Hans Blüher

Hans Blüher did not found the Wandervogel movement but he was an early member of it and its first "historian". (Amongst other things he considered it as 'an erotic phenomenon'.) Anti-schools and anti-churches, he was also ideologically anti-family. Having enjoyed sexual relations with other boys from the age of 14 onwards, he became a proponent of Heinrich Schurtz's theory of the Männerbund - the idea that the original "unit of society" in Europe had been not the family but a "homo-social" society of men.

Despite this seemingly somewhat parochial gay iconoclasm, politically Blüher was a staunch conservative and monarchist, even visiting Kaiser Bill during his exile in Holland. Indeed, Blüher vision of homosexuality wasn't the standard cultural Marxist one. Rather than undermining society, his hope was that through pederasty and male bonding within Männerbunden homosexuality would lead to a healthier nation and a stronger state.

It has to be admitted straight off that this is a little bit batty. It's hugely unlikely that our thatched house-dwelling, wagon-driving, dog-owning, mead-drinking Aryan ancestors ever organised their societies around glorified circle-jerk groups rather than along the standard lines of mummies and daddies and kiddies that we have (still, just about!) today. There are cognate words for 'wife' in enough Proto-Indo-European languages to suggest that the concept existed and was an important one, even if the wives themselves were little more than chattels. The family, in other words, was clearly a "thing" even very early on, to suggest that the family has indeed been a "thing" since Proto-Indo-European times. And recent attempts to re-imagine blood brotherhood ceremonies (or. in Christian times adelphopoiesis ceremonies) as pre-modern versions of "gay marriage" are similarly unconvincing.

Such ideas are at least interesting though, partly because they hold out the possibility of homosexuality being a positive rather than a purely negative phenomenon, and partly because the "Männerbund thesis" went on to become a key element of what I call radical National Socialist ideology.* Blüher himself, his pro-Hohenzollern politics notwithstanding, did end up supporting the Nazis, if only as the least worst political option available in a mad and dangerous world.

Despite his ideological opposition to families, Blüher did eventually fall for a member of the opposite sex and settled down and had children. And he withdrew his support for the Nazis after the Night of the Long Knives effectively marked the end of radical National Socialism. Whether Blüher ever actually "saw the light" is a moot point. He died in 1955.

* Indeed, it reached a wide non-Nazi gay audience via Germany's prototype gay magazine Der Eigene. According to Wikipedia, when the magazine was closed down by the Nazis in 1933 all of the materials that had gone into it were handed over to none other than Ernst Röhm.  (Who else!?) As an aside, but somewhat unsurprisingly, modern boylovers have also taken an interest in Blüher and his work.