German Masculinity Research Articles

Contradictory Fin-de Siècle Reform: German Masculinity, the Academic Honor Code, and the Movement against the Pistol Duel in Universities, 1890–1914

The pistol remains the weapon of cripples, the senile, and those infected with a communicable disease. The murder instrument of the highwayman, the dastardly, insidious pistol, is the preferred weapon of the officer.—Hugo Böttger, Editor of theBurschenschaftliche BlätterEven though fraternity men glorified their duels with swords, a series of frivolous pistol duels with deadly ends led students to organize a movement against pistol duels that swept German universities in 1902 and 1903. Students argued that pistol duels violated the rules of reason, morality, and religion—and were thus also purportedly un-German. Male students organized assemblies, made passionate speeches, and passed resolutions in opposition to the pistol duel. They then sent these resolutions to the War Ministers in Prussia, Bavaria, and Saxony. Burschenschaft fraternity men built on their long tradition of liberal political activism and convened assemblies in Berlin, Bonn, Breslau, Freiburg, Giessen, Greifswald, Halle, Kiel, Königsberg, Leipzig, Marburg, Munich, Rostock, and Tübingen and passed resolutions inspired by the movement. Some of these assemblies drew large numbers of students, for example, 600 students in attendance in Leipzig, 1,500 in Munich, and 1,500 in Freiburg. In Berlin, leaders of 67 organizations representing 2,400 members signed petitions against the pistol duel. Other universities not included were majority Catholic institutions, such as Münster or Würzburg, where the opposition to all forms of the duel was even stronger as a result of the Catholic Church's prohibition against dueling. Reaching universities throughout Germany, this movement united students from across the political spectrum.

American Cinema and the Construction of Masculinity in Film in the Federal Republic after 1945

Since 1945, film in the Federal Republic has maintained an ambivalent relationship to American cinema and its embedded ideologies and nowhere is this more evident than in (West) German film's representations of masculinity. This article focuses on three historical moments when political and social shifts resulted in a problematising of male identities in the Federal Republic: the mid-1950s, the early 1970s and the late 1990s. Cinema responded to a perceived destabilisation of gender norms by exploring constructions of German masculinity in relation to the ambivalently received models of male identity offered by American cinema. With a detailed analysis of three specific examples – Georg Tressler's Die Halbstarken (1956), Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Der amerikanische Soldat (1970) and Fatih Akin's Kurz und schmerzlos (1998) – this article investigates the manner in which German cinema engages with these competing conceptions of masculinity and demonstrates the ways in which divergent understandings of gender identity can impact on representations of national and ethnic identity.

Book ReviewsCold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West. By Suzanne Clark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Edited by Roy Jerome. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics. By Charlotte Hooper. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook Reviews Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West. By Suzanne Clark. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000. Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Edited by Roy Jerome. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Manly States: Masculinities, International Relations, and Gender Politics. By Charlotte Hooper. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001.Matthew BassoMatthew BassoUniversity of Richmond Search for more articles by this author University of RichmondPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 30, Number 3Spring 2005 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/426796 Views: 83Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author(s).PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity

Jerome, Roy, ed. Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. 338 pp. $19.95 paperback. This collection brings together articles on postwar West German masculinity, written by a group of accomplished literature professors and psychologists from Germany and the United States. The editor, Roy Jerome, is a clinical psychologist specializing in masculinity, trauma, and violence and the overriding theme here is therapeutic: the collection intends to work through men's silence and shame about the Nazi past, in order to promote healing and shape more tolerant masculine identities in contemporary Germany. These are ambitious goals. The success of the volume, however, will be determined primarily by the reader's sympathy for neo-Freudian depth psychology, as the majority of the contributions draw heavily on psychoanalytic theory and practice. After an introductory essay that provides a brief overview of methodologies and key literary texts for German men's studies (Klaus-Michael Bogdal), the book turns to theoretical considerations on male identity. Here a case study by Dr. Tilman Moser, a psychoanalyst whose practice concentrates on treating psychopathologies related to National Socialism, exemplifies the volume at its most clinical. Moser uses techniques of Korpertherapie (psychomotor therapy), which prescribe physical contact between analyst and analysand, to lead the son of an SS officer through an anguished therapy session. This offers some insight into the way at least one man has come to terms with his Nazi father, but is difficult to generalize as a model for postwar male identity. A following essay on the family dynamics that lead to child abuse (Klaus-Jurgen Bruder) only weakly asserts a connection to more general constructions of German masculinity; as is often the case here, psychology trumps historical context. The second half of the volume examines postwar West German literature and offers a useful overview of themes and literary movements related to masculinity issues. The articles, again dominated by psychoanalytic interpretations, shed some light on the way subsequent generations of writers dealt with manhood and memories of National Socialism. Essays on Hans Erich Nossack (Inge Stephan) and Wolfgang Borchert (Hans-Gerd Winter) describe a range of literary conceptions of a denazified masculinity in the immediate postwar period. Other work in this section brings us into the 1990s, including a general review of homosexual imagery in West German literature after 1945 (Wolfgang Popp), the confluence of the personal and the historical/political in the vaterliteratur of the 1980s (Barbara Kosta), and a strong piece by Russell West on male identity and the father-son relationship in ex-neo Nazi Ingo Hasselbach's Fuhrer-Ex: Memoirs ofa Neo Nazi (1996). …

