Sexuality, Memory, Morality

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 the cross-generational collaboration between older liberals and younger New Leftists that made that liberalization possible.

Taking this broader empirical and conceptual terrain as foundational, this essay considers controversies over sexuality in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s with a particular view toward explicating how sexual politics functioned as a main locus for recurrent reconstructions of the memory and meanings of Nazism. In aiming to illuminate how we might think about the ever-altering interconnections between sexual and other kinds of politics, the essay shows how sex can be the site for talking about very many other things besides sex and working through a multitude of other social and political conflicts. As it turns out, to delineate the ways in which sexuality, memory and morality recurrently intersected in postfascist Germany is also to shed light on Germans' efforts to grapple with the possible relationships between pleasure and evil.

At the same time, this essay is concerned to reconstruct the very specific and complex mechanisms by which a particularly powerful (and to this day influential) false memory of Nazism as sexually repressive became ascendant. The point is to contextualize historically the multiple stages in the evolution of memories of Nazism's sexual politics and their perceived pertinence in the evolving post-Nazi present. For while the literature on postfascist memory in West Germany is large, what attention to the workings of memory in conflicts over sexuality in particular offers us is an extraordinary insight into how memories get "layered"—that is, the way each cohort and constituency approached both the immediate and the more distant past only through and against the interpretations of its historical predecessors. What becomes evident, in short, is the intricate mutual imbrication of different eras in German history. What also becomes evident is that attention to sexual politics provides us with an alternative to the emerging consensus that post-Nazi Germans strenuously downplayed the genocide of European Jewry in their narratives of the Third Reich. For as it turns out, both sexual conservatives in the 1950s and sexual liberals and New Leftists in the 1960s and thereafter made references to the Holocaust (concentration camps, gas chambers, Auschwitz) central as they made moral arguments about sexuality.

Legitimating Conservatism

Why would the Federal Republic of Germany, so soon after the end of Nazism, world war and Holocaust, direct so much moral energy into the reorganization of sexual relations...