“Modern Sexuality”

For the past thirty or forty years, a particular understanding of modern sexuality has been prevalent among historians—not of what modern people actually did sexually, but of how they thought about it. According to this conception, sexuality in premodern and early-modern times was understood as the whole broad spectrum of actions that served the purpose of sexual pleasure. Pleasure itself was understood to be undifferentiated and purely bodily; in principle, then, every sexual action could give pleasure to every person. Whether a person did one thing or another was determined by circumstance or opportunity, or by his or her other personal and social attributes—whether it be kindness or cruelty, dutiful or disorderly instincts, honor or depravity, low or high status, powerlessness or power, and so on.

In modern societies, by contrast, sexuality was understood not as a spectrum of actions, but rather as a direction of desire rooted deep in and suffusing the human personality; it was a crucial and determining element in selfhood. It was also differentiated: different people desired different things, and were therefore different in kind from each other. Men and women who desired people of their own gender were homosexual; those who desired members of the other gender were heterosexual; those who desired both were bisexual. If they experienced sexual pleasure as a result of pain, they were masochists; of cruelty, sadists; of both, sadomasochists—and so on. Some of these forms of desire might be pathological, others normal; some might be socially harmful and others socially beneficial; but the individual could not do much about it anyway. One is what one is, and, as the Social Democratic leader August Bebel put it in 1887, sexual desires are “drives… that are intimately connected with one's innermost self, are one's self itself (das Sein selbst).”Footnote ²

Modern people therefore understood sexuality as socially important as well. Sexuality was rooted in the reproductive instinct and was, therefore, after the survival instinct, the strongest and most important motive of human behavior. It was the foundation of family life—the motivation for social aspiration, whether for wealth or power or respect; and sexual gratification (or a lack thereof) was critical in determining a person's happiness and vitality, their sense of satisfaction with their own individual lives, and their sense also of their integration into their society more broadly. Sexuality was understood to be the motor at the heart of the individual and of society, something very profound and very important.

My own research has been confined to the period between about 1880 and about 1935; at least for that period, it has very much confirmed this picture of the modern understanding of sexuality. One finds this understanding of sexuality and of its importance everywhere in the sources, and with increasing frequency across the period I have studied. In this sense, Dagmar Herzog has—quite correctly—recently called the twentieth century “the century of sex.”Footnote ³ Yet, as Anna Clark has pointed out, there was not a consensus on the nature of sexuality—and therefore not on the meaning or implications of its importance either. The idea that sexuality was something deeply rooted in and determinative of human nature was generally accepted; but what sexuality was like, and what political conclusions should be drawn from what it was like, were questions that were hotly debated. According to Clark, there were, in fact, two conceptions of sexuality: “sexual desire as polluting and dangerous, and sexual desire as creative, transcendent, and transformative.”Footnote ⁴

The interpretive models—the “grand narratives”—generated by historians have mirrored this bifurcation. In some interpretations the modern era is seen as an age of sexual liberation, as an integral part of a broader, modern dynamic of democratization. The personal became increasingly political, which opened the door to the questioning and erosion of inherited, outdated, restrictive ideas, prohibitions, and laws. Sexual rights were thus ultimately added to the rights of political and social citizenship. This was part of an irresistible development in the direction of the “extension of the democratic model to the furthest conceivable limit,” in the words of Lawrence Birken.Footnote ⁵ Jeffrey Weeks has concluded that the “long, convoluted, messy, unfinished but profound revolution” in sexual relations has been “overwhelmingly beneficial” because it has “given rise to discourses of individual autonomy, rights and sexual justice that… can empower new forms of agency.”Footnote ⁶

Others, by contrast, have tended to see modern sexuality as an essential element in a tendentially totalitarian modernity. Michel Foucault famously described how sexuality was “deployed” in order to allow regulatory power to penetrate ever more deeply and broadly into the fabric of society. Sexuality made it possible for power to develop both “infinitesimal surveillances, permanent controls, extremely meticulous orderings of space… an entire micro-power devoted to the body,” as well as “comprehensive measures, statistical assessments, and interventions aimed at the entire social body.” It all amounted to a “whole social practice” of “state-directed racism.” One product of this was National Socialism, but, more broadly, sex was, in all modern societies, the critical, “most internal element in a deployment of sexuality organized by power in its grip on bodies and their materiality, their forces, energies, sensations, and pleasures.”Footnote ⁷ The welfare state, as Philippe Donzelot put it, was no longer “social fascism,” but “social sector fascism.”Footnote ⁸ Similarly, Angus McLaren has seen in the modern history of sexuality one long series of “moral panics… employed by the powerful for the surveillance, disciplining and silencing of the marginal.”Footnote ⁹ Finally, Annette Timm has argued that there was a widespread modern ideology of sex, which she characterizes as a “consensus that individuals should view reproduction as a national duty.”Footnote ¹⁰

To make the situation even more complex, recent research has made it clear that political and social action directed at liberating or controlling sexuality often had unintended consequences—consequences that sometimes ran directly counter to activists’ intentions. McLaren, for example, explicitly acknowledges that moral panics could create a sense of solidarity among the sexual subcommunities they targeted, thereby actually contributing to their political mobilization and effectiveness.Footnote ¹¹ By contrast, as Jennifer Evans and Jane Freeland remark in a review essay on sexuality in twentieth-century Germany, “progressive policies… held the power both to liberate and limit women's choices, options and actions” because “the state, through its actors, normalizes… behavior through the celebration of certain identities over others.”Footnote ¹² One example might be “respectable” homosexuals’ efforts to disavow and distance themselves from “flagrant” or “decadent” homosexuals, or from the phenomenon of homosexual prostitution. Dagmar Herzog thus writes in her survey, Sexuality in Europe, therefore, about “how profoundly complicated the sexual politics of the twentieth century in Europe actually were,” of “the problems often embedded… within what were thought to be liberalizing efforts,” and of the “recurrent backlashes” sparked by liberalizing initiatives. Her own work on Nazism and sexuality also showed that even a sexually very repressive regime could also be pro-sex, in at least some ways. In both cases she was acutely aware of the ambivalences of sexual politics and of the unintended consequences of interventions by the state and various social actors; she pithily concluded, in short, that “sex is complicated.”Footnote ¹³

This complexity was not just chaotic, however; it had a structure—one that cannot be captured by the simple binary model: repressive or liberatory. The politics of modern sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not just complicated and not just ambivalent: it was divided—in three, to be precise. It was “trivalent,” and there were three mutually contradictory modern answers to the question, “What is sexuality like?” There were therefore also three distinct—if diffuse—modern sexual-political camps, or groupings, pursuing agendas derived from those answers. None of these camps can be reduced simply to progressive or repressive.

