Männerbund theory

The word Männerbund was coined in 1902 by the ethnologist Heinrich Schurtz to describe initiation rites in East Africa, and the youth movement of Wilhelmine Germany took it up with new meaning. Blüher held that what drove the Wandervogel, along with revolt against the fathers’ generation, was the homoerotic bond between leaders and boys, and in 1917 he generalised this in The Role of Eroticism in Male Society: A Theory of Human State Formation by Essence and Value. In his view same-sex orientation is an inborn fate, “inversion”, and men of the “male hero” type who bear it form the associations that found states; humans are state-building beings not by economic reason but by nature. Citing ancient Greece, tribal men’s houses, knightly orders, student fraternities and later the SA and SS, he argued that desire repressed within turns into persecution without. Women, bound to the family, could not form states, and Jews suffered from “Männerbund weakness” and “family hypertrophy”, so that women and Jews became the “other” of the Männerbund. The young Heinrich Himmler read the book in 1922 and was deeply shaken, but concluded that a male society was necessary without being erotic, turned the theory around and saw homosexuality as a threat that would destroy the state—a basis for Nazi persecution policy. Blüher in turn interpreted the Night of the Long Knives through his theory, casting Hitler as repressor and persecutor and Röhm as a free “male hero”.