The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (37 page)
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Authors: John Henry Mackay
Tags: #Fiction, #General
Magnus Hirschfeld has already called attention to several of the familiar Berlin landmarks in the novel. Alas, the most important to the story—the Passage—is no longer there. The building that contained it was destroyed by bombs during the Second World War; that area has twice been rebuilt since. Built in 1869-1873, the Passage—officially Kaisergalerie—was an arcade 400 feet long, 24 feet wide, and 40 feet high. One entrance was on Unter den Linden; halfway through it there was an angle and the other entrance was at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Behrenstrasse. But Hirschfeld did not mention another landmark, In den Zelten (literally, in the tents), where Hermann and Gunther ate in an outdoor restaurant. Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Science was in that area (at In den Zelten No. 10) and he also lived there. That building too was destroyed in the war. After the rubble was cleared away, the grounds became part of the Tiergarten park.
In the novel Pipel makes an appointment to meet Hermann at the “the bear sign” (the Berolina, the emblem of the city of Ber-lin)—at the “left calf” (linke Wade). Mackay says Pipel loved little jokes that like. It was probably a popular joke: there is today a music and dance group called “Berolina linke Wade” that presents, mostly for seniors, dances from Berlin in the 1920s.
Although Mackay’s novel, as a “milieu description” (Hirschfeld), concentrates on the hustler scene, it is notable that several other homosexual “scenes” are also included—or at least mentioned (for example, those who “spank”). The “Count” is an example of voyeurs—or, as the refined Atze remarked, those who “get it off merely from looking!” Many couples visited the lounges—”always an older man and a younger.” (This is not propaganda; it reflects the taste of the time. Today couples of the same age are more in fashion, not to say “politically correct.”) Effeminate homosexuals, “aunties,” are also in the novel. In view of Mackay’s dislike of the effeminate, clearly seen in Hermann’s refusal to call his relative “aunt,” it is notable that the only one of Hermann’s coworkers who offers to help him is effeminate. The “closed circles of gentlemen who did not cruise the street”—briefly enjoyed by Gunther—probably describes that of Mackay’s friend Benedict Friedlaender (1866-1908), a well-to-do private scholar, married, and author of
Renaissance des Eros Uranios
(1904), which urged a return to the ideal of Greek love. His suicide in 1908 cut off much of the financial support of Mackay’s fight to gain public recognition of man-boy love.
Perhaps the most surprising event in the story for American readers today is the length of Hermann’s prison sentence: two months. For Hermann’s “offence” Americans are regularly given an “indefinite” sentence, in practice a sentence to prison for life. Even in cases where the official sentence is for a limited time, upon its completion the man may be held indefinitely under a form of “preventive detention” as “likely” to commit the crime again. The idea of “preventive detention” is the same as that used by the Nazis (in Nazi terminology “Vorbeugungshaft”) to send to concentration camps those homosexuals who had served their court sentence. The situation is not as bad in Germany today, though Hermann would still find himself in conflict with the law. Although § 175 was abolished in 1994 (nearly a century after the Scientific Humanitarian Committee in Berlin circulated its first petition for its repeal—and 127 years after the brave pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs first spoke out publicly against that law at a Congress of German Jurists in Munich), the law against sex with those under the “protected” age (of sixteen) has been strengthened.
Mackay’s view of that law and the courts that enforced it—expressed in the novel by the wise old woman, Hermann’s aunt—is permeated by his individualist-anarchist viewpoint: “There are few human beings who have not become criminals against their fellow humans—not directly, but rather indirectly, in that they tolerate and advocate laws such as this one for example.” And she added, her eyes flashing in anger: “And what are all the crimes in the world compared with the ones committed by those in gowns and vestments, robes and uniforms!” This and her other opinions on man-boy love are, of course, Mackay’s own.
This novel is of undeniable literary merit. Because of its subject matter, it has been ignored by the literary critics—or dismissed as “trivial literature.” As Hermann said, describing his unrequited love: “If it had been a woman he was suffering over—how they all would have understood him! Then his passion would have been great and sacred, and his despair noble. . . . But since it was only a boy—madness, if not a crime, the only cure to be locked up. Locked up in a cold-water treatment institution for the insane.” It is, in fact, a beautifully crafted story of the eternal joys and sufferings of love. For anyone willing to see this love as
love,
Mackay’s masterful treatment of it is universally compelling. At the same time, the action of the story takes place in a determined time and location that are described with historical exactness, making it a valuable document of a Berlin that will never be again.
The personalities of the story come alive for us in the sure sketches of Mackay. The brief chapter describing the gathering of a dozen boys around the Hustler Table at Uncle Paul’s is a masterpiece of characterization. But Mackay does not romanticize these boys. He sees them as limited by the hypocritical, bourgeois morality of the society on whose margin they must lead their empty, often sordid lives.
On its publication Walter Hauer (in Adolf Brand’s
Eros
1/3, pp. 39-42; Brand was also publisher of
Der Eigene)
wrote that it was “the only novel on a grand scale that homosexual literature has to show” and he concluded: “We are richer by a great work of art, a work that has captured in its bright mirror all the nuances of our love and our life, that has dared to say once and for all the unsaid, the not-to-be-said, and to present things that no one has had the courage to touch; and from the very same poet who wrote the splendid words ‘This love must I tenderly sing,’ these things have been raised to such a height that every objection must remain silent” (quoted in Marita Keilson-Lauritz,
Die Geschichte der eigenen Geschichte,
Berlin: Verlag rosa Winkel, 1997, p. 208). In a late review of the book, Kyrill (Christian von Kleist) also concluded that it “belongs to the few books in the literature on ‘our subject’ that may raise a claim to art”
(Der Eigene
13/2, 1931, p. 61). In the years since then gay literature has seen many works of true art.
The Hustler
remains one of them: an enduring work of art from the hand of the Scotch-German writer—anarchist, boy-lover, his own man—the unique John Henry Mackay.
Hubert Kennedy
