiesing’s biography of the Grimms is the first major English-language one in decades. It can be dense with details, but when I read Murray B. Peppard’s 'Paths Through The Forests'(1971), a more approachable biography of the Grimms, I found myself missing Schmiesing’s unrulier thickets of Prussian bureaucrats and long asides about German grammar. Hers is hearty German fare. It also presents findings that complicate the brothers’ image as ethnographic purists.

The popular perception of how the Grimms collected their tales was captured in an illustration that appeared in an eighteen-nineties German magazine: Jacob and Wilhelm are shown visiting a humble cottage, listening to an older peasant woman. “This rustic scene did not actually take place,” Schmiesing writes. The Grimms’ informants tended to be well-educated women from affluent families who retrieved stories from villagers and servants in their employ. The woman in the illustration, Dorothea Viehmann, was indeed one of the Grimms’ poorer informants, but her tales were not as “genuinely Hessian” as the brothers once described them. She was of Huguenot extraction on her father’s side, accounting, scholars have speculated, for the French influence on some of her stories.

Schmiesing also revisits the scholarship on Wilhelm’s change in editorial policy. Possibly in response to critical disapprobation, he updated the second version of “Children’s and Household Tales” to satisfy nineteenth-century gender norms. In the first edition, the story of Hansel and Gretel begins with their mother telling their father to abandon the siblings in the woods. In the second edition, the father’s wife—the archetypal evil stepmother—makes the order, because it was unseemly to suggest that a biological mother would dispose of her children so coolly. (The father going along with it all—just fine!)

Although their legacy may be as German Mother Geese, the brothers regarded their fairy-tale volumes as one project among many, and hardly the most important. In 1829, the Grimms, then in their forties, took jobs as librarians at the University of Göttingen, in the kingdom of Hanover. There, Jacob published “German Mythology” (1835). He believed that, just as etymologists could identify features of ancient languages through modern descendants, he could approximate ancient German mythology through folklore. He scoured ballads, fairy tales, and legends for references to heroes, wise women, dwarfs, giants, ghosts, cures, magic, and more.

Unlike “Children’s and Household Tales,” “German Mythology” was a national, and nationalist, sensation. The book positively rejuvenated the composer Richard Wagner. In his autobiography, “My Life,” Wagner wrote of encountering “German Mythology”: “Before my mind’s eye, a world of figures soon built itself up, which in turn revealed themselves in such unexpectedly sculptural form and so primordially recognizable that, when I saw them clearly before me and heard their speech within me, I finally could not comprehend whence came this almost tangible familiarity and certainty of their bearing. I cannot describe the effect of this on the disposition of my soul as anything other than a complete rebirth.” With “German Mythology,” Jacob had hoped to defend his ancestors—the Germanic peoples who invaded the Roman Empire—against allegations of barbarism. It’s a defense that, Schmiesing writes, “was at times overtly racialized.” Though Wilhelm praised the fairy tales of Sierra Leone, Jacob once wrote an article in which he called fetishism “a descending into dullness and coarseness, like that which rules the wild Negro,” and insisted that it was “essentially foreign to a people like our ancestors, which as soon as it appears in history, acts worthily and freely and speaks a finely wrought language that is closely related to that of the noblest peoples of antiquity.”

The Grimms’ professional lives were as unstable as the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1837, a new monarch dissolved Hanover’s legislative assemblies and cast aside its constitution. Jacob and Wilhelm, joining five of their colleagues, signed a statement in protest. The dissenters—who were ordered to leave Hanover within three days—became known as the Göttingen Seven, and their act of defiance was later enshrined in German history as a banner moment in the nation’s path to democracy. Wilhelm even revised a fairy tale with the episode in mind. In an earlier version of a story titled “The Blue Light,” a man leaves the military because he is too old to fight. In the new version, the protagonist is a wounded soldier who is discharged by his sovereign with the words “You can go home now. I no longer need you, and you shall receive no more money from me. I give wages only to those who can serve me.”

The detail of wages withheld spoke to the financial straits in which Jacob and Wilhelm now found themselves. In 1840, Arnim’s widow implored the Prussian prince, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, to find positions for two of her friends, whom she did not name. After doing some digging, the Prince learned their identities, and wrote back, “The fruit of my grim researching was—two researching Grimms!” Alexander von Humboldt, the celebrated geographer and naturalist, arranged for the brothers to pursue their scholarship in Berlin on a combined salary of three thousand thalers, to be divided as they pleased “since they live like man and wife.”

Two years later, Humboldt came to Jacob with a question. The Prussian court was announcing a new honor for achievements in the arts and sciences. Could Jacob advise on how a specific word in the statute should be spelled? The word in question: deutsch.

The project that would preoccupy the Grimms for the remainder of their lives was the Deutsches Wörterbuch—the German dictionary. A publishing house in Leipzig had pitched them the idea in 1838, but Jacob hesitated. He had concerns about the systematizing of language, and about German-language classes in schools—he cherished the idea of the mother tongue being imparted by actual mothers. Still, the Grimms had models for a different kind of lexicon. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, from the mid-eighteenth century, had been part of a movement away from rigid language textbooks. Entries featured texts drawn from various periods, giving a sense of how language changed over time. Johnson and others believed that dictionaries could record, and not merely dictate, the expressions of a people, in a version of what Savigny, the Grimms’ old professor at Marburg, had preached about the law.

Just as they had worked with informants on their fairy tales, the Grimms solicited dictionary entries from more than eighty contributors, including professors, philologists, and preachers. The results could be enchanting. The first entry was for the letter “A”:

       "A, the noblest and most primordial of any sound, resounding with fullness from the chest and throat, first and easiest sound that a child will learn to produce, and which the alphabets of most languages rightfully put at the beginning."

The men worked twelve hours a day to meet publishing deadlines, but they managed to sneak in some fun. In the complete first volume, which appeared in 1854, the Grimms included Wilhelm’s affectionate nickname for his wife, bierlümmel (beer lout). It took them sixteen years to finish that first section—which ended with the entry for biermolke (beer whey)—but the quibbles rolled in almost immediately. Catholics complained about the preponderance of word-usage examples from Martin Luther, and about the tone of certain entries. The one for ablass (indulgence) read, “Principally the ecclesiastical remission of sin for money . . . against which the Reformation victoriously inveighed.” Jacob believed that the capitalization of common nouns was an inorganic import and did away with it, a choice that inspired parodies in the German press.

