Sexuality takes many forms. It constitutes an experience and an expression of identity. But it can also take the form of a label defining a person or group. Journeys of personal, sexual self-discovery commonly involve searching for the limits, which reflect and define who and what particular individuals feel themselves to be. By contrast, political ideologies more often involve defining the limits of what the state will tolerate and generating stereotypes about opponents and groups identified as other. Many modern prohibitions and taboos have been class, race, or gender specific. Double standards have tacitly allowed the group with the most power to define what constitutes permissible behaviour and to exercise sexual rights that they have explicitly denied to others. Minority groups within German society (and other societies) have been subjected to repression because of their sexuality; have seen their sexuality become the object of racist or sexist stereotypes and slurs; have had the right to exercise and control their own sexuality taken away from them and denied; or have experienced violation and intrusion of their own bodies (removing their ability to reproduce or denying their right to refuse sex). Sexuality has thus historically been about the exercise and denial of power as well as the pursuit and enjoyment of pleasure. The first part of the article provides an overview of the field of sexuality over the course of the twentieth century. The second part addresses in more specific fashion issues in recent research on constructions of sexuality under National Socialism and since.
However much they claim to be serious and detached, historians are no strangers to issues of sexuality. In the context of twentieth-century Germany, there are already specialist studies of topics as varied as pornography, sadistic fantasies, nudism, illegitimacy, masturbation, venereal disease, erotic emporia, state-regulated prostitution, sexual violence, and serial killing.Footnote 1 The history of sexuality can evidently be approached from a number of angles – not just from above, but also ‘from below’, and also, voyeuristically, from a more obtuse angle. Morality and ethics; medicine and the law; arts and the media; literature and film; music and fashion all have an influence on (and could form the basis of historical analysis of) sexuality.Footnote 2 This article explores the various approaches and points to new directions that studies of sexuality in German history appear to be taking.
The power of law to define sexuality has historically made it a key site of struggle. Following Bismarck's foundation of the Empire and the creation of a unitary legal code, sex between consenting adult men was made an offence punishable with imprisonment as ‘sodomy’ and ‘unnatural vice’ under Paragraph 175 of the 1871 Criminal Code.Footnote 3 Another section of the code that remained on the statute books for the major part of the twentieth century referred to the crime of ‘procuring’ (if hotel owners or parents allowed unmarried couples to stay the night together). With the abdication of the Kaiser, a range of groups campaigned to condone, reform, or restrict sexual practices seen as particularly beneficial or injurious to the public good. Many on the German Left believed that a revolution in German society would also bring about a revolution in sexual relations.Footnote 4 Clara Zetkin later claimed to have been berated by Lenin for allowing her comrades to discuss sex reform at the expense of more pressing political necessities.Footnote 5 In the event, the liberal constitution and the temporary compromise reached between the Majority Socialists and the Centre Party produced results in the sphere of sexuality that fell far short of radical expectations. Nevertheless, the League for the Protection of Motherhood and Sex Reform (Bund für Mutterschutz und Sexualreform – BfM) and its founder Helene Stöcker continued to fight for women's rights to sexuality and unwed motherhood.Footnote 6
In the practical work of advice clinics, a ‘motherhood–eugenics consensus’ emerged across a wide spectrum of sex reformers, which assumed that it was ‘“better to prevent than to abort”, that sexuality was better regulated than repressed and that access to legal abortion, contraception, eugenic sex education, and general social welfare would assure a new rational and humane social order’.Footnote 7 Left-wing intellectuals lent their support for campaigns to reform inequalities in sexual relations.Footnote 8 Social Democrats and Communists showed a rare degree of solidarity in supporting campaigns to abolish Paragraph 218 (that criminalized abortion), arguing that access to legal abortion would alleviate the suffering of working-class women.Footnote 9 But in the public sphere, dominated by right-wing mass media and political propaganda, the humane and the rational were often fighting defensive battles against renewed conservative ideas about the proper place for women and the need for increased moral purity. Calls for Paragraph 175 (and with it the criminalization of homosexuals, nicknamed ‘175ers’) to be abolished were unsuccessful during the Weimar Republic, but were taken up by campaigners in both East and West Germany after the Second World War.
