The Uranian and the Gone Native: Two Threats to the Same Order

How the 19th-century state pathologized both the man who loved men and the colonizer who crossed the line—and why the German response to that history became the foundation of European liberty

There is a moment in Friedrich Schiller’s Aesthetic Education of Man—the Sixth Letter, written in 1795—where he draws a distinction that the 19th century would spend the next hundred years trying to erase.

Schiller is talking about what the state will tolerate in its servants. The state, he writes, is “so jealous of the exclusive possession of its servants” that it would rather see them consort with the “Venus of Cytherea”—the common, material, reproductive love—than with the “Uranian Venus.” The Uranian Venus, drawn from Plato’s Symposium, is the heavenly love, the love between equals, the love that is not bound to reproduction or to the state’s demographic project. It is a higher love. And it is, from the state’s point of view, a threat.

Schiller was not writing about sexuality in the modern sense. The Uranian was not yet a sexual identity. It was a philosophical category—a mode of relation, a form of excellence, a way of loving that existed outside the state’s prescribed structures. But the state’s jealousy was real. And within a century, the state would take that philosophical category, collapse it into a medical diagnosis, criminalize it, and send the men it described to concentration camps with a pink triangle sewn to their jackets.

This is the story of how the Uranian and the “gone native” became the same threat. And it is the story of how Germany—the state that perfected the persecution—became the state that built the legal architecture of the response.

The State That Needed Sons

The industrial state of the mid-19th century had a problem. It needed workers for its factories and soldiers for its armies. Prussia had pioneered universal conscription in 1813, and by the 1870s the entire German Empire was organized around the principle that every able-bodied man owed military service to the state. The army needed bodies. The factories needed bodies. The state needed a population that reproduced.

That need transformed marriage and reproduction from a private matter into a public interest. The state began to manage the population as a resource: birth rates, mortality rates, marriage rates, fertility. This is what Michel Foucault would later call biopolitics—the state’s management of life itself. And the unmarried man, the man who did not sire, the man who opted out of the reproductive project, was no longer just a moral failure. He was a shirker. He was a defector.

Enter Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. In 1864, this German jurist published the first of his twelve pamphlets under the title Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe—”Researches on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love”. Ulrichs coined the term “Urning”—drawing directly on Plato’s Uranian Aphrodite—to describe men who desired men. And he went further than any predecessor. He argued that the Urning was born that way. He described same-sex desire as innate, as a natural variation. He even proposed the possibility of an “Urning marriage,” a form of legal recognition for the love he insisted was not a crime but a fact of nature.

In 1867, two years before the North German Confederation would adopt the Prussian sodomy statute as Paragraph 143 of its penal code, Ulrichs stood before the Congress of German Jurists in Munich and demanded the repeal of all anti-sodomy laws. He was shouted down. But the act itself—a self-identified Urning, speaking publicly, in his own name, before the assembled legal establishment of the German states—was unprecedented. He had made the category visible. And visibility, as the state understood, was a threat.

The state’s response was to classify him. To pathologize him. To make him a case study, a diagnosis, a species of person who could be managed.

Foucault’s famous formulation captures the shift: “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.” Before the 19th century, the law punished an act. After the 19th century, the law managed a type of person. The category was the point. The category made the person legible. And legibility made him manageable.

The term “homosexual” itself was coined in 1869 by Karl Maria Kertbeny, a Hungarian journalist and translator, in an anonymous pamphlet protesting the Prussian anti-sodomy statute. Kertbeny’s argument was that the “homosexual instinct” was innate, given by nature at birth, and that punishing it was therefore unjust. The word he invented would become the taxonomic label that the state and the medical profession would use to manage the population he had tried to defend.

That same year, 1869, the Berlin psychiatrist Carl Westphal published Die Konträre Sexualempfindung—”Contrary Sexual Feeling”—in the Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten. It is considered the first scientific paper on homosexuality. Westphal described two cases: a young woman who from her earliest years dressed as a boy and was attracted only to women, and a man who wanted to wear women’s clothes and act the part of a woman. He coined the diagnostic category “contrary sexual feeling” to describe them. The classification was the point. Westphal was not interested in the moral status of the acts. He was interested in the type of person who committed them. The type was the pathology. The pathology was the handle the state needed.

Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German psychiatrist, took Westphal’s classification and made it a system. His Psychopathia Sexualis, first published in 1886, described homosexuality as a “sexual perversion” and classified its forms as either “congenital” or “acquired”. Krafft-Ebing combined Ulrichs’ Urning theory with Bénédict Morel’s theory of degeneracy and concluded that most homosexuals had a mental illness caused by degenerate heredity. The Urning had been a natural type in Ulrichs’ argument. In Krafft-Ebing’s system, he became a diseased type.

But Krafft-Ebing also opened a door. By classifying homosexuality as congenital in some cases—by treating it as innate rather than chosen—he made it available to a different kind of argument. If it was innate, then the person could not be blamed for it. If the person could not be blamed, then the law that punished him was unjust. The same classification that pathologized the Urning also gave him a defense.

That defense was taken up by Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1897, Hirschfeld—a German-Jewish physician and sexologist—founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee) in Berlin. It was the world’s first organization dedicated to the rights of homosexuals, and its founding purpose was to campaign against Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Penal Code, the legacy of the earlier Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code, and to secure social recognition for sexual minorities. Hirschfeld’s strategy was to use science as a weapon against law. He argued that homosexuality was a natural, inborn variation—not a disease, not a crime, not a sin. And he built an institution to prove it.

In 1919, Hirschfeld opened the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, the world’s first institute for the study of sexuality. It was a place of research, political advocacy, counseling, and public education. It was also, in the eyes of its enemies, a symbol of everything the old order was determined to destroy. Adolf Hitler would later call Hirschfeld “the most dangerous man in Germany”.

The Colonizer Who Crossed the Line

Half a world away, the same logic was operating on a different front.

In British India, the early East India Company officials had married Indian women, learned Indian languages, adopted Indian customs, and built networks of kinship and intelligence that made the empire function. The “gone native” colonizer was not a failure. He was an asset. He was the empire’s bridge to the society it was trying to govern.

But by the mid-19th century, the empire had changed its mind. The racial lines hardened. “Going native” became a career-ending offense. Intermarriage was discouraged, then prohibited. Mixed-race children were stigmatized, abandoned, or hidden away in orphanages.

This was not an abstraction. It was enforced on individual lives, often brutally, and often against men of modest rank and little protection. In British East Africa, the case of H. Silberrad, Acting Collector in Nyeri, became a scandal in 1908 after a settler accused him of bringing “native girls” into the government boma for “immoral purposes” and demanded his removal “as a sign that the Government wishes all natives to see that an official who acts thus does not do so with the approval of the Government.” The charges were dismissed locally, but the Colonial Office intervened with a warning that made the real rule plain: “the practice of cohabitation with native women has been and is extremely common throughout the colonies and protectorates of West & East Africa; indeed, I am informed that of the unmarried white officials there is only a small percentage who have abstained entirely from the practice.” The lesson for the ordinary officer was not that the practice was forbidden. It was that discovery was.

The German colonies had their own vocabulary for this. In Deutsch-Südwestafrika—modern Namibia—the term was Verkafferung, denoting the “sinking of a European to the cultural level of the native.” The Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon described it as a “regrettable degeneration,” caused by “a lonely life in the field, in constant intercourse with colored people, and especially marriage with them.” The Verkafferte European was, in the lexicon’s words, “always a lost member of the white population.” Punishment was administrative as much as legal: sources record that settlers suffering from alcoholism were expelled from the colony altogether, and the Verkafferung implied “the denial of the legal-political status” of the individuals concerned.

In British West Africa, the phrase was “going Fantee”—a term that described the European who had “reverted” to native customs. It appears in the late 1800s and early 1900s as “a short-hand expression of the failure of ‘civilization’ to take hold.” Rudyard Kipling used it in Plain Tales from the Hills: “He was perpetually ‘going Fantee’ among natives, which, of course, no man with any sense believes in.” To be known as a man who had “gone Fantee” was to be marked as unreliable, undisciplined, and unfit for the responsibilities of colonial administration.

