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.

Can Humans Ever Understand How Animals Think?

 

A flood of new research is overturning old assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of – and changing how we think about our own species

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Giraffes will eat courgettes if they have to, but they really prefer carrots. A team of researchers from Spain and Germany recently took advantage of this preference to investigate whether the animals are capable of statistical reasoning. In the experiment, a giraffe was shown two transparent containers holding a mixture of carrot and courgette slices. One container held mostly carrots, the other mostly courgettes. A researcher then took one slice from each container and offered them to the giraffe with closed hands, so it couldn’t see which vegetable had been selected.

In repeated trials, the four test giraffes reliably chose the hand that had reached into the container with more carrots, showing they understood that the more carrots were in the container, the more likely it was that a carrot had been picked. Monkeys have passed similar tests, and human babies can do it at 12 months old. But giraffes’ brains are much smaller than primates’ relative to body size, so it was notable to see how well they grasped the concept.

Such discoveries are becoming less surprising every year, however, as a flood of new research overturns longstanding assumptions about what animal minds are and aren’t capable of. A recent wave of popular books on animal cognition argue that skills long assumed to be humanity’s prerogative, from planning for the future to a sense of fairness, actually exist throughout the animal kingdom – and not just in primates or other mammals, but in birds, octopuses and beyond. In 2018, for instance, a team at the University of Buenos Aires found evidence that zebra finches, whose brains weigh half a gram, have dreams. Monitors attached to the birds’ throats found that when they were asleep, their muscles sometimes moved in exactly the same pattern as when they were singing out loud; in other words, they seemed to be dreaming about singing.

In the 21st century, findings such as these are helping to drive a major shift in the way human beings think about animals – and about ourselves. Humanity has traditionally justified its supremacy over all other animals – the fact that we breed them and keep them in cages, rather than vice versa – by our intellectual superiority. According to Aristotle, humans are distinguished from other living things because only we possess a rational soul. We know our species as Homo sapiens, “wise man”.

Yet at a time when humanity’s self-image is largely shaped by fears of environmental devastation and nuclear war, combined with memories of historical atrocity, it is no longer so easy to say, with Hamlet, that man is “the paragon of animals” – the ideal that other creatures would imitate, if only they could. Nature may be “red in tooth and claw”, but creatures whose weapons are teeth and claws can only kill each other one at a time. Only humans commit atrocities such as war, genocide and slavery – and what allows us to conceive and carry out such crimes is the very power of reason that we boast about.

In his 2022 book If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, Justin Gregg, a specialist in dolphin communication, takes this mistrust of human reason to an extreme. The book’s title encapsulates Gregg’s argument: if Friedrich Nietzsche had been born a narwhal instead of a German philosopher, he would have been much better off, and given his intellectual influence on fascism, so would the world. By extension, the same is true of our whole species. “The planet does not love us as much as we love our intellect,” Gregg writes. “We have generated more death and destruction for life on this planet than any other animal, past and present. Our many intellectual accomplishments are currently on track to produce our own extinction.”

If human minds are incapable of solving the problems they create, then perhaps our salvation lies in encountering very different types of minds. The global popularity of the documentary My Octopus Teacher, released by Netflix in 2020, is just one example of the growing hunger for such encounters. In the film, the South African diver Craig Foster spends months filming a female octopus in an underwater kelp forest, observing most of her lifecycle. Foster presents himself as the anti-Jacques Cousteau; he doesn’t go underwater to study the non-human, but to learn from it.

Humility is a traditional religious discipline, and there is a spiritual dimension to Foster’s quest and to the film’s success. On YouTube, where the trailer has been viewed 3.7m times, thousands of people testify that My Octopus Teacher made them weep, changed their understanding of the world and made them resolve to lead better lives. It’s clear that, for modern people who seldom encounter animals except for pet cats and dogs, entering into a close relationship with a non-human mind can be a sacred experience.

