Heinrich Hössli

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The young Heinrich Hössli at the beginning of the 19th century

Heinrich Hössli (born August 6, 1784 in Glarus ; † December 24, 1864 in Winterthur , also written as Hößli or Hösli ) was a Swiss cleaner , cloth merchant and writer . He wrote with Eros. The Greeks' love for men was the first important defense of homosexuality .

Life

Hössli was the first of 14 children to be born to master plasterer Hans Jakob Hössli (1758–1846) and his wife Margreth Vogel (1757–1831). He learned his father's craft in Bern. Back in Glarus, he concentrated on the production of fashionable hats for women and men and began trading fabrics for women’s clothing. He was always open to new things and, according to Ferdinand Karsch, he had “a well-trained female taste, the so-called chic”. He was well known for his ladies' hats and decorations, and business was doing so well that he was able to purchase real estate and save a sizable amount of capital. In 1811 he married the housemaid Elisabeth Grebel. With her he had two sons who later both emigrated to the United States . His wife, from whom he lived almost all his life, lived in an apartment in Zurich , where his sons grew up and Heinrich often visited them. Hössli, on the other hand, stayed in Glarus and developed into a "loner" and "eccentric" who was known for his unkempt looks, his "foolish" love of glasses and his frank, church-critical comments.

By calling he was a liberal free spirit and a book fanatic. He quenched his thirst for reading in reading societies , which were at that time a male union, and he sought friendships with pastors and teachers. He had great respect for academics who had studied Latin and Greek , philosophy or theology . Hössli became a supporter of a " natural philosophy " that knows no prejudices and is made up of ideas from Troxler , Schelling and a lot of Plato , among other things . Sometimes, in the evening, the autodidact later saw himself as a "Filosof".

It is not known whether Hössli himself was homosexual.

The Eros

Heinrich Hössli drawn Caspar Müller in the late 1830s

On September 30, 1817 was lawyer Franz Desgouttes one of the last people in Europe to strangulation whacked . The cause was his murder of his writer and friend due to unfulfilled passion. The "story of Desgoutte's suffering" occupies Hössli a lot and he wrote an apology for love for men (gender relationships) . On the one hand, certain forms of love for men were socially accepted in antiquity, on the other hand, many things of ancient culture were valued very highly during Hössli's lifetime and regarded as models for their own time. It was easy to argue that peoples who had produced such a great culture and literature could not have been morally corrupt. These arguments were used again and again in later times to a decreasing extent.

On the mediation of the later philosophy professor Ignaz Paul Vitalis Troxler , Hössli traveled with him to Aarau in the summer of 1819 to visit the respected politician and folk writer Heinrich Zschokke in his new domicile, the Villa Blumenhalde . Hössli submitted his essay to Zschokke in order to persuade him to write a treatise in defense of love for men, since Hössli did not yet trust himself to do such a thing. Zschokke developed the topic for the literary debate Der Eros or about love , which appeared in 1821. Hössli's position is represented by the figure Holmar , Desgouttes by Lukasson and Zschokkes by Beda . Holmar justifies the idea of ​​Greek Eros with reference to antiquity. Bede , on the other hand, points to the impossibility of love without sensuality. In the end, even Holmar admits that "the consent of the spirit to the unreasonable superiority of a passion is punishable." Hössli himself was very disappointed with Zschokke's work.

He now began to work as a writer himself and wrote a two-volume monograph with the title Eros in 17 years of work . The love for men of the Greeks, their relations to history, education, literature and legislation of all times and the subtitle The unreliability of the external characteristics in the sex life of the body and the soul . The first volume appeared in Glarus in 1836. The sale of the work was banned by the cantonal government in 1837 at the instigation of the local Evangelical Council . The St. Gallen journalist and publisher Jakob Friedrich Wartmann, who was known for his radical liberal stance, was upset about the book ban in Glarus, which contradicted his demands for progressive freedom of the press . The remaining edition of the first volume was brought to safety in St. Gallen, and the second volume was also published there in 1838. Wartmann was of the opinion that the book should be sold discreetly, and so the second volume was even rarer than the first.

In his work, Hössli attempted to prove that eros between people of the same sex is a pure, immutable, morally superior and divine natural phenomenon. He argued that in spite of centuries of heretics , persecution, punishment with imprisonment, torture and execution , this love could never be eradicated and that it must therefore be seen as a natural disposition. He derived naturalness from cultural authority.

«Our entire treatment of this phenomenon, as we all well know, is based solely on the saying: 'It is not nature.' The most human and clearest people that has ever lived [...] but said: 'It is nature . ›»

- Volume II, p. 182

His implication was that this love could neither be punished as a crime, nor cured as a disease, nor condemned as sin . Desgouttes' fate is also mentioned several times in Scripture. Finding the identity of his “target group” is facilitated by numerous quotes from history and literature - not only from the Greeks and Romans , but also from the Orient . His recourse to Plato shows that he, like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs later , was familiar with the term “Venus Urania” from Plato's banquet . With the differentiation between the outer appearance of the man and the characteristics of the male soul, he anticipated Ulrich's theories about the female soul in the male body. Hössli did not yet have a term of his own for the phenomenon. He talks about "the appearance", love, sodomism or pederasty . Already in the introduction to the first volume he draws a comparison between the earlier persecution of witches and heretics and that of sodomites in his time. According to Meier, Hössli saw in the liberation of the man-loving also a touchstone for liberalism and democracy of small states .

