murder, but refused to explain his motives, till he was put under medical examination. Then he confessed the affair.
A Romancist of
Military Uranian-
ism: Alexander
von Sternberg.
Belles-lettres have not been silent as to the homosexual soldier. The French novelist "Pierre Loti" mentioned, introduces such an element in his tales and sketches, though Loti conveys more homosexuality in his sea-stories. Short episodes, in various familiar fictions, are uranian enough to merit attention. One such occurs in Tolstoi's "Anna Karénina", when the hero of Anna's unfortunate romance, Wronsky, notices the entrance of two Russian fellow-officers, into a restaurant, one older, the other a young type; who are indicated as notorious for a pederastic relationship so much so that Wronsky avoids their society. But another Continental authour, now many years dead and almost forgotten, Alexander (von Ungern) Sternberg (d. 1868) rises par excellence among- portraitists of some of the most sympathetic aspects of soldierly uranianism. He has presented many phases of it. Particularly is this the mainspring of psychologic study in one of Sternberg's novels of the Napoleonic era, entitled "Jena and Leipzig". We find there the homosexual tie that unites two young officers, who begin their friendship-love with their confinement in a hospital after the Battle of Jena, and die together in the struggle at Leipzig. Along with this military novel may be mentioned von Stenberg's story, "Die Beiden Schützen", which has also a soldier-uranic atmosphere; the narrative of a tragic sexual love between two young Berlin recruits at the time of the so-called "Berlin Revolution" in 1848. A brief résumé of these two military stories by Sternberg is timely here, as being typical. In "Jena and Leipzig". Franz von Selbitz of aristocratic birth, loves passionately but in troublous secrecy, his com-
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