Christoph Schlatter. Merkwürdigerweise bekam ich Neigung zu Burschen: Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder homosexueller Männer in Schaffhausen 1867 bis 1970. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2002. 540 S. + 20 Abb. EUR 36.00 (broschiert), ISBN 978-3-0340-0524-1.
Reviewed by Clayton Whisnant (Department of History, Wofford College)
Published on H-German (March, 2004)
Homosexuality in Small Towns: The Case of Schaffhausen, Switzerland
Homosexuality in Small Towns: The Case of Schaffhausen, Switzerland
In 1976, the philosopher Michel Foucault suggested in the introductory volume to his History of Sexuality that "homosexuality"--at least as we know it today--is in fact a modern phenomenon, created by a whole network of medical discourses that have proliferated through the West since the nineteenth century. Since then, an exciting debate has raged in many fields about the veracity of Foucault's thesis. Many scholars (who have come to be known as the "essentialists") have continued to insist that there is something unique enough to the desire for members of the same sex to call, for example, Socrates "gay," even if the Greeks never would have used such a term. But even those scholars known as the "constructionists" who demand recognition for the role that society plays in shaping our understanding and even the very nature of same-sex desire, there is still a great deal of disagreement about the relative importance of medical ideas in this construction. The sociologist David Greenberg, for example, tends to emphasize the role of social transformations such as economic development and the growing bureaucratization of society in creating a homosexual identity.[1]
While the overwhelming trend among the "constructionists" has been to accept Foucault's theory about the discursive construction of sexuality, several historians have suggested that we should not simply accept medical theories as the sole determiner of our modern understanding of homosexuality.[2] As George Chauncey writes: "it would be wrong to assume, I think, that doctors created and defined the identities of 'inverts' and 'homosexuals' at the turn of the century, that people uncritically internalized the new medical models, or even that homosexuality emerged as a fully defined category in the medical discourse itself in the 1870s."[3] In his work Gay New York, Chauncey provides a wealth of evidence that demonstrates very well the need to pay attention to the host of other discourses about sexuality, many of which circulated by word of mouth without leaving many written traces, to come to a fuller understanding of the emergence of the "modern homosexual."[4]
Recent scholarship on the discursive construction of homosexuality suggests that the modern category of "the homosexual," which traces same-sex desire back to a person's inner character, did not emerge suddenly or evenly across the Western world, but instead took hold slowly among the white, educated urban bourgeoisie sometime at the end of the nineteenth century (or perhaps at the beginning of the next, depending on the scholar). From here, it spread to the other classes and ethnic groups. At the same time, it had to compete with older understandings of same-sex desire still rooted in the poorer, less educated classes, which focused on the "sinful" or "unnatural" act itself without necessarily drawing attention to one's inner character. However, one persistent hole in the scholarship up until now has been the experience of homosexuality in rural areas and small towns.
Why this hole exists is no real mystery. Historical evidence of any kind of sexual activity is always hard to find given its traditionally private nature, and men or women engaged in homosexual activity were obviously even more secretive about it given the many social and legal sanctions involved. Due to this difficulty, historians have generally focused on large urban areas, since here one could often find a developed subculture that served to bring same-sex desire out into the open. No one really doubts that homosexual activities also took place in smaller towns and villages, but what evidence that can be found is generally so meager that it is difficult to draw many conclusions, nonetheless write a whole book on the matter. And this is not to even mention the mountains of red tape that must be cut in order to get permission to look at available material!
Given this background, it is easy to appreciate what a goldmine Christoph Schlatter has found in the town of Schaffhausen and subsequently exploits in his book. Schaffhausen, which, during the timeframe studied by Schlatter, grew from a town of 10,000 in 1860 to no larger than 50,000 by 1970, is located near Switzerland's northern border with Germany, about twenty miles or so from Zurich. The town developed an industrial base during the nineteenth century, with an emphasis on iron- and aluminum-manufacturing, but also with supporting industries in textiles, leather, and watch-making. With respect to homosexual activity, Schaffhausen seems to fit pretty well what we would expect from a town this size. In chapter 10 of Schlatter's book, we learn that the city did not have a particularly developed homosexual subculture before 1970. Next to one short-lived bar/restaurant--the "Hirschen" in the nearby suburb Feuerthalen, which was owned and operated by a candidly gay man in the late 1920s--there were no public establishments where gay men could openly meet, even after 1942 when Swiss lawmakers decriminalized homosexual acts between men. Instead, men interested in same-sex contacts resorted to the same public places used throughout the Western world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: parks, public bathrooms, and, for the brave, public baths. They also could head off to Zuerich, Duesseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, or other large cities in central Europe that offered a more developed gay scene.
It is not, then, the number of homosexual cases to be found among the court records explored by Schlatter that makes this town unusual. Indeed, in many instances Schlatter has available to him only one or two court records for a single decade. What then allows for Schlatter's success? Not the number, but the richness of the material found in these records. Where many historians have been forced to piece together brief descriptions of police investigations or court proceedings, Schlatter has gained access to records that at times include personal letters taken as evidence, interrogation protocols, letters written by the accused after the arrest to explain or justify their activities, psychiatric records, and finally records regarding the outcome of the trial.