From the 1970s onwards, feminist historians placed a new emphasis on exploring the historical development of patriarchal relations and the ways in which gender bias and discrimination have affected women's rights, particularly their rights to make decisions about their own bodies. Early feminist research tended to concentrate on those areas where women had suffered discrimination and persecution, either as a result of exclusion from the workplace or because of interventions by the state and the medical profession. While debates have continued for years about how far young women were genuinely liberated by the First World War and whether the realities for the ‘new women’ were anything like the images presented in Weimar films and the press, there is little dissent from the view that the Third Reich sharply eroded women's rights and suppressed debate about equality and liberation.Footnote 10 More controversial were the questions of whether or not women had been complicit in destroying their own freedoms and how the victimization of women in National Socialism intersected with persecution of other marginal and oppressed groups.Footnote 11
While 1933–4 can be seen as a clear turning point in terms of attitudes towards women as a whole, the consequences of the Nazi seizure of power were much more far-reaching and potentially disastrous for those women and men who were deemed racially unfit, for interracial couples, and for lesbians and homosexuals.Footnote 12 Research on eugenics and the politics of race has shown that the state was not only prepared to make deep intrusions into the private lives of its citizens, but to use medical interventions in order to bring about a permanent alteration of the German body politic.Footnote 13 The racial health of the national community was to be constructed by means of forced sterilization of ‘unfit’ women and castration of homosexual men.Footnote 14 Atina Grossmann has pointed to the way in which eugenic thinking and attempts to suppress abortion among racially ‘healthy bodies’ not only occurred before, but also continued after, the Third Reich.Footnote 15
Sexology, the scientific discipline devoted to the study of sex, offers another common starting point for the study of historical attitudes to sexuality. Early sexology was strongly influenced by the late nineteenth-century passion for collecting and naming. Early sexologists merged anthropology with biology in the pursuit of a typology categorizing various types of sexual deviation and the sexual characteristics of different races. Recounting the unusual practices of far-flung tribes and exotic peoples served as a means of projecting particular characteristics on to an imaginary other at the same time as underlining the superiority of white civilization and European society. Using highly spurious ‘scientific’ categories and causation, Professor Dr August Forel ‘proved’ that the mercantile nature of the Jews also imbued their sexual relations and that the ‘violent and unbridled sexual passion of the Negro’ was a characteristic of ‘the intellectual inferiority of this race’.Footnote 16 Despite its relative proximity, the urban proletariat was viewed through the same lens of prurient interest masked by disgust and disdain that served to underpin the proclivities of the white, adult, male bourgeoisie as natural and normal. ‘What is to be expected of the sexual life of the elder children who live and sleep in the same room and often even in the same bed as their mother and father?!’Footnote 17 During this period, fears that adolescent masturbation constituted a dangerous, debilitating, and contagious pathology themselves became pandemic.Footnote 18
Nevertheless, even before the end of the Kaiserreich men like Magnus Hirschfeld, Eduard Fuchs, and Otto Rühle began to challenge the assumptions on which these categories were based. Influenced by the emergence of Freud's ideas about psychoanalysis and discussions within German Social Democracy about marriage, the family, and the rights of women, they pursued a less judgemental approach to sexual difference and championed the rights of gays and lesbians.Footnote 19 In the Weimar Republic, Hirschfeld founded the Berlin Institut für Sexualforschung (Institute for Sexological Research). His theory that homosexuality constituted a third, intermediate gender between masculinity and femininity gained international recognition while his prominent role in campaigns for greater liberalization in sexual affairs made him a target for National Socialist and conservative hostility. The bonfire made of the institute's archive after the Nazi seizure of power has often been interpreted as an attempt to destroy sexology (along with Marxism and Freudianism) in Germany for good. But as was the case with the related disciplines of biology and anthropology, sexology was allowed to continue, albeit in a form heavily influenced by Nazi racism.
