Günther von der Schulenburg (officer)

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Karl Werner Günther Reichsgraf von der Schulenburg (born August 20, 1865 at Oefte Castle ; † March 4, 1939 in Düsseldorf-Grafenberg ) was a German officer , publicist and homosexual activist .

Background and early years

Oefte Castle

Günther Graf von der Schulenburg was the son of the major and royal Prussia. Chamberlain Ernst Wilhelm August Graf von der Schulenburg (* July 3, 1832; † March 23, 1878), a son of Count Werner von der Schulenburg-Wolfsburg , and his wife Melanie Henriette Emilie Friederike von Helldorf (* June 28, 1835; † April 26, 1917), a daughter of Carl von Helldorff , was born on the family estate of Schloss Oefte near Kettwig as one of four children. So he came from the extensive aristocratic Schulenburg family . He received private lessons until he was eleven, after which he attended two high schools in Thuringia . After graduating from school, he went to the military and was promoted to Rittmeister . From 1886 he managed the family estates and was financially independent. In 1892 he had the simple, classicist Oefte Castle redesigned in the neo-Gothic style by the Hanoverian architect Ferdinand Schorbach . In his hometown he was socially recognized and integrated. In 1889 he married the Belgian noblewoman Jeanne van de Walle; the couple had two children. He himself had hoped in vain that marriage would dissuade him from his homosexual tendencies.

activities

Even during his boarding school, von der Schulenburg had sexual contacts with his schoolmates, later preferably with young men between the ages of 15 and 17 from the working class, some of whom he also supported financially. To find such contacts, he often went to Cologne . His own son later reported that he had been sexually molested by his father. Despite multiple police investigations, he was never brought to justice. In 1898, in connection with an attempt by the Schulenburg to approach a high school student in Cologne, reports were made in Cologne newspapers. He then received numerous letters from homosexuals, which led him to seriously consider his sexual orientation. There was a break with his family and he resigned from a planned candidacy for the Reichstag .

Around 1900 Günther von der Schulenburg joined the Scientific and Humanitarian Committee (WhK) and operated from 1903 to 1908 as a contact for the Rhenish-Westphalian Sub-Committee , in 1907 he resigned after several public scandals. He also tried unsuccessfully to found a homosexual aristocratic association. He published homoerotic poems under the pseudonym Siegfried .

When Günther von der Schulenburg found out in 1904 that Joseph von Fürstenberg was about to marry, he informed his future father-in-law about his homosexual activities. Von Fürstenberg committed suicide two days after returning from his honeymoon. Thereupon von Schulenburg was socially ostracized in his circles. In 1906 he was expelled from the official gallery at the Katholikentag in Essen . Three years later he caused the publicist Adolf Brand to out Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow as homosexual, but stayed away from the subsequent court proceedings, so that Brand remained without evidence and was sentenced to 18 months in prison for defamation .

On August 14, 1907, von der Schulenburg gave the lecture Homosexuality in the Middle Ages and the Post- Middle Ages in front of the WhK , which despite technical deficits can be regarded as the first scientific contribution to this topic. In 1908 he claimed in a newspaper article that a “certain Jansen” had formed a “pederast club made up of high school students”; the “certain Jansen” was Wilhelm Jansen, leader of the Wandervogel movement, who then had to resign from all his offices.

Hans von Tresckow , head of the homosexual inspection of the Berlin criminal police, later expressed the assumption that the denunciations from Schulenburg were revenge for the fact that his peers avoided him because of his “unnatural tendencies”.

Incapacitation and imprisonment

Because of all these incidents, Günther von der Schulenburg's wife, who was supported in her project by Archbishop Anton Fischer , among others, urged her husband to be incapacitated. Your application was granted in 1909 by the Velbert District Court . In an expert report drawn up in 1911, he was certified as having “degenerative insanity” and “mental weakness”, since homosexuality would not have been recognized as a reason for incapacitation.

During the First World War , von der Schulenburg was expelled from Switzerland and Italy and arrested in 1918 in Tyrol , where he owned property. Apparently he was on the run. With the creation of a Rhenish Freedom Party , which sought an independence of the Rhineland, he was charged in 1923 with treason to two years imprisonment convicted.

literature

  • Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller , Nicolai Clarus: Man for man. Biographical lexicon on the history of love for friends and male-male sexuality in the German-speaking area . LIT Verlag Münster, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-643-10693-3 , p. 1089-1090 ( preview in Google Book Search).
  • Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918. Edited by Center for Gay History . Hermann-Josef Emons-Verlag Cologne 2006. ISBN 978-3-89705-481-3 . Pp. 47-61. ( PDF pp. 99–106)
  • Peter Winzen : Love of friends at the court of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Norderstedt 2010, pp. 75, 154 and 167.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dietrich Werner Graf von der Schulenburg, Hans Wätjen: History of the sex from the Schulenburg 1237 to 1983. Lower Saxony printing and publishing house Günter Hempel Wolfsburg, ISBN 3 87327 000 5 , Wolfsburg 1984.
  2. ↑ a b Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 47. ( PDF P. 99)
  3. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 50. ( PDF P. 100)
  4. ↑ Peter Winzen: Freundesliebe am Hof ​​Kaiser Wilhelm II. BoD, 2010, ISBN 978-3-8391-5760-2 , p. 76 f . ( Preview in Google Book Search).
  5. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 56. ( PDF P. 103)
  6. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 52. ( PDF P. 101)
  7. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 58. ( PDF p. 104)
  8. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 57. ( PDF p. 104)
  9. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 59. ( PDF pp. 104–105)
  10. ↑ Erwin In het Panhuis: Different from the others. Gays and lesbians in Cologne and the surrounding area 1895–1918 . P. 60 f. ( PDF p. 106)
personal data
SURNAME Schulenburg, Günther von der
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schulenburg, Karl Werner Günther Reichsgraf von der (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German officer, publicist and homosexual activist
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH at Oefte Castle
DATE OF DEATH March 4, 1939
Place of death Düsseldorf-Grafenberg