Community of one's own

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The Community of Owners (GdE) was a literary gay association that was founded in 1903 by Adolf Brand as one of the first in the world in Berlin . It served to support Brand's magazine Der Eigen .

history

The group was founded in 1903 as a kind of closed circle of magazine readers and editors based on the subscribers to the magazine Der Eigen . The reasons for the founding of the association are unknown, but Adolf Brand himself commented in a propaganda brochure in 1925: “The GoE was founded on May 1, 1903 in Berlin with the employees and readers of the art magazine Der Eigen , in order to enable its appearance, the was in danger at the time due to complaints and persecution. ” Hubert Kennedy has interpreted the formation of the group as an attempt to escape censorship, not as a release for the general public but for a closed circle, although the trick is not worked and Adolf Brand was sentenced to two months in prison in 1903 for publishing indecent magazines. In 1905 they succeeded in being recognized as an "art magazine" in court.

In the above-mentioned brochure from 1925, Adolf Brand defines the group as “a private association of the writer Adolf Brand, which is exclusively under his direction and administration”. However, there is a founding document signed by twelve people:

The association was founded by its director, Adolf Brand, editor of the art magazine Der Eigen. The signatories of the founding statute are: 1. the writer Benedikt Friedländer , the author of the work Renaissance des Eros Urano - 2. the manor owner Wilhelm Jansen , the founder of the organization of the Jung- Wandervogel - 3. the painter Fidus - 4. the - 5. the Writer Peter Hille , the first art critic of his own - 6. the composer Richard Meienreis - 7. the writer Paul Brandt - 8. the writer Walter Heinrich - 9. the writer Reiffegg - 10. the Dutch naval doctor Lucien von Römer - 11. the writer Hanns Fuchs - 12. Martha Marquardt .

Seven of the signatories were also members of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee (WhK). The controversies between the GoE, especially in Brands Texten, and the WhK are difficult to understand when you consider that not only these seven members but many other two associations belonged, that their respective magazines shared authors and that there were personal relationships. It is possible that both a certain inferiority complex on the part of Adolf Brand and his personal rivalry with Magnus Hirschfeld influenced the fact.

The group used the social approach of outing ; H. the public exposure of homosexuality by known or influential persons, taking into account the fact that the act was a crime in Germany at the time. The first victim of this technique was Kaplan Dasbach , a centrist politician, a process that ended relatively without consequences for Adolf Brand because Dasbach was not very interested in the matter. Instead, the 1907 scandal almost wiped out the club. In the midst of the Harden-Eulenburg affair , Brand accused Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow of being homosexual. As a result, Brand was sentenced to a year and a half in prison; The magazine Der Eigen did not appear until 1919 after the First World War. During these years the association continued to exist and Brandt's supporters mostly met in 1911 and 1912 every Wednesday at around 9 p.m. in a separate part of the Neues Theater restaurant in Berlin.

Brand diversified his editorial and published erotic postcards with naked young men in series called German Race or Race and Beauty, as well as some patriotic and bellicose books. In 1916, Brand was found not guilty in a lawsuit accused of "disclosing indecent photos". His defense was that the photographs had a scientific, artistic, and hygienic purpose of the breed, but were by no means homoerotic.

According to its own information, the group had around 2,000 to 3,000 members. The number should be compared with the almost 50,000 that the largest association of bisexual / homosexual people of the time, the Bund für Menschenrecht (BfM) had.

Ideals / goals of the association

Although Brand had originally worked with Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee , he developed a point of view that was opposite to that of the Jewish doctor. Hirschfeld defended the existence of a third sex between man and woman in the line of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and his man with the soul of a woman. Instead, the members of the community were the own followers of Elisar von Kupffer and Benedict Friedlaender , whose work Renaissance des Eros Uranios (“The Renaissance of Urana Eroticism”, 1904) deeply impressed them. Friedlaender defended in his treatise that homosexuality was a normal and basic human desire and refused to identify homosexuality with femininity. They went so far as to deny their relationship to “homosexuality” in the Hirschfeld sense, and called their feelings of love for friends “love between friends”.

In addition, they believed that Hirschfeld had medicalized homosexuality, as Harry Oosterhuis noted: “Most of the writers of Der Eigen felt that their feelings and experiences could not be understood in scientific categories and that art and literature were better means of expression. “That said, it wasn't a biological problem, it was a cultural problem. They rejected any idea that “love between friends” was in any way unhealthy or degenerate, as there was a trend that they saw as superior even to heterosexual love, an attitude that bordered on misogyny.

The doctor Edwin Bab took a different position within the community of one's own . Despite the rejection of the biological origin represented by Hirschfeld, he did not quite agree with the ideas of Friedlaender and Brand. He believed that the homosexual and feminist movements should be allies: since all men were actually bisexual, as an alternative to premarital and extramarital sexual relations, men had to express their sexual desires with one another, which would make the disappearance of prostitution possible.

Both Friedländer and the GdE longed for a return to the Greek ideal, denied women any social role and defended a kind of pedophilia that resembled classical and educational eros. Although John Henry Mackay was not part of the GoE and its anarchist ideals that defended freedom for women, he can be considered a typical author of this type of thinking. It needs to be made clear that none of them defended sex with prepubescent boys, so Mackay was attracted to boys between the ages of 14 and 17.

The group was also close to the German nudist movement, with the emphasis not so much on the eroticism of the body, but on nudity itself and health, strength and determination. Towards the end, some members had anti-Semitic tendencies, including Adolf Brand, and developed a theory of the homosexual superman, the hero who was superior to the heterosexual. In this sense, the thinking of the GdE connects with some aspects of National Socialism , in its ideal of the male man, although its anarchist tendencies and later the awareness of homophobia. Nazional Socialism kept them at a distance. In fact, Brand attempted to coexist with National Socialism through an open letter, which of course was not possible, but enabled him to escape persecution because of his sexual orientation, even though he was in poverty.

literature

  • Manfred Herzer , 1997, “Adolf Brand and His Own.” Sternweiler, Andreas; Hannesen, Hans Gerhard, ed. Goodbye to Berlin? 100 years of the gay movement (in German). Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel. ISBN 3-86149-062-5
  • Rainer Herrn , 1999, Moved differently. 100 years of the gay movement in Germany. MännerschwarmSkript Verlag, Hamburg 1999, ISBN 3-928983-78-4 , p. 80.
  • Hubert Kennedy , Adolf Brand
  • Edgar J. Bauer , Third Gender , "The Own: His Founder"
  • Niko Wahl , 2004, "The situation of homosexuals in Austria before 1938", persecution and deprivation of property of homosexuals On the territory of the Republic of Austria during the Nazi era: Efforts to restore, compensate and pensions in the Second Republic, Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, p. 94. ISBN 978-3-486-56798-4

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Adolf Brand, The community of one's own. Covenant for friendship and freedom. Statute. (Berlin-Wilhelmshagen 1925), pp. 2 and 23