Sex po fašismu: Paměť a morálka ve 20. století

by Dagmar Herzog

V knize autorka zkoumá vztah mezi sexuální politikou a morálkou v Německu ve 20. století. Vychází z analýzy sexuální politiky nacismu, v níž shledává jak prvky utlačovatelské, tak prvky sexuální svobody. Nacistickou realitu následně konfrontuje se sexuální politikou a tuhou sexuální morálkou v 50.–70. letech, přičemž velkou pozornost věnuje i proměnám německé paměti na třetí říši. V bádání o nacistickém i poválečném Německu se jedná o práci jedinečnou, jež dává nové odpovědi na příčiny a podobu kulturní vzpoury pozdních 60. let, jež ovlivňují německou společnost dodnes.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany, Sexuality, Politics, Feminism, Sociology

420 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2005

About the author

Dagmar Herzog (born 1961) is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis, theology and religion, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory, and she has edited anthologies on sexuality in the Third Reich, sexuality in twentieth-century Austria, and the Holocaust.

Reviews

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herzog claims that “careful attention to the history of sexuality prompts us to reconsider how we periodize twentieth-century German history.” It does this by challenging assumptions about “key social and political transformations” and providing “new insights into a broad array of crucial phenomena.” It also provides “content [and:] force” to anti-Semitism before and during the Third Reich. It provides an understanding of the appeal of Nazism to conservative and liberal Germans. It helps explain the demoralizing and emasculating effects of the loss of WWII. It also helps to explain the ways in which sexuality was used to “master” the Nazi past both in the 1950s Federal Republic of Germany and the 1960s youth protesters and their sexual liberation movement.

How sexuality is remembered at different points in German history by historical actors is directly related to their actions in their present. The book begins, for example, with the observation that the memory of sexuality under the Nazis during the 1950s was of sexual liberalization and the abandonment of traditional sexual morals. It was state-endorsed depravity and secularization. The move back toward Christian sexual mores, while partially stimulated by the Allied-promoted revival of Catholic and Protestant churches in the Federal Republic, and the rise of the Christian Democratic Party, was in large part a move by Germans to distance themselves from the depravity of the Nazis. Focusing discourse exclusively around the sexual misdeeds of the Nazis, not around the persecution of the Jews, was a method of mastering this past.

Herzog’s examination of Nazi sexuality shows that Germans in the immediate postwar years were not wrong to remember the Nazis as sexually liberal. Nazism’s anti-Christian neo-paganism did promote heterosexual sex of all kinds (marital, pre-marital and extra-marital) as the privilege of the master race. Sexual restraint, experimentation, sterilization (and of course worse) were reserved specifically for those deemed undesirable by the Nazi racial hygiene program. Herzog examines popular magazines, sex advice columns, and other evidence, showing that the rhetoric of sexual dignity was mostly aimed at the depravities of Jewish sexuality and bourgeois depictions of the body. Nazi sexual policy intensified the liberalization of sex that began in the Weimar era, even as it criticized it.

Later, in the 1960s, a new generation coming of age came to believe that the sexual conservativism of their parents was a holdover of Nazi sexuality. The New Left student movement were exposed to the Auschwitz trial (1963-1965) that revealed the horrors of the holocaust that had gone unremembered in the 1950s relentless focus on sexuality. The students promoted a connection between sexual repression and moral atrocity that was then echoed by scholarly examinations of Nazism of that era. Disturbingly, these students likened themselves to the victims of the holocaust, and likewise their parents to Nazis. Again this misremembering of the Nazi past was a way of mastering the past. One of the movements most interesting components is that, while it sought to prevent fascism through sexual liberation, it nonetheless contained anti-Semitic undertones. Jews were absent and faceless in this understanding of the holocaust, and its victims and its horrors abstract.

[sophie esther · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was an excellent analysis on the role of sex in Nazi politics, and socialist reactions to the end of World War II. The book's format provides a clear (or clear as one can be, when it comes to the sexual history of Germany) picture of the ways in which the Reich fostered its lies, how sex was actually treated within the regime, and how Nazi lies were carried on after the war, by those who claiming to revolt against fascism. Herzog destroys the lie that Nazi Germany was a repressive state, and exposes the misinformation carried out by the New Left movement after the Reich. She also critisizes the appropriation of the subject of sex within the Nazi context, where some erotisize the study by exploiting the sexual violence and sexual perversity within the regime. Herzog ends up painting a picture of the sexual history of the Reich as neither overly sexual, nor repressed. Instead, she aims to tell it as it is.

