The title of this book portends a juicy plunge into the sex and family lives of German ruling elites under two dictatorships. For better or worse, depending on one's preferences, the book does not deliver on that promise. The “ruling elites” in this study encompass only the tiniest sliver of each regime's political ruling class. The featured National Socialists are Magda and Josef Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, and Ernst Röhm, while the profiled German Communists are Erich and Margot Honecker, Walter Ulbricht, and Max Fechner. This narrow focus on a few powerful individuals with already well-documented lives might have made it possible to offer some really fascinating “Einblicke” into their “sexual lives.” As it turns out, the word Einblick refers here only to “insight,” not to a glimpse behind the curtain that the word can also evoke. Fischer views her characters’ sexual lives from oblique angles that deliver only basic information on the sexual orientation and/or (presumed) sexual partners of these eight historical figures.

Fischer's discussion of the leaders’ private lives is not dull or thin, her case studies are rich in biographical and contextual detail, and the sections on Ernst Röhm and the Honeckers are the best in the book: they cover material that is not widely known, and do indeed furnish interesting insight into these individuals as public personalities who did or did not try to cover up the unconventional aspects of their lives. By 1929, Röhm no longer hid his homosexuality—though he recognized the difficulty it created for the Nazi party (NSDAP) as it (inconsistently) reached for a mantle of respectability during its rise to power. Fischer explores the shifting and diverse views of the party elite and especially Adolf Hitler's own views about how to handle Röhm's homosexuality. The section on Erich Honecker traces his relationships with women from the 1930s on, following his twisted road to a second marriage with the young Margot Feist. Originating in a clearly sexually-charged affair (at least for him), their partnership evolved into a sheer power-marriage with no love lost between husband and wife. Initially, the East German Socialist Unity Party (SED) intended to open a “morals” investigation into the adulterous liaison, but instead maneuvered to erase the unconventional origins of the new marriage of the already powerful Honecker.

The case studies are preceded by two chapters: the first places this study within the field of comparative dictatorship research; the second summarizes and analyzes the sexual and gender ideologies of the NSDAP and the SED. Fischer's justification for comparing the two modern German dictatorships rests on the assumption that they were both totalitarian, though she refers to arguments by scholars who reject the totalitarian thesis and seems not to accept it herself completely. She notes that the two dictatorships were structurally very different, but argues for the validity of a comparison between how they negotiated the line between public discourse about gender relations and real-existing (elite) practices of sexual relations.

The chapter on the regimes’ “propagated moral ideas about marriage, family, and homosexuality” provides a serviceable but pedestrian overview of National Socialist and SED gender ideology and policies, as well as their shared abhorrence of homosexuality. The chapter is weak in its treatment of the gender and sexual discourses of the two parties before they attained political power. Fischer barely mentions the ambivalently experimental sexual culture of Weimar Berlin, which may have shaped the (later) views of both National Socialists and German communists. She does refer to some of the underdeveloped and, indeed, scattered views of disparate National Socialists before 1933, but has virtually nothing to say about the discourse of the Weimar Communist party on marital or sexual matters, or about the Bolsheviks’ radical attacks on conventional, bourgeois (hetero)sexuality in the early 1920s. She mentions Friedrich Engels, but does not discuss the well-articulated critique of bourgeois marriage by him and other (German) Marxists. These omissions are important for several reasons. First, Erich Honecker and Walter Ulbricht were old enough to have been exposed to unconventional Communist ideas about marriage and heterosexual relations. Second, one cannot understand the significance of the sheer conventionality of SED positions on marriage and sexuality after 1945 without gaining some sense of the socially and sexually more radical worldview rejected by Joseph Stalin and never even considered by postwar Eastern European communists.

Fischer does recognize changes in the actual and propagated sexual mores of the two regimes over time. In both cases, change was stimulated by their equally strong commitment to natalism. National Socialism's racist natalism and the SED's consistent pro-natalism undermined each regime's initial insistence on monogamous marriage as the site of legitimate sexual activity. In the Third Reich, the links between marriage, sex, and reproduction were partially decoupled during the war—but, one must emphasize, only for the “racial” elite in the Schutzstafel (SS). The “propagated moral ideas” of the SED became less conventional after 1970, especially, in its treatment of single motherhood and female (hetero)sexuality but also, to some degree, of homosexuality. In contrast to the Third Reich at war, the SED's more gradual and much less sinister loosening of conventional sexual mores applied to ordinary East Germans, not the party elite. The Honeckers had to keep up the fiction of a happy and monogamous married life until the bitter end.

Fischer has consulted a wealth of print sources. Her secondary bibliography is impressive in the breadth of German-language books cited, but only includes a miniscule number of the many outstanding English-language studies on the discourse and practices of Weimar sexuality, Nazi marriage and reproductive policies, and East German gender relations. The book suffers from important weaknesses: an underdeveloped theoretical framework, a narrow definition of elites, and an inability to provide much insight into the intimate experience or self-perception of elite individuals and couples. Still, the chapters on those individuals and couples offer an interesting and valuable perspective on the entanglements of sexual norms, sexual behavior, and gender relations at the very pinnacle of power of the Third Reich and GDR.