Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-ph5wq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-28T18:28:30.127Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Can Democracy Be Queer?: Male Homosexuality, Democratisation, and the Law in Postwar Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2022

Samuel Clowes Huneke*
Affiliation:
Department of History and Art History, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, 3G1, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA

Abstract

When Nazi officials surrendered to the Allied powers on 8 May 1945, gay German men hoped fervently that their suffering had come to an end. Ten years earlier, the fascist government had promulgated draconian new laws criminalising all forms of male same-sex behaviour. After the war, as Allied officials embarked on an extensive programme of democratic renewal in the occupied lands, gay men hoped that democratisation would mean the repeal of these laws. Yet, the new West Germany retained the Nazi-era laws until 1969, convicting over 50,000 men in those twenty years. Using petitions to government officials as well as essays in and letters to the editors of homophile magazines, this article examines how gay men in West Germany conceived of democratisation, asking what expectations they held for the new republic, how their views shifted as it proved hostile to queer citizens, and what this history means for the broader understanding of democratisation in the postwar world.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Lorenz, Gottfried and Bollmann, Ulf, ‘Die Rechtsprechung nach §§175 und 175a StGB in der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg im Spiegel der Haupt- und Vorverfahrensregister der Staatsanwaltschaft der Jahre 1948 bis 1969’, in Finzsch, Norbert and Velke, Marcus, eds., Queer | Gender | Historiographie: Aktuelle Tendenzen und Projekte (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2016), 253–4Google ScholarPubMed.

2 Whisnant, Clayton J., Male Homosexuality in West Germany: Between Persecution and Freedom, 1945–69 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 108CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenkranz, Bernhard and Lorenz, Gottfried, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen: Die Geschichte des schwulen Lebens in der Hansestadt (Hamburg: Himmelstürmer Verlag, 2012), 89Google Scholar.

3 H.L., ‘Die deutschen Bundestagswahlen und der Homoerot’, Der Kreis, 25, 6 (1957), 10Google Scholar. The homosexual rights activist Kurt Hiller suggested similar electoral strategies in the 1920s; Marhoefer, Laurie, Sex and the Weimar Republic: German Homosexual Emancipation and the Rise of the Nazis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 67Google Scholar.

4 Just as I use ‘queer’ as an umbrella term for different groups of gender and sexual nonconforming individuals, I use ‘gay’ as a convenient shorthand for men who identified as being physically, sexually, or romantically attracted to other men. Craig Griffiths, ‘Between Triumph and Myth: Gay Heroes and Navigating the Schwule Erfolgsgeschichte’, Heroes. Helden. Héros (2014), 58.

5 Evans, Jennifer, ‘Introduction: Why Queer German History?’, German History, 34, 3 (2016), 371–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herzog, Dagmar, ‘Syncopated Sex: Transforming European Sexual Cultures’, The American Historical Review, 114, 5 (2009), 1295CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Gammerl, Benno, anders fühlen: Schwules und lesbisches Leben in der Bundesrepublik. Eine Emotionsgeschichte (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2021), 338–9Google Scholar.

6 Mazower, Mark, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 182–91Google Scholar.

7 See Evans, Jennifer, Life among the Ruins: Cityscape and Sexuality in Cold War Berlin (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whisnant, Male Homosexuality; Pretzel, Andreas, Ohnmacht und Aufbegehren: homosexuelle Männer in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2010)Google Scholar; Gammerl, anders fühlen. There is also increasing interest in lesbian and trans experiences in this period; see Andrea Rottmann, ‘Queer Home Berlin?: Making Queer Selves and Spaces in the Divided City, 1945–1970’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2019.

8 See Jarausch, Konrad H., After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1995 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar; Greenberg, Udi, The Weimar Century: German Émigrés and the Ideological Foundations of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)Google Scholar; Taylor, Frederick, Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2011)Google Scholar; Strote, Noah Benezra, Lions and Lambs: Conflict in Weimar and the Creation of Post-Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Forner, Sean A., German Intellectuals and the Challenge of Democratic Renewal: Culture and Politics after 1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017)Google Scholar; Till van Rahden, ‘Clumsy Democrats: Moral Passions in the Federal Republic’, German History, 29, 3 (1 Sept. 2011), 485–504.

9 The historiography of everyday life in occupied Germany includes Grossmann, Atina, Jews, Germans, and Allies: Close Encounters in Occupied Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Heineman, Elizabeth D., What Difference Does a Husband Make? Women and Marital Status in Nazi and Postwar Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Black, Monica, A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020)Google Scholar.