Through careful use of these records, Schlatter is able to make a very significant contribution to the ongoing debate about Foucault's thesis. He finds ample evidence of the importance of medical discourses in shaping the ways that sexual contact among men was addressed. At the beginning of the period he studies (the 1860s), he finds that same-sex activities were commonly linked with masturbation by both the authorities and the participants themselves (pp. 233-234). Schlatter attributes this to the impact of medical theory, which since the early-nineteenth century had been increasingly singling out "self-abuse" as the root of a whole host of physical and mental diseases. Yet Schlatter does not ignore another way of describing same-sex contact common in the nineteenth century, namely as the unintended result of simple drunkenness. This confirms a point made by many other historians, namely that medical discourses on homosexuality did not absolutely saturate all of European culture, but instead competed with several other modes of understanding. Schlatter provides evidence to illustrate the ways that the men could choose among various kinds of discourses depending on whom they were talking to (for example, friends or police officers) and their immediate goals (which, given most of the author's sources, was to escape prison sentences).
Both of these nineteenth-century discourses had one thing in common, though: they focused on the sexual act. Although both discourses persisted well into the twentieth century, by the 1890s there were signs that a new understanding of homosexuality was gradually emerging which attributed homosexual acts to an inner nature (Veranlagung). As one might suspect from other research, it does appear that this understanding was slower to take root among the working-class population than among the wealthier, more educated classes (p. 316). Unfortunately, one thing that is difficult to determine from the sources is how much at first these references to a homosexual inner nature was held personally by the men themselves, and how much these references were motivated by the questions posed to the men. Schlatter admits that generally the questions asked by the police officers are not included in the interrogation protocols. In most cases, from around the turn of the century on, we should assume that the police officers were posing questions like, "What is your orientation [Veranlagung]? Do you have a homosexual nature? Can you give me more information about this?" (p. 238).
Whether the attribution of a homosexual nature came from the police or from the arrested men themselves, the important fact was that "now the matter had a name" (p. 238). And soon after the appearance of the word homosexual in court and police records during the 1920s, they quickly began to reflect a debate being carried out in the medical and scientific community about whether homosexuality is inborn or acquired. From this time on, Schlatter argues, it was no longer possible for men to avoid confronting modern sexual discourses and the stigma that this discourse brought with it (p. 254). But this does not mean that gay men were the passive pawns of modern medical ideas. Indeed, Schlatter notes that gay men by the 1950s and 1960s often adopted a very different position from psychiatrists and lawmakers within the debate over whether homosexuality is inborn or acquired. While the authorities after the Second World War tended to favor the seduction thesis, gay men themselves increasingly saw their homosexuality as hereditary. This was quite remarkable, Schlatter notes, since this was not at all what the police wanted to hear--a good indication that this was a belief held by the men themselves.
In addition to its contribution to the debate about Foucault's thesis, Schlatter's book also provides a wealth of information intriguing to anyone interested in sexual matters. For example, one section provides several detailed sexual biographies, at least as they can be reconstructed from Schlatter's sources. There is also a chapter on the different kinds of relationships and sexual contact that men had amongst themselves, ranging from the transitory contacts made in parks and public restrooms to the "Schlafstubenbeziehungen" common among workers and "Dauerbeziehungen" found only rarely.
The biggest weakness of the book is the failure to try to more firmly situate what we learn about Schaffhausen with what we know about gay life in the major cities. What, for example, are we to make of the clear signs of a modern homosexual identity in Berlin and other big cities by the 1870s (and perhaps as early as the seventeenth century in London, according to some scholars[5]), while the identity does not make an appearance in Schaffhausen until the 1890s? The reader is left to draw his or her own conclusions here. Another weakness is the failure to refer to contributions to the debate over Foucault that have been made within the English-speaking world. For instance, many gay scholars have suggested that modern medical discourses about homosexuality went through a major shift in this period from envisioning homosexuality as a product of gender deviance to describing it as something not necessarily related to one's sense of gender. There is not even the slightest mention of this significant shift, however, in Schlatter's work.
All in all, though, Schlatter's book is a welcome contribution to the debate about Foucault's thesis. Hopefully, it will inspire other scholars to seek out historical sources concerning homosexual activity in smaller towns--which most of us assumed, up till now, did not occur in any sufficient quantity. Until this scholarship can be completed, Schlatter's book will help scholars to make at least some sounder conjectures than previously about what it was like to be a gay man in a small Central European town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Notes
[1]. David F. Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1988).
[2]. Jeffrey Weeks and David Halperin are probably the best-known advocates of Foucault's thesis.
[3]. George Chauncey, "From Sexual Inversion to Homosexuality: Medicine and the Changing Conceptualization of Female Deviance," Salmagundi 58-59 (Fall 1982-Winter 1983), p. 115.
[4]. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World (New York: Basic Books, 1994).
[5]. Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture 1660-1750," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Meridian Books, 1989), pp. 129-140.
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Citation:
Clayton Whisnant. Review of Schlatter, Christoph, Merkwürdigerweise bekam ich Neigung zu Burschen: Selbstbilder und Fremdbilder homosexueller Männer in Schaffhausen 1867 bis 1970.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
March, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8983
Copyright © 2004 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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