Max Kramer. German Studies Review. Volume 41, Issue 2, May 2018.

Stefan George and Georg Simmel knew each other from 1897 on, when George gave a semipublic reading of his poetry in the apartment of the Lepsius family in Berlin, which Simmel attended. It is from Simmel that George adopted the term übergeschlechtlich while translating Shakespeare’s sonnets in 1909. This combined interest in Simmel’s concept and Shakespeare’s sonnets—which unlike Petrarch’s sonnets, as many have maintained, were primarily addressed to a male youth and only secondly to a woman—may be the source of George’s redefined notion of übergeschlechtlich. The concept became an article of faith of a literary clique that, despite existing under the suspicion of homosexuality, wanted to be perceived as beyond sexuality. More complex and problematic still were their theoretical and personal allegiances, on the one hand, with the many Männerbünde (associations of men) of the time, such as the Wandervogel youth movement or the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (Community of Self-Owners), and, on the other hand, with the sexologists’ homosexual rights movement, represented primarily by the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee). The George-Kreis kept its distance from these two radically opposed movements, but as this article will show, had much in common with both. With the notion of übergeschlechtlich as its conceptual foundation, George and his disciples managed to navigate between both movements without being identified with either one. This article will seek to determine to what extent this was a conscious strategy and to what extent it was the result of circumstance. The George-Kreis remained an ambiguous force and benefited from this status.

Stefan George was born into a Catholic family of wine merchants of Lorraine heritage and abhorred the materialism and ultramodernism of Wilhelmine Germany, which he saw as an “enemy of all things cultural.” During his first stay in Paris, he was invited to Mallarmé’s famous mardis, the regular Tuesday evening salons whose attendees “included among their number at one time or another virtually every major literary and cultural figure of the day.” This contrasted with Berlin during the Gründerjahre, which “was a newcomer to international prominence” and “displayed all the familiar qualities of the parvenu.” The two countries also differed in that to the west of Alsace-Lorraine homosexuality had remained legal since the promulgation of the Napoleonic Code in 1810, while “Prussia’s Paragraph 143 became Paragraph 152 in the North German Confederation’s penal code, which a few years later became Paragraph 175 in the German Empire’s penal code,” i.e., it was classified with bestiality as a punishable offense. This is significant because from his first verses, written when he was still a schoolboy, to his last collection, published in 1928, much of George’s poetry bears witness to the same-sex inclinations of its author. George’s own disciples, however, preferred to euphemize this pervasive aspect of his poetry until well after World War II. Stigmatization and the fact that “until 1969 the infamous section 175 made it difficult to even discuss gay themes all too overtly” also played their part.

In George’s day homosexuality was directly discussed solely in the sexual sciences and diagnosed as pathology or as degeneracy. Verbalizing it in literature meant taking recourse to sophisticated strategies. George’s poetry, therefore, both masks and signals a profound social conflict in an era that saw strong challenges to conventional concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality. These were fueled by the surfacing of diverging theories on homosexuality by medical scientists across Europe. The later growth of psychoanalysis added further to this competition of ideas. Magnus Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen (Yearbook for sexual intermediate types) appeared between 1899 and 1923; i.e., roughly contemporaneously with George’s poetic review, Blätter für die Kunst (Pages for art), which was in circulation between 1892 and 1919.

Between the Sexologists and the Masculinists

Hirschfeld’s theory of Zwischenstufen conceptualized same-sex sexuality in a trans-gender spectrum of six sexual intermediate stages of human sexuality. His notion was inspired by both Johann Ludwig Casper, who argued that homosexuality was inborn and therefore natural, and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who, in his two-volume book on homosexuality, Forschungen über das Rätsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Studies on the riddle of male-male love), hypothesized homosexuals as members of a drittes Geschlecht (third sex) because they supposedly possessed a female soul in a male body. Whether Ulrichs believed in this notion scientifically or rather saw it as a convenient legal stance in the struggle for equal rights is not clear, but it is obvious that Ulrichs took same-sex love to be neither a disease nor degeneration. The effect of his theory was that it blurred the boundaries between masculinity and femininity. Hirschfeld took his own cue from him and integrated the notion of a third sex into a larger spectrum of human sexuality. His aim was to show that all degrees of adult sexuality were natural and fully developed. George and his antimodernist disciples stayed away from publicly outing themselves as homosexuals and realigning themselves with the members of Hirschfeld’s pacifist and accommodationist Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Friedrich Gundolf and Friedrich Wolters, two eminent members of the George-Kreis, were among the many to strike at it with fury: “That we have nothing to do with those by no means pleasant people who whimper for the repeal of certain criminal laws follows obviously from the fact that the most disgusting attacks against us have issued from precisely such circles.” The question still stands whether this harsh reaction was mainly due to a desire to canonize George as a universal poet or due to the fact that not all members of the George-Kreis harbored homosexual feelings. What is certain, however, is that George’s notion of übergeschlechtlich relates to that of the third sex in an important way, as we shall see later.