Despite their critics, the Grimms carried on. In their hands, the dictionary was a form of political speech, the only kind that ever worked for them. In 1848, amid the wave of nationalist revolutions across Europe, Jacob was invited to serve as a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, a body convened in an effort to create a unified German state. But the meeting descended into factionalism as competing class and geographical interests revealed the country to be far more divided than Jacob had fantasized. The brothers retreated to their study to work on the dictionary. Every letter was a step toward the goal—if not a unified Germany, then at least a unified German people, connected by words, and by familial bickering about their meaning.

On December 16, 1859, Wilhelm died, at the age of seventy-three, following complications from back surgery. Jacob sat by his bedside and counted each of his brother’s last breaths. Four years later, Jacob followed. Stricken with an inflamed liver and then a stroke, he lay in bed conscious but unable to speak. He reached for a picture of Wilhelm and brought it up to his face, and died not long afterward. The two are buried in Berlin as they lived, side by side.

In 1871, Kaiser Wilhelm ascended to the throne of a newly unified Germany. In Goslar, a northern town in the Harz Mountains, an imperial palace was renovated to include a fresco drawing of “Briar Rose,” symbolizing a long-slumbering, finally awakened German identity. It was the fairy-tale ending the Grimms had dreamed of, and, as in many of their stories, there was no happily ever after.

The Grimms’ stories, with their promise of bodying forth an authentically Teutonic spirit, were so sought after during the Nazi years that Allied occupying forces temporarily banned them after the war. Scholars have since stressed that their nationalism was rooted in a shared cultural and linguistic heritage, not blood and soil. Still, the task of narrating the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm remains as thorny as the hedge that trapped Briar Rose’s suitors. As Schmiesing writes, it “entails navigating between too naively or too judgmentally presenting the nineteenth-century constructions of Germany and Germanness to which they contributed.”

In truth, this ambivalence existed for Jacob, too, who worried that the standardization of German in schools might downgrade dialects and the very folk speech that their lives had been devoted to capturing. The brothers knew better than anyone that every story of enchantment is also a story of disenchantment, and their lifelong cause was no exception. The nation has proved to be humanity’s most cherished fairy tale, and its grimmest.

The Brothers Grimm Were Dark For A Reason. By Jennifer Wilson. The New Yorker, November 4, 2024

 

 The Brothers Grimm, A Biography.   Yale Books

Lesbian Magazines in Weimar Berlin

 

Berlin in the 1920s was ablaze with sexual and gender freedom. Magazines at newsstands boasted covers featuring people who were transgender and clad scantily. Their headlines touted stories on “Homosexual Women and the Upcoming Legislative Elections,” and offered, on occasion, homoerotic fiction inside its pages.

Publications like Die Freundin (The Girlfriend); Frauenliebe (Women Love, which later became Garçonne); and Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex, which included writers who might identify as transgender today), found dedicated audiences who read their takes on culture and nightlife as well as the social and political issues of the day. The relaxed censorship rules under the Weimar Republic enabled gay women writers to establish themselves professionally while also giving them an opportunity to legitimize an identity that only a few years later would be under threat.

 “Reading stories about other queer women was such a powerful way that women came to terms with their own queerness,” Laurie Marhoefer, a professor of history at the University of Washington, told me. “That was super important for women more than for men because men would just have more opportunities to find other queer people.” Marhoefer, who first learned of these publications as a graduate student in Berlin in the 2000s, is part of a growing group of academics focusing on this oft-forgotten moment in German history.

Such research is part of a wider interest in the Weimar Republic, bolstered by recent TV shows like Transparent (which drew connections between the 1920s and modern-day queer identity) and the gritty Babylon Berlin, whose characters include a female sex worker who spends her days as a detective. Benjamin Tallis described the appeal of these depictions in New Perspectives: “The visceral thrill of watching 1920s Berlin as a creative, decadent socio-cultural mecca, beset by suffering, and haunted by myriad ghosts yet alive with possibility, is tempered by the knowledge of the political abyss that awaits.”

Although these fictional tales tend to romanticize this interwar period, the primary source documents that miraculously survived the period of the Third Reich and subsequent and repressive Cold War years provide a richer and more complicated picture.

There were some twenty-five to thirty queer publications in Berlin between 1919 and 1933, most of which published around eight pages of articles on a bi-weekly basis. Of these, at least six were specifically oriented toward lesbians. What made them unique is the space they made for queer women, who had traditionally been marginalized on account of both gender and sexuality, to grapple with their role in a rapidly changing society. (The concept of the “new,” albeit straight, woman in the Weimar Republic has been researched broadly, including by Rüdiger Graf in Central European History, who writes that it reflected a crisis of masculinity following defeat in the First World War as well fears over the country’s future when women were putting off getting married and having children.)

In these interwar years in Germany, queer and transgender identity became more accepted, in large part thanks to the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, a Jewish doctor whose Institut für Sexualwissenschaft focused on issues of gender, sex, and sexuality. At the same time, women in Germany were making strides toward greater independence and equity; they gained the right to vote in 1918, and feminist organizations like Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine cultivated space for women in public spheres, encouraging their advancement in politics. As Sara Ann Sewell writes in the journal Central European History, the German Communist Party created the Red Women and Girls’ League in 1925 to attract more women and working-class people, particularly through organizing factory workers.

More generally, German women were becoming increasingly empowered. Queer people—including women—rallied around the abolishment of contemporary sodomy laws. This struggle “created a wider climate of publication, activism, and social organization that was much more embracing of different types of queer and trans lives,” according to Katie Sutton, an associate professor of German and gender studies at the Australian National University.