Many sexologists sought not only to study and categorize sexuality, but to influence sexual behaviour by offering explanations and advice. Sex advice literature offers a good opportunity for studying the often ideological nature of discussions about sexuality. While some authors sought to popularize the findings of biology and sexology and to make them available to the wider population (along with techniques for achieving orgasms and information about contraception), other writers more influenced by theology saw advice literature primarily as a means of encouraging abstinence, continence, and the inviolability of marriage.Footnote 20 Sex advice writers were also divided over the issue of how much (or how little) knowledge about sex it was healthy and necessary for children and adolescents to have.Footnote 21 Although the focus tends to be on the high-profile Weimar sexologists (like Max Hodann and Wilhelm Reich) who were forced into exile and who did not return to Germany after the war, less prominent figures continued to give advice during the Third Reich and afterwards adapted their ideas for the altered conditions of post-war, divided Germany.Footnote 22 Although historians of sex education are tentatively beginning to explore this area, the history of the relationship between these separate, competing strands (how they merged and overlapped as well as contradicted each other) has yet to be written. The extent to which figures like Reich and Hodann had an influence on Scandinavian and Soviet sex reformers, and that the Catholic Church sought to speak uniformly on sexual matters, means that this history is probably best approached from a comparative European perspective.Footnote 23
Germany's eventful political history in the twentieth century – with two attempts at liberal democracy and two highly ambitious attempts to transform society by means of racial and/or social re-engineering – has inevitably made it an interesting place to study continuities and changes in medical-legal attempts to define and control sexuality. Politics have frequently intervened (at times with great violence) into the history of sexuality in Germany. The emphasis on political and state interventions has tended to overshadow and preclude research into alternative social and cultural interpretations. Medical-legal attempts to define and control sexual behaviour naturally lend themselves to a ‘Foucauldian metanarrative of modernity’.Footnote 24 While the history of sexuality continues to be dominated by this preoccupation with ‘bourgeois knowledge-workers’, new research is beginning to reveal the extent to which the ‘deviants’ themselves were able to contribute towards the way in which the ‘experts’ defined them.Footnote 25
Some would argue that the power of the political has led to an underestimation of longer-term factors of social change. It is legitimate to ask whether the watersheds and nadirs so violently brought into relief by the Third Reich, its radical racial vision, and its demise have not resulted in a downplaying of trends similar to those in other countries. Debates about the images and reality of ‘new women’ in Weimar raise important questions about the degree to which urbanization and industrialization brought genuine increases in sexual freedom for young, single career women. Likewise the disruption caused by the world wars can be seen to have caused lapses in morality and alterations in the usual relationships between men and women.Footnote 26 But while there is growing recognition that the Foucauldian approach is overly top-down and constraining, many historians of sexuality in Germany find it difficult to go beyond the well-travelled path of sexuality as constructed by sexual experts.Footnote 27 Despite the interest in sexuality shown by a wide range of cultural and social historians, their work appears to have little impact on those who explicitly devote themselves to studying the history of sexuality. As Vibeke Petersen suggests, historical examination of films, magazines, and cheap fiction can help explore popular culture's role in women's self-fashioning.Footnote 28 Everyday, oral history and biographical approaches can reveal the extent to which sexuality is not only intensely personal and private, but also socially constructed and milieu-specific.Footnote 29
Youth culture provides another important site for the study of sexuality. One of the main attractions of the unofficial youth subcultures that sprang up from the end of the nineteenth century was the opportunity they offered for interaction unsupervised by adults and the possibility for generating attitudes to sex at odds with those of wider society.Footnote 30 The Wandervogel movement offered members an escape from the constraints of bourgeois, suburban civilization. Meeting in Steglitz, the founding members explicitly excluded girls and shunned conventional interactions with the opposite sex. Fierce debate developed within the movement as to whether it constituted a homosocial Männerbund or a club for the grooming of ‘inverted’ acolytes.Footnote 31 During the Third Reich, a range of milieu-specific experiences and outlooks towards sex were reflected in youth subcultures such as the Edelweiss pirates, the Leipzig Meuten, the Hamburg Swings, and the Viennese Schlurfs.Footnote 32 In the post-war period, successive subcultural phenomena were proclaimed to be decadent and depraved from jazz and bebop fans in the 1940s and early 1950s; fans of Rock ‘n’ Roll from 1956 to the beginning of the 1960s; to Beat fans and mods in the mid- to late 1960s.Footnote 33 While student radicals and members of the commune movement in West Germany took sexual rebellion further by deliberately drawing attention to their sexual freedom, the Tramper fans of East German rock music generated more traditional concern about youth subcultural decadence.Footnote 34 In spite of the much-vaunted liberalization of attitudes towards sex in the GDR, the sexual antics of punks, skinheads, heavy metal fans, Poppers, and graveyard-frequenting Gruftis were as much of concern to the authorities in the 1980s as their real or potential political beliefs.
