Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is a notorious figure in European history.1 A Jewish intellectual of Vienna, Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 after publishing a single book based on his doctoral dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). The work was admired by some of the greatest intellects of our century—Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, August Strindberg. More recently, it has attained virtually legendary status among scholars as an exemplary text of European misogyny and antisemitism. While Geschlecht und Charakter is certainly unrivaled as a compendium of turn-of-the-century prejudices, stereotypes, and anxieties, it is not simply a deranged thinker's chronicle of personal nightmares. This fact has been obscured due to the failure of recent scholars to situate Weininger and his work in the intellectual and cultural contexts of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. This paper demonstrates that Geschlecht und Charakter is an intensely personal analysis of intellectual, political, and cultural themes that were of central importance to contemporary Viennese intellectuals.

In 1912 the Catholic lawyer, real estate speculator, and Center Party politician, Karl Trimborn wrote to his wife about a visit he had made to their Belgian relatives:

Their Catholicism, this demonstrative insistence on the Catholic point of view, this goingthrough thick and thin while excluding all criticism is not sympathetic to me. It encourages me to contradict them and to demonstrate my liberal point of view … In no way did we have an argument, but as we said good-bye, we knew: we are different people.

In the late eighteenth century, any attempt to categorize humankind by race was necessarily tied to the controversy surrounding slavery as well as to the debate about the general perfectibility of humankind, which, in turn, focused on the potential of “primative” peoples to achieve higher (European) levels of civilization. The widespread glorification of the Pacific Islanders as unspoiled childern of nature in the wake of Rousseau's idealization of a natural state and Bougainville's La Nouvelle Cythère made the debate even more complex; the enthusiastic reception of these texts in Europe bespoke an alienation from a polarized society and a dissatisfaction with rapid technological advances. Meanwhile, scientists were striving to avoid such rhetoric by attempting to define anthropology as a science, to collect data, and to categorize humankind free of political bias and the limitations of any particular philosophy of history.

During the last several decades, the history of the self, its nature, essential shifts, and trajectory have undergone considerable re-examination. The Western Civilization textbook premise that the history of the West and the rise of individualism correlate closely with each other is being critically examined. There are a number of different historical, anthropological, literary, and sociological discourses about bodies, memory, conscience, subjectivity, identity, privacy, sexuality, and gender, which have developed separate narratives about the self, frequently (mostly) in isolation from one another. Some recent feminist theory finds the thesis of individualism irrelevant for women and suggests that the self as a continuing story (autobiography) is gendered. Some theorists counter the creative possibilities of forgetting to a self constructed around a memory core. Multiple selves, schizoid selves, and decentered selves challenge older ideas of identity. The dialectic between public and private produces new problems about who “owns” the self, its image, and its location. Bodies, sexualities, and desire turn out to be shaped and disciplined within hidden forms of power. Old ideas about the rise of the individual and new ones about the pathologies of the self make the self and its history a central issue for contemporary debate.

In August 1891, shortly before his graduation from the University of Leipzig and his subsequent departure on a trip around the world, Harry Graf Kessler visited the city that had become an icon of German culture in the nineteenth century. Weimar, vegetating in the long twilight years of Carl Alexander's reign, made an unfavorable impression on the young aesthete. At the church cemetery, thinking no doubt of the way England and France honored their great writers, he remarked, “I do not find the idea that the coffins of our two greatest poets should serve as the antechamber for all the princely nullities of the house of Weimar especially worthy—it reminds one a little too strongly of the Geheimen Hofrat.”

“You anti-Christian animal, what have you stung? I crush you, I the Lord crush you as you sit on My chair which you exalt up to the stars. I want to kick you into the deepest hell; now you are there and do not know what happened to you. On you, on you shall my soul take revenge; you God of the heathen who pray to you, who pray to you.” Thus began the letter dictated by Anna Margaretha Jahn and addressed to her confessor, Johann Christoph Wurtzler, pastor of the Moritz Church in Halberstadt, who had died three days earlier on 19 December 1692. The letter, transcribed by two men as Jahn spoke, closed with the commandment from God that the writing be delivered to Wurtzler's house and read aloud to his corpse, at which point he would become alive again, if that had not occurred already.

