Queering German Culture by Leanne Dawson

Abstract

 Reviews Queering German Culture. Ed. by L D. (Edinburgh German Yearbook, ) Rochester, NY: Camden House. .  pp. £. ISBN ––– –. Although Queer Studies and German Studies have historically shadowed each other, it is surprisingly rare that they are in direct conversation. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out, the English word queer shares a root with a German one, quer (Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, ), p. xii). More, as Leanne Dawson shows in the Introduction to this volume, both contemporary transnational queer theory and contemporary queer culture are indebted to German contributions, from early sexologists such as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Magnus Hirschfeld, who first researched and theorized homosexuality, to cultural icons such as Marlene Dietrich, omas Mann, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, which remain generative for contemporary queer cultural production. ese traces and affiliations remain underexplored, both within German Studies and within transnational Queer Studies—which has oen taken Anglo-American culture as its objects and anglophone or francophone theorists as its guides. Dawson rightly argues that, as LGBT rights discourses take centre stage in German politics, it is more than timely to probe the cultures and histories that underpin and are oen in tension with these discourses. is volume offers eight eclectic essays that take queer approaches to various aspects of German culture from the early twentieth century on. While the title ‘Queering German Culture’ suggests a systematic approach to German culture as a whole, the editor states that the structure of the volume is intended to resist linear structures that might imply a narrative of progress. Dawson’s Introduction provides a compressed overview of queer German history and theory from the mid nineteenth century on, a useful if necessarily simplified point of orientation for the following chapters. Dawson’s first chapter offers a compelling transnational comparison between the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn and Spinnboden in Berlin, arguing that such community-led archives queer the concept of ‘home’ by creating an alternative intergenerational community of knowledge and values. Cyd Sturgess’s fascinating and theoretically rich ‘“Die zarte Haut einer schönen Frau”: Fashioning Femininities in Weimar Germany’s Lesbian Periodicals’ explores the different ideological underpinnings of the rival publications Frauenliebe and Die Freundin. Sturgess suggests that Frauenliebe’s association with Magnus Hirschfeld led to a more liberal and more commercial approach to gender and sexuality, whereas Die Freundin advocated bourgeois moral standards and a culture of assimilation. At the same time, Sturgess demonstrates how the regular trans supplements published by each paper undermine any simple opposition between the two queer approaches. Kyle Frackman’s essay examines the  documentary Unter Männern — Schwul in der DDR, arguing that this ‘throws into relief the contradictory and occasionally grotesque duality of East German gender and sexual discourse’ (p. ) while its queer stylistic effects emphasize the artificial nature of the documentary medium. In the second section, ‘Queering the Other’, John Plew’s diagnosis of a homopho- MLR, .,   bic double bind in omas Mann’s aesthetics works within the established queer German canon, unlike Nicholas Courtman’s discussion of queer politics and homophobia in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Gehen, Ging, Gegangen () and Terézia Mora’s Alle Tage (). Courtman’s essay argues that, while Mora’s text opens up space for a queer migrant heterotopia, Erpenbeck’s celebrated novel is imbricated in a heteronormative temporality which erases queer migrants. Sarra Kassem’s essay also discusses the transnational queer via the oen erased figure of the lesbian political refugee in Fatih Akin’s Auf der anderen Seite (). e final two essays, by Lauren Pilcher and Gary Schmidt, survey how performative femininity undermines the patriarchal logic of cinematic looking in Fassbinder’s cinema, and analyse the ways in which three novels—by Jonathan Franzen, Phillip Roth, and omas Brüssig—renegotiate the boundary between homosocial and homosexual desire. It would be highly un-queer to demand that a volume entitled Queering German Culture adhere to a hegemonic idea of totality or consistency, either of methodology or in reference to a normative, bounded idea of ‘German culture’. e heterogeneity of the at times furtive, unexpected, and aslant readings in this volume is in itself queer. At the same time, the...