First, there was a loosely coherent, conservative religious grouping, which included Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, as well as men and women. For them sexuality was a purely egoistic, amoral, antisocial force that was rooted deep in mankind's animal nature and posed a permanent threat to the coherence and autonomy of one's truly human, spiritual-intellectual life—and therefore also to orderly social and political relations. Political, social, religious, legal, and intellectual authorities were there to keep this animalistic, antisocial sexuality under control, and to teach and require people how to control their animal, antisocial appetites—not just sexual appetites, but also greed, gluttony, and selfishness more generally. As one Catholic observer argued in 1909, “general morality grows out of specifically sexual morality.”Footnote ¹⁴ If sexual morality were not enforced, the material would triumph over the spiritual, egoism over community, and society would degenerate into a tyrannical chaos ordered only by force and appetites, not by values. Both political liberty and the inward freedom of the individual person were therefore dependent on the presence of an authoritarian—or, at least, authoritative—political cultural and social order. If that order collapsed, one Protestant morality campaigner summed it up in 1904, the result would be:

In short, for conservatives, the authoritarian political order—and the repressive sexual morality it defended—had both social/political and religious significance; together, they underpinned the liberty and spiritual well-being of the subject.

Among many on the sexual-political Left—including those in the sex-reform movement, many medical sexologists, and a range of popular or popularizing advocates of sexual health and freedom—a very different modern conception of sexuality prevailed. Here sexuality was widely seen as the expression of vital, joyful, creative capacities deeply rooted in human nature. It was the primordial force and foundation of all creativity, the seedbed and vital energy from which art and science grew. It was also the motor of all interpersonal relationships—love and parenthood, of course, but also friendship, sociability, philanthropy, patriotism, and the creative social energies that built all social forms, from the family up to the state. A great many on the Left also saw sexuality as the motor of biological evolution, driven by sexual selection—i.e., by desire—and leading humanity ever upward not only in its cultural forms, but also in its biological substance.

The sexual-political Left was therefore predominantly social democratic in orientation, though some political liberals participated in the sex-reform movement as well. As one sex-reform radical put it in 1912, the current sexual order was incompatible with “genuine justice and democratic freedom,” and the “current barbarity of sexual life” must give way to a “democratic social order.” Democracy, she held, was “the highest goal and aim of the times”; current family law was a relic of “patriarchal and aristocratic ages of civilization,” contrary to the “principle of moral freedom” and to the “constitutive principles” of the new social order, namely, “individuality and solidarity.”Footnote ¹⁶ These, and hence a democratic ordering of sexual life, were the precondition for the further evolution of humanity. The further organic and cultural development of humanity was only possible if sexual energies—desire and pleasure—could flow freely through society and through individual lives. That meant that ideas, institutions, traditions, authorities, or elites that had the power to tell people what they could or could not do with their sexuality must be cleared away. The power of money, too, must be banished from sexual life—no one should ever be moved to shape his or her sexual life according to considerations of material security or comfort or ambition. People must decide for themselves, on the basis of their own internal experience of their deeply-rooted individual sexual nature and desire, what they would and would not do sexually. Only if they did could the process of evolution further develop the essentially human in humanity, i.e., that which distinguishes us from the rest of the animal world.

Sexuality was, in short, the motor of transcendence. In that sense political freedom and social equality—and the more libertarian code of sexual morality that underpinned them—had both a political and a fundamentally religious, or transcendent, meaning for the Left as well.

There was also a third grouping: those in Germany who drew much different conclusions from evolutionary theory. An amorphous intellectual grouping on the radical Right—including, in particular, some racial theorists and antisemites, as well as some members of the (politically diverse) community of medical sexologists—saw sexuality as the most important characteristic of the individual specifically as a member of a particular nation or race. Sexuality was for them the expression of the all-important, all-determining will of the nation, or of the race for life and power, implanted deep within every one of its individual members. As the foundation of the demographic power of the race/nation, sexuality was ultimately the decisive factor in the life of humanity. Desire decided the fate of human communities and, ultimately, of the entire human species, since demographic success decided which nations or “races” would take part in the further evolutionary development of humanity.

The activists of the sexual-political Right were predominantly antidemocratic in a specific sense: they did not believe that people have sexual rights, but rather sexual duties. The purpose of sexuality was the demographic growth and biological improvement of the nation or race; forms of desire that did not contribute to this aim (e.g., homosexuality, non-procreative sex) were unnatural, senseless, pathological—not only useless but also harmful, and must thus be eliminated. The radical Right also saw social privilege as biologically harmful, since ability, not the happenstance of birth, must decide which people had decisive political, social, and sexual power. Christianity was, for them, the morality of slaves: it was superstitious, unscientific mumbo-jumbo and nonsensical claptrap, prudish and hypocritical and the source of many sexual pathologies, e.g., the ideal of chastity or virginity, abstinence among the Catholic clergy and young people, prostitution as the natural complement to restrictive family and marital customs and laws, as well as the idea that sexuality and, in particular, men's sexual aggression were dirty, sinful, morally wrong. Many on the Right even believed that the Christian idea of monogamy restricted the fertility of the best, most socially successful men while encouraging that of “losers”—who could get women despite their inferiority because their betters were limited to one wife. That limited the quantity and quality of the race/nation. All this had to be abolished as well.

