Freundschaftsdämmerung: Johannes Müller, Sigismund Wiese, Friedrich Ramdohr und Heinrich Hössli

This essay examines the decline of the sexually ambiguous category of “friendship.” In the eighteenth century, a friendship discourse flourished in German literature. A male author could publicly declare that he wanted to be another man’s wife. Contrary to quick dismissals today, the sexual implications of this discourse was clear to eighteenth-century readers. But, at the same time, there was a space for plausible deniability. By the middle of the nineteenth-century, however, such ambiguously flowery language was no longer possible.

“Freundschaftsdämmerung: Johannes Müller, Sigismund Wiese, Friedrich Ramdohr und Heinrich Hössli,” in Erinnern und Wiederentdecken. Tabuisierung und Enttabuisierung der männlichen und weiblichen Homosexualität in Wissenschaft und Kritik, ed. Dirck Linck, Wolfgang Popp, Annette Runte (Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1999) 191-218.