Mosse, George. 1985. Ch 1 “Introduction”, Ch 2 “Manliness and Homosexuality”, and
Ch 3 “The Rediscovery of the Human Body”, in Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle Class
Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
pp. 1-22, 23-47, and 48-65.
"sexuality... is basic to human behaviour and preoccupied the moral concern of respectability." p.2
"an alliance that regarded control over sexuality as vital to the concept of respectability, indeed, to the very existence of bourgeois society." p.2
"What one regards as normal or abnormal behaviour, sexual or otherwise, is a product of historical development, not universal law." p.3
"respectability came to rule behaviour patterns... and was based on a consistent attitude toward the human body, its sensuous qualities and its sexual functions." p.4
"Modern manners and morals... were to a large extent the products of late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century religious revivals." p.4
The middle classes "perceived their way of life, based as it was upon frugality, devotion to duty, and restraint of the passions, as superior to that of the "lazy" lower classes and the profligate aristocracy." p.5
"Behaviour was an expression of inward piety - that moderation and control over the passions which the religious revival proclaimed and which fitted so well the lifestyle of the middle classes." p.5
"Here virtue, personal dignity, and loyalty exemplified a coherent order of the kind to which the bourgeoisie aspired, and one that was constantly endangered by outsiders who rejected both respectability and an ordered society." p.8
"Nationalism helped control sexuality, yet also provided the means through which changing sexual attitudes could be absorbed and tamed into respectability." p.10
"The distinction between normality and abnormality was basic to modern respectability; it provided the mechanism that enforced control and ensured security." p.10
"To a large extent the physician took over from the clergy as the keeper of normalcy." p.10
"virility and manly bearing were signs of virtue. Nationalism adopted this ideal of manliness and built its national sterotypes around it." p.10
"masturbators, like those infected with venereal disease, were pale, hollow-eyed, weak of body and spirit - the antithesis of the emerging national stereotype. They were alien to the ideals of manly combat and social conquest." p.11
"Moral terror was to accompany the rise of respectability." p.12
"The masturbator, according to Tissot, threatened the division between the sexes: he was pale, effeminate, devoid of energy." p.12
"To remain healthy entailed a willingness to follow the dictates of nature, which supported the new respectability." p.13
"Manliness meant freedom from sexual passion, the sublimation of sensuality into leadership of society and the nation." p.13
"Masculine comportment and a manly figure exemplified the transcendence of the so-called lower passions." p.13
"This ideal of classical beauty was co-opted by nationalism, just as nationalism would annex many other political movements and philosophies over the years." p.16
"The visual self-representation of the nation was just as important as the much cited literature of nationalism." p.16
"Nationalism and respectability assigned everyone his place in life, man and woman, normal and abnormal, native and foreigner; any confusion between these categories threatened chaos and loss of control." p.16
""Establishing order and quiet in a man's family," we hear at the end of the eighteenth century, "is a better means of keeping a husband than good looks."" p.17
"Woman as a national symbol was the guardian of the continuity and immutability of the nation, the embodiment of its respectability." p.18
"The intimate modern family developed in the eighteenth century, superseding older ideas of kinship." p.18
"The distance between the place of work and the home became a sign of prestige." p.18
"the family was a cheap and efficient surrogate for the state, controlling the passions at their source." p.20
"Those who were the prisoners of respectability in the Protestant North projected their forbiden sexual fantasies upon foreign nations and regions." p.20
"female symbols... stood for immutability... providing the backdrop against which men determined the fate of nations." p.23
"sexual differentiation had to be maintained if culture was to flourish." p.24
"Sexual perversion was thought to be almost as threatening to middle-class life as the restlessness of the lower classes" p.25
"Homosexual acts led to divine retribution, not only rebellions and revolutions, but natural catastrophes such as the destruction of the city of Lot because some of its inhabitants had practiced this unnatural vice." p.25
"All sexual acts outside marriage or for purposes other than procreation were unequivocally condemned; it was sinful even to contemplate them." p.26
"Masturbation and homosexuality were not regarded as inborn but were attributed to bad thoughts and bad nerves." p.28-29
"Sodomy and masturbation led to impotence and thus to depopulation; the secrecy that accompanied deviant sexuality resembled a conspiracy sowing hatred against the state" p.29
"Both Hölderin and Schiller linked their cult of Greek beauty not to the family but to male friendship, the Männerbund whose popularity was never to vanish in nineteenth-century Germany." p.30
"despite the potential danger of homoeroticism, Greek ideals of friendship and beauty were not discarded, but rather adapted to heterosexual love." p.31
"Order and harmony were supposed to keep the passions in check." p.31
"Masculinity was expected to stand both for unchanging values in a changing age and for the dynamic but orderly process of change itself, guided by an appropriate purpose." p.31
"The dark and secret recesses deep within the "jungle of cities" were usually considered breeding grounds of homosexuality and masturbation." p.32
"The city was home to outsiders - Jews, criminals, the insane, homosexuals - while the countryside was the home of the native on his soil." p.32
"Natural selection, which Darwin had seen at work among animals, would reward a healthy national organism free of hereditary disease and moral weakness. On the simplest level, this meant dedication to reproduction." p.33
"Would greater freedom for homosexuality endanger Germany's military strength? All agreed that it was essential to the health of the nation to maintain the ideal of masculinity in opposition to sensuality and effeminacy." p.34
"the concept of "degeneration" emerged as the antithesis of manliness." p.34
"Characteristically for the process of diagnosing the outsider, a train of thought based upon subjective belief was transformed into medical knowledge." p.35
"The legitimacy of all desires must be judged by the standards of society." p.35
"the stereotypical depiction of sexual "degenerates" was transferred almost intact to the "inferior races" who inspired the same fears." p.36
