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.