Worms, Ants and “Greek Love:” Benedict Friedländer’s Theory of Sexuality

Abstract

The paper presents the scientific and intellectual project of Benedict Friedländer, one of the leaders of the first homosexual movement in early twentieth-century Germany. Friedländer was the founder of the homosexual organizations Community of the Special (Gemeinschaft der Eigenen) and the Union for Masculine Culture (Bund für männliche Kultur) and was one of the leading figures in the homosexual movement’s anti-liberal wing. He laid the groundwork for the masculinist theory of erotic male brotherhood – the Männerbund – which gained popularity around the First World War. The paper presents Friedländer’s intellectual and political biography and describes the connection between his zoological research and his conceptions of sexuality, homosexuality, and race. Unlike other scholars who highlighted the ancient Greek ideal as the axis of Friedländer’s intellectual project, I claim that his political conception was overall biological. His overarching ambition was to prove that same-sex male attraction is to be found in nature, as well as to explain and clarify its biological function. In Friedländer’s conception, the function of human homosexuality was to create a society, as in other social animal species. The paper identifies Friedländer’s political-zoological project as belonging to a diverse group of German reform initiatives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which called for a reform of life customs (Lebensreform), based on an ideology of scientific rationality and the idealization of a ‘natural’ lifestyle, and which aimed to strengthen society’s resilience and health. Moreover, even though Friedländer shared this admiration of the Greek erotic ideal, he saw the Greeks as only one example of a “male society,” in his definition, alongside Japanese culture – which he admired no less.