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Biography:
Karl Maria Kertbeny
In 1824, the man now remembered as Karl Maria Kertbeny was born Karl Maria Benkert into
an artistic family in Vienna. His father Anton was a writer, and his mother,
Charlotte Graf, was a painter. Two years after Karl was born, the family moved to Budapest
where they ran a hotel they owned. Kertbeny's childhood was far from aristocratic,
but the income from the hotel provided a comfortable living for the Benkerts.
At 14, Karl became a bookseller's apprentice. In his adulthood, he wrote about a
twenty year old friend he met while he was learning to sell books. Karl wrote that
his friend had "abnormal tastes I would have never in my dreams suspected".
Karl's friend killed himself and left a note explaining that a blackmailer had
extorted all of his money and that he had to commit suicide to avoid exposure and family
shame. In the note, the friend provided a list of others who were also "this
way" and asked that Benkert contact them. When he did, he was introduced to a network
of friends with "abnormal tastes", and found it necessary to express "my
normal sexual orientation decisively and in earnest, having to protest sharply against
every immediate expectation". At least in his adult recollections, the tragedy
of this episode of blackmail-induced suicide excited his "instinctive drive to take
issue with every injustice".
In 1843, he served a stint in the Hungarian 5th Artillery Regiment, and then moved to
Budapest where he rubbed elbows with the Hungarian literati. Inspired, he apparently
decided that he would rather be a writer than a bookseller. His father died in
1846, and his death seems to have sparked a wanderlust in his son, who traveled widely from
1846 until 1868. During his travels, Benkert wrote for various newspapers and
journals and published several German translations of Hungarian poetry. His original
writing - he authored at least 25 books during his lifetime - was largely autobiographical
and betrays a great drive to hobnob with the famous characters who populate his books.
Critics seem unanimous in their opinions of Kertbeny's work. One commentator,
writing in 1913, offered this appraisal: "Indeed, on a closer examination
the whole of his activity offers the sad view of the most idle scribbling, in which --
even for a journalist -- there is no lack of unforgivable superficiality and the most
shocking tastelessness." Perhaps as a result of this tasteless superficiality,
his prolific writing earned him little money. This was doubly difficult for Benkert
because he had to contribute to his mother's financial support after his father died.
In 1847, Benkert legally changed his name from the German Benkert to Kertbeny, a
Hungarian name. The change had two advantages: it gave him an air of nobility because it
referred to a minor noble title which he claimed belonged to his family and it allowed
Kertbeny to pose as a Hungarian patriot, a position of honor among liberal Europeans.
Kertbeny coins "Homosexual"
Kertbeny settled in Berlin in 1868, ending his literary travels. He apparently lived a
conventional bachelor's life. No evidence exists that he was a homosexual (except,
perhaps, the vehemence of his denials), and he claimed to be "normally sexed",
although not particularly energetic sexually. He said that an "anthropological
interest" combined with a sense of justice and a concern for the "rights of
man" motivated his publications about homosexuality.
In 1869, Kertbeny anonymously published a pamphlet entitled "Paragraph 143 of the
Prussian Penal Code of 14 April 1851 and Its Reaffirmation as Paragraph 152 in the
Proposed Penal Code for the Nordeutscher Bund. An Open and Professional Correspondence to
His Excellency Dr. Leonhardt, Royal Prussian Minister of Justice". A second tract,
with an equally florid title, followed quickly in the same year. In the pamphlets,
Kertbeny reiterated several arguments raised by his contemporary, Karl
Ulrichs, but his emphasis was different. Instead of Ulrichs' emancipationist goal of
uniting the people he called Urnings to better their position in
society, Kertbeny stressed that the Prussian anti-sodomy law, Paragraph 143, violated the
"rights of man" as they had been described in the French
Revolution. A man, he felt, had the right to do with his body whatever he wished so long
as no one else was hurt. Another problem that vexed him was blackmail. His
anonymous childhood friend died because P. 143 gave blackmailers the legal tool they
needed to extort money from homosexuals.
In support of his legal arguments, Kertbeny developed an elaborate
system for classifying sexual orientation. By arguing that all sexual
propensities are inborn, Kertbeny hoped to show that homosexuals acted not out of moral
failure, but because of natural inborn tendencies.