Still, in contradistinction to the schools of thought that were emerging from sexology and psychoanalysis, the primary source of George’s affinities must be sought elsewhere. The most important connection is the masculinist wing of the German homosexual rights movement, namely the Männerbünde, in Heinrich Schurtz’s 1902 definition of the term. Bernd Widdig establishes a parallel between the George-Kreis, the Freemasons, the Wandervogel, the Liebenberger Tafelrunde (Liebenberg Circle), and even the SS, while Gisela Völger and Karin von Welck explain the Männerbünde as “associations of men that were formed voluntarily and consciously” and for which a “a certain aura of secrecy, an initiation rite, and a hierarchic structure” were representative. The Männerbund is often headed by a “charismatic leader personality to whom the members are unconditionally subordinated.” Männerbünde had an “elitist awareness (of their mission)” and were “characterized by (homoerotic) demonstrations of a repressed sexuality.” While the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee on various levels complicated the traditional dividing lines between the masculine and the feminine and presupposed up to a certain degree an attraction for one’s own gender in all individuals, the masculinists opposed such sexologist doctrines of homosexuality and made a cult of virility in their same-sex communities. A particularly strong version of this masculinism was that of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, an organization founded in 1903 by the rightwing, antidemocratic, and increasingly antisemitic homosexual activist Adolf Brand. The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen “celebrated individuality, German nationalist ideals and aesthetics, and male bonding and invoked the cultural paragons and ideals of Classical Greece.” While the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen did also “help those seeking counsel in ‘matters of blackmailing in §175 cases,'” its goals were generally opposed to those of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, which concentrated on the repeal of Section 175 and aimed at raising awareness of male and female homosexuality by “enlightening the public through specialized articles drawn from medicine, jurisprudence and political science,” all the while championing tolerance and equality. The Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, on the contrary, was keen to “emphasize the special cultural, aesthetic, and political importance of erotic relations between men, often times through the very dissociation from the claims of emancipation on the part of the women’s movement.”

At roughly the same time, the Wandervogel youth movement was founded and, like the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, took its inspiration from Hellenic ideals and promoted the Männerheld (hero of men), a male who attracted other males due to his extraordinary toughness and overall masculine personality. Hans Blüher, an early member of the movement, in later times celebrated a nationalistic and antisemitic German virility, although initially he had collaborated with Freud and Hirschfeld, i.e., sexologists. For Blüher, Jews “far from being too homosexual … were not homosexual enough [because of their] overemphasis on the family—and underemphasis on male-bonding, homosexuality, and institutions of homosociality.” Blüher came to vehemently oppose Hirschfeld and his notion that male homosexuals necessarily had an effeminate character. Instead, he proposed a division between feminine homosexuals and the Männerheld, around whom all male societies formed. This was supposed to mirror a racial divide and Kultur-Konflikt (culture clash) between, on the one hand, “the usual big-city decadence” and, on the other, healthy virile men. In Blüher’s opinion, “the men and boys in the Wandervogel movement … uniformly manifested masculine traits and preferences.”

The case of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen was similar to that of the Wandervogel and the later Bündische Jugend (the second phase of the German Youth Movement after World War I). Hirschfeld’s “starting-point of an unalterable homosexual nature as a natural, innate, biological datum, as a kind of interior androgyny, allows for organization and emancipation of a new type of human being.” Instead of recognizing the medicalization of homosexuality, the masculinists formulated a homosocial alternative: “Males should join ranks, youths should be brought into contact with experienced male adults, because it is these relationships, and not the family which create the basic elements of state and culture.” In short, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen believed in a generalized bisexuality and was at its very core opposed to the type of human that the sexologists had discovered: “love between man and woman [was] justified by physical procreation” while “homo-eroticism [was] glorified … as a means to raise oneself above everyday mediocrity and the masses.” For the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, human sexuality could then not be subdivided into Hirschfeld’s six stages, but into categories like “aesthetic enjoyment, sympathy, love, sociability, male bonding, and education.”

In this respect it is worth noting that the Eulenburg affair, which unfolded in 1907 and which had a profound impact on the German Youth Movement, further strengthened this emphasis on a chauvinistic and misogynist ideal of manliness in Germany. This was paralleled by the general resistance among many men against the rise of women’s emancipation, which challenged male domination at the turn of the century and which provisionally culminated in Germany (and many other countries) in women’s suffrage shortly after World War I.

The members of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen and the followers of the Wandervogel movement—with their penchant for male camaraderie, trekking, and campfire atmosphere—certainly saw themselves as diametrically opposed to those who subscribed to the emasculated notion of a third sex. Nonetheless, even they came under strong attack by German writers of the conservative revolutionary thought such as Ernst Jünger, who in 1928 uncompromisingly condemned the members of the German Youth Movement for their effeminacy: “In all honesty, all this ethical claptrap, these wussy issues, this caterwauling about their misunderstood feelings, this adolescent moonlight sentimentality, and the hormone-driven culture transplanted into their souls, make me want to puke.” Jünger carried on by saying that “all these people should have a firecracker stuck up their asses and then set off so that they learn how to jump and scream to their hearts’ content” and concluded that “this is a group that would like to cobble together a code of ethics out of their ideological and sexual deficiencies.” To be sure, Jünger’s comment may say as much about his own male fantasies as it does about the youth movements, but it does summarize how the ethos celebrated in these movements did verge on the homoerotic.

