This book
was originally conceived as a study of the generation of 1968 in West Germany.
Seeking to understand how Nazism and its legacies were interpreted in the
1960s, especially by the New Left student movement, I was struck by the preponderance
of arguments that the Third Reich was a distinctly sexually repressive era and
that to liberate sexuality was an antifascist imperative. Numerous New Leftists
argued directly that sexuality and politics were causally linked; convinced
that sexual repression produced racism and fascism, they proposed that sexual emancipation
would further social and political justice.
Members of the West German New Left student movement, along with many of their liberal elders, defended activism on behalf of sexual emancipation on the grounds that sexual repression was not merely a characteristic of fascism but its very cause. As one author put it, “it would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality.” Another argued that “brutality and the lust for destruction become substitutes for bodily pleasure . . . This is how the seemingly incredible contradiction that the butchers of Auschwitz were – and would become again- respectable, harmless citizens, is resolved.” Or as yet another phrased it even more succinctly: “In the fascist rebellion, the energies of inhibited sexuality formed into genocide.” In the 1960s these views were widely held, and they provided moral justification for dismantling the postwar culture of sexual conservatism. To liberate sexuality, it was believed, would help cleanse Germany of the lingering aftereffects of Nazism.
For many commentators in present-day reunified Germany, more than fifteen years after the collapse of communism, it has become standard to denigrate the rebellions of the later 1960s for their Utopian romanticism and fierce anti-capitalism. But in their historical moment, those rebellions – and not the least the sexual element in them – were signally important. They fundamentally reconfigured familial, sexual, and gender relations and all codes of social interaction. They undermined the authority of political life for nearly two decades, and the succeeded in reorienting society-wide moral discussion and debate towards global concerns like social injustice, economic exploitation, and warfare.
As my research unfolded, I found that the New Left’s interpretation of the Third Reich’s sexual politics as profoundly repressive had been almost uniformly adopted in recent scholarship on Nazism as well. I also found, however, in researching the more immediate post World War II period, that numerous commentators in that period had a completely different interpretation of the Third Reich. They argued that the Nazis had encouraged sexual licentiousness or even suggested that their sexual immorality was inextricable from their genocidal barbarism. Indeed, for many of these more immediate postwar observers, the containment of sexuality and the restoration of marriage and family were among the highest priorities for a society trying to overcome Nazism. It increasingly appeared as though the postwar culture of sexual conservatism was not ( as the New Left believed) a watered-down continuation of a sexually repressive fascism but rather had itself developed at least in partial reaction against Nazism. . .
In aiming to illuminate how we might think about the ever-altering connections between sexual and other kinds of politics, the book shows how sex can be a site for talking about very many other things besides sex and working through a multitude of other social and political conflicts. At the same time, specifically the contrast of developments under three regimes – fascist, democratic capitalism, and state socialism –offers an opportunity to ground historically investigations into the relationships between social structures, ideologies, bodies, and minds and to consider how, in the twentieth century, sex could become such an extraordinarily significant locus for politics, one of the major engines of economic development, and such a central element in strategies of rule. “Sex is not a natural act,” the psychologist Leonore Tiefer once wrote; the seemingly most intimate parts of our lives are strongly shaped by social forces, even as the dynamics of the interrelationships between the social and the individual are elusive and constantly changing. The challenge is to take such matters as sexual practices, or subjective accounts of the dissociation or connection between physiological sensations, fantasies, and emotions, as legitimate objects for historical inquiry.
Throughout, a crucial point – and each chapter reveals another dimension of this phenomena – is that memories were not preserved and passed on in some pure, uncontaminated fashion. Rather, “memories” of the Third Reich were continually constructed and reconstructed after the fact, so much so that these subsequent memories were even more influential – in political and social conflicts, and individual psyches – than the actual complicated original reality. Each memory was always also an interpretation, mixing kernels of truth about the past with powerful emotional investments that had much to do with an evolving present. The ways the Nazis constructed Weimar, or the ways former citizens of East Germany, after reunification, constructed their experiences under communism, or the ways former New Leftists in the early twenty-first century have re-imagined the significance of 1968, offer further expositions of this theme. Moreover, and while the literature on post-fascist memory in Germany is large, what attention to the workings of memory in conflicts over sex in particular offers us extraordinary insight into how memories get ‘layered’ – that is, the ways each cohort and constituency approached both the immediate and the more distant past only through the interpretations of its historical predecessors. What becomes apparent, in short, is the intricate mutual imbrication of different eras of German history.