The idea of the octopus as the nonhuman mind par excellence was popularised by the 2016 bestseller Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith. A philosopher rather than a marine biologist, Godfrey-Smith got an opportunity to see the creatures in action at a site off eastern Australia known to researchers as Octopolis. There he discovered that octopuses are “smart in the sense of being curious and flexible; they are adventurous, opportunistic”, prone to making off with items such as tape measures and measuring stakes.

The fascination of the octopus is that while its behaviour seems recognisable in human terms as mischief or curiosity, its neural architecture is immensely different from ours. Since Darwin, humans have grown used to recognising ourselves in our fellow primates, whose brains and body plans are similar to our own. After all, humans and chimpanzees share a common ape ancestor that lived in Africa as recently as 6m years ago. Our most recent common ancestor with the octopus, by contrast, is a worm-like creature thought to have lived 500-600m years ago.

Because the mind of the octopus evolved in a completely different fashion from ours, it makes sense of the world in ways we can barely imagine. An octopus has 500m neurons, about as many as a dog, but most of these neurons are located not in the brain but in its eight arms, each of which can move, smell and perhaps even remember on its own. In Godfrey-Smith’s words, an octopus is “probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien”. When such a being encounters a human at the bottom of the ocean, what could it possibly make of us?

For most of the 20th century, animal researchers wouldn’t even have asked such a question, much less attempted to answer it. Under the influence of the American psychologist BF Skinner, scientific orthodoxy held that it was neither legitimate nor necessary to talk about what was going on in an animal’s mind. Science, he argued, only deals with things that can be observed and measured, and we can’t directly observe mental faculties even in ourselves, much less in animals. What we can observe is action and behaviour, and Skinner was able to modify the behaviour of rats using positive reinforcement, such as rewards of food, and negative reinforcement, such as electric shocks.

 When Jane Goodall first went to study chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1960s, the very notion of animal subjectivity was taboo. Her practice of giving names to the individual chimps she observed – such as David Greybeard, who her studies made famous – was frowned on as unscientific, since it suggested that they might be humanlike in other ways. The standard practice was to number them. “You cannot share your life with a dog or a cat,” Goodall later observed, “and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings. You know it and I think every single one of those scientists knew it, too, but because they couldn’t prove it, they didn’t talk about it.”

Today, the pendulum has swung in the other direction. Scientists speak without embarrassment about animal minds and consciousness. In popular writing on the subject, Skinner appears only as a villain. In his 2016 book Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, primatologist Frans de Waal discusses a mid-20th-century experiment in which researchers at a primate centre in Florida, educated in Skinner’s methods, tried to train chimps the way he had trained rats, by withholding food. “Expressing no interest in cognition – the existence of which they didn’t even acknowledge,” De Waal writes, the researchers “investigated reinforcement schedules and the punitive effect of time-outs.” The staff of the primate centre rebelled and started feeding the chimps in secret, causing Skinner to lament that “tender-hearted colleagues frustrated efforts to reduce chimpanzees to a satisfactory state of deprivation”. You could hardly ask for a better example of how the arrogance of reason leads to cruelty.

Meanwhile, animals without “rational souls” are capable of demonstrating admirable qualities such as patience and self-restraint. Among humans, the ability to sacrifice immediate pleasure for future gain is called resisting temptation, and is taken as a sign of maturity. But De Waal shows that even birds are capable of it. In one experiment, an African grey parrot named Griffin was taught that if he resisted the urge to eat a serving of cereal, he would be rewarded after an unpredictable interval with food he liked better, such as cashew nuts. The bird was able to hold out 90% of the time, devising ways to distract himself by talking, preening his feathers, or simply throwing the cup of cereal across the room. Such behaviours, De Waal notes, are quite similar to what human children do in the face of temptation.

More intriguing than the convergences between human and animal behaviour, however, are the profound differences in the way we perceive and experience the world. The reason why an encounter with an octopus can be awe-inspiring is that two species endowed with different senses and brains inhabit the same planet but very different realities.