10 Hans-Georg Stümke, Homosexuelle in Deutschland: eine politische Geschichte, Beck'sche Reihe (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1989), 137–42; Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 88–93; Gottfried Lorenz, ‘Hamburg als Homosexuellenhauptstadt der 1950er Jahre: Die Homophilen-Szene und ihre Unterstützer für die Abschaffung des §175 StGB’, in Andreas Pretzel and Volker Weiß, eds., Ohnmacht und Aufbegehren: Homosexuelle Männer in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Männerschwarm, 2010), 128–35.

11 Rüdiger Lautmann, ‘Das Verbrechen der widernatürlichen Unzucht: Seine Grundlegung in der preußischen Gesetzesrevision des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Kritische Justiz, 25, 3 (1992), 308; Robert Beachy, ‘The German Invention of Homosexuality’, The Journal of Modern History, 82, 4 (1 Dec. 2010), 804–8.

12 Beachy, Robert, Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New York: Knopf, 2014), 341Google Scholar; Whisnant, Clayton J., Queer Identities and Politics in Germany: A History, 1880–1945 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016), 20–1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Beachy, Gay Berlin, 90; Ralf Dose, Magnus Hirschfeld: The Origins of the Gay Liberation Movement, trans. Edward H. Willis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2014), 41–2; Whisnant, Queer Identities, 29–30; LeVay, Simon, Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bauer, Heike, The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017), 24–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Glenn Ramsey, ‘The Rites of Artgenossen: Contesting Homosexual Political Culture in Weimar Germany’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 17, 1 (1 Jan. 2008), 96.

15 Marhoefer, Sex and the Weimar Republic, 120–1, 143.

16 Wackerfuss, Andrew, Stormtrooper Families: Homosexuality and Community in the Early Nazi Movement (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2015), 296316CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Herzog, Dagmar, Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 8890CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Schoppmann, Claudia, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik und weibliche Homosexualität (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft, 1991), 8897Google Scholar.

17 Christian Schäfer, ‘Widernatürliche Unzucht’ (§§ 175, 175a, 175b, 182 a.F. StGB): Reformdiskussion und Gesetzgebung seit 1945 (Berlin: BWV Verlag, 2006), 38–45.

18 Stümke, Homosexuelle, 119; Jellonnek, Burkhard, Homosexuelle unter dem Hakenkreuz (Paderborn: Schöningh Paderborn, 1990), 1213CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Johnson, Eric A., Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 288Google Scholar.

19 Geoffrey J. Giles, ‘The Denial of Homosexuality: Same-Sex Incidents in Himmler's SS and Police’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 11, 1/2 (2002), 256–90.

20 See Schoppmann, Nationalsozialistische Sexualpolitik; Laurie Marhoefer, ‘Lesbianism, Transvestitism, and the Nazi State: A Microhistory of a Gestapo Investigation, 1939–1943’, American Historical Review, 121, 4 (Oct. 2016), 1167–95; Anna Hájková, ‘Den Holocaust queer erzählen’, Sexaulitäten (2018), 86–110; Samuel Clowes Huneke, ‘Heterogeneous Persecution: Lesbianism and the Nazi State’, Central European History, 54, 2 (June 2021), 297–325.

21 Anonymous, A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City: A Diary (New York: Picador, 2017), 244.

22 Akantha, ‘Berlin tanzt!’, Der Kreis: ein Monatsschrift, 17, 9 (1949), 8–10, 22.

23 ‘Dokumente des Unrechts’, Der Kreis, 19, 1 (1951), 3.

24 L.G.H., ‘Die Freiheit läßt auf sich warten’, Der Kreis, 16, 10 (1948), 2.

25 Petition from S.K., 10 Jan. 1955, Bundesarchiv-Koblenz (BArch-Koblenz), B 141/4075, 5.

26 Ewald Tscheck, ‘Die Männerbundidee in der deutschen Romantik’, Der Kreis, 14, 3 (1946), 3. For more on Tscheck, who may have even joined the Nazi Storm Troopers in the 1920s, see Beachy, Gay Berlin, 229–230.

