Suchergebnisse

States of Liberation traces the paths of gay men in East and West Germany from the violent aftermath of the Second World War to the thundering nightclubs of present-day Berlin. Following a captivating cast of characters, from gay spies and Nazi scientists to queer politicians and secret police bureaucrats, States of Liberation tells the remarkable story of how the two German states persecuted gay men – and how those men slowly, over the course of decades, won new rights and created new opportunities for themselves in the heart of Cold War Europe. Relying on untapped archives in Germany and the United States as well as oral histories with witnesses and survivors, Huneke reveals that communist East Germany was in many ways far more progressive on queer issues than democratic West Germany.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Acknowledgments -- A Note on Place Names -- Terms and Abbreviations -- Maps -- Introduction -- 1 Dance on a Volcano: Homosexuality from the German Empire to Zero Hour -- 2 Paranoid Republic: §175 and West Germany's Persecution of Gay Men -- 3 Equivocal Animus: Homosexuality and Socialism in East Germany -- 4 Ever Disdained, Ever Despised: The Crooked Path of Emancipation in West Germany -- 5 Gay Spies in Cold War Germany -- 6 Three Million Votes: Gay Citizenship and Power in West Germany -- 7 Into the Labyrinth: When Gay Activists Met the Socialist State -- 8 "I'm Not the Chancellor of the Gays": Homosexual Politics in 1980s West Germany -- 9 A Golden Age in the Grey Republic: Liberation and the Stasi in East Germany -- Epilogue -- Appendices -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- GERMAN AND EUROPEAN STUDIES

On September 25, 2017, Germany awoke to the horrifying reality that the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party founded in 2013, had romped to third place in the previous day's federal election. With 12.6% of the vote, the party became not only the official face of the opposition to Angela Merkel's not-so-grand coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD), but also the first far-right party to enter the Bundestag since the 1950s. Election watchers soon noticed that the AfD had racked up stunning margins in the states that once made up the German Democratic Republic (GDR), coming in first on the second ballot (Zweitstimme) in Saxony and second in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia. That the AfD, a racist and xenophobic party that campaigns against European integration and immigration, should do so well in once-socialist states bespoke East Germany's strange resonances in German culture and memory nearly thirty years after its dissolution.

When Nazi officials surrendered to the Allied powers on 8 May 1945, gay German men hoped fervently that their suffering had come to an end. Ten years earlier, the fascist government had promulgated draconian new laws criminalising all forms of male same-sex behaviour. After the war, as Allied officials embarked on an extensive programme of democratic renewal in the occupied lands, gay men hoped that democratisation would mean the repeal of these laws. Yet, the new West Germany retained the Nazi-era laws until 1969, convicting over 50,000 men in those twenty years. Using petitions to government officials as well as essays in and letters to the editors of homophile magazines, this article examines how gay men in West Germany conceived of democratisation, asking what expectations they held for the new republic, how their views shifted as it proved hostile to queer citizens, and what this history means for the broader understanding of democratisation in the postwar world.

Abstract
Although gay espionage is a well-established Cold War trope, this article analyzes new evidence that intelligence agencies in divided Berlin actively sought to recruit gay men. They did so because they believed that gay men's contacts in the opaque and class-crossing queer subculture made them ideally suited for the purposes of intelligence work. Using files from the archives of the East German secret police, this article sheds light on these practices through the experiences of a gay agent recruited in 1960. It analyzes his experiences in order to question the relationship between sexuality and the modern security state. In so doing, the article highlights a gap in the Foucauldian model of surveillance, revealing not only how surveillance could play a permissive, rather than a disciplinary, role in queer lives, but also how the paranoias of the security state could reinforce themselves through the surveillance of subcultures.

AbstractIn recent years scholars have shown increasing interest in lesbianism under National Socialism. But because female homosexuality was never criminalized in Nazi Germany, excluding Austria, historians have few archival sources through which to recount this past. That lack of evidence has led to strikingly different interpretations in the scholarly literature, with some historians claiming lesbians were a persecuted group and others insisting they were not. This article presents three archival case studies, each of which epitomizes a different mode in the relationship between lesbians and the Nazi state. In presenting these cases, the article contextualizes them with twenty-seven other cases from the literature, arguing that these different modes illustrate why different women met with such radically different fates. In so doing, it attempts to bridge the divide in the scholarship, putting persecution and tolerance into a single frame of reference for understanding the lives of lesbians in the Third Reich.

In 2008, a monument to the gay victims of the Holocaust was erected that paid tribute only to its male victims, reigniting a long-running debate regarding the fate of lesbians in the Third Reich. Using four previously unanalyzed police investigation files at the Landesarchiv Berlin, this article opens a window into the lives of lesbians living in Nazi Berlin. The four case studies below highlight the capricious nature of Nazi rule and the surprising ways in which discourses of homosexuality appeared in the everyday lives of prostitutes and factory workers. At the same time, they demonstrate a surprisingly robust and open world in which lesbianism was not only not persecuted, but even tolerated in limited ways. While these materials suggest a chasm that separated the experiences of gay men and lesbians under the Nazi regime, they also highlight not only the limits of tolerance but the ways in which it can reinforce persecution itself.

[Note: This session occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic shortly after the majority of university instruction in the United States had moved online. During the session, individuals joined the online meeting to intentionally cause disruption. This phenomenon, called "Zoombombing" was occurring regularly during online educational sessions at this time. The event hosts addressed the disruption and the session continued. As a result of the disruption, this recording contains language some may find offensive.] In the twelve years the Nazis were in power, the German government convicted around fifty thousand men under the countrys sodomy law, §175 of the penal code. Around ten thousand were sent to concentration camps, where approximately six thousand perished, some subjected to gruesome medical experiments. Today, memory of gay persecution under the Nazis lives on in the form of the pink triangle, a ubiquitous symbol of gay liberation that was originally the designation of homosexual concentration camp inmates. But why did the National Socialist go out of their way to persecute gay men and why did lesbians largely remain untouched by the terror? While the Nazis had run on a moralizing platform that promised to stamp out prostitution and homosexuality, the widespread persecution of homosexuals was motivated not by the eugenic concerns of the Nazis racial state, but rather by fears that gay men were naturally drawn into conspiratorial cliques and thus posed a political threat to the regime. For the same reason, the National Socialists were less apprehensive about the threat of female homosexuality. The fascist government, after all, had succeeded in driving women out of politics and the workplace and back into the home, where they posed less of a threat to society or the state. This talk traces the changing contours of the Nazis divergent treatment of gay men and lesbians, showing when and how their anti-homosexual views arose, how they waxed and waned, and how they ultimately impacted the formation of modern gay and lesbian identity, both in Germany and abroad. ; University Libraries, Virginia Tech