What such an ethos replete with Männerhelden might look like in literary form can be seen in some of George’s poems, like “Der Waffengefährte” (“The Comrade in Arms”), “Einem jungen Führer im ersten Weltkrieg” (“To a Young Leader in the First World War”), “Der Auszug der Erstlinge” (“Exodus of the Firstborn”), or “Sonnwendzug” (“Solstice Procession”). This last poem, in particular, shows the highly productive metaphoric mixture of sensuality, homosociality, and the “irrational experience of being part of a group,” another characteristic of a Männerbund. The poem recounts a nocturnal festivity in some hall during the summer solstice. The room is characterized by heat, an extreme sultriness, and probably some drunkenness. All of a sudden, a blast of air blows out the torches and the action proper unfolds. The assembly rushes out, dances through villages, and, by now naked, at dawn encounters reapers, shepherds, and planters, and starts mingling with them in the most erotic way:

Haften unsren hellen blick des traumes
In die nährenden blicke
Scheuen tiers die staunen und nur langsam
An der glut sich entzünden.
Blanke glieder hängen sich und schlingen
Um die sehnigen braunen
Fest wie ranken um die mutterbäume
Das gedränge verwirbelt
Nass von scholle und gestampftem grase
Mit dem staub der gesäme.

Fix our eyes, remote and glazed with visions,
On the eyes of the earthbound
Creatures, shy and unaware, who slowly
Turn to flame in our fires.
Candid limbs are clinging close and twisted
Round the sinewy brown ones,
Firm as vines about the mother branches.
They are swirled, they are tangled
With the dewy clods, the trampled grasses,
And the dust of the seeding.

If this allegorical description—which envisions the farm workers as tier and otherwise speaks of Blanke glieder that twist around sehnigen braunen in the midst of staub der gesäme—did not get the sexual overtones of this homoerotic encounter across, the end of the poem leaves no doubt about it:

Ruf von lust und grausen hallt im haine
Vom beginnenden jagen
Zitternd tasten hände noch nach locken
Da verdurstet schon manche
Heiss von fang und flucht besprizt vom safte
Ausgequollener früchte
Blut und speichel harter lippen trinken

Cries of lust and terror ring through thickets,
Of the hunters and hunted.
Shaken fingers for the locks still fumble.
Some athirst past endurance,
Hot with chase and flight and splashed with juices
From the fruit over-ripened,
Drink from callous lips the blood and spittle

In a combination of lust and fright, the group of people and the farmers intertwine and get to the point of exchanging body fluids. The scene speaks partly of sexual arousal, partly of violence, and climaxes in the poem’s final metaphor:

Und auf qualmigen garben
Andre wechselnd beide blumen küssen
Auf der brust den Gewählten.

And on steaming sheaves
Others, alternatively, kiss both blossoms
On the breast of the Chosen One.

By now the reader is “accustomed to George’s habit of reaching for botanical metaphors to convey the physical realities of sexuality.” Without a doubt, the kissing of the two flowers that would happen to be present on the chosen one’s chest conveniently dampens the finale’s eroticism of male-male sexual activity. Even Ernst Morwitz, usually known for his epigonic rereadings of George’s poetry, appreciates this difference and recapitulates the passage by saying that “others gone down onto dusty sheaves kiss the tips of their chosen ones’ breasts—which are called flowers.” Shortly before, with words like besprizt, safte, Ausgequollener früchte, Blut, and speichel, George seems “almost to revel in the act of naming the slippery liquids of sex.” The poem stays, nevertheless, sufficiently restrained in tone and constantly keeps within the regulatory limits of the heterosexual imperative. Yet, despite the shunning of all-too-direct language, the “breast” of the last line undoubtedly belongs to a male, as the German declension makes clear, den Gewählten. All told, the poem, which lacks any reference to women, relates the encounter of a naked group of men with a number of utterly virile field hands and afterward stages their erotically connoted entwining, kissing, and perhaps orgasmic eruption: besprizt vom safte. Marita Keilson-Lauritz speaks of homoerotische Orgiastik (homoerotic orgiasm), and Claude David, too, in his conservative reading of George’s poetry, concedes that the poem stands for “the breaking of the law” and tellingly reproaches it for “the too violent images, the taste of scandal, the very excess of ‘sensuality.'” Unsurprisingly, David carefully avoids telling his readers which scandal and which sensuality he exactly means, but the “vegetable euphemisms” speak for themselves. As a matter of fact, it is these euphemisms in “Sonnwendzug” that have made the representation of queer eroticism in a homosocial milieu possible. In sum, George’s elitist forms of male fantasies do place him in the aesthetic and moral vicinity of the masculinists.

