Goethe and Schiller were a Couple. That’s what it says on the monument in Weimar, which bears the inscription: “The seal pair from the father land.” The relationship was in the character of the literature on other facets of the togetherness you liked the middle of the 19th century. Century, when the monument was erected, don’t think. It is the newer cultural studies, took to the intimate relationship of the two classics with new conceptual registers.
The result is a study with a salacious title: “Hot Brothers. Queer Theory and the Age of Goethe,“ by Robert Tobin appeared in 2015 and was of great scientific interest. For a reader in Berlin, the keyword of the “warm brothers” to put on a key: Rosa von Praunheim, the Doyen of the gay cinemas in Germany, a wig, and put himself in the mind back to a time two hundred years before his time. The Crocs he kept, making his Film “men friends” has, from the outset, something of an impromptu time – travel or a costume drama in hints, of a “period picture” in “casual footwear”.
A period of intense Homo-sociality
however, the project of some relevance, because the message of Tobin has not arrived in the bourgeois German Public, yet to the full extent. Could you summarize in about this way: The German classical period was an era of intense Homo-sociality, and at least in Parts also of homosexuality, however, had this concept at the time, not yet-developed concepts. “In this respect, the people did not even know what they were,” says Rosa von Praunheim, while he gets to work in the Detail.
His Film, he writes explicitly on the character of a “workshop”, some of the actionist shares of men’s friendships””. Because the big issue requires not only concessions to the “Genius Loci” – so a trip to Weimar, it is irritating also to the performative implementation. So it comes to temporary Inbesitz of the monuments by young men who like more than just a hint, may have looked like an intimate contact between the men, in the course of time. The cultural tourists’t let that put you off. And Praunheim makes it a pleasure to walk in beautiful landscapes don’t stop there. He wants to know.
For a whole range of conversation partners about Robert Tobin, are to be found. Since Goethe and Schiller (as Winckelmann, Kleist, Gleim, Platen, and August of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg) belong to the father land, they are subject to appropriate reclamation efforts. And so a number of people come in “men’s friendships” to deal from a scientific or committed or identifying point of view, the question of whether the numerous protestations of intense devotion between Goethe and Schiller and between many other men friends followed to 1800 concrete, physical actions. So, out of hand: Had Goethe Sex with men? At the end, with Schiller?
Since all human Action comes from contexts, needs to Rosa von Praunheim for the answer go back a little. He has to go back to Winckelmann who played the German, a Canon of the Beautiful gave in to the “well-formed boys” (primarily made of marble or Oil) a significant role. He must to Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, had for friendship, even a temple building. He turns to the journeys of Alexander von Humboldt, an Expert says: “His sexuality is behind his desire to travel”. And he trusts on August, Archduke of Saxony-Gotha-Altenburg, of a “poetic novel” with the title “Kyllenion. A year in Arcadia,“ has written, the shepherd idyll, has significant potential for a queer reading.