Despite all the setbacks, Hössli continued to work and tried to have a third volume follow, but it was never completed. To be free for this, he sold his property in Glarus in 1852 and gave the house on the corner of Bärengasse to his favorite nephew Jakob Kubli ("Jögg"), whom he had taken in like a son. This was followed by an unsteady hiking life around Lake Zurich , where he stayed in various hotels and pensions.

Sons

His older son, the engineer Jakob Rudolf Hössli (“Jögg”), born in 1812 , lived with his family in the state of New York , soon broke off all contact with Switzerland and was last seen in Otisco (New York) .

The younger Johann Ulrich Hössli ("Hansi", "John") had " inherited the views laid down in his father's Eros ". After various affairs in Switzerland, he became wealthy in the United States through property speculation. The letters to his father from the period from 1842 to 1857 have been preserved.

«I would live very well and comfortably in Switzerland and because of you it would be more than anything to me […] but see, the several reasons against it stem from one source or at least mostly from one source. I want to say E (ros). Especially the past things from the time of the red lion in M., that was an unpleasant story, many circumstances worked together there. "

- Biography of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack 1903, p. 104

John brought the impoverished young Heinrich Rosenberger across the Atlantic around 1842, let him participate in his business and he later became the Swiss consul in Galveston (Texas) . In 1848, John adopted Henry Wilson, then 16 to 17 years old, as a foster son and financed an apprenticeship in the book trade. But when his father forbade the connection in 1853 and caused numerous " defamations ", the contact had to be broken off. In 1857 John expressed skepticism about his father's work:

«Of everything that can be proven from antiquity and also for nature - I always speak specifically of this case - it is said: 'This is an old thing, it is well known' and 'that doesn't make it any better' . The opinion of individuals does not count for much. "

- Biography of Ferdinand Karsch-Haack 1903, p. 106

On May 1, 1861, John drowned in a ship disaster off Halifax when he wanted to return to Switzerland.

Death and aftermath

Hössli's daguerreotype at a ripe old age

Also in 1861 the remaining volumes of Eros were destroyed in the fire of Glarus . Hössli's wife had already died at this time. In 1864 he died in a hospital in Winterthur. The original estate was probably bought by Karsch-Haack in 1902 and has disappeared since his death.

In the year Hössli died, the Hanoverian Karl Heinrich Ulrichs , still under the pseudonym Numa Numantius, published the first of his twelve writings on same-sex love. Without knowing Hössli's work, he also argued that his desire is innate and, in contrast to Hössli, brings his own biography as a central example. Ulrichs found out about Hössli's work on February 12, 1866 and was able to include it in his other writings.

When Meier published his double biography in 2001, the Historical Association of the Canton of Glarus “out of consideration for the majority of its members” wanted nothing to do with an event. In 2014, however, the association made a financial contribution to a book about Heinrich Hössli and the president of the association gave a lecture at the book opening .

Works

  • Eros, The Greeks' love of men, their relationship to history, education, literature and legislation of all times. 2 volumes (1st volume: Glarus 1836; 2nd volume: Sankt Gallen 1838). Neudruck Verlag Rosa Winkel, Berlin 1998, Volume 1: ISBN 3-86149-056-0 , Volume 2: ISBN 3-86149-057-9 , new Volume 3: Materials on Heinrich Hössli with a foreword by Manfred Herzer , short biographies by Karsch and the novella Der Eros von Zschokke, ISBN 3-86149-058-7 .
  • Witch trials and beliefs, priests and devils. Leipzig 1892 ( archive.org ).

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Hubert Kennedy: Hössli, Heinrich. ( Memento of May 15, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) In: glbtq: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, 2003. Version of March 3, 2004.
  2. ↑ Christian Zürcher: A Glarus man is the forefather of the gay movement. In: Tages-Anzeiger . September 30, 2014, accessed September 15, 2015 .
  3. ↑ Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller: Man for Man - A biographical lexicon. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-518-39766-4 .
  4. ↑ a b F [erdinand] Karsch [-Haack]: Source material for assessing alleged and real Uranians II. In: Yearbook for sexual intermediate stages . V / 1, 1903, pp. 445-706.
  5. ↑ Pascale Ziltener: The first book about male love was printed in St.Gallen . In: St. Galler Tagblatt . December 24, 2001, at www.rainbow.at.
personal data
SURNAME Hössli, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hösli
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss cleaner and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1784
PLACE OF BIRTH Glarus
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1864
Place of death Winterthur