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Georg Christoph Lichtenberg
(1742-1799) was a professor of physics, mathematics, and astronomy at the University of Göttingen, Germany. His witty aphorisms are still widely read today. In 1777, he met the 13-year old Maria Stechard and took her into his home where she became his housemaid and lover. She died at the age of 18.
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While Western countries have long disapproved of sexual contact with children, such contact with young adolescents has usually been seen in a different light. After all, in many cultures of the past, girls were married as soon as they reached puberty. In ancient China, on the other hand, a “child bridegroom” could marry an adult woman, share her bed, and begin sexual intercourse with her as soon as his sexual response allowed it (1). In 18th-century Germany it was still possible for the highly respected university professor Georg Christoph Lichtenberg to live with a 13-year old girl (2). In the 20th century, two literary masterpieces described the passionate love of adult men for someone very young. In Mann’s “Death in Venice”, the object of desire is a 14-year old boy; in Nabokov’s “Lolita” it is a 12-year old girl (3). The men who are in love with them are not at all portrayed as monsters, but as tragic figures deserving the reader’s compassion. The 1970s and early 1980s even saw the first attempts in the USA and other countries to organize men who loved boys, but they soon met with a great deal of hostility, even from the “gay liberation movement”. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s, a Swiss film director still received official financial support for a semi-documentary about his love affair with a 13-year old male prostitute in Rome. The film then won the praises of a Catholic jury at a film festival (4).
Since that time, however, Western public opinion has undergone a dramatic change. Today, any such relationships are severely condemned. Indeed, in many countries they are crimes, and the adults involved cannot expect the slightest sympathy either from the courts or from society at large.
(1) See the comment by M.L.Ng here.
(2) See the the book by Gert Hoffmann, Die kleine Stechardin 1999, Engl. “Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl”, W.W. Norton, 2004
(3) Thomas Mann, “Death in Venice” 1912 (Film by Luchino Visconti 1971and opera by Benjamin Britten 1973); Vladimir Nabokov “Lolita” 1955 (Film by Stanley Kubrick 1963)
(4) “Er moretto”, a film by Simon Bischoff 1985
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