Georg Simmel’s Definition of übergeschlechtlich

These movements of the revival of the male eros hold the key to understanding George’s affiliations and admirers for “the culture of Eros espoused by the German Youth Movement, in which the pathos of alienation from conventional society found its compensation in a proud body culture of male camaraderie received, in the early poetry of Stefan George, a potent mythological legitimation.” It is not known whether George ever read Ulrichs, but “it is quite likely since he was certainly aware of his work and was unquestionably interested in the subject.” To this might be added George’s readings on the dispute between Heine and Platen on the subject of homosexuality, in which Ulrichs’ works were extensively cited and discussed, and George’s study of the figure of the androgyne, with which he was acquainted through the reading of Jean Lombard and which led him to write Algabal. Yet, already in 1914, George’s stance against the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee seems to have been well-known, because Peter Hamecher, a contemporary critic, states that George “opposes popular prejudices as much as scientific attempts,” which was a sideswipe at the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. Likewise, in 1926 Otto Kiefer linked George’s notion of eroticism to dorische Knabenliebe (Doric boy love) but also cautions the reader that this eros “has intentionally nothing to do with sexuality.”

George and his circle must therefore be grouped for the most part with the masculinist partisans of the homosexual rights movement, but they were also no strangers to certain sexologist set pieces like the third sex, which was exploited by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee to achieve legal victory, but reemerged in George’s work under the guise of the androgynous youth—both as a national hero and an effeminate avatar. George’s vision of same-sex love and friendship was masculinist but also inclusive of women, albeit in a limited way, as we will see later. It was homoerotic but also platonically homosocial. It was nationalist but also allowed for the presence of a great number of Jews in the George-Kreis—more about this later too—and initially the Kreis collaborated with a great many foreign authors. This conundrum is best condensed in what Georg Simmel has termed übergeschlechtlich, which crops up first in his essay on the problem of the sexes from 1911. Stefan George used the term in the preface to his Umdichtung of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

The original Simmelian definition of übergeschlechtlich differs, however, considerably from George’s adaptation. The former defines übergeschlechtlich as “the fact that the masculine is absolutized … as the objective simpliciter.” Simmel complements this by saying that “the ideas and ideal demands that develop both from and for the masculine acquire the status of trans-sexual (übergeschlechtlich) absolutes.” The übergeschlechtlich absolute is thus the absolute which would be beyond the empirical reality of masculine and feminine and which, while originating in the masculine, would represent something objective, factual, and universally human, unlike the feminine, which would be specifically feminine and thus could never be universal. Simmel explicitly equates the “objective” with the “male” and makes it a privilege for the master “that he does not always need to think about the fact that he is master” while the slave “will never forget his status,” or rather her status because she is judged “according to criteria that are created for an antithetical being,” which is why “the autonomy of the female principle cannot be acknowledged at all.” Consequently, “the male prerogative imposes this duality of standards on women—the masculine as the trans-sexually objective, and the specifically female standard that is directly correlated with [it].” Woman, on the other hand, “lives in the most profound identity of being and being-a-woman, in the absoluteness of immanently defined sexuality, the characteristic essence of which does not require the relationship to the other sex.” In brief, “for the man, the sexual question is a relational question” while “for the woman, this is a question of her nature,” the relativity representing the “absolute, the autonomous being (Für-sich-Seiende) of her nature.” As Guy Oakes explains, “her conduct is more homogenous than the man’s and more intimately linked with her character,” but for this very reason the woman also lacks a capacity for detachment, which leads to her disposition to personalize her relationships. “Criticism of any aspect of her conduct bears upon her entire person,” which has as its correlative that “women generally fail in the creation of objective culture.” Simmel’s conclusive remark on the problem between the sexes is that “in the male nature there is a formal element that prepares the ground for its transcendence into an impersonal idea and norm that even lie beyond the real.” Conversely, “the chief virtue of a woman … is to exist in a state of harmonious and self-contained repose.” Whether or not Simmel’s analysis of the gender relationship, with its premise that women are persistently trapped in their biology, does not somewhat fall victim to the same male bias that it tries to outline is not the point here. As can be easily inferred from the other terms with which übergeschlechtlich is paired in Simmel’s essay—überspezifisch, überpersönlich, überhistorisch—the term übergeschlechtlich aims to translate the notion of an absolute beyond sexuality, not a liminal space between the male and the female or between heterosexuality and homosexuality. His analysis delineates how the human absolute relates to the male and the female genders. It is descriptive, not prescriptive or imperative, for Simmel’s stance against patriarchalism and his sympathy for the women’s movement is well known.

George’s Redefinition of übergeschlechtlich

In George’s prefatory note to his translation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the Simmelian concept rematerializes in a noticeably different fashion. The notion of absoluteness beyond sexuality disappears and instead is turned into a strong apology of homosexual desire in literary representation:

in the middle of the sequence of sonnets stands, in all registers and degrees, the passionate devotion of the poet for his male friend [seinen freund]. One should accept it even if one does not understand it and it is equally foolish to defile with criticism or with redemption what one of the greatest Mortals considered good. Materialistic and intellectualistic eras in particular have no right to make words about this subject since they cannot even have the slightest notion of the world-creating power of supersexual Love [übergeschlechtliche Liebe].

Unlike Simmel’s concept that shows how in Western patriarchal thinking everything neutral is, in fact, perceived as rooted in the masculine, George’s notion of übergeschlechtlich speaks more of a spiritual and creative affection that nevertheless would be erotically charged so that “‘transcending sex’ does not mean ignoring sex altogether.” The notion of “übergeschlechtliche Liebe” is singular in that it “assigns, rather, socio-cultural meaning to (homo)sexuality.” The sophisticated way George reads or misreads Simmel’s term of übergeschlechtlich subtly shifts the attention from the problem of the genders to that of homosexuality.