Magazines aimed at adolescents can provide a particularly useful site for charting changing social and cultural mores, especially with regard to sexuality. Bravo, the mass circulation magazine for West German teenagers, has been the subject of a number of studies.Footnote 35 Discussions of clothing, fashion, music, and dancing all had a bearing on how sexuality was defined, interpreted, and experienced. Problem pages and personal ads offer a codified arena for exploring the conflict between desire and the constraints of ‘normality’. The onset of Capri pants and miniskirts represented important battles in widespread, but highly personal struggles to redefine ownership of adolescent female sexuality. In the GDR discussions of teenage sexuality were dominated by the mood of party politics, but more liberal discussions did emerge during periods of reform. Junge Welt, the daily newspaper aimed at members of the Free German Youth (FDJ), first began to address issues concerning relationships and sex in its advice column in 1955.Footnote 36 This new-found interest in sex led to a campaign of sexual enlightenment which went as far as the proposal that male and female FDJler should share tents.Footnote 37 Although this minor ‘sex wave’ subsided again in the aftermath of the Hungarian Uprising of 1956, similar swells emerged in the 1960s and then with more lasting effect in the 1970s.
I
A growing number of historians of sexuality have begun to argue that a reassessment of Nazi attitudes to sex and sexuality is long overdue.Footnote 38 It is no longer possible to argue (as many in the 1968 generation did) that National Socialism was simply sexually repressive. Instead of seeing the Third Reich as a prudish era similar to that of mid-1950s West Germany, they point to the many areas where sex took place without heed to Christian or bourgeois conventions and where eroticism was at least tacitly allowed to flourish. Sexuality, they argue, played a much more important part in the way in which the Third Reich was experienced than has previously been recognized. In certain respects, Elizabeth Heineman has argued, this new emphasis can be seen as reflecting the already existing distinctions between perpetrators, victims, and bystanders with sex variously helping people to kill, to survive, and to be co-opted by the regime.Footnote 39
Sex in the Third Reich has ceased to constitute an unspeakable ‘terra incognita for historians of Germany’.Footnote 40 Newly discovered areas include: state regulation of prostitution;Footnote 41 the ‘Hiller Girls’ erotic revue;Footnote 42 the persistence of homosexual subcultures in spite of increased persecution;Footnote 43 the prevalence of homosexual ‘crimes’ even in the virulently homophobic SS;Footnote 44 the role played by sex in the erosion of inhibitions about killing;Footnote 45 and the baby boom among Jewish survivors after the war.Footnote 46 George Mosse's insistence that sculpture in the Third Reich contained nothing that was genuinely erotic is understandable, but difficult to sustain.Footnote 47 The naked ‘living bodies’ depicted in Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia and photographed as part of the ‘Belief and Beauty (Glaube und Schönheit)’ programme certainly were.Footnote 48 Surviving photographs and film footage of the ‘Festival of the Amazons’ and the ‘Night of the nymphs’, held in Munich in 1938 and 1939 respectively, show that parts of the Nazi elite had no problem in embracing public displays of carnivalesque nudity. It is only if we take the claim that the Nazis would ‘clean up Germany’ at face value that it becomes surprising that they were prepared to use sex to manipulate people. Sex was an important part of the ‘seductive surface’ used to promote, advertise, and sell 1930s Germany (not least abroad).Footnote 49
