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New Haven: Yale University Press.

Freud, Blüher, and the
Secessio Inversa: Männerbünde,
Homosexuality, and Freud’s Theory of Cultural Formation

JAY GELLER

In
Totem and Taboo
Sigmund Freud endeavored not only to reconstruct the origins of religion but also those of sociopolitical life. Out of threads of British colonial ethnography (Atkinson, Darwin, Lang, Robertson-Smith, Spencer and Gillen, Westermark) Freud manifestly wove together his narrative of the primal horde (
Urhorde
), the murder of the father by the band of brothers, and its consequences. Upon this evolutionary patchwork
Totem and Taboo
would read the Oedipus complex, Freud’s algorithm of individual development and desire within the nuclear family, into the origin of human culture.
1

This essay argues that the warp and woof that structures Freud’s tapestry of human history is less the confluence of British imperialism and Austrian bourgeois social norms than the entanglement of the gendered, ethnic posi- tion of this son of
Ostjuden
living and writing in the metropole with a par- ticular strand of argument that emerged out of the enthusiasm and
Männer- phantasien
(male fantasies) surrounding Germany’s late nineteenth-century colonial adventures: Hans Blüher’s sexualizing of the ethnographer Heinrich Schurtz’s theories about the foundation and governance of the state by male associations.

Despite devastating critiques by anthropologists of his “just-so story,”
2
Freud remained until the last stubbornly convinced of its truth.
3
Yet, as the tale traversed his corpus from
Totem and Taboo
to
Moses and Monotheism
, Freud would continually tinker with the relationships within the band of brothers, especially with the role played by homosexuality. This essay argues that the changes in Freud’s depiction of homosexuality in his accounts of so- cial origins—the increasingly sharp distinction between homosociality and homosexuality that ultimately culminated in the foreclosure of homosexuali- ty from Freud’s narrative—may be connected with the antisemitic,
Völkisch
turn of
Männerbund
theories as well as the racialization of homosexual iden-

tities. In the wake of both Blüher’s writings and the loss of Germany’s over- seas colonies some postwar German ideologues and ethnographers recolo- nized their tribal past with homogeneous communities led by cultic bands of male warriors, while others endeavored—far too successfully—to restore those idealized
Männerbünde
(male bands) in the present. Moreover, Blüher’s work facilitated the public dissemination of a racial typology of homosexual- ities: the opposition between the healthy inversion characteristic of manly Germanic men and the decadent homosexuality of effeminate Jews.

Overdetermined Origins

Freud’s work, like so many other psychical acts, was overdetermined.
4
For Freud this story of beginnings was meant also to signify an end—and indeed ensured one. He wrote to his colleague Karl Abraham that his study would “cut us off cleanly from all Aryan religiousness” associated with the psychoanalytic movement, namely, C. G. Jung.
5
It did. Further as some have noted, Freud’s account of the primal horde with its violent and jealous father, with its band of parricidal sons, with its guilt-motivated apotheosis of the paternal imago, may well be said to characterize the psychoanalytic movement.
6
Others have taken a different biographical tack and posited Freud’s own ambivalent rela- tionship to his father.
7
Still others have also indicated that, rather than tracing the origin of social life, he was backdating the bourgeois family of his own day.
8
In this last endeavor Freud joined with the vast majority of ethnographers and social thinkers who viewed kinship ties—and naturalized familial roles— as the crucial form of social organization of tribal societies (
Naturvölker
).
9
They further considered the paternalistic family as both the culmination of those so- cieties’ evolutionary development and the foundation of modern European (
Kulturvölker
) civil life.

Freud’s exercise in genealogical construction was, however, perhaps less the blind bourgeois tendency to universalize its historical norms
10
than the no less unconscious attempt to legitimize both his own position as a postcolonial subject and the institution of socialization and identity formation—the fam- ily—that was under siege.
11

Postcolonial as Prehistoric

From the time of Freud’s birth to the publication of
Totem and Taboo
the Jew- ish population of Vienna increased some twenty-eightfold, from around

6,000 to over 175,000. Waves of Jews from the impoverished provinces of Galicia as well as from Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary streamed into the imperial capital. Generations who had experienced ghettoization, extensive civil, economic, and vocational restrictions, and a traditional Jewish lifestyle found themselves emancipated citizens with access to secular education (
Bil- dung
) as well as the liberal professions and with a Judaism redefined as a pri- vate religion rather than a way of life. Yet these assimilation-seeking former inhabitants of the Austro-Hungarian periphery also found themselves still largely engaged in commerce and finance, residing primarily in districts with large Jewish populations and subject to discrimination, prejudice, and antise- mitic representations.
12

