W. Daniel Wilson's engaging, thorough, and original analysis of the role of male-male love and sexual desire in Goethe's writings makes significant advances in our understanding of Greek love in the age of Goethe, as well as of Goethe's contributions to the representation of same-sex desire in the West. Published in German, the text reads smoothly and elegantly despite its highly scholarly and even technical nature—no doubt in part thanks to Angela Steidele's translation. While most of Wilson's conclusions about Goethe's writings are convincing, his framing of and approach to Goethe's texts and the study of sexuality provide an opportunity for stimulating discussions about the international study of sexuality and textuality.

Wilson's study begins with a stunning interpretation of Goethe's poem “Ganymed” (1774). The poem, concluding with its beautiful harmonization of active and passive in the phrase “umfangend umfangen,” sets about to do nothing less than provide “a radical reinterpretation of Greek love,” by unsettling the dynamics between the classical Greek erastes and eromenos, the lover and the beloved (60; all translations are my own). The beloved Greek shepherd, long portrayed as the passive object of the attentions of the lover Zeus, finds in Goethe's poem, “for the first time in 2,500 years of literary history, a voice” (69).

For Wilson, “Ganymed” stands in opposition to “Der Erlkönig” (1782), in that the former tells the story of a sexually mature youth who desires the attentions of the lover, while the latter represents the feelings of a boy who is the unwilling object of an older man's advances. Wilson argues that Mignon, from the Wilhelm Meister novels, is similar to the boy in the “Erlkönig”—that is, the victim of sexual violence. He concludes with the tantalizing suggestion that Mignon might in fact have been castrated, which would certainly shed revelatory light on the following line in the poem “Mignon” (aka “Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen blühn?”): “Was hat man dir, du armes Kind, getan?” (2:4).

In his chapter on Goethe's experiences in Italy, where—as Goethe reported in 1787 in a letter written to Duke Carl August—he came upon many instances of the “love of men amongst themselves,” Wilson demonstrates his virtuosic hermeneutic gifts, with an especially compelling and comprehensive interpretation of the Venetian Epigrams.

“Goethe”—the mythic complex of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's life and works—has long been used to construct, consolidate, and repeatedly rehabilitate German national identity. Faust in particular has been enlisted in efforts to shore up the German nation. These often wrong-headed attempts to appropriate Goethe for the sake of the nation have obscured the fact that the nation is indeed a central topic in Faust. From the seemingly cheerful bustling nation of the Volk in “Vor dem Tor” (Before the gate) to the decaying nation of the Holy Roman Empire in Faust II, which Faust unsuccessfully attempts, with the aid of paper money, to turn into a kind of Kulturnation, the play repeatedly brings up the question of the national. Again and again, however, the nation stumbles in its efforts to accommodate Eros and pleasure—margarete's demise is just the first example of this failing. Faust's final act, the creation of a modern nation between the land and the sea, suggests that devising a new sense of the national might be his ultimate deed. While it is deeply unclear whether Faust's nation solves any of the problems that Faust uncovers, there are hints that Goethe offers his public glimpses of the possibilities of a reconception of the national after Faust's ascent into heaven.

Faust's deal with the devil famously culminates in his vision of a nation between the land and the sea, “nicht sicher zwar, doch tätigfrei” (11564; not safe, admittedly, but actively free).

IT MAY SEEM odd to include Thomas Mann in a study of realism, considering that he wrote the majority of his novels and short fiction in the twentieth century, long after the age of realism. Indeed, some of his greatest literature appeared after the Second World War, when the movement had already found a final resting place in the lexica and encyclopedias of literary history. Nonetheless, Mann considered himself a nineteenth-century writer, heavily indebted to such masters of realism as Dickens and Dostoyevsky. With respect to male-male desire, one of the primary concerns of his works, he is even more thoroughly a product of the late nineteenth-century realist imagination than he himself admits. Deeply entrenched in Mann's early short fiction is one of the major constructions emerging from the late nineteenth-century German-speaking world that produced realism: the modern homosexual, who was discovered — some would say invented — by liberal sexologists, jurists, and activists in Germany and the Austro-Hungarian empire. Admittedly, Mann's essayistic writings actually endorse a subsequent politics of male-male desire that came to be popular with antiliberal modernist thinkers at the end of the century, but the late nineteenth-century realist view of the “third sex” fundamentally shapes his literature. Thus, Mann's fiction promotes a liberal medico-legal vision of same-sex desire that emerges from the same roots as late nineteenth-century German realism, although his nonfiction writing flirts with a modernist, early twentieth-century understanding of male-male sexuality.

The “Third Sex”

The progressive vision of same-sex desire espoused by the late nineteenth-century medical community and the homosexual emancipation movement is aptly summed up by the term “the third sex.” It is the view that men who love men and women who love women are characterized by gender inversion. In other words, members of the third sex are actually female souls dwelling in male bodies or male souls in female bodies. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825–95) coined the term and articulated this conception of same-sex desire most influentially. Ulrichs can be considered the founder of the homosexual emancipation movement in Germany, the first such movement in the world. A classically trained lawyer, he openly argued for the rights of men who loved men, going so far as to appear in person at a congress of 500 lawyers in Munich in 1867 to call for the decriminalization of consensual sexual acts between adult men.

This volume brings together some of the leading scholars of German realism working today and testifies to the vitality of the field. It includes essays on familiar authors — Stifter, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Thomas Mann — and canonical texts but also considers writers frequently omitted from traditional literary histories, including Luise Mühlbach, Friedrich Spielhagen, Louise von François, Karl May, and Eugenie Marlitt. Although the book does not attempt to cover every author or aspect of the period — which would, in any case, be impossible — an effort has been made to include a representative sampling of German realist prose in the second half of the nineteenth century. While the contributors vary in their choice of topic and approach, they all situate the literary works in their historical context and also suggest reasons why these texts remain of interest today. Thus, the contributors focus on questions of national identity during the period of Germany's first political unification; examine representations of Germans abroad and foreigners at home at a time of mass emigration and colonial expansion; consider attitudes toward work in a period of rapid industrialization; and reflect on questions of sexual identity and gender roles in works by both men and women in the era of the family journal, the first organized women's movements, and the earliest advocates for homosexual rights. Each essay refers to relevant literature on the particular author or topic discussed, and the volume concludes with a complete list of works cited. The book should, therefore, be of interest primarily to students and scholars of German literature but also to those concerned with the topic of realism in literature and questions of subject-formation, national identity, and cultural memory in an era of rapid historical change.

I would like to thank the contributors for their willingness to collaborate on this project, their patience with my demands, their respect for deadlines, and, above all, the quality of their work.