In 1913, the leading sexological journal in Germany published an essay in which a young right-wing antisemite in Munich warned that Europeans were degenerating because of “indiscriminate mixing with inferior races,” the welfare state, the humanitarian ideal of Christianity, democracy, “pleasure-seeking,” the “overvaluing of personal comfort,” and capitalism. He warned that the “coolies” would promptly “be firmly established in all four quarters of the globe and, given their limitless reproduction, soon overrun all other races,” including “the most highly developed, the Aryan race.” He recommended “selective-breeding measures on a large scale” that would make the Aryans so superior that it would be “easy [for them] to dominate the earth and hold the other races in check,” abolish parliamentary government in favor of dictatorship, and create a new eugenic religion.Footnote ¹⁷

The place of eugenics in this tripartite landscape of ideas about sex was complex. Eugenics appealed most strongly to those on the sexual-political Left. For many Social Democrats, eugenic ideas embodied the principle of solidarity in sexual life: the individual had a duty to society to ensure the health of his or her offspring, and society, in turn, had a duty to the individual to help him or her accomplish that (e.g., by assuring mothers adequate housing, safe working conditions, as well as adequate nutrition and healthcare). Those attracted to more libertarian variants of socialism often argued that because “nature” wanted healthy babies, people's freedom to follow their sexual instincts—their desires—was the best guarantee of eugenic health. As the Swedish sex reformer Ellen Key put it in an influential book published in 1905, “society must make it possible for the erotic happiness of the individual to serve the improvement of the species.”Footnote ¹⁸ Religious conservatives were rarely interested in eugenics. Eugenic ideas were more attractive to the radical Right—for example, among those who thought that polygamy would allow the best, most successful men to have lots of children, thereby improving the overall quality of the nation's offspring. But particularly among those attracted to proto-totalitarian ideas, eugenic beliefs tended to be overshadowed by Social Darwinist and outright racist thinking (antisemitism in particular).Footnote ¹⁹

The relationship of Sigmund Freud's ideas to the modern coneption(s) of sexuality was no less complex. In one sense, Freud offered a devastating critique of the modern conception of sexuality that underlay all three conceptions of sexuality prevalent in his time. His Three Essays on Sexuality (1905), in particular, pointed out that the idea that sexual orientation and/or perversion were “acquired” effectively meant simply that people fell into the habit of behaving one way and not another, whereas the notion that sexual orientation was “inborn” was actually just a metaphor. No one actually had any idea what mechanisms these terms described. The final line of the book concluded “that we know far too little about the biological processes that constitute the essence of sexuality to be able to develop, from our isolated insights, a theory adequate for comprehension of either the normal or the pathological” in sexual life. And yet, strikingly, Freud, too, nevertheless insisted that we do know that sexuality is the product of “inner-somatic stimuli.”Footnote ²⁰ In short, the only thing we know for sure about sexuality is that it is a deep-rooted, determining element in human nature.

It is not surprising, then, that Freud's thinking was important for all three groups. Some on the sexual-political Left saw in his conception of polymorphous perversity a confirmation of their belief in the radical individuality of sex. Some Christian conservatives understood Freud to be championing (though in a very roundabout way) their own vision of gender relations, e.g., civilization's repression of sexuality, the importance of the paterfamilias, childbearing as woman's chief occupation. Some right-leaning sexologists thought his theories suggested that perversions were neither permanent nor a product of sinful urges, but could be therapized away. Oddly enough, then, Freud's radical questioning of the modern conception of sexuality essentially amounted, in the end, to a restatement of its fundamental postulates—one that did not supersede the trivalent politics of that conception.Footnote ²¹

This schematic description of the politics of sexual morality in the three decades between 1880 and World War I is oversimplified, of course. There is a certain reductionism involved in delineating only three sexual-political groupings—just as there is in models that suggest that there were just two conceptions of sexuality (progressive and repressive) or in the one-factor model that sees a fundamentally unitary concept of modern sexuality. The situation was much more complex than any such schematic representation can capture. Many groups and individuals do not fit neatly into anyone of these three groupings; and each group was also divided internally by different interests, issues, and even personalities. For instance, there were, in many cases, clear differences between male and female perspectives within each of the three groupings outlined here.Footnote ²² Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish religious conservatives were sometime vehemently hostile to one another. Social Democrats engaged in bitter debates over sexuality, often between revisionists and “orthodox” Marxists.Footnote ²³ Many liberals did not fit into this schema very well—supporting the dismantling of state intervention in private life, for example, but extremely skeptical of the eugenic enthusiasm of sex reformers and of their advocacy of sexual individualism. Politically and theologically liberal Protestants could be found in the morality movements, but also in the sex-reform movement, and many sexologists were left-liberals repelled by radical right-wing ideas. There was, particularly among the academic medical men who dominated sexology, a positive incentive to disagree with everyone else as a way of achieving professional distinction. Finally, doctors engaged in the campaign against venereal disease varied widely in their thinking about other questions of sexual politics and policy: some favored sex reform, for example, whereas others saw it as romantic nonsense; some favored the abolition of regulated prostitution, whereas others wanted to confine all prostitutes to brothels run by the state or city.Footnote ²⁴

Any conceptualization involves reductionism, of course, and historians can always rightly point out that things were “more complicated than that.” But it is methodologically useful to entertain such reductionisms—to deploy them as complementary heuristic devices. Each of the ones outlined earlier yields a valuable interpretive payoff; each is empirically justifiable; each produces a valid and fruitful conclusion.

Despite many complexities, there was a conceptual least common denominator within each of these three groupings; on that basis, each was gaining coherence in the years before 1914—building alliances and organizational ties, hammering out common policy positions, exchanging visits to national conferences, building collaborative local initiatives, and sometimes even creating interlocking executive boards. These broad coalitions had varying degrees of unity: relatively greater among religious conservatives (at least within each confession, but, to some extent, also among them); relatively weaker within sexology, which was torn between a social democratic Left, a right-liberal center, and a radical, proto-totalitarian Right. All three were nevertheless gaining coherence over time. Even in straightforward political terms, a tripartite pattern was emerging ever more strongly within that complexity.

Just as important, this scheme allows us to address directly the role modern conceptions of sexuality played in German political development in the early twentieth century. The conflicts among the advocates of these three modern conceptions of sexuality contributed to the transitions between different regime forms in twentieth-century Germany. In particular, bitter debates over abortion, prostitution, censorship, population policy, marriage law, homosexuality, and many related topics played an important role in the political crisis of the Weimar Republic. In the final upheaval of 1930–1933, these debates were likely not decisive: they were one important factor among many others, including, of course, the economic crisis.Footnote ²⁵ But these three conceptions of sexuality were nevertheless decisive in defining the available political alternatives. Conservatives, Social Democrats, and fascists all put sexuality at the heart of their anthropology; they all understood sexuality to be a central and deciding characteristic of human beings and human society. And what one believes to be politically possible and necessary is defined by what one believes people to be like. Political and policy agendas were therefore profoundly shaped by the need to enlist, control, direct, protect, or shape sexuality as a deeply rooted, determining, important part of what people are.

