queer masculinities

Robert D. Tobin: Germany 29
great appreciation of the sensuality of Greek culture and its appreciation
of the body. Whereas critics of Greek love tended to condemn the
practice of exercising naked, Winckelmann has nothing but praise for
the gymnasia:
Their exercises gave the bodies of the Greeks the strong and manly
countours which the masters then imparted to their statues without
any exaggeration or excess. The young Spartans had to appear
naked every ten days before the Ephors, who would impose a
stricter diet upon those showing signs of fat. 52
Following Winckelmann, Ramdohr’s analysis of same-sex love in Venus
Urania is framed entirely as a question of Greek aesthetics.
Literary figures also made extensive use of the classical tradition for
discussions of same-sex desire. The novelist Wilhelm Heinse made one
of the earliest defenses in the German tradition of male–male love
when he noted in his foreword to his translation of Petronius’
Satyricon: ‘Who would prove to the Greeks that the pleasures that they
took with beautiful Ganymedes should not have delighted them more
than the pleasures with their women.’ 53 This passage is reminiscent of
Christoph Martin Wieland’s casual aside in his most famous novel,
Agathon, regarding the Greek custom of kissing boys instead of girls:
‘“O unhappy one!”, he [Socrates] said to the young Xenophon, who
could not understand that it was a dangerous thing to kiss a beautiful
boy, or – to speak in accordance with our customs – a beautiful girl.’ 54
In 1774, the poet Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim defended Heinse
against Wieland’s accusations of immorality by pointing out that
Wieland’s own early poetry had introduced German youth to the idea
of Greek love and encouraged them to acquire Ganymedes of their
own. 55 Wieland’s poem, ‘Juno und Ganymed’ [Juno and Ganymede],
published anonymously in 1765 as part of Comische Erzählungen
[Comical Stories], was filled with rococo bantering about the relative
merits of male and female lovers.
The most extraordinary example of sexualized heroic, ‘Greek’ friendship
found in the German literary tradition of the eighteenth century
is Schiller’s fragmentary play, Die Malteser [The Maltese], which he
began in 1795. Set among the Knights of Malta, ‘the plot is simple and
heroic, as are the characters, who are at the same time exclusively masculine,’
Schiller wrote to his friend Wilhelm von Humboldt. 56 Two of
the main characters of the play, Crequi and St. Priest, were to be lover
and beloved, following what Schiller refers to in his notes as the ‘love