Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century

Douglas Pretsell

Urning is a biography of the earliest recognisably modern sexual identity. The urning identity was, in fact, the dominant male same-sex sexual identity in the German speaking world between 1864 and 1897 but was subsequently eclipsed by terminologies such as homosexual, gay, or queer.

Cover photo from the book, Urning.

NOTCHES: What drew you to this topic, and what questions do you still have?

Douglas Pretsell: Reading about Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, I had been both impressed by his curious activist energy and perplexed at the discontinuity between his pamphlet-activism and the later homosexual rights movement that took off from 1897. It was as if when Ulrichs laid down his pen to walk over the Alps into Italian exile in 1880, the same-sex attracted world went into hibernation until revived again by Magnus Hirschfeld near the turn of the century. Although never explicitly stated, this ‘Sleeping Beauty’ hypothesis has been implicit in much of the scholarship around both Ulrichs and Hirschfeld. It just seemed implausible to me and I became passionately interested in what happened in this neglected lacuna. The idea for the book sprang from that interest.

NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?

DP: There are three further themes that are related to sexuality but also distinct:

First, Michel Foucault famously positioned the ‘homosexual’ as new ‘species’ and a byproduct of the discursive shift from church to psychiatry in the late nineteenth century. My book shows that instead urning activists and their lobbying instigated rather than resulted from this discursive shift. So another theme in this book is centred on the development of a new brain focused psychiatry in the 1860s.

Second, although gender identity would go through several subsequent permutations, the history of the urning identity does have some bearing on trans history. Some of the individuals who called themselves urnings were cross-dressers and others had a deeper identification across gender. So the history of transgender becomes another theme of the book.

Finally, most of the book focuses on the German speaking world and it would be easy to silo this history as country specific. However, the final chapter focuses on John Addington Symonds who translated and transmitted Ulrichs’s ‘uranian’ ideas to an English audience and resulted in a brief urnanian subculture in 1890s England. This chapter demonstrates that these identitarian ideas had a bearing on the development of sexual identity beyond Germany’s borders in the decades that followed.

NOTCHES: How did you research the book?

DP: Other histories of this period have focused on the published writings of prominent thought leaders: Ulrichs, the Hungarian journalist Karl Maria Kertbeny or the psychiatrists Karl Westphal or Richard von Krafft-Ebing. In my book, I instead used the correspondence from or the autobiographic accounts of men who called themselves urnings. In doing this I turned the lens around to create a history from below where it was the subjective accounts of same-sex attracted men that were the exclusive sources used.

NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?

DP: The final four chapters in the book focus on men whose commitment to the urning cause led to conspicuous attempts at activism: Swiss activist Jakob Rudolf Forster; the dissenting case study authors who wrote to Krafft-Ebing; the discrete police reform effected by Adolf Glaser; and the translation and transmission by John Addington Symonds. There were other characters I could have included such as the novelist Carl Robert Egells, who published his novella Rubi in response to Ulrichs activism, or the mysterious cross-gender writings of the pseudonymous urning ‘H. Marx’. These, and other vignettes were not included in the book mainly because they were too insubstantial to form solid chapters with relevance to the narrative flow. These stories will, however, appear in forthcoming publications.

NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?

DP: Yes. I started writing from the perspective of Ulrichs and his ideas. But embedded within Ulrichs’s pamphlets I found the republished letters of many of his urning readers. I realised that it was these letters rather than Ulrichs’s interpretations that should form the backbone and primary resources for the book.

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

DP: Like many gay men, I took an interest in gay history long before I started writing about it. I first heard about and began reading about Ulrichs on 1^st May, 2008, when I attended a public LGBTI event at ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs Platz’ when I was living in Munich. I looked the name up on the internet that afternoon and began reading about him and other figures in German queer history from then on.

NOTCHES: How do you see your book being most effectively used in the classroom? What would you assign it with?

DP: In my personal opinion, all internationally focused teaching about the history of sexuality should include what happened in 1860s Germany with Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl Maria Kertbeny at or near the beginning of the lecture series. The dawn of sexual modernity and the first tentative steps into activism is a good starting point to foreground the more overt LGBTI activism of the early, middle and later twentieth century.

I think my Urning book, possibly alongside Robert Deam Tobin’s Peripheral Desires, Ralph Leck’s Vita Sexualis or Hubert Kennedy’s biography, could be the recommended texts. My Palgrave critical edition of Ulrichs’s correspondence or Michael Lombardi Nash’s translations of Ulrichs’s pamphlets would then be the primary sources for use at tutorial level.

NOTCHES: Why does this history matter today?

DP: With LGBTI rights under threat in many parts of the world today, including here in the UK but also in Germany and the USA, it has never been more important to know and disseminate the deep historical roots of the movement. This is all the more so with my Urning book, with the agency of ordinary same-sex attracted men brought to the fore.

NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?

DP: I am collaborating on an edited book on the ‘World Around Ulrichs’, which will be published next year. This will form the tail end of the work I began at La Trobe University, Melbourne. However, now that I am at Keele University in the UK, my research focus is now reoriented to the psychiatric encoding of homosexuality in the International Classification of Disease in 1946.

Douglas Pretsell Douglas Pretsell is a historian of queer history with interests in personal identity and the scientific categorisation of sexuality. With a background in neuroscience, he brings new perspectives to this field. His most recent book is Urning: Queer Identity in the German Nineteenth Century. He has previously published critical editions of the translated correspondence of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and also a critical edition of the translated autobiographical case studies that Richard von Krafft-Ebing published in Psychopathia Sexualis. He is now at Keele University in England working on the Leverhulme funded project ‘Homosexuality in the International Classification of Diseases to 1960’ with Professor Dominic Janes.