Robert Tobin

Anthropology and the German Enlightenment : perspectives on humanity

This volume is a collection of essays on various notions of the human state during the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment period in Germany. The book includes articles on Madame de Stael, Herder and India, Kant and race, Nicholas von Zinzendorf, Lichtenberg, the Brothers Grimm, and Humboldt.

Faust’s Transgressions: Male-Male Desire in Early Modern Germany

Faust, the scholar who made a deal with the devil in order to experience life as fully as possible, has come to be seen as the quintessential German, one who particularly exposes the dilemmas and traumas of modernity. But there is another persistant aspect of the Faust legend that has been neglected in the scholarly literature. Specifically, male—male desire and references to sodomy have steadily accompanied accounts of the Faust story, from Klinger and Goethe to Thomas Mann and his son Klaus. In Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s novel of 1791, Fausts Leben, Taten und Hollenfahrt [Faust’s Life, Deeds, and Journey to He11], Faust’s dealings with the devil bring him in contact with sodomitical popes. In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, the relationship between the protagonist and Mephistopheles is close enough that many interpreters have found a homoerotic tinge to it; in any case, Mephistopheles ends up smitten with the boyish angels in the final scenes, as Margarethe and the Eternal Feminine rescue Faust from the jaws of Hell. Klaus Mann’s Mephisto (1936) is based upon the story of the homosexual actor, Gustav Grundgens, although the novel transforms this homosexuality into interracial sadomasochism.

Winckelmann – Homosexualität, schwule Kultur, Queer Theory

Bereits zu seinen Lebzeiten war W. fur seine enthusiastische sinnliche Liebe zu jungen Mannern bekannt. Seine Veranlagung wurde bemerkenswert offen besprochen, manchmal sogar positiv bewertet, und von Anfang an mit seiner kunsthistorischen Arbeit in Verbindung gebracht. Obwohl W. fast genau einhundert Jahre vor der Einfuhrung des modernen Begriffs »Homosexualitat« ermordet wurde, fand er bald Aufnahme in die Reihe beruhmter Homosexueller. Noch heute bleibt sein Werk wichtig sowohl fur die Geschichte der modernen Sexualitat als auch fur die Queer Theory.

Liaisons dangereuses: Sex, Law, and Diplomacy in the Age of Frederick the Great (review)

“redeeming social importance” as a legally meaningful category became the straw that broke the back of prosecutors of obscenity. Britain followed shortly thereafter with a revised Obscene Publications Act of 1959 in which a book was to be judged as a whole according to its effect on the average person rather than on those thought to be particularly susceptible. Ladenson concludes her text with a brief nod toward the present, observing that transgression has become its own justification, “an absolute—and therefore empty—value” (236). We study the texts that comprise her history not for their own sake but rather because they form a history of transgression, a conclusion even Ladenson seems uncomfortable with but to which she is nonetheless resigned. This is a smart, informed, and thoughtful book that never seems comfortable resting on one point or one argument. The result is a slightly scattered narrative that probes a lot of angles and raises a lot of questions. With Ladenson as witty guide of the obscene and the absurd, a reader could do worse.