Take the sense of smell. As humans, we learn about our surroundings primarily by seeing and hearing, while our ability to detect odours is fairly undeveloped. For many animals, the reverse is true. In his 2022 book An Immense World, the science journalist Ed Yong writes about an experiment by researcher Lucy Bates involving African elephants. Bates found that if she took urine from an elephant in the rear of a herd and spread it on the ground in front of the herd, the elephants reacted with bewilderment and curiosity, knowing that the individual’s distinctive odour was coming from the wrong place. For them, a smell out of place was as fundamental a violation of reality as a ghostly apparition would be for us.

  Animals that perceive the world through scent, such as dogs, even have a different sense of time. We often talk about the importance of “living in the moment”, but in fact we have no other choice; since visual information reaches us at the speed of light, what we see around us are things as they existed an infinitesimal fraction of a second ago. When a dog smells, however, “he is not merely assessing the present but also reading the past and divining the future”, Yong writes. Odour molecules from a person or another dog can linger in a room long after the source is gone, or waft ahead before it appears. When a dog perks up long before its owner walks through the front door, smell can seem like a psychic power.

If giraffes can do statistical reasoning and parrots understand the concept of the future, then where does the distinctiveness of the human mind really lie? One favourite candidate is what psychologists call “theory of mind” – the ability to infer that each person is their own “I”, with independent experiences and private mental states. In The Book of Minds, the science writer Philip Ball describes the classic experiment that tests the development of this ability in children. A child and an adult watch as an object is hidden under one of three cups. Then the adult leaves the room and the child sees a second adult come in and move the object so it’s under a different cup.

When the first adult returns, where does the child expect she will look for the object? Very young children assume that she will know its new location, just as they do. Starting around age four, however, children start to understand that the adult only knows what she has seen herself, so they expect her to look under the original, now empty cup. “Indeed,” Ball writes, “they will often delight in the deception: in their knowing what others don’t.”

Developing a theory of mind is necessary because we can never know what is going on inside other people in the same immediate way we know ourselves. Most adults take for granted that other people have the same kind of inner life they do, but this remains a kind of assumption. René Descartes was one of the first philosophers to wrestle with this problem, in the 17th century. “What do I see from the window but hats and coats which may cover automatic machines?” he asked. “Yet I judge these to be men.” But Descartes didn’t extend the same benefit of the doubt to animals. Even more than Skinner, he saw them as automata without any inner experience, “bêtes-machines”. Ball notes that Descartes dissected live animals to study the circulation of the blood, “and dismissed any cries of pain that procedure elicited as a mere mechanical response, not unlike the screech of a poorly oiled axle”.

Four centuries later, De Waal complains that science still hasn’t overcome the tendency to draw a dividing line between the inner lives of humans and those of other creatures. The reason that scientists have focused on theory of mind, De Waal believes, is because no animal has been shown to possess it. Such “interspecific bragging contests”, he writes, are designed to flatter our sense of superiority. In fact, it seems that even here we’re not clear winners. According to Ball, recent attempts to replicate the theory-of-mind experiment with chimps and bonobos suggest that the majority of them pass the test, though the evidence is ambiguous: since the subjects can’t talk, researchers gauge their expectations by tracking their eye movements.

 Even if other species were conclusively found to possess a theory of mind, of course, it would not challenge our monopoly on the kind of “rational soul” that produced the pyramids and monotheism, the theory of evolution and the intercontinental ballistic missile. As long as these quintessentially human accomplishments remain our standard for intellectual capacity, our place at the top of the mental ladder is assured.

But are we right to think of intelligence as a ladder in the first place? Maybe we should think, instead, in terms of what Ball calls “the space of possible minds” – the countless potential ways of understanding the world, some of which we may not even be able to imagine. In mapping this space, which could theoretically include computer and extraterrestrial minds as well as animal ones, “we are currently no better placed than the pre-Copernican astronomers who installed the Earth at the centre of the cosmos and arranged everything else in relation to it”, Ball observes. Until we know more about what kinds of minds are possible, it is sheer hubris to set up our own as the standard of excellence.

