Male Sexuality and Psychological Trauma: Soldiers and Sexual Disorder in World War I and Weimar Germany
In the history of the intersections between war, gender, and sexuality, historians have debated the degree to which the age of total war represented a step toward "remasculinization," a process by which traditional constructions of masculinity are bolstered and strongly redefined as a reaction to a breakdown of hegemonic conceptions of masculinity.1 In German society the First World War led to particularly intense debates over whether or not combat had been essentially healthy or destructive for the male psyche and body. On the brink of 1914 doctors and critics anticipated that the war would reinvigorate men weakened by decades of peace and the accelerated pace of modernity. The brutality and stress of modern warfare, however, seriously tested traditional gender norms and boundaries.2 The postwar milieu was wrenched by cultural debates over the social effects of the war, intensified by the political divisions in the wake of defeat and revolution. Conflicts over the rise of the "new woman" and debates over the memory of the war as something either horrifying or laudable culminated with the [End Page 60] Nazi seizure of power. The Nazi state aimed unprecedented violence against men and women who failed to conform to the regime's social and sexual ideals. Through remilitarization and war Nazi ideologues hoped to counter allegedly degenerative behaviors like homosexuality and restore the health of the male body and psyche.3
Total war brought an unprecedented invasion of the state and military into sexual and reproductive life.4 In Germany during the First World War the military enlisted doctors to investigate and contain a wide range of psychological problems, including the sexual disorders that were felt to have undermined military efficiency. Doctors warned of an epidemic of sexual trauma in the form of men whose behaviors were permanently altered by the psychological stress of combat, in particular, the experience of killing.5 In order to cope with the deprivation and stress of the front, homosexuality, masturbation, and other "deviant" behaviors proliferated, even in men who appeared "masculine" and "normal." As men grew accustomed to killing, it was believed, they became addicted to it as a heightened experience that drained sexual drives and turned men impotent. Most alarming to contemporaries was that this effect of the war was largely invisible and not simply confined to so-called feminine men, the physically abnormal, working-class men, or those labeled neurotics. Further, these men allegedly transmitted the depravity and violence of the trenches to postwar domestic life, threatening social chaos.
The First World War generated in Germany a widespread fear that modern industrial combat caused sexual disorders in men. This anxiety about male sexual disorder originated with psychiatrists and by the end of the war had become part of a broad-based perception that modern war was harmful to men, challenging traditional bourgeois assumptions about war and sexuality. Before the war doctors and social critics had nurtured a myth of the war experience that envisioned men transcending their sexual drives in their will to sacrifice for the nation.6 However, the trenches created a new kind of man [End Page 61] brutalized by mass violence, no longer dependent on women for sexual satisfaction, and addicted to violence as a source of sexual release. Fears about the creation of this "new man" undermined attempts by doctors to portray war as an ennobling experience that reinvigorated male sexuality.
The experience of total war fueled anxieties across political lines. The war's effects on male sexual life were especially traumatic for Weimar Germany's middle class, which shared common notions of war as a problem for male sexuality even if increasingly politically fragmented. By the end of the war socially and politically conservative doctors feared that the war had obliterated the sexual...