On closer inspection, it is evident how this twist is made possible. In his preface, George juxtaposes the term übergeschlechtlich directly with the term Liebe just after having evoked the passionate devotion of the poet to his friend or rather freund, the grammatical gender of which is male in German. This juxtaposition transforms the devotion into a homophile statement in which the philia would not be completely devoid of eros, particularly because George, in the same breath, levels criticism both at the homophobic attack (tadeln) against Shakespeare and the need for a defense (rettungen) of the English poet’s perceived homosexuality through the gay liberation movement. Given both the general public’s hostile stance toward same-sex sexuality and George’s unease with the homosexual rights movement, none of what George says here can be taken at face value. Ascribing the interpretation of the implications of these lines in sexual or homosexual terms to “self-serving attempts to reclaim [George] for gender studies,” as Ludwig Lehnen maintains, betrays a lack of sense of the intricate social and cultural geography conditioning the literary work of art. George clearly manipulates the original meaning of the Simmelian notion and confers an erotic connotation to a word that until then was perfectly devoid of it. Its mention in relation to Shakespeare’s sonnets—which are famous for their male/female complexity—is sufficient indication. Therefore, rendering George’s updated version of the notion of übergeschlechtlich as “love that overcomes the sexes,” as Margherita Versari does (in line with the overall desexualizing tendency of her book on the discourse of love in George’s poetry), strips it of its sexual undertones in favor of an entirely chaste concept of love, because the carnal aspect of love would be, so to speak, completely conquered. But in that case, why would George have joined übergeschlechtlich with such strong epithets as love and passion at all? Why would he have alluded to the blond youth and the dark lady in Shakespeare’s sonnets, that is, to the twofold bisexual passion that they inspire? As is apparent in the introduction to the third volume of the Jahrbuch für die geistige Bewegung (Yearbook for the spiritual movement), written by Gundolf and Wolters, George attributed cultural significance to homoeroticism and deemed it a necessary element of the educational process: “Without this eros, we believe [that] all education is mere business or idle talk.” Furthermore, the George-Kreis implicitly admitted to the possibility of “unnatural forms of fornication” within the cult of friendship propagated by the Kreis. This is especially so since they allowed for these in the context of the “sacred institution of marriage,” with which they directly compared themselves: “not excluding the possibility of physical excesses in same-sex friendships.” The relation between purely platonic love and homosexual ausschreitungen (physical excesses) was always an ambiguous one for George and his disciples. Yet, in George’s occasional direct remarks on homosexuality, the “physical aspects of same-sex eroticism were either denied or idealized.” George mystified the sexual character of the relations; Daniel DiMassa speaks of this as the “disenfranchisement of the body in George’s Reich of the spirit.” This issue did not escape someone like Thomas Mann who was full of “contempt for George’s mystification of homoeroticism” and who opined “that there is no manliness among the disciples of George’s Männerbund.” But we would fall for George’s and his circle’s tricks if we interpreted the term übergeschlechtlich as wholly free of any connotation of practiced sexuality. The homoerotic quality is all too evident in a great number of George’s poems and many of these speak of a social presence. At the same time, a focus on this presence does not necessarily override or even exclude a spiritual dimension in George’s works. Indeed, the contrary is the case here.

Übergeschlechtlich and its Conceptual Counterparts

In the larger context of modernist poetry, the term übergeschlechtlich can be grouped together with the more frequently used androgynous and hermaphroditic. Like the former, they provide a soupçon of utopian perfection in that man and woman are fused in a single body and that “the androgyne human is the one who is not sexually needy anymore.” As a model, the imperial Roman sculpture Sleeping Hermaphroditus, on display at the Louvre, captures this ideal state in stone. Another designation, pansexual, was also brought into the picture by the modernists because it, too, functioned as a stand-in for nonnormative sexual behavior and identity. In addition to these, the word hermaphrodite can also be construed not as asexual per se but as fully bisexually polymorphous. None of the aforementioned terms have had a stable definition throughout the centuries, but by and large it is in this conception of the polymorphous that the terms potentially blend. The androgyne is “the utopia … of freeing the individual—defined by his sexual role (and fundamentally and exemplarily so)—from all constraints and dependences.” The terms übergeschlechtlich, androgynous, hermaphroditic, and pansexual were thus brought into play by artists like George as a cipher for the phenomenon of homosexuality, which was believed not only to be the mere opposite of heterosexuality but also to be rooted in a much more encompassing and universal take on gender bimorphism. In this male-bonding scenario a certain male-male spiritual ideal was supposed to be superior to its male-female counterpart. The hermaphrodite, of course, had had a literary presence since Plato’s Symposium, its presence reinforced by Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but it was “the Romantics [who] were the first to integrate the myth of the androgynous in their literary and artistic representations.” Likewise, only the “‘hermaphrodite’ of the 1830s and 1840s gave way to a protohomosexual ‘type,'” who, subsequently, became the “medically defined and criminalized ‘invert’ of the late nineteenth century.” Indeed, it is “hardly questionable that the androgyne was more omnipresent in the literary and pictorial imaginary toward the end of the nineteenth century than in that of any other era.” Likewise, “the reference to this myth was to give the erotic revolution of the Fin de siècle its historic legitimization” and “the philosophy of adultery, tribadism, and homosexuality find in [this myth] their canonical text.”

