Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (22 page)

discussed above, the appropriation of his work by racialist theoreticians and street fighters. Freud describes Blüher at this time as one of the “prophets of these out-of-joint times.” While Freud argues that such “collective psychoses” of the Germans are beyond reason,
117
nevertheless his two later discussions of the primal horde, in
Civilization and Its Discontents
and “The Acquisition and Control of Fire,”
118
appear to reflect an additional distancing or recharacter- izing of the Männerbund. In these texts homosexuality among the brothers has shifted its locus from sociality to rivalry. Both these discussions emphasize the importance of renouncing homosexuality for cultural and technological progress to take place.

Putting out fire by micturation . . . was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.

Where Freud invokes homosociality it does not serve a genetic function, rather it emerges as an external happenstance; any sexual content to these re- lations derives from displaced heterosexual libido:

The work of civilization has become increasingly the business of men, it confronts them with ever more difficult tasks and compels them to carry out instinctual sublimations. . . . [H]e has to accomplish his task by mak- ing an expedient distribution of his libido. What he employs for cultural aims he to a great extent withdraws from women and sexual life. His con- stant association with men, and his dependence on his relations with them, even estrange him from his duties as a husband and father.

The communal life of humanity, Freud argues, is founded upon “the power of love, which made the man unwilling to be deprived of his sexual object— the woman—, and made the woman unwilling to be deprived of the part of herself which had been separated from her—her child.” The family is “the germ-cell of civilization.”
119
Diminution of its role and the shift in its tenor suggest that Freud may well be motivated by the specific threat that Männer- bund theory and practice presents to him and his fellow Jews.

Finally, when Freud transfers his consideration of the primal horde to the deserts of Midian in
Moses and Monotheism
, any suggestion of homosexuality in the relationships and rivalries between the brothers is avoided. Instead he

writes that the brothers clubbed together and stole wives. While such avoid- ance behavior accords with Freud’s desire to silence the association of male Jews with effeminate homosexuals as well as his desire to maintain the truth of his theory, he may also be distancing himself and the Jewish people from the now Aryan-identified—and Germany-ruling—Männerbund.

Yet Freud implicates homosexual rivalry when addressing the origins of antisemitism. One of the “deeper motives” he proposes posits a Christianity jealous of its elder brother (“the first-born favorite child of God the Father”), Judaism. This unconscious motive is conjoined with another: the “disagree- able, uncanny impression” created by that “custom by which the Jews marked off their aloof position”: circumcision. The attempt to foreclose the “dreaded castration idea” that Freud considers as a primary root of antisemitism is also one of the sources of adult homosexuality.
120
Indeed, in his 1922 essay, “Some Neurotic Mechanisms in Jealousy, Paranoia, and Homosexuality,” Freud sug- gests that two primary factors that lead to the development of homosexuality are the fear of castration—whether manifest in a horror of women as a con- sequence of the discovery that they do not have a penis or in a renunciation of women in order to avoid the potentially dangerous rivalry with the father and father figures—and the repression and transformation of the hostile and jealous rivalry with an older brother.
121
Antisemitism hence is motivated by the attempt to disavow homosexuality, and Freud, even as he has sustained the internalized heterosexual norms and his own theory, here engaged in post- colonial mimicry and in the process reversed the stereotypical roles of the nonvirile, homosexual Jews and the virile, heterosexual non-Jews.
122
But all was for naught as the Männerbund drove the father of psychoanalysis from his home.

The End of a Rivalry

As Freud’s primal horde with its internalized bourgeois European norms trav- eled from
Totem and Taboo
to
Moses and Monotheism
, so the notion of the Männerbund transferred from a fund of colonial knowledge, to a metropole viewed as alienated from its own colonizing force, to an unmanned state col- onizing its past, to a masculine society colonizing the colonizers. During this period Freud engaged and disengaged Blüher who drew upon that fund to generate theories about the foundational role of eros in the formation of mas- culine societies and states. As this essay has demonstrated, this conflict of social-ontological visions of identity and state formation—between the pater- nalistic family represented by Freud and the distinct homosocial masculine

society professed by Blüher, between the postcolonial’s mimicry of the colo- nizer (with its potential for subverting the latter) and the colonialist’s phan- tasmatic appropriation and transmogrification of the colonized (with its po- tential for erasing the latter)—was mediated by rival conceptions of homosexuality and of their relationships to the Jews. Thus Blüher in
The Role of the Erotic
ties the psychoanalytic notion of curing inversion to a most pro- found agreement with the “norms of the bourgeois order”—and that the physician “perceives only the family and is blind to masculine society.”
123
Be- yond the texts discussed above, Freud, for his part, is simply dismissive of Blüher personally. Commenting to Werner Achelis in 1927 about his corre- spondent’s manuscript “The Problem of Dreams: A Philosophical Essay,” Freud wrote, “I several times felt that the essay contained quite ‘brilliant’ thoughts. At other times, for instance when you invite the reader to admire Blüher’s genius, I had the impression of being faced with two worlds separat- ed by an unbridgeable gulf.”
124

