Was Castrum Peregrini’s Wolfgang Frommel gay? A Merkur discussion
In September 2018 I published in the German literary magazine Merkur a now downlaodable essay about the correspondence between Castrum Peregrini’s cult leader Wolfgang Frommel and his younger friend Friedrich W. Buri. In it I showed that this edition by Stephan C. Bischoff suppressed the fact that Frommel was for a long time an active supporter of the Nazi’s and argued that the editor desexualized Frommel’s sexual encounters with boys, of which Buri was one. The book couldn’t in my opinion stand the test of what an academic edition should be and I regarded it as propaganda for a type of friendschip that fits in the Classical Greek, however very Germanic tradition of ‘Pedagogical Eros’, a type that led to many documented cases of sexual abuse of boys and young men in Germany and Holland.
Bischoff wrote a long for the biggest part ad hominem critcism of my piece, which elicited serious comments by Christiane Kuby, Paul Visser and Joke Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, who were all one way or another connected to the Frommel Kreis. the Frommel circle. Christiane Kuby’s comment addresses the sexuality that was an integral part of Frommel’s idea and execution of his and his friends friendships. Paul Visser brings in his own dark and shocking experience as a victim of Frommel’s first younger friend William Hilsey and Joke Haverkorn van Rijsewijk rebuts Bischoff’s unsavory characterization of her intentions to write her intense and honest memoir Entfernte Erinnerungen and W[olfgang Frommel].
I reprint here one of my two comments, because it discusses homosexuality in the Frommel circle. It also discusses how in my view German George scholars seem to use the term homosexuality to avoid the much more disturbing terms pederasty or pedophilia in the biographical context of both Wolfgang Frommel and his ‘master’ Stefan George.
My perspective is that of a gay man, who was once part of the Frommel Kreis.
“One of the oddest of Bischoff’s observations in his blogpost is the characterisation of Wolfgang Frommel as a gay man. My comments on Bischoff’s edition of the correspondence between Frommel and F.W. Buri, initially a boy of 12, regarded amongst other issues sexual abuse, not ‘homosexual abuse’, if that is even a category. They were however countered by the editor, a trained medical doctor, as follows: ‘Frommel als Homosexuellen zu diskreditieren, wie es nicht nur F[rank] L[igtvoet], sondern auch Literaturexperten wie Ulrich Raulff und diverse Journalisten getan haben, ist inakzeptabel, sagte zu Recht Kai Kauffmann in seiner Rede am 26. September 2018 in Heidelberg zur Finissage einer George-Ausstellung im Haus Cajeth.’
One reason to call Bischoff’s characterisation odd is because Frommel was not a homosexual: he was possibly a pedophile and a pedosexual, for sure an ephebophile and ephebosexual, and — however secretly, but also with gusto, particularly when the women were young — a heterosexual. Another reason is that Frommel, like George, despised homosexuality when it referred to a relationship which copied traditional heterosexual relationships, when the relationship was not hierarchical and pedagogical. George called it ‘widerlich’ and Buri used the quote from where this word stems, as motto for his memoir Ich gab dir die Fackel im Sprunge: ‘Freundschaft zwischen Männern muss erzieherisch sein und tragisch, sonst ist sie widerlich.’ Buri wanted, I think, to make clear to the world that he was not a homosexual.
It is a misunderstanding to think that Frommel was secretly gay and Castrum a haven for gay men. Castrum’s ideology was anti-gay and most boys lured into the cult were heterosexual. To belong they were destined to have a sexual experience with an older male friend. However, the ideology was not always reflected in the reality: Frommel’s older friend (and younger friend of Stefan George), and Urfather of the cult Percy Gothein, used the Herengracht 401 where Frommel and friends lived during the war when he visited as ‘a boy’s bordello’, according to one of these boys quoted in Annet Mooij’s biography of Gisele d’Ailly, and Gothein stayed not alone in this abusive behavior.