Dagmar Herzog goes the furthest in her attempt to re-evaluate (or ‘historicize’) sexuality in the Third Reich. Sex, she argues, was used not just as a means of exclusion, but also of inclusion. She points to Nazi-inspired advice literature which encouraged the heightening of pleasure for married women and the fact that the Nazis did not ban the sale of condoms or remove the machines that vended them. Contrasting ‘Nazi affirmations of sexual pleasure both within and outside of marriage’ with more traditional attempts by the churches and bourgeois society to control sexuality, she argues that this constituted a continuation of ‘liberalizing tendencies’.Footnote 50 The fact that people deemed to be Aryan could have conscience-free, non-reproductive heterosexual sex in the Third Reich (against a backdrop of virulent anti-Semitism, homophobia, and brutal eugenic medical interventions) indicates ‘libertine’, pro-sex trends.Footnote 51
Parts of Herzog's book (particularly those dealing with West Germany) are highly persuasive. In an original and thought-provoking chapter, she argues that the stance adopted by Christian Democrats in West Germany in the mid-1950s was a reaction to (rather than a continuation of) National Socialist attitudes to sex. By emphasizing the extent to which the Third Reich had been sexually decadent and morally transgressive (as well as routinely brutal and murderously racist), the churches were able, disingenuously, to distance themselves from the defunct regime and to disguise their own involvement in bringing the Nazis to power. Herzog goes further in arguing that the 1968 generation was brought up with ‘a profoundly distorted understanding of the national past’.Footnote 52 This led 1960s radicals to misinterpret the conservative outlook of the Federal Republic as a continuation of National Socialism. ‘To liberate sexuality, it was believed, would help cleanse Germany of the lingering aftereffects of Nazism.’Footnote 53 In rebelling against the stifling puritanism of their youth, they embraced a position (and proclaimed it to be ‘anti-fascist’), which was actually closer to the Nazis' self-serving disavowal of Christian morality.
On their own, the chapters on West Germany would make for a powerful and convincing book. Unfortunately, Herzog's critique of the 1968 generation leads her to argue that the entire history of sexuality in Germany requires rewriting because it is dominated by the misperceptions of the 68ers. The ‘standard scholarly assumption, so widely held that it is seldom documented in detail, is that Nazism was at its core antisex’.Footnote 54 Yet Hans Peter Bleuel's 1973 book amply illustrated the ambivalence of Nazi attitudes to sex.Footnote 55 Equally, the large body of literature, which exists on gender in the Third Reich, does not find adequate recognition in Sex after fascism. Instead Herzog refers repeatedly to ‘most scholars’, who on closer inspection turn out to be a few, not particularly influential, self-confessed publicists.Footnote 56 This lack of clarity and a tendency (in certain chapters) to argue against the evidence make it a very uneven book. Nevertheless, this does not prevent Herzog from making bold claims. Thus we are told that careful attention ‘to the history of sexuality prompts us to reconsider how we periodize twentieth-century German history; it changes our interpretation of ruptures and continuities across the conventional divides of 1918, 1933, 1945, 1968, and 1989’.Footnote 57 But the evidence that such turning points are invalid is thin. How ‘liberating’ was a political regime in which an organization like the SS implemented racial screening of potential spouses? Herzog's binary attempt to define eras and political systems as either ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-sex’ is inevitably reductive.Footnote 58 As a consequence, she succeeds in displacing an impossible and unrealistic state of total and complete sexual repression from one period (the Third Reich) to another (late 1950s West Germany).
