The Aesthetics of Sexual Ethics: Geschlecht und Gesellschaft and Middle-Class Sexual Modernity in Fin-De-Siècle Germany

Abstract

From its fin-de-siecle inception against the backdrop of Wilhelmine-era body culture and Lebensreform movements, the liberal German periodical Geschlecht und Gesellschaft consistently worked to push the boundaries of sexual discourse within a framework of bourgeois respectability. Until the end of World War I, it did so by prioritizing aesthetic discourse, with contributors undertaking progressive, sexually explicit readings of the Western canon, challenging controversial censorship decisions - using 'high' culture to appeal to an educated Bildungsbürgertum readership - and exploring a new Darwinianinspired sexual ethics. While the institutional and intellectual history of the furor sexualis as a paradigm of modernity has largely been mapped since Foucault, with historians charting the 'scientification', 'biologization' and 'medicalization' of German society in early twentieth-century modernity, this article positions aesthetic discourse as a key aspect of the pursuit of the truth of sex. It also shows how this cultural paradigm largely disappeared in the Weimar era, when shifts in middle-class demographics led to an increasing focus on science in discussions of sex.