GREEK LOVE IN MODERN GERMANY
As everywhere in modern Europe until the influence of the French Revolution began to be felt, sodomy (variously defined, but always including pedication) was illegal. Its strict illegality throughout the Holy Roman Empire, of which Germany was part until its dissolution in 1806, was defined by section 116 of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, in force since 1532, which prescribed the death penalty. However, there seems to have been little prosecution of it before the 19th century. For example, a study on Austrian legal proceedings against sodomy has shown that most cases in 16th to 18th century Austria concerned bestiality, and only two cases of sodomy between males went to court in the reign of Charles VI (1711-40), and the rulings are not known in either case.[1]
The Abate Bastiani by Giacomo Casanova is the Venetian adventurer's brief and sympathetic account of a boysexual cleric he met in Breslau in 1766.
Following the French annexation of bits of Germany in 1811, all male homosexuality became legal in them (with no age of consent) according to the Napoleonic Code. The latter's influence was, however, much greater than this and induced some German states to follow suit, most notably Bavaria in 1813. This ended with unification in 1871, when the Prussian law against all male homosexuality was extended to the whole of the new country. Thereafter Germany was one of the European countries where all male homosexuality was illegal until the late twentieth-century and mostly subject to strong social disapproval, so it is remarkable that during the Second Reich (1871-1918), she was without parallel in having a number of writers arguing strongly for toleration of not only homosexuality, but, in some cases, Greek love in particular.
John Henry Mackay (1864-1933), essentially German despite his name, was the greatest writer of the time on Greek love, which he clearly distinguished from androphilia. His polemical Sagitta's Books of the Nameless Love (1913) is reviewed elsewhere. His novel, The Hustler (1926), also reviewed elsewhere, preserves priceless details of the pederastic scene in Berlin of the 1920s. Seen from the perspective of a German boy-lover, society was bitterly unfair, as is brought out well when the thoroughly decent protagonist is arrested and tried for his affair with a boy of 15. For the 21st- century reader, however, the most startling thing may be the terrible prison sentence finally imposed, … two months!
In fact, Mackay was presenting a horror story of the worst that could happen, for Berlin at that time had become so tolerant of Greek love that pederasts from more repressive countries were enraptured. English journalist Michael Davidson’s account of his time there from 1928 to 1933 brings to vivid light both this and the sudden and horrific change that came with the National Socialist take-over in 1933. Also in the pre-National Socialist period, there was some revival of idealistic pederasty associated with the adolescent Wandervogel ("Wandering Bird") movement, as described by Parker Rossman in "Who Dares Speak of Love?"
The writer Norman Douglas (1868-1952) was essentially European despite his birth in Austria and mostly Scottish ancestry, but from 1921 he went on regular holidays in the Vorarlberg, where he had been brought up, either bringing boyfriends from France or Italy, or having liaisons with local boys until disaster struck in 1936. These affairs are described in Holloway's biography of him.
The story of the Viennese Heinz Kohut and his tutor, ca. 1924-6 is a heartening account of the tremendously positive effects a Greek love affair could have on a lonely boy, besides being a fine example of a historically common phenomenon: the sexual element following naturally on affection built between a man and boy with no predisposition towards homosexuality.
A rent-boy scene flourishing in Austria around this time was described by another English visitor, Robin Maugham, in Dieter, a Viennese boy on the game, 1932-6. A brief general survey of boy prostitution in non-Austrian Germany was given in Boys for Sale (1969), but was nearly limited to the first half of the 20th century.
The title of Gad Beck's memoir, An Underground Life, refers to his politically subversive activities, for it is testimony to how even a Jewish boy could have an untroubled sex life with men and boys in the early years of the Third Reich.
The history of Greek love in twentieth-century Germany turned out to be strangely repetitive, gradually increasing tolerance twice succumbing to extreme repression.
The half-century after the Third Reich was, from a pederastic point of view, well evoked in an interview given in 1981 by Hajo Ortil, best-known for his involvement in Freikörperkultur, the German naturist cultural movement with which idealistic Greek love was much entwined through most of the 20th century. His story, published in his own lifetime, is remarkable testament to how, for some four decades after the fall of the Third Reich, discreet Greek love, when it was doing no harm, was in practise sometimes allowed to flourish again.
Other good examples of this are to be found in Wolf Vogel's Secret Love: Eros between Boy and Man, true stories of love affairs between boys and men told to the author in interviews or letters by the former boys and, in a few cases their parents. All are set in the 1960s-70s except the first chapter describing the author's own boyhood experience in the early to mid- 1950s, which is evocative of the sexual appeal of me to pubescent boys not destined to be gay. Letters to Wolf Vogel were from men and boys recounting thrie experiences. "He's My son's Best Friend", "We Made Love Just Like Everyone Does" and "In the Bar I Gave Him a Kiss" are Vogel's interviews of a loved-boy's mother, of a youth of 19 who had been loved by a man between the ages of eleven and sixteen, and of a married man of 33 who warmly recalled his sexual adventures with men during his pubescence, for financial help as well as fun. From Boy-Love to Friendship Between Men is an account of an "erotic friendship" between a married man of 32 and one of 45 that had begun when the younger was 11.
Ironically, Greek love finally gained a quasi-legal status in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1994 and in Austria in 2002, when the age of consent was reduced to 14, just as social attitudes were hardening to the point of making its practice almost impossible and consensual affairs involving slightly younger boys were being suppressed with renewed intensity.
It is beyond the chronological remit of this website to follow the history of Greek love any later, so the question is left unaddressed of whether men like Ortil, who managed without mishap to conduct discreet love affairs with boys during the Third Reich, would in practice find Germany, as it became not long after his death, less or even more repressive.
[1] Susanne Hehenberger, Unkeusch wider die Natur: Sodomieprozesse im frühneuzeitlichen Österreich (Vienna: Löcker, 2006), pp. 161 & 216.
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