Jewishness and Queerness, Displayed and Portrayed
Let’s return to the year 1910, the date when Flechtheim, a gay man, married Bertha Beti Goldschmidt, a young Jewish woman whose family the Flechtheims had known for many years; the Goldschmidt family had amassed a fortune through real estate and Betti Goldschmidt herself had an active interest in art. 35
Most sources that bring up this marital union mention that it was arranged and ushered by Flechtheim’s parents because they had been eager to quell rumors about their son’s sexual orientation. And, while secondary source consistently affirm that Alfred Flechtheim was gay, they do not provide primary sources on which this assertion is based.36 However, based on aggregate information, I do believe that Flechtheim was gay and that is the assumption I have made in writing this piece.
It goes without saying that incompatibility around something as fundamental as sexual orientation would generate outbreaks of discord and ferocious fighting with Goldschmidt, as in the instances described by German journalist Florian Illies.37 In addition, Flechtheim’s penchant for financial risk seems to have been an aggravating factor in the marriage at times, exemplified by Flechtheim employing Goldschmidt’s dowry to purchase artwork during their honeymoon in Paris.38 His father-in-law was understandably scandalized—for no one knew what long-term value, if any, the paintings might acquire—and Goldschmidt and Bertha were secured a retroactive division of property. While Flechtheim’s behavior in this episode could be branded as reckless and selfish, it could just as well reflect the perspicacity, discernment, and calculated risk required by a successful gallerist. Be as it may, Flechtheim and Bertha Goldschmidt somehow managed to forge a modus vivendi, mutual acceptance and collaboration in terms of running the Flechtheim Galleries. Flechtheim’s homosexuality seems to have remained an open secret throughout his life, but it was not publicly acknowledged.
Homosexuality in Europe remained illegal and socially marginalized throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. In fact, homosexuality became increasingly scrutinized in the context of the nation-state, where national imaginaries were built upon and conceptualized as a “masculine strength” project. Gays and lesbians were considered a deviance which impaired “the orderly reproduction of the nation” and therefore “threatened to undermine the state from within.”39 For example, consider Germany and France, the two countries with which Flechtheim was most associated. In France, the French Revolution had decriminalized sexual relations between people of the same sex in 1791 (men, more specifically), but the legacies of positivism came to increasingly pathologize and medicalize homosexuality throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, linking it to all manner of social ills.40
In Germany, the situation was similar, even as the interwar years brought a maturation of nineteenth-century efforts at promoting gay rights, both legally and on a socio-cultural plane.41 Individuals such as Magnus Hirschfeld and his Institute for Sexuality made inroads into public life and celebrated artistic and bohemian circles, which Weimar cabarets made renowned, and lent spaces where queerness enjoyed a space of chic legitimacy, even among sectors of the bourgeoisie. Yet insofar as state law was concerned, homosexuality remained illegal despite a 1929 ‘smoke and mirrors’ law, and gender deviation from prescribed bourgeoisie heteronormative conceptions remained socially frowned upon.42
Jewishness was no less complicated in Germany and France. As Western and Central European Jews became solidly middle class in the nineteenth century, thanks in part to emerging legal and civic guarantees, as well as their devotional embrace of Bildung (study and cultivation), their integration into and success in these fast-changing societies unsettled broader population sectors. Traditionally, animosity toward Jews had been based on the charges of deicide leveled against them by the Catholic Church (and later, Protestants as well). Christian doctrine stipulated that Jews, although physically and morally corrupt, could be metaphysically redeemed through baptism. However, with the advent of race theories in the nineteenth century, religious age-old prejudices transmogrified into anti–Semitism, which held that Jews had irredeemable biological traits that were alien and inimical to their “host nation.” In other words, not even baptism could redeem a Jew. Like homosexuals, Jews were medicalized and perceived as effete and counterproductive in a context wherein aggression, virility and physical superiority defined nationalism. Altogether, it was not coincidental that the nation- state narrative emerged alongside the pathologizing of homosexuality and the racialization of the Jews in the nineteenth century.43
Jewishness and homosexuality were, thus, categories that oscillated between the merely problematic all the way through to the aberrant and abhorrent in terms of the emerging nation–state and homogenized conceptions of “German- ness” and “French-ness.” For many Jews, queers, and other marginal or subaltern populations, the constant psychological and social maneuvering between center and periphery emboldened them on a social, cultural, and intellectual level. They also developed defiant attitudes toward conservative norms, such as exclusionary social frameworks or aesthetic canons. (Just the same, of course, it could induce conformism, attempts at psychological self-suppression, and even identification with and advocacy for normative and conservative standards.)