"His hatred of his own "secret vice," his outrage at being called feminine, and the duel he fought with another homosexual who had questioned his manliness, all shoe Proust trying to escape the "cursed race"." p.36
"A new science of sexology made its appearance at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, no longer the handmaiden of forensic medicine. Such medical inquiry could lead to a reconsideration of homosexuality" p.37
"Making the distinction between true and pseudo-homosexuals was one way of trying to preserve the categories of normalcy and abnormality while attempting to legitimise homosexuality." p.38
"Ellis believed that homosexuality, by directing men's energies toward public rather than private concerns... made human civilisation possible... Essentially, Ellis held that sexual acts were a private matter, not subject to public judgement." p.38
Freud - "Maturity meant restriction and definition of the sexual aim, that is to say, homosexuality." p.39
"Benedict Friedländer argued that homosexuality was necessary in any well-functioning army. He maintained that homosexuals were uniquely capable of transcending sexuality, thus rendering them particularly manly." p.41
"Jews also wanted to enter society and fervently embraced its norms. They sought to escape the stereotype of the outsider which society had foisted upon them by emphasising their commitment to respectability and manliness." p.41-42
"These amplified mirror images of society point to a tragic self-hate, and testify to the pressure society put on those who differed from the accepted norms." p.43
"Refusing to assimilate into respectable society, the decadents proclaimed that they represented the nearly perfect society of the future in which the worship of masculinity and virility would be unknown." p.44
"Homosexuality was taken to indicate a heightened sensibility - a central component of the concept of decadence. Decadents were wont to proclaim that "man is growing more refined, more feminine, more divine"" p.44
In Decadent subculture - "lesbians and homosexuals could find a community of the like-minded and transcend the stereotype of homosexuality, not by adopting the ideal of manliness but by challenging the very existence of normalcy." p.45
"the German Youth Movement... sought moral and physical health in the context of their voluntary yet cohesive community and in a more meaningful nationalism. They found roots in their own camaraderie, in the unspoilt Germanic landscape, and in the nation as inner experience." p.46
"German youth saw the male nude body as the temple of manliness, while for most decadents it exemplified an almost feminine sensuousness." p.46
"artificiality of modern life, of unspoilt nature embattled against modernity." p.48
"The rediscovery of the human body... was not supposed to encourage sensuousness but was part of a longing for the genuine which was set in opposition to prevailing moral attitudes." p.49
"The urge to be natural, to integrate oneself with an unspoilt setting, was thought to free the human body of its sexuality." p.49
"To hide the body from the sun in shame could now be branded as a sign of moral and mental sickness" p.50
"Nudity as distinct from mere lack of clothes must be represented as part of the pure, reverential contemplation of nature" p.51
"The beautiful body, so we read in one of the early journals of the youth movement, Die Schönheit (Beauty) of 1903, is a work of art. Whoever possesses such a body does not own it: it belongs to all men." p.51
"The metaphors of sun and nature linked the rediscovery of the body to the national stereotype... blond hair, blue eyes, and a white skin were regarded as marks of a superior people in both England and Germany." p.52
"The fact that national symbolism and the setting of nudity coincided was no accident." p.53
"The workers nudist movements, which had a considerable membership split between various left-wing associations, saw the emancipation of the human body from constraints as part of the liberation of the proletariat." p.53
"Just as foreigners must be expelled from the country, so "foreign bodies" must be eliminated from the human body." p.53
"Respectability and nationalism were linked to form a bulwark against sexual passion, a danger always present in nudist thought and imagination." p.54
"For Pudor, it was not nude women but those who were clad who induced male lustfulness. Veiling the human body was said to whet the sexual appetite, and bourgeois dress invited immorality." p.54
"linking nature to the national mystique served to reinforce the effort to transcend sexuality and sensuousness." p.55
"The rediscovery of the human body combined with the exclusively male nature of the early youth movement did raise the spectre of homoeroticism, even homosexuality. Those who tried to recapture their own bodies as well as nature from the hypocrisy and artificiality of bourgeois life as they saw it, also wanted to find refuge in a true community of affinity. They began to perceive the nation as such a community. Moreover, the nation helped to spiritualise their new sensuality, to integrate new discoveries into older respectabilities." p.57
"Illicit sexuality of any kind was looked upon as distracting boys and girls from the development of their true inner selves as well as from service to the community." p.58
Stefan George and his weird poet cult - "It was this order's task to guard the "secret Germany" until the time was ripe and the Reich could be reborn through beauty of body and soul." p.59
"The new leader - at times described as an emperor - would surround himself with disciples, living symbols of beauty like the boy Maximin; the rest of the German people would exercise self-discipline and gladly serve." p.59
"Here homoeroticism was the principal agent of national renewal, certainly one of the most startling consequences of the rediscovery of the human body." p.60
In England - "Unlike Germany, the beautiful male was not symbolic of the nation of the national landscape, but simply part of an individual's literary sensibility." p.62
"Edward Carpenter... called for a return through nature to a true community among men." p.62
"English nationalism, when compared to that in Germany, played a minor role in attempting to tame the rediscovery of the body into respectability. The ideal of masculinity taught as a virtue in the great English public schools defined manliness as sexless, passions held in check through self-control over mind and body." p.63
"Male beauty was supposedly deprived of its sensuousness by integrating it with nature" p.64
"The dynamic of modern nationalism was built upon the ideal of manliness. Nationalism also put forward a feminine ideal, but it was largely passive, symbolising the immutable forces which the nation reflected." p.64
"Modern German nationalism saw itself as largely based upon a community of men; personal relationships among men therefore became a vital concern." p.65
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