In emphasizing the late 1950s as a period of ‘extraordinary sexual conservatism’, she blinds herself to the controversy (or ‘moral panic’) surrounding Rock ‘n’ Roll (and by extension to the conflicts over adolescent sexuality) that occurred precisely during this period in both East and West Germany.Footnote 59 Far from having forgotten about ‘the antibourgeois and sexually transgressive aspects of Nazism’, commentators from across the political spectrum continued to make direct references to them. In condemning the loss of inhibition and the ecstatic, uncontrolled behaviour demonstrated by fans at jazz and Rock ‘n’ Roll concerts, critics made direct allusions to the reactions of preceding generations to Hitler.Footnote 60 Likewise, Herzog fails to recognize that the communist Socialist Unity Party (SED) leadership embarked on a major ‘anti-sex campaign’ in the winter of 1965 (just two years after issuing a more liberal communiqué to youth). Fearful of stirrings of discontent among fans of Beat music in the GDR, the Kahlschlag Plenum vilified writers, filmmakers, and other intellectuals for daring to explore issues of sexuality.Footnote 61
At times, Herzog's approach serves to decontextualize rather than to illuminate the episodes of German history she is referring to. In her account, the League of German Girls (BDM) was a simmering pot of unconstrained debauchery.Footnote 62 Most studies of this organization, however, have described the experience of membership as limiting and regimented in comparison to the opportunities for entertainment and interaction with the opposite sex to be found in the big cities and in the alternative youth subcultures.Footnote 63 Michael Kater (whose 1980 article was Herzog's source for her arguments about BDM depravity) does emphasize the ‘sexually alluring’ qualities of the ‘Faith and beauty’ programme (in which young women with film-starlet figures dressed up in glamorous apparel). But he argues that, far from being their intention, the ‘unabashed sexual promiscuity among youth turned out to be a slap in the Nazis’ face'.Footnote 64 Party leaders could only look on with prurient horror as the ‘giving a child to the Führer’ slogan became a runaway success.Footnote 65
The Nazi authorities may, as Herzog suggests, have condoned the publication of advice literature linking sexual pleasure with their racial vision. By encouraging husbands to push their wives' buttons such advice writers supported the goal of producing a master race. But the Nazi leadership in no way condoned the unmarried woman's independent and non-reproductive search for sexual pleasure. As Elizabeth Heineman argues, ‘Healthy, fertile Aryans who chose not to marry could not be full members of the Volksgemeinschaft.’Footnote 66 It is worth repeating what Hitler had to say about the need for boys to toughen themselves up (and to harden their bodies) in order to avoid developing ‘sensuality’, syphilis, and other allegedly ‘Jewish’ characteristics.Footnote 67 Young people who made the mistake of thinking that their sexuality belonged to them could rapidly find themselves at odds with a ruthlessly cynical regime. Indulging in promiscuous behaviour defined as ‘asocial’ (in other words without tacit encouragement or an officially turned blind eye) frequently resulted in a trip to a re-education camp.Footnote 68
Himmler's Police Order of 1943 was brought in to curb young people's access to unsupervised entertainment and to reclassify virtually all uncontrolled leisure-time activities for young people as ‘loitering’ (Herumtreiberei).Footnote 69 As Detlev Peukert argued, in condemning those in the subcultures, the
semi-official National Socialist reports on the swing cliques stress the incidence of promiscuity, group sex, ‘sexual intercourse involving minors’ and, generally, unabashed pleasure in sexuality (which the reports denounce as moral depravity). The wording and tone of these internal reports as a rule said more about their authors and readers than about the objective behaviour of the young people.Footnote 70
What was particularly ‘characteristic of male-supremacist Nazi society’, Michael Kater suggests, is that ‘it was girls, rather than the boys, who were singled out as sexually abnormal or seduction-driven culprits’.Footnote 71