In light of the dynamics of Jewishness and queerness in Europe of his day, Flechtheim likely grappled with issues around identity during his childhood and adolescence in a manner that sharpened his ability to be bold and discerning beyond the normative, the prescribed, and the conformist. Flechtheim seems to have retained social networks with other acculturated Jews, a pattern among west/central European Jewry, segments of which also overlapped, in part, with the art world. Flechtheim’s marriage, sexual orientation issues aside, also reflected how parental influence and even outright marriage arrangements (and dowries) continued to play an important role among intra Jewish marriage patterns, even as romantic ideas about partnership emerged.44
Anecdotal statements suggest that Flechtheim had an affirmative Jewish identity. His friend, the photographer Thea Bauer Sternheim, reportedly exclaimed upon meeting him: “How thrilling it is to meet a Jew who doesn’t hide his heritage but is actually proud of it, and who says things like: ‘Don’t you think that King David was more feudal than some fly-by-night Hohenzollern?’ ” 45 Further research into his life would probably yield more specific insights into Jewish dimensions of his cultural, social, and intellectual life. For example, he served as president of the Maccabee boxing association.46
Facial features such as Flechtheim’s were the target of anti-Semitic derision, mockery, and malevolent caricaturization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in popular as well as more rarefied mediums. As was the custom between artists and patron-dealers, there were numerous artists that painted portraits of Flechtheim, such as Jules Pascin, Nils von Dardel, Karl Hofer and Hans Bolz. One controversial portrait, Der Kunsthändler Alfred Flechtheim (The Art Dealer), produced in 1926 by Otto Dix, carries a whiff of anti–Semitic visual tropes. Catherine Soussloff has contextualized Dix’s painting within a larger orbit of anti-Semitic illustrations that pandered to stereotypes of “[the] old and weak Jew who lacks physical prowess and manliness,” and of Jewish immigrants from the east (Ostjuden) as “bastardizing” German language and culture.47 Soussloff clarifies that artists might not have openly, or even consciously, been aware of their dislike for patrons, but that they “reflect the ambivalence [toward Jews] of their society.”48 A 1927 sculpture of a nose by the German artist Rudolf Belling is one example of other art scholars like Rose Washton reference when they state that Dix was not the only artist to employ anti-Semitic stereotypes in his work.49
Flechtheim must have been keenly aware of the implied meanings in depictions of his features. When posing for photo portraits, Flechtheim had a marked predilection for profile angles that emphasized his markedly Ashkenazi archetype. Perhaps, even, his confident and self-aware embrace of his features was connected to his fascination for modernism and vice versa (and, incidentally, it indicates the high valorization he gave to photography as an artistic medium). After all, if modernism and its “new aesthetic strategies, including the use of abstraction and new color schemes,” attracted Flechtheim, could it have not also led him to appreciate his own physicality in a society and culture in which it was otherwise derided? 50
Many of the photographers who snapped these Flechtheim portraits were Jewish themselves, including Thea (Bauer) Sternheim, Lili Baruch and Frieda Riess. I have not been able to establish whether another photographer, Jacob Hilsdorf, was also Jewish. Hugo Erfurth and some others were not. In any case, Flechtheim’s photographs insinuated an embryonic identity politics that would mature politically three decades later, in the United States. The zeitgeist of the 1960s was both an outcome and genesis of intersectional battles for civil and political rights for African Americans, women, and LGBTQ populations. Concomitant to these efforts was the campaign to create a new consciousness, awareness, and validation of African- American aesthetics and beauty, succinctly expressed by the famous slogan Black is Beautiful.
In this context of the struggle for racial justice and debate on hegemonic, normative beauty standards that actress and singer Barbra Streisand repeatedly had portrait photographs of herself taken. Like Flechtheim, she sought portraits that emphasized her archetype Ashkenazi features (and the physical likeness between Flechtheim and Streisand is astounding.) Thus, Streisand made a contribution toward the amplification and acceptance of different ethnicities and physicalities. Specifically, her pictures called attention to, and aimed to challenge, turned-up noses as the sole beauty ideal. (Many Jewish women of Streisand’s generation in the United States had plastic surgery to meet this beauty ideal). Scholars Lester Friedman and Camille Paglia have said about Streisand, and I believe something similar can be argued about Flechtheim, that the insistence on emphasizing her nose was “defiantly ethnic” and a statement on “Jewishness as something to be proud of, to exploit and to celebrate.”51
Of course, Fleichtheim and Streisand lived in different societies, across different time periods, before and after the Holocaust, and in eras with very different geopolitical and identity vocabularies. The national imaginaries and “fault lines” around which ethnic and racial difference was constructed in 1920s Germany and the 1960s United States differed enormously–Judaism/Jewishness in the case of the former and the Black/African-American experience in the latter. In the U.S., the Ashkenazi archetype and others such as Asian and Middle Eastern, have occupied a gray area in the black–white racial spectrum of the United States. Nonetheless, Fleichtheim’s keen insight into image and media intersected and the way with which it intersected with his Jewishness anticipated a later era.
El rinconcito levantino 