The hermaphroditic figure was often morbid, satanic, sterile, and only sensual. The late nineteenth century developed a veritable fascination for all things sick and sexual, so it comes as no surprise that it produced an abundance of androgynes, hermaphrodites, and transvestites in the form of literary characters and types. Among the better known and strictly poetic creations that show this fascination are Gautier’s “Contralto,” Banville’s “Hermaphrodite,” Swinburne’s “Hermaphroditus,” Moore’s “The Hermaphrodite,” D’Annunzio’s “L’androgine,” Samain’s “L’Hermaphrodite,” and Nervo’s “Andrógino.”

George’s work is strongly anchored in this development. After an analysis of George’s androgyne Algabal character, Robert Norton comes to the conclusion that “George had reached a critical impasse” because the notion of androgyny seemed to lead to “a kind of suffocating death, a silence,” which only the death of the young boy Maximilian Kronberger changed and which, in the end, directed George toward “the discovery of the neo-Platonic possibilities of what he called ‘spiritual marriage’ and ‘supersexual love’ [übergeschlechtliche Liebe].”

Such encoding of homosexuality, which aims at skirting censorship, is itself produced by censorship, thus, not altogether unfamiliar with it. Judith Butler states that “censorship produces discursive regimes through the production of the unspeakable,” that is, by “enforcing the very distinction between permissible and impermissible speech.” This encoding expropriates the permissible, authorized, i.e., heteronormative discourse, and resignifies it subversively. Keilson-Lauritz shows how in George Doppelgeschlechtlichkeit (androgyny) is linked to innocence. If the terms androgynous, hermaphroditic, or pansexual had a defusing quality, this was, a fortiori, true with the notion of übergeschlechtlich and its depersonalized core. For a poet like George, this expression’s advantage over the other terms must have been that it has an even less overtly sexual and more universal implication, so it does not merely indicate a sexual doubling but also the effacement of sexuality or even of identity itself. The third sex is the notion adopted by the sexologists. Androgyny and hermaphroditism can be less well dissociated from homosexuality. Pansexuality also carries considerably greater implications of the sexual than of the social. Übergeschlechtlich has an altogether more widespread scope. On top of the usual definitions, Keilson-Lauritz brings in definitions ranging from “transcending the medicalization of love by sexologists” to “love transcending the limitations of social gender” and “transcending biological sex and/or genders” or even “love transcending generations.”

The meaning of übergeschlechtlich is difficult to render into English. As seen above, Oakes suggests “trans-sexual” and Norton “supersexual.” Obviously, neither is perfect. The notion of übergeschlechtlich takes the sexual into the social realm and transcends the dualistic division of gender and love. As it does this, it is a key concept for the analysis of how George’s poetry and the George-Kreis coped with the sexologist paradigm of inversion promoted by the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee. It is likely that George availed himself of the close counterparts übergeschlechtlich, androgynous, hermaphroditic, and pansexual so that he could simultaneously conceal and reveal a reprehensible sexuality and universalize what primarily concerned a minority.

Women, Jews, and Nazis

Stefan Breuer says that, while “George liked to be hosted by women and valued conversations with them[,] he insisted that they needed to be kept outside the state.” Rachel Freudenburg somewhat attenuates this radical understanding of the George-Kreis by pointing out that George had dedicated Das Jahr der Seele (The Year of the Soul) to Ida Coblenz and that Gertrud Kantorowicz published poetry in the Blätter für die Kunst, albeit under a gender-neutral pseudonym. All in all, there was a presence of quite a few women, especially Sabine Lepsius and Edith Landmann, in the George-Kreis. Whether this can be called an “inclusion of women” is doubtful, but it did set the George-Kreis apart from other Männerbünde. Fundamentally speaking, George tried to keep women outside the body politic he was creating, and George’s übergeschlechtlich is not based on an equal fusion of the masculine and the feminine but on usurpation of the feminine. Examples of this vision can be found in poems like “Der du uns aus der qual der zweiheit löstest” (“Thou Who from Dualism’s Pains Didst Free Us”) and “Ich bin der Eine und bin Beide” (“I am the One and I am the Two”). Perhaps George’s misogynistic agenda is most apparent in a poem like “Lass deine tränen um ein weib” (“Leave Off Your Tears for a Woman”) from the collection Pilgerfahrten (Pilgrimages), where, in a few stanzas, the speaker dismisses any heartfelt feeling for women and in so doing insinuates that love for women cannot equal that for men.