Such was also the trajectory followed by Sigmund Freud. Born in Freiberg, Moravia, he and his family moved to Vienna when he was three. They lived in the district of Leopoldstadt where the vast majority of Jews from the periphery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had emigrated and where most of the lower-class Viennese Jews such as the Freuds resided; Leopold- stadt figured “the Jewish ghetto in the popular imagination.”
13
Despite their tenuous financial situation, his parents ensured that young Sigmund acquired a bourgeois Bildung at gymnasium and university; he then pursued a bour- geois career path, and after marriage resided in a bourgeois district. Although he never denied—denial struck him as “not only undignified but outright foolish”
14
—and indeed frequently asserted that he was a Jew, Freud realized that he was not in control of the significance of that identification. For many gentiles—and not a few assimilated Jews—“Jew” conveyed the image of the Ostjude, the east European shtetl Jew.
15
This identification was in part sus- tained because a cultural division of labor between Austro-Germans and Jews remained even though the types of employment in bourgeois Vienna had changed.
16
Also contributing to this identification was the migration of Os- tjuden in and through central Europe, especially after the pogroms of the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth. Fur- ther, the identification was in part generated by a need to make distinctions. Such differentiation helped create, maintain, and confirm identities that could replace those eroded by the forces of modernization, secularization, and commodification. These identities were forged out of the “natural” differences of nation and race, sex and gender. For Freud’s German readers the space be- tween the inhabitants of the colonizing metropole and those of the colonized periphery created, maintained, and confirmed those essential and hierarchical differences; however, when the colonized entered the metropole and accul- turated, the ever precarious identities of the dominant population became more so. To counter the threat, the colonizers imagine the postcolonial sub-

ject is merely mimicking them; underlying differences remain and are forever betrayed.
17
The Jews, for example, perform their difference; their purported disintegrative intellect and particularity correspond to the presumed disinte- grative effect of their presence amid the would-be homogeneous and harmo- nious dominant culture of the metropole.

Thus throughout his adult life Freud endeavored to distance psycho- analysis from the label “Jewish science,” himself from the linguistic, cultural, and religious accoutrements of his more traditional forebears, and both from the antisemitic representations that littered public—and private—life.
18
Like other black faces, Freud wore the white masks of Austro-German bourgeois sexual, gender, and familial identities
19
—identities that psychoanalytic dis- course sustained as much as it provided the narratives and tools to subvert them. And like other postcolonial subjects he internalized the intertwined dominant antisemitic, misogynist, colonialist,
20
and homophobic discourses that regularly and traumatically bombarded the Jews (and himself as a Jew) with the opposition between the virile masculine norm and hypervirile cum effeminate other. Freud then reinscribed these images as well as those norms in a hegemonic discourse (the science of psychoanalysis) that in part project- ed them upon those other Jews (not to be confused with Jewishness per se) as well as women, homosexuals, so-called primitives, the masses, and neurotics, and in part he transformed these representations into universal characteris- tics.
21
Freud’s repudiation of traditional Jewry climaxed with his depiction of the savage Hebrews in
Moses and Monotheism
. This mass of ex-slaves was un- able to renounce its instincts—unlike their later Jewish and bourgeois de- scendants—and as a consequence murdered their leader Moses.

Faulting the Feminizing Family

In discursively acting out his position within the dominant order, Freud sought to defend not only his place there but that order itself. As Freud was preparing his first major foray into societal origins, the bourgeois family was going largely unchallenged in ethnographic and historical discourses; howev- er, its political significance was being contested throughout central Europe. The contradictory changes that this region experienced going into the prewar years of the twentieth century—industrialization, bureaucratization, urban- ization, increasing commodification, women’s emancipation, the decline of liberalism amid the rise of mass politics, as well as the perception of demo- graphic decline, feminization,
22
syphilization, and enervation—led to a revolt of sons (and daughters) against the fathers
23
and the old order. In crepuscular

Vienna not only was the legitimacy of the family in question, so was that of the paternalistic state. In a society in which conventional identities were emp- tied of their assumed essences and values, in which traditional elites were countered by mass politics, and in which rational morality competed with nonrational violence, the state was viewed as nothing but sterile convention, hierarchy, and constraint.
24
Critiques proliferated. Alternatives were pro- pounded.

In
Totem and Taboo
Freud was not just responding to the crisis by an- choring the family in the origin of human society, he was also responding to an alternative notion of the political that emerged amid the confluence of the newly self-conscious youth culture
25
and several other new powerful male- exclusive social formations in Germany: the friendship circle around Kaiser Wilhelm II, the homosexual orientation of which was a public secret until Harden’s articles transformed it into a public scandal;
26
that other friendship circle about Benedict Friedlaender; the self-proclaimed elite of manly men who pursued
eros uranios
and formed the Greek-miming Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (community of the special);
27
the circle of poets, critics, and idoliz- ers surrounding Stefan Georg; and the ultra-virile community of colonial en- trepreneurs (which after World War I and the loss of the colonies was matched by the Freikorps, who shared frontline experience of trench war- fare).
28
Within these romanticized communities of male comrades organized about charismatic leaders—perhaps best exemplified by Hans Blüher’s histo- ry of the individual circles (
Horden
) of the
Wandervogelbewegung
(the German youth movement)
29
—the (antibourgeois and antifeminist) notion of the male band as the foundation of the political began to be theorized as the counter to the woman- and Jewish-coded family held responsible for both the bu- reaucratic anonymity of modern public life and the “feminization” of social life.
30
In particular, the development of the (homo)sexualized and later racial- ized version of the Männerbund initially disseminated by
Wandervogel
(mem- ber of the youth movement) Hans Blüher may explain the persistent return of Freud’s construct of the primal horde throughout the rest of his writing life.

Correspondences

While writing
Totem and Taboo
Freud was engaged in an extensive epistolary debate and an exchange of writings with Blüher over the nature of homosexu- ality and its role, in particular, in the German youth movement and by exten- sion in social formation.
31
The then twenty-three-year-old Blüher was one of the leading thinkers of the German youth movement and theoretician of the