Xenophanes, a pre-Socratic philosopher, observed that if horses and oxen could draw pictures, they would make the gods look like horses and oxen. Similarly, if non-human beings could devise a test of intelligence, they might rank species according to, say, their ability to find their way home from a distance unaided. Bees do this by detecting magnetic fields, and dogs by following odours, while most modern humans would be helpless without a map or a GPS. “Earth is bursting with animal species that have hit on solutions for how to live a good life in ways that put the human species to shame,” Gregg says.

But if human and animal minds are so essentially different that we can never truly understand one another, then a troubling thought arises: we would be less like neighbours than inmates who occupy separate cells in the same prison. The kind of understanding Foster achieved with his octopus, or Goodall with her chimpanzees, would have to be written off as an anthropomorphising illusion, just as Skinner warned.

The possibility of true interspecies understanding is the subject of Thomas Nagel’s landmark 1974 essay What Is It Like to Be a Bat?, to which every writer on animal cognition pays their respects, sometimes wearily. Nagel, an American philosopher, concluded that humans can never really understand a bat’s inner experience. Even if I try to picture what it’s like to fly on webbed wings and spend most of my time hanging upside down, all I can imagine is what it would be like for me to be a bat, not what it’s like for a bat to be a bat.

For Nagel, this conclusion has implications beyond animal psychology. It proves that mental life can never be reduced to things we can observe from the outside, whether that means the way we behave or the pattern of electrical impulses in our neurons. Subjectivity, what it feels like to exist, is so profoundly different from what we can observe scientifically that the two realms can’t even be described in the same language.

Few people have ever taken the challenge of Nagel’s essay as literally as Charles Foster in his 2016 book Being a Beast. A barrister and academic by profession, Foster set himself the challenge of entering the mental worlds of five animal species by living as much like them as possible. To be a fox, he writes: “I lay in a back yard in Bow, foodless and drinkless, urinating and defecating where I was, waiting for the night and treating as hostile the humans in the row houses all around.” To be a badger, he dug a trench in the side of a hill and lived inside it with his young son Tom, eating earthworms and inhaling dust. “Tom was filling tissues with silica and blood for a week,” Foster notes.

Foster welcomes all this damage and discomfort, but not in the spirit of a scientist doing fieldwork. Rather, he evokes the medieval flagellants who covered their backs with welts to purge themselves of sin. That Foster defines sin as a transgression against nature rather than God doesn’t make the concept any less religious. “Evolutionary biology is a numinous statement of the interconnectedness of things,” he writes, and his preaching translates easily into Christian terms: “Say, with Saint Francis, ‘Hello, Brother Ox,’ and mean it,” he demands.

Foster’s way of seeking communion with the animals may be extreme, at times comically so, but his basic impulse is shared by many of today’s students of animal cognition, and an increasing number of laypeople as well. Encountering an animal mind can perform the same function as a great work of art or a religious experience: it makes the familiar strange, reminding us that reality encompasses far more than we ordinarily think.

The great difference is that while a traditional religious experience can awaken human beings to God, an animal epiphany can awakens us to the fullness of this world. “What she taught me was to feel that you’re part of this place, not a visitor,” Foster says in the closing lines of My Octopus Teacher, and by “this place” he doesn’t just mean a particular kelp forest, but the Earth itself. At first this might sound like an odd realisation: where else would human beings belong if not on our one and only planet?

But in the 21st century, it is clearly becoming harder for us to think of ourselves as genuinely belonging to the Earth. Whether we look back on our long history of driving other species to extinction, or forward to a future in which we extinguish ourselves through climate breakdown, many humans now see humanity as the greatest danger facing the Earth – a cancer that grows without limit, killing its host.

It is no coincidence that, at the same moment, tech visionaries have begun to think about our future in extraterrestrial terms. Earth may be where humanity happened to evolve, they say, but our destiny calls us to other worlds. Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the explicit goal of hastening humanity’s colonisation of Mars. Other “transhumanist” thinkers look forward to a fully virtual future, in which our minds leave our bodies behind and achieve immortality in the form of electromagnetic pulses.