Like Marhoefer, Sutton came upon the Weimar-era lesbian publications in Berlin and was surprised that there wasn’t more engagement with these magazines or with the queer history of the Weimar Republic more broadly on the part of academics in the English-speaking world. Exceptions included the notable work of historian Claudia Schoppmann and her 1996 Days of Masquerade and Heike Schader’s 2004 Virile, Vamps, und wilde Veilchen (Virility, Vamps, and Wild Violets). The latter focused on the queer tropes that proliferated in lesbian magazine fiction of the time, and their creation, according to Sutton, of “codes of lesbian desire and lesbian eroticism” through color, flora, smells, and body parts, notably mouths, lips, hands, and breasts.

For its part, magazine fiction of the time challenged some of the restrictions of class and race in its love stories. A 1932 issue of Die Freundin, for instance, includes a story about a relationship between the German Töpsdrill and the Moroccan Benorina. Exoticizing of the “other” was common; Sutton points to another piece of fiction published in Ledige Frauen (Single Women) in 1928 about Helga, a German coffee importer, who falls for Nuela, a servant from Java. Notwithstanding the white, sometimes racist perspectives of the narrators, such stories offered compelling renderings of women-centered utopias.

Outside of fantasy, these publications also created a space for readers to assert themselves in the real world through personal ads and event listings. There included cream puff eating contests, ladies and trans balls, and lake excursions on paddle steamers. In fact, aspects of lesbian culture also seeped into the mainstream, particularly when it came to fashion, with a rise in the popularity of short haircuts, straight skirts, and pantsuits. There was little difference between the imagery in mainstream fashion magazines and the masculinized aesthetic eroticized in the queer ones. The “hint of queerness” in the mainstream, Sutton said, was “sexy and fascinating, but also a bit scary and potentially off putting.” A popular element in lesbian publications, the monocle was similarly charged, and, Sutton says, “a queerly coded, quite masculine symbol of owning the gaze.”

Such sartorial choices were in keeping with debates in the lesbian magazines of the time around the “extent that masculinity might be seen as hierarchically superior to that of the feminine lesbian women,” according to Sutton. Moreover, these debates foreshadowed the butch/femme debates of the 1980s and 1990s and the border wars of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.

Style was particularly significant for trans women and men who in the Weimar Republic defined themselves with a variety of terms: both as transvestites and masculine women who wore men’s clothes but identified as women. Trans people were given space in both their own magazines and even in some of the lesbian ones, highlighting a sense of cross-identity camaraderie. Die Freundin had a regular trans supplement highlighting these voices.

 In a 1929 issue, a writer named Elly R criticized the treatment of trans people in mainstream media, referencing sensational coverage of men wearing their wives’ wedding dresses. “Everywhere in nature we find transitional forms, in the physical and chemical bodies, in the plants and the animals,” she wrote. “Everywhere one form passes into another, and everywhere there is a connection. Nowhere in nature is there a delimited, fixed type. Is it only in man that this transition should be missing? As there is no fixed form in nature, a strict separation between the sexes is also impossible.”

These magazines were resilient, a testament to the strength of the communities they served. Still, they faced challenges. The 1926 Harmful Publications Act was intended to impose moral censorship on the widespread pulp literature sold at kiosks and newsstands, including the queer publications, which often featured nude photographs.

The Catholic and Protestant Churches as well as public morality organizations and conservative politicians led the fight against what they called “trash and filth literature.” As Klaus Petersen explains in a German Studies Review article, the list of materials, which included at least seventy works on sexology and “filth literature,” could still be sold, just not to those under age eighteen. While “the instrument was blunt and [its] impact minimal,” the restriction was boosted by members of religious and youth groups that checked up on newsstands to see what material was visible or advertised to children. (This is not a far cry from the Nazi book burnings that would occur just a few years later.) But the law also spurred a counter-campaign by writers, publishers, intellectuals, and leftist political activists who objected to these limitations, as Petersen explains.

“This coalition of protest groups against infringements of the freedom of expression considered the Index a simplistic and entirely ineffective means to avoid an honest discussion of the fast change in social attitudes and moral values and campaigned against it as an unconstitutional instrument of suppression.”

Despite their relative progressivism, these publications also represented a rather narrow, bourgeois segment of the German population. Even if women had greater access to education and publishing opportunities, the women who enjoyed this greater access were largely urban elites. Little if no space was given to proletarian struggles. “Middle-class values of respectability and citizenship shaped the political agenda, with contributors drawing on the powerful language of national inclusion in formulating their demands of legal and social acceptance,” wrote Sutton in an article in German Studies Review.

It’s also important to note that whatever sexual liberation the LGBTQ+ community enjoyed was at the discretion of the state, whose goal was to control its members. This was seen in the Transvestitenscheine (“transvestite certificates”) handed out by the German police to protect against the arrest of those cross-dressing in public. Between 1908-1933, dozens of such passes were distributed. They also guarded against arrests for sodomy law violations and played a role in a 1927 battle over legalizing prostitution, largely aimed at preventing the spread of venereal diseases.

That said, the plight of sex workers was largely excluded from consideration in the publications in question, and mentions of their readers’ privilege were few and far between. Still, a 1929 Die Freunden article cautioned readers: “Don’t go to your entertainments while thousands of our sisters mourn their lives in gloomy despair.”

More notably, these magazines gave precious little foresight into what was to come in Germany: the attempted extermination of all who did not fit the Aryan ideal. That, of course, included lesbians, some of whom perhaps took steps to save their own skin. Ruth Roellig, who wrote for Frauenliebe and published Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women) in 1928, a first-of-its-kind travel guide to queer Berlin, published a second book in 1937. Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin (Soldiers, Death, Dancer), an anti-Semitic screed, proved to be Roellig’s last book, though she lived until 1969. Selli Engler, a lesbian editor who founded the magazine Die BIF – Blätter Idealer Frauenfreundschaften (Papers on Ideal Women Friendships), wrote Heil Hitler, a play she sent directly to the führer.

As feminist and queer activism grew in Germany in the 1970s, so too did interest in the Weimar period. In 1973, Homosexual Action West Berlin began to collect flyers, posters, and press releases in an effort to create a comprehensive archive of lesbian history. The group eventually morphed into Spinnboden, Europe’s largest and oldest lesbian archive, with more than 50 thousand items in its holdings, magazines among them. Katja Koblitz, who runs the archive, says the existence of these lesbian periodicals is invaluable.