Kertbeny and Ulrichs
Kertbeny took great pains to distance his "homosexual" from Karl Ulrichs'
"Urning". The homosexual, according to Kertbeny, was not necessarily or even
frequently effeminate, and the supervirile type included many of the great heroes of
history. In spite of a varied correspondence in which Kertbeny sent at least 32 letters to
Ulrichs and received 16 in return, the two men never came to agree on the nature of
same-sex love. Ulrichs mentioned Kertbeny only once in all of his collected works,
and then only in passing.
In correspondence, Ulrichs wrote to an associate, Carl Robert Egells, about a
"grumbler", that is a "comrade" who found fault with Ulrichs' work.
The grumbler was almost certainly Kertbeny. Ulrichs wrote the letter before
he knew that Kertbeny had written anonymously about homosexuality, and even though Ulrichs
thought Kertbeny was jealous of him, he welcomed Kertbeny into the Urning cause:
In the case of one of these chief "grumblers" the basis is probably an
unconscious jealousy. He writes quite well, has indeed more rhetorical and more
flourishing style than I, and is also a poet. To be sure he has never had anything
printed, would like to come forward himself in our cause (something, please note, that
precisely I would most keenly wish, I mean, that he would do it), but appears not to find
the time to prepare his manuscript for the press. This man appears unable to forgive
me for the fact that not he, but I have come forward.
Ulrichs' approach to the emancipation of Urnings was entirely different from
Kertbeny's, so it's no surprise that their relationship was strained. Ulrichs
claimed to be an Urning, a man with the soul of a woman, and he published most of his
pamphlets under his own name. Kertbeny, whose pro-homosexual work always appeared
anonymously, claimed that he was heterosexual and he expressed a visceral distaste for
effeminacy. Kertbeny wanted to free people he sometimes called the
"slaves" of homosexualism from prosecution on liberal political grounds; Ulrichs
wanted to create a movement to improve the Urning's position in society. Even though
these men agreed that sexual orientation is innate and both opposed P. 143, their
differences kept either one from crediting the other with any contribution to his own
work.
"Homosexuality" Spreads
In 1868, Kertbeny promised his publisher a definitive work, Studies on Sexuality.
Whether the book was ever written is unknown, but he intended to write a historical study
devoted to the forms of homosexuality from antiquity to modern times, arguing that the
advent of the modern era demanded legal respect for mankind as it was expressed in the
French legal tradition.
In 1879, Kertbeny collaborated with a zoologist, Gustav Jager, and contributed a
chapter to Jager's Discovery of the Soul (1880). Jager's publisher was afraid to
publish Kertbeny's chapter on homosexuality, so it was not included in the final version,
but Jager used Kertbeny's terms. Richard von Krafft-Ebing probably
borrowed the terms homosexual and heterosexual in his Psychopathia Sexualis from
Jager. Krafft-Ebing's book was so popular among both layman and doctors that the
terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" became the most widely accepted
terms for sexual orientation.
Three years after his collaboration with Jager, Kertbeny died, apparently of a stroke.
Sources and Further Reading
This article is based largely on Feray and Herzer, 1990 and Herzer, 1985, the most
authoritative sources on Kertbeny in English. The quotation appraising Kertbeny's
work is from von Pukanszky as cited in Herzer, 1985. Quotations of Kertbeny's
recollection of his friend who committed suicide are from citations in Feray and Herzer,
1990. The excerpt of Ulrichs' correspondence with Egells is from Hubert Kennedy's
1998 biography of Ulrichs. There, Kennedy argues convincingly that Ulrichs' comments
were about Kertbeny.
Feray, Jean-Claude and Herzer, Manfred, trans. Glen W. Pepple, 1990. "Homosexual
Studies and Politics in the 19th Century: Karl Maria Kertbeny". Journal of
Homosexuality Vol. 19 no. 1.
Herzer, Manfred, 1985, trans. Hubert Kennedy. "Kertbeny and the Nameless
Love". Journal of Homosexuality. Vol.12, No. 1.
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 1995. The Invention of Heterosexuality. New
York: Plume/Penguin.
Kennedy, Hubert, 1988. Ulrichs: The Life and Works of Karl Heinrich
Ulrichs, Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Alyson.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 1994, trans, Michael Lombardi Nash. [originally, varies
dates in the mid-1800s]. The Riddle of 'Man-Manly' Love: The Pioneering
Work on Male Homosexuality. Buffalo, New York: Prometheus.
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© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
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