The intensive involvement with the German bourgeoisie (Bürgertum) during the past decade has found scholars busy pasting labels on a social group that they sweepingly termed the “bourgeoisie.” Yet, the studies of a number of German and Anglo-American scholars have focused mainly on the urban Protestant bourgeoisie, while the rural (small towns and villages with less than 5,000 inhabitants) bourgeoisie and the Catholic bourgeoisie have received little attention. Considering the fact that rural society still comprised one of the main features of the European landscape, and that Catholics were approximately one third of the population during the second half of nineteenth-century Germany, the neglect of this group becomes even more surprising. Is it possible to write the history of the German bourgeoisie without its countryside elements (Bürgertum auf dem Lande) and without its Catholic bourgeoisie? Can so prominent a sector of German society be this casually dismissed? This article seeks to examine the issue from a number of different perspectives. Using a regional survey, it will show the existence of a Catholic bourgeois stratum in southern Germany (largely in the rural areas) and, through the presentation of a regional model, it will also attempt to sketch, albeit in broad strokes, some of the more pertinent aspects of the German Catholic bourgeoisie.

“More than any other social institution”, proclaimed parliamentarian Bernhard Winkelheide in a meeting of the first West German Bundestag, “the family has fallen into the whirlpool created by the collapse.” His colleagues evidently agreed. Surrounded by families that still bore the scars of wartime separation and death, lawmakers made the “reconstruction of the family” a priority in the first decade of the Federal Republic's existence.

In the early 1930s, Dr. Konrad Guenther, a longtime advocate of nature conservation, was exhorting the German people to return to “the soil of the homeland.” In the past, according to Guenther, whenever the German people had been forced to respond vigorously to the pressure of hard times, they had returned to their “natural” roots. He called on the population to learn about the Heimat (homeland) and its natural environment, ‘not only through reason alone, but with the entire soul and personality; for the chords of the German soul are tuned to nature. Let us allow nature to speak, and let us be happy to be German!” The stakes were high, for if the German people failed in this way to unite into a strong, “natural” community, they would become “cultural fertilizer for other nations.” Following the fall of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Guenther became one of the most vocal exponents of the notion that conserving nature would aid in the cultural unification and “racial cleansing” of Germany. Indeed, Guenther and his fellow conservationists saw their longstanding dream of a nationwide conservation law at last fulfilled under the Third Reich. The 1935 Reich Conservation Law guaranteed state protection of “the nature of the Heimat in all its manifestations”—if necessary through police measures.

In 1973 Yad Vashem, the international organization commemorating Holocaust martyrs and heroes, extended its highest honors to one of Germany's most influential business leaders. Berthold Beitz, head of the Krupp Foundation in Essen, was declared one of “the righteous among the nations” and was inducted into a very small group of individuals who had risked their lives to rescue Jews during the Third Reich. As a young manager in German-occupied Galicia, Beitz had been considered a rising star in the firm of Karpaten Öl. A trustee acting on behalf of the board of directors, Beitz was in a key position to witness the brutality of the SS in occupied Poland. In 1943, as he began to suspect his government's murderous intentions, Beits grew determined to risk his career, and possibly his life, to protect Jews from a tragic fate. Through various means of trickery and bargaining with the SS, Beitz took under his wing both young and old, skilled and unskilled, and employed them in scattered oil installations in eastern Galicia, ultimately protecting many of them from deportation and probable death in Belzec.

In March 1920 the German Reichstag passed legislation which fundamentally altered the country's tax system. The tax package, known as the Erzberger taxreform after its chief architect, Finance Minister Matthias Erzberger of the Center Party, soughtto stabilize the chaotic financial affairs of the young Weimar Republic. Not unexpectedly, the effort provoked intense opposition from many segments of the population. Resistance to the tax plan was particularly strong among the working class, and when it was implemented in July and August, large-scale protests and strikes occurred in various parts of the country. Although an enormous literature exists on labor problems in the Weimar Republic, the tax protests of 1920 have been largely ignored.