The history of (hetero)sexuality Herzog offers is strangely silent about the disempowerment women have traditionally experienced (and continue to experience) as a result of gender stereotyping and discrimination. To suggest, as Herzog does, that elements of National Socialist ideology were ‘liberating’ because they incited and manipulated sexual desire is to risk falling prey to a masculinist discourse that legitimates and condones the objectification of women and which equates sexual pleasure with male pleasure. Should we be so surprised that the SS tabloid Das Schwarze Korps used allusions to sex to titillate its readers as well as pandering to their prejudices?Footnote 72 William Combs saw this as a predictable attempt to appeal to a young male readership and in line with a policy of encouraging early marriages and higher birth rates. But unlike Herzog, he also pointed to the paper's hostility to women's independence (as expressed in glamorous, ‘exotic’ fashions and make-up) and its tacit acceptance of husbands' violence towards disobedient wives. ‘To achieve the Aryan culture the SS considered appropriate, it was willing to regulate every woman's life from the lipstick she could wear to the number of children she should bear. Seen from this perspective, the powerlessness of women was essential to the SS plan for a totalitarian society.’Footnote 73
This powerlessness is reflected in the SS policy of vetting potential wives and civil service edicts encouraging husbands to have extramarital affairs as long as they were racially appropriate (or as Herzog puts it, giving men a ‘legal right’ to ‘fool around’).Footnote 74 While Nazism made it easier for men who were deemed ‘racially fit’ to cheat on their wives, it made it much harder for women to escape from loveless marriages or to speak out about their mistreatment at the hands of men. The Nazis replicated and reinforced the traditional double standard.Footnote 75 They gave themselves opportunities in the sexual sphere precisely because they denied them to others (gays, lesbians, Jews, gypsies, Afrodeutsche, and the disabled). What Herzog sees as ‘sexually liberating’, many others would interpret as manipulative, abusive, unequal, sexist, and intrusive.Footnote 76 As much as the Nazi regime promoted pride in healthy bodies and the absence of feelings of guilt, it destroyed intimacy and privacy. Anxieties about racial defilement replaced fears about immortal sin.Footnote 77
Herzog does not define what she means by ‘sexual liberalization’. Chauvinistic, potentially wife-beating SS-men were apparently ‘liberated’ because they could cheat on their wives. Men in the GDR, meanwhile, were liberated because they supposedly did their share of housework. But the underlying message of her argument seems to be that the more it is possible to silence the churches and to deny them a public voice on issues of sexuality, the freer, happier, and more liberated we will be. Herzog, a former church historian, takes such a dim view of Christianity and its message on sex that even the Nazis seem preferable. The sex advice literature of the Third Reich became more enlightened, she suggests, because the church presses were closed down.Footnote 78 Similarly, it is possible to present the sex advice literature of the GDR as being much more rational than its counterpart in the Federal Republic because the churches were denied a voice on these issues. But can Nazi sex advice be described as ‘liberating’ without comparing it to the rational, humanist, secular advice offered in Weimar Germany? Such a comparison would show that in spite of its references to female orgasm, Nazi sex advice was but a pale (and reactionary, racist) imitation of its Weimar forebears. Likewise, GDR sex advice would have taken a very different form without the model provided by Max Hodann and others in the Weimar Republic.Footnote 79
Progressive advice without clearly defined and practicably defensible rights is not necessarily all that liberating.Footnote 80 The image of sexual utopia depicted in East German sex research is substantially diminished and undermined by the absence and official suppression of discussion about western-style feminism and gay liberation in the GDR. Lesbians and gays who sought to commemorate those who died wearing the pink triangle in concentration camps were subjected to Stasi surveillance, arrest, and varying degrees of intimidation.Footnote 81 Women who did not just want to praise the state's record on childcare and female employment opportunities, but who wanted opportunities to discuss issues affecting women freely and openly, played a significant role in the development of the opposition movement that helped to bring down SED rule.
