Introduction: Gay German History: Future Directions?

Gay German History:

Future Directions?

The study of germany's gay history has come a long way since its meager beginnings in the 1970s.¹ Drawing vitality from the gay and lesbian liberation movement that sprung to life in West Germany at the beginning of the 1970s, the study of gay history was driven forward by a relatively small cadre of devoted historians. Some of them were academically trained, but most were admirably self-taught. An important landmark came in 1985, when Manfred Baumgardt, Manfred Herzer, Andreas Sternweiler, and Wolfgang Theis opened the Schwules Museum in Berlin. Since then, as one visitor noted, "the museum has produced fabulous exhibitions and publications of the highest aesthetic and intellectual quality, without ever neglecting witty and erotic content."² Over the years the museum has nurtured scholars interested in German gay history both by providing a central location for pursuing and sharing ideas and by compiling a large archive and library. Berlin, not surprisingly, has been the center for much of the work, but scholars elsewhere have made their own invaluable contributions: Wolfgang Voigt and Hans-Georg Stümke in Hamburg, Rüdiger Lautmann at the University of Bremen, Rainer Hoffschildt in Hannover, Burkhard Jellonnek in Saarbrücken, and Günter Grau at the University of Bremen, to name but a few. Scholars from outside of Germany have also made significant contributions: U.S. historians James Steakley, Geoffrey Giles, and John Fout, for example, as well as Harry Oosterhuis from the Netherlands.

Gay history in Germany, as elsewhere, initially pursued two major themes, one tragic and the second heroic. For the first generation of gay and lesbian activists an important part of confronting homophobia in the contemporary world was uncovering its roots in the past. This research could take them deep into the Middle Ages to uncover the origins of social prejudice and legal persecution against same-sex desire.³ The bulk of the scholarship, though, quickly became focused on the fate of homosexuals under Hitler's regime. This research has grown quite large since it began in the early 1970s, taking on an increasingly local character in the past decade or so.⁴ The second theme at the center of much research has been writing the history of the first homosexual rights movement, from its origins with mid-nineteenth-century writers such as Karl Ulrichs to its flourishing in the Weimar Republic and its ultimate demise at the hands of the Nazis in 1933.⁵ Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld and his Scientific-Humanitarian Committee (Wissenschaftliche-humanitäre Komitee, or WhK) has garnered much attention; so too has Hirschfeld's chief rival, Adolf Brand, publisher of the world's first gay periodical, Der Eigene (The Self-Owners), and founder of his own group, the Community of the Self-Owners (Gemeinschaft der Eigenen, or GdE).⁶

In the course of the 1980s new research directions emerged. One strand of study, very much influenced by the social history that had grown in strength during the previous two decades, examined the homosexual milieu that surfaced at the end of the nineteenth century in several large cities and would survive until today despite a severe contraction during the Nazi era and World War II. With concepts and research strategies borrowed from anthropology and the subcultural school of sociology, these researchers were able to map out city areas that served as locations for gay men to meet and have sex; they also could trace a range of linguistic, symbolic, and material strategies that provided gay men and women with a way to resist the hegemony of the dominant heterosexual culture at a symbolic level.⁷ The other direction, often closely connected with previous efforts to research the early homosexual movement, was greatly influenced by Michel Foucault's work. This body of scholarship set Hirschfeld's efforts as scientist and activist into a much larger context of writers...