Karl-Günther Heimsoth, also known as Karl-Guenter Heimsoth (4 December 1899 – 1934), was a German physician, polygraph, and politician. Heimsoth was a member of the Nazi Party and later the Communist Party of Germany.
Life and work
Early life and studies (1919 to 1924) Karl-Günther Heimsoth was born in Charlottenburg, the son of a court clerk and bank director. His youth was spent in Dortmund, where in June 1917 he passed his abitur, a test of maturity which was simplified temporarily because of the First World War. He then enlisted in the Prussian Army and until the end of 1918 participated in World War I, being deployed on the Western Front - finishing with the rank of lieutenant. In the summer semester of 1919, Heimsoth began studying medicine at the University of Tübingen. Heimsoth continued his clinical training at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Kiel University, and the University of Rostock. At the University of Rostock, he passed his state examination to practice medicine in the spring of 1924. During his studies, in 1920 and 1921 he participated in the Ruhr Uprising, the fights in Thuringia, and the Silesian Uprisings as a member of the Freikorps. Between August and November 1924 Heimsoth wrote at Rostock his dissertation entitled Hetero- und Homophilie ("Hetero- and Homophilia"), which was devoted to homosexuality. With this work, Heimsoth was probably the first to introduce the term "homophilia" in sexology. The thesis argued that in certain erotic and friendly relationships there are certain norms looked for and desired which are "the same". This homophilia can occur both in relationships between men and between women. In contrast, Heimsoth saw heterophilia as a relationship characterized by "the opposite"; considered well within the range of heterophilia are platonic relationships between an effeminate man and a masculine man. His interpretations of homosexuality and male friendship were based upon previous ideas, as developed in 1903 by Otto Weininger in Geschlecht und Charakter ("Sex and Character") and in 1919 by Hans Blüher in Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft ("The Role of Eroticism in Male Society"). Heimsoth's reflections start with Blüher's theory on the central meaning of eroticism between men to society. From Weininger, Heimsoth took the "law of the polar union" as an impulse of the sexual union and completed it with a second "law of the homopolar union". He basically tried to prove that a masculine man could want another masculine man, because there were esoteric and friendly connections in such a relationship which were not wanted nor looked for in the other sex, but rather in the same sex, as an opposite pole. His hypothesis was one of the first to question heteronormative assumptions and stereotypes, which seek to explain homosexuality as nothing more than a reflection of the heterosexual dynamic that looks for opposite characteristics. As such, it was pioneering in its approach to homosexuality as a sexual attraction that seeks out what is similar or identical, without any reference to the heterosexual polarity or proxies for the same in the form of 'third genders'. Male homosexuality would thus be defined by the attraction of the masculine to the masculine without any reference to the feminine or to the polarity of the male female difference. Thereby liberating the sexual orientation and attraction between homosexual males from electromagnetic analogies and other such heteronormative paradigms that try to explain all sexual attraction as being a function of polar opposites. Heimsoth's 1924 dissertation represents thus an emancipated conceptualization of same-sex attraction that is divorced from the heterosexual and from the conceptualization of homosexuality as an 'inbetween' state between the feminine and masculine.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