I hope to offer perspectives that are relevant for scholars studying memory cultures also in other national contexts. The aim is to explore the processes by which certain cultural understandings – with enormous and quite concrete consequences for how lives are lived- are achieved. Precisely, then, by historicizing how German constructions of the Nazi past evolved, and the remarkable impact those constructions have had (and continue to have), the book considers the lasting power not just of real but also of fictive memories.
Members of the West German New Left student movement, along with many of their liberal elders, defended activism on behalf of sexual emancipation on the grounds that sexual repression was not merely a characteristic of fascism but its very cause. As one author put it, “it would be wrong to hold the view that all of what happened in Auschwitz was typically German. It was typical for a society that suppresses sexuality.” Another argued that “brutality and the lust for destruction become substitutes for bodily pleasure . . . This is how the seemingly incredible contradiction that the butchers of Auschwitz were – and would become again- respectable, harmless citizens, is resolved.” Or as yet another phrased it even more succinctly: “In the fascist rebellion, the energies of inhibited sexuality formed into genocide.” In the 1960s these views were widely held, and they provided moral justification for dismantling the postwar culture of sexual conservatism. To liberate sexuality, it was believed, would help cleanse Germany of the lingering aftereffects of Nazism.
For many commentators in present-day reunified Germany, more than fifteen years after the collapse of communism, it has become standard to denigrate the rebellions of the later 1960s for their Utopian romanticism and fierce anti-capitalism. But in their historical moment, those rebellions – and not the least the sexual element in them – were signally important. They fundamentally reconfigured familial, sexual, and gender relations and all codes of social interaction. They undermined the authority of political life for nearly two decades, and the succeeded in reorienting society-wide moral discussion and debate towards global concerns like social injustice, economic exploitation, and warfare.
As my research unfolded, I found that the New Left’s interpretation of the Third Reich’s sexual politics as profoundly repressive had been almost uniformly adopted in recent scholarship on Nazism as well. I also found, however, in researching the more immediate post World War II period, that numerous commentators in that period had a completely different interpretation of the Third Reich. They argued that the Nazis had encouraged sexual licentiousness or even suggested that their sexual immorality was inextricable from their genocidal barbarism. Indeed, for many of these more immediate postwar observers, the containment of sexuality and the restoration of marriage and family were among the highest priorities for a society trying to overcome Nazism. It increasingly appeared as though the postwar culture of sexual conservatism was not ( as the New Left believed) a watered-down continuation of a sexually repressive fascism but rather had itself developed at least in partial reaction against Nazism. . .
In aiming to illuminate how we might think about the ever-altering connections between sexual and other kinds of politics, the book shows how sex can be a site for talking about very many other things besides sex and working through a multitude of other social and political conflicts. At the same time, specifically the contrast of developments under three regimes – fascist, democratic capitalism, and state socialism –offers an opportunity to ground historically investigations into the relationships between social structures, ideologies, bodies, and minds and to consider how, in the twentieth century, sex could become such an extraordinarily significant locus for politics, one of the major engines of economic development, and such a central element in strategies of rule. “Sex is not a natural act,” the psychologist Leonore Tiefer once wrote; the seemingly most intimate parts of our lives are strongly shaped by social forces, even as the dynamics of the interrelationships between the social and the individual are elusive and constantly changing. The challenge is to take such matters as sexual practices, or subjective accounts of the dissociation or connection between physiological sensations, fantasies, and emotions, as legitimate objects for historical inquiry.
Throughout, a crucial point – and each chapter reveals another dimension of this phenomena – is that memories were not preserved and passed on in some pure, uncontaminated fashion. Rather, “memories” of the Third Reich were continually constructed and reconstructed after the fact, so much so that these subsequent memories were even more influential – in political and social conflicts, and individual psyches – than the actual complicated original reality. Each memory was always also an interpretation, mixing kernels of truth about the past with powerful emotional investments that had much to do with an evolving present. The ways the Nazis constructed Weimar, or the ways former citizens of East Germany, after reunification, constructed their experiences under communism, or the ways former New Leftists in the early twenty-first century have re-imagined the significance of 1968, offer further expositions of this theme. Moreover, and while the literature on post-fascist memory in Germany is large, what attention to the workings of memory in conflicts over sex in particular offers us extraordinary insight into how memories get ‘layered’ – that is, the ways each cohort and constituency approached both the immediate and the more distant past only through the interpretations of its historical predecessors. What becomes apparent, in short, is the intricate mutual imbrication of different eras of German history.
I hope to offer perspectives that are relevant for scholars studying memory cultures also in other national contexts. The aim is to explore the processes by which certain cultural understandings – with enormous and quite concrete consequences for how lives are lived- are achieved. Precisely, then, by historicizing how German constructions of the Nazi past evolved, and the remarkable impact those constructions have had (and continue to have), the book considers the lasting power not just of real but also of fictive memories.
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