Sexuality, Memory, Morality

Abstract

In view of Nazism’s horrific crimes, sexuality might be seen as a frivolous or inappropriate subject for scholarly study of twentieth-century Germany. Yet precisely the opposite is the case. Among other things, 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. Consideration of the history of sexuality, and insistence on integrating the history of sexuality with more traditional historiographical foci, also challenges our assumptions about key social and political transformations and provides new insights into a broad array of crucial phenomena. To neglect the history of sexuality, for example, is also to fail to care about the content or force of anti-Semitism both during Weimar and in the early years of the Third Reich. Similarly, if we set sex aside as irrelevant, we miss opportunities to comprehend the appeal of Nazism to profoundly diverse constituencies, just as we risk misunderstanding the emotional repercussions of Germans’ defeat in World War II. Ignoring sex means we do not comprehend adequately the intertwined histories of religion and secularization. Perhaps most importantly, to treat sexual issues as marginal is to fail to see how the postwar Federal Republic of Germany, in striving to be incorporated into the Cold War West, was able to manipulate the memory of Nazism and to redirect moral debate away from complicity in mass murder and toward a narrowed conception of morality as solely concerned with sex. In turn, failure to tell the histories of sexuality and post-Holocaust politics together means we misunderstand major aspects of the liberalization of West German society in the 1960s, and