Peripheral desires

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In Peripheral Desires, Robert Deam Tobin explores the emergence of a new vocabulary and understanding of human sexuality in German-speaking central Europe from the 1830s to the early twentieth century. He highlights how literary authors, politicians, and medical professionals consistently linked nonnormative sexualities to locations outside major cities like Berlin and Vienna. For instance, Aimée Duc and Lou Andreas-Salomé viewed Switzerland as a refuge for women escaping Germany's sexual constraints. Similarly, Ferdinand Karsch-Haack's sexual ethnologies and Karl May's novels associated nonnormative sexualities with colonial territories, particularly German Samoa. Same-sex desire emerged as a significant theme, with connections drawn between homosexuality and Hungarian nationalism in the works of Adalbert Stifter and Karl Maria Kerbeny. Arnold Zweig linked same-sex desire to Jewish identity, projecting it onto the territory of Palestine, while Thomas Mann famously associated male-male desire with Venice, a city straddling land and sea, Europe and the Orient. As Germany and its surrounding regions became fertile ground for homosexual subcultures in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Tobin examines the political, scientific, and literary factors that shaped this evolving understanding of sexuality.