ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 reads Eduard Bertz’s English-language children’s novel, The French Prisoners (1884), in light of nineteenth-century German discourses of same-sex love. A German intellectual, Bertz earned some notoriety for his scholarship on Walt Whitman, as well as through his friendship with English writer George Gissing and his association with Thomas Hughes, and he made contributions to Magnus Hirschfeld’s sexology journal and the early homosexual emancipation movement. Set in a German boys’ school during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, The French Prisoners depicts the passionate friendship between a German youth and a young French soldier and anticipates strategies both for articulating homosexuality used at the end of the nineteenth century and for advocating on its behalf. German-language scientists largely pioneered the scientific study of homosexuality, and this medical discourse competed with earlier models of Christian romantic friendship. In his correspondence and sexological writings, Bertz expresses a deep conflict over homosexuality, and his boys’ book similarly evidences ambivalence. While the German youths ultimately cannot save the French soldiers in their care, the novel nonetheless represents the passionate attachments of youth as providing a model for avoiding the jingoistic enmity that gives rise to war.
