“A Dark, Impenetrable Wall of Complete Incomprehension”: The Impossibility of Heterosexual Love in Imperial Germany

Abstract

In the years around the turn of the twentieth century, the “war between the sexes” was a major topic of public discussion and concern in Germany—in the daily press, in academic sexology journals and organizations, among medical and psychiatric professionals, in the women's movements, among conservative Christians, in art and music. Jacques Le Rider has even referred to the “obsessive leitmotif of male-female confrontation” in central European culture in this period. Much of what has been written about this topic in recent years posits a crisis of gender relations produced by the growth of the women's movement, and by the backlash against it. The idea that the feminist challenge generated hostility between men and women in this period was one that was also common at the time, particularly among anti-feminists. As Hedwig Dohm put it in 1913, “In all anti-feminist speeches and writings, the hostility between men and women is tirelessly denounced as a characteristic of the times, and a product of the women's movement.”

‘All the progressive forms of life are built up on the attraction of sex’: Development and the social function of the sexual instinct in late 19th- and early 20th-century Western European sexology

“…Sexological organizations and networks, including the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, the World League for Sexual Reform, and the Institute of Sexology in Berlin, actively participated in conversations around birth rates, including discussions about whether and how the numbers of births might be managed to the advantage of both the individual couple and society as a whole (Matte, 2005). These debates about reproductive control drew directly and explicitly on sexological frames of reference and theorizations of the sexual instinct, and in turn linked the politics of reproduction, contraception, and population control to racialized assumptions about the evolutionary development of civilization (Carey, 2012; Dickinson, 2007; Garton, 2004: 161–7; Kline, 2005; Leng, 2018).…”

Push and Pull: Biological and Psychological Models of Sexuality in Medical Sexology and Psychoanalysis (1870–1930)

“…Lust murders, rape, and other forms of sexual violence, as well as sadomasochism fueled evolutionary speculations about the affinity of primordial predatory and cannibalistic behavior and the brutal origins of the sexual instinct. That male and female sexuality, defined in terms of instinctive aggression and submission, were antagonistic and that therefore heterosexuality was far from harmonious, was a recurring concern in sexual science (Dickinson, 2007;Moore, 2009).…”

Introduction

“…The establishment of psychotherapy as a legitimate form of medical treatment and the development of sexology as a new (medical) science were major contexts for Moll's work. 43 He participated in and was, to some extent, a leader in two of the most contentious scientific debates -psychology versus psychoanalysis, and the modernisation of sexuality -during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, his role as an expert witness in the Eulenburg Affair, one of the notorious sex scandals of Imperial Germany, and many other occasions when he gave evidence in court proceedings, made Moll a public figure.…”