The Portuguese had their own term: cafrealizado. In Angola and Mozambique, it referred to the Portuguese colonist who had adopted indigenous manners and often taken an African wife or concubine. The term “surgiu no século XVIII com o propósito de estigmatizar o português”—it arose in the 18th century to stigmatize the Portuguese who, especially in East Africa, crossed the line. The cafrealizado was treated as a threat to the colonial project itself, because he demonstrated that the boundary between colonizer and colonized could be crossed.

The same pattern repeated across every colonial empire. In the Dutch East Indies, interreligious marriage prohibitions applied before 1848, barring marriages between Christians and non-Christians; “although this prohibition was framed in terms of religion, it was commonly understood to be about race.” In the American South, anti-miscegenation laws were enforced disproportionately against Black men and poor whites, while white men of property who fathered children with enslaved women faced no legal consequence. The rules were universal on paper and selective in practice. The point was not to prevent crossing. The point was to ensure that only the right people could cross, and on terms that preserved their status.

The Same Threat, the Same Response

The Uranian and the “gone native” were the same threat because they were both refusals of the state’s reproductive and social project. The Uranian refused the duty to sire. The “gone native” refused the duty to remain separate. Both produced persons who could not be placed in the state’s categories. Both were managed through the same instruments: criminal law, marriage law, colonial regulation, medical taxonomy.

And both were, in practice, exempt for the elite. In British India, senior officials who kept Indian mistresses were tolerated or quietly transferred. In Wilhelmine Germany, the Eulenburg affair of 1906–1909 exposed the fact that the Kaiser’s closest friend and confidant, Prince Philipp Eulenburg, was alleged to be part of a “homosexual camarilla” that had shaped imperial policy. The scandal shook the monarchy to its core—not because homosexuality was rare in the elite, but because it was tolerated in the elite and criminalized in the population.

The affair was sparked by the journalist Maximilian Harden, who accused Eulenburg and General Kuno von Moltke of homosexual conduct—a criminal offense under Paragraph 175. The scandal dominated European headlines until 1909. It was the first modern scandal in which homosexuality was openly discussed. And it revealed the paradox at the heart of the system. The same law that was used to imprison working-class men was used to attack the Kaiser’s inner circle. The state had created a category it could not control.

The Weimar Interlude

The collapse of the Empire in 1918 and the birth of the Weimar Republic opened a brief window. Berlin became a center of gay and lesbian life—bars, clubs, newspapers, organizations. Hirschfeld’s Scientific-Humanitarian Committee collected signatures on petitions to repeal Paragraph 175. And in October 1929, a Reichstag committee voted by a narrow margin to remove Paragraph 175 from the draft of a new German penal code. It was the closest the reformers had ever come. The law would have been repealed.

It was never implemented. The political crisis that would bring the Nazis to power intervened. And with the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, the window closed.

The Road to the Camps

The path from classification to exclusion to extermination is a single continuum.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, many in Germany believed they would be friendly to homosexuals. Ernst Röhm, the leader of the SA, was openly gay. His sexuality was public knowledge. Gay men felt safe because one of the most powerful men in the regime was one of them.

That illusion lasted barely a year. In the summer of 1934, Hitler ordered the execution of Röhm and 300 of his men in the Night of the Long Knives. Röhm’s homosexuality was used as a justification for the purge. The regime then began to dismantle the gay infrastructure it had tolerated. Gay and lesbian bars and periodicals were shuttered in the spring of 1933. All homosexual organizations were banned.

The key move came on June 28, 1935, when the Ministry of Justice revised Paragraph 175. The revision expanded the range of criminal offenses to encompass any contact between men—physical or in the form of a word or gesture—that could be construed as sexual, and it strengthened penalties for all violations. It also added Paragraph 175a, which created a new category of “serious indecency” with harsher penalties.

