Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (21 page)

For Blüher, the inverse of the inverted type is neither the heterosexual nor the effeminate male but the Jew:

With the Jews it is as follows: they suffer at one and the same time from a weakness in male-bonding and a hypertrophy of the family. They are submerged in the family and familial relations. . . . Loyalty, unity, and bonding are no concern of the Jew. Consequently, where other peoples profit from a fruitful interaction of the two forms of socialization [i.e., the family and the Männerbund], with the Jews there is a sterile division. Nature has visited this fate upon them and thus they wander through his- tory, cursed never to be a people [
Volk
], always to remain a mere race. They have lost their state.

There are people who are simply exterminated as peoples and who there- fore disappear, but this cannot be the case with the Jews, for a secret process internal to their being as a people constantly displaces the ener- gies typically directed toward male bonding onto the family. . . . Conse- quently the Jews maintain themselves as
race
through this overemphasis of the family.
93

Here Blüher touches upon the riddle and scandal that the Jews presented to European modernity. The riddle is how have the Jews persisted without a state; and the scandal: that they have persisted without a state. Since the state was understood as the objectification of a “civilized” people (a Kulturvolk as opposed to a Naturvolk), the survival of the stateless Jews threatened the le- gitimacy of the colonizer state. Jewish persistence presented intimations of its (i.e., the colonizer state’s) mortality. Against these threats the accusation that the Jews form a state within a state was propounded, thereby both denying the paradox and concretizing the threat.

Other thinkers from Spinoza in the
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
to Freud in
Moses and Monotheism
have made other efforts to solve this scandalous co- nundrum; and Spinoza’s answer-–with which Freud concurred, seeking to suppress it if not repress it—was the feminization of the Jews.

As for the fact that [the Jews] have survived their dispersion and the loss of their state for so many years, there is nothing miraculous in that, since they have incurred universal hatred by cutting themselves off completely from all other peoples . . . by preserving the mark of circumcision with such de- voutness. That their survival is largely due to the hatred of the Gentiles has already been shown by experience. . . . The mark of circumcision is also, I

think, of great importance in this connexion; so much so that in my view it alone will preserve the Jewish people for all time; indeed, did not the principles of their religion make them effeminate [
effoeminarent
] I should be quite convinced that some day when the opportunity arises . . . they will establish their state once more, and that God will chose them afresh.
94

Blüher comes to a similar conclusion: Jewish statelessness and survival are connected to their effeminacy. That is, the Jews have devoted themselves ex- clusively to the woman’s realm of the family and have focused upon the woman-associated reproductive instinct. The importance placed on circumci- sion confirms this since this sign fetishizes that instinct. In
Secessio Judaica
Blüher explicitly ascribes effeminacy to the Jews: “The correlation of mascu- line nature with German essence and a feminine and servile nature with the Jewish essence is an unmediated intuition of the German people, which from day to day becomes more certain.”
95

But the Jews pose an even greater peril to modern society: not only do they threaten the formation of the state, they also portend the subversion of the
Völkisch
family: “There are men so burdened by the incestuous drives of the Penelope type [i.e., woman-as-wife-and-mother] that they are driven to marry into a foreign race. This is particularly characteristic of the Jews and, notably, even among the Zionist Jews, who consciously promote their own racial type for both sexes while being unconsciously driven toward foreign races.”
96
By so characterizing the Jews, Blüher has depicted them as the patho- graphic homosexual that Freudian theory argues is motivated by a primal fear of incest and hence avoids sex with all women.
97
The Jews represent the kind of homosexual, the inverted
Weibling
, from whom Blüher sought to distin- guish his Männerheld.

