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Biography:  Karl Heinrich Ulrichs

	Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was born August 25, 1825 to Elise and Hermann Heinrich Ulrichs at his family's estate, Westerfeld, near Aurich in the Kingdom of Hanover, one of the Teutonic Kingdoms that was absorbed into Germany when it was unified in 1871.
	Elise was relieved when Karl, her fourth child, was born alive and healthy.  Two of the three	Karl Heinrich Ulrichs                    photo credits
	babies she had borne before Karl had died in infancy.   Only Louise, Karl's older sister had survived.  Two years after Karl was born, Elise gave birth to a third healthy baby, Ulrike, the sister to whom Karl grew closest. Elise came from devout Lutheran stock - her father and brother were both ministers - so young Karl was taught to be a faithful Christian.

In the short books he wrote as an adult, Ulrichs often turned to his own childhood experiences to illustrate his theories.  He remembered himself as a feminine boy.  According to his adult recollections, when he was forced to wear boys' clothes, he screamed:  "No, I want to be a girl" and his mother became concerned.  "Karl, you're not like other boys", she said, and she warned him often that unless he changed, he would grow up an "odd one".  Whether these recollections are accurate is hard to say because Ulrichs may have remembered a childhood that fit with the third sex theory he developed as an adult.

On Karl's tenth birthday, he saw his father buried.  His father died from injuries caused when he fell while taking field measurements in the course of his work as an architect in the civil service. Shortly after, Elise moved the family to Burgdorf to live with her father who took over as Karl's teacher.  At about 14, Karl went away to school in Detmold where he stayed with his Lutheran minister uncle.   While studying in Detmold, he had his first sexual awakening, and began to fantasize about handsome soldiers and the naked Greek gods that illustrated his school textbooks.

Although his mother and grandfather had expected him to study architecture like his father, when Karl was given a chance to take liberal arts courses, he excelled.   Permitted to pursue the University career he wanted, Ulrichs matriculated at a university in Gottingen in 1844.  He majored in law and excelled in the classical languages he learned to love.

During his university years, his fondness for men grew, especially for men in uniform, and he remembered being "tortured", probably by a mixture of guilt and sexual frustration, by his attraction to some forestry students he watched at a dance.  Though he thought the girls he danced with made good friends, he yearned to dance with the handsomely uniformed foresters, but he knew he couldn't. 

In 1846, Ulrichs moved to Berlin, a city that had a reputation as a center of same-sex "vice", to complete his final year of university study.  There, he found others like him and probably got his first chance to know the soldiers that he had always fantasized about.  Soldiers throughout Europe were poorly paid, and many were willing to trade sexual favors for money to supplement their meager incomes.   Though Ulrichs never admitted that he sampled their pleasures, he did write a poem praising the kisses of a Hussar, a soldier in the Prussian infantry.

A Career Destroyed

After finishing his studies, Ulrichs passed the required exam and entered state service in 1848 in Hanover. The career path he had chosen began at low rank, but a well-liked lawyer could expect promotions to high level jobs in the state bureaucracy or even a judgeship.

Ulrichs was promoted in 1852, but just two years later he was forced to resign his position as assistant judge because his sexual activities with other men had come to his superiors' attention.  He may have been blackmailed, but the evidence is inconclusive. While same-sex sexual activity was illegal in Prussia, the Kingdom of Hanover had no sodomy laws at the time. Nonetheless, the stigma attached to same-sex eroticism was so severe that Ulrichs only had two choices:  resign or be fired.   To avoid the humiliation and scandal of official termination, Ulrichs resigned.   For the next several years, he stayed with various relatives and then worked as a reporter for the Allgemeine Zeitung of Augsburg, and as secretary to a representative to the German Confederation in Frankfurt am Main.

Ulrichs' career as a writer never earned him much money and the inheritance he received in 1856 when his mother died was small.  Since Ulrichs had chosen a career as a writer, and eventually as an activist in the cause of homosexual emancipation, he always had to struggle to make a living.

Early Activism

Ulrichs was active in the German nationalist Young German Society which was organized in 1858 as a literary society and he contributed its publication, Teut.   In 1859, when the Society reorganized as the All German Society, Ulrichs' peers liked and respected him enough to name him Secretary of the Society.  The society's new agenda was explicitly political, supporting the unification of Germany against the hated French with a romantic ideal of the brotherhood of all Germans.