We can thus conclude, first, that there was “a” modern sexuality. But that fact does not tell us much as far as politics was concerned. A conceptualization that does not help us understand the difference between National Socialism, Social Democracy, and Christian conservatism will not help us much to understand German political history in the twentieth century. It does not help explain any political outcomes, and, in Germany's twentieth century, political outcomes were decisive in shaping the lives and experiences of almost everyone. To reduce it to a formula: the politics of modern sexuality was political, not discursive. It was driven by a complex set of conflicts about sexuality, not by any political logic inherent in the modern conception of sexuality. The modern conception of sexuality defined a field of political contention, but neither the terms nor the outcome of that contention.

Yet, second, the single-factor reductionism implicit in the idea that there was “a” modern sexuality does explain one extremely important issue: why sexuality was at the center of all modern political programs. The least common denominator among the three varieties of sexual politics was this shared modern conception of sexuality as a deeply rooted, determining aspect of the self. That conception was deeply rooted in modern political ideas and systems; it was, in fact, a determining element in them. This is why the politics of sexuality was critically important in the political life of Germany (and indeed of Europe) in the nineteenth century and particularly in the twentieth—because everyone did agree that sexuality was important, even if they disagreed about what sexuality was like.

The binary reductionist model (progressive vs. repressive) is less easy to defend. It nevertheless reminds us of something critically important about the early twentieth century: that in sexual politics, as in every other respect, conservatives were not the same as totalitarians. The radical Right was “progressive” in the sense that it was entirely future-oriented: it championed a program of radical change, not of reaction. In Germany this fact was of enormous importance. Conservatives could ultimately be reconciled to a democracy that seemed ready to defend a sufficient measure of moral and sexual repression, or “restoration,” as they understood it. The radical Right could not.

Dynamic Complexity

The advantage of the three-factor reductionist conceptualization described here is, above all, that it helps us to define the complex dynamics of the debate over sexuality. For it was of decisive significance in Germany that these three sexual-political camps interacted with each other in a way that made sexuality increasingly important politically. At its inception, each of these three positions was championed by relatively small and relatively fragmented groups of intellectuals and activists—tens of thousands by the 1900s—and none of them was at all united. There were certainly lines of intellectual affinity, overlapping social milieus, partially shared values and projects; but those elements of cohesion developed practical meaning only over a period of some years, in some cases two or three decades.

In fact, the constituent elements of each grouping (as it would take shape by 1914) emerged in a piecemeal process of steadily ramifying and diversifying social self-organization. Liberal Protestant women inspired by the British campaign against regulated prostitution, led by Josephine Butler, formed the first modern associations in Germany devoted to moral reform in the early 1880s. Conservative Protestant men followed suit (partly in reaction against these) in the middle 1880s, but conservative Catholic and Jewish men's organizations were formed only at the end of the 1890s. A wave of women's organizations—radical, liberal, and conservative—then formed between the late 1890s and the mid-1900s.Footnote ²⁶ The homosexual rights movement took shape in the late 1890s, the broader sex-reform movement not until the middle of the 1900s.Footnote ²⁷ Social Democratic thinking regarding sexuality was elaborated starting in the 1880s, and socialist women's unions became an important public voice on sexual matters starting in the late 1890s.Footnote ²⁸ Sexology began to emerge as a discipline already in the mid-1880s, but the two major German sexological associations were not formed until 1913.Footnote ²⁹ Eugenics emerged in the 1890s as well, but took organizational shape only in 1904–1905.Footnote ³⁰ The Society for Combating Venereal Disease (Deutsche Gesellschaft zur Bekämpfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten), which came to play an important role in debates about sexuality, was not formed until 1902.Footnote ³¹

There was, in short, a steadily growing universe of associations, “movements,” and public voices concerned with issues related to sexuality, and the discussion of sexuality consequently grew ever more cacophonic.Footnote ³² This reflected the fact that a rising number of Germans had the resources—money, time, and education, as well as the amenities and proximities of the urban environment—to engage in organizational activity and project their voices into the public sphere, e.g., through the rapidly expanding print media. But it also revealed a snow-balling effect: when activists in one group injected their agenda into public discussion or public policy, those affected or potentially affected organized in response. It is important to stress that this steady multiplication of voices, positions, organizations, and even identities (gay man, unmarried woman, soldier of Christian virtue, working-class socialist mother, medical custodian of the national health, etc.) was not the same thing as sexual liberation. Many of these groups championed rather repressive ideas. It should also be stressed that the manifold issues they addressed did not aggregate immediately into tightly associated complexes. That process took a good deal of time. Before the middle of the 1900s, most of these groups were content to champion particular positions on specific issues: homosexual rights, prostitution policy, censorship and public decency, family law reform, public policy toward venereal disease, etc. Many of them were small, with memberships in the high hundreds or low thousands; there was also a complex organizational landscape of local and regional groups, which, in many cases, only gradually and partially coalesced into national “movements” and institutions. Germans working in many fields of social activity during this period had a term for this pattern: Zersplitterung (fragmentation) or sometimes Vereinsmeierei (mindlessly parochial associational activity).

These groups of activists were embedded, however, in broader potential constituencies likely to agree with them. In the case of conservative Christian morality campaigners, for example, that included church personnel; civil servants and jurists committed to authoritarian political and moral principles; conservative women committed to religious traditions; activists and functionaries in the expanding charity establishments of the churches. One could draw up a similar list for each of the other two groups: doctors, working women, teachers, publishers, authors, booksellers, young single male professionals, medical academics, etc.Footnote ³³

In the course of a wide range of only loosely related conflicts over public policy and debates in the press around the turn of the century (regarding, for example, regulated prostitution, the criminal code, the artistic nude, theater and film censorship, the advertisement and sale of prophylactics), the activists in each of these particular groups sought to mobilize greater numbers of potential constituents in order to generate greater leverage on the legislative process and/or influence on public opinion. They broadcast their ideas more widely by holding mass meetings, distributing pamphlets, or issuing periodicals; they recruited members and founded more local chapters; they encouraged or persuaded potential supporters among constituent groups to form their own organizations to champion shared values.

This broader mobilization actually generated new divisions and new conflicts, however. Mobilizing broader constituencies often brought into these movements people whose interests and perspectives differed in important ways from those of the smaller groups of activists who had initiated them. The result was actually increasing disagreement and conflict within each camp, and, in some cases, outright organizational fissioning. The new ones then generated still further pressure to mobilize and activate constituencies.

