Expanding trans German studies

Considering trans German studies conjures images of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: gender-bending parties of the Weimar Republic, sexological research at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, and ongoing linguistic advocacy for gender-neutral pronouns. As an emerging subfield, trans German studies examines topics such as trans Germans’ engagement with magazine culture (Sutton; Herrn, Das 3. Geschlecht); individual historical legacy and memoir (Amin); and camp readings of trans irony in legal records (Nunn, “Against”). A significant body of scholarship leans on the long history of pathologizing trans existence to discuss transness and its intersections within medical archives (Herrn, Schnittmuster; Garde; Nunn, “Trans”). These scholarly developments arise as media like the webseries Druck and the Netflix documentary Eldorado bring trans Germans into the public eye, even as some legislators seek to regulate living trans people out of public life. Overall, this emerging area of research is both historically rooted and deeply relevant to contemporary life. Still, trans German studies remains limited in scope because of our focus upon the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Even as scholars in other disciplines examine intersections between anti-Blackness and anti-transness in history (Snorton) and locate trans potential in medieval ballads (Raskolnikov), Germanists remain focused on the time since the birth of sexology. The reason for this is often concern for anachronism: we would prefer not to assign modern trans identity to those who came before us. In a sense, this is understandable—the desire to recover historical forms of gender-making has led to inappropriate claims of ancestry that erase histories of colonialism and living cultural diversity (DeVun and Tortorici 2). However, the assumption that pre-trans historical figures cannot be analyzed with a trans lens assigns them a compulsory cisgender status, which also flattens gender diversity within the archive (Bychowski 1). Instead of fearing this form of anachronism, we Germanists would do well to expand our views of how transness (and other similarly “modern” lenses) may enrich our scholarship in all historical periods. One issue with our current scope is the implied link between pathology and trans discourse: there is an implicit barrier in 1910, when the pioneering sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld published Die Transvestiten and therein described a desire to dress in the fashion of another gender. If one is generous, we may even set the barrier at nineteenth-century psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, which defined desires for and “delusions” of gender transition as a form of “conträre Sexualempfindungen” (91). A very limited amount of trans German studies scholarship reaches further into history than this. While a Foucauldian discourse model may insist that the medical codification of modern trans vocabulary is the start of trans life, one must consider the implications of this: such a view requires that a (presumably cisgender) physician deigned to write about us, allowing trans life to spring into existence. The trans people whose bodies and experiences fed into this model are not credited. Additionally, this reliance upon a medical definition privileges accounts of surgical and hormonal transition, which may not be desired or feasible even for modern trans people. Instead, it is better to adopt a definition of transness that does not center medical transition: to be trans is to move away from one's assigned or unchosen gender (Stryker 36). To that end, I offer the example of Anastasius Lagrantinus Rosenstengel. Born in 1687, Rosenstengel lived in what is today Halle until he transitioned and left home as a teenager, after which he traveled across Germany as a member of a Pietist sect, as a soldier, and as a tailor. Rosenstengel lived most of his life as a man, and he detransitioned only under duress, such as when he escaped a desertion charge by outing himself (Steidele 178). He did, however, choose to transition again, and he married Catharina Margaretha Mühlhahn in 1717. After his mother-in-law outed him to authorities, he was charged with homosexual activity and executed in 1721. From his trial records comes the most in-depth account of his life which remains. If not for Rosenstengel's outing and execution, he may have passed into the void of history without scholarly notice. Instead, he was thrust into the public eye, and he retains his uneasy fame as the last person assigned female to be executed for sodomy in Europe. Rosenstengel, despite the clear trans themes of his biography, has mostly been portrayed in scholarship as a cisgender lesbian. For example, his life has been described as a record of historical lesbianism (Eriksson) and love between women (Frančíková) as early as 1981 and as recently as 2022. In the style of what M. W. Bychowski calls “cisgender scholarship,” such analyses prioritize cis identities to the point that Rosenstengel's stated name and gender fall from view (Bychowski 2). Rosenstengel's body and the sex assigned to its fleshy configurations are treated as essential truths which supersede his maleness. As a result, his choice to transition and live as a man for most of his life is forgotten in favor of a focus upon his orientation from a place of cisgender womanhood. This is so pervasive that I can locate no scholarly sources which prioritize Rosenstengel's preferred name over the name under which he was baptized and executed. Even in her In Männerkleidern, the most in-depth analysis of Rosenstengel's life yet, Steidele alternates between male- and female-coded names and pronouns in reference to him. I do not problematize this trend to invalidate queer potential within Rosenstengel's story—certainly, if he lived today, he might identify as a cisgender lesbian as some scholars posit. However, we cannot ignore his stated gender, even if his society did revoke his manhood upon his outing. As Kit Heyam writes, the need to pass for one's maleness to be respected “doesn't make [a person's] maleness inherently inauthentic, and it doesn't exclude them from trans history” (59). Anastasius Rosenstengel's life is an example of trans potential within German cultural history from before the development of modern trans vocabulary. He chose to transition and step away from the female gender he was assigned, and I have taken him at his word, using the name and pronouns he chose for himself. We should recognize trans potential within his story and others, even when it seems anachronistic. There may be far more opportunity for this than we realize: cases of gender transgression like Rosenstengel's were not uncommon (Steidele 40). What other cases of “trans before trans” potential might Germanists find if we view our field through this lens? It is valuable to examine even pre-trans literary and historical texts in this way, as scholars in other fields continue to show. Why should they have all the fun? The potential already rests within our materials of interest—we only need to recognize it.

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