Yet Freud, dying in exile like many of his “people” after the Männerbund called National Socialism had extended its rule to Vienna, offered his last word—last completed work—
Moses and Monotheism
, which chronicles how the children of Israel, acting like the noninverted band of brothers who had been exiled from the primal horde, murdered “the greatest of [Jewry’s] sons.”
125

Notes

1. Sigmund Freud,
   Totem and Taboo
   [1912–13], vol. 13 of
   The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud
   , ed. James Strachey et al., 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974).
   

2. Sigmund Freud,
   Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
   [1921],
   S.E.
   18:65–143, citing A. L. Kroeber.
   

3. Cf. Sigmund Freud,
   Moses and Monotheism
   [1939],
   S.E.
   23:55, and esp. 130–32.
   

4. Cf. Edwin R. Wallace IV,
   Freud and Anthropology: A History and a Reappraisal,
   Psy- chological Issues no. 55 (New York: International Universities Press, 1983).
   

5. Sigmund Freud to Karl Abraham, 13.5.13, in
   A Psychoanalytic Dialogue: The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1926
   , ed. Hilda C. Abraham and Ernst L. Freud, trans. Bernard Marsh and Hilda C. Abraham (New York: Basic, 1965), 139.
   

6. Cf. François Roustang,
   Dire Mastery
   , trans. Ned Lukacher (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1982); and Robin Ostow, “Autobiographical Sources of Freud’s So- cial Thought,”
   Psychiatric Journal of the University of Ottawa
   2 (1978): 169–80.
   

7. Ernest Jones,
   The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud,
   vol. 2:
   Years of Maturity, 1901–1919
   (New York, Basic, 1955), 354.
   

8. Bronislaw Malinowski,
   Sex and Repression in Savage Society
   (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1927): “It is easy to perceive that the primeval horde has been equipped with all the bias, maladjustments and ill-tempers of a middle-class European family, and then let loose in a prehistoric jungle to run riot in a most attractive but fantastic hypothesis” (165);
   

   cf. John Brenkman,
   Straight Male Modern: A Cultural Critique of Psychoanalysis
   (New York: Routledge, 1993), 112ff., drawing upon the work of Carole Pateman, e.g.,
   The Sexual Contract
   (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
   

9. Cf. Heinrich Schurtz,
   Urgeschichte der Kultur
   (Leipzig/Wien: Bibliographisches In- stitut, 1900), 94–99; Heinrich Schurtz,
   Altersklassen und Männerbünde. Eine Darstellung der Grundformen der Gesellschaft
   (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902), 65–82; Rosalind Coward,
   Patriarchal Precedents: Sexuality and Social Relations
   (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983); also see Joan Bamberger, “The Myth of Matriarchy: Why Men Rule in Primitive Society,” in
   Women, Culture, and Society
   , ed. Michele Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lam- phere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974).
   

10. Freud was not blind to his class position. In a June 1907 letter to Jung (William McGuire [ed.],
    The Freud/Jung Letters
    , trans. R. Manheim and R. F. C. Hull [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988], 64), Freud wrote that “if I had based my theories on the statements of servant girls, they would all be negative.” Perhaps he forgot about his patient, the innkeeper’s daughter Katharina from
    Studies in Hysteria
    . Also cf. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White,
    The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
    (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 152–69, on Freud and the Victorian bourgeois fascination with servant girls, gov- ernesses, and nannies—as neurosis-causing seductress, object of desire, and object of iden- tification (citing Freud’s 3 October 1897 letter to Fliess).
    

11. Guy Hocquenghem,
    Homosexual Desire
    , trans. Daniella Dangoor (London: Allison and Busby, 1978), 60–61: “Freud discovers the libido to be the basis of affective life and immediately enchains it as the Oedipal privitisation of the family. . . . At a time when cap- italist individualisation is undermining the family by depriving it of its essential functions, the Oedipus complex represents the internalisation of the family institution.”
    