Blüher’s exemplar of the inverted Männerheld who forms the Männer- bund is Carl Peters. In his
The Founding of German East Africa
Peters describes the colonial community of males bound to one another without the presence of women. Blüher in turn describes Peters as an inexhaustible conqueror, or- ganizer, man of action, a politico who will have nothing to do with women.
98
This designation of the colonialist self-construction as exemplary demon- strates that the experience of German colonialism led writers to draw upon a different reservoir of fantasies than those generated prior to Germany’s entry into the colonial venture.
99
No longer either the representative of a familial, kinder, gentler colonialism or the lone investigator opening up virgin territo- ry, the German male colonialist became the vanguard of the
Herrenvolk
(mas- ter race). With the loss of those colonies after World War I, German ethno- graphic analysis of tribal societies turned to another idealized vanguard: the

ecstatic warrior male cultic bands that led the ancient Germanic tribes. Posit- ed as a source and foundation of the religious, ethical, and political life of the German Volk, this construct provided a counter to the cultural claims of the Western colonial powers.

The scientific and popular image of those original Germans had been that of the peasant during the nineteenth century. As a pure racial image it was embraced by the “conservative-German cultural wing”; however, such blood- and-soil romanticism was denounced by Blüher: explicitly as nonheroic, ret- rograde kitsch, implicitly for valorizing the family as the foundation of Ger- manness.
100
Other models would follow, including the idyllic vision drawn from the Icelandic sagas of a noble clan that trusts in the gods who in turn vouchsafe their paradisical situation. In the 1920s, however, another model emerged among the students of the Viennese scholar of ancient Germanic studies Rudolf Much, which drew from Schurtz’s and Blüher’s writings on Männerbünde. It posited an ecstatic warrior male cultic group as most char- acteristic of the ancient Germans. These secret societies were responsible for warring against human and demonic enemies and thereby protecting the tribe on both the material and spiritual levels. Weiser’s 1927
Ancient Germanic Youth Initiation Rites and Male Bands
and Höfler’s 1934
Secret Cultic Groups of the Germans
in particular emphasized not only that these groups lorded over the tribe but also that they bore within themselves state-forming power. He held that they were a source and foundation of the religious, ethical, and political, in sum, of the cultural life of the German Volk to the present—the national socialist present.
101

Anthropologists also revisited the phenomenon of Männerbünde after the loss of Germany’s colonial possessions; however, unlike Schurtz, whose in- ventory of colonial appropriations was conditioned by the crises gripping Wilhelmine Germany, these researchers took a proactive stance in their ethnographic comparisons and exemplars. Wilhelm E. Mühlmann, a student of Eugen Fischer, who developed his theories of racial eugenics and misce- genation while working in German Southwest Africa, focused on cultures with state-forming, militaristic-ascetic male bands. Such culling of heroic types to form elite Männerbünde is typical of racial groups like the Polyne- sian Arioi and the ancient Germans, which are born both to expand their hegemony and to dominate other populations.
102
Identifications of this sort were picked up by both postwar youth groups and the right-wing paramili- tary Freicorps and then by Nazi ideologues like Alfred Baeumler, the author of
Male Band and Science,
who already in the 1920s directed students to call to mind the Männerbünde of earlier times out of which the original state emerged. Ultimately Himmler embraced the Männerbund in his vision of the

SS.
103
These racial and ultimately antisemitic reconstructions and realizations of the Männerbund idea diverged from Blüher’s conception by both deem- phasizing the erotic dimension and, since race was their fundamental propo- sition, fusing the male socializing-and-state-forming drive with the reproduc- tive instinct. They did retain Blüher’s positioning of Jewry as the antithetical enemy of masculine society.

