Engels & "die Widerwärtigkeit der Knabenliebe"

Did Engels Condemn Gay Sexuality?

An inaccurate Stalin-era translation misrepresents the views of the founders of the modern socialist movement.

The following letter, and the response by Sherry Wolf, appears in the March-April issue of International Socialist Review¹.

The November-December issue of the ISR includes a review of Sherry Wolf’s new book, Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics and Theory of LGBT Liberation.

We look forward to reading this important book, but we would like to draw attention to a significant translation problem. The review says, in regard to Marx and Engels,

“Their sole public reference is a line about ‘the abominable practice of sodomy’ in Engels’ The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.”

Friedrich Engels never wrote those words.

Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884, in German, drawing on notes prepared by Marx before his death. It was translated into Russian in 1892, but an English translation didn’t appear until 1902, after Engels’ death.

However, the most widely circulated English version was published in 1942 in a translation by Alick West and Dona Torr, prominent members of the British Communist Party. That’s the version that contains the words quoted in the review. In a section discussing the ancient Greeks:

“They fell into the abominable practice of sodomy and degraded alike their gods and themselves with the myth of Ganymede.”

Surprisingly, the West- Torr edition appears not to have been translated from Engels’ original German text, but, according to the copyright page, “from the fourth Russian edition, Moscow, 1934.”

What Engels wrote, in German, was

“sie versanken in die Widerwärtigkeit der Knabenliebe und ihre Götter entwürdigten wie sich selbst durch den Mythus von Ganymed.”

West and Torr rendered “die Widerwärtigkeit der Knabenliebe” as “the abominable practice of sodomy.”

Volume 26 of the Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), published in 1990, translates the phrase as “the perversion of boy-love.”

A better translation would be “repugnant boy-love,” but the MECW text is far truer to the original German than the West-Torr version.

So Engels was criticizing the Greeks not for homosexuality, but for pederasty – the sexual abuse of children.

That interpretation is strengthened by Engels’ reference to “the myth of Ganymede” -in which the god Zeus falls in love with and kidnaps a beautiful young boy. Again, the issue is child abuse.

Marxists consider that adults who have sexual relations with young people are violating the rights of children. Given the disparities of power, no child can give meaningful consent to sexual relations with an adult. That was the ancient Greek interpretation of the Ganymede myth, and it was Engels’ view as well.

We don’t have access to the 1934 Russian version of Origin of the Family, so we can’t check whether the “sodomy” mistranslation first occurred there, or if it originated with West and Torr.

Either way, it was consistent with Stalinist policy: homosexual acts, which had been removed from the criminal code shortly after the 1917 revolution, were recriminalized by Stalin in 1933.

The founders of Marxism did not provide any analysis of the situation of gays. Marxists have learned much from the insights of the gay and lesbian liberation movement in recent decades. But the claim that Engels denounced sodomy in one of his most important works is a Stalinist invention.

Ian Angus & John Riddell
Editors, Socialist Voice

Sherry Wolf responds: Thank you Ian and John for raising this little known fact. Another studious reader familiar with the original German, Keith Rosenthal, called this to my attention after reading Sexuality and Socialism. The book is heading into its second printing with the correct translation noted.