The dream of German unity that The All German Society stood for was motivated by the pitiable condition of the German military in the late 1850s.  Since the German kingdoms saw themselves as separate states, each with its own independent army, they were militarily vulnerable to the French.  Ulrichs and his fellow Society members were especially incensed by a crushing Austrian defeat in 1859.  Napoleon III trounced an Austrian army in Milan and with this victory, he was able to force Austria to surrender Lombardy, Modena, and Tuscany.  The All German Society was infuriated that the other German kingdoms sat by and did nothing to help their Austrian brethren.  Ulrichs published a poem, Battle Cry, in Teut decrying the lack of German unity that made Austria such an easy target.  He called on the German kingdoms to unite, and he especially scolded Prussia, the military powerhouse among the German kingdoms, for its passivity in the face of Austrian humiliation.

Ulrichs was so enthusiastic about the cause of German Nationalism that he joined a second political organization, the Free German Foundation for Science, Art, and General Culture based in Frankfurt.  At the foundation, Ulrichs lectured often about the need to unify Germany into a great nation, sometimes with such fervor that he provoked dissent.

In 1861, Ulrichs publicly expressed his first ideas about his own sexual nature using the terms of Animal Magnetism to members of the Foundation.  Although Animal Magnetism was a scientific theory that had been discredited, it was enjoying a brief renaissance in respectable German scientific circles. In a short outline he submitted to the Free German Foundation, Ulrichs described the "passive magnetism" of soft iron which is attracted to the "active magnetism" of steel.  People exhibit just the same kind of force, he wrote.  Women, with their passive magnetism, are attracted to the active magnetism of men.  Ulrichs argued that he and some other men possessed the same passive magnetism that exists in women, and so these members of a third sex are attracted to men .

He wrote that laws designed to suppress the expression of "passive magnetism", which is just as natural in men as it is in iron, are based on "poorly understood Bible passages" which have the same moral force as medieval laws about witchcraft and heresy. Ulrichs had already lost a respectable position because of his sexuality, so he knew he was taking a risk when he counted himself among the passively magnetic, but whatever fear he felt for himself didn't deter him.

In a series of circular letters to his family, Ulrichs began to improve on these early ideas.  Impressed by the medical literature about hermaphrodites, he concluded that he had a female sexual tendency (an attraction for men) that was just as natural and God given as the sexually ambiguous anatomy of a hermaphrodite.  Ulrichs came to believe that he and others like him were hermaphrodites of the mind.  Though his body was male, Ulrichs thought, he had the mind of a woman.

Ulrichs planned to publish his ideas about his sexuality, and wrote to members of his family to ask what they thought.  The responses varied only in the extent of their disapproval:  his sister Ulrike thought the idea "distasteful", her husband found it "inadvisable", and one of his many Lutheran pastor relatives was so disgusted that he told Ulrichs to stop writing him. 

Just as Ulrichs was about to publish his first booklet, the Free German Foundation expelled him from their ranks.  The foundation found his third sex and passive magnetism theories so offensive that when he insisted that his case be reconsidered, they rebuffed him with a legalistic (or was it sarcastic?) argument.  Ulrichs had claimed to be a member of a third sex, Foundation officials reasoned, and the Foundation bylaws only recognized members of the first two.

Numa Numantius and Urnings

Ulrichs tried to find a publisher for his first booklet, but no one wanted to be associated with such radical ideas.  Even though he made only a modest income, Ulrichs felt that his work was so important, and that anti-sodomy laws were so terrible, that he published Vindex (The Vindicator) at his own expense in 1864.  He wanted to publish his pamphlets under his own name, but he knew that the Ulrichs family would be embarrassed by his work, so he reluctantly used the pseudonym Numa Numantius.

The first task Ulrichs undertook in Vindex was to create new words for love between men.  He gave the love between men a German name that translates as "man-manly love".  Since he was a classical scholar, Ulrichs naturally turned to the ancient Greeks for the rest of his terminology.  He called men who love men Urnings and men who love women Dionings after Plato who had "traced the origins of man-manly love to [the god] Uranus, the love for women to [the god] Dione," in his fictional Symposium.   

Vindex, one of Ulrichs shorter works, presented the legal argument which he repeated again and again throughout his publishing career: 

1. Urnings are born.

2. Love for men is as natural for Urnings as love for women is for Dionings.

3. Therefore, prosecution of Urnings for doing what comes naturally is unjust.

Ulrichs quickly published a second volume, Inclusa, in the same year.  Inclusa was his first public defense of his scientific theory of man-manly love. 

Over 1000 copies of each pamphlet were printed in April and May, 1864, but on May 20, police in Leipzig seized most of Vindex and the few copies of Inclusa that had not yet been distributed. A judge was asked to decide whether they were illegally indecent or not. He found that they were not obscene, so the pamphlets were returned.   The situation in Berlin was less favorable: in September all the copies police could find were seized there, and Vindex and Inclusa were censored in all of Prussia.

Ulrichs' readers responded to the pamphlets differently.  Many men wrote to thank him for fighting for their rights, some for helping them understand themselves.

