When different writers from the period have mentioned Kraft-Ebing, it has been in pretty different ways, but I found this quote in the appendix of The Intermediate Sex which seems to cast some light over the issue:
Sexual inversion has usually been regarded as psycho-pathological, as a symptom of degeneration; and those who exhibit it have been considered as physically unfit. This view, however, is falling into disrepute, especially as Krafft-Ebing, its principal champion, abandoned it in the later editions of his work.
- Otto Weininger, Sex and Character. 1906
This clears up for me how his earlier statements square together with his later advocacy against antisodomy laws.
In 1879, Ulrichs wrote in Critische Pfeile, the last part of his series of pamphlets on uranians:
My scientific opponents are mostly psychiatrists. They are, for example, Westphal, Krafft-Ebing, Stark. They made their observations on Urnings who were in institutions for the mentally ill. They appear not to have seen mentally healthy Urnings. The rest follow the published views of the psychiatrists.
Which is to say, he regarded Krafft-Ebing as an opponent.
Hubert Kennedy, Ulrichs biographer, writes:
Ironically, the man who became the major proponent of the sickness model of homosexuality, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902), became interested in studying the subject precisely as a result of reading Ulrichs’s writings, as he explicitly stated in a letter to Ulrichs of January 29, 1879 (Critische Pfeile, 92). Already in 1877, Krafft-Ebing had written that Ulrichs was “afflicted with this perverse drive” and that Ulrichs “still has not furnished proof that he, as an inborn phenomenon, is eo ipso a physiological and not perhaps a pathological one” (Krafft-Ebing 1877, 305–306). With only a slight change in the wording, this statement was included in his Psychopathia sexualis (1886, 58) and it remained in all later editions of this perennial bestseller.
Although Krafft-Ebing became interested in the subject because of Ulrichs, his understanding of it was rather along the lines of the degeneration theory of Bénédict Auguste Morel (1809–1873), as presented by Morel in 1857. This is shown already in the title of Krafft-Ebing’s 1877 work, which may be translated: “On certain anomalies of the moral drive and the clinical-forensic evaluation of them as a probable functional sign of degeneration of the central nervous system.” Nevertheless, Giovanni Dall’Orto sees a positive influence of Ulrichs on Krafft-Ebing, in that Krafft-Ebing “softened, thanks to him, the original premise, which saw in the homosexual a serious degenerate, and a criminal for life” (Dall’Orto 1985, 66).
Seeing as this mentions Krafft-Ebing never editing out the part about homosexuality “likely being pathological rather than inborn” I’m not sure what edits, exactly, he did make. I suppose that even in thinking it a “biological error” -- as he did all sex not turned to procreation -- he may still have expressed himself less damningly on the subject.
At any rate, historian Harry Oosterhuis writes about Krafft-Ebing:
Krafft-Ebing’s overall attitude became more and more lenient and humanitarian: from the early 1890s he opposed the penalisation of homosexual acts and he was among the first to sign Hirschfeld’s petition advocating the abolition of Section 175 of the German legal code, which made so-called ‘unnatural vice’ punishable. In his last article on homosexuality, published in Hirschfeld’s Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen [Yearbook for Intermediate Sexual Types], Krafft-Ebing admitted that his earlier views on the immoral and pathological nature of homosexuality had been one-sided and that there was truth in the point of view of many of his homosexual correspondents who asked for sympathy and compassion
And while I can no longer find the source, I have once seen a quote where Ulrichs, shortly before his dead, expressed great hope at Krafft-Ebing support for the petition to repeal Paragraph 175, seeing it as a sign that his words were finally being heard, years after he had retired from his advocacy.