27 Bruns, Claudia, Politik des Eros: Der Männerbund in Wissenschaft, Politik und Jugendkultur (Köln: Böhlau, 2008), 383441Google Scholar; Claudia Bruns, ‘The Politics of Masculinity in the (Homo-)Sexual Discourse (1880 to 1920)’, German History, 23, 3 (Aug. 2005), 306–20; Harry Oosterhuis, ‘Eros and Male Bonding in Society: Introduction’, in Harry Oosterhuis, ed., Hubert Kennedy, trans., Homosexuality and Male Bonding in Pre-Nazi Germany: Original Transcripts from Der Eigene, the First Gay Journal in the World (New York: Haworth Press, 1991), 119–26; Ian Patrick Beacock, ‘Heartbroken: Democratic Emotions, Political Subjectivity, and the Unravelling of the Weimar Republic, 1918–1933’, PhD thesis, Stanford University, 2018, 119–20.

28 Norton, Robert Edward, Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 These respondents belonged to a number of parties, including the centre-right German People's Party (DVP), the far-right German National People's Party (DNVP), and the fascist Nazi Party (NSDAP); Beachy, Gay Berlin, 236.

30 Beacock, ‘Heartbroken’, 100–134.

31 Adrian Daub, ‘From Maximin to Stonewall: Sexuality and the Afterlives of the George Circle’, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 87 (2012), 32.

32 ‘Echo aus Briefen’, Der Kreis, 14, 5 (1946): 2.

33 For more on the IFLO, see Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 88–9.

34 IFLO, ‘Wir und der demokratische Staat’, Die Insel, 2 (Mar. 1952), 4.

36 Ibid., 4–5. This rhetoric mirrors some earlier thought, especially that of Kurt Hiller, who notably argued for the ‘right to one's own body’; see Hiller, Kurt, Das Recht über sich selbst: Eine strafrechtsphilosophische Studie (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1908)Google Scholar.

37 Pierre Rosanvallon, for instance, critiques those who equate democracy with ‘the triple reign of the market, of the rights of man, and of opinion’; Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, Samuel Moyn, ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 196.

38 William J. Novak and Stephen W. Sawyer, ‘Epilogue: The Need for a New and Critical Democracy’, The Tocqueville Review, XLI, 2 (2020), 113.

39 Samuel Clowes Huneke, States of Liberation: Gay Men between Dictatorship and Democracy in Cold War Germany (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 90–2; Robert G. Moeller, ‘The Homosexual Man Is a “Man”, the Homosexual Woman Is a “Woman”’: Sex, Society, and the Law in Postwar West Germany’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4, 3 (1 Jan. 1994), 404–26; Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 108–10.

40 Klaus Berndl, ‘Zeiten der Bedrohung: Männliche Homosexuelle in Ost-Berlin und der DDR in den 1950er Jahren’, in Rainer Marbach and Volker Weiß, eds., Konformitäten und Konfrontationen: Homosexuelle in der DDR (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2017), 25.

41 Stefan Micheler, ‘…und verbleibt weiter in Sicherungsverwahrung’ – Kontinuitäten der Verfolgung Männer begehrender Männer in Hamburg 1945–1949’, in Andreas Pretzel and Volker Weiß, eds., Ohnmacht und Aufbegehren: Homosexuelle Männer in der frühen Bundesrepublik (Hamburg: Männerschwarm Verlag, 2010), 62–90.

42 Fulbrook, Mary, Reckonings: Legacies of Nazi Persecution and the Quest for Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 251Google Scholar.

43 Dieter Schiefelbein, ‘Wiederbeginn der juristischen Verfolgung homosexueller Männer in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Die Homosexuellen-Prozesse in Frankfurt am Main 1950/51’, Zeitschrift für Sexualforschung, 5, 1 (1992), 59–73; ‘Homosexuelle: Eine Million Delikte’, Der Spiegel (29 Nov. 1950), 7–10.

44 Andreas Pretzel, NS-Opfer unter Vorbehalt: homosexuelle Männer in Berlin nach 1945 (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002), 322.

45 Petition from Erhard S., 16 Aug. 1955, BArch-Koblenz, B 141/4075, 32.

46 ‘Die deutsche Situation … 1949!’, Der Kreis, 17, 4 (1949), 34.

47 ‘Kameraden schreiben uns’, Der Kreis, 21, 1 (1953), 3.

48 ‘Was wir meinen…’, Der Kreis, 25, 7 (1957), 8.

49 ‘Irrwege und Umwege zur Wahrheit’, Der Kreis, 19, 5 (1951), 3.

50 For more on Laserstein, see Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 95–6; Jennifer V. Evans, ‘Bahnhof Boys: Policing Male Prostitution in Post-Nazi Berlin’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 12, 4 (1 Oct. 2003), 628–30; Evans, Life among the Ruins, 141–2.

