Gemeinschaft der Eigenen

It was founded on 1 May 1903 as a closed circle of readers and contributors to protect Der Eigene, which faced censorship and prosecution. The writer Benedict Friedlaender, the Wandervogel patron Wilhelm Jansen and the painter Fidus were among the signatories of its founding statute. It had some 2,000 to 3,000 members. Where Hirschfeld, following Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, saw homosexuals as a “third sex” between man and woman, its members followed Friedlaender’s Renaissance des Eros Uranios (1904) in treating homosexuality as a normal male desire detached from femininity, and accused Hirschfeld of medicalising it. Holding male friendship superior to heterosexual love, they drifted into misogyny, and they were close to the Greek ideal of pedagogical eros and to the naturist movement. They practised the outing of prominent men, and when Brand targeted Chancellor Bülow during the Eulenburg affair in 1907 he was sentenced to eighteen months. In the 1920s they joined Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee only in the campaign against Paragraph 175. Towards the end some members, Brand among them, turned antisemitic and developed the idea of a homosexual “superman”; their virile ideal had points in common with Nazism, though anarchist leanings and Nazi homophobia kept them apart. Its activity ended in 1933 when the Nazis seized Brand’s papers.