“These magazines were in one part a sign of the blossoming and of the richness of the lesbian subculture in these days,” she said. “Reading these magazines was a form of reassurance: Here we are, we exist.”

Publishing Queer Berlin. By  Hannah Steinkopf-Frank.   JSTOR Daily, June 7, 2023.

 

Each year, Lesbian Visibility Day on April 26 gives prominence to an often unseen minority. In Weimar Berlin, before the Nazis seized power, writer Ruth Roellig put same-sex female desire on the map for the first time.

It was 1928 and Berlin was undergoing a revolution. Poverty, insecurity and political polarization were everywhere. Yet at the same time, the German capital was enjoying a taste of freedom that had once seemed utopian. The storm of fascism had not arrived yet, and women and sexual minorities were eager to claim their place in society.

"The Weimar Republic was, especially in Berlin, in eruption," Sabine Balke, managing director of the Digital German Women's Archive, told DW. "Everything was possible."

Or so it seemed. Even though female emancipation was making day-to-day strides, crossdressers could still be arrested on the streets, and homosexual relations were criminalized.

Lesbians, often considered the most invisible group within what we today call the LGBTQ community, also had a glimpse of how the world could be if its rules were different. What we know about that today is to a great extent due to the work of a woman who drew the map of same-sex female love and desire in that era.

Heady times

Ruth Roellig (1878-1969) began writing just after finishing school. Hers was a male, straight world, yet she soon managed to publish fiction and travel journals. But it was the Weimar Republic and the relative press freedom that came with it that paved the way for some of her most remarkable works, at least from a contemporary perspective.

"For lesbians, the more relaxed censorship under the Republic was important. Many new lesbian magazines appeared," historian Laurie Marhoefer told DW. Garçonne, Die Freundin or Frauenliebe were some of the publications that gave homosexual and bisexual women a place not just to tell their own stories but also to discover safe spaces and leisure activities that did not force them to hide their sexual orientation.

 "One could go to the clubs and meet similar people, other lesbian women, to dance, to make music," Balke says. It was the time when cabaret queen Claire Waldoff's - also openly homosexual - rebel voice was played in the radios all over the country.

Pioneering work and historic document

Through her articles in Frauenliebe, Roellig became a prominent figure in the lesbian scene of Weimar Berlin. Publishing those pieces also meant outing herself, but it did not seem to be a great danger at the time. As it often does, progress must have felt irreversible.

Nonetheless, it wasn't until 1928 that her greatest contribution to the lesbian history in Germany was published. In Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin's Lesbian Women), she extensively depicted the German capital's network of bars, cafés and clubs aimed at this public. It was much more than a pioneering queer city guide.

"It's very important because it's evidence of what was there," Sabine Balke underlines. Also the head of Spinnboden, Berlin's lesbian archive, Balke is aware of the historical importance of such a document: "In the 70s, when women started to fight for a more open sexuality or against the abortion ban, they did not know that there had been something similar in the 1920s."

The backlash

The rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 also meant the end of this brief period of sexual emancipation. The magazines and venues that in the previous decade had become so important for sexual minorities were shut down. Roellig's life also changed forever. "She had exposed herself," says Balke. "She could not write as a lesbian woman anymore. She had to quickly make sure that everything disappeared."

Yet it was not the end of her writing career. Ruth Roellig did publish another novel in 1937: Soldaten, Tod, Tänzerin ("Soldiers, Death, Dancer"). With its anti-Semitic content, this book left a disturbing legacy. Within a few years, around six million Jews would be killed in the Holocaust. Roellig never wrote again.

Historian Laurie Marhoefer insists on the need to underline the controversial part of this pioneer in lesbian activism: "Every time we mention her, we also have to consider this part of her legacy. She was no 'bystander' in the Nazi period."

No black and white

Balke agrees, but also thinks it's important to go beyond that. "It was a question of survival. That's why we today cannot just say: She was a Nazi." After having openly maintained a lifestyle hated by the regime, Ruth Roellig was in complete danger. "But it could also be that she found that all right and was genuinely anti-Semitic," she adds.

"I think this shows us that people do not have only one story, and that they're not only good, or only bad" – a concept that, as Balke points out, Hannah Arendt underscored in her work.

 Whether Roellig was truly anti-Semitic or not is a question we cannot answer nowadays, Balke believes: "It's very hard to judge." By the time she died in Berlin, in 1969, she no longer held openly anti-Semitic views nor was she openly lesbian. What remain are her books and articles, the controversial legacy of the woman who made lesbians visible in Berlin decades before the Stonewall riots and the first gay pride marches.

At the time, however, Roellig was probably unaware of the importance of Berlins lesbische Frauen, Balke believes. The book was lost for many years and re-edited in the 1970s under the title Lila Nächte (Purple Nights). And for Balke, thanks to that book, "Ruth Roellig lives in our history."

 The woman who gave birth to lesbian Berlin. By Enrique Anarte. Deutsche Welle,  April 26, 2019. 

I came across these magazines when researching the topic of my most recent written assessment. By now, I have carried an intense fascination with the sexual socio-political climate of the Weimar Republic for a couple of years. On the course ‘Reassembling Modernism: Artists’ Networks in Europe 1909-1960’ as an undergraduate, I was introduced to Weimar culture when we examined the Neue Frau in the Berlin of the 1920s. It was a text by Maria Makela entitled ‘New women, new men, new objectivity’, however, that truly peaked my interest in the subject.

This year, I revisited the Neue Frau and explored her myth and ideological potential whilst considering her as a phenomenon of cosmopolitanism—in relation to class, gender and violence in the city. Makela’s essay was my starting point, and these magazines gave me an example of how the Neue Frau’s multi-faceted identity was utilised to develop a progressive symbol of gender subversion. The Neue Frau/neue frauen is the German adaptation of the New Woman. The New Woman was a female figure, a new gender type, who emerged in modern society towards the end of the nineteenth century, becoming a popularised construct in the first half of the twentieth century.
 
