To queer the eighteenth century is to look at it differently, from a new perspective informed by the sexuality and theory of a later century. Queering the eighteenth century means wrenching it from established contexts in order to read it against the grain of traditional readings and dissolving the accreted interpretations that stifle or avoid those textual passages that do not lend themselves to orthodox readings. Such passages might often suggest a queer sexuality, that is to say, a sexuality divergent from the assumptions of present -day heterosexual norms. By targeting such passages in a text, a queer analysis can...

Whether individuals like Frederick the Great, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Johannes von Müller were involved in queer subcultures and what kind of identity grew out of such subcultures is properly a historical question that asks what really happened between the individuals in question and what sort of identity they really had. Queer theory generally does not discuss this historical question about what happened in the eighteenth-century boudoirs; instead, looking at two texts from around 1800, it analyzes the rhetoric that surrounded whatever sexuality or proto-sexuality was “there.”

That rhetoric surrounding textuality can be said to have a history, producing what...

In the works of Johann Friedel and August von SachsenGotha, one of the eighteenth-century German discourses that structures modern homosexuality is orientalism. One of the most positive reviews of Sachsen-Gotha’s novel came from the novelist Jean Paul. Goethe, in his own orientalist projectThe West-Eastern Divan (West-Östlicher Divan),grants the novelist Jean Paul a certain preeminence among orientalist poets: “A man who has penetrated the breadth, height, and depth of the Orient will find that no German author has approached the Eastern poets and other authors more than Jean Paul” (HA2:184). Given that according to Goethe, “the tender feeling...

Because the terms “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” have strong roots in the sexological, psychiatric, and ultimately medical discourses of the nineteenth-century German-speaking realm, medicine is an obvious point of departure for a study of the discursive origins of modern sexuality. Of interest here will be both the connections between medicine and sexuality as well as the literary nature of medicine and sexuality and their interrelationship. The characteristic contribution of Germany to eighteenthcentury literature, the Bildungsroman, carefully recorded the medical discourses of its era and revealed their fundamental, literary ambivalence.

The eighteenth century witnessed the rise of medicine both in society and...

Any discussion of the Bildungsroman must of course eventually turn to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whoseWilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre;1796), is generally credited as being the first truly successful example of the genre. Any discussion of medicine and its ambivalences will probably turn at some point to drugs,pharmaka,those inherently ambivalent means of healing that can also lead to addiction and death. Goethe and his texts provide insight into both categories.Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,for instance, is written in a medical discourse; same-sex desire turns out to be the dangerous prescription that helps a young man...

The efficacy of pederasty as a pharmakon to ensure the development of the complete male has a specific grounding in gender. In keeping with the eighteenth-century attitude toward the pharmakon as a kind of homeopathic medication—just enough toxin to bring about a positive effect—Goethe seems to argue that a touch of femininity could help produce a man. Like homosexuality, effeminacy could help “man” construct his masculinity, according to Goethe. In the November 1788 issue of a German journal,The German Mercury (Der teutsche Merkur, edited, incidentally, by Wieland), Goethe anonymously published a short piece entitled “Women’s Roles on...

Two of the bits of Faustian flotsam and jetsam that wash up occasionally on literate shores for use in the general press, “the Faustian bargain” and “the eternal feminine,” reflect the story’s masculine origins and Goethe’s addition of the feminine to that legacy. A queer reading of Goethe’sFaustfurther uncovers the gender biases in Goethe’s writing. It shows that despite the desire of his male characters to attain a kind of femininity, they can never escape their man-to-man world. The interaction between the men in this masculine world, however, destabilizes traditional gender categories to the point that Goethe’s gender...

Wherever we find Goethe, we are sure to find Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), the other half of the pair who constitute German classicism. Schiller, whose star waned somewhat in the twentieth century, was, if anything the more popular of the two German writers in the nineteenth century. His playsThe Robbers, Wilhelm Tell, Wallenstein, The Maid of Orleans, Maria Stuart, Intrigue and Love,as well as his many ballads and poetic and philosophic essays, ensured for him a prominent place in the constellation of German literary stars. And like so many figures in that constellation, there is a homoerotic strand...

The writings of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) occupy a queer place in literature-queer because they consist either of art criticism, studies on lightning, appeals for public bathing facilities, or of fragments and aphorisms that Lichtenberg kept secret from his contemporaries. In neither case do Lichtenberg’s works fall into traditional categories of literature such as the novel, the poem, or the drama. Nonetheless, he is one of those authors like Shakespeare and Pope or Goethe and Heine whose writings are quoted constantly. In the German linguistic realm, he is said to be the third most frequently cited author, after Goethe...

Confronted by efforts of early twentieth-century homosexual literary critics to use sexual categories in interpreting many of the characters and authors of German literature, the poet Stefan George responded with icy aloofness: “We do not ask whether the devotion of Schiller’s Don Carlos to Posa, Goethe’s Ferdinand to Egmont, the passionate enthusiasm of Jean Paul’s Emanuel for Victor or Roquairol for Albano has anything to do with a witchhunting section of the law or a silly medical category: rather, we have always believed that we find in these re lationships an essential, constitutive element of the entire German culture.”¹ George’s...