12. Cf. Robert Wistrich,
    The Jews of Vienna in the Age of Franz Joseph
    (Oxford: Uni- versity Press, 1989).
    

13. Marsha L. Rozenblit, “Jewish Assimilation in Habsburg Vienna,” in
    Assimilation and Community. The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe
    , ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven
    

    J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 235.
    

14. Sigmund Freud, “Address to the Society of Bnai Brith” [1926],
    S.E.
    20:273.
    

15. Steven E. Aschheim,
    Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923
    (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982).
    

16. Katherine Verdery, “Internal Colonialism in Austria Hungary,”
    Ethnic and Racial Studies
    2, 3 (1979): 378–99, drawing upon Michael Hechter,
    Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966
    (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1975).
    

17. Jay Geller, “Of Mice and Mensa: Anti-Semitism and the Jewish Genius,”
    Centen- nial Review
    38, 2 (1994): 361–86.
    

18. Sander Gilman,
    Freud, Race, and Gender
    (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 201, n. 1, provides an extensive list of the literature on Freud’s Jewishness; this four- page compendium covers works from 1924 to 1992. For a discussion of more recent works including Gilman’s, see Jay Geller, “Identifying ‘someone who is himself one of them’: Re- cent Studies of Freud’s Jewish Identity,”
    Religious Studies Review
    23, 4 (1997): 323–31.
    

19. Cf. Frantz Fanon’s
    Black Skins, White Masks
    , trans. Charles Lamm Markmann (New York: Grove, 1967). Fanon’s analyses of the dilemma of the colonial or postcolonial in the metropole have become a regular counterpoint in studies of Freud’s Jewishness; cf. Daniel Boyarin,
    Unheroic Conduct. The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man
    

    (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 248; and Daniel Boyarin, “What Does a Jew Want?; or, The Political Meaning of the Phallus,” in
    The Psychoanalysis of Race,
    ed. Christopher Lane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), reprinted as “Homopho- bia and the Postcoloniality of the ‘Jewish Science,’” this volume. On the representations of Jews as black, see Sander Gilman,
    Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness
    (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), esp. 29–35.
    

20. Cf. Diana Fuss, “Identification Papers,” in Diana Fuss,
    Identification Papers
    (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35–36.
    

21. Discussions of the postcolonial subject as a negotiator of the interface of local ex- perience and practice with imperial culture, language, and representation can be found in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds.),
    Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader
    (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994). For the analogous situation in India, see Ashis Nandy,
    The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism
    (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983).
    

22. Cf. Hans Blüher, “Was ist Antifeminismus,” in Hans Blüher,
    Gesammelte Aufsätze
    

    (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1919), 92: “bourgeois society is feminized [
    feministisch
    ].”
    

23. Cf. Hans Blüher,
    Wandervogel. Geschichte einer Jugendbewegung
    , 3 vols. (Prien: Kampmann and Schnabel, 1922 [1912]), 2:144–45, 3:40. Also see Ulfried Geuter,
    Ho- mosexualität in der deutschen Jugendbewegung
    (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1994); Joachim Knoll and Julius H. Schoeps (eds.),
    Typisch deutsch: Die Jugend-Bewegung. Beiträge zu einer Phänomenologie
    (Opladen: Leske und Budrich, 1988); Thomas Koebner, Rolf-Peter Janz, and Frank Trommler (eds.),
    “Mit uns zieht die neue Zeit.” Der Mythos Jugend
    (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp, 1985); Walter Lacquer,
    Young Germany: A History of the German Youth Move- ment
    (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1984).
    

24. The classic account of the last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its capi- tal is Robert Musil’s encyclopedic novel,
    Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften
    (
    The Man Without Qualities
    ).
    

25. Winfried Mogge, “Von Jugendreich zum Jungenstaat–Männerbündische Vorstel- lungen und Organisationen in der bürgerlichen Jugendbewegung,” in Gisela Völgler and Karin v. Welck (eds.),
    Männerbande. Männerbünde. Zur Rolle des Mannes im Kulturvergle- ich
    , 2 vols. (Köln: Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, 1990), 2:103–10.
    