The role of conservative Protestant men in mobilizing conservative Protestant women is perhaps the best single example. The former initially believed that the extant system of state-regulated prostitution, in which women who registered with the police and submitted to regular medical inspection could legally sell sex, was sinful and had to be abolished. In 1899 leading Protestant men initiated the formation of the Protestant Women's League as a counterweight to liberal women, who were agitating for the abolition of regulation in favor of decriminalization of all prostitution. It turned out, however, that conservative Protestant women saw regulation as a clear instance of gender bias: they did not see why female prostitutes should be regulated or punished, but not their male clients. Within a few years the Protestant Women's League came to advocate decriminalization of prostitution, appealing to what the chairwoman, Paula Mueller, called the “sentiment of solidarity” between respectable women and prostitutes.Footnote ³⁴ The idea that such solidarity was possible outraged many moral conservatives; but by 1912, in fact, the male Protestant morality campaigners had come to agree with their erstwhile protégés. That opened a bitter debate within the Protestant Church and charity establishment, where more conservative men, less exposed to women's views, remained committed to criminalization.Footnote ³⁵

At the same time, of course, building larger and more active organizations further stoked the hostility among these groups as well. As activists strove to articulate and broadcast their ideas and influence public policy more effectively, they generated increasingly direct and intense conflicts with their rivals, creating further pressure to articulate ideas, mobilize constituents, secure greater influence on policy, etc. To give just one example: in 1910, an organization in Dresden that favored the decriminalization of prostitution celebrated the fact that, because of recent police success in introducing brothels in some cities, “new life and fresh energy have come into our movement” because women were so outraged.Footnote ³⁶

In the end, from about the second decade of the twentieth century in particular, this dynamic of fragmentation actually generated rising centripetal forces within the three broad groupings outlined in the first section of this article. As debates over a range of specific moral and policy issues heated up, particular groups began to seek allies among other, sympathetic groupings that were caught up in the same kind of dynamic escalation in their own areas of concern. They needed to build coalitions and alliances in order to gain influence on public opinion, on the administrative system, as well as on governments and legislatures. After about 1908, those alliances began to be formalized by systems of interlocking directorates, and, by 1913, certain key figures held important formal leadership positions across the whole spectrum of organizations on the sexual Left: the homosexual rights movement, the sex-reform movement, the psychoanalytic movement, Social Democracy, the women's suffrage movement, and the left end of the sexological spectrum. Familiar names for students of the period include Magnus Hirschfeld, Helene Stöcker, Iwan Bloch, Heinrich Koerber, and Marie Stritt. Another striking example was the remarkable rapprochement between, on the one hand, liberal Protestant women in the movement against regulated prostitution and in the broader so-called mainstream, nominally nonconfessional women's movement, and, on the other, conservative Protestant women in the German Protestant Women's League. That alliance was brought about, in part, by intellectual and personal affinities, but especially by shared animosity toward sex reform. A less surprising development was the increasing sympathy between Protestant and Catholic men's morality organizations. That alliance was no means a given, in light of the intense confessional hostilities that sometimes came to the fore even as late as 1912 and 1913; but it was a predictable response to the growing cultural and political power of the Left.Footnote ³⁷

As these alliances took shape, the stakes for all parties steadily rose, of course. Each group saw its opposition becoming a more and more coherent and massive threat—one aimed not just at any one particular issue, but at a whole complex of values that were increasingly understood to be interrelated and interdependent. These complicated dynamics meant, then, that the question of sexuality was debated with steadily rising intensity, in wider and wider social circles, as well as in more and more media outlets and organizations. And it also became the subject of policy debates of increasing frequency, intensity, and coherence. By 1908, for example, in the context of a debate over reform of the national Criminal Code (in its entirety, not just the section relating to crimes against morality and sex offenses), Prussian Minister of Justice Max von Beseler told his cabinet colleagues that prostitution reform is “at present the most hotly contested question in the area of criminal law. The whole nation takes the liveliest interest in this matter.”Footnote ³⁸

In short, this dynamic of rising complexity and intensity meant that the century of sex became progressively more and more the century of sex. What is striking, though, is that this was happening precisely not because there was an underlying consensus about what sexuality is, and not because there was an underlying consensus on expanding systems for regulating it, but rather because there was not such a consensus. The momentum here was not generated by an underlying coherence, but by a self-sustaining dynamic of rising conflict. Sex became more and more politically important because more and more people disagreed about what it was like, why it was important, and what should be done about it.

Sex and “Sexuality”

There is, of course, one oddity about the preceding discussion: it does not actually say anything about sex—about what people actually did. The focus has not been on sex but on the politics of sex. That is typical of most of the literature on the history of sexuality in Germany (and, to a lesser extent, in Europe as a whole). One reason for this is that political outcomes mattered very much in modern German history. A second is this it is extremely difficult to discover what people did sexually, especially before roughly the 1920s. There are good indications, and we can speculate on the basis of suggestive fragmentary evidence, but we can reach few definite conclusions. The great preponderance of available evidence does point, however, to one clear meta-conclusion regarding the relationship between the politics of sexuality and the practices of sexuality: most Germans outside the political and intellectual elites were not especially interested in the ideas about sexuality that excited the radical Left, the radical Right, and conservatives; sometimes, they had not even heard of them.Footnote ³⁹

We know this from countless examples—indeed, from almost every example we can find. The Left, the radical Right, and Christian conservatives all saw prostitution as essentially an abomination—the surrender of the most intimate and inward person for mere money, a waste of the individual's precious biological potential, a severe danger to individual and social health. But millions of people obviously thought differently. We know, for example, that the majority of middle-class German men around 1900 had first had sex in return for money; early survey research (admittedly extremely limited and selective) suggests about 60 percent, and the figure is higher for men in some professions that involved longer training periods. It was commonly estimated that, before World War I, up to 330,000 women in Germany sold sex, i.e., something approaching 2.5 percent of all women aged fifteen to forty; this implies a male clientele that numbered at least in the low millions (that said, we have little idea how many different customers a woman working in the sex trade had in a year).Footnote ⁴⁰

Something similar can be said of birth control. The radical Right and Christian conservatives saw contraception as abuse of one's biological or spiritual self; many doctors saw it as harmful to mental and physical health; even most of the Left found it aesthetically distasteful. Many of these people were particularly concerned about the effect of coitus interruptus on the nervous system and moral sensibilities. Yet, in 1913, the leading sexologist Max Marcuse estimated that some two-thirds of sexually active couples practiced some form of contraception, with coitus interruptus “far and away the most common method.”Footnote ⁴¹ Factory workers or clerical employees who defended the hiring of prostitutes and the use of contraceptives as practical necessities, given the supposed realities of young people's lives, certainly were not less “modern” than those who wailed about declining fertility or morality.Footnote ⁴² In fact, more than thirty years of panic over contraception and the birth rate, from around 1900 to the mid-1930s, apparently did little to slow the decline of fertility.

