Daily Life in the Nineteenth Century457years of hard labor. When that statute was reformed in
1912, it permitted the flogging of homosexuals without
a jury trial. These statutes remained in force until 1967.
Such statutes did not even mention lesbianism, an un-
thinkable subject to most Victorian legislators.
The criminalization of homosexuality led to dra-
matic scandals and trials at the turn of the twentieth
century. The most famous trial involved a celebrated
Irish writer, Oscar Wilde. Wilde was arrested following
an acrimonious and public battle with the marquess of
Queensbury (a bully chiefly remembered for formulat-
ing the rules of boxing), the father of his lover. Wilde
was convicted in 1895 and imprisoned until 1897, an
experience that he related in Ballad of Reading Gaol
(1898). The government could have indicted many
other prominent homosexuals—such as the members of
the Bloomsbury set (named for a district of London),
which included the economist John Maynard Keynes,
the biographer Lytton Strachey, and the novelist E. M.
Forster—but the government would have been obliged
to arrest several of its own members.
A larger scandal over homosexuality occurred in
Germany, where the central figures were not intellectu-
als but the commanders of the German army, members
of the imperial government, and close associates of
Kaiser Wilhelm II. The policy of the German army was
to court-martial homosexuals if they had been publicly
identified. That policy led to two dramatic trials in
1903–06, at which several officers were named, includ-
ing the commander of the royal guard who was a mem-
ber of the royal family. This led to the public admission
that Prince Friedrich Heinrich of Prussia was gay. The
German press then began a flamboyant investigation of
homosexuality in the army and the government. The
press soon focused on the kaiser’s closest friend, Prince
Philipp zu Eulenburg, an ambassador and a member of
the House of Lords. When a police investigation be-
gan, the Berlin vice squad quickly identified several
hundred prominent aristocrats, officers, and officials as
known homosexuals, including General Kuno Count
von Moltke, the military commandant of Berlin. The
result was another wave of courts-martial in 1907–09.
The German public soon received admissions of homo-
sexuality from a long list of public figures, ranging from
the director of the state theater to the royal equerry. As
the number of homosexuals in royal and military circles
became clear, one segment of the German press turned
to homophobic attacks, using the affectionate nick-
names that lovers revealed at trials. At the peak of this
scandal, a prominent general died of a heart attack
while dressed in a ballerina’s tutu, to the cruel delight of
political cartoonists.
The German scandals had tragic results for the in-
dividuals involved and dangerous implications for soci-
ety. Kaiser Wilhelm II blamed the entire experience
neither on the criminalization of homosexuality nor on
the men who had broken his laws, but on the machina-
tions of “international Jewry.” He reached this bizarre
and ominous conclusion because the journalist who had
exposed Eulenburg was Jewish. It was equally ominous
that the scandals, and the homophobic attacks, encour-
aged aggressive militarism, as a proof of masculinity, in
Germany.