 

The Neue Frau was a fashionable woman who adopted traditionally heteronormative, ‘masculine’ traits within her dress identity to disassociate herself from the pre-WWI woman. Her image epitomised modern femininity, but it also effectively mirrored how interwar Germany perceived itself to be under cultural threat from the masculinisation of a ‘New’ generation of emancipated women. In the pages of queer publications, however, the Neue Frau’s image was represented without ridicule or cynicism. It was interesting to reconfigure my own perception of her image after months of aligning it with the caricatured parody that male, Neue Sachlichkeit artists had painted her to be.

In the case of the women depicted in Liebende Frauen (1927-1930), the tensions felt nationwide between opposing genders are made redundant. At the time of the1929/30 issue, Liebende Frauen was one of two lesbian magazines in Berlin; the other, the more widely-known Die Freundin (The Girlfriend: Journal for Ideal Friendship between Women) had been in circulation since 1924. Art historian Heike Schader notes that Liebende Frauen is most likely a reprint of the magazine Frauenliebe (Women Love); which in turn was renamed Garçonne in 1930.

In the above image, a cover dated 1929, the female subject sports a bubikopf—a haircut strongly associated with the Neue Frau, which translates directly to ‘boy’s head’ and was reconfigured into numerous variations, such as the shortened and smoothed ‘Eton crop’, similar to that of Louise Brooks’ Lulu in Pandora’s Box. The overlapping strings of pearl necklaces that decorate her neck, the draped cut of her neckline and way in which her face is coquettishly turned from the camera’s gaze tells the reader that this Neue Frau, like Brooks’ Lulu—will not apologise for claiming her own sexuality. This cover presents allure and a conscious play on the provocation of desires, celebrating the figure of the New Woman by virtue of her dress and demeanour.

These covers are truly wonderful examples of how the New Woman, specifically the homosexual New Woman, found alternative means of how her image could be disseminated in popular culture via ways less damaging to her personhood. Each cover is a portal into an important history for women, and they each contribute to the Neue Frau as a social construct: one that was repeatedly well-documented until the Weimar Republic’s fall. 

To see more of these wonderful covers, go to the Spinnboden Lesbenarchiv und Bibliothek, Berlin’s online archives: www.meta-katalog.eu

Additionally, there are lots of many interesting texts covering the Neue Frau’s image, such as:
Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture by Katherina von Ankum
Women in German History: From Bourgeois Emancipation to Sexual Liberation by Ute Frevert
Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses in German Culture, 1918-1933 by Mila Ganeva
The New Woman International by Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco
Visions of the “Neue Frau”: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany by Marsha Meskimmon
The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany by Katie Sutton
 
Sources
Maria Makela, “New Women, New Men, New Objectivity” in New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933
Heike Schader, ‘Liebende Frauen’
Katie Sutton, ‘The Masculinisation of Woman’ in The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany
 
In her image: the documentation of the Neue Frau in German Weimar-era lesbian magazines. By Kathryn Reed. The Courtauld,  February 26, 2019. 

Before World War I, Berlin was known for its large male homosexual subculture. After the war, however, the sudden emergence of a visible lesbian subculture was unprecedented and remarkable because, previously, lesbianism had been thought to be rare. The development of modern mass culture coincided with the rise of homosexual subculture, facilitating the formation of lesbian identities. However, as will be suggested first, these identities also had their roots in medical discourse and the homosexual emancipation movement, which looked to medical research to support its demands for homosexual rights. Also, lesbian clubs and nightclubs, as well as lesbian magazines, were closely linked to the homosexual emancipation movement, and they were the sites which brought women together and which facilitated lesbian identification. Therefore, this paper will explore the production of these identities by examining the subcultural network and, in particular, the lesbian magazine Die Freundin, as a mass cultural publication in which science, mass culture, and subculture intersected. This will highlight the constructed, unstable and ambiguous nature of Weimar lesbian identities, which were varied and overlapping.

Scholars of sexual cultures and gender relations in Germany have tended to overlook Weimar lesbian identities, confining their interest to the subculture itself, rather than to the role it played in the development and elaboration of homosexual identities more generally. For example, in relation to lesbians, the works of Lillian Faderman and Brigitte Eriksson, Ilse Kokula, Adele Meyer and Claudia Schoppmann have provided valuable documentation of the Imperial, Weimar and Nazi periods. More specifically, both Richard Dyer and Ruby Rich have examined homosexual cinema in Weimar,while Katharina Vogel and Petra Schlierkamp have documented the history of the lesbian magazines Die Freundin and Garçonne respectively. One recent scholar, Christiane von Langerke, has investigated the numerous historical designations for lesbians in order to prevent these women from being subsumed under the male-identified label of ‘homosexual.’  All of this work is invaluable as a foundation for further scholarship.

However, as Patrice Petro’s study of female spectatorship and textual practice in Weimar Germany has powerfully illustrated, gender is of paramount importance to representation and ways of looking. That is, Petro has shown “the existence of a female spectator, and the function of representation for mobilizing her desires and unconscious fantasies.” Like the women’s magazines in Petro’s study, lesbian magazines such as Die Freundin made a direct address to women, articulating their desires and offering them ‘modern’ new conceptions – and choices – for gender roles, sexuality, relationships and, hence, possibilities for identification.

This suggests that a study which builds on the inroads made by Gudrun Schwarz and Geertje Mak, and specifically considers the nature and production of lesbian sexual identities, is needed. Both von Lengerke and Faderman have illuminated the changes and continuities of woman-centred relationships across time, but such an approach has a tendency to imply an essential lesbian identity, which is constant and, despite the variations they discuss, well-defined. For example, Faderman encapsulates lesbian behaviour under a single rubric of “romantic friendships” that spans countries and centuries. In contrast, this paper will situate lesbianism within a specific historical and cultural context. In the same way that Denise Riley has disrupted the idea of ‘woman’ as a discrete category,[ this paper will highlight the constructed and unstable nature of Weimar lesbian identities.

