Tracie Matysik's book is a compelling and original account of the concern with ethics and the constitution of moral norms in Germany and Austria from 1890–1930. Matysik does not provide a synthesis of all the various organizations and intellectuals who used ethics to inquire into challenges to meaning-conferring human action by industrialization and secularization at the fin-de-siècle. Rather, she demonstrates how debates about ethics, whether conceived as the transhistorical ground of moral claims (Ethik) or normative morality (Sittlichkeit), reveal how dynamic, unstable, and contested even the most self-evident presumptions about moral claims, identity, and behavior prove to be. She is also concerned with the centrality of sexuality to these discussions, which engaged a diverse array of intellectuals and social activists, in particular those with ties to the Social Democratic Party. Indeed, she shows how cultural crisis was often defined by reference to the transformation of sexual norms.
German, Swiss, and Austrian intellectuals of various sorts looked to Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, and others for guidance, but the issues they debated addressed questions about appropriate conduct raised by new social developments, including struggles for animal rights, women's rights, gay rights, and thus the expansion of moral agency. At that historical moment, the turn to ethics (with which contemporary American and European intellectuals are once again fervently engaged) was an effort to respond to the increasing predominance of Gesellschaft over Gemeinschaft, of individuals over tradition, of self-assertion and meaning creation over inherited legacies and uncritical adoption of the past. Matysik discusses the German Society for Ethical Reform, a mostly secular group with divergent views (and diverse religious backgrounds), which addressed the ethics of social relations in a new age from the point of view of community well-being and was preoccupied with the parameters of universalism in relation to the limits of historically defined social and political formations. Its members included Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Lily Braun, and less well-known figures such as Wilhelm Foerster. She also discusses Helene Stöcker's “New Ethic” and her League for the Protection of Mothers, which concerned itself with improving the status of women and mothers. Stöcker defined sexuality as a form of moral expression and challenged extant moral regulation and its impact on “the moral subject.” Matysik extends her discussion to the ways in which ethical questions underpinned other debates, including those about colonialism and the criminalization of female homosexuality in the German Criminal Code (the latter, according to Matysik, demonstrates how efforts to define lesbian sexual relations coherently failed, and exposed inadvertently the incoherence of normative sexual regulation). Finally, she concludes with long analyses of the role played by discussions of ethics in Social Democratic Party arguments about women's roles and in psychoanalysis itself. After the Great War, the ethics reform movement faded, now linked seemingly to more pressing questions about the nature of political participation, or was rendered irrelevant by the brutality of the slaughter. But in Matysik's narrative, psychoanalysis (Freud, his disciples, Lou Andreas Salomé, and debates over femininity) takes up ethics reform in a new guise after the war and illuminates its underlying subversiveness.
Matysik has three main analytical aims: she refuses to reduce these discussions to stalemates because of alliances between progressive and unholy ideas. For some historians, that bourgeois feminists sympathized with eugenics arguments manifests the limits of feminism and signals progressive advocates' blindness to racism. Instead, through rigorous and careful readings of texts, Matysik does not deny such alliances, but demonstrates how contingent they are to the dynamic recasting of the moral subject. Stöcker may have been sympathetic to some eugenicist ideas, but she also argued against the grain and in feminist terms that sexuality and subjectivity were inextricable forms of moral self-assertion and identity. Second, Matysik argues that ethics reformers were not seeking to expand moral and social regulation in new terms (as the term ethics implies) but were attacking regulation by calling into question all the mind-body, heterosexual-homosexual, male-female, ethics-politics dualisms that had long dominated definitions of the moral subject and its parameters. She argues, persuasively, that their arguments were far more self-reflexive than they are usually given credit for, and constitutive of conflict rather than promises to resolve pressing debates. For this reason, ethics reformers could not be harnessed simply in one political direction or the other. Implicitly then, she wishes to complicate the well-established idea that fascism merely took to extremes many expressions of modern regulation developed by progressive organizations, including hygiene and eugenics. Finally, Matysik argues that we must understand various reformers' and psychoanalysts' efforts to define female sexuality coherently as evidence of a moral subject always in the making and never fully contained by regulation. The instability of efforts to define “femininity,” she claims, is a synecdoche for the absence of a stable moral subject. This is the larger import of the book.
A compelling and subtle interpretation of both familiar and unfamiliar texts, Matysik's argument reiterates the dynamism she wishes to analyze without pausing sufficiently to evaluate how moral subjects are subjected to regulation. There is little reference to the constraints imposed on lesbians and Jews, for example, except by reference to contradictions in texts, and it is hard to grasp the relationship between the dynamism of ethics reform in its postwar psychoanalytic guise and Hitler's assumption of power. And in the concluding chapter there is some slippage from sexuality to gender. Matysik moves away from regulation to the dynamism intrinsic in ethics reform: this shift is important and original analytically because it refuses to reduce discursive contradictions to political limits. But as she knows, discourses that consistently undermine themselves are not intrinsically subversive of social order. The book is far quieter on that thorny problem. These questions aside, Matysik's study is surely one of the most important contributions to the intellectual history of central Europe to appear in a long while.