The legal revision was accompanied by a rhetorical transformation. The Nazis did not treat the homosexual as a criminal. They treated him as a pathogen—a threat to the Volkskörper, the racial body. In Nazi eyes, gay men were “weak and unfit to be soldiers, as well as unlikely to have children and thereby contribute to the racial struggle for Aryan dominance”. The classification, translated into law by the Empire, was translated into genocide by the Nazis.

The consequences were catastrophic. Approximately 50,000 men were sentenced under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi period, and around 10,000 were deported to concentration camps. There, they were forced to wear pink triangles on their clothing. The pink triangle designated not just a convict but a person to be eliminated.

Conditions in the camps were brutal beyond description. Homosexual prisoners constituted the lowest rung in the camp hierarchy. They were frequently assigned the most difficult and dangerous work. Other prisoners often ostracized them. More than half of the men deported with the pink triangle were murdered. In Buchenwald, one historian estimated that every second inmate with a pink triangle died. Some were subjected to experiments—an SS doctor attempted to “cure” homosexuality through the implantation of sexual hormones.

And then came the part that Germany took decades to acknowledge. After 1945, West Germany kept the Nazi-amended version of Paragraph 175 on the books until 1969. East Germany removed it from its criminal code in 1968. West Germany reverted to the pre-Nazi version in 1969, limiting the law to “qualified cases,” and finally repealed it entirely in 1994, four years after reunification.

Men who had been convicted under the Nazis were not recognized as victims. Some were re-imprisoned after the war. The classification and exclusion did not end with the Nazi defeat. It continued in the Federal Republic. The German state had not merely failed to stop the persecution. It had continued it.

The German parliament did not complete legislation to pardon all homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era until May 2002. A memorial to the gay victims of the Nazi regime was unveiled in Berlin in 2008, a concrete slab near the Brandenburg Gate with a window showing a film of two men kissing. It took more than sixty years for Germany to say publicly what had been done.

The Response: Human Dignity as the Foundation

This is the history that produced the German legal response. And it is a response that is not about sexuality in the narrow sense. It is about the state’s power over the individual, and the limits of that power.

The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, enacted in 1949, begins with Article 1: “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” Article 2 guarantees the right to free development of personality. The German Federal Constitutional Court has consistently interpreted these provisions as protecting individuals against discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and gender identity.

The grammar is anti-totalitarian. The state classified, excluded, and exterminated. The response is: never again. The state must not have the power to do this. The state must not have the power to define a person out of existence.

This is why the German framing is different from the American framing. The American grammar is affirmative and identity-based: who you are, what you demand, what the state must recognize and celebrate. The German grammar is negative and individual-rights-based: what the state must not do. It says: the state must not intrude. The state must not degrade. The state must not classify a person as a pathology to be managed.

The pink triangle is the memory of what the state did. The Basic Law is the response to that memory.

At the European level, Article 21 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union prohibits discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation. The Charter became binding with the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. This is the juridical architecture of the response. It is not a celebration of identity. It is a limitation on power.

The Universal Lesson

The connection between the Uranian and the “gone native” is not an analogy. It is a single administrative project with multiple fronts. The state needed legible categories. The Uranian and the “gone native” produced illegibility. The state’s response was to classify, criminalize, pathologize, and—at the extreme—exterminate.

The road to individual liberty runs through the recognition that the state’s categories are not natural facts. They are administrative choices. The Uranian was not a pathology. He was a person. The “gone native” was not a perversion. He was a person. The state’s power to define them otherwise was the threat. And the response—in German constitutional law, in European human rights law—is to limit that power.

Schiller’s Uranian Venus was never about sex. It was about a form of love that existed outside the state’s prescribed structures. The state’s jealousy, which Schiller described in 1795, was the first recognition that such a love was a threat. The 19th century’s response was to classify it, criminalize it, and try to eliminate it. The 20th century’s response—after the camps, after the continued persecution, after the decades of silence—was to say: never again.

This is the German lived reality. It is also a universal lesson. The state that claims the power to define a person out of existence is the state that will eventually try. The limitation of that power is not a concession to a minority. It is the foundation of liberty for everyone.

