The Correspondence of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, 1846-1894

by Douglas Ogilvy Pretsell

This book will be the first critical edition of all the surviving correspondence to, from and about Karl Heinrich Ulrichs between 1846 and 1894. Ulrichs, a former Hanoverian lawyer, was the first to articulate a personal identity of sexuality that defined individuals by their sexual object. This articulation of sexual modernist identities is Ulrichs’ abiding legacy to the world. He wrote twelve short books between 1864 and 1879, arguing for the removal of laws and prejudice against 'urnings' and articulating a scientific theory that placed them as a third gender. He is a foundational figure in the history of sexuality, yet there has never been an edition of his complete correspondence in either English or the original German.
The correspondence between the years of 1846 and 1894 covers three definable the years before Ulrichs began writing (1846-1864); the years between which all his principle works, his lobbying and all his activism took place (1865-1879); and his final years in exile (1880-1895). The analysis will contend that the correspondence reveals that Ulrichs’ project was not just a lonely campaign against legal prohibition of the 'hydra of public contempt', but instead was part of a far wider campaign of community-led self-definition that was actively promoted at home and abroad.

290 pages, Hardcover

Published May 21, 2020

Reviews

[C · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The year that Ulrichs died, 1895, was a landmark year in queer history: Oscar Wilde was tried and found guilty of gross indecency in London in April and May; Magnus Hirschfeld, a young Jewish doctor, was making preparations to establish a sexual health clinic in Berlin and working on the manuscript for his first book on homosexuality, Sappho und Sokrates, Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds' work on sexual inversion appeared in Germany as Das konträre Geschlechtsqefühl. Each of these men was aware of Ulrichs and his works. Ulrichs' campaign stands out because it preceded the flowering of Weimar homosexual culture, the launch of the first homosexual rights organisation and the establishment of the discipline of sexology by several decades. Ulrichs felt his ideas had been neglected in his later years, but his work had laid the groundwork for all the developments in the understanding of, and the fight for, the rights of homosexuals in the century that followed" (p. 30)

In this critical edition of the letters of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, accompanied by an introduction that traces his life with connections drawn to his letters and work, Pretsell compiles the life and letters of a pioneering writer, theorist, and activist of the rights and lives of people he termed urnings, those who desire man-manly love. Although Ulrichs has been mentioned in a number of history books throughout the years and especially the last decade, Pretsell's critical work contextualizes the life of Ulrichs and how his work connected him to others in the queer republic of letters that formed around him in the late-1800s. As Robert Deam Tobin shows in his survey history of German formations of same-sex literacy (the making of meaning by reading and writing the word and the world), Ulrichs was a product of his time, language, and what was possible for him to think and imagine, as were those who came before him and after.

P.S. Pretsell has also written a thesis/dissertation on Ulrichs and his time called "The Age of the Urning: Queer Identities and Advocacy in Germany, 1864-1897", which hopefully he'll turn into a book.