26. In late 1906 one of Germany’s leading critics and the editor of the independent Berlin weekly
    Die Zukunft
    , Maximilian Harden, attacked what he called the “Liebenberg Round Table,” the group of male friends led by Prince Philipp zu Eulenburg who formed the closest circle of advisers to Kaiser Wilhelm II. Harden held that “the prince’s homo- sexuality inclined him to advocate weak, pacific policies that undermined the energetic, warlike course more befitting Germany’s world power”; Isabel V. Hull, “Kaiser Wilhelm and the ‘Liebenberg Circle’” in
    Kaiser Wilhelm II: New Interpretations
    , ed. John C. G. Röhl and Nicolaus Sombart (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 193. Harden’s public accusa- tions of homosexuality in the highest military and political circles—in particular, his “out- ing” of Eulenburg and Count Kuno von Moltke—led to a rash of tabloid articles and car- toons about the homosexual camarilla as well as a series of libel trials against Harden in 1907–9. See James D. Steakley, “Iconography of a Scandal: Political Cartoons and the Eu- lenburg Affair,”
    Studies in Visual Communication
    9, 2 (1983): 20–51.
    

27. James W. Jones,
    “We of the Third Sex”: Literary Representations of Homosexuality in Wilhelmine Germany
    (New York: Peter Lang, 1990); Harry Oosterhuis and Hubert Kennedy
    

    (eds.),
    Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany
    (Binghamton, N.Y.: Harring- ton Park, 1991).
    

28. Among others Klaus Theweleit,
    Männerphantasien
    , 2 vols. (Frankfurt/M: Roter Stern, 1977–78); and Nicolaus Sombart,
    Die deutschen Männer und ihre Feinde. Carl Schmitt,ein deutsches Schicksal zwischen Männerbund und Matriarchatsmythos
    (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1991).
    

29. Heimat und Aufgang
    and
    Blüte und Niedergang
    —first two volumes of
    Wandervogel
    .
    

30. Cf. inter alia, Bernd Widdig,
    Männerbünde und Massen. Zur Krise männlicher Iden- tität in der Literatur der Moderne
    (Opladen: Westdeutscher, 1992); and Klaus von See, “Politische Männerbund-Ideologie von der wilhelminischen Zeit bis zum Nationalsozial- ismus,” in Völgler and Welck,
    Männerbande. Männerbünde
    , 1:93–102.
    

31. John Neubauer, “Sigmund Freud und Hans Blüher in bisher unveröffentlichten Briefen,”
    Psyche
    50, 2 (1996): 123–48.
    

32. Hans Blüher,
    Secessio Judaica. Philosophische Grundlegung der historischen Situation des Judentums und der antisemitischen Bewegung
    (Berlin: Der weisse Ritter, 1922), 21ff.
    

33. Hans Blüher, forward to the second edition of
    Die deutsche Wandervogelbewegung als erotisches Phänomen,
    14 (dated December 1914), which as a separate volume bore the subtitle
    Ein Beitrag zur Erkenntnis der sexuellen Inversion
    , 3 Aufl. (Berlin: Hans Blüher, 1918).
    

34. Cf. Hans Blüher,
    Traktat über die Heilkunde, insbesondere die Neurosenlehre
    (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1926), on psychoanalysis as un-German.
    

35. Letter to Freud, 2 May 1912; cit. Neubauer, “Sigmund Freud und Hans Blüher,” 133.
    

36. Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness” [1908],
    

    S.E.
    9.
    

37. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
    [1905],
    S.E.
    7, especially 55–56, n. 1 (note added in 1915). Freud here suggests a research agenda that, alas, he never takes up: “From the point of view of psycho-analysis the exclusive sexual interest felt by men for women is also a problem that needs elucidating and is not a self-evident fact based upon an attrac- tion that is ultimately of a chemical nature.” While according to this note inverted object choice may be universal and while “in general the multiplicity of determining factors [in a person’s final sexual attitude] is reflected in the variety of manifest sexual attitutdes in which they find their issue in mankind,” Freud still here associates those who opt finally for inversion with the archaic, the primitive, and early stages of development.
    

38. Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality,” 190; cf.
    Three Essays
    , where Freud argued that inverts do not manifest the two key characteristics of degeneracy: “(1)
    several
    serious devi- ations from the normal are found together, and (2) the capacity for efficient functioning and survival seem to be severely impaired” (138; emphasis added).
    

39. Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality,” 201.
    

40. Blüher letter to Freud, 2 May 1912; cit. 134.
    

41. Freud letters to Blüher, 10 May 1912, 7 July 1912, 10 July 1912; cit. Neubauer, “Sigmund Freud und Hans Blüher,” 135, 138, and 140.
    

42. Cf. Hull, “Kaiser Wilhelm”; and Steakley, “Iconography of a Scandal.”
    

43. Blüher letter to Freud, 3 July 1912; cit. Neubauer, “Sigmund Freud und Hans Blüher,” 136–37.
    

44. Freud letter to Blüher 10 July 1912; cit. ibid., 138.