In the late nineteenth century, as scientists increasingly turned their attention to sexuality, a growing body of medical literature was produced. In 1886, Richard Krafft-Ebing’s book, Psycopathia Sexualis, asserted that homosexuality was an abnormal congenital manifestation. The physicians Magnus Hirschfeld and Iwan Bloch both expanded on this discourse, arguing that true homosexuals were biologically predisposed to members of the same sex. Conversely, they believed that pseudohomosexuals – usually women – were the creation of external circumstances, such as the absence of male sexual partners in prisons and schools.

As European sexologists described and explained other sexual ‘anomalies,’ the list of medical identifications grew. As one Weimar transvestite explained, “when sexual science began to concern itself with the sexual orientation of humans, it searched for words with which to designate the different variations. That is how names like sadist, masochist, fetishist, exhibitionist, bisexual, transvestite, homosexual, and so on originated.” Similarly, the labels for lesbians expanded to include ‘masculine lesbian,’ ‘feminine lesbian,’ ‘transvestite,’ ‘Mannweib’ (literally, ‘Man-Woman’ but suggesting a masculine woman), ‘Männin’ (‘Butch’), and ‘gleichgeschlechtlichliebende Frau’ (‘same-sex loving woman’). The variety of names for women suggests the instability of lesbian identity and the expansion of the discourse.

Medical ‘science’ was integral to conceptions of sexuality and underpinned the homosexual emancipation movement. Hirschfeld in particular argued that since homosexuality was inborn, it was natural and should not be persecuted, and in 1897 he founded Germany’s first homosexual organization, the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. After the First World War, Hirschfeld founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin (1919) and, in 1923, the League for Human Rights, a group dedicated to homosexual emancipation.

At the same time, the manifold growth of mass culture, particularly in Berlin, brought homosexuals together and facilitated identification. There were mutually reinforcing relationships between the organized homosexual rights movement, the large number of public leisure and entertainment venues (like clubs and nightclubs), and the extensive publications of the homosexual press. Indeed, one reader of Die Freundin, a male transvestite, stated that after he read the books of Iwan Bloch and Otto Weininger, as well as others, he had the greatest longing to go to Berlin and spend time with people who were his like.

 A 1931 Berlin travel guide highlighting the city’s sexual attractions claimed that there were at least 160 bars and clubs for male and female homosexuals. With the (temporary) abolition of censorship, films dealing directly with male and female homosexuality were shown in Berlin’s 300 cinemas. A large quantity of lesbian popular fiction, newspapers, and magazines also appeared. The German Friendship Association added community-building activities to this entertainment scene, and to the political activities of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, by holding dances and weekly meetings and publishing a weekly newspaper, Die Freundschaft.

The first guide to the homosexual club scene, Ruth Roellig’s Berlins lesbische Frauen (Berlin’s Lesbian Women), was published in 1928 with a foreword by Magnus Hirschfeld. This guide purported to educate and enlighten homosexuals and the public,but it also served to alert and connect women to the wider lesbian community. One woman recalled that Berlin’s Toppkeller Club was “so exciting that women from all walks of life came, even actresses. It was always so crowded, and on Fridays you could hardly get in at all.”

One of the most popular ladies’ clubs was the Damenklub Violetta, led by Lotte Hahm, a well-known figure in the homosexual rights movement .The Violetta hosted many dances, such as the “Calling-Card Ladies’ Ball” (Damenball mit Saalpost) and the “Dance Roulette” (Roulette-Tanz), and also auto tours of the Spreewald and fashion shows for masculine women and transvestites. One of the most popular activities was the “Moonlight Steamship Party” (Mondschein-Dampferpartie), in which a ship carried passengers from Spittelmarkt to Mugelsee, where they disembarked at the Inselhotel, enjoyed orchestra, cabaret, and tombola, and danced until 5 or 6 a.m., after which they returned to the ship for a quick sunrise photograph before sailing back.

Such clubs could also be found in other German-speaking cities, including Zurich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt, Leipzig and Breslau, and the League for Human Rights encouraged women across Germany, Switzerland and Austria to start and join clubs in their own towns and regions. This helped to expand the subculture and the homosexual rights movement itself.

In creating a sense of community through common experience, clubs informally politicized lesbians, linking the social scene to the homosexual rights movement. For instance, at Violetta, women sang “Das Lila-Lied” (The Purple Song), which declared lesbians’ difference and eventual liberation.Lotte Hahm also reminded women that “Not only dance and social events can bring you equality, but rather struggle is also necessary.”

Lesbian magazines, of which there were at least five, were available at newsstands or by subscription, and together they circulated to more than one million readers across the German-speaking countries. The magazines’ centrality in facilitating the growth of subculture and identification can be illustrated by examining the most popular publication, Die Freundin (The Girlfriend), which appeared monthly, and later weekly, with some interruptions from 1924 to March 1933.

Die Freundin was closely affiliated with the League for Human Rights through the group’s chairman, Friedrich Radszuweit, who also published the magazine. Given this overlap of the publisher’s interests, it is not surprising that through its editorials, Die Freundin politicized homosexuals by highlighting the League’s concerns, such as the repeal of Paragraph 175, the law criminalizing male homosexuality. Die Freundin accepted only advertisements from members of the League for Human Rights, and it exhorted its readers to patronize only those clubs sanctioned by the publication. The need for club owners to hold League memberships also undoubtedly benefited the homosexual rights movement by increasing the organization’s size.

Die Freundin also played a significant role in fostering the growth of the subculture by publicizing homosexual films, clubs, nightclubs and books available from the Berlin publishing house Radszuweit, which published both non-fiction, including medical books on sexuality,and fictional works, such as Grete von Urbanitzki’s Der wilde Garten (The Wild Garden), Anne Elisabeth Weirauch’s trilogy Der Skorpion, the German translation of Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness (Quell der Einsamkeit) and even novels that presented a less flattering image of lesbians, such as Alfred Döblin’s Die beiden Freundinnen und ihr Giftmord (The Two Girlfriends and their Murder by Poisoning). These kinds of publications facilitated lesbian self-identification. As one lonely and isolated woman living in a small town explained, she “had only one joy..., the book The Scorpion. I love it. With it, I feel that I belong to you, that no one can tear the innate feeling of happiness out of the heart.”