These projects sound futuristic, but they are best understood as new expressions of a very old human anxiety. We have always suffered from metaphysical claustrophobia – the sense that a cosmos containing no minds but our own was intolerably narrow. That is why, since prehistoric times, humans have populated Earth with other kinds of intelligences – from gods and angels to fairies, forest-spirits and demons. All premodern cultures took the existence of such non-human minds for granted. In medieval Europe, Christian and Greek philosophical ideas gave rise to the doctrine of the “great chain of being”, which held that the universe is populated by an unbroken series of creatures, all the way from plants at the bottom to God at the apex. Humanity stood in the middle, more intelligent than the animals but less than the angels, who came in many species, with different powers and purviews.

 Filling the universe with hypothetical minds, superior to our own in wisdom and goodness, helps relieve our species’ loneliness, giving us beings we could talk to, think about, and strive to emulate. Our need for that kind of company in the universe hasn’t gone away, though today we prefer to fill the region “above” us in the space of possible minds with advanced extraterrestrials and superpowered AIs – beings that are just as hypothetical as seraphim and cherubim, at least so far.

Our rising interest in animal minds can be seen as a way of filling in the regions “below” us as well. If an octopus is like an intelligent alien, as Godfrey-Smith writes, then we don’t need to scan the skies so anxiously for an actual extraterrestrial. Yong quotes Elizabeth Jakob, an American spider expert, to the same effect: “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets … We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.” Perhaps simply knowing that these other minds exist can help us make peace with the limitations of our own.

 

Can humans ever understand how animals think? By Adam Kirsch. The Guardian, May 30, 2023.

Naturalist Charles Foster wanted to reconnect with his inner beast – so he tried living as a badger, a deer and a fox

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Charles Foster lifts a wriggling worm to his lips. “Cheers,” he says.
 
We clink worms.
 
He warns that it might try to escape, and that there will be a strange, stereo-squirmy sensation when the worm splits in two.
 
He grimaces and chews pedantically to make sure every last bit has gone. Foster’s right: there is a grittiness to them. Earthworms wouldn’t be my first choice on the à la carte.
 
Foster has been on all fours for much of the morning, reminiscing about the periods he spent living as a badger, an otter, an urban fox. He also spent time, less successfully, as a red deer and a swift. In one way or another, he says, he has spent most of his 53 years being an animal, or at least trying to.
 
As a toddler in Manchester, he would look out of his bedroom window, fascinated by the tawny owl perched on a lamp outside. The family moved to Sheffield, where it was the blackbird in the garden he couldn’t stop thinking about. The bird stared at him with its yellow eye-rings and black pupils, taunting him. It knew something, and Foster wanted to know what.
 
“I was tantalised and infuriated,” he says. “I went down to the local library and read everything I could about blackbirds. I got a blackbird brain and pickled it in formalin, and would sleep holding it, wondering whether its wisdom would diffuse into me. I stuffed a blackbird and it circled on a piece of thread above my head when I went to sleep at night. I mapped every blackbird nest in our area and put them down in charts. I made maps of their flight path, and took ladders and looked into their nests. And I failed utterly to work out what made a blackbird tick.”
 
Foster was an unusual boy who grew into an unusual man. He was born to high-achieving, working-class parents who both became head teachers of primary schools. He had even greater ambitions for himself. His parents sent him to the local comprehensive, but he went to the library and read up about public school scholarships. Without telling his parents, he applied for one and won it. He left the comp to go to public schools far away in Bristol and Shrewsbury, where he entered a new world of privilege and expectation. Part of him hated it, but he thrived.

 
He promised himself he would re-engage with the natural world after his O-levels. “As soon as the last paper was finished, I went home and spent a day and a night lying in the Mayfield Valley just above our home in Sheffield, at a hare’s eye level. This was a sort of redemptive process that would undo all the life-denying process of the exams. That was my first conscious attempt to live like an animal.”
 
Did he enjoy it? “Enjoy isn’t the word. But I could feel a lot of toxins were being washed out. That seeded in me something – that in living the life we normally live, we are living a life that isn’t natural. And in order to be properly human, we’ve got to be properly animal.” Foster pauses and looks at me. “Do you think I’m insane?”
 