While George “publicly said nothing either in favor or against the Nazis,” it is equally undeniable “that George’s writings gave an important emotive inflection to the inspirational and ritualistic politics that characterized the fascist imperative during the interwar period.” Unlike, however, Blüher’s Wandervogel and other distinctly antisemitic organizations in the early twentieth century, the more cosmopolitan and less völkisch attitude of the George-Kreis toward Jews and Judaism complicates the matter. The ultraconservative Kreis included a great number of equally ultraconservative assimilated Deutschjuden. As a matter of fact, it consisted of a disproportionately high number of Jewish members and was therefore “on the whole viewed by the National Socialists as a Jewish movement.” In a letter to Hanna Wolfskehl, Gundolf wrote that he was “more anti-Zionist than ever, so that the dissolving [Auflösung] of Jewry seem[ed] desirable to [him].” Gundolf wanted to “serve Shakespeare and not Yahweh or Baal.” Commenting on this passage, Norton points out that this state of mind was common among German Jews of the time: “before 1933 innumerable German Jews were more passionately, more wholeheartedly ‘German’ than many of their non-Jewish compatriots.” Joseph Mali states that for George “Jews were particularly disposed to his conception of Germany as primarily a mythical—rather than political—Reich because as such it was open and equal to all Germans, regardless of their ethnic and civic categorization.” According to Jürgen Egyptien, “George’s attitude toward Jews was not racially motivated,” but he rejected Judaism out of a “social and cultural antisemitism,” and in order for Jews to be welcome in the George-Kreis they had to “distance themselves from their fathers’ original faith.”

Indeed, the very problem of George’s intermediate poetic state religion is that it attempted the utterly anachronistic transposition of the model of paiderastia from Ancient Greece to the twentieth century in the form of some bigger-than-life German Männerhelden and Hölderlinian Griechendeutschen (Hellenic Germans) who were supposed to lead an art-for-art’s-sake mythical elite group of people. Within this authoritarian and nationalist agenda, George’s cult of male friendship and pedagogy ambiguously suggested both philia and eros between master and disciple. Thus, stressing the über-manly and übermenschlich qualities in homosexuality, it was inescapably bound to produce certain overlaps with more contemporary values. As the conviction of Oscar Wilde—based on his homosexual acts—had become a cause célèbre, it is worth noting “that George and his circle had the tendency to decorporealize homosexual orientation and homosexual relations in front of the general public while differentiating them at the same time from the homosexual emancipation movement.” The George-Kreis portrayed itself neither as a homosexual emancipation group nor as a masculinist society. A clear-cut separation between the Kreis and other formations—i.e., the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, the Wandervogel, or the Reform Pedagogical Movement—can also be challenging because many of their representatives collaborated with or directly inspired each other at some point. Early on, Brand was involved in the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee; Hirschfeld wrote the preface to Blüher’s Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen (The German Wandervogel movement as an erotic phenomenon), and Freud and Blüher engaged in an exchange of letters on the question of whether homosexuality was a pathology or not. Together with Schurtz and Freud, Blüher names Benedict Friedlaender—one of the cofounders of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen—among the three main sources of his book Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft (The Role of Eroticism in Male Society), in which Blüher significantly cites a poem from George’s Stern des Bundes (Star of the Covenant) at the very end of each of the two volumes. Most importantly perhaps, “several times [Blüher] tried in vain to make his way into the famous circle around Stefan George,” but “Blüher’s tendency to draw the public’s attention to sexuality and homosexuality” and his “unconcealed hostility toward Jews” were met with “aversion” by George.

Likewise, George rejected Gustav Wyneken, an important protagonist of the Reform Pedagogical Movement and founder of the Wickersdorf Free School Community. Wyneken admired Blüher and George and also had close ties with the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, but he had to resign after he was accused of touching two underage males in 1920. This was not the first time he was involved in a sexual abuse scandal. No wonder George judged him to be “a thin rationalist with neither faith nor awe.” Regarding this issue, Hirschfeld also had a penchant for adolescent boys, as did of course George. Thomas Karlauf interprets the cult around Maximin in the collection Der Siebente Ring (The Seventh Ring) as “the outrageous attempt to declare with pedagogic zeal [that] pederasty [was] the highest spiritual way of life.” In the present age of online child pornography and mediatized child abuse, his statement provokes an immediate frisson, but George’s and the masculinist vision of a Hellenic society based on pederasty must be seen in the context of its time and as a means to an end. For sure, Karlauf’s statement has since been put into perspective by Kai Kaufmann, who recapitulates that “if George had homoerotic tendencies—which was probably the case; if he even desired and loved young men—and actually why not; he intentionally transposed, i.e., sublimated these affects into the medium of poetry but also into (other) forms of friendship.” In George’s poetry, pederasty is a reaction against a positivistic age and a nostalgic celebration of a society inspired by the male form, as can be found in a poem like “Einem jungen Führer im ersten Weltkrieg,” where the soldier returning from World War I is described as keusch (chaste) and as a knabengestalt (slim form of a boy) and yet as a future guide, leader, Führer: “die schulter sich hob drauf / man als bürde schon lud / Hunderter schicksal” (Proud rose your shoulders and free, / bearing a weight even then: / Fate of your squadron).