Almost any example leads to a similar conclusion. Abortion was murder to Christians, race suicide to the radical Right, a tragedy to the Left—and, of course, illegal. But Marcuse found that, for the most part, at least working-class women “see the fact of abortion as something self-evident, and see no reason to deny it,” since they “do not perceive it, in the least, to be something immoral.”Footnote ⁴³ The social elite saw masturbation either as extremely dangerous for mental and physical health, or as not too dangerous if practiced in moderation—or, at the very least, as shameful and ridiculous. Early survey research from the period nevertheless found that over 90 percent of men and over 70 percent of women masturbated.Footnote ⁴⁴ The great majority of the social elite similarly saw homosexuality as a terrible danger to the health of the nation, as a sinful abuse and waste of one's God-given reproductive powers, or as justifiable in some cases—but always disgusting. Still, early survey data suggest that more than 1.5 percent of middle-class men considered themselves homosexual; that as many as 7 percent considered themselves bisexual; and that as many as 5 percent identified as heterosexual, but had engaged in homosexual acts as schoolboys. As one Munich lawyer remarked, just as the greatest homosexuality scandal in prewar German politics was reaching its peak in 1908: “God, yes, it's sad and certainly highly reprehensible, but isn't it actually quite common? Is the youth of any man who has passed through a cadet school, a boarding school, or something similar free of it?” Among women, incidences of self-reported bisexuality and homosexual experience at school were lower, but as many as 5 percent considered themselves homosexual.Footnote ⁴⁵ Despite fifty years of intense political debate and propaganda, the Nazis were horrified to discover even in the early 1930s that most working-class men did not see homosexual acts as a problem. As Geoffrey Giles has put it, the “more relaxed and uncomplicated attitude toward sex among the working class was a constant source of puzzlement and frustration to judges”—and to most sexologists, sex reformers, and the clergy as well.Footnote ⁴⁶

The surprising thing about actual sexual practices (as far as we can discern from available sources), then, is that in terms of the current prevalent understanding of the distinction between premodern and modern sexualities, most people in the early twentieth century seem to have had a premodern conception of sexuality. Many different sexual acts gave them pleasure; they engaged in many of those acts, as opportunities arose and circumstances determined; and they were not really concerned with the moral, health, or power-political implications. Indeed, in some of their variants, early twentieth-century scientific-medical understandings of sexuality seem to belong more to the conceptual world of the early modern society of orders, in which peasants, burghers, clergy, and other groups were understood to be different in nature and quality from each other. That was not true, of course, of Magnus Hirschfeld, who once calculated that there were 43,046,721 distinct forms of sexual desire, and thus that “love is as varied as people are.”Footnote ⁴⁷ But what about those who concluded, for example, that it was in some people's “inborn” nature a desire to have sex with statues?Footnote ⁴⁸ This seems to approximate the phrase “here be monsters” used by cartographers—a placeholder for actual knowledge for those frightened by their own ignorance.

The gap between actual sexual practices and the “modern” conception of sexuality prevalent among the social and intellectual elite was, finally, a major reason for the deepening politicization of sexuality in the early twentieth century. Social developments such as urbanization, the growth of the commercial media, and universal literacy steadily raised the visibility of sexual practices both within and outside those elites. This was a constant theme in this period, in fact: that vice was no longer ashamed of itself. Not only were “modern” conceptions of sexuality being articulated with increasing clarity and vehemence, but it was also increasingly clear that none of those conceptions actually matched what people did in their sex lives. That, in turn, invited (or even seemed to require) either greater intervention by the state and medical or moral experts to impose some discipline and order—or greater liberalization because such interventions were clearly unrealistic. In short, the rising political importance of sex—the fact that the twentieth century was becoming ever more the “century of sex”—is, in part, evidence precisely of the failure of the regulatory ambitions of those groups that thought sex was important in a society that did not seem to agree with them.

The Coherence of Complexity and Contingency

The model proposed here is highly empirical and descriptive; it does not start with a particular problem and move back in time to explain its origins. This serves an important interpretive purpose: it is not useful to seek explicitly in the history of sexuality around 1900 an explanation for any later major historical events—such as the democratic revolution of 1918, the collapse of Weimar, the Holocaust, or even the sexual revolution of the 1960s. To do so encourages us to see in the history of earlier political debates primarily the prehistory of those later events. That, too, is a fruitful reductionism, one that enables us to see some of the potentials of those earliler debates more clearly. But the thrust of the more recent literature has been to abandon it in favor of more complex and open-ended narratives.

There is good reason to adopt that stance in particular toward German history, for no other modern national history arguably makes clearer the need to develop a model of modernity that can account for the multiplicity of modernities. Germany was home in the twentieth century to an authoritarian constitutional monarchy, then a democratic republic, then a totalitarian dictatorship, then again both a democratic republic and a totalitarian dictatorship, and then a reunified democratic republic. To the extent that debates about sexuality played a role in those transitions, the dynamic described here could—and did—clearly contribute to multiple different outcomes. What we need to understand, therefore, is not only how the debate over sexuality contributed to a particular outcome, but also how it generated multiple divergent potentials.

The empirical findings of my own work lend support to two important theoretical perspectives on how modern societies work. One is a particular strand in postmodern theory, which trenchantly critiqued the assumptions of structural functionalism. Bruno Latour reduced this approach to a pungent formula in 1993, suggesting that we should “sort out instead of debunking” complexity—that is, we should stop trying to identify monolithically coherent imperatives concealed behind the apparent complexities of modern social life, and instead study the complexity itself.Footnote ⁴⁹ But the locus classicus is, of course, the work of Michel Foucault—especially The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he argued that history (properly conceived) reveals “several pasts, several forms of connexion, several hierarchies of importance, several networks of determination, several teleologies.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Foucault made this point even more energetically in a 1973 essay in which he urged historians not to look for the coherence hidden behind historical complexity, “because this search assumes the existence of immobile forms that precede the external world of accident and succession”—whereas, in truth, the “forces operating in history are not controlled by destiny or regulative mechanisms, but respond to haphazard conflicts.” This is precisely the finding of my own research: that the politics of sexuality was political, not discursive.Footnote ⁵¹