Sources

Schiller, Friedrich. On the Aesthetic Education of Man, Sixth Letter (1795–96).
Plato. Symposium, 180c–181d (Pausanias’ speech on the two Aphrodites).
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich. Forschungen über das Räthsel der mannmännlichen Liebe (Leipzig, 1864–1868). Published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius. Hefte 1–7.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich. Vindex. Social-juristische Studien über mannmännliche Geschlechtsliebe (1864). Ulrichs’ argument that same-sex desire is innate.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich. Speech before the Congress of German Jurists, Munich, 1867. The first public demand for the repeal of anti-sodomy laws by a self-identified Urning.
Kertbeny, Karl Maria. Anonymous pamphlet protesting the Prussian anti-sodomy statute (1869). First public use of the term “homosexual”.
Westphal, Carl. Die Konträre Sexualempfindung. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, vol. 2 (1869), pp. 73–108. The first “scientific” paper on homosexuality; coined the phrase “contrary sexual feeling”.
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von. Psychopathia Sexualis (Stuttgart, 1886). Described homosexuality as a “sexual perversion”; classified congenital and acquired forms; linked homosexuality to degenerate heredity.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. Founding of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee), Berlin, May 1897.
Hirschfeld, Magnus. Founding of the Institute for Sexual Science, Berlin, 1919. Destroyed by the Nazis in May 1933.
Ellis, Havelock, and John Addington Symonds. Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897). First English medical textbook on homosexuality.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction (1976). “The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”
Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code (Strafgesetzbuch), enacted 15 May 1871.
Reichstag Committee on Criminal Law, vote to repeal Paragraph 175, October 16, 1929. The committee voted by a narrow margin to remove the law from the draft penal code; it was never implemented.
Domeier, Norman. The Eulenburg Affair: A Cultural History of Politics in the German Empire. Trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2015. The scandal broke in 1906; the first modern scandal in which homosexuality was openly discussed.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Revision of Paragraph 175.” June 28, 1935: Ministry of Justice revised Paragraphs 175 and 175a, expanding criminal offenses and strengthening penalties.
Arolsen Archives. “Rudolf Brazda: ‘They didn’t destroy me.’” Approximately 50,000 men sentenced; around 10,000 deported to concentration camps with pink triangles; more than half murdered.
Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. “Paragraph 175 Prisoners in Auschwitz.” Homosexual prisoners constituted the lowest rung in the camp hierarchy.
Röll, Wolfgang. Study of Buchenwald, cited in “Homosexual Inmates in the Buchenwald Concentration Camp.” Every second inmate with a pink triangle died.
German Bundestag. Pardon of homosexuals convicted under Paragraph 175 during the Nazi era, May 2002.
German Bundestag. Repeal of Paragraph 175, 10 March 1994; effective 11 June 1994.
East German Criminal Code, removal of Paragraph 175, 1968.
West German Criminal Code, revision of Paragraph 175, 1969; full repeal 1994.
Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime, Berlin, inaugurated 27 May 2008. Designed by Elmgreen & Dragset.
Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany (Grundgesetz), Article 1 (human dignity) and Article 2 (free development of personality).
Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, Article 21 (non-discrimination), OJ C 202, 7.6.2016, p. 398.
Prussian conscription laws: Edict of 9 February 1813; Law of 3 September 1814.
Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (1794), Part II, Title 1, §§ 76 et seq.
Joshi, Shubha. “The Closet in the Colony: British Colonialism, Indian Nationalism and (Re)definitions of Gender and Sexuality.” Diss., Rice University, 2007. On “going native” and interracial homoerotic intimacies as related concerns.
Silberrad case, British East Africa, 1908. Colonial Office correspondence on cohabitation with native women.
Deutsches Kolonial-Lexikon (1920). Entry on Verkafferung.
Kipling, Rudyard. Plain Tales from the Hills (1888). Use of “going Fantee.”
Portuguese colonial terminology: cafrealizado, 18th-century origin.
Dutch East Indies interreligious marriage prohibitions before 1848.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Paragraph 175 and the Nazi Campaign against Homosexuality.”