 
Ara spei  (Refuge of Hope), 1865.  The Fifth Pamphlet in the Series.
                                                                                        photo credits

Others wrote to disagree with him, especially complaining that they found themselves attracted to men, but were not the least bit feminine. Some even sent money, though never a lot, to support Ulrichs work. 

Political Prisoner

Events in 1866 re-ignited Ulrichs' nationalism. The Prussians invaded Hanover and forced her king into exile, annexing Hanover to Prussia in September and imposing the Prussian penal code which included an anti-sodomy statute, P. 143, that became P. 175 when Germany was united in 1871. Many Hanoverians were devoted to their monarch, and some were so loyal that they left home to serve their king in exile.  Ulrichs chose instead to stand and fight.  At a public meeting, he condemned the Prussian actions and called on Hanoverians to unite behind their king.  Ulrichs could not have been surprised when the Prussians put him in jail for two months. After his release, convinced as always of the rightness of his cause, he held more meetings. The Prussians arrested him again, and this time seized all his personal papers including the names of 150 Urnings he knew.  After 86 days in jail, Ulrichs was released and exiled from Hanover.  His papers were never returned.

Numa Numantius Comes Out

In 1868, perhaps hardened by his prison experience, Ulrichs took a courageous step:  he published two pamphlets, and instead of his usual pseudonym, he signed them with his own name.  He never called himself Numa Numantius again.  The first of his 1868 pamphlets, Gladius Furens ("Raging Sword"), recalls his harrowing experience at a conference for German lawyers and judges.

Thanks to the financial support from readers from all over Europe, Ulrichs was able to travel to Munich to attend the 1867 Congress of German Jurists.  There, Ulrichs was scheduled to present a proposal for the elimination of criminal penalties for man-manly love throughout Germany.  When his turn came to rise to the podium, Ulrichs was so anxious that his heart was "pounding in my breast".   Without admitting that he was an Urning himself, Ulrichs began his argument that the "penal code ... discriminates against an innocent class of people."  Once his audience knew that he was defending Urnings, one side of the lecture hall erupted with loud calls for adjournment.  Ulrichs offered to yield his place at the podium, but then others in the audience yelled "continue, continue!", so he did.  Apparently embarrassed by Ulrichs' subject, the President of the Congress asked him to continue his lecture, but to switch to scholarly Latin.  Ulrichs refused and returned to his seat.  Even though he never finished his speech, the attendees received printed copies of his intended remarks and a few wrote him letters of support, but the majority opinion was against him.

Ulrichs and the "Doctors of the Insane"

Beginning with his first pamphlet in 1864, Ulrichs' strategy had been to create a public discussion.  He believed that once the problem of man-manly love was exposed to the light of reason, right-thinking Germans would support the elimination of laws against Urnings.  In 1869, the public discussion he had hoped for finally came, but instead of responding to Ulrichs carefully honed arguments, his critics dismissed him as an immoral kook. 

An anonymous broadside like The Paradox must have hurt Ulrichs, but certainly not as badly as a review of his work that appeared in a respected German medical journal in 1869.  Ulrichs had long hoped for support from doctors who were considered experts on psychology and sex, so he must have been pleased that a medical journal would review the pamphlets he had sent them.  Any hope he had entertained was crushed when he read the review.  The anonymous reviewer asked:  "what does this poor unfortunate man name as the temple of nature?  The final ending of the intestine, which in humans received from the Almighty no other purpose than to release the rawest dregs, the last waste of the animal economy - the unfortunate 'private scholar' will have this foul-smelling hole honored as a sacred temple of love." 

In spite of this brutal treatment, Ulrichs never gave up in his quest to win influential doctors over to his views, but not a single one ever agreed with him that man-manly love is healthy. Many eminent psychiatrists, like Karl Westphal and Richard von Krafft-Ebing, agreed that laws against Urnings should be rescinded, but only so that they could have their "pathology" treated by doctors. 

Ulrichs tried especially hard to court Richard von Krafft-Ebing.  When Ulrichs read an article by Krafft-Ebing that seemed supportive of his views in 1866, he sent a collection of his pamphlets to the eminent psychiatrist.  In a letter he wrote thirteen years later, Krafft-Ebing credited Ulrichs with inspiring his own medical investigations.  "From that day when you sent me your writings...", Krafft-Ebing wrote, "I have turned my full attention to this phenomenon, which was just as puzzling as it was interesting to me;  and it was only the knowledge of your books which motivated me to study this highly important area..."

When Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing's own book on the "anti-pathic sexual instinct", appeared in 1886, Krafft-Ebing claimed many of Ulrichs' ideas as his own - without giving him any credit - and he added an ominous twist.  Just like Ulrichs, Krafft-Ebing  reasoned that homosexuals have a congenital sexual instinct directed toward their own sex, but Krafft-Ebing added something else:  degeneration.   When Krafft-Ebing added Morel's theory to the mix, Ulrichs' Urning was transformed from a healthy, natural creature into a pitiable degenerate.