Representations of East German Masculinity in Hannes Stöhr’s Berlin is in Germany and Andreas Kleinert’s Wege in die Nacht

Given that, at least in economic terms, the women of the former GDR are often described as the ‘losers’ of the unification process, it may seem surprising that the two films examined in this article should focus on the difficulties of men in coming to terms with the process of social transformation which followed the ‘Wende’ in the new federal states. Berlin is in Germany (2001), by the West German born Hannes Stöhr, and Wege in die Nacht (1999), by East German director Andreas Kleinert, both portray the difficulties of East German men in maintaining a masculine identity in the unified Germany. However, in Stöhr’s film the GDR regime is shown to be responsible for the male protagonist’s initial loss of masculine authority, which the capitalism of the unified Germany ultimately allows him to regain. Kleinert’s film, however, portrays its central figure as a representative of a specifically East German model of masculinity which is now being undermined by the capitalist system. Whilst these films recall to an extent the crises of masculinity which accompanied the end of the First and Second World Wars, they reflect specifically on the process of ‘innere Einheit’ as the take–over of one patriarchal social order by another.

Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity

Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity

A New, "Western" Hero? Reconstructing German Masculinity in the 1950s

n 1952 one of West Germany's foremost experts on youth and film, Fritz Stiickrath, wrote a damning critique of film westerns, in which he connected the consumption of movie westerns directly to male juvenile delinquency. Stiickrath titled his piece The Attack of the Ogallala on the Youth, thus suggesting that both western films and American Indians were dangerous. In 1956 he wrote another, much more positive article on the same topic, now arguing that westerns could in fact help boys to distinguish between good and evil. A year later, the West German staterun television station broadcast a show with the title Nothing against Wild-West-Films, during which an education professor maintained that westerns provided an outlet for the excessive energies of young men and thus fulfilled an important societal function.' These three examples stand for changing West German attitudes toward westerns, which transformed from a general rejection of the genre in both dime novels and movies to increasing acceptance as a tool for shaping proper West German men. In this article, I examine briefly what was at stake in this change of heart. While my aim is not a general critique of westerns, I suggest that some shifts within the genre may have contributed to transforming German views of westerns in the postwar period. More important, I argue that the changing West German attitudes toward westerns have to be understood in the context of the legacy of National Socialism and the cold war division of Germany. Although my focus is on West Germany, I draw some comparisons to East German reactions. In doing so, I investigate debates over westerns as a site for the reconstruction of East and West German masculinities. Finally, I explore briefly how changing

The "Remasculinization" of Germany in the 1950s: Discussion

Previous articleNext article No AccessForumThe "Remasculinization" of Germany in the 1950s: DiscussionSusan JeffordsSusan Jeffords Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 24, Number 1Autumn, 1998 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/495323 Views: 19Total views on this site Citations: 7Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1998 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Marcela Knapp The Social Visibility of Corporeality: The Rebel Youth Films in the Fifties, (Mar 2020): 173–232.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40086-6_6Aimar Ventsel Blurring masculinities in the Republic of Sakha, Russia, Polar Geography 1 (Aug 2018): 1–19.https://doi.org/10.1080/1088937X.2018.1498141Linda R. Owen, Markus Schubert, Susanne Schröter, Jürgen Martschukat, Olaf Stieglitz, Daniel Albrecht, Constanze Spieß, Olaf Stuve, Michael Groneberg, Wolfgang Mertens, Holger Brandes, Richard Collier, Björn Krondorfer, Michael Meuser Disziplinen und Ansätze, (Jan 2016): 73–236.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-476-05196-7_3Mason Allred Pumping Up Masculinity: The Initial Intervention and Lasting Legacy of Hans and Franz, The Journal of Popular Culture 45, no.22 (Mar 2012): 241–263.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-5931.2012.00923.xRuth Ben-Ghiat Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity, film and the transition from dictatorship, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 10, no.33 (Sep 2005): 336–365.https://doi.org/10.1080/13545710500188361Uta Gerhardt Politique sociale et maternité : le cas de l'Allemagne à l'Est et à l'Ouest, Travail, genre et sociétés N° 6, no.22 (Oct 2001): 59–81.https://doi.org/10.3917/tgs.006.0059Nina Baur Konsequenzen des Verlusts des ganzheitlichen Denkens: Soziale Marktwirtschaft und die Triade Arbeitsmarkt, Sozialstaat und Geschlechterbeziehungen am Beispiel von Westdeutschland, (): 189–229.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-91803-7_9

Rehabilitating Fatherland: Race and German Remasculinization

At the opening of the 1952 conference in Wiesbaden, The Fate of Mixed-Blood Children in Germany, Erich Lifner, editor of the FrankfurterRundschau, was declared a hero of humanity. Lifiner was feted not for his journalistic achievement, but for becoming an adoptive father to Donatus, an interracial child born to a German refugee allegedly raped by an African American GI shortly after German defeat. Liiner's heroization underlined his exceptionality as a rare role model for socially responsible paternalism. Indeed his anecdotes chronicling Doni's integration into Lifner's white family emphasized less the personal relationship between adoptive father and son than the social implications and social utility of interracial fathering after National Socialism. Lifner's experience, that is, was packaged as a pedagogical example for the moral rehabilitation of German masculinity and the West German nation.'