In Memory of the One and Only Adolf Brand

Portrait of Adolf Brand (1874 - 1945) 

based on an engraving by Arnold Siegfried 

Der Eigene, Vol. 7 (1924)

 

 

Adolf Brand was a German writer, anarcho-egoist, and a pioneering queer campaigner. He is perhaps best known today for publishing the first openly homosexual periodical in the world - Der Eigene - which ran from 1896 until the early 1930s, when the Nazis eventually put a stop to it [1]. 

The title - usually translated into English as The Unique - betrays the influence of the philosopher Max Stirner upon Brand's thinking and refers to Stirner's concept of radical individuality [2]. The small number of subscribers to the magazine were treated to essays of a scholarly nature on various cultural and political themes, as well as nude photographs of young men. The threat of censorship was, of course, a constant concern.

 

Brand contributed a significant number of his own poems and articles alongside those from a range of contributors, that included many German and Jewish intellectuals of the time. Der Eigene wished to see modern homosexual culture develop as a model inspired by ancient Greek pederasty and the heroic warrior ideal of Sparta. 

 

For Brand and his fellow members of a group formed in 1903 known as the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, the love of an older man for a youth was seen as a perfectly natural expression of male sexuality. They vehemently rejected medical theories of homosexuality put forward by those who promoted the idea of an intermediate sex, for example, or saw gay men as essentially feminine in nature.  

 

Eventually, the GdE evolved into a kind outdoors society, involving camping, trekking, and nudism (or Nacktkultur as it was known) - all good clean (manly) fun. Perhaps rather less attractive was their misogny, elitism, and ideas of beauty rooted in race. 

 

Some might also question their militant strategy of outing well-known men as homosexuals. If this caused some of these men and their families great suffering - and even pushed a few towards suicide - Brand and company insisted that was a price worth paying; the way into the future, they said, followed a path over corpses [Weg über Leichen]. 

 

It's perhaps not surprising to discover that Brand was imprisoned multiple times for his activities. But whilst even in court he refused to apologise for his promotion of homosexuality, in his later life he gave up his activism, married a nice girl, and settled down (only to be killed by an Allied bomb in February 1945).        

 

 

Notes

 

[1] When Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, Brand's house was searched and all the materials needed to produce the magazine were either seized or destroyed.  

 

[2] Der Eigene clearly refers to Max Stirner's classic anarchist text Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844). 

      Stirner, for readers unfamiliar with the name, was a 19th-century German philosopher associated with a highly individualistic form of anarchism known as egoism (his key text above is usually translated into English as The Ego and Its Own). 

      For Stirner, no state, party, or social institution, should have any power or authority over the individual, who must be free to live out their own lives in their own way, in a loose non-systematic association with other egoists. His thinking has influenced many within the anarcho-communist and libertarian circles.    

Repress Nothing! In Memory of Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877 - 1920)

Otto Gross - the maverick psychoanalyst and utopian anarchist whom radicals and exponents of free love continue to revere - died 100 years ago today: from pneumonia; aged 42; in a Berlin hospital, having been found lying in the street, starving, penniless, and half-frozen to death.

A sad and premature (arguably all-too-predictable) end to the life of a charismatic drug-addict who spent much of his adult life in and out of psychiatric institutions and who rejected all caution and restraint; a man who was even evicted from the community of bohemians at Ascona for trying to instigate orgies at which participants could openly explore their bisexual desires. [1]    

Inspired by his readings of Max Stirner, Nietzsche and Kropotkin, it's said that Gross influenced in turn many artists and writers with his neo-pagan (and proto-feminist) attempt to revalue all values, including D. H. Lawrence - which, of course, is where my interest in him comes from, rather than his relationship to Freud and Jung, who basically thought him a hopeless madman about whom the less said the better.

Lawrence, of course, never met Gross and doesn't directly refer to him in his writings. [2] But his wife, Frieda, had had an affair with the latter in 1908 (at the same time that Gross was also involved with Frieda's sister, Else) and so a lot of his revolutionary ideas to do with politics, culture, the unconscious and human sexuality, were transmitted via her. It's almost certain that Lawrence also read Gross's letters to Frieda (which she treasured throughout her life):

"They affirmed the idea of the saving sexual relationship outside the bonds of society: they stressed how a sexually liberated woman could escape the trammels of the ordinary and be an inspiration for intellectual and striving men; they showed a passionately thinking man struggling to come to terms with the new and to escape the past. In many ways, they offered Lawrence the themes for his next eight years of writing; and (above all) they offered a way of thinking about Frieda [whom Gross regarded as the woman of the future]." [3]

Having said that, it's important to stress that Lawrence would have mistrusted (and disliked) Gross in person and to note that he soon saw through his idealism - including his sexual and political idealism.

And for us, living here in 2020, does Gross's thinking still trouble, still challenge? Or does it only bore and depress? Unfortunately, that's a question that some also ask of Lawrence ...

Notes

[1] Perhaps more interesting from a thanatological perspective, is the fact that Gross affirmed the sovereign freedom of the individual not merely in sexual terms, but also as the right to be ill and to die in a manner (and at a time) of their own choosing. He regarded neurosis and suicide as legitimate expressions of protest against a repressive social order.    

[2] Lawrence gives us a fictionalised representation of Otto Gross in his unfinished novel Mr Noon (written 1921-22); the character of Eberhard appears in Part II of the work. 

[3] John Worthen, D. H. Lawrence: The Early Years 1885-1912 (Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 443-44.

See also: John Turner, Cornelia Rumpf-Worthen and Ruth Jenkins, 'The Otto Gross - Frieda Weekley Correspondence: Transcribed, Translated, and Annotated', in The D. H. Lawrence Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, (Summer, 1990), pp. 137-227. Click here to read online.