Convention got the better of him again. Foster sacrificed his inner hare and went to Cambridge University, where he studied veterinary science and law. After he left, he worked as a vet and a barrister, as an academic teaching medical law and ethics, as a philosopher and as a magazine columnist. (He still dabbles in all of these, and currently teaches at Oxford University.) He couldn’t have moved further away from the little boy who worshipped the spontaneity of nature. Instead of empathising with wild animals, Foster started shooting them for pleasure. He ran ultramarathons, 150 miles in a week, over the deserts of Africa. He made good money as a barrister, hunted in tweeds and lived the good life.
 
He soon felt a fraud. “The secret of a good barrister is that they are an empty vessel into which the soul of the latest murderer or rapist can be poured. It’s a very spiritually debilitating job to do. The damage that did called me to consider: what on earth is this creature called Charles Foster who occasionally voices opinions, who says he is a moral agent, who says he has ethical positions?”
 
Who did he think the real Charles Foster was? “The real Charles Foster grew up in a little semi in Sheffield and had his mates up and down the road, whereas I had remade myself as something else.” He saw himself as the kind of swashbuckling hero that Rider Haggard might have created. “I was a very arrogant, presumptuous, fantastically self-confident barrister. Even by barristers’ standards.”
 
One day he had an epiphany – well, an anti-epiphany. He was on an expedition across the Sinai, sitting in the midday sun, and he started to weigh up his achievements. “I thought: I will spend my time looking at the enormously fascinating, kaleidoscopically colourful soul of the fantastic Charles Foster. And I couldn’t see anything at all. It was like looking into a well. There was a rising sense of panic, from which it took years to recover.”
 
How did the fallout express itself? “A lot of the pinstriped swaggering vanished overnight,” he says. “The pride haemorrhaged away. I was a pretty broken person. I mean, I continued at the bar, I carried on working. But I became increasingly introspective.”

 
In his mid-30s, Foster’s first marriage fell apart and he started spending more time trying to understand what made animals tick: what is it like to be an otter guided by the smell of shit? Was he as competent a city dweller as an urban fox?
 
We stop at a spot in the woods. See, this could make a nice little sett, he says. He points to a small hollow covered with branches. Foster is a big man – 6ft 3in and a good 15 stone – but he eases himself into the hollow with surprising dexterity. When he lived as a badger in Wales with his son, Tom, they would sleep by day and prowl by night. In Being A Beast, the book he has written about his experiences, Foster wonderfully conveys the sensuality of life where smell is everything, and sight virtually irrelevant. But the book is very funny about his many bestial failings. Yes, he and Tom can cope in the summer, when badger life is a form of extreme camping, but returning in midwinter is a different matter. As an otter, he had less success. Part of the problem was he didn’t like otters: nasty killers with little to recommend them. He enjoyed the sprainting (shit-sniffing, which he did with his children; before long, they could distinguish each other’s poo) and spent hours swimming the lakes on Exmoor. But no, otter life didn’t do much to enrich the soul.
 
As for being a red deer, he really struggled. Yes, he grew his toenails and hair long, but these felt like superficial gestures. He asked a friend to set his bloodhound on him, so he could know what it was like to be hunted. There was an initial surge of adrenaline as he ran, but ultimately the experience was humiliating: when the dog tracked him down, it just gave him a contemptuous glance and walked off. Foster admits he was a rubbish deer. “I found it impossible to come down the pyramid and become a victim.”
 
By contrast, there is something ecstatic in his hopeless attempts to be a swift. He adores these most ethereal of birds, and is in awe of their ability to find their way from the eaves of his study in Oxford to their ancestral home in Congo and back again, to fly 30,000 miles a year without perching (swifts sleep and mate in the air). Foster goes paragliding, follows their path to Africa, eats similar foods; but it serves only to remind him how lumpen he is.
 
It is freezing but gloriously sunny in the woods. Foster slips out of his sett, takes off the mask the Guardian has lent him for the photoshoot, lights his tiny Hexamine cooker and knocks up a few barbecued worms, which he serves with nettles and garlic. They taste better cooked: less slippery.
 