In the wider context of the Eulenburg affair, the Wandervogelbewegung was publicly described as a “club for pederasts” and so was the George-Kreis. Ultimately, the differences or commonalities between these groups and people were not only of an ideological order. They also issued from the Wilhelminian and interwar social spaces in which the actants evolved. The forces at work between them owed much to dynamics of distinction, emulation, and jealousy and thus cannot be approached only through a history of ideas. George was able to put a spell on a great number of people partly through his poetry and ideology but also through his charismatic personality. What the George-Kreis shared with the masculinists was an ambiguous place in society since, as a whole, the Kreis did not meet the standards of hegemonic masculinity, yet was complicit with it, in R.W. Connell’s terminology. The George-Kreis employed a strategy similar to that of the other modern Männerbünde in that it skillfully deflected the suspicion of sexual and social abnormality. By way of the concept of übergeschlechtlich, it managed not to be (entirely, positively) seen as a group of deviants but rather to have its master courted by Bernhard Rust, the Prussian Minister for Science, Art, and National Culture, to join the newly purged Preußische Dichterakademie (Prussian Writers’ Academy). Gustav Jaeger had introduced the distinction between the socially unintegrated “monosexual” (i.e., onanist) on the one hand, and the “homo” and “heterosexual” together as the “normally sexual” on the other, thereby theorizing homosexuality as part of normative sexuality. Fried-laender presupposed that “sensual love … between individuals of the same sex” was a feature of all social creatures. According to him, “most men [were] naturally more or less bisexual,” and he achieved the “construction of a broader homo-social male community … through the radical negation of women and femaleness.” Female homosexuality did not enter into the equation. In fact, “there is no mention at all of a comparable continuum of same-sex desire in regard to women” because “homosexual identity politics was superseded by male identity politics.” Blüher, following Friedlaender’s notion of a generalized (male) bisexuality, established that one sexuality came to predominate only after puberty and that “homosexuals alone … could become Männerhelden and initiate, Männerbünde,” which he viewed as the homosocial bedrock of the nation state. The masculinists’ aim was the “integration of the homosexual into the male normal spectrum.” In turn, George achieved this normalizing effect through the notion of übergeschlechtlich and was able to create a Männerbund that, unlike the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, was not perceived as primarily homosexual. Brand, the originator of the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, saw his house raided by the Nazis—as was, of course, Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for Sexual Research).

In the form of übergeschlechtlich, George puts forth a source of ultimate gender bending, of a species beyond category, superseding all differences yet also reminiscent of homosexuality and misogynous as well. The sexologist notions of inversion and third sex had unrelentingly negative connotations at the beginning of the twentieth century, while terms like pansexualism, hermaphroditism, and androgyny found an easier acceptance because of their connection to antiquity. Übergeschlechtlich was shorthand for any more open conceptualization of gender identity. The utopian character of George’s work is firmly rooted in the fin de siècle debate on sexuality that took place in forensic medicine and that had become part of the bourgeois culture générale. George’s literary Männerbund, with its undialectical hostility to modernity, was aiming at establishing an empire of the mind in which different strands—aesthetic fundamentalism, masculinism, historical antisemitism, Deutschtum, homosociability, homosexuality, and pederasty—all came together in their own way. It is likely that to a certain degree George owed the notion of übergeschlechtlich also to Nietzsche and his concept of the Übermensch, although “George himself was quite specific about how he surpassed Nietzsche,” whom he considered “merely a precursor.” George also welcomed National Socialism as a political movement, since it was the first time his views “were being echoed in the outside world.” Norton’s judgment is that Hitler benefited from “the conflation of aesthetic and political authority George represented in the public mind.” Nevertheless, while producing staunch Nazis, the George-Kreis attracted a large number of Jews in its midst. It is another paradox that distinguishes the George-Kreis from other Männerbünde. Furthermore, unlike them, it also allowed for a small number of women in its orbit, the blueprint of which, as Freudenburg argues, may have been the literary salons, which were often led by (Jewish) women and were sympathetic to homosexuality. All things considered, George and his circle “work[ed both] within the dominant (antisemitic, misogynist, homophobic) idiom” and within a feudalistic, antidemocratic, masculinist, and hegemonic mode. There is no way “to rescue homoeroticism from the clubbishness of George’s Reich” and no way “to rescue George from his own homoerotic communitarianism.” As this article has shown, George’s appropriation and reworking of Simmel’s notion of übergeschlechtlich was a conscious and strategic act. The notion underlies much of George’s poetry and helped form a state which, for all intents and purposes, was a homosocial one and which had at its core a homoerotic, pederastic ethos. “There was much of the theatrical, of the pose, in the George circle,” and much of the adoption of the idiom and mode was performative, owing to the atmosphere of the time. Yet, in order to ensure the perpetuity of his state, George was ready to deal with groups of people who for various circumstantial reasons were necessary to its survival: women, Jews, and eventually Nazis. The histories of homosexuality, misogyny, antisemitism and fascism are deeply entangled, but it is important to remember that “the spread [of the notion of the Männerbund] in the cultural and political landscape of the early twentieth century far transcende[d] the extreme fascist right wing.” The ideologically critical readings of George and his circle as protofascist often fall into a heteronormative caricature of the homosexual dimension in both his work and the Kreis. Strictly poetological readings of his work have been the hallmark of hagiographic approaches that try to clear George’s name both from Nazism and the practice of pederasty. The reason it remains, indeed, difficult to establish a direct link from George’s agenda to either of these even today lies in the enduring power of the Simmel-George configuration.