Clearly, physical and psychological isolation were major problems for both lesbians and transvestites. Personal advertisements helped overcome this, bringing together readers from as far away as Amsterdam. “Nuremberg. Lonely woman seeks same, educated but modern thinking girlfriend.”

In the impersonal city, Die Freundin could also be used to signal one’s identity to others ‘in the know.’ Several articles in the magazine depicted scenarios in which women reading or purchasing the magazine met like-minded women who had noted their choice of reading material. For example, one story told how a transvestite reading Die Freundin in a café attracted the notice of another woman. Another story began with two strangers meeting accidentally at the newspaper vendor where they had both just purchased Die Freundin.

Through Die Freundin lesbians discovered other women who “yearned for a great love,” but who, as the fictional character Lotte explained, “could not like any man.” Lesbians found both capable and career-minded women who reflected their own aspirations, as well as women who embodied the ‘feminine’ ideals to the extent that they were comfortable only in the company of other women. If women felt comfortable in men’s clothing, or if they embraced the modern styles, they also found like-minded women in the magazine – and the magazine gave them a name. One lesbian, Charlotte Falk, explained, “Through my indifference, through the style of my clothes, which are sporty but completely normal, my shoes, I... became a Mannweib... I had absolutely no idea that so many women love as I do...”

If the small advertisement section of Die Freundin provided a way for women (and men) in even the remotest German-speaking towns to find and make contact with one another and to psychologically, if not literally, expand their community, the readers of Die Freundin also developed a real sense of fellowship. A letter sent to Die Freundin about another reader’s contribution on the issue of cross-dressing and marriage began warmly with “Dear sister Willina!” and closed with “It would be a great pleasure for me to hear more from you and also from your wife herself. Warmest greetings. Your Georgette.”

 Yet it was not only a sense of fellowship that facilitated identification. Die Freundin’s representations and image were instrumental in the production of sexual identities. However, few articles in Die Freundin programmatically outlined female homosexual identities. Instead, they were elaborated implicitly through its fiction, non-fiction and/or medical articles.

In a classification scheme that invoked the heterosexual gender paradigm, lesbians were often differentiated as either ‘virile’ or ‘feminine.’ As with their heterosexual counterparts, these traits were thought to be manifested both physically and psychologically.The feminine woman was “echt weiblich” (“genuinely feminine”). She was dependent and had a clingy character, but was also a very skilled “housewife,” whereas the ‘virile’ woman had no affinity for housework, was independent and career-minded. This kind of male-female complementarity was seen and reinforced at the Klub Monbijou in the Bell-Dance, in which only the ‘young lads’ or ‘Bubis’ would hold bells, which they used to ring for their ‘gals’ or ‘Mädis.’

However, in the magazine’s fiction, the virile ‘type’ tended to be more common, probably owing to the notion that lesbianism was an inverted sexuality in which a woman was masculinized. For example, one novel serialized in Die Freundin described the lesbian Olga as a cigar-smoker and as having dreams in which she rode horses in the dark of night . In addition:

    “She felt herself to be a man and believed that she felt better in such surroundings. Even her rooms appeared to be furnished according to a rather masculine taste. She had a drawing room with an escritoire. She possessed a smoking room and a gaming room. Her bedroom gave the impression of being austere and cold. One found no vanity table or attractive Biedermeier armchair of the kind that women usually love. The walls were decorated with female figures, portraits, nude studies – the only objects to lend the rooms a certain warmth.”

Lesbian and transvestite “marriages” also reflected male-female role division, and most male transvestites seemed to accept and regard housework as a logical extension of their gender role. Indeed, an affinity for either a masculine or a feminine profession seemed to validate what was believed to be one’s “true” gender.

Visible manifestations of lesbian sexual identities were also to be found on the covers of Die Freundin. Most often, the images featured women as objects of sexual desire, which, indeed, they were. Very early on, readers expressed their sexual longings by requesting more nude photos. Over time these depictions expanded to include exotic ‘orientals’ , ‘natural’ women , New Women , masculine women (who were usually celebrities), and transvestites . Although photographs of bare-breasted women were the norm and many images were reused – not just once or twice, but many times over the years – the array of representations suggests that the lesbian community was comprised of a great variety of women and that over time lesbian identities became increasingly complex.

Other representations, particularly those associated with “modern” women, also interested Die Freundin’s readers. For instance, the incidence of smoking among women around the world was discussed in the article “Rauchende Frauen” (“Smoking Women”).] There were also articles on a possible tax on the Bubikopf (pageboy hairstyle) and on the British Lords’ opinions of short hair. Meinungsaustausch Fragen (“Exchange-of-opinion Questions”) even asked for readers’ views on the Bubikopf.  In one response, Irene von Behlau came out strongly in support of the Bubikopf and urged all lesbian women to embrace the fashion.

As this accounting suggests, readers actively participated in shaping their own identities. They sent Die Freundin literary contributions, as well as their personal experiences, insights and opinions on “Questions of the Day” (“Tagesfragen”) and “Fashion Questions” (“Modefragen”). Regarding the latter, a transvestite named Ellen van Derk complained that men who did not want to shave their beards should not wear women’s clothing and that, moreover, too many transvestites wore jewellery with artificial pearls.

I will return to the issue of transvestites, but what should be clear at this point is that lesbians were not part of a singular, discrete, uniform category, whose identity was the expression of a singular and innately fixed disposition. As will be shown below, their identities were varied, ambiguous and contested. Clearly, one reader was aware of the constructed nature of sexual identities when s/he asserted that “the norm is not something given by nature, but rather is determined by us, created from our own minds.”

Lesbians reappropriated and rearticulated their identities from medical and popular discourses and countered the dominant discourses that labelled them “sick” and “unnatural.” For example, Die Freundin’s editors asserted homosexual morality by pointing to heterosexual depravity as the cause of the high incidence of children and youth infected with venereal disease by their fathers or through prostitution.