You know, I say, I think you were most at home as a badger. “Why do you say that?” he asks. He looks disappointed. “I think I got closer to foxes than anyone else.”
 
I feel bad. Of course he made a much better fox: he got to scavenge through rubbish bins, mooch around London, share their emotional intelligence. “I wasn’t able to be olfactory enough as a badger,” Foster explains. “Another reason I didn’t get so close to badgers is that they are much more naturally relational animals than I am. I’m actually quite a lonely, wretched animal – and badgers aren’t.”
 
Tom made a great badger, I say. He puffs up with pride. “Yes, Tom’s a fantastic badger.”
 
We head off home where Mary, Foster’s second wife, has made pumpkin soup for lunch. She is a lovely, grounded woman who runs the house and looks after their four young children (Foster has two more from his first marriage); Mary also works as a GP one day a week. You can’t move in the house without bumping into stuffed birds, badgers, foxes and otters. A zebra skin dominates one wall in the lounge. I thought Foster despised his shooting days? “But it’s so beautiful.” Isn’t there something masochistic in having it there? “Yes,” he says, “it’s a bit like Christian ascetics constantly reminding themselves of the sins of the past.”
 
We sit down to lunch. I ask Mary if it took him long to adapt whenever he came back to domestic life. “He re-engaged with the family quite quickly,” she says. “The hardest thing for him was probably using knives and forks. Sitting at a table. Basic social mores. He likes standing up to eat anyway, walking around and doing things.”
 
Could she tell the difference when he returned after being a badger from, say, when he returned from being an otter? “I don’t think I could, no,” Mary answers gently. “I’m usually preoccupied with children’s bottoms and putting food on the table.” She looks at Foster affectionately. “You don’t get the attention you deserve!”
 
Was Mary surprised when he announced he’d be living as a beast? “Oh, no,” she says. “None of it was alien to what he’s ever been. I mean, you were living as an urban fox in London before I met you. Skulking around in the park at night.”
 
“I wasn’t sleeping in parks back then,” Foster clarifies. “I was trying to get into the head of an urban fox, eating out of dustbins and sometimes sleeping under bushes. I was doing that on and off most of the time I lived in London.”

 
Mary smiles. “I domesticated you, didn’t I?”
 
She says he has always been an extremist. “You suck the marrow out of it and agonise over it, to feel you’ve got to grips with it.” What form does his agonising take? “Verbal and physical. Always obsessing over the meaning of life, and what it means to be fully human. Whereas I just think, well, we’ve got to feed the kids.”
 
In the end, Foster’s book is a beautiful and bonkers metaphysical quest, with a number of questions at the heart of it – some universal (what does it meant to be human?), but most tied up with his own identity (what does it mean to be Charles Foster?). “All of us, I guess, wonder how real our relationships are,” he explains. “We wonder whether we are talking at cross-purposes, whether we can know anything about our nearest and dearest – this was just another lens through which to view that question. I thought, if I can have a relationship with something that is as different from me as a fox or a badger, then there’s a possibility that I might be able to know my wife or my children or my best friend.”
 
The revelation occurred when he was living as a fox, and came face to face with another fox that had stolen his chicken leg. “I felt not just that I was looking and observing, but that I was being looked at and being observed. That was the reciprocity I had longed for. I don’t feel I got that anywhere else.” And he came off second best to the real fox? “Oh yes! It was a better Londoner, a better liver. It could run faster, it needed less sleep, its teeth were sharper, it nose and ears were better. It was just superior.”
 
It made the whole exercise worthwhile, he says. “I’m reassured that relationships aren’t impossible. I’m reassured that I know something about Mary. I’m reassured that there is some core identity called Charles Foster, who’s capable of making real choices.” The angst-ridden uberman relaxes into a smile. “It’s made me slightly less insecure.”
 
Going Underground : meet the man who lived like an animal.  By Simon Hattenstone. The Guardian, January  23, 2016