Italian Exile

During the 1870s, Ulrichs published a few pieces, mostly in Latin, but he stopped writing about Urnings.  In letters uncovered by his biographer, Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs reveals that he was depressed because the criticism leveled at him had been so vicious, and because his fellow Urnings offered little financial or moral support.  Finally, in 1879 he published one last booklet, Critical Arrows.  There he responded to his critics, and concluded that man-manly love is not the business of the "Doctors of the Insane."

In 1880, Ulrichs, now 55 years old, decided to leave the hostility he experienced in Germany and move to Italy.  On a scenic trip that he took mostly on foot, often camping at night, Ulrichs explored the Italian countryside.  He traveled for about a year, then spent to years in Naples.  He finally settled in the small mountain town of L'Aquila, about fifty miles from Rome.  He managed to make a simple living as a tutor in the many languages he knew, and  Alaudae, a journal he published to promote Latin as an international language, earned him a little income. 

Even though Ulrichs described himself as an exile in L'Aquila, his twelve years there were far from lonely.  He stood out because he was a German and because he always seemed to be studying, but his neighbors quickly learned to like him, and his daily correspondence with Alaudae's readers kept him busy.  When John Addington Symonds, a famous English literary scholar who idolized Ulrichs, visited L'Aquila, Ulrichs relished the chance to talk to an expert about English Literature.

When Ulrichs was buried in Aquila in 1895, his funeral was a grand occasion befitting a local celebrity.  Officials from the mayor on down attended, and his funeral cart was draped with flowers from his many admirers.   It is sad that Ulrichs could not know that just two years after his death, Magnus Hirschfeld would continue his work in Berlin.

Cover Page of the Aquila Death Registry where the death of Karl Ulrichs was recorded in 1895.        photo credits

Notes

Hubert Kennedy's kind review of this article included several corrections which have been incorporated.  Michael Lombardi Nash's translations of Ulrichs' Latin titles and editorial suggestions have improved this mini-bio.

Hubert Kennedy's 1988 biography of Ulrichs is the standard biography of this heroic figure on which this mini-bio depends. Ulrichs childhood recollections are cited in Kennedy, 1988.  On the reasons that Ulrichs left his job as a lawyer, see Kennedy, 1997.  Ulrichs recollection of his warning that he might grow into an "odd one" is from his Inclusa. The reactions of Ulrike and her husband to Ulrichs' plan to publish are cited in Kennedy, 1988.  The quotations from Ulrichs early autobiographical sketch about Animal Magnetism are cited in Kennedy, 1988.  The term "man-manly love" is Michael Lombardi's translation of Ulrichs' German term.   The quotation from The Paradox of Venus Urania is excerpted from a passage quoted in Kennedy, 1988, as is the quotation from the review of Ulrichs work in the Medizinishche Press.  The quotation from the letter from Richard von Krafft-Ebing is from Critical Arrows.  Except where noted otherwise, quotations from Ulrichs' books are from Michael Lombardi-Nash's translation of his work (Ulrichs, 1994).

Photo Credits

The photograph of Karl Ulrichs is reproduced from the Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen, vol. 1, 1899 courtesy of the Archiv für Sexualwissenschaft, Berlin.

The cover page of "Ara Spei" is reproduced from an original copy housed at the Archiv und Bibiliothek des Schwulen Museums, Berlin.

The cover page of Das Paradoxon der Venus Urania is reproduced from an original housed at the Archiv und Bibiliothek des Schwulen Museums, Berlin.

The photograph of the book of Death notices is from a photograph by Massimo Consoli and is used with the kind permission of Archivio Massimo Consoli.

Sources and Further Reading

Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, 1910-1911. "Hanover". Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Greenburg, David F. 1988. The Construction of Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kennedy, Hubert, 1997. "Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: First Theorist of Homosexuality" in Vernon Rosario, ed., Science and Homosexualities. New York: Routledge.

Kennedy, Hubert, 1990.  "Karl Heinrich Ulrichs" in Wayne Dynes, ed., Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. 

Kennedy, Hubert, 1988. Ulrichs:  The Life and Work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs: Pioneer of the Modern Gay Movement. Boston: Alyson.

Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, trans. F. J. Rebman, 1928. Psychopathia Sexualis with Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study. Brooklyn: Physicians and Surgeons.

Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, trans. Michael Lombardi-Nash, 1994. The Riddle of Man-Manly Love: The Pioneering Work on Male Homosexuality. Buffalo: Prometheus.

© 1999 Andrew Wikholm All Rights Reserved