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By Leon Stevens

A rather epicurean friend of mine once remarked of an athletic-looking young man, "With all those muscles he can't be too bright. With the time it took him to build up that physique he couldn't have had much time left over to read anything."

Since the French Revolution and the creation of the Hanseatic League, in other words, since the rise of the European merchant class "bourgeoisie," we in the West have shared two sets of conflicting ideals in regard to the male mode of living.

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The first, inherited from medieval and Nordic traditions, stresses physical strength, roughness and a harsh lack of sensitivity to any articulation of form. The second, a creation of the mercantile continental "burghers," emphasizes refinement, calculation, inventiveness and aesthetics as positive male attributes of the new arsitocracy.

The former ideal transformed itself into the sporting bourgeois dilettante with a microcosmic grip on life and the latter into the bourgeois scholar and artist with a macrocosmic vision. The two rarely fused as they did in the philosopher-athletes of classical Greece.

The tension between these two ideals is accentuated in German literature which characterizes artists as physically weak, unhealthy and abnormal (as for example "Werther," in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther). In fact, art is frequently associated with evil, decay and the "demonic" and it is through this vehicle that closeted undercurrent of homoeroticism flows through German literature.

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The love-struggle between virile banality and cultural decadence is a constant theme for the greatest German novelist, Thomas Mann. In his first novel, Buddenbrooks, he traces the gradual decline of a family of Hanseatic businessmen over three generations. As members of the family lose touch with the rigors of commerce, they become aesthetically inclined but physically weak until the last male heir, a diseased musician, dies.

Encouraged by the success of Buddenbrooks, Mann ventured to assemble a short, highly autobiographical novel called Tonio Kroger. In this work, Mann delineates the hopeless attachment of a sensitive, youthful intellectual, Tonjo, the son of an influential middle-class merchant, to his handsome blueeyed school companion, also of respectable middle-class birth. Tonio neglects his arithmetic for the humanities and is enthralled by the German classics. He vainly tries to interest his butch friend, Hans, in literature but Hans is bored with it and would much rather ride horses. Eventually, Hans begins a friendship with an equestian banker's son with whom he has much in common. Jealous Tonio feels bitter

BRAWN

HIGH GEAR

AND BRAIN,

GERMAN

AND

GERMANE

Thomas Mann

Abermals blieb er zur Ausschau stehen. Und plötzlich, wie unter einer Erinnerung, einem Impuls, wandte er den Oberkörper, eine Hand in der Hüfte, in schöner Drehung aus seiner Grundpositur und blickte über. die Schulter zum Ufer.

and betrayed. The affair mains

climaxes when Hans declines to read Schiller's Don Carlos recommended to him by Tonio. (Don Carlos is a play in which a prince of Spain is deserted by his male comrade and regent toward whom he possesses an Oedipal affinity.)

Following Tonio Kroger, Mann compiled another autobiographical novel entitled Death in Venice. This volume concerns itself with a highly disciplined novelist, like Mann, who concealed his homosexual desires over the course of his lifetime. In his later years, however, the novelist "Gustaf Aschenbach," permits his discipline to crumble and, under the most impossible conditions on à vacation to Venice, attempts to cruise an attractive Aryan youth. He dyes his hair and applies make-up to his face in a desperate effort to appear younger.

Here again Mann expresses the "unhealthy" stoic's helpless attraction to the common, "healthy" stud. Consistent with Mann's symbolism, Aschenbach, perishes from eating rotten strawberries beholding the nearly nude body of his young golden-haired antagonist.

The contradiction is brought more sharply into focus in one of Mann's short stories called The Exchanged Heads. It is derived from an Indian legend in which a young woman falls in love with both a flabby intellectual and a chunky unimaginative lumberman. She wishes that the well-built lumberman had the brain of the puny intellectual and implores a Hindu god to solve her problem. The diety seems to do so by transposing the heads of the two men so that the intellectual has the gorgeous body of the lumberjack. The young woman thinks she now has her ideal lover in the newly created knowledgeable muscleman. However, with the passage of time, the muscular physique soon grows flabby because the scholar does not exercise it, but the woodsman works out on his job and gets his new fat figure into splendid shape. (The woodsman, incidentally, happens to be the scholar's best friend and the story is replete with bisexual inferences.)

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The woman thus learns the bourgeois doctrine that mind and muscle are antithetical; that health and wisdom were disparate. It is a myth, often selfactualized, which we encourage today. Mann, in his later works, sublimates his homosexual impulses as does "Gustaf Aschenbach" (and most German men of literature) in an abstract quest for an unnamed or unspeakable objective which is somehow linked with abnormality and evil. This undefinable longing or "Sehnsucht" together with the frustration and sadness it incurs, "Weltschmerz" are perhaps the two predominant elements in German literature. Heterosexual Germanists generally do define the terms "Sehnsucht" or "Weltschmerz" or offer some inadequate rationale for their existence.

not

CANDINA MENINDEXENThomas Mann masterfully.

SEPTEMBER 1976

illustrates in his own work how homosexual desires can be disguised beyond any recognition in elaborate and breathtaking literary abstraction. A closeted gay can say only carefully but subtly, "I desire another man, although I ought not," yet he can proclaim loudly, "I am lonely but I can't say why," thus the most well-known German national folk song (written by the romantic poet Heinrich Heine) begins: "Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten, dass ich so traurig bin." ("I know not what it should mean that I am so sad."). The poem proceeds to relate the myth of the mariner who cannot resist the enchanting voice of the siren and is drawn to his doom on the rocks of the siren's shore.

Central European culture is embellished with signals heralding an immense closeted gay literary tradition. The confused affinities of Hegel, the woman-hatred of Schopenhauer, the super-macho of Nietzsche, and the insatiable craving of virtually every German writer and poet for the strange, abnormal and decadent, point to the closeted homosexual usurpation of German thought.

Does this mean that literature fraught with "Weltschmerz" is indicative of its originator's gayness? Not necessarily. The hegemony of introverted Nordic homosexuality describes a cultural matrix into which the bulk of composition must fit. What is more, the lack of emotion in German classicism (vis a vis romanticism) automatically restricts "Weltschmerz" and "Sehnsucht" to a minimum. Goethe, for example, may likely have been a "Gustav Aschenbach" who never broke down. In Geothe's words, "The classic is healthy, the romantic is sick." Goethe's intense "platonic" relationship with Schiller and his unstable several relationships with women, some of whom (ex. Frau von Stein) were intellectually quite stimulating, has convinced uninhibited speculators that he

was

bisexual. (This, coupled with more circumstantial details such as the eulogy of his lifeless physique by his long-time male secretary Eckermann etc.). Stoics such as Goethe (who is often said to have been "incapable of tragedy") might never arrive at the decadent abyss wherein he could expand an overtly homosexual situation.

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The entire concept of classic vs romatic may partially stem from the inability of peers to interact. In the other words, aesthetic-decadent romantic cannot tolerate the formal ("normal") and mediocre classic, or the wise mature classic fails to interact with the naive, impulsive romantic.

Schiller thought of Goethe as a "naive" poet, but classified himself as a "deliberate" poet. (For the reasons he outlines in his About Naive and Deliberate Poetry). Schiller's writing was carefully calibrated and architected, Goethe's was spontaneous and impulsive.