In Herzog's account, East Germany becomes a screen on to which to project the possibility of an alternative to West Germany rather than an actual society with its own preoccupations, shibboleths, and contradictions.Footnote 82 This leads her to make assumptions about the SED's ability to transform East German society that even ardent Marxist-Leninists dismissed as over-simplified and mechanistic.Footnote 83 The reality is that East Germany was far more interesting, multi-layered, and conflict-ridden than Herzog allows. Although, from the start, gender equality was loudly proclaimed and more rational attitudes to sex later became an important means of defining the superiority of socialism, in practice huge contradictions, problems, and divisions remained. Ignoring contradictions within the official message and placing blind faith in the SED's ability to predict what the population wanted and needed, Herzog argues that the regime leadership succeeded in accomplishing exactly what it set out to achieve.Footnote 84 Nevertheless, as a wide range of feminist historians have argued, in spite of the SED's bold propaganda claims about the future of women in socialism and massive state support for women's involvement in the workplace, gender inequality proved highly resistant to ‘quick fix’ solutions. The principle of equality was not just ‘automatically established in everyday life’.Footnote 85
Although Herzog credits the SED with eradicating both gender inequality and shame, both persisted as a result of a lack of will (on the part of senior politicians) to challenge outdated concepts and behaviour and the determination of significant numbers of men to carry on as usual. Herzog alludes to the hypocrisy of Das Schwarze Korps in showcasing ‘pulchritudinous naked women luxuriating in sun, sand, and sea’ while condemning ‘half-clothed and overly made-up women from what look like Weimar dance halls’.Footnote 86 Yet when the East German publication, Das Magazin, exhibits the same tendency (of viewing its female nude photography as pure, natural, and life-enhancing), this is seen in a much more favourable light. Apparently ‘these photographs generally lacked the lascivious look and the nonaverage bombshell bodies so prevalent in Western pornography. Meanwhile, the heterosexual male anxieties that both funded and were fostered by the pornography typically available in the West were not provoked in the same way in the East.’Footnote 87 But even loyal East German commentators could find this wishful-thinking self-justification difficult to credit.Footnote 88 The reality is that popular publications in the GDR (particularly those targeted at men in the military) shared the tendency identified by Herzog of trying to have ‘things both ways at once’ – to present themselves as guardians of good taste and pristine morals ‘and to titillate and pander to the pleasures of looking’.Footnote 89
While it was common for East German commentators to criticize lurid headlines about sex crimes as characteristic of the inciting (and brutalizing) nature of capitalism, the GDR press was not above using similar tabloid-style techniques when the circumstances suited.Footnote 90 Thus in 1956 Junge Welt published a picture of a fifteen-year-old girl from Bamberg who, according to the accompanying extracts from a West German newspaper, had been raped by seven US soldiers together with the message ‘Get out of Germany’.Footnote 91 In an attempt to deter young people from latching on to the ‘mod’ phenomenon, the November 1965 issue of Konkret, the magazine for members of the paramilitary Society for Sport and Technology (GST), printed a photograph of boys in parkas alongside a selection of explicit covers from Scandinavian pornographic magazines, some of which were evidently gay.Footnote 92 The implication was clearly that listening to the Rolling Stones would turn adolescents ‘queer’. Leading educational psychologists criticized such propaganda techniques for stimulating the sexual curiosity of youth.Footnote 93
The question remains as to how we should interpret sexuality in the Third Reich. Should we, as Herzog suggests, recognize that ‘liberalizing elements’ continued unchecked or should we, following Jeffrey Herf, decide that this, like other forms of modernism in the Third Reich, was not only anti-traditional, but also deeply reactionary?Footnote 94 The period immediately after the Second World War also raises questions that are not easily answered. How do we relate the apparently positive memories of sexual liberation (and ‘fraternization’ with British and American soldiers) during this period with the waves of mass rapes of German women committed by Soviet soldiers (together with other forms of objectification and mistreatment of women) in the aftermath of the war?Footnote 95
The history of sexuality as constructed in life-worlds ‘is still in its infancy, and the literature itself [is] in flux’.Footnote 96 It is possibly premature therefore to talk of using insights from the history of sexuality to rewrite mainstream political history. As the new literature that is emerging from the study of the GDR (much of it combining archival research with various forms of ‘discursive analysis’) suggests, we are only tentatively beginning to explore what sex (and sexuality) was like for people from different generations and milieux.Footnote 97 With more common ground for interaction between diverse theoretical and methodological approaches, it is possible to look forward to a new period of intense and stimulating debate about this fascinating, but controversial and often difficult, subject. But while it is interesting and exciting to explore the ‘seductive surfaces’, we should not let them blind us to deeper, less accessible, underlying human realities.