Bischoff added to his ‘discreditation’ quote: ‘Das sollte F.L. wissen, der als Schwuler und gleichgeschlechtlich Verheirateter von der Liberalisierung der Homosexualität profitiert’. That means that I as a gay man should understand that I cannot discredit another man because he is gay. I understand that, but formulating it the way he does Bischoff stresses again Frommel’s assumed homosexuality. May I now add that I don’t suffer of self hate: not only my best friends are gay, I am it myself, so I would not discredit a homosexual because of his homosexuality. And then: ‘Profitieren von der Liberalisierung’? Sounds homophobe to me. Equality is a civil right, isn’t it? Or should I thank liberal Bischoff and his liberal friends for — when it comes in handy — changing their tune? I heard them sing in the past.
One more thing. What exactly did Prof. Dr. Kai Kauffmann say? We don’t know, because Kauffmann spoke in Heidelberg without a written text, as he emailed me. He riffed, when talking about the allegations of sexual abuse toward George and George followers, on another speech he had held in Bingen for the Stefan-George-Gesellschaft. That one is printed on their site. Neither in Heidelberg nor in Bingen did he speak about Frommel as a homosexual, Kauffmann wrote me. He talked about homosexuals in general. Here it is in the Bingener Fassung, when he talks about the needed academic research by George scholars into the allegations: ‘In keinem Fall darf es passieren, dass Homosexuelle, die zu Zeiten Georges unter der Strafandrohung des § 175 standen, von uns heute indirekt wieder in das Zwielicht des Schmutzigen, ja der Schweinerei gestellt werden, denn das hieße die damaligen Opfer moralischer Stigmatisierung und juristischer Verfolgung und Bestrafung erneut zu Tätern zu machen.’ So that should settle the case, although I am slightly taken aback by the wording ‘Zwielicht des Schmutzigen, ja der Schweinerei’. That could have been said a tad less salaciously. [I learned later that this was a quotation from a text by Ulrich Raulff].
Professor Kauffmann held his speech however at the closing session of the bibliophile exhibition of George and George related books, organized by antiquarian Thomas Hatry and historian Hans-Martin Mumm. Bischoff obviously attended. They have, like Bischoff, a great heart for homosexuals. In their catalogue they attack Julia Encke, who published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sontagszeitung the first account in a mainstream publication on sexual abuse in the Frommel Kreis in Germany and looks in her piece as well into the possibilities of sexual abuse in the George Kreis. Her piece, Hatry and Mumm write in their Vorwort: ‘richtete sich letzten Endes gegen die Homosexualität insgesamt.’ Well, if I can use my authority as a gay man and as one of the sources of Julia Encke’s piece, I am happy to say: No, she didn’t. She was focused on abuse, abuse inspired by the pedagogical eros ideology, that George codified in his Der Stern des Bundes: a collection of poems, that can be read — and was used as such — as a grooming manual. Just like Bischoff transforms Frommel into a gay man to get his point across that his critics are homophobes, so do Hatry and Mumm with Stefan George. They write: ‘Stefan George [bot] mit seinem Werk und seinem Kreis den Homosexuellen seiner Zeit einen künstlerischen Schutzraum […], der es erlaubte, sich zu seiner Dichtung zu bekennen, ohne sich outen zu müssen.’ But not unlike Frommel, George would never have accepted that he had created a haven for closeted gay men or worse, would never define himself as gay. George made through his disciples his distance to homosexuals and homosexuality very clear.
What happens in both cases, the Frommel case and the George case, is the transformation of both men into homosexuals. The fact that both men looked in the first place for boys and young men to erotically educate them, that pederasty was their first mission, a mission that lead particularly in casu Frommel and his circle to a lot of cases of sexual abuse, and in most cases to mental abuse, is that way obsfucated. By making both men homosexuals the George scholars — Bischoff, Kauffmann, Hatry and Mumm are not alone in using this magic wand — redefine the attacks on their sexual misbehavior as attacks on their homosexual behavior. And the latter ‘darf in keinem Fall passieren.’ Of course not. But the question is not about homosexual abuse, but about sexual abuse of boys and young men and in Frommel’s case girls and young women [as well].”