As the quotations from Foucault used at the outset of this article suggest, he was primarily in pursuit of a different agenda in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, which appeared in 1979. But echoes of these earlier concerns are present there as well—for instance, in the concept of the “tactical polyvalence” of discourse: the idea that the same discursive elements (he was referring to ideas in particular, but one could apply the same principle to modes of knowledge or to institutions and their practices) could be used as parts of different broader strategies for organizing society.Footnote ⁵² This is one reason that there are multiple teleologies—and multiple conflicts—in play in any society at any given time. The understanding in this later study of how power is actually structured also echoes that earlier sense of openness and indeterminacy. Foucault argued that power is omnipresent in social orders “not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.” In short, “it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society.”Footnote ⁵³ This formulation neatly fits the empirical model presented here for Germany. Social actors take up (are assigned, or adopt, or invent, etc.) a wide and proliferating variety of sexual identities, using the terms, and in the context of the relationships, defined by prevailing notions about sexuality. And they exercise the forms of power those subject positions give them at various and particular sites in the social order, in pursuit of divergent interests and agendas defined by that discourse and by the terms of particular social interactions.Footnote ⁵⁴

There is a danger, of course, that appreciating the ways in which people defined and drew on the resources of their own subject positions and social roles, as well as on the forms of power they entailed, could end by obfuscating the extent to which differentials in power overdetermined the struggle over sex and morality. But an analytic focus on the dynamic energies generated by the complex and conflictual relationships in social systems is not at all incompatible with an analysis of the relative power of different actors within such social systems. In my own work, I have analyzed the severe limitations imposed on women's activism by men's near-monopolization of financial, institutional, educational, legal, and professional resources and roles. The modesty ascribed to women further constrained their participation in public discussion of sexual matters; so, too, did the almost universal denigration of women by men—including, in particular, stereotypes about their innate hysteria, loquaciousness, and irrationality. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, heterosexual male professionals (e.g., doctors and the clergy) not only had incomparably greater resources with which to engage in public debate and advocacy, but also made strenuous efforts to denigrate, exclude, and/or silence less privileged people—particularly women, but also the working classes and homosexuals. The intense taboo against homosexuality made open activism for homosexual rights akin to social suicide, and the leadership of the homosexual rights movement was subject to repeated legal harassment—as were more radical advocates of women's sexual rights. Both groups were targets of virulent forms of stigmatization and denigration. In short, heterosexual professional men were able, to a very significant degree, to stack the deck in their own favor.

That was nevertheless decreasingly true over time. The constraints on active participation in public debates (very) slowly eroded, as social change—and women and homosexuals themselves—gradually forced redefinitions of social and sexual identities and roles in ways that gave them incrementally growing access to money, education, professional careers, and experience. The escalating stridency with which at least some men pursued repressive, exclusionary, and misogynistic discursive and legislative agendas in the early twentieth century was testament to their stubborn grip on power and privilege, as well as to their realization that it was eroding.Footnote ⁵⁵

What is more, power and privilege are anything but monolithic in highly differentiated modern societies; and in Germany, social differentiation overlay inherited cultural and religious divisions, as well. Many doctors and many in the clergy championed heterosexual male interests, for example, but they did so in radically different terms—and in competition with each other. Conflicting or competing economic, professional, and class identities and interests frequently overlapped with, cut across, and complicated those derived from the field of sexuality—for example, in the case of doctors expanding their professional opportunities and status through campaigns against venereal disease or by defining the new field of sexology (Sexualwissenschaft); of members of the clergy seeking to claim new or recover eroding forms of cultural, social, and institutional authority; of the leadership of the labor movement endeavoring to claim respectability or articulate an autonomous working-class culture, including one of sexuality; of self-employed women seeking to create degrees of sexual freedom commensurate with their growing social autonomy; or of police officials aiming to maintain or expand their professional functions at the expense of women in the sex industry. Political ideologies and agendas obviously also played a central role in debates about sexuality, and vice versa. Socialists, liberals, conservatives, and right-wing radicals all struggled to define their communities’ understandings of sexuality, often in confused and conflicted ways—as in the case, for example, of Protestant liberals’ ambivalent and divergent responses to sex reform, or of intense debates over sexuality between “orthodox” and revisionist Social Democrats. Religious agendas and identities were likely most important of all: Catholic, Jewish, liberal and conservative Protestant—each articulating theological and moral positions heavily inflected by gender.

The history of the debate over sexual morality in Germany in the decades around 1900 seems, then, to support a particular strand in, or reading of, postmodern theory—a reading that encourages us to identify complexity, conflict, contestation, and change as constitutive of social orders, rather than as disruptive factors in otherwise (and normally) stable social systems. This reading can help us to grasp the ways in which social systems and structures change—are eroded, renegotiated, mutated, superseded, (re)constructed. This approach is not without drawbacks and can be frustrating. Seeing social order as essentially or fundamentally coherent, unitary, and “functional” (i.e., producing stability) promises to let us see past the details to the essential, past the ephemeral to the stable, past the contingent to the necessary, past processes to outcomes. It allows us to explain, not just describe. By comparison, it is not very satisfying to state simply that the situation was complex and unstable and evolving and that there were many potential outcomes. The loose agglomeration of ideas one might call the “theory of complex systems” can help us move beyond that kind of statement. Systems theory is, in part, a particular theorization of contingency—one that encourages us to define its limits, to explore the multiple but not undefined potentials generated by all the messy details that we deliberately do not reduce to functions of a deeper unitary, hegemonic, or monolithic order or regime.

The theory of complex systems approaches this agenda by examining how dynamic interactions among a large number of parts within a system give rise to aggregate behaviors of that system that cannot be explained by the specific characteristics of any of those parts. In other words, the behavior of the system derives from the dynamics of interactions within the system as a whole, rather than from the dominant and deciding influence (power) of one of its parts. In the jargon of the field, such patterns are described as “emergent.” In particular, systems theory discourages the tendency to assume that systems work because contradictions and conflicts within them are only apparent, or because they are reconciled as expressions of a deeper unitary logic. As Niklas Luhmann, the greatest theorist of complex systems, put it, the model of equilibrium central to systems theory does not emphasize the ways in which “the old balance is re-established or a new state of equilibrium is reached” after a disturbance; instead, it “locates a system's sensitivity to disturbance.” In fact, many systems are characterized by positive feedback mechanisms, so that “certain developments happen by means of a mechanism of self-amplification and cannot be controlled with regard either to their consequences or to their expedience.” Such situations “have nothing to do with the stability of the system and with keeping certain values stable. Instead, it is a matter of changing the system… in a specific direction.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Two points are of particular importance here. One is that the behavior of complex systems arises (“emerges”) precisely from contradictions and conflicts inherent in them; systems do the “work” they do because of these contradictions and conflicts, not despite them. Conflict and contradiction are not epiphenomena in systems made fundamentally coherent by underlying and governing principles; they are the system—they constitute it.Footnote ⁵⁷ The other point is that the “work” complex systems (here social systems) do is often not the work of stabilization, but rather the work of transformation. That is particularly true of modern societies in sociological systems theory because the process of progressive social differentiation makes them increasingly complex, hence increasingly divided, hence increasingly dynamic. It may seem trite to suggest that modern societies are constantly in flux, but systems theory offers a way of thinking about why and how they are, about what drives that flux, and about the range of potential contingent outcomes inherent in them.

