Eroticism, Love, and Sexuality in the Two Postwar Germanys

Over the last several decades, a wave of research on the history of sexuality has swept through German studies.¹ The wave is now breaking over the historiography of the Cold War era. To study postwar sex, historians wade into waters awash in research material, yet muddied by received opinion. Distilled from memory, novels, movies, and political bias, the popular imagination remembers West Germany as a socially repressive place, before it made a hairpin turn into a more permissive era. The hinge came at “1968,” when young rebels unleashed the “sexual revolution” and overturned a stuffy world of legal and customary regulation of sexual speech and behavior. The New Left critique of repressed sexuality broke moral taboos against, most prominently, extramarital sex; it transformed the understanding of sexual pleasure, especially for women; and it fostered the decriminalization of homosexuality and most categories of obscene publications. Whether happy or unhappy with these consequences, (Western) Germans typically accept a story that serves the useful purpose of either crediting or blaming the sexual revolution for the way Germans live now. Popular mythology about East German sexuality is bifurcated. Many former West Germans assume that the Communist regime was as repressive sexually as it was politically. East Germans have infused fading memories with a dose of Ostalgie to concoct a tale about a liberated sexual culture that the socialist state tolerated and even encouraged. Whether as a narrative about Communist oppression or Socialist liberation, East German sexuality is also politically charged.

The books reviewed here mine the rich sources on postwar sexuality in order to dig its history out from under the popular legends. The following essay discusses their findings, methods, and arguments from three points of view: the relationship between continuity and change, the significance of society, and the political meaning of discourse. Taken together, the books see continuity and change as dynamic across three layers of sexuality: state regulation (including that of sexual speech), discourse about sexuality and state regulation, and sexual norms. The relationship between continuity and change in sexual discourse, policies, and behavior did not shift neatly over time from repressive to permissive, or vice versa. The authors question the usefulness of such binary terms. Controlling and liberalizing, moralistic and tolerant, traditional and modern, conventional and nonconforming tendencies coexisted and intertwined in ideologies, policies, and practices that can be difficult to chart on a scale of “old vs. new” or “conservative vs. liberal.”

The evolution of twentieth-century sexuality was, then, not linear over time. Before 1914, the authors seem to agree, law and practice were dominated by a recognizably (if already contested) conventional sexuality; since the 1960s, they concur, sexual liberalization (though still contested) has knocked down ever more legal, discursive, and normative barriers to allow for the realization of individual desires. What happened in between is hard to encapsulate, for the “sexual-moral order,” as Elizabeth Heineman calls it (8), was always under intense negotiation. The huge political transitions of twentieth-century German history did not determine its course. This view endorses scholarly recognition of ambiguity within and between the sexual histories of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich.² The authors under review extend the interpretation of ragged political boundaries to the sexual histories of the...