The Collision of Male Aversion and Female Desire: A Marriage Becomes a Political Issue

THE HEARING OF EVIDENCE in the first Moltke-Harden trial provided revelations that caused a sensation throughout Europe, and in its wake marriage, friendship, and sexuality became politicized to an extent previously unknown. The union between Kuno and Lilly von Moltke could hardly have been more “Wilhelmine” in character. At their wedding on March 12, 1896, Emperor Wilhelm II served as best man for his friend and aide-de-camp. The monarch was also head of the state church in Prussia, and at the court in Berlin there was elation that another “confirmed bachelor”—a status that society did not rate highly— had embarked on matrimony. The jubilation was short-lived, however. To general astonishment the 52-year-old general filed for divorce from his 29-year-old wife, who was considered a great beauty, in November 1899. The failed marriage did not become a subject of public attention until years later, however, when she served as a key witness in the first Moltke-Harden trial. There she was called to testify about whether Kuno Moltke was “sexually abnormal,” as Harden put it, or “particularly antipathetic to the female sex,” in the words of the court. Wilhelmine society attached considerable importance to preserving personal honor, but establishing the truth took precedence over other legal interests—fiat justitia et pereat mundus. An insult was not a punishable offense if it could be proved “demonstrably true.”4 That the court permitted evidence to be heard on this claim rested on two important assumptions: first that an allegation of abnormal sexual behavior was insulting, and second that it could be proved or disproved in a court of law. From the vague nature of Harden's allegations concerning sexual abnormality and the legal logic of how truth had to be proved, it necessarily followed that Moltke's marriage and indeed his entire private life would become the subject of forensic scrutiny.

If the decision to allow debate on this aristocratic marriage to take place in open court was sensational, what the chief witness had to say about General Moltke's sexual qualities was no less so.