The process by which sexuality became increasingly politicized in twentieth-century Germany—why Germany's twentieth century became more and more the “century of sex”—appears to fit this framework well. Again, that dynamic process was not a product of a modern consensus about sex, but just the opposite—or rather, it was the product of both consensus (regarding the fundamental importance of sexuality) and its opposite (regarding the nature of sexuality, and also regarding the significance of popular sexual practices). This constellation created a coherent and self-reinforcing dynamic of escalating diversity, disagreement, conflict, and urgency. It was precisely the conflicts it generated that made the “system” of ideas and practices we call modern sexuality increasingly energetic—increasingly influential, powerful, and important. That appears to be a common pattern in modern societies, not just with respect to sexuality.Footnote ⁵⁸ One often thinks that a system of ideas, or of social institutions and practices, that is internally self-contradictory and conflicted will be weak, self-sabotaging, or paralyzed. But, in fact, the opposite proposition—that self-contradiction and internal conflict are the way powerful systems do the transformative work of producing change—is equally plausible.

The extent to which the escalating debate about sexuality contributed to regime changes in Germany also illustrates a second important principle in the theory of complex systems: the unpredictable character of emergent behaviors, the lability or structured instability of complex systems. Because conflict and contradiction are not resolved in complex systems (like societies) but rather constitute them, those systems generate and retain multiple potentials. Interventions by external factors and the evolution of relationships among component parts—which can often be thought of as changes within, and interactions with, higher-order systems (e.g., the international system of states) or lower-order systems (e.g., religion)—can cause complex social systems to yield radically different but still coherent emergent behaviors, to “flip” or “jump” from one potential state to another. The energetic dynamic established by complex and conflicted relationships among the parts of a system is not necessarily headed in the direction of one or another particular outcome. It may not produce an ever more powerful “logic” driving that system toward a particular resolution, but rather simply an escalating potential for a “jump” from one state to another.

In this particular case, the debate over sexuality contributed to the creation of radically different but coherent political outcomes—regime forms—in rapid succession because it helped to generate multiple political potentialities. Each was increasingly tending toward radicalization as they jostled against each other. Each was charged with a rising level of social energization (the growing size of organizations, the ramifying number of contentious issues, the increasingly intense sense of threat and urgency, the rising and broadening political conflict). But that does not mean that one necessarily had to prevail over the others, except in the sense that it could drive a temporary political outcome. No one of the three major camps or groupings that, by 1914 or 1933, participated in the political struggle over policies relating to sexuality could successfully eliminate the others and thus permanently rule out competing potential political outcomes. As Margaret Archer has put it, the politics of sexuality in Germany over the course of the twentieth century is best described as “a wild zigzag, as social groups struggle to wrest the wheel from one another.”Footnote ⁵⁹ They not only struggled: in changing circumstances, at different times, in different places, and in rapid succession, they succeeded.

This model may help to resolve a certain irresolution in our thinking about power and sexuality. For example, after asserting in The History of Sexuality: An Introduction that power “comes from everywhere,” Foucault nevertheless wrote of the “major dominations,” “hegemonic effects,” and “comprehensive systems” that the “complex strategical situation” in any society produces. But he then qualified that picture radically once again in discussing the “rules of continual variations” and the “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourse” characteristic of the operations of power relations, and the “strange reversal[s]” they could generate.Footnote ⁶⁰ Viewed through the lens of systems theory, the politics of the debate over sexuality in Germany in the early twentieth century might suggest that the theorization of continual variation and polyvalence may be more realistic than the theorization of hegemony. Yet, it might also simply suggest that dominations can be major, and effects hegemonic, without being stable.Footnote ⁶¹ To the extent that modern societies settle into a distinct order or regime, they do so locally rather than comprehensively, provisionally and temporarily rather than stably and lastingly. Social orders are always reformulating themselves, always being renegotiated, always undermining and reconstituting themselves. Over long periods of time (relative to individual life spans), these renegotiations and reformulations can substantially modify even the most extraordinarily stable fundamental elements in most societies—such as class power, the organization of economic life, gender distinctions, racial orders, basic ontological assumptions or tropes. In some cases, such truly fundamental change can even happen suddenly.

Of course, few modern societies have been reordered and reconstructed as often or as radically as modern Germany, which has experienced successive regime forms that survived, respectively, for forty-eight, fourteen, twelve, and forty-one years. But social forms, institutions, policies, and practices evolve rapidly in all modern societies, even where constitutional forms are stable. The collapse of much of the state regulation of sexuality in the European-American world starting in the early 1960s is a good example. As Karl Marx famously observed, all that is solid in modern societies is constantly melting.Footnote ⁶² Again, the project of formulating explanations for the stability and coherence of social systems is undeniably a useful one—but modern social systems produce contingency, change, and movement as well. Germany's tumultuous history in the twentieth century is a good example.

Obviously the debate over sexuality in Germany was not a “complex system” in the sense that natural phenomena often are—an ecosystem, for instance. But systems theory offers a useful metaphor in this case because it asks us to look more closely at how a complex set of relationships works as a whole to create movement. What is driving that movement? What concrete options or alternatives does it create? This is a fruitful way of thinking not about the coherence underlying complexity, or about the ambivalence of that coherence, but rather about the coherence of complexity.

To return to Dagmar Herzog's observation cited at the outset: “sex was complicated,” indeed, in the twentieth century. But we can understand the work that complexity accomplished. It did not work to create liberation or repression—or, at least, not one of those things alone. It worked to generate more complexity, as well as the multiple potentials that complexity creates. It was a part—and an important cause—of the extraordinary lability and dynamism of Germany's (and Europe's) twentieth century.