Robert Tobin and the longue durée of German LGBTQ+ history

Abstract

Back in the late 1990s when I first read these words, they opened my eyes as to why, considering my family background, I went into the field of foreign languages. Unlike many in our profession, I was not of German heritage, my parents weren't academics, and I was and still am the first in my extended family to earn a graduate degree. Studying French and German literature allowed me to escape the culturally stultifying and sexually normative confines of late 1970s Canadian suburbia. In the essay “The Theory of Seduction and the Problem of the Other” (1999), Jean Laplanche wrote about sexuality and foreignness in a way that attractively resonates with the term queer. Destabilizing claims to an abiding, undisturbed notion of the self and sexuality, Laplanche spoke of das Andere—the other-thing in us, the otherness of our unconscious, the enigma of sexuality. Das Andere is the internal otherness that we perpetually carry within us and that de-centers us and our sexuality, but that is founded by contact with an external otherness and that we seek out.

Bob Tobin's academic adventuresomeness, his search for das Andere, endowed his entire scholarly project—in fact, his very presence—with lightness and brightness. His intellectual curiosity and capaciousness led to enormous insights and taught us to pursue our scholarly passions and to seek out novelty; Wissenschaft is fröhlich. Bob and I were both students of Stanley Corngold at Princeton and inherited from him, back in the 1980s, a pleasure in reading against the grain, but with utmost admiration for the texts we were deconstructing. This respect, yet also subversion, are there in Bob's extraordinary contribution to the study not just of Goethe, but also of Christoph Martin Wieland, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Karl Phillip Moritz, Jean Paul Richter, and Thomas Mann, among many other authors. Bob was always a dedicated Corngold protégé—both theory junkie and textual reader. His thinking was brilliantly counterintuitive or verquert; his productive attention to ambiguity made him a fabulous reader. For example, Bob strongly argued that queer desires, which Goethe called both in and against nature, repeatedly come to represent nature itself throughout Goethe's writings, so that the seemingly diametrically opposed notions of homo- and heterosexuality, natural and unnatural, poisonous and curative, inside and outside, collapse into each other.

Starting with the observation in Warm Brothers that Goethe connects homosexuality to the trope of writing, Bob continued with remarkable consistency in his scholarship to link aesthetics and LGBTQ+ history, as if he were determined to archeologically reconstruct the textual nature of sexuality throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Taking inspiration from Jacques Derrida's “Plato's Pharmacy,” Bob repeatedly returned to the notion of writing as a pharmakon, as having a seductive and bewitching component. In Peripheral Desires: The German Discovery of Sex (2015) and subsequent articles, he pointed out the centrality of literature to the study of sexualities, such as with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century readers of Greek, Roman, and Persian texts; the hommes de lettres Károly Mária Kertbeny and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs; Richard Krafft-Ebing and his literary sources; and Hans Blüher and Adolf Brand in their fantasized realities. He reminded us how past and foreign cultures provide a lens through which to both read and celebrate same-sex desires, that is, to generate and mediate longings, as Thomas Mann did in his reception of Friedrich Schiller. Further mindful of diachronic continuities and concerned to address readers outside Germanistik, he concluded Warm Brothers with a chapter on “Made in Germany: Modern Sexualities” and Peripheral Desires with one on “American Legacies of the German Discovery of Sex.” Finally, as well as literary conceptions of sexuality, Bob consistently explored their political, colonial, and medical dimensions.

But how did we start? I remember Bob's encouraging me to attend the Rutgers queer theory conference back in the early 1990s. That heady visit made me realize that our scholarship had to push boundaries. Along with Simon Richter, we then organized a 1994 Modern Language Association (MLA) session on Outing Goethe and His Age, which became the volume we published with Stanford in 1997. The ballroom was packed; men were making out in the back; and both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post reported on us. Repeat notoriety for Bob two years later at the MLA when he organized the session on “Goethe's Masochism.” Bob and I both published books in 2000; he with Warm Brothers and I with The Queer German Cinema, which couldn't have been written without his prompting and personal introduction to Rosa von Praunheim. The next year 2001 marked the appearance of Bob's revised dissertation Doctor's Orders: Goethe and Enlightenment Thought. Perennially and belatedly shadowing Bob, I only recently followed his early exploration of eighteenth-century medical history, in particular, the homeopathic dictum that like cures like (similia similibus curentur). In Doctor's Orders, Bob examined how in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre this principle infuses the Tower Society's healing methods of using the irrational beliefs of its patients to cure them (as in the cases of Wilhelm, Mignon, the Harper, and the Beautiful Soul), but with the caveat that by so doing it must not celebrate illness. Again, Bob read against the grain, deploying the notion of the pharmakon to do so. His interpretation remains the most important application of homeopathy in literature to date.

A final word about Bob's participation in educational and local communities. Over the years, at Whitman College and then Clark University, he was involved with LGBTQ+ student life on campus while teaching human rights and sexuality studies. When I saw him for the last time, at the 2019 Lacan conference at Clark, Bob gave me a private tour of an exhibit he had co-organized on LGBTQ+ history in Worchester, Massachusetts, in recognition of which he received the keys to the city of Worcester. What this exhibit also revealed was that he cultivated a curator's passion for the obscured and enigmatic, das Andere, that needed to be brought to light with pride and dignity. His scholarship had already demonstrated the archivist's pursuit of lesser-known texts, which was amply on display already in Doctor's Orders, with its broad command of Enlightenment medical thought. Indeed, few literary scholars have managed to cross the aisle, even to determine the course of another discipline, as Bob has done for the history of LGBTQ+ sexuality. And it is the rarest of Germanist*innen who cheerfully addresses a wider public audience, as Bob so readily did.