Károly Mária Kertbeny

After quarrelling with his father Benkert took to a wandering life, served for a time as an artillery cadet and in 1843 resolved to become a writer. When his father died in 1846 he set out again without a passport, called on Heine in Paris, met George Sand and Musset, and travelled by way of London to Karl August Varnhagen von Ense in Berlin. On Varnhagen’s advice he changed his surname in 1847 to Kertbeny, a Hungarian name with an aristocratic ring. The Hungarian struggle for freedom in 1848 won liberal intellectuals’ sympathy and opened the way for his translations. Beginning with Petőfi’s poems in 1849, translating Petőfi, Arany, Vörösmarty and Jókai into German became the centre of his life’s work, and Bettina von Arnim wrote him more than sixty letters up to December 1850. After the revolution was crushed he gave himself up to the Austrian authorities and settled again in Pest in 1852; later he published Silhouetten und Reliquien (1861–1863), memoirs of his famous acquaintances.

Living in Hanover from 1867 to August 1868, Kertbeny first used the word “homosexual” in a letter of 6 May 1868. The letter was addressed to Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who called homosexual men Urnings and demanded the abolition of their punishment, and the two corresponded. To replace contemptuous words such as “pederast” Kertbeny devised a system of sexual types, calling men attracted to women “heterosexual”, those who masturbate “monosexual” and practitioners of anal intercourse “pygists”.

In 1869 he published two anonymous pamphlets against Paragraph 143 of the Prussian penal code (later Paragraph 175 of the imperial code). His argument was the liberal one: consensual sexual acts in private are no business of criminal law, and the statute delivered homosexuals to blackmailers and drove them to suicide. Where Ulrichs grounded abolition on the disposition being inborn, Kertbeny left that question aside as “a very interesting riddle of nature” and started from the state’s lack of any right to intervene in private matters, though he too repeatedly described the sexual drive as innate and unchanging. He also held that homosexual men were not by nature effeminate, parting ways with Ulrichs’s “female soul confined in a male body”.

Their paths diverged as well. Ulrichs declared himself an Urning and kept fighting, while Kertbeny, who called himself “normally sexed”, withdrew. His diaries record, in self-censored form, encounters with young men, and after Ulrichs’s arrest he wrote: “Awful days!.... I have burnt all the dangerous letters.” In 1880 he offered a chapter on homosexuality for Gustav Jäger’s book, but the publisher left it out; Jäger used his terminology elsewhere. When Krafft-Ebing took the words from Jäger’s book for his Psychopathia Sexualis, “homosexual” and “heterosexual” became the standard terms and replaced Ulrichs’s Urning and Dioning.