I also recommend Herzog's article "Hubris and Hypocrisy; Incitement and Disavowal: Sexuality and German Fascism" which explores the same theme, and provides other scholarly sources on the subject of sexuality and Nazism.

[Angelo Moldovan]

It seems that the Frankfurt School and the New Left student movement of '68 had absolutely no idea what they were talking about. The sexual politics of the nazi regime were less sexually repressive that those of the United States and West Germany in the post-war period. Moreover, "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 been developed at least in partial reaction against Nazism". Sadly, the idea of a "traditionalist" Third Reich prevails and has found a nice nest in the minds of most scholars, especially the leftist ones. The popular interpretations still describe Nazi Germany as sexually repressive and conservative. I wonder what would it take for the post-modernist bunch to acknowledge the baselessness of their statements and interpretations?

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herzog’s analysis in Sex after Fascism (2005) traces the continuities and discontinuities between the pre-Nazi period, Nazi Germany, and post-World War Two era regarding the regulation and conception of sex, and how popular conceptions of sex worked to construct and reconstruct the memory of previous generations. In the wake of the Second World War West Germany set off to deal with the trauma of the war. Unlike East Germany, where they differentiated themselves from Nazi-era policy through their anti-capitalist stance, West Germany distinguished itself by reinstating conservative sexual morals, in contrast to the deeply racialized by permissive heterosexuality of the Nazi regime. Indeed, Herzog argues that the Nazi’s relaxed view on pre-marital and extra-marital relations found continuity with the Weimar period’s liberalizing notions on sex. Thus, conservative sexual politics reconstructed a domesticated view of heteronormative relationships (p. 88). These views, often informed by the church, reinforced the link between lax sex morality and vulgar crimes of the Nazi regime. Herzog argues that the New Left movement of the 1960s reconstructed the memory of the Nazi era as a sexually repressive period that produced horrendous war crimes. More importantly, the “68er” generation understood their childhood under the conservative, old-fashioned, and repressive period of the 1950s. This is best exemplified in the radical, anti-authoritarian parenting in which parents encouraged children to freely express themselves rather than reinforce their children’s subordination. Following the end of the sex wave and the New Left’s loss of influence, the 1980s saw people using sex, not to understand Nazism, but to understand “1968 itself” (p. 221). Indeed, Herzog demonstrates how changing constructions and reconstructions of sex are critical to understanding Germany’s development and how people understood and dealt with the memory of Nazism.

[Kathryn Ritchie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating stuff. I love historical memory.

[Francesca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herzog's thoroughly researched book gives great insight into attitudes towards sex, and their relationship to gender dynamics, from the Weimar Republic to the 1990s with a particular focus on the post- War era. The conclusion details her aim as being to refute the claim that Nazism never would have occurred without sexual repression, which she has successfully managed by giving a detailed yet highly readable engagement with the misremembering of how sexuality really was in each era.

Her discussion of sexual liberation and the correspondingly more emancipated role of women in East Germany is handled in an informative and well balanced way too, and sheds real light on the lives and attitudes of many Germans throughout the century.

[D]

School

[Flossie]

Interesting and fun read :) I’m never sure what I expect to get from history books besides like “oh that’s cool” and that’s kinda all I got here but that’s ok tbh :)

[Jelena · Rating 4 out of 5]

The last decades went a bit too fast for my taste but overall very interesting I definitely learnt something new

[Ella · Rating 4 out of 5]

An absolutely fascinating look at sex and memory discourses in postwar Germany.

[nutsa]

An especially pertinent read against the current backdrop of the right wing's global rise to power.

[Kittie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only managed to read 3/4 of the book because my friend had to take it back to Germany with him. The history of sexuality in the post-war years and how it was wielded as a political tool by fascists, conservatives, and even the left was highly interesting.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book's analysis of culture within the German borders is diminished by the slightly embarrassing oversight of the nearly-precise parallels to simultaneous goings-on in the U.S. (Uta Poiger's subsequent work integrating the two sides is much more convincing).

[Kate O'Hanlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating and well researched. Herzog traces changes sexual attitudes and practices in Germany from Weimar to the 90s, teasing out the various and contradictory ways in which memory, politics, religion and the specter of Nazism inform the oscillations between conservatism and liberalization.

[Sean Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read in a good while.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read all year