PRINCIPIOS Y LINEAMIENTOS GENERALES

Hirschfeld switched from general medical practice to sexology after “the sui- cide of a young officer who shot himself on the eve of his marriage, bequeath- ing . . . Hirschfeld many of his notes and drawings.”10 _{He repeatedly returned}

to this traumatic event in his writings, to both validate his sexology and let speak the voice of a “Selbstmörder.”11 _{The German word Selbstmörder has no} single English equivalent, translating literally as “someone who murders him- self” (a woman would be a Selbstmörderin), thus overtly casting the person in criminal terms. Andreas Bähr has argued that the modern introduction of the Latin term suicide alongside the older self-murder marks a gradual historical shift from criminalizing to pathologizing self-killing.12 _{Yet suicide, not unlike} homosexuality, remained stigmatized as it moved from the courtroom to the clinic. Countries as politically diverse as the United States, England, Russia, and the German nations all had antisuicide laws that posthumously punished the person—for instance, by annulling the dead person’s will.13 _{In addition,} Judeo-Christian religions treated harshly those who had committed the sin of suicide, often denying the dead person conventional burial rites.14 _{While over} the course of the nineteenth century some of these laws were repealed—the German Penal Code of 1871 decriminalized unassisted suicide—and while religious attitudes softened, this did little to change social attitudes.In one of the earliest histories of modern suicide, the English observer Henry Romilly Fedden noted that when “the comforts of Victorianism overlay the primitive horror of suicide and blunt the precise dogmatic teaching of the Church it [was] no longer the thing in itself that create[d] the scare, so much as what other people [thought] of it . . . [because] loss of fortune [was] substituted with the scourge of gossip.”15 _{Fedden’s observation anticipates the tone of the} suicide letter written by Hirschfeld’s patient. The letter emphasizes the man’s fear of social disapproval, explaining that he will kill himself because he lacks the “strength” to tell his parents the “truth” and stop a marriage “against which nothing could be said in and of itself.”16 _{Hoping that his parents will} never learn about “that which nearly strangled my heart,” the man avoids giving “that” a name, indicating his unspeakable sense of shame.17

The suicide letter shows how the expectation of marriage and family to- gether can reinforce heterosexual norms in a way that makes queer life both unspeakable and unlivable. Hirschfeld’s own choice of words suggests that he did not consider the young man’s suicide a voluntary act.For while Selbst-

mörder was already the common German term by the time of this particular

death, it existed alongside Freitod, literally “free death,” an older concept that gained renewed popularity around the turn of the nineteenth century through Friedrich Nietzsche’s work.18 _{Nietzsche celebrated “the free death,} which occurs because I want it,” arguing that the ability to choose death is one of the characteristic features of the superman.19 _{Hirschfeld was familiar} with Nietzsche’s work, considering him one of the thinkers “who at least theoretically fully understood homosexual love.”20 _{This makes it all the more}

De at h, Su iCiDe , a n D MoDe r n hoMoSe x ua l Cu lt u r e ■ 41

significant that he ignored the more heroic, romantic notion of the freely chosen death, describing the patient suicide instead in terms of Selbstmord, a choice of word associated with shame, taboo, and social ostracization.

Yet if, for the man, naming his feelings was an unspeakable act, his sui- cide note nevertheless also conveys awareness that there are others who are like him. Entreating Hirschfeld to listen to the “outcry of a desolate man,” the Selbstmörder’s final words implore his physician to dedicate his life to the homosexual cause: “The thought that you [Hirschfeld] could contribute to [a future] when the German fatherland will think of us in more just terms,” he writes, “sweetens my hour of death.”21 _{The plural “us” and the forward-} looking plea for action alert us to the fact that suicide is a final act only for the person who dies. Katrina Jaworski has argued that “in relation to suicide, death is not power’s limit, since norms, meanings and assumptions and the processes that are part of making sense of suicide will constitute knowledge before, during and after the act of taking one’s life.”22 _{For Jaworski, this real-} ization is closely tied to the difficult question of agency, which in her reading is overshadowed by the fact that “dead or alive, it may not be possible to be free of the operations of power.”23 _{The suicide letter transfers the man’s own} failed hopes onto Hirschfeld via an ambiguous demand for justice “for us” in the “fatherland.” The word us evokes both a larger group of people and a closeness between Hirschfeld and the man. By his own account, Hirschfeld was treating the young officer for severe depression around the time of this death. We cannot know for certain if the closeness evoked by the young of- ficer refers to an actual friendship between him and his doctor. However, this seems unlikely given the overall tone of the letter and its formal address (“Sie”). Ultimately, the psychic, emotional, and social pressures that led to the young officer’s suicide are unknowable to us, in the same way that there is no hard evidence that the man’s posthumous opening up to Hirschfeld is linked to a recognition that Hirschfeld himself was attracted to men. Yet if the truth of events appears elusive partly because we must rely entirely on Hirschfeld’s narration, the account nevertheless reveals the conditions that might contribute to the end of a homosexual life around 1900. It constitutes, in Cvetkovich’s terms, a repository “of feelings and emotions, which are en- coded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in practices that surround their production and reception.”24 _{The poignancy of the story lies} in the young man literally bestowing on Hirschfeld a material record of the fears and unfulfilled desires that he was unable to discuss in their face-to-face meetings, a move that self-consciously turns the life that was unspeakable for him into one of the emotional prompts for Hirschfeld’s subsequent profes- sional practice.