Lesbians also referred to the philosopher and theorist Otto Weininger’s unfortunately but indicatively influential book Sex and Character and invoked the existence of a sexual continuum to assert that their sexuality (which was linked to gender) was a natural variation, a transitional form (“Übergangsform”) found between the masculine and feminine poles of gender. Contributors to Die Freundin argued that: “Nowhere in nature does a fixed and demarcated type exist... Just as there is no firmly delimited form in nature, a strict distinction between the sexes can be ruled out.”The concept of ‘natural variation’ confirmed lesbians’ belief that their identity was an essential trait rather than an acquired vice. They refuted accusations of degeneracy by arguing that homosexuals had existed throughout history, from Sappho, to Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Die Freundin’s inclusion of male and heterosexual transvestites, along with lesbian transvestites, who really combined two identities, complicates the question of lesbian identification. Pictures and regular articles about male transvestites reinforced the message that the community of “Girlfriends” was not limited to the female sex but also included those with female “natures.” Even after the Human Rights League created a special magazine for them, transvestites continued to read, write to, and advertise in Die Freundin, suggesting their identification with lesbians.

Geertje Mak has shown that within the discourse of sexual science elaborated by Magnus Hirschfeld in Die Transvestiten (Transvestites) (1910), a man’s internal drive to wear female clothes was considered a natural sexual variation that did not automatically make him a homosexual. Mak argues that women were not included in this concept of transvestitism and, as a consequence, their sexuality remained linked to their gender, defining them as “inverted.” However, the editors of Die Freundin applied the concept of natural sexual variation broadly to both males and females. This explains why the line between transvestitism and lesbianism was so unclear. The magazine actually offered two competing discourses: the concept of the “inverted, masculine woman”  and the notion of “sexual variation in nature” . While much of the magazine’s fiction and photographs offered up images of ‘masculine’ women such as “Charly and Boy,” it did this alongside of articles that insisted that: “There are only bisexual variations.”

The ambiguity was compounded by the fact that the definition of a transvestite seems itself to have been in a state of flux. The term ‘the third sex’ was used by Hirschfeld until about 1910 to denote all homosexuals, but after the war, Radszuweit Publishing Company used it in the book Das 3. Geschlecht (The Third Sex) to refer specifically to transvestites. Still, men and women moved fluidly back and forth between the two identities of ‘transvestite’ and ‘lesbian.’ The ambiguity – indeed, the overlap – of lesbian and transvestite identities is illustrated by one reader of Die Freundin, Hans Irmgard Markus, who wrote that where she lived she had few opportunities to meet a girlfriend and that she had been forced by her uncle to marry a man. Gradually, however, Markus achieved her husband’s conversion into a woman, by inducing him to dress in women’s clothing and perform housework. She, on the other hand, had assumed a male role, dressing as a man and becoming a city councillor. In this way, Markus testified, their relationship became “like one that usually occurs between girlfriends.” Yet this configuration, which was in effect a simple reversal of heterosexual gender roles, indicates the ambiguities in a system that tried to transcend the traditional gender paradigm (one that fixed sexuality and behaviour to gender), but which was nevertheless beholden to it.

In theory, what constituted a ‘true’ lesbian was a congenital disposition, but Die Freundin also implicitly made the distinction that, unlike pseudo-homosexuals, true lesbians were indifferent to, or had an aversion to, men. One story, “How Hannelore Fell in Love with a Man,” vigorously illustrates this belief. This short story describes a romantic tryst that occurred one afternoon between Hannelore and a ‘man’ whom she met by chance at a café. The author emphasizes the confusion felt by Hannelore, whose indifference and distaste for men was normally so great that even taking a seat near one was to be avoided. When eventually the new boyfriend removed ‘his’ male disguise to reveal that ‘he’ was, in fact, a woman, the message was clear: true lesbians are only ever attracted to other women. Moreover, the story suggests that this attraction was such a strongly ingrained biological affinity that it transcended the deceptive outward appearance of male clothing.

Bisexuality, on the other hand, was another matter. Despite its characterization in Die Freundin as a variation of transvestitism, it was largely treated as a form of pseudo-homosexuality. Indeed, after a reader complained to the publication that one could not speak freely in it on the topic of bisexuality without encountering disapproval, another reader pointedly replied that a person could not serve two masters and that such women, i.e. bisexuals, were not true homosexuals.

More delicately, Roellig labelled prostitutes “a special category” because she believed they only entered homosexual relationships to try to find happiness and salvage what remained of their humanity. Although congenital homosexuality was in doubt in the case of prostitutes, as with bisexuality, having sexual relationships with men called the authenticity of a homosexual identity into question.

 The question of prostitution also reflects the mutability of lesbian identification. In 1924 considerable concern was expressed in Die Freundin over the problem of Mädchenhandel (white female slavery)  Over time, however, this changed. Editorials defensively asserted the moral rectitude of homosexuals and distanced lesbians from prostitution, thereby suggesting once again the shifting nature of sexual identities.

In conclusion, the homosexual cultural network, exemplified by Die Freundin, was the site at which science, subculture, and mass culture intersected to produce new and constantly shifting identities. The variety of often conflicting discourses present within the subculture also produced overlapping and sometimes contradictory identities. Nevertheless, if the behaviours and desires of women (and men) did not conform to gender norms , homosexual subculture linked them to a new community and new possibilities for identification. As one reader stated: “As so often [happens] in the world, it was through chance that I came into the possession of Die Freundin and Das 3. Geschlecht. It was through them that I received valuable enlightenment about my own nature and also learned that I am not, by any means, unique in the world.”

 

“I feel that I belong to you”: Subculture, Die Freundin and Lesbian Identities in Weimar Germany. By Angeles Espinaco-Virseda.  York University, April 1, 2004.

Under the Nazi regime, there was no official law or policy prohibiting sexual relations between women. Nonetheless, beginning in 1933, the Nazi regime harassed and destroyed lesbian communities and networks that had developed during the Weimar Republic (1918–1933). This created a climate of restriction and fear for many lesbians.

Lesbians under the Nazi Regime.  United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.