Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg

Bad Gays

Huw Lemmey & Ben Miller

History

4.6 • 842 Ratings

🗓️ 18 January 2022

⏱️ 59 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The "Eulenberg Affair," a series of media scandals about homosexual behavior at the highest levels of the German Imperial court, dragged on in the press for years as it made and broke careers in journalism, sexology, and the court while helping define both Imperial Germany’s relationship to masculinity and the emerging homosexual emancipation movements. Plus drag ballet, Wagnerists, extremely racist paintings, songs about roses, and moustaches with names. ----more---- SOURCES: SOURCES: Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Vintage, 2014) Miranda Carter, “What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?,” The New Yorker, June 6, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/what-happens-when-a-bad-tempered-distractible-doofus-runs-an-empire Norman Domeier, “The Homosexual Scare and the Masculinization of German Politics before World War I,” Central European History 47, no. 4 (2014): 737–59 Norman Domeier, “Scandal & Science – The Power of Sexology in the Eulenburg Affair, 1906-1909,” n.d., http://www.hist.ceu.hu/conferences/graceh/abstracts/domeier_norman.pdf Martin B. Duberman, Jews, Queers, Germans: A Novel/History, Seven Stories Press first edition (New York ; Oakland: Seven Stories Press, 2017) John C. G. Röhl, The Kaiser and His Court: Wilhelm II and the Government of Germany, trans. Terence F. Cole, 1st ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Alex Ross, Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music (New York: Picador Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021) Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Theory and History of Literature, v. 22-23 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Our intro music is Arpeggia Colorix by Yann Terrien, downloaded from WFMU's Free Music Archive and distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Our outro music is by DJ Michaeloswell Graphicsdesigner. The 15-second clip of "Monatsrose" by Philipp, Prince of Eulenburg is sung by tenor Marcel Wittrisch with orchestra and organ conducted by Bruno Seidler-Winkler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mq2XXG8JRNU

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to Season 5, Episode 4 of Badgays, a podcast all about evil and complicated queer people in history.
0:23.6	My name is Heelemi. I'm a writer and author.
0:25.7	And I'm Ben Miller, a writer, researcher, and member of the board of the Shulist Museum in Berlin.
0:31.3	Last week we talked about Ernst von Rath, the Nazi diplomat. Who are we talking about today, Ben?
0:37.9	Well, as always, I'm going to start with a story. We're remaining this week in the world
0:44.3	of the Prussian elite and the Prussian upper classes, but we're turning the clock back
0:50.3	now to November of 1908, and we're at the DonShingen Castle in the Black Forest, which is one of
0:56.3	Kaiser Wilhelm II's country retreats. The reign of Wilhelm I, under whose stern leadership,
1:02.8	the Hohensala and Royal House of Prussia had unified all of the formerly separate lands of Germany in
1:07.9	1870 had come to an end 20 years earlier, and he was replaced by
1:12.6	the far less impressive Wilhelm II, his grandson, who became the emperor after the 99-day,
1:19.7	brief sickly reign of Frederick III. Tactless and blunt, Wilhelm II embarked on an aggressive
1:25.9	colonial project and alienated former allies, including Adov von Bismarck, who he fired in 1890.
1:32.3	Nevertheless, he loved retreating to his country estate where he could relax and enjoy an evening's entertainment with generals.
1:39.3	On this November evening, Dietrich Graf von Hoosen-Hieselah, chief of the German Imperial Military Cabinet, decided to put on a little show.
1:48.7	To strains of music piped in by a military band, the good general danced into the room in a pink tutu and ballerina slippers,
1:56.8	playing and jetting around the room to the delight of the entire audience.
2:01.9	As if in an allegory about flying too close to the sun, or in this case flying too close to the spotlight,
2:07.6	at the end of the performance, dancing in a more and more frenzied fashion,
2:11.3	jumping and blowing kisses and pirouetting as if possessed by the red shoes themselves,
2:15.9	he dropped dead of a heart attack.
2:18.0	Was he still in the tutu?
	...

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