GLR May-June 2025

passport and stranded under Prussian military occupation. Ulrichs was horrified by the imposition of autocratic Pruss ian rule and started agitating in public meetings against Prussian occupation. In early 1867, the Prussians clamped down on the Hanoverian protests, and Ulrichs was twice arrested and detained at the fortress in Minden. In the process, the authorities searched his apartment and found his works and correspondence and made sure the press reported that Ulrichs was the one who had pub lished the urning pamphlets as Numa Numantius. Ulrichs was released into Bavarian exile, where he was now free to use his own name in his writings. He used the opportunity to make a protest on the stage of the Odeon Theatre in Munich during the Congress of German Jurists, the world’s first instance of public queer activism. Ulrichs published his account of the experience under his own name in his sixth pamphlet. While Ulrichs had found new strength from his persecution and incarceration, for Kertbeny the experience was rather dif ferent. Events saw to it that they would not meet, but the Prus sians had got hold of the letters he had sent to Ulrichs. On top of his passport troubles, this must have presented him with sev eral difficulties. Kertbeny’s diaries record that he was burning all documentation of his friendship with Ulrichs at this time, and he later wrote of the traumatic difficulties he had experi enced with the authorities. The whole experience spurred him to move away from Prussian military rule and into the relative anonymity of the Prussian capital, Berlin. It was from there, in 1868, that he wrote the draft of a letter to Ulrichs, the only one that has survived in the archives. This letter included, for the first time, his alternative neologisms “homosexual” and “het erosexual” and articulated a decisive rejection of Ulrichs’ tactics and theories. Kertbeny wrote that Ulrichs’ use of a third gen der, a biologically determined fixed and innate sexual identity, would just mean the urning would be pitied like a cripple. He in stead said that they should be fighting for the universal right of all men to have the freedom to choose a partner of either sex. In this letter, Kertbeny signaled his own intention to write on male and female homosexuality. Prussia was making plans to consolidate its rule over the whole of North Germany when a horrific crime in Berlin dom inated the headlines. The main suspect, Carl Zastrow, who was almost certainly innocent, called himself an urning and pos sessed a copy of Ulrichs’ most recent pamphlet—facts that were reproduced in the newspapers. Ulrichs’ ideas were being dis seminated in the local and national press on the coattails of a crime of unmitigated depravity. All this coincided with the leg islative passage of the new legal code and the decision whether May–June 2025 From Kertbeny’s 1868 letter to Ulrichs. Key words are highlighted. National Széchényi Library (Hungary).

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