51 Emphasis in original. Loy Wenker and Jack Argo, ‘Dr. jur. Botho Laserstein’, Der Kreis, 23, 5 (1955), 3.

52 Riechers, Burkhardt, ‘Freundschaft und Anständigtkeit. Leitbilder im Selbstverständnis männlicher Homosexueller in der frühen Bundesrepublik’, Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, 1 (1999), 41–3Google Scholar.

53 Hans-Joachim Schoeps, ‘Überlegungen zum Problem der Homosexualität’, in Der homosexuelle Nächste (Hamburg: Furche-Verlag, 1963), 113; Schiefelbein, ‘Wiederbeginn’, 67.

54 Huneke, States of Liberation, 69; Erik Huneke, ‘Morality, Law, and the Socialist Sexual Self in the German Democratic Republic, 1945–1972’, PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 2013, 208; Berndl, Klaus and Kruber, Vera, ‘Zur Statistik Der Strafverfolgung Homosexueller Männer in Der SBZ Und DDR Bis 1959’, Invertito: Jahrbuch für die Geschichte der Homosexualitäten, 12 (2010), 88Google Scholar.

55 Wannes Dupont, ‘The Two-Faced Fifties: Homosexuality and Penal Policy in the International Forensic Community, 1945–1965’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 28, 3 (1 Sept. 2019): 361–3.

56 Johnson, David K., The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 114Google Scholar.

57 Michael L. Hughes, ‘“Rechtsstaat” and “Recht” in West Germany's Nuclear Power Debate, 1975–1983’, Law and History Review, 33, 2 (2015), 413.

58 Michal Kopeček and Ned Richardson-Little, ‘Introduction: (Re-)Constituting the State and Law during the “Long Transformation of 1989” in East Central Europe’, Journal of Modern European History, 18, 3 (1 Aug. 2020), 279; Dijn, Annelien De, Freedom: An Unruly History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosanvallon, Democracy, 209.

59 David Minto has recently argued that the evolution of such legal strategies was a transatlantic phenomenon; David Minto, ‘Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy’, The American Historical Review, 123, 4 (1 Oct. 2018), 1093–121.

60 ‘Kameraden schreiben uns’, Der Kreis, 21, 1 (1953), 6.

61 ‘Die deutsche Situation … 1949!’, Der Kreis, 17, 4 (1949), 35.

62 Rosenkranz and Lorenz, Hamburg auf anderen Wegen, 91; Whisnant, Queer Identities, 88–90, 102–3.

63 Jackson, Julian, Living in Arcadia: Homosexuality, Politics, and Morality in France from the Liberation to AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Faderman, Lillian, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015), 53Google Scholar.

64 C.M., ‘Zur Auffassung der Homoerotik u. ihrer Stellung im Strafrecht’, Der Kreis, 25, 4 (1957), 11.

65 C.M., ‘Zur Auffassung der Homoerotik’, 11.

66 Huneke, States of Liberation, 26.

67 Hannah Arendt, ‘Freedom and Politics: A Lecture’, Chicago Review, 14, 1 (Spring 1960), 28–46; Danielle Allen, ‘Equality and American Democracy: Why Politics Trumps Economics’, Foreign Affairs, 95, 1 (2016), 23–8.

68 Jackson, Living in Arcadia, 57; Martin Meeker, ‘Behind the Mask of Respectability: Reconsidering the Mattachine Society and Male Homophile Practice, 1950s and 1960s’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 10, 1 (2001), 78–116.

69 Cervini, Eric, The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020), 108Google Scholar.

70 See Brown, Timothy Scott, West Germany and the Global Sixties: The Anti-Authoritarian Revolt, 1962–1978 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 286329CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Poiger, Uta G., Jazz, Rock, and Rebels: Cold War Politics and American Culture in a Divided Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 218–23Google Scholar; Herzog, Sex after Fascism, 141; Huneke, States of Liberation, 95–100.

71 For more on the 1969 reform of §175, see Robert G. Moeller, ‘Private Acts, Public Anxieties, and the Fight to Decriminalize Male Homosexuality in West Germany’, Feminist Studies, 36, 3 (2010), 528–52; Whisnant, Male Homosexuality, 166–203.

72 Gallie, W. B., ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 56 (1955), 168Google Scholar.

73 Gellately, Robert, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

74 Ahmed, Sara, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2006)Google Scholar.

75 Forner, German Intellectuals, 74–113.