Disavowing Homosexuality

This positioning of the Jew as effeminate homosexual and social threat could not have appealed to Freud—that “manly” postcolonial Jewish subject. In the cases that preceded his encounter with Blüher, cases in which he was working through his theory of homosexuality, Freud made every effort to sever the connection between homosexuality and male Jewry. As I have argued else- where,
104
in “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year Old Boy” Freud made every rhetorical effort to belie the continuation of the young Jewish boy Little Hans’s homosexual “accesses”
105
after the resolution of his anxiety neurosis and, by never acknowledging his patient’s Jewishness, to deny the relationship between Hans’s circumcised identity and the castration complex at the root of both those “accesses” and that neurosis. Even when Freud returns to this case in the 1926
Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety
,
106
he pointedly refuses to ex- plain Little Hans’s neurosis in terms of the negative oedipal complex, where- by the boy assumes a passive, feminine attitude toward the father, emphasiz- ing instead that “little Oedipus,” as Freud refers to Little Hans, continued to be characterized by an “energetic masculinity.”
107
Similarly, in his study of the relationship between Judge Schreber’s repressed homosexuality and his para- noia, Freud avoids any suggestion of Schreber’s identification with the Wan- dering Jew; Freud also further distanced this Jewish-identified psychotic from effeminacy by reading Schreber’s feminizing emasculation as castration.
108
The singular status Freud accorded Schreber—making his case paradigmatic for the psychological effects of repressed homosexuality—became a major point of contention between Freud and Blüher. One more instance of Freud’s efforts to screen this connection between Jewishness and homosexuality ulti- mately appears when Freud publishes
From the History of an Infantile Neuro- sis
in 1918, the year the second volume of
The Role of the Erotic
appeared. The infantile neurosis belonged to Sergei Pankeieff, also known as the “Wolf Man,” whom Freud was seeing during the period leading up to his first com- munication with Blüher. When assaying the factors that contributed to the Wolf Man’s latent homosexuality (i.e., his negative Oedipus complex as Freud

eventually described it), Freud includes circumcision; however, he specifies that it is the circumcision of Christ, which the young Sergei would have learned “during the readings and discussions of the sacred story.”
109

The association of effeminate homosexuality and the Jews was not the only aspect of Blüher’s text that would have been of concern to Freud. Exac- erbating its problematic reception by Freud would have been the prominant place Freud’s
Dämon
and the object of his homosexual affect, Wilhelm Fliess, assumes in Blüher’s volumes.
110
Upon opening the work, Freud would have discovered that, in addition to discussing the blatantly antisemitic homosex- ual Friedlaender as precursor and devoting once again considerable attention to the for Freud ever problematic homosexual Otto Weininger, Blüher im- mediately addresses Fliess’s work. Blüher argues that Fliess’s “valuable” re- search on male and female periodicity and on the relationship between smell and sexuality—the two major research areas that preoccupy the Freud-Fliess correspondence—grounds his (i.e., Blüher’s) own conclusions about the bio- logical basis of marriage.
111
Upon completing the work, Freud would again have Fliess’s presence rubbed into his face: not only did Fliess and Blüher share the same publisher, Verlag Eugen Diederichs, which was the leading dis- seminator of writings from the German masculinist counterculture, but ad- vertisements for Fliess’s works also covered the back page of Blüher’s work.

In Freud’s works that appear after the publication of
The Role of the Erot- ic
, with its elaboration of the universal (homo)erotic character of masculine so- ciety and of male identity formation, homosexuality becomes more and more marginal to Freud’s theory of social origins. Thus, when he brings up the pri- mal horde and its successors in his work on
Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
, homosexuality is relegated to a footnote that elaborates upon what he means by emotional ties forced upon (i.e., they are extrinsic) the brothers by the inhibition of their sexual aims [toward their mothers]. This footnote does make an interesting addition by suggesting that only through this reori- entation—that is, by displacing their love and desire from the father as well as the mother—could they kill him.
112
Freud further equivocates on the role of homosexual ties in the relationship between sublimated libido and sociality; as Diana Fuss also suggests, here Freud conceptualizes “homosexuality and ho- mosociality as absolutely distinct categories.”
113
The former is a matter of de- sire and object choice, the latter created by identification.

Soon after the publication of
Group Psychology
, Blüher’s widely read anti- semitic pamphlet
Secessio Judaica
appeared.
114
In that text the work of the “Jew Sigmund Freud” is presented as exemplary of corrupt Jewish ways of thinking due to its “pure materialism” and “insidious presuppositions.”
115
